Hello!
Happy New Year! It’s already somehow the 16th of January. A recent conversation with a friend about Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘Who Is America?’ made me realise how much the pandemic crippled my sense of time. I referenced that it came out “a few years ago”, before checking and realising it was actually released in 2018. Six years ago. Anyway. Onwards into 2024. This is what I’ve been spinning since we last spoke…
Lupus Nocte
HOGARTH
Epidemic
I’ve been a fan of Swedish musician Mr. Nocte for a very long time. He’d regularly appear in synthwave playlists and, more recently, his music has soundtracked parts of ‘The Boulet Brothers' Dragula’. ‘Hogarth’ is his most recent offering, but over the Christmas period I spent a lot of time listening ‘Solitary Moments’, a fantastic track he released just before Christmas. While ‘Solitary Moments’ is all tweeting birds and dreamy electronic trills wrapped up in vapourwave sensibilities, ‘Hogarth’ draws more from darkwave, like the soundtrack to a cyberpunk dystopia and a sound very much associated with Lupus Nocte (I mean, just look at that sleeve art). He’s got a great back catalogue as well. I’d advise you to get stuck in.
Isa Gordon
FOR YOU ONLY
Optimo
A friend recommended this album to me and it’s been swirling around my head ever since. This is the debut from Ayrshire-raised, Glasgow-based Isa Gordon, an electronic producer with a focus on, well, a bit of everything really. Genre-hopping really is the word, flitting from avant-pop to experimentalism, from synthpop (sort of) to electropop (sort of). It’s electronica if I’m trying to narrow it down but I digress. There’s some fantastic sound design in ‘For You Only’ (the title track for instance, eclectic drums swamped in thick synths that evoke Black Moth Super Rainbow) and Gordon has a talent for the unexpected. Tracks will start in one direction, turn left at a moments notice, then left again. Take ‘Blue Fire’, opening with strings like someone playing a guitar through a dial-up modem, before morphing into layers of robotic electronic textures, vocal chants, and deep, rhythmic drums. She’s an artist that’s now firmly on my radar.
OGRE Sound
ZONED IN (INTERZONE REDUX)
Bandcamp
Robin Ogden is becoming a regular feature among these digital pages, and for good reason. His latest offering is a stonker. ‘ZONED IN (Interzone Redux)’ is his own “neo-concrète” reimagining of his 2020 album ‘Interzone’. In his own words, “created entirely from ‘Interzone’'s audio materia: exported, re-rendered, manipulated and reinterpreted solely within the biome of a hardware sampler”. It should be said that these are not just remixes of tracks found on ‘Interzone’ - this is all entirely new stuff. Opener ‘Supplicant’ trills into focus like the signal from a satellite, before the cold metallic howl of ‘Beyond’ frightens with an ominous ripple. ‘Liminal’ does what it says on the tin - expansive drones and echoing yawns that soundtrack the spaces that time avoids. And those synths on ‘Macrosphere’ reminds me a lot of Disasterpeace’s ‘It Follows’ soundtrack. 10s across the board and then some.
Cumulostratus
RIVER VALLEY
Bandcamp
I’ve been wracking my brains trying to work out why this record even appeared on my radar, but I’m so very glad it did. Not much is known about Cumulostratus, though I do know he’s called Joe and is from Kansas City in Missouri. A cumulostratus, or a stratocumulus as its more commonly known, is a type of cloud characterised by dark, rounded masses, usually in groups or waves (thank you Wikipedia). Makes sense really, considering this is lots of hazy electronics and wistful melodies. I’ve chosen his 2022 EP ‘River Valley’ to feature here, but I’d also recommend checking out his albums ‘Old Spells’ and ‘Portals’. Here on ‘River Valley’, tracks have an ambient, post-rock edge to them. Think something like This Will Destroy You, with the intensity lowered to six.
Sky-high guitar chords echo into the atmosphere on ‘Viridian’, while the arpeggiating strings of ‘Naturality’ could soundtrack the end of a John Hughes film. I think Cumulostratus is now recording under another pseudonym Weather System.
Time to dig deeper
Darkest
THE ETERNAL ORBIT OF THE LOST MOON
Bandcamp
I’m never more excited than when there’s new music from Darkest. Single ‘A New Cosmos’ appeared in September last year and last week ‘The Eternal Orbit Of The Lost Moon’ dropped out of nowhere. This Athens-based synthesist has a particular penchant for conjuring intergalactic electronic worlds and ‘The Eternal Orbit…’ is no different. It sounds like a lost Tangerine Dream track from the ‘Exit’ era, with hints of Vangelis dotted throughout. It’s been on repeat since its release and I’m hoping this means Darkest is priming us for a new album. I can’t recommend this single enough.
And that’s your lot. As always you can find my ramblings elsewhere in both print and online in Electronic Sound. You can also follow me on Threads or Bluesky, though the jury is still out over which I’m going to start posting on frequently. I’m also thinking of rejigging this section a little bit. Nothing major, but maybe a bit of a reformat. We’ll see. But before I go…
Readers take note. Moonbuilding, that fabled publication of all things weird and wonderful in the world of electronic music and it’s periphery satellites, is launching its own Substack, and I recommend you don’t miss out. It’ll be a weekly operation, filled to the brim with music recs, chats with interesting folk, as well as books, gadgets, and events. You can sign up and get the low-down here.
This was one of my favourite stories from the end of last year that got me really excited about the future (a rare occurrence nowadays). Researchers at the University of California have identified characteristics of whale vocalisations that are analogous to our human vowels and diphthongs (a diphthong is a sound formed by two vowels, like ay, oi, ou etc). Through the use of a language model called fiwGAN, AI was trained to imitate whale linguistic codas and embed that into the vocalisations. It’s a pretty incredible discovery and use of AI, and scientists have even managed to have a “conversation” with a whale called Twain. You can read the research paper here.
If I was going to recommend one TV show for you to watch, it would be Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s ‘The Curse’. It stars Fielder, Safdie and Emma Stone and focusses on an alleged curse and the affects it has on a couple as they try and film their problematic HGTV show. But that’s not even the half of it. It’s described on Wikipedia as a “satirical black comedy thriller” but as with everything Nathan Fielder, it’s better to just sit down and watch it. After its wild finale aired last week, it might be an all-timer for me. It also has a fantastic electronic score composed by jazz musician John Medeski and produced by frequent Safdie collaborator Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never (look out for some words on that next time). The entire show is surrealism at its very best. For fans of ‘Twin Peaks’, particularly ‘The Return’ series.