Always feels right to open another New Weird Britain with people who came here from elsewhere, and who culturally enrich this nebulous ‘here’ with their creative presence in it. And I can elevate that statement beyond formulaic liberal platitude by pointing you towards hearing them too. London’s People Of The Wind and their self-titled debut LP of weighty out-jazz poetry – acquaint yourself!
People Of The Wind were founded by Pouya Ehsaei, joined here by vocalist Tara Fatehi. Tamar Osborn and Alfa Sackey are not full members but feature on most of the album’s 10 songs. Ehsaei and Fatehi, both from Tehran, have been in the UK for over a decade – ditto Sackey, a Ghanian percussionist. Sax player/clarinettist Osborn describes herself as “half English, half mixed race South African,” and has globetrotting session muso credentials, but certainly doesn’t sound like she’s dialling her parts in, nor do her bandmates.
‘After Water’, an early number, is POTW in excelsis. Ehsaei, who’s previously released solo electronic albums on the Entr’acte and ZabteSote labels, does excitingly deconstructive things with his beats as well as computer-manipulating Sackey’s, and gradually slowing down Fatehi’s “it’s children running underwater…” refrain so her grizzled torch-singer style (a Lydia Lunch vibe here, actually) is rendered knowingly absurd. The clarinet’s delicacy belies its sticking power through these six compelling minutes, and despite POTW’s arrangements often being restrained and spacious, so many things happen in these tracks, with so many styles and influences invoked.
Also debuting eponymously, and swelling with dub, hip hop and spoken word elements, Bird Of Peace Orchestra’s album-length tape makes for choice side-by-side listening with the People Of The Wind record. You can approach it from a starting point of enjoying dream pop or post rock, and perhaps then enter a wormhole where textures are both familiar and not.
From Bristol, BOPO’s six members comprise Jasmine Butt, Amos Childs and Alex Rendall, aka Jabu; Birthmark and Intel Mercenary, both already in the Jabu orbit before this grouping formed for a Roger Robinson support slot; and Daniela Dyson, an Anglo-Afro-Colombian vocalist who joined the trio for a 2020 tape. BOPO is somewhat the sum of its parts, which isn’t to say no-one tries anything new, though in the case of ‘Phantom Limb’ Birthmark does bite some old lyrics of his own, about going to the club and keeping oneself to oneself by the speakers.
The levity of Dyson’s microfiction ‘Rom-Com-Plot-Lines’ is undercut by the ambient guitar and square-root-of-Nico vocals of the following ‘Ties’; ‘3am Blue Velvet’ is the album’s indie ‘in’, its essential vibe hopefully scrutable to a fan of, say, Beach House. And ‘Love Sustain’ is not the first time I’ve heard a link between the generation-apart Bristol scenes of Planet Records and Young Echo in one piece of music, but it’s maybe the most profound occurrence.
We stay in a particular lane with Locket, the second EP of 2025 by Shell Company and their third overall. The trio are tagged as a “Manchester/Glasgow” arrangement by Accidental Meetings, their label here; April’s Shards was handled by Numbers, from the latter city, and its ice floe-slow guitar/synth glimmer and morose monologue is for sure a stylistic departure by its historical ravey average. Still, you sense Rosabella Allen, Chris Banks and Rob Banks have at minimum a clubbers’ past, if not present, with their latest six tracks coming off like music for heavy-comedown wallowing – or any scenario where lights are low and silence is golden.
Shell Company are bolstered by multiple talented friends on Locket, with a flugelhorn (the first ever to feature in this column, aerophone fans) on EP opener ‘Gritty’, played by Jack Alston and positioned most ambiently in a Sylvian/Hollis-adjacent fashion. Richie Culver rocks up on ‘Salt Fields’, his vocals an insular murmur but outstripped by Allen’s sullen sentence fragments, like torn-up diary entries; Iyunoluwanimi Yemi-Shodimu, whose singing lights up the title track, is also half of Manc duo Gomid, who I’d say are very much in Shell Company’s headspace, more so than Culver even. Intensely navel gazing music, this, but that need no more be a pejorative than, say, calling a Venom album a fucking racket.
Dylan Mallett’s earliest EPs as Silver Waves are now 11 years old: the producer, then in his teens, was a busy presence in the mid-10s iteration of Weird Bristol, which had a lot of the same people as now but definitely differed in various ways. Mallett’s music, too, has evolved from that earlier rush of quasi-techno scuzz, as new Silver Waves mini-album Aninstar (Illegal Data) shows.
This is in fact his first proper release since 2016, thus his first appearance in this column, but there’ve been semi-regular Silver Waves live sets, including the debut of an electroacoustic trio format. Mallett has also picked up mix/mastering credits and some video game/art show soundtrack work. All of which trains a light on Aninstar’s ever-mutating synth grids, verdant digital jungles and melodic sequences as clean and uncanny as an alien’s Airbnb. Drums may have originally been human-hit but are edited with extreme care into something unplayable; the real world pokes through in the empty-warehouse ambient tones on ‘Turns Into’, which per its title mutates into a wasps’ nest of elegantly irate feedback. ‘Spider Of Easton’, which follows, is suitably named too, in that its way with screwy dub techno rhythms and synths melting into vocals feels affiliated with the Bristol sound that’s flowered with producers like Batu.
Helen Anahita Wilson, a composer, sound artist and researcher based in Brighton, doesn’t really seem to be active in a ‘scene’ in the way most people featured here are. Her discography preceding new album Nightshade – a concept album about the plant family of the title, released on US noise label Flag Day – comprises some Satie-esque piano sketches and collaborations with Talvin Singh.
Her chemotherapy treatment a few years back led not only to her being featured in a Cancer Research ad campaign, but the music Wilson generated from it forms part of an ongoing series of compositions where plants and plant derivatives help to generate audio – something inherent to Nightshade’s core theme. Because it is mere audio, the details behind the processes are ultimately window-dressing for the actual listening experience. (‘Jersey Royal’, one of two spud-titled sub-two-minute pieces featured, may link to the ‘potato synth’ Wilson recently demonstrated on Radio 4’s “witty, irreverent look at the world” Infinite Monkey Cage, if you desire visuals.)
The music, though, is broad in scope and frequently good. “Biodata from an ashwagandha plant” contributes to the stark sound design of ‘Hel’s Bells’; it reminds me a little of Tom James Scott, whose most recent album, I note while jotting down this vague thought, was also titled Nightshade. It finishes on a low-key kind of high with closing pair ‘The Devil’s Trumpet’, with Amos Miller adding grave trombone to Wilson’s industrial drone, and ‘Bella Donna’, an organ piece with a touch of the Kali Malones.
Tim Harrison is a film and TV biz pro of some 20 years’ standing, mainly doing sound design on things like Black Mirror and Flux Gourmet. So he makes a living assembling weird noises, rather than fitting it around a day job he hates like experimental musicians are supposed to do. Recur is the first time Harrison’s music has been released in standalone form; debut album A Strange Loop arrives as an LP on Aumeta, which is otherwise his production company. Beginning conception in 2016, the results justify the time sunk into this passion project: ambient composition avoiding the tastefulness and other pitfalls that sometimes come with this approach.
Though Harrison seems to be Recur’s head, or only, composer, over 50 musicians apparently contributed to this album. The full ensemble has a dozen other members, four of whom comprise the Ligeti Quartet, and fair sections of A Strange Loop feel like their kind of ‘new music’ – classical without the starchiness, but replacing that with a different strain of dirgeful intensity, exemplified here on ‘Ode To Void’. Earlier on, ‘Gnossienne’ constructs a grand stringed edifice around Terry Riley-like arps to stirring effect, and ‘Hieroglyph’ allows its wistful ambient melody and fourth-world sax wash to be decentred by a procession of bumps in the night – de facto foley effects, perhaps coaxed from a piano’s innards, that get icily close to you in the mix.
Still, it’s something of a tonic to move on to a record fuelled by an implicit hatred of ‘the music industry’, technological progress (or the spectrum of crimes committed in its name) and accomplished professionalism. Well, maybe not that last one – there’s plenty of it to be heard on or, Urim, Mark Harwood’s latest solo LP. It is though performed by people who Harwood, who runs the Penultimate Press label from his London home, has likely not met and who are equally likely unaware they feature on this zonged-out field-hospital stitch-up: five hairy tracks of plundered groove and general copyright liberation fronting.
In the tarnished tradition of these sorts of risk-it-all releases, it’s hard to say for certain what we hear Harwood doing here, though it’s not nowt: ‘Tarshish’ is peppered by the sort of crinkled pocket-dial noise you might expect from someone like Posset. The unspoken musical theme of or, Urim is mellotron-mad mid-70s German prog, multiple doorstop-thick slices of which emerge near-intact from the mist: I won’t name names in case surviving band members have Google Alerts set up and are litigious, both of which feel likely. Arguably as much a mixtape as an artist album, if you’re on Mark Harwood’s level you should initially enjoy having your lines blurred, and then enjoy realising you don’t have to care.
Our look at Horns Of Death, Daryl Worthington’s third release as Beachers, should most properly begin by acknowledging that Worthington is also a tQ columnist – regularly reviewing cassettes which often occupy the ‘sound art’ realm, as this cassette does. As with the previous two Beachers releases, both from 2024 and also on his own Ineffectual Suns label, there’s a concept explained anecdotally.
Everything we hear on Horns Of Death is derived from a replica fox-hunting horn, bought in a moment of “morbid curiosity”. Sometimes he blows it in the upstanding and orthodox way its maker envisaged, albeit inside an inner-city flat rather than on some Tory farmer’s land; sometimes a more delicate tone prevails, and often the horn is used as a percussion instrument, as free improv saxophonists sometimes do, or inadvertently creates sound as Worthington disassembles it. There is ample layering of parts and general computerised editing, though much of what we hear seems to be pretty as-it-was.
Horns Of Death is a strong release in various ways – the intriguing and/or tonally pleasing sounds it contains, the likelihood of it being the first ever experimental hunting horn album, and the sociopolitical context of its instrument it imparts, wordlessly. Granted, many listeners may prefer the more verbose approach of, for example, Conflict’s ‘Berkshire Cunt’.
gumpPat Daintith, of Hygiene and London Clay, also oversees the label Noble Lowndes Annuities, a name seemingly appropriated from a defunct broker company. Obscure lore and wild goose chases may too be germane to the latest NLA release, a seven inch credited to Suzie Marlowe. Suzie, we’re told, came from Kent and had periods as a punk, a painter and an occultist before vanishing in the early 80s. A recent discovery of some old possessions of hers included a demo tape, two songs from which have been salvaged.
As with other remarkable recent Old Weird Britain discoveries, like Industrial Coast’s Evil Roger releases and Smaragdus’ tribute to north Wales’ megaliths, it’s less a question of whether you choose to believe the story and more how long the teller will maintain a straight face. In this instance, Suzie’s bio is credited to a ‘Professor of Subcultural Ontology’ from the University of Fulchester, and for better or worse I get that reference.
All told, then, here we have just under six minutes of murky yet compelling minimal synth powered by primitive-sounding drum machine and minor-key, melancholy melodies. On ‘Esplanade’, vocals are both delivered and mixed as if captured inadvertently, whether they’re elusive, proto-shoegaze sighs or matter-of-fact spoken word, while the speech on ‘Les Amours De La Pieuvre’, to the extent it’s intelligible, is more cut-glass than on the A-side – layered and spliced into a frantic babble, like being trapped in the middle of a large open-plan call centre.
To end, two more songs on a 45 from some folks whose activity in decades past is a matter of public record. Glaswegian grrrls in the garage Lung Leg have been back gigging now and then for a few years, but their side of this split on Errol’s Hot Wax is their first new music of the millennium. “All girls wrote this song!” they chorus on ‘Girls’, and it’s true, including the guest sax from insufficiently-sung punk great Lora Logic. It sounds like about six different songs in the space of three minutes, which I hope means Lung Leg are soon to parlay this into a more extensive release.
Two-thirds of Unmarry Me, Chris Rowley and Jon Slade, go back (slightly) further still: they’re probably still best known for their first band, Huggy Bear, but have each remained active in the three decades since their dissolution. They’re joined here by Lise Frances, whose mid-00s group Help She Can’t Swim were in the Huggy Bear lineage and really good for a while. ‘Unmarry Me! (Anthem)’ is the trio’s first release (they also have their own single out this month) and it’s a satisfyingly sassy and slightly surreal jumble of jazzbo/Last Poets vocalising and Dub Narcotic type snaky bass burble.
