Improvisation tends to be a lurking possibility in these columns, even if not actively being practised, but for the first New Weird Britain of 2026 it’s the dominant theme. No reason that my conscious is aware of, and this February edition mops up a few releases from late 2025 (the last ‘proper’ NWB column having been in October) such as Enough, the debut LP of rafter-rattling, all-improv loft doom by Long Swan Tongues.
LST are a duo of bassist Al Wilson, who also released albums with Personal Hell and Ghold in 2025, and violin player Edd Sanders, who did likewise with the folk rocky Red River Dialect but whose other improvising duo Kalkin are a closer spiritual relation to this project. They live in Todmorden and recorded this in the town’s focal pub venue The Golden Lion. It’s been on their Bandcamp for just over a year and two of its three tracks were put on vinyl by Manchester label Sacred Tapes – but don’t sleep on ‘Then More’, aka the ‘digital bonus’, because it’s ten extra minutes of being beaten with a pillowcase of gravel in an artful and ultimately soothing way.
I don’t think I’ve heard this instrumental formula before – sludge metal bass tuned through the floor, violin wired up to generate malevolent feedback – which is kinda surprising in hindsight, as on the evidence of Enough it’s an obvious winner. Wilson is well versed in playing slow and heavy, but I reckon ‘Enough’ the track might be his ultimate expression of that to date: with Sanders relentlessly needling away and the pair matching one another blow for blow, it’s like a Theatre Of Eternal Music version of Khanate. And you can’t be saying things like that lightly!
When it comes to folk music, there may be no UK city more storied than Newcastle (and its surrounding area). A book looking over its history could end up pretty hefty, not least because younger musicians there keep alighting on folk as a medium of expression and doing things with it in their own image. Jasmine Padgett is a new name to me – likewise the small coterie of artists she performs with, often in Newcastle’s Ouseburn district – but her publicly shared output so far is absolutely part of a folk continuum, albeit at the fringes of the form.
There’ve been a few album-length Padgett releases since November, all interesting, but I’ll focus on her latest, the self-released Melodic Acoustic Music tape. Its title, though not inaccurate as such, understates its contents: five epic pieces, nigh-on filling what I think is an actual C90 with freebooting string work, beds of lurking drone and incidental domestic sound bleeding into Padgett’s playing. There are a few contributing vocalists, reading a poem apiece by Barrington Gates and Christina Rossetti, and the Hardanger fiddle of Richard Scott, I assume on the vast and psychedelic 26-minute closer ‘Med Tålmodighet’ although nothing played on here sounds very conventional. It’s all tapping the same cosmic source as free folk elders like Pelt and the Jewelled Antler lot – heads who were making music before Padgett was born – but it’s got its own personality and feels genuine and organic as you like. Strong tip!
The wider ripples of that generation-old US scene just mentioned take us quickly to the sort of meandering that can arguably be traced back to John Fahey more than anyone else but is treacherously, commendably un-Western in its horizons and tunings. This is what Bristol’s Riley/Radley are up to on Hookahs Of The Cave, their first duo recording, and for a project that states its formative inspirations upfront they take it somewhere pretty distinctive.
Ben Chasny casts a pretty big shadow over the global spread of acid folk guitarists who like to choogle now and then, and there’s no mistaking Danny Riley’s absorption of his electric frazzle. A Sun City Girls namecheck, meanwhile, comes through in goofball track titles like ‘Enclave Of Parisian Cash’ and guitar/drums intercourse equal parts jabbing and fluid, right in the eye of the figurative triangle connecting Beirut, Appalachia and no wave-era NYC. ‘Swells Nowhere’, last of Hookahs’ five jams, is the most ecstatic and amp-buzzy, and makes it clear why Noah Radley and Dan Johnson got together for a drum battle tape a few years back (released through Radley’s Elastic Furniture label, as is this).
Three more Bristolian improvisors hopped onstage at the city’s Croft venue two years ago (when it was called the Crofters Rights), scampered hither and yon for 25 inspired minutes, and a recording is now available, on the Liquid Library label and credited to Kelly / Sneddon / Grigg. That’s guitarist Matthew Grigg, double bassist Jo Kelly and saxophonist Rebecca Sneddon.
Everyone pulled their weight that evening and no-one throws said weight around to anyone else’s detriment. Sneddon is the closest adherent to jazz convention, which works well in an anchoring sense and still allows for plenty of sharpened skronk; Grigg I find the hardest to picture exactly what he’s doing to/with his guitar to generate these sounds, which also speaks well of his exploratory zest. Kelly’s bass technique more often approximates ‘wounded beast’ than ‘rhythmic ripple’, but minimalist delicacy is perfectly possible, as in the last few minutes of this set. All three musicians play in multiple other musical groupings, some of which might sound a bit like this and others which won’t; the tape is dedicated to their sometime bandmate Robin Foster, on account of his enforced absence that night, and all proceeds from it go to St Peter’s Hospice.
Pat Thomas, Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright are three more exalted English jazzers who make no bones about standing on the shoulders of giants, because that’s good jazz etiquette. Their giants, or the ones they choose to quote on the front covers of their Strata, Act (Joy Contemporary)* album at least, are Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, guys who rewired free improvisation in Britain and beyond. Both of the quotes relate to their having played with American pianist Cecil Taylor; this sprawling release – five performances taped in London and Zurich in 2022, totalling almost three hours in digital form and released by Finnish label We Jazz – is not a tribute to Taylor as such, but seems to use his legacy as a source of energy.
The influence of Taylor on Thomas’ piano technique, honed over more than 40 years, is considerable, and audible in these sets as you’d expect. It’s as often his electronics leading the charge, though, another route to enlightenment but no less potent, and both nonpareil psychic sparring partners for Abbott’s no-surface-untapped percussion and Wright’s fearsome shards and tonal blocks of saxophone. Abbott and Wright also chip in on the electronic side of things, and are in fact presented here as XT, their duo name. Thomas and Wright are also 50% of [Ahmed], and plenty of their essential aesthetic is echoed across Strata, Act, although I’d suggest this is more outwardly challenging. This really feels like an artefact you could spend months with and still hear new things.
I’d already committed to giving Leviathan Whispers (Buried Treasure), the late 2025 LP by Tim Hill, some just-in-time shine before I realised his co-credits with at least a couple of players from the last two trios. He and Pat Thomas were both in Mike Cooper’s band during the 1980s; more recently, Hill and Matthew Grigg have combined in an array of ensembles, live and recorded.
Known mostly as a saxophonist, on this album Hill – now based in Taunton – arranges a polygamous wedding between his various horns and his stash of analogue and digital electronics. On mid-album doozy ‘Notes From Underground’, we get ICR Records’ Colin Potter and Jonathan Coleclough giving things an extra dusting of industrial ambience. Earlier on Leviathan Whispers, a baritone drone conjures a mean fug, sometimes soundtrack-ready and occasionally approaching a jazz reading of Tim Hecker-esque power ambient, but with more palpable wit. After ‘Notes…’, the solemn keyboard melody which bedrocks ‘The Ghost Horn’ commences a three-part coda that’s the album at its most aurally welcoming: ‘The Milk White Path’ blows more-Bohren-than-Bohren smoke rings for somnambulists in rumpled suits and ‘Whirl Me Round’ is like ‘The Last Post’ if there’d been a war where all the most suave people on earth died.
Shen Jing, who records as Shenggy Shen, has lived in London making experimental music for nearly 20 years. Before that, she played drums in Beijing punk band Hang On The Box, the only context in which I’ve previously encountered her. Horses, titled to mark the imminent Chinese new year’s zodiac sign, is a cassette featuring Jing and Sheng Jie as a duo with potentially confusing names but two sides of stark, resonant improv.
With Shenggy still a drummer (albeit you’ll do well to hear any punky rhythms herein) and Jie (who I think lives in Beijing, though evidently gets about a bit) on electronic cello, this set was recorded last November in Dalston venue SJQ. Oddly, the listing for that gig says they were performing their 2021 album Parallel Weaving, but that doesn’t seem to have been what transpired – so we get 33 minutes of new music, decidedly less tearout than that album to boot. Jie uses her electroacoustic setup to canny effect, with moments of close quarters bowed intimacy melting into pools of shuddering static; Jing mostly seems to be playing a conventional kit in an unconventional way, but introduces some gamelan-sounding percussion at a particularly minimalist moment in the middle third.
How many times have you pondered the psychogeography of ambient dub techno today? Well, come with me to the north west Wales coast, where Matthew Ridgway has crafted an album of just that, titled Syren, under his Gafael alias. The music develops amidst glacial beauty, flecked with seafoam and coloured by isolationism; it seems Ridgway regards this project as highly specific to his surroundings and national/regional identity, which makes it intriguing that all four Gafael albums to date have been issued through American labels (Syren on North Carolina’s Enmossed, the previous three on Noir Age of Miami).
The two sides of this cassette, styled as ‘Submerge’ and ‘Emerge’ respectively, are both a continuation and alteration of Ridgway’s aesthetic. His use of field recordings from the great Gwynedd outdoors, as heard on 2022’s elegant Serpentine, remains part of the Gafael sound design, but the dub chords which cut through the fuzzed-out organic matter are a largely new addition. On ‘Emerge 2’, Syren’s closest thing to an epic, the aqueous synth sweeps and patters of metallic percussion approach a blessedly non-obnoxious sort of bombast. Closer in spirit and execution to Gas than Basic Channel, it may well be that Ridgway’s relationship to soundsystem culture is nebulous – yet a different, highly satisfying meditative sound has resulted here.
Romeo’s Fall (Accidental Meetings), Ruth Hughes’ second tape as Exlruth, documents a 2024 live performance and radically recontextualises the base (sp.) thrills of being in the dance. It took place in London arts centre Somerset House and featured two performers, with Hughes adding effects into the live mix: again, there are parallels with dub technique here, but in the hands/throat of vocalist Nik Rawlings and double bassist Caius Williams a type of faux-medieval worship music emerges. Meanwhile, the club subculture paid unlikely tribute here is makina, the high energy hardcore style beloved by Jordan Pickford and other people who grew up in Sunderland, as Hughes did.
This is the composer’s second makina-themed release, following a 2024 EP (as Excelsior Ruth); that one bore clear echoes of the genre’s actual sound, which cannot be said for Romeo’s Fall. To that end, a listener can skip over its surrounding lore if they choose, because Hughes’ score and this rendition more than stand on their own terms. Rawlings, a countertenor, deploys chandelier-high notes in pointed contrast to the low-gravity drone of Williams’ bass: a restless improviser around London, recordings of his with Theodora Laird and Tara Cunningham have been covered in previous NWBs, but tasked with vivifying someone else’s vision he aces the assignment.
The debut EP by Falmouth’s Xanax is presented as a lathe cut 10-inch and being sold by its creator for nine pounds including postage (if you live in the UK). You know those TV ads you used to get where the owner of a regional chain of carpet stores would appear onscreen claiming their latest knockdown prices were the result of him going bananas, insane etc? Charlie Murphy, who is Xanax, must have been similarly afflicted – but, unlike your average home décor CEO, is crazy about punk principles above all.
Mirror, written and recorded solo by Murphy with most of its postproduction done by Sam Stacpoole (who’s also Xanax’s second live member), is virulently punk-sounding as electronic records go. The beats are fast and hit hard, the synths seem to be fighting among themselves, there’s little if anything describable as a melody and the vocals are pure anarcho wideboy. There’s a bit of an EBM thing present, mainly in thud-funk opener ‘Field Of Sight’, but more of a redlined noise-techno thing: Murphy chucked an issue of his zine Afterimage in the envelope with my record, and two of the acts he interviewed in there, Nation Unrest and Container, will dually point you towards the sound of this belter disc.
