Field Commander Ali is the solo project of Ali Mollica, a folk song person living on the South Coast of NSW, Australia . 'The Next From Field Commander', her new record and second under that taken name, was recorded in her bedroom in Stanwell Park, a beachside town surrounded by bushland. Here, where the Great Dividing Range meets the Tasman Sea, Mollica worked quickly in the early part of 2025, utilising little more than a classical guitar and a 4-track tape recorder to execute her vision. The result is a truly beguiling Australian folk record.

With a voice that balances understated vulnerability with determined stoicism, Mollica describes everyday scenes, passing interactions and the moments that follow moments between people, all with an astonishing clarity of expression. Full moons are felt but remain unwitnessed, great loves lean into praxis or strain against it, and time is a character that watches quietly on all the while.

Despite its modest conception, both the songs and recordings are possessed by a unique density. Layered vocals are used undramatically but effectively. Conversational asides seem to open outwards like leaves, and offhand remarks reveal themselves to be quiet realisations through subtle repetition. There is an intimate spaciousness within these songs too, with shuffling pages, creaking chairs, and distant whistling all entering the sonic sphere.

The spirit of folk song clairvoyants like Bridget St John, Anne Briggs and Maxine Funke may be sensed throughout, while Michael Hurley’s ‘Wildegeeses’ is given a faithful, though suitably idiosyncratic, re-reading. A tradition is being channeled here, though ultimately what you are hearing is the emergence of a distinct new voice.

As such, 'The Next From Field Commander' moves with a meandering yet captivating immediacy, clear and self-assured, while remaining deeply receptive to the world and all the things in it - ‘still reaching out, still finding out’. As Mollica notes herself:

"My songs often express the literal goings on in my life – the lyrics are raw and unbridled (and maybe a bit unhinged, too); but underneath this immediacy is a heavy hum that I think sounds like not knowing. How I wish to know!"

If knowing remains beyond us, the process of trying to work it out is as compelling as ever.

TRACK LISTING

1. She Was Picking Flowers
2. Wildegeeses
3. One Kind Of Forever
4. Time
5. Prefab Moon
6. Lonesome Saturday Bed
7. Dark Cloud

Operating on the fringes of pure improv, organised chaos, minimal composition, lo-fi electronics and Italian spaghetti westerns, wide-eyed and with a healthy dose of DIY aesthetics lies the world of Jaan. It’s a poetic & cosmic universe, exploring “discreet music” whilst wandering on the edges of the Cat People soundtrack & Brian Eno’s more experimental output, in which you might yourself find floating, wandering or in the middle of a market place.

Jaan is a collective of one, a deliberately anonymous activistic unit with strong ties to the international art scene. Purposefully bypassing the know-it-all of the the internet & embracing the bygone mystery of dusty old archives and deep-dive searching, remarkably little is known about this project. Jaan is lead by veteran experimental sonic alchemist Jaan; they operate between Greenland, the Middle East and Europe, with frequent associates Lisqa, Mashid & Schneorr N. acting as local hubs for collaboration and exploration.

The purpose of this wilful obscurity: full focus on the actual music, whether live events or on recordings. Which brings us to 'Baghali', their first for World of Echo. It’s a deeply personal album, much like slowly browsing old family albums filled with vaguely remembered tales, some still very much present, some faded, leaving but a ghost-like reflection of what once was. 'Baghali' was compiled over the course of a year on the road, trapped in snow storms, waiting for cancelled flights and stuck rides. It’s made up of snippets of diary, quick recordings on road sides, abandoned buildings, garden ruins, vast desert and focussed studio sessions, following a collage-like aesthetic and steeped in an exploration of non-lineair storytelling. There’s broken memories, a sense of displacement and an occasional yearning for what can’t be again, clouded in fever and unrest, but there is also hope, wonderment and bright colours seeping through the cracks in the wall. Jaan weaves home-made instruments, old tape loops, broken synths, beat-up reeds, dusty beat boxes and the occasional doom guitar squall into a tapestry of fractured sound, with tracks following their own inherent logic rather than following formats. Sounds crash in and out, field recordings placing the listener firmly in an environment then throwing several perspectives at once onto them, with individual elements - a wandering clarinet, a lone mandolin, a beat out of place yet perfectly in place - slowly walking in and out & doing their thing.

The whole album is alive, breathes, takes a wrong turn, gets lost, somehow finds its way again - effortless and with a unique sense of space and flow.

TRACK LISTING

1. Scented Feathers
2. Purple Watermelon
3. JuJu
4. The Lust Greens Of The Restless Mind
5. The Girl Is A Lady
6. Mashid
7. Pomegranate Garden
8. Fragments Of Home
9. This Is The Year
10. Velesh Kon

Will Yates has made music as Memotone since 2007. He operates in the tradition of what Robert Fripp has called 'a small, independent, mobile, and intelligent unit.' If you book him, he will come. When he arrives, he will have everything he needs to make his complex, engaging music: a clarinet, a guitar, synths, samplers and pedals, quickly unpacked in the corner of a club, gallery or village hall. Starting small, he will build layer upon layer of melody, accompanying himself and cutting across himself, creating a music that avoids cliche and moves beyond easy description. His recordings have followed the same trajectory. Moving quickly, he has released fifteen or so albums across various labels. Taken together, these recordings are the sound of a skilled, inventive composer pushing at the edges of what he wants to listen to himself. It is possible to hear a variety of influences in his music: folk and jazz forms, the textural inventiveness of British DIY electronica and Chicago post-rock and the blurred sci-fi brass of Jon Hassell are all discernible. But mostly, Will's work seems to stem from a constant drift between long hours in his home studio, and time spent outside in the woods and hills around his home in Wales.

On first listen, you're on unfamiliar ground with this new Memotone album. Its textures are dry and brittle, its weave open and loose. But even the first time I return to it, lushness creeps in at the edges, tiny green shoots on what appeared to be bare soil. smallest things sheds the skin of Will's previous recordings, removing the electronics and the looping and layering of previous work, to create something almost entirely acoustic. But don't be fooled into imagining music that's folksy, pastoral or twee. Opening track 'I Could See the Smallest Things' is a statement of intent. Widely spaced guitar is underpinned by earthy cello and sleepwalking clarinet, making a gorgeous threadbare pattern, which recalls a Morton Feldman miniature or a Morandi still life. 'Glimpse' immediately follows, starting with a clockwork rhythm that is subverted with rippling free percussion and filmic strings. Tipsy and lovelorn live favourite 'Time is Away Theme' finally makes an appearance on vinyl. The clonks, scrapes and whispered vocals of 'Keep the Change' are straight from a Robert Wyatt daydream and beautiful album closer, 'In Dreams', with vocals from Eva May, hovers in the same space as Janet Sherbourne's work with Jan Steele or Julie Tippetts' Sunset Glow.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Could See The Smallest Things
2. Glimpse
3. Carved By The Moon (Acoustic)
4. In January
5. Don't Mind
6. Chairs On The Lawn
7. Keep The Change
8. Time Is Away Theme
9. Goldcrest
10. I Heard Edith Say
11. I'm Late For Something
12. In Dreams (w/ Eva May)

UEVPD - Usage/Efficiency/Variance/Platform/Domain - is the solo project of Dominic Goodman, a former member of Mosquitoes and currently one half of Komare.

UEVPD is released in an edition of 250, each in hand printed, die cut sleeves. 

The self-titled UEVPD debut LP, released on 22nd November via World of Echo, consists of eight sequentially numbered electro-acoustic tracks made over approximately five years, living recordings that have morphed in shape over time, each systematically stripped back to their elemental form before being deemed complete. From the outset, Goodman purposefully deployed a relatively limited array of equipment and adopted a determinedly minimalist approach to composition, a practice in restraint that privileges detail and nuance. Field recordings, made using a combination of dynamic, condenser, contact and electret microphones, geophones and hydrophones, were allied to a basic modular/analogue synth setup, allowing for little in the way of excess or indulgence.

The results are markedly defiant, displaying an expert exercise in control and restraint that lets in little light but plays a great service to space and time. This is patient, claustrophobic sound design that bears out the value in attentive listening, a meditation on the acceptance of passing time, change, growth, death and regeneration. As such, listeners might connect associative lines with the likes of Pan Sonic and Mika Vianio’s solo work, Emptyset and Civilistjavel (who’s Tomas Bodén shows up on mastering duties here), though this remains distinctively Goodman’s vision, a continuation of his interests shown in Mosquitoes and Komare that further pushes out into the murky unknown.

RIYL: Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio, Emptyset, Peter Rehberg, Civilistjavel, Prangers, library electronics, circuit bent sounds. 

TRACK LISTING

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

Able Noise are a cross-continent duo based between The Hague (NL) and Athens (GR), built around the experimental baritone guitar and drum playing of George Knegtel and Alex Andropoulos. After a few formative attempts at collaboration, they 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. 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, to be released via World of Echo on 1st November.

The shift to a studio environment was a significant one, since Able Noise was primarily conceived as a live band, thinking of and writing for the live concert experience specifically. Consider their practice an Active Performance of sorts, one that seeks to challenge understandings of the medium of the live arena, how its properties and limitations can be addressed creatively, and the dialogical relationship between performer and the audience. Those who have caught them live will have witnessed very physical yet malleable performances, shaped each time by the context at hand, be that the time of day, the acoustic properties of the space, and the shared energy of the assembled patrons.

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, Knegtel and Andropoulos 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. 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.

TRACK LISTING

To Appease
Crickets
Providence
Boycott
Tumbling
Inertia
Ceaseless Sun
Garden
To Two
Violence

Guests are Jessica Higgins and Matthew Walkerdine of Glasgow, UK, both formerly of the bands Vital Idles and Mordwaffe. They have been closely tied with DIY music, art and publishing for over a decade. Using (amateur) electronics, singing, speaking and field recording they make songs which blend the rhythms of popular music and contemporary approaches to collage, sampling, improvisation and repetition. As inspired by film and art as they are the legacies of twee underground and avant garde experimentalism, their loose, domestically twinged compositions explore feelings, atmospheres and moments which are hard to articulate and the quite literal notion of being a “guest”.

“I wish I was special” is their debut record, and with it a chance taken to explore terrain not previously covered by their other groups. The ideology of DIY practice appears integral to these eleven compositions, side-stepping virtuosity in favour of instinct and impression, unafraid to press unknown buttons and walk head first into mistake, finding inspiration where convention might not otherwise allow one to tread. The results are confoundingly fresh, sharp-of-mind, and unusually intimate. There’s an obvious intelligence at play here, and no little humour of course, but crucially there’s also a sense of the personal, a first-thought/best-thought (auto)didacticism that celebrates shared understanding and implicit trust. What, ultimately, we might view as the fearlessness in radically being yourself around another. It’s an approach that draws some comparison with the private musings of Flaming Tunes, Idea Fire Company’s domestic electronics, or perhaps even Annea Lockwood’s framing of emotional connection within avant garde structures. More so, Guests represent a compelling continuation of DIY post-punk experimentation that values intuition over prowess, and with it guides the listener into unexpected spaces that somehow comfort as much as they challenge.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: World Of Echo are fast becoming one of the most creative cult labels of recent times. After discovering the mighty Tara Clerkin Trio, they introduce to use this beguiling new act. Imagine if Dry Cleaning quaffed a load of Quaaludes and tried their hand at DIY electronix, and you might get the idea behind Guests.

TRACK LISTING

Talking About Talking
A Veneer, A Promise, Whatever
(my Cooperation)
Arrangements, As In Making Them 
(something Romantic)
(anemones)
Terrazzo
Melodrama
(glossy!)
Chalky Outline
(ha Ha Ha)

Not far off two years from the day, Bristol's Tara Clerkin Trio return to World of Echo and the EP format for a five song collection of quixotic, emotional redolence. But do not mistake their absence for inertia. If their musical output has been a little sparse during those in-between years, limited to a few solo ventures and an astonishing ten minute long piece as a trio, their time has otherwise been richly spent: continuous writing and recording, extensive live performances across Europe and Japan, a cultivation of local and more far-flung artistic connections (musical and otherwise), and a monthly NTS show that, through the voice of others, speaks most obviously to their own unorthodox interests. It's the conflux of that winding activity that leads indirectly to On The Turning Ground, 26 minutes of probing, thoughtful composition that draws from no one specific source. Their inspirations might be centreless, but the trio still possess a very obvious anchor in the form of their hometown. Bristol stands as a city of multitudes, heterogenous and vibrant in such a way as to allow it to renew and remake time and again. Tara Clerkin Trio drink from that same well, duly reflecting a rich musical heritage built on fwd-facing electronic subcultures and experimental urges. As such, On The Turning Ground finds them subject to their own subtle internal evolution, the pervasive sense that you've caught them mid-bloom, on their way to becoming but never anything but themselves. The two instrumental pieces that bookend the EP stand as a perfect case in point, displaying an increasing mastery of compositional space. Pensive and restrained, 'Brigstow' and 'Once Around' both emanate an interstitial quality that's not so much after- as in-between-hours, miniature dub-folk symphonies held together by the kind of tacit understanding that remains the preserve of only the closest of family units. If those two tracks are shaped by a sense of shifting temporality, then the three vocal-led pieces that comprise the record's core feel like a gentle ossifying of aesthetic into something approaching their own unique form of avant-pop. 'Pop' is, of course, a broadly subjective concept, but there's no avoiding the overt sparkling melodicism of songs like 'Marble Walls' and 'The Turning Ground', undeniable re-directions of that late 90s impulse to bend pop sensibilities into off-centre terrain, to render the familiar new again. This is what Tara Clerkin Trio do, gently pulling the ground from under your feet, turning you to face something you'd not quite seen before. To view the world as they do: sideways, sometimes, all of the time.

TRACK LISTING

1. Brigstow
2. World In Delay
3. Marble Walls
4. The Turning Ground
5. Once Around

In spring, Again. But it's true this time. In Spring is the second record by Tara Clerkin Trio, a Bristol-based group who appeared to emerge from below the radar of near-all in early 2020 and in the presence of one of the most captivating records of that year. This latest 23 minute, four song collection, recorded in various stages and locations over the last twelve months, does nothing to detract from those first impressions, refining the woozy and shimmering oddness of their debut into an avant-pop sensibility that is increasingly their own. If the group did arrive fully formed, what that form was did feel supple and hard to grasp. They were, in a sense, essentially new sounding, or at least ghosts between the established lines, and with this new record have doubled-down on their inherently Delphian instinct. At its heart, In Spring is a record of subtle contrasts, experimental yet familiar in its intimacy, obviously modern though tied to certain lineages, and driven by a pop logic which is also free-form and seemingly improvised. Their approach to sound is perhaps the guiding principle here, less concerned with genre as it is texture and feeling, drawing from jazz, folk, modern composition, trip hop and downtempo electronica, yet evading all of those categorisations. Tara Clerkin Trio are too generous of heart to be ripping up any rulebook, they simply seem oblivious to its need. Their geography does provide some context. Bristol's progressive sonic heritage inescapably bleeds into these four tracks, the enclave of open-minded artists around Planet Records in the mid 90s perhaps the closest point of comparison. There's that same magpie spirit which is both futuregazing and aware of its past, though is mostly set on finding its own path. This is in essence what defines Tara Clerkin Trio, feeling their way through freedom of instinct and curiosity, forging their own desire lines. Not so much taking the road less trodden, just walked at their own winding pace. "Done before, And I'll do it again" Ringing in my head While I try To feel.

TRACK LISTING

1. Done Before
2. Night Steps
3. Memory
4. In Spring.

Originally released in 1995 by Planet Records and reissued on CD in 2003 by The Pastels’ Geographic Music imprint, this is the first time Movietone has been reissued on vinyl. An expanded double-LP edition, it includes the extra tracks from the 2003 CD (their first two singles, and an unreleased demo of “Chance Is Her Opera”), and adds three more unearthed gems: demos of “Alkaline Eye” and “She Smiled Mandarine Like”, and an early take of “Late July”, recorded in a garden by Dave Pearce (Flying Saucer Attack) in 1993. Taken together, this is the definitive collection of music from the first phase of one of Bristol’s most remarkable groups.

Movietone was the cumulation of a series of events, explorations, and discoveries, starting at secondary school – the group’s core membership of Kate Wright, Rachel Brook, Matt Elliott and Matt Jones met at Cotham School in Bristol. As for many other groups, their early years were all about experimenting, and finding ways to ‘make do’, a DIY sensibility that would inform Movietone through their decade-long lifespan. From formative rehearsals in a shed in the garden of Brook’s family home, to recording early material to four-track in Redland Library, and on into the Whitehouse and Mr Grin’s studio sessions for their debut album, Movietone’s music fell together in a creatively unpredictable, yet conceptually rigorous manner.

By the time they released Movietone, they’d found a home with Bristol’s Planet, run by author Richard King and James Webster, who had both released their first two singles, “She Smiled Mandarine Like” and “Mono Valley”. There was other music happening around them in Bristol, too, from the Jones brothers’ avant-rock outfit Crescent (who were Movietone’s closest conspirators), through Elliott’s jungle/electronica project Third Eye Foundation, and Brook and Elliott’s membership of Flying Saucer Attack. A closely knit community, Movietone are the centre of this nestling architecture of groups.

The vision in the music, mostly, belongs to Wright, but Movietone ran in democratic creative consort. Listening back to Movietone, you can hear this democracy in action through the wildness of the music, which is balanced by the poetics of Wright’s lyrics and melodies. Full of half-captured memories and entangled abstractions, there’s an elliptical, ruminative quality to much of the writing here that shows the deep influence of the Beat Generation writers, along with a twilight environment captured in the songs that’s pure third-album Velvets, Galaxie 500, early Tindersticks, Codeine. Unpredictable interventions – the crashing glass in “Mono Valley”, the sudden explosions of “Orange Zero” – point towards the noise blowouts of My Bloody Valentine, the unpredictability of Sonic Youth; Wright’s understated vocal cadence suggest a deep, embodied understanding of John Cage’s Indeterminacy.

Movietone would go on to make three fantastic albums for Domino – Night & Day (1997), The Blossom Filled Streets (2000) and The Sand & The Stars (2003) – and their Peel Sessions were released earlier this year on Textile. Still held in high regard by artists like Steven R. Smith, and The Pastels, whose Stephen McRobbie once described them as “one of the great unknown English groups,” it’s an absolute thrill to listen to Movietone anew – still inspired, still seductive, still magic, still mysterious.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
Chance Is Her Opera
Heatwave Pavement
Green Ray
Orange Zero
Late July
Darkness-Blue Glow
Side B:
Mono Valley
Coastal Lagoon
Alkaline Eye
3AM Walking Smoking Talking
Three Fires
Side C:
She Smiled Mandarine Like
Under The 3000 Foot Red Ceiling
Orange Zero (single)
Chance Is Her Opera (demo)
Side D:
Late July (demo)
Alkaline Eyed (demo)
She Smiled Mandarine Like (demo)