Feel like it’s been long enough that a column such as this one can shout out a couple of ‘weird grime’ releases without it being all cringey, or like it’s going to undermine ‘real grime’ or something. Besides, the people involved here have put in the graft! So let’s have a look at Adventures In The Otherworld (Living Ornaments), the debut by Jack Williams and Nick Denton as 11:11. Given a quiet digital release last year, and a tape pressing a month or so ago, its seven tracks comprise a remarkably sui generis suite that uses zen and anger to equal effect.
Williams and Denton are real ones for sure, but not the sort of underground I’m often talking about here. The former produces as idntmttr and works as an engineer in Belly Of The Beast studio, founded by the latter, who you might know better as Dizzee Rascal’s co-producer and mentor Cage. ‘The Grey Area’ is a low-key jazzy murmur of an opener, livened slightly by a sampled description of some sort of out-of-body experience: one of four instrumentals, with ‘Dispossessed’ pitting ambient techno fluidity against weightless woodblock hits and creaking strings, ‘Main Feed’ bamboozling with fidgety polyrhythms and ‘Maranasati’ leaning heavy into a Badalamenti/fourth world interzone. No weakeners – yet it’s the three tracks featuring London MC Lucky I’m Luke which illuminate 11:11’s brilliance. Hinting at mid-2010s sinogrime, Rhythm & Sound type dub techno and deep house of the DJ Sprinkles ilk, it’s its own thing for all that, never more so than on ‘The Collapse’ on which Luke preaches a most compelling end-time message.
The five-track State Of Flux is the first release by Guy ‘Guido’ Middleton for almost five years, and the first one sold as a physical format for way longer again. Don’t bother clearing a space in your record bag, though, because the Lifted Icons label – from Bristol, as is Guido – are releasing it as a Super Nintendo game cartridge. Strictly speaking I think it’s just a regular download and they send you a random old game with a new label stuck on as well, but it’s all fun eh.
Moreover, it’s not completely random as novelty artefacts go, with Middleton citing the music from the Final Fantasy series as his major inspiration for State Of Flux. The relationship between console soundtracks and grime production is pretty well established, and if you’re au fait with the style Guido hit upon with his early records for the Punch Drunk label – silkier than grime or dubstep’s average, with 80s-style synth trippage and R&B retools – it’s not a giant leap to the world of pixellated RPGs. Heart-rush arpeggios and dark-corridor keyboard stabs permeate ‘Adventures Await’, loverman sax and badman vocal idents tart up ‘Emotional Times’, and the melody tapped out on ‘Gentle Hearts’ sounds not so much innocent as newborn.
Endless is the second collaborative release by Stonecirclesampler, aka NWB regular Luke J Murray, and Travis Elborough, a writer whose work frequently addresses nostalgia, forgotten histories and cultural ephemera. It’s a one-track, 20-minute CDR released via Sleep Fuse, a sublabel of prolific psych imprint Reverb Worship, which sells its wares (such as this one) via eBay and doesn’t stream them online. Making you more in thrall to my opinion than normal, if that’s possible, and toying with the danger the release won’t be for sale by the time this column is published.
With Murray citing a roots of dubstep influence on this greyed-out marriage of drone, drizzle and passing vehicles, you’re advised to find parallels in his synth tone rather than waiting for a beat that will never come, and wonder if we were too hasty in turning ‘nightbus’ into a wrung-out cliché after a hundred Burial essays. Elborough recites, in his disarmingly precise Open University narration style, a series of adjectives, placenames, landmarks and taglines (“rail music… for insomniacs”) whose connection is unclear but which I’m primed to believe blossoms into a cryptic puzzle when written out in full. The pair invoke J.G. Ballard, and as Endless sounds like wet tarmac and extinguished hope, why not.
I wrote about Joe Murray, under his Posset alias, back in 2019, but the release wasn’t a solo recording, as latest album Scum is. It also wasn’t covering all 28 songs on the first Napalm Death album, as latest album Scum is. A brilliant idea, albeit one which would be a terrible idea if had by nearly any other musician. Murray, in general, is a dedicated anti-musician, typically creating his sounds through cassette manipulation, feedback, analogue hiss and game-of-chance vocal cutups: the audible presence of acoustic instruments on the odd track here goes against his own grain.
And what of Napalm Death themselves, who accidentally stumbled into a kind of mainstream after this LP’s 1987 release and were met by people who couldn’t conceive of a sound this unlistenably extreme? Murray, who says he discovered Scum as a teenage John Peel listener, is a wiser head, acknowledging the album’s “chaotic buzzing insect rumble” but also the depths of its arrangements and production aesthetic.
His takes are lateral thinking in extremis, of course. ‘You Suffer’ – four words in one second, extreme metal’s ultimate meme song – is, Posseted, two minutes of unspooling tape and fragments of ‘why?’s. ‘Instinct Of Survival’ and ‘Control’ are acoustic strums with cloven hooves, Murray intoning Napalm’s turbo-anarcho lyrics in sullen spoken word; a repeat gambit is to slow speech down to a gut-bubbling gurgle that outstrips even the most br00tal grindcore vocalist. Does ‘Sacrificed’ seek to replicate the sound of a blastbeat as heard on a live crowd bootleg, is ‘Point Of No Return’ a post-Discharge bass barrage as reenacted on tin cans and string? Only Posset knows. Superb release!
Next up is a song-a-side split LP, released via Cold Spring, between Iggor Cavalera and Shane Embury, who of course joined Napalm Death on bass after Scum and stuck around ever since. Embury’s taste for electronic music has been aired previously through solo project Dark Sky Burial; ‘Own Your Darkness’ is his first ever release under his own name, I think Cavalera, whose quarter-century drumming in Sepultura will forever be his calling card, has produced a wide variety of electronic music since leaving the Brazilian metal giants: Petbrick, a duo from his adopted home of London, have released some fine dins.
‘Neon Gods’ follows Cavalera’s collab tapes with Vomir and Integrity’s Dwid Hellion, and its brand of noise isn’t quite that forbidding, though fair stretches of this 20-minute composition get pretty gnarly: an early strafing segment reminded me of Anthony Di Franco’s JFK project and the coda is a full-fathom blowout. Embury’s steez is more cinematic – as you might expect if you’ve heard Dark Sky Burial, though this is distinct from that – with something like a roided-up version of the Berlin School sound resulting at points and a welcome horror-synth interjection about nine minutes in.
Cameron Winters, who records as Kavari and – for her most recent release – Eel Blood, seems positioned at a curious and good intersection, as regards scenes and styles. Having made a name for herself producing queer hyperpop of the pneumatic hard dance type, a noise influence has leached into Winters’ aesthetic, to the point where, in the case of Eel Blood’s Scalping Gods For Their Neglect album (Venalism), it’s utterly dominant. She has a celebrity fan in Ethel Cain, it seems, and if the latter’s recent Perverts album is one of the more challenging works by a contemporary pop artist, then this punishing tape is a healthy reminder that these things are all relative.
Opening track ‘Apocrypha’ is a scree-backed array of news clips about various things that make 2025 a dogshit time to be alive on a British or global scale – which ironically feels a bit hackishly retro, like Consolidated or someone – but thereafter, Scalping Gods… gets to work. Certainly, we’re a long way from any kind of party mentality with ‘Blackreach’, almost seven minutes of rotting, haunted-shipyard wall noise; ‘Body Pits’ retains the grotesquely diaphragmatic frequencies but favours abrupt switcheroos over unbending barrages. Quite hard to know for sure if, and where, vocals feature on this album, though ‘Your Last Breath Can’t Be Given’ seems to be an especially grisly exception to this, fashioning a needling drone of sorts from asphyxiated gasping.
This column doesn’t review many demos, I realise on the occasion of reviewing one. Leucotome from Manchester have just released a tape on the Crush Zone label from Todmorden, though, which they’re calling a demo and which sounds like one too. And if you take that to be snark then consider the unplumbably murky and fascinating depths of the marginal goth/coldwave/anarcho punk/UKDIY scenes of olde – this being Leucotome’s sonic ancestry – where bands’ earliest public recordings often end up being highly prized artefacts.
The trio – Evelyn, Fionnuala and Megan, precise contributions uncredited – cover enough ground on these six songs for a thread of cohesiveness to be a credit in itself. ‘Atomic Sisterhood’ is an arresting introduction, synths variously shimmering and grinding underneath officiously barked lyrics about bad energy, but one which won’t necessarily prepare you for the zither-y melody and theatre-folk vox of ‘Tricoteuse’, which follows it, or the black-booted riff on ‘Small Rituals’ that punches up the song’s lopsided Young Marble Giants frame. ‘Epithalamion’ is naught but one grungily lunging guitar and a succession of two-word lines, and somehow it sounds like a lot more. A second Leucotome recording could potentially sound like a lot of things and I’d be down with pretty much any of them.
Making your first release a cover version – that’s something else you don’t see a lot of. Unless you’re an X Factor winner, a 1960s pop act, or Nirvana. Or Spike, which is an alias of Hannah McLoughlin and whose self-titled cassette (on the Gob Nation label) opens with Warren Zevon’s sole hit single ‘Werewolves Of London’, done in bedroom synthpop style. It proves a useful signpost towards the four mordant songs which follow it, in addition to being a creditably unfaithful take in its own right.
Audaciously, Spike’s second track ‘Tiquetonne’ also begins as someone else’s song, Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman’s 90s pop-classical smash ‘Time To Say Goodbye’. This is a façade, as the subsequent two minutes of helium-trance synthesiser and heavy-lidded vocals underline. ‘Voca Me’ has the shoots of multiple potential great pop songs, but elects to stay eccentric and sci-fi with its arrangements, and satisfyingly so. Owen Williams, also of The Tubs and Sniffany & The Nits, takes an unspecified collaborative role on this EP, but the sense is that Spike is McLoughlin’s solo vision primarily, and one you ought to investigate if you like groups such as Black Marble or Lust For Youth circa International.
Unclear, at present, if GAX is to be written that way because it’s an initialism or because the people behind the name think it requires shouting. It may well however be a terse portmanteau of the two instruments featured on it, Vasco Alves’ gaita de fole (a type of Portuguese bagpipes) and Seymour Wright’s saxophone. ‘The Traditions’ / ‘As Tradiçōes’ (Infant Tree) is the London duo’s first release, recorded some 15 years after their first performances together – at Eddie Prévost of AMM’s London Improvisation Workshop, which might give you an idea of the level of ‘out’ at play here.
That said, the two nine-minute scorchers on this 10-inch record don’t really wander freely in the sense of AMM ultra-abstraction (Wright has plenty of solo work that fits if you want that). ‘The Traditions’ is a mettle-tester early on for sure, with prod-yer-fillings reed abuse and fugged air blasts not only doubleteaming cruelly but persistently having silent, protracted pauses inserted, just as you’re getting acclimatised to it. Why? To keep us rubes guessing… I guess. ‘As Tradiçōes’ is a drone piece, which is to say that Alves’ bagpipes would more easily be identified as such by one of said rubes, and it’s exhilarating – unerringly stolid as a Phill Niblock composition but with the perception of a climactic goal.
Often susceptible to the charm of a rustic drone himself – whomst among us isn’t! – Richard Skelton uses them, sporadically if not perpetually, as bedrock for melodic dappling on his latest release, American Memory (Folded Time). Per the title, the cassette is his latest release as Imperial Valley, a project for which Skelton holidays in Depression-era Americana (indeed doing so under an alter ego, CF Moore) and comes up with something like his take on ambient desert blues. A musician (and writer) whose references to British and Irish flora, fauna and landscape have permeated his work at every turn, it seems he can evoke bleached-white cow skulls as ably as dry stone walls.
Both of American Memory’s tracks are eponymous, and precisely 22 minutes long. The first leans, in its earlier mode, on rangy psychedelic guitar, and a desiccated-sounding fellow adds muttered dialogue every so often – CF Moore purports to be a field recordist, you see. A passage of disassembled bluegrass gives way to a long segment that traverses ‘American Memory II’ and sounds more GY!BE-like than anything I’ve heard by Skelton before. The sustained feedback that drives the last ten minutes is outwardly delicate, but fibrous and nutritious underneath, and – yes – forged by the power of a drone.
