For September’s new Welsh music you may have missed, Noel Gardner has tapes, LPs, EPs, CDs, plain ol’ digital and a sound palette with techno, post-rock, experimental, hardcore and the strange and eerie style known as dungeon synth…
DJ GUY
Guy Evans was a central figure in south Wales’ 90s rave scene, during which time he recorded hours of his own music but released virtually none of it. Multiple archive releases have emerged in the last decade, enhancing his status, and now he’s dropped a brand new 12-track album, Inspiration Dance. It’s a skilled hark back to his earlier manoeuvres between techno, house and breakbeat (Evans moved towards the jungle scene later in the 90s, though that isn’t really reflected here), with florid synth melodies woven between drum programming that’ll keep you on your toes. The frequent use of truncated, emotion-tugging vocal samples is pure 1991 Kickers boots-wearing warehouse fare, in the best way. A great return!
FALSE HOPE FOR THE SAVAGE
This Cardiff band have been around for several years but I caught them for the first time only recently, at the Arctangent festival in south-west England. Not sure if it was deliberate timing that they released this, their self-titled debut album, on the same weekend, but it would make sense as a wagon to hitch to, as False Hope For The Savage play a type of brooding, wordless post-rock which is strongly associated with that festival – think the likes of Mono, Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky. That said, FHFTS largely favour measured delicacy over rock bombast, with final number of seven Stalker adding folky strings to good effect.
GUILTY PARTY
Unwound is the second single released by Guilty Party, a four-piece alt-rock band from Cardiff, under that name. Before that, they were called Big Thing and before that Winter Coat – Buzz has reviewed them in both incarnations – and have been active for several years, so while their claim to have formed “at the turn of 2023” presumably speaks to a desire for a fresh start, it strikes me as more likely to confuse people than anything. There has been a little tweaking done to their sound, though, with producer Gethin Pearson overseeing a slick, full-bodied radio rock rush of a song which nevertheless keeps firmly in check with the band’s indiepop core. The harmonic potential conferred by Guilty Party’s two-boy two-girl lineup is harnessed well, and there’s a cute tinkly keyboard break about two-thirds in.
IKOBA
Some of the most mind-bending shit I’ve been able to include in this column hands down, Ikoba’s Transcode consists of 45 tracks over about three hours, arranged in alphabetical order of their titles. Musically, we’re talking super whacked-out nonlinear techno with a jazz mentality to the beats and a noise aesthetic to the sound design – is Jamal Moss meets E-Saggila way off? Probably – and at the time of writing nearly everything contextual about Ikoba is a brilliant mystery to me. He appears to live in Newport (and was previously on the Creative Sound & Music course at USW there), grew up in Uganda, used to produce as Brik Phro and tweets some intense philosophical aphorisms and psychedelic biro drawings. If any of the above sounds good to you I 100% recommend this album.
JAKE HEALY
Jake Healy has been on and off my Buzz review radar since maybe the start of the 2010s when he still lived in the Rhondda and made boisterous noisy rock stuff. These days he’s based in Bristol and plays in the post-metalish Sugar Horse, but also performs under his own name, and a tape release of a May 2023 live set at Cardiff art space Shift is reason enough to bring him back into the fold. Healy is at his most aurally challenging as a solo artist, with this 35-minute recording veering from passages of overdriven, scuzzy electronics to snatched moments of crackly old vinyl. Membrance, fourth of five tracks on the digital version (there didn’t seem to be any pauses in the actual set), has a dub/techno/noise aesthetic that’s especially imposing.
KEMYS INFERIOR
Kemeys Inferior is a hamlet northeast of Newport, the city where Kemys Inferior (note the alternate spelling) apparently lives. From what I can tell with limited info to hand, the artist is named Zak, is in his twenties and has yet to play live, but creates sandpaper-rough, uptempo punk-spirited techno at a rapid rate: his last release, about a year ago, was an unfiltered dump of 70 tracks. Pit Pony has a mere four, but comprises 20 minutes of springheeled entertainment if you like sped-up vocal samples, 7 am warehouse kickdrums and hissing hi-hats. It’s kinda like Jerome Hill is he had more of a noise-scene aesthetic, which is good by me; Kemys Inferior has released a couple of tapes previously and will hopefully do more.
DAS KOOLIES
For a project which you assume has a degree of compromise to it, Das Koolies can at least draw on a rich backstory. It’s all the Super Furry Animals minus Gruff Rhys, who evidently isn’t interested in making music under that name, and finds the remaining four honouring the early-90s techno-influenced origins of the group. DK.01 (Strangetown), a 17-track double LP following two previous 12”s, combines the familiar harmony-rich Super Furry psych-pop sound with acid-flecked, cinematic arena techno akin to 90s icons like Orbital. It’s well realised and sometimes even fun, if lacking enough sonic variety to justify its length – at its best when it does go off-script, like mid-album glam/schaffel/rockabilly number, Pain Down The Drain, which sort of functions as a callback to when SFA hat-tipped Chicory Tip on Golden Retriever but actually sounds more like Earl Brutus.
MIDDLEWOOD
Chris Sear, who makes spartan instrumental synth music as Middlewood (among a few other names), lives on the English side of the Welsh Marches but seems to have an affinity with Wales’ rural outposts. And as I have an affinity with both his latest tape, Midwinter, and the label which released it – Verdant Wisdom, based nearby Sear – bigging him up’s a no-brainer. If you think the title odd for something released in late summer, Sear initially put it on his Bandcamp last Christmas Day, and these five contemplative compositions of unadorned, slow-moving grace would have surely been a tonic for anyone seeking to escape scratchy paper crowns and uncles with bad politics.
PHASE4OUR
Coordinates, a five-track EP released through the stalwart electronic label Machine, is to the best of my knowledge the first new music by Phase4our for nearly 20 years. A south Wales duo linked to the Access Tonal Communications collective, who were really onto something circa the mid-00s, they originally traded as SEK01 and released an album of severe glitching electro, War Industry. On this outing, they’re a little more interested in melodies and moods bordering ambience, with Lacmer seemingly taking production cues from classic Detroit techno, though a sinister undertone consistently prevails. Nowhere is this more apparent than Zealot (Cri Mvit) and the oleaginous lip-smacking sound that features prominently, like a very graphic dream about your wartiest grandma pulling you in for a kiss.
RANCOUR
Rancour’s Cardiff City Scumbags 7” (Nuclear Family) is the first record for almost six years from a quintet who I do not imagine to be scumbags, despite what they might wish, but who certainly represent Cardiffian hardcore at its more screwfaced and rotgut. There are five songs on this disc – well, the fifth is a sort of dance remix that lasts less than one minute – and it’s not actually as metallic as the gloopy skull drawing on the cover suggests, but thanks to the two guitarists’ taste for squealy divebombs and doomy chugging parts, is still fairly metal. Somewhere between the early Cleveland HC scene (cf Integrity and the like) and latter-day London bands like Mastermind, maybe. Good to have Rancour back!
YSBRYDNOS
Having reviewed – and been most impressed by – the debut tape by this Carmarthenshire-based solo black metal project after it came out in earlyish 2022, Ysbrydnos has since released two more in 2023. One was a split release with a project named Sourcerior, who countered the Welsh act’s raw, misty blackened assault with some eerie dungeon synth; this latest, given the dramatic title Altar Of Moss Vol.1 – Amidst A Forgotten Glade, finds Ysbryd (the man behind the name) on a dungeon synth tip himself. Turns out he’s a dab hand at it, with the 11 tracks on this album (recorded between 2019 and this year) centring on slow, minimal, portentous keyboard figures, as this genre tends to, but expressing cinematic qualities and airs of folk and occasionally industrial in its sound design. The physical tape is way sold out but the music’s well worth hearing.
words NOEL GARDNER
