Bridget Hayden’s brand new album Cold Blows The Rain (Basin Rock) is, I feel confident in saying, the most accessible release this British underground keystone has put her name to in a quarter-century and change. Accessibility is a stigmatised concept, though, so we should perhaps proceed with context. Its eight songs, recorded with the Apparitions – a newly minted trio of Hayden, repeat collaborator Sam Mcloughlin and Dan Bridgwood-Hill aka dbh – are all folk standards of note, fame even, and pay tribute to Hayden’s mother Anne, who died a few months before Cold Blows’ release.
Anne’s habit of singing songs like these at home planted a seed of folk and blues fandom in Bridget, detectable in plenty of her previous gear, but invariably with an obscure production aesthetic and submerged vocal. Not this time, and the frying decay of her typical guitar style is absent too, replaced by banjo and unusually delicate cello and synth layers. Mcloughlin and Bridgwood-Hill, on harmonium and violin, are sensitive foils, and Hayden’s voice is upfront in the mix and given dreamy, pseudo-choral post-production effects.
The results have the air of being untroubled by restrictions, and reaffirm the siblinghood between folksong of the British/Irish and Appalachian ilk. For me at least, it also reignites a period some 20 years ago where a ton of really interesting (and tuneful) folk music was coming out of the American quasi-noise subterranea: Hayden, both solo and as part of Vibracathedral Orchestra, was only a degree of separation from it. Whether Cold Blows The Rain proves a one-off or a new direction, it’s an artistic success by any measure.
In Bacup, near Hayden’s adopted home of Todmorden, we find Thorn Wych, who’s notched a few compilation appearances before debut LP Aesthesis (Hood Faire) and whose sound is unique in the most literal sense on account of all the featured instruments being self-built from native wood. Her flutes and ocarinas, each slightly different to the last, can be bought via the link above; meanwhile, shapeless stringed contraptions are given pickups and create the rustic, droning beds of these thickly psychedelic pieces.
By no means maximalist or overproduced, Aesthesis nonetheless makes keen use of the editing suite. A typical Thorn Wych number is ripe with overdubs, shifted pitch, frail delay and almost foley-like sonic interjections. It’s not obvious how much of this is improvised, if any, but sometimes structure prevails – rendering ‘Out Of The Eater Came Something To Eat’ a ritualistic folk jam, ‘Serpent Psalm’ woodblock barnyard boogie freakage. The broad vibe is equal parts devotional and sacrilegious, grave and celebratory: I’m again moved to think of that New Weird America outbreak, albeit the more legitimately freerange stuff that prevailed before overground attention came knocking, like Pelt. Fans of them, London’s Triple Negative, or various tendrils of the La Nòvia collective are directed this way most highly.
Active in what’s often cheerfully dubbed the no-audience underground for some 15 years now, Stuart Chalmers probably should have been reviewed in here before, issuing his inscrutable music via multiple labels on the NWB radar. I: Awakening The Ancestors (Cruel Nature / Reverb Worship), his first as Nomad Tree, is a heady starting point – if not for you, then for Chalmers himself. Often found fashioning sound from tape grot, pedal wrangling and glitchy imprecision, these three longish-form pieces instead use dulcimers, gongs and “percussion sourced from animal or natural materials,” with segments recorded in a Cumbrian cave and Peak District church.
The first two minutes of this release imitate – or are? – eerie winds such as might comprise the intro to a black metal album. The inchoate bells and monolithic bass drum which follows are kvlt enough too, ditto the title ‘On Sorcerous Wings Take Flight’, but Chalmers transmits poise and grace over shock or schlock, coaxing shapeshifting feedback from a wired-up dulcimer and evolving the composition at justly glacial speed. ‘Seeking Through Deepest Fears’ organises itself round droning, possibly bowed strings and percussion lively enough to whisk us to desert-psych climes: Earth divided by Rangda might give you a working idea. And ‘Amongst Forest Spirits Or Wild Beasts’ begins as floor mulch before a gong bath emerges, only it’s not so much a bath as the algae-ridden town fountain which you, in a state of delirium, have climbed into on market day.
The personnel who recorded Strange Brew Sessions, 40 minutes of improvisation issued on tape via the Ceramics label, don’t appear to have an ensemble name as such. “Copper Sounds, Dali St Paul, Laura Phillips [and] Dan Johnson” says the cover – unwieldy, but covering the bases. Clued-in heads will anticipate healthy levels of bounced-off creativity from these Bristol pollinators (Phillips, also part of Viridian Ensemble with St Paul, is currently Aberystwyth-based), and listening in, you feel like you’re party to something both spontaneous and clandestine.
As it seems was the case. Recorded, per its title, in the second room of Bristol venue Strange Brew while Copper Sounds (Sonny Lee Lightfoot and Isaac Stacey) had an installation there in 2021, the duo – sculptors who make music from their creations’ resonant properties – met with their three cohorts, set up and played without a moment of prior planning. St Paul contributes vocals, manipulating them in a manner not unlike her 2024 Penumbra tape with Maxwell Sterling; Phillips’ favoured waterphone complements Lightfoot and Stacey’s glazed clay pots, which are played mechanically by them (via sequencers) and manually by Johnson. The session tends towards subtle rather than hectic, though moments like the buzzing babble that opens side B offer base thrills of a sort, and deep – or certainly close – listening is your key to nirvana.
As Biped, Teddy Glendinning has notched up some five years of music which deploys melody in an avant-garde way, bears its soul enigmatically, and doesn’t really fit into any clear style or category. To that end, Bristol has proved a good home for the artist, with previous releases on regionally-inclined labels Avon Terror Corps and TBC Editions. Property is a lathe-cut 10-inch on a London-based one, Charlie Behrens’ Collapsing Drums, and its three tracks amount to a quarter-hour of light-touch electroacoustic intrigue with a greater focus than before on Glendinning’s poetic tendencies.
‘Property’ the song begins with a drunken piano and double-tracked croon/wail vocals before a lurchy beat kicks in. The lyrical theme, so to speak, is the narrator’s petty bourgeois ambitions (living in “a local area” near to a gym, etc), delivered in a tone made more adenoidal by digital manipulation. ‘It’s Cancelled’ is more determinedly electronic in its glitch-techno bedrock, and talks of priests and concubines inside its two-minute window. ‘Patience’ runs on repetition, surreal imagery and knowing illogic in its phrases (“I’m a man / Because I am a woman”), while the music is aleatory and – save for another piano, more background detail than lead instrument – doesn’t give away much about how it was assembled.
Brighton breakbeat stacker Zak Brashill, aka Etch, has cranked out vinyl at a fair old rate in recent years, though slowed his roll a little in 2024. If this was a consequence of devoting his time to new 15-track double LP Scream Of The Butterfly (Sneaker Social Club), then the results justify it: oak-hard post-jungle wrangling full of screwfaced vibes but oddly euphoric with it.
Such atmosphere is achieved with the help of a few guest MCs and producers. If you know Killa P, you’ll know he’ll deliver the goods when you desire talk of shootings metaphorical and literal in patois, and that’s what ‘Prayer Wheel (Left You Fi Dead)’ brings. ‘Heatmap’ is a big-boned skeleton upon which Emz professes to “come from the underground like a turnip”, and on ‘Not Surprised’ basslines toll, bell-like, as Lee Scott does his dirtbaggy Merseyside-accented thing. Naturally, it’s less demonstrable what E.M.M.A and J-Shadow add to instrumentals ‘Stepford Lives’ and ‘Star Fallen’ – which isn’t to suggest they’re superfluous, the results (cinematic hip hop and Source Direct go footwork, respectively) speaking for themselves here. That still leaves two-thirds of Scream… done in solitary style, and from the mid-00s dubstep thump and Mobb Deep samples on ‘Three Of Me One Of You’ to ‘Amnixiel’ – a late-album flurry of activity with complex rhythms and urban-menace bass, like doing trigonometry in an unlit underpass – Etch excels.
Luke Sanger has been making goodtime techno as Luke’s Anger for far longer than this column has existed, so as with Etch, a review is overdue. Corporate Hell (Co-Accused) is a great place to start with this producer, or to remake or maintain one’s acquaintance, being four uptempo geezerish struts whose bloodline is distinctly British. Goes without saying techno is an international language, sure, but from Bang The Party’s Back To Prison LP to the distortion-happy wonkiness of Neil Landstrumm and Subhead to the 8am sesh gremlinery of the Liberator DJs’ extended universe, this is the prime lineage of Luke’s Anger.
By which we mean synth lines that squeal like burned-out car brakes – the mainstay of ‘Haffa Bar Jack’, along with hissy hi-hats, and the opening title track – and others that draw an equivalence between acid and electro, namely ‘The Sentinel’. ‘UFOh No!’ is the most maximalist of the EP’s four tracks, by virtue of a midsection that sounds like a room full of fruit machines all paying out at once, but is flawlessly direct, robust acid tracking however you slice it.
It’s nice when people’s musical abilities find an outlet in a spectrum of scenes, and Misha Phillips seems to be one of those people. A drummer in various Brighton bands, it strikes me that Pascagoula (punky sludge metal), Mulholland (twiddly math-rock) and Lambrini Girls (6 Music-friendly indie, Phillips featuring in a ‘session’ capacity) are all fairly distinct, and there’s also a few solo aliases to account for, with two releases under her own name issued recently.
Nollie Flip Over The Sea Of Galilee, a CD on local label Come To Brazil, comprises five pensive guitar instrumentals with scant use of effects and a vibe that compares well to David Pajo’s Aerial M releases (strum mode) or Stars Of The Lid (hum mode). Then there’s Moulin Rouge Is Next, a cassette on Outsider Art: relative to the great majority of what Dean Lloyd Robinson releases through that label, these compositions are placid and welcoming, but ‘What Comes After’ is a misleadingly hushed opening track. ‘In The White Of The Eyes (Smiling)’ organises itself around needling feedback and power electronics-esque machine splutter for its 15-minute duration, a state reprised for the shorter ‘Black Mirror’, and the concluding title track also reveals the phrase’s source – it’s a lyric from early-70s folk rock number ‘In My Room’ by Jimmy Campbell, not so much sampled as defiled to make for a brash ending.
Joe Parkes, who we greet here as Pale World, has also straddled a few styles over time – not all noise per se, but invariably noisy (punk skronk in Machiavellian Art; powerviolence in Vile Sect). Later In The Day, Pale World’s latest Outsider Art tape, is a longform piece of undisputed noise music. Its half-hour duration fades in, with singular, ominous chords which make me think of one of those early Jandek records; then something heavy is dragged across something rough-surfaced, a la The New Blockaders’ Changez Les Blockeurs. Layers of sound enter the fray, like an especially perverse symphony, then an inferno of harsh static, whipped away seven minutes later as suddenly as it began. From here, the eerie and the brutish vie repeatedly for dominance, each faction turning over the ball with exciting imprecision.
The case for Pale World being one of the most valuable players in the 2020s UK noise field is made further with Abstractions Of Dead Dreamers: another cassette, this time via Brachliegen Tapes and due out just after this column. As extreme as Later In…, Parkes’ approach changes a little here, with a cut-up digital feel to much of the opening title track. Pianos and shreds of muffled conversation play their worthy part, too, in a typically cacophonous collage.
A few lengthy gestation periods feature among this column’s chosen releases: Bridget Hayden’s album emerges nearly two and a half years after it was recorded, the Strange Brew Sessions tape just over three, while the first and so far only session by Repo / Tetkov / Lord happened a full half-decade ago. This material provides the source for the Midlands Life Crisis album, studio-tweaked in piecemeal form by Liam McConaghy and released on his Aphelion label.
‘Repo’ here are Repo Man, verbose jazzpunks from Bristol who include McConaghy on guitar; Kordian Tetkov and Matt Lord play in Capri Batterie, an Exeter group probably best known for recording an album with Stewart Lee. With Repo Man vocalist Craig ‘Bojak’ Barrow no slouch himself in the loquacious rant stakes, the upshot is that his band go a bit more ‘out’, Capri Batterie lean into some wilful rock moves, and involved personnel sound attuned to each other’s ambitions, even if those involve being jarring and awkward. About half the album features two tenor saxes (played by Barrow and Lord), with the likes of ‘Civil Swan’ generating robust abandon, and bouts of contemplation are created when McConaghy’s edit showcases the knotty arpeggios of his guitar playing. And why shouldn’t he?
