MUSIC

With a clutch of EPs under his belt spanning a wealth of pallets, Henzo narrows the focus on his debut studio album “The Poems We Write For Ourselves” - a culmination of persistent iterations over several years, distilling his sonic milieu into something that feels decidedly his own. The album proper is coupled with a debut live performance which reinterprets the tracks and splices them with omitted material from the time of writing - recorded in full in the intimate confines of Manchester’s growingly infamous Stage and Radio basement. Honing his craft in the shadows of Lancashire, Poems is an expansive reflection of the producer’s time spent away committing to the scope of an LP.

A thread of stratified sound design weaves throughout the record, but with a discerning dancefloor proclivity mostly prevalent. Cold opener “Noggin” riffs on noughties Raster-Noton a la Byetone rebuilt with fractal tear out DnB, with closer “Indulgence” following suit on a puckered plod of Dub Techno ambience. More club-focussed moments come in the form of “Rustica Slump” and “Blue Will...”, the former’s sickly sweet vocals resolved by the latter’s stoic UKG/Techno rudeness. “A Bouquet of Clumsy Words” channels mechanical shuffle with a stripped back 2/4 pulse whilst maintaining a firmly FWD>>energy alongside “Plant Your Roots In Me” on a similar vector - swapping out a straight kick pattern for a bludgeoning 808 assault on an early Hessle-indebted tip.

“Take Stock, Touch Grass” harks to golden era ClekClekBoom and Night Slugs with a bare bones kick and vocal motif, updating the formula with a tweaking lead line that places it firmly in the contemporary space. “Swell:Shrink” sings from the same sheet with a shrieking, space age wobble doing the heavy lifting, knocking the pace back to a shoulder-lean swagger on a slow fast conundrum Henzo has shown his flair for on previous releases.

The outliers to Henzo’s more known approach, “Worm Grunting” with Belfast’s Emby, an amalgamation of halfest time DnB and illest mannered Road Rap, plus “The Rest Is The Mess You Leave”, a starkly anti-retro Ghettotek endeavour, give grounds to the LP. Clearly rooted in the comfortable universe of the dancefloor, these tracks expand the producer’s realm into loftier heights as he graduates into long play land.

Moin follow their EOY-topping 'You Never End' with a pithy jazz-pilled appendix, bringing back poet Sophia Al-Maria and adding Ben Vince's circuitous horns to offset Valentina Magaletti's gummiest live rhythms. Next level biz, obvs - crucial listening whether you're into Slint, Tara Clerkin Trio, Mica Levi/Spresso, Bark Psychosis or Still House Plants.

Not exactly a continuation, 'Belly Up' is a fresh bite cooked from similar ingredients. Moin bent out the tabs last year on their third album, emulsifying the post-punk and hardcore oils that smeared their early plates with modish funk and disintegrated, industrial-strength noize. Joe Andrews, Tom Halstead and Valentina Magaletti cogitate over the same themes here, but train their senses on jazz, assembling brittle and mutable modernist shapes around impeccably springy live syncopations.

Raw, direct opener 'See' is a case in point; Qatari-American artist, writer and filmmaker Al-Maria's droll non sequiturs helped cement the aesthetic of 'You Never End' and make a welcome return, now inserted between Magaletti's sluggish marching band extemporisations and prolific collaborator Ben Vince's transcendent sax loops. Andrews and Halstead keep it restrained, tagging on deadened hardcore tangs and a nasal keyboard vamps that maps the London topography between 4Hero and Tirzah. Vince appears again on 'I'm Really Flagging (or I Trusted U)'; what sounds like a clip from the same ad-libbed workout surges next to flimsy synths and cheeky samples. It plays like a sequel, still rallying around Magaletti's exaggerated, tom-heavy patter, suggesting alternate routes to the finale.

The boxy, no-wave curdled funk that characterized 'You Never End' is reheated on 'X.U.Y.' and evaporated into a quiescent mantra, but Moin's most ambrosian moments appear when they reduce the heat. 'You Leave Me Breathless' sounds as if it's a loose, unplanned rehearsal, with AutoTuned crows melting over a long, limber patchwork of paradiddles from Magaletti. And the trio don't completely ignore the rave backroom, banging together grungy Akai-coruscated samples and 808 State synths on the greyscale 'I Don't Know Where To Look'. As always, they don't exactly boot us back to the '90s - Moin make us wonder what it might have sounded like if there was access to a different array of technology.

Awesome compilation of rare dub versions of Amy Winehouse songs

Tracklist :

Side A

Valerie Dub
Dubber Than Me
You Know I'm No Dub
Dub & Mr. Jones
Dub To Black
Redub
Will You Still Dub Me Tomorrow
Wake Dub Alone

Side B

Dub The Box
Love Is A Dubbing Game
You Know I'm No Dub - Take 2
Dub To Black - Take 2
Will You Still Dub Me Tomorrow - Take 2
Dub The Box - Take 2
Love Is A Dubbing Game - Take 2
You Know I'm No Dub - Take 3

London bassbin mutator Brassfoot twists up his first EP since a killer 2022 album; five tracks of trippy electronics and rudely strident, locked-in steppers grooves for TTT’s weirdo club sanctuary

Since debuting on Funkineven’s Apron in 2015, Brassfoot has built a solid rep for his psyched-out bent on soundsytem conventions across a slew of 12”s and tapes for likes of DBA and beside J M S Khosah for London/Tokyo co-op NCA. ‘Search History’ checks in with the perennial club screwball for the first time in years, clocking in with the detuned synth excursion ‘Double Speak’ and tripping from the sodden stepper ‘Kinda Vicarious’ to spiralling, iridescent arps in the dreamier motion of ‘Cat Riddles & Gunnels Juice’, spurting a class bit of breakcore-type pressure with the chopped breaks and pinging cowbells of ‘Earthtopia’ recalling NPLGNN and Ossia, and seeing it off with the dank zinger ‘A Nation, No Flag’.

On their most explicit venture into music for moving image, Miles Whittaker & Sean Canty rudely fracture piano and vocal recordings by US filmmaker-musician Kristen Pilon in a short-circuiting of style and pattern that arguably amounts to some of their best yet on DDS. Yup it’s uncanny dream-within-a-dream type gear, landing somewhere between their commissions for Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and creeping classics by The Caretaker.

Shredding up definitions of electro-acoustic opera, spectralist chamber musique and concrète rave, Demdike hit square between the eyes/ears of film music vernaculars on a startlingly strong addition to their unique oeuvre, now in its 16th year of elusive psychoacoustic strafes and jump-cuts across putative borders. The 13-part, hour-long album dislodges source material made for the experimental film ‘To Cut and Shoot’, by Kristen Pilon, an NYC-based musician and filmmaker, to farther refract the film’s themes of serendipity and the nature of ghosts and dreams with a flickering flux of sound-imagery and aleatoric weirdness appropriate to her original meditations, but also freely messing with their forms. 

Situated just a few miles north of Houston, Cut and Shoot is a relatively insignificant Texas town with an unforgettably bizarre name. Pilon grew up not far from Cut and Shoot, and it's there where she ran into 65-year-old machinist and motorcyclist Robert Lewis Stevenson, better known as Bobbo, who's pictured on the album's cover. The meeting occurred a few months after Pilon recorded her improvisations on piano, strings and voice in the basement cellar of the Halle in Manchester, with Bobbo providing the necessary narrative heft the trio needed to inspire an experimental film and its accompanying soundtrack. 

Responding to Kristen’s initial piano and operatic vocal recordings, Demdike return a volley of discrete parts tilting from typically cantankerous mayhem to quieter, more clandestine buzzes sliced with crazed interstices of the imagination, all marbled with the plasmic contrails of the paranormal which have long been peculiar to their work. With a poetic flair reflecting Pilon’s own phrasing and melding of mediums, Demdike unfold and expand her melodic fragments into temporal mazes, variously resembling the most messed-up ends of The Caretaker in ‘A Grave Fall (January)’, but also liable to skew into buckshot club turbulence, as with ‘Belly Up’, or the bittersweet bruk contortions of ‘Twist’. 

The storyline wickedly frays and loops into itself with a non-linearity that recalls the mid-to-latter stages of Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ or waking from a sweaty fever dream only to pitch back into its thorny bush of ghosts, often within the space of one track. It’s testament to the ever-tighter binds of Demdike’s symbiotic vision that the results nevertheless hold a thread of logic that weaves in everything from their Jon Collin jams to reams of mixes and Gruppo edits with an unresolved, open-ended quality that still keeps us on our toes, perhaps more so than ever here.