DUN BURR
Although it’s been online since 2021, a few weeks back saw a tape version of Ruralistic Ways from Dun Burr released on the mysterious and collectible Verdant Wisdom label, which is based on the Welsh border (their Instagram says Herefordshire, other places say Powys, let’s not stress over it). You can still buy a copy as of mid-June, to my pleasant surprise! Ruralistic Ways purports to be inspired by time spent in the lush countryside around VW’s patch and sits in a sweet spot between minimal synth, dungeon synth and new age: all slowly unfurling melodic figures which I could sometimes envisage being reappropriated in a brasher, beat-based context (Taking Shelter) but is in effect hermetic and calming.
IAN ARKLEY
Here’s a really interesting solo album from Ian Arkley, a musician associated with the more goth/death-leaning end of the UK doom metal scene: Arkley plays in My Silent Wake and has been on that scene since the late 80s. More recent releases as part of industrial veterans Attrition might be a clearer pointer to parts of Two (Opa Loka), an album that bisects acoustic ambience and experimental folk and was recorded in south-west Wales, where I believe he lives. The instruments used on these recordings aren’t listed, merely that Arkley played them all, but the Cyclobe-esque ones with droney, harmonium-like sounds such as Times Of Innocence are right up my alley – ditto the ones where something stringed and perhaps medieval is put through a whack of reverb. Its final track, Raven Valley, surpasses the 20-minute mark.
MIDDING
Cardiff group Midding were reviewed in these monthly columns as recently as last autumn, but under their previous name, Clwb Fuzz. In that that sounds more like a gig promoters’ handle than a band, probably not a bad call, although I keep reading it as ‘middling’, which can’t have been the intention. Fortunately, Midding’s first two Mk.2 songs are a bit better than middling. Figurehead is on a psych/shoegaze tip in terms of its tempo, aesthetic and production values, but there’s some twangy Tex-Mex guitar parts that push things in a vaguely Gun Club direction. Rain Down is a fairly short number that’s throwaway in principle but has a precious core, its languid strum and tousled vocal-like one of those semi-acoustic songs you got on most Blur albums.
OUTSIDE BROADCAST
Another year, another short review of Cardiff-based electronica project Outside Broadcast, whose Earth Calling and Mrs Windsor’s Island albums featured in this column in 2020 and ‘21 respectively. The latest Outside Broadcast album Socialism (described as a sort of self-tribute to their political leanings and “the fight for worldwide social justice”) takes the expansive proggy electronica leanings that were already audible and makes it the prime focus. Over 18 tracks we get plenty of gleaming cinematic-techno synths, effervescent-yet-measured electro-tinged basslines and samples of dialogue from very famous movies such as Blade Runner and 2001. I found the latter element rather offputting – it feels like using a cheat code to achieve profundity – but this musical mode is, on the evidence to date, Outside Broadcast at their strongest.
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SENDERO LUMINOSO
Sendero Luminoso is a solo venture from Owen Griffiths, whose CV includes a few psych-rock type outfits such as Infinity Forms Of Yellow Remember (their Bandcamp page is hosting this release, even) but is now living somewhere rural and rather distant from their Cardiff base. Three tracks – one instrumental, two vocal – recorded on an eight-track at home, Sendero Luminoso is less riff-monstrous than Griffiths’ usual mode but certainly still within psychedelic confines. It Is What It Is drones and creaks with a sort of bucolic calm but plenty of shivery unease; Sacred Bones is a bit gnarlier, like a Loop demo meets some super-austere coldwave turn; and It’s So Easy is not a Guns N’ Roses cover but a sleepy strummer that goes nowhere as a song and does so very pleasantly.
SKULL HONOURS
Most delighted was I to stumble upon the knowledge that Rod Thomas, drummer of early-00s Carmarthenshire post-hardcore band Jarcrew, is still making music, under the name of Skull Honours! He had an earlier alias, Touchstone Pictures, that released a tape about a decade ago before vanishing, and indeed Jarcrew have a couple of gigs (and a reissue of their one album) due this year. Skull Honours’ SKHNZ5 is five tracks/almost 40 minutes of cosmic synth gloop, certainly with soothing tendencies but a shade jittery and paranoid too: very ‘early 70s German commune’, or post-millennial updaters of same such as Emeralds. Chilldozer has some very pretty ambient techno melodies and folktronica loops in addition to a commendably bad title.
SPURIOUS TRANSIENTS
Spurious Transients is an electronic psych project from somewhere in Pembrokeshire, which always features Gavin Lloyd Wilson and intermittently other people too: on Fake Music, the latest Spurious Transients album, he assembled everything apart from a few samples. There are rather a lot of samples on the album, it should be noted – much of it sounds like dialogue from American psychological experiments or dramatisations of it. Musically, Wilson appears to have moved more towards beat-based electronica than the last Transients album I heard, in 2020, which seemed more geared towards guitars. My highlight is the penultimate Why Did Mother Come Out So Frequently?, which cooks up an almost ambient jungle atmosphere to go with its evocative title.
STEREO MINUS ONE
A forbidding opening few minutes to Lodestone (Machine.), the eighth album by transplanted Cardiffian Dan Haines Cohen aka Stereo Minus One, is a bit of a false frightener: its grizzly stormclouds of electronics are on-brand for the project, but so are more palatable numbers like the fuzzed-out dub techno of the title track and the spring-heeled IDM of Switched and the archly-titled Empty The Floor. There is melodic sunlight peeking through pinholes in these rumbling, bass-dominated, sometimes industrial constructs, meaning Lodestone is never just flat-out computer music moodiness – but it’s one best appreciated with no distractions, and perhaps a preexisting liking for the output of labels like PAN or Mille Plateaux. In this house, it’s a hit!
TOM ALGORITHM
Released digitally through a Russian label, Calligraphy, the four-track Time is, I think, the debut EP by the Cardiff-based Tom Algorithm, if not his debut release entirely. (He’s been around for a few years as a DJ and promoter, under his given name Tom Ware.) The title track opens with eight minutes of melodic, agreeably lachrymose and trance-adjacent techno whose synths sometimes seem to mimic a bowing violin; it’s remixed at the end too by someone named Windom R. Elements is a more percussive tech-houser with a creepy haunted vocal refrain and Jill’d takes bits from the previous two numbers – shuffly drums, sawing melody lines – and throws in a clanging piano break for good measure.
WOODOOMAN
WoodooMan, more formally known as Iwan Ap Huw Morgan, had this solo-with-pals project percolating for a while before nailing it in-studio, but new album Y Nos is his second full-length, following debut Obsidilove in late 2020. I like this one for much the same reasons as I did that – energetic, psychedelic bluesy hard rock with appreciable heft, possessing cosmic depth and a sense of fun with neither outweighing the other – but Y Nos seems a bit more fully realised, thanks most likely to the contributions of Cardiff musicians like Frank Naughton, Kate Wood and Andy Fung. A song like In The Night, piano-driven and bedsit-folkish without the shroud of distorted guitars, could have exposed Morgan’s shortcomings if they were apparent, but actually holds up as well as anything here.
words NOEL GARDNER