Jon Buckland

Ultracrepidarian

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The Quietus •

Guest Playlist: Dis Fig | The Quietus

Dis Fig is a performer, producer, and vocalist who has collaborated with The Bug, The Body, and Asian Dope Boys. Her latest record, What To Make Of These Mortal Hands, is out on 23 October via Thrill Jockey and is a riveting mesh of sounds veering from harsh and muscular to frail and vertiginously weighty.

Here, in her own words, Dis Fig discusses the influence of her cutting-edge contributors and the inspirations who helped shape this album’s sonic palette.
The Quietus •

Jon Hassell – Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three) | The Quietus

Jon Hassell departed this world on 26th June 2021. He’d lived an extraordinary life entwined in the musical landscape of the 20th century, studying under Stockhausen and Pandit Pran Nath, and collaborating with the likes of Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, Techno Animal, David Sylvian, Björk and Ry Cooder. He also developed the highly influential concept of Fourth World music, a blend of primitive and futuristic ideas and techniques encompassing modern electronic sounds and global traditional musics.
The Quietus •

Helen – Linda’s Head | The Quietus

Ahoy! Liz Harris of Grouper draws up the anchor of her 2013 slowcore side project and sets sail once more with drummer Jed Bindeman on the high seas

On 27th March 1980 Mt. St Helens erupted. Two months later, Liz Harris (AKA Grouper) was born. In 2013, she teamed up with drummer Jed Bindeman and Scott Simmons on bass, introducing the world to their shoegaze band Helen with the double A-side single ‘Felt This Way’ / ‘Dying All The Time’. Their dreamy debut The Original Faces followed two years after with the band subsequently laying dormant… until now.
The Quietus •

The Low Culture Essay: Jon Buckland on Dumb & Dumber | The Quietus

This month’s subscriber essay looks at a film that presented a far more complex view of male friendship than most buddy films of the 90s

“If Harry does something dumb, you drink, and if Lloyd does something dumb, I’ll drink”

After seconds of consideration, my wife and I came up with these exhaustive rules to determine, once and for all, which of the two leads from The Farrelly Brothers’ 1994 comedy deserved the title of ‘Dumber’. We chose our respective poisons and, one night early on in our relationship set about solving a question that nobody had dare ask.
Bandcamp Daily •

Semiratruth, “S!M”

In 2014, The Simpsons outsourced one of their couch gags to the Oscar-nominated, experimental animator Don Hertzfeldt. Hertzfeldt handed in what remains to this day one of the most audacious, creative, and arresting intros to an episode of the long-running cartoon. It parodied and ridiculed the show, advancing us to the year 10,535 where the disfigured characters are reduced to bleating mangled versions of their catchphrases at one another, intermittently stopping to plug merchandise. It was a bold deconstruction of a beloved TV series.
The Quietus •

Nu-Jazz – Un-Jazz | The Quietus

In the third series of Donald Glover’s groundbreaking TV series Atlanta, rising rapper Paper Boi (played by Brian Tyree Henry) finds himself rapidly losing touch with reality after consuming a Nepalese space cake. He spirals through a series of nightmarish scenarios involving a woman sobbing in an art gallery, British schoolkids tossing a baby around and a visit to the ‘Cancel Club’ where Liam Neeson seems to double down on his racist admissions. Along the way, he encounters Lorraine, a sort of adversarial guardian angel, who dubs him ‘New Jazz’ and pops a Goofy cap on his head.
Bandcamp Daily •

Jem Finer and John Matthias on the Strange Magic of “Almost Starlight”

Mid-August, in the small village of Felpham on the South coast of England, approximately 200 people filed into an 11th-century church to listen to a violin and hurdy-gurdy duo. The pair consisted of The Pogues founding member and Longplayer mastermind, Jem Finer and the theoretical physicist John Matthias who also creates epic, sprawling works of sound. His Fragmented Orchestra project, for example, covered the UK in transmitters, sending sounds that bounced back and forth between them like neurons.
The Quietus •

Blown Minds: Matt Cargill’s Favourite Albums | The Quietus

You could have crossed paths with Matt Cargill keeping the show on the road at such cream-of-the-crop festivals as Supernormal and Acid Horse. Maybe you’ve been privy to his perennially bonkers and joyous rooftop takeovers at Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival. Perhaps you’ve seen him at his day job running tech at the King Alfred Phoenix Theatre in Golders Green. Or you might even have spotted him at the Hope And Ruin one Brighton Halloween, in a hail of fake blood and tissue wads, thrashing the life out of a papier-mâché Skipper the Eye Child from Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.
The Tonearm •

The Euphoric and Exuberant Noise of Nolan Hildebrand

A few years ago, a New Jersey noise artist who goes by the name of EROSLOVESYOU printed a run of t-shirts with the phrase "The difference between sound art and noise is institutional funding." They might not be the first person to have had that thought, nor the first to draw comparisons between the worlds of academia and DIY movements, but they were certainly the first to print it on a t-shirt and ship them worldwide.
The Quietus •

The Remnants of Worship: Michael Cloud Duguay Interviewed | The Quietus

Just off the East coast of Canada, resting in the Atlantic Ocean, is a large island called Newfoundland. This sizable piece of land – similar in size to England – is nicknamed The Rock and is accessible from the mainland via ferry. Recently, composer and producer, Michael Cloud Duguay, along with multi-instrumentalist Andrew MacKelvie, engineer Jake Nicoll, and field recordist Dave Grenon climbed into a vehicle known affectionately as the Scamper and embarked on a 30-hour drive to Newfoundland from Duguay’s home in Peterborough, Ontario.
The Quietus •

Waves Eaten by Flames: Endless Summer by Fennesz at 25 | The Quietus

In 2001 Christian Fennesz released his third full-length record Endless Summer which followed the disrupted drone and noise aesthetics of debut Hotel Paral.lel and spectres-in-a-blizzard sounds of plus forty seven degrees 56′ 37″ minus sixteen degrees 51′ 08″. The strange string of numbers in the title of the second album were coordinates for the open-air studio in his native Austria where he recorded the album.
Bandcamp Daily •

How Visible Cloaks Stitched Themselves Back Together

It’s been nine years since Visible Cloaks (the duo of Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile) released their last studio album, Reassemblage. In the interim, there have been EPs and collaborative records; Doran also scored the video game Season: A Letter to the Future. But for those of us mesmerized by their previous album, it’s been a long wait to hear a new full-length outing from these master electronic manipulators.

The delay was worth it. Each shard of sound feels expertly chiseled; every iteration, tone, and note sculpted into unique, ephemeral sonic art.
The Quietus •

Shatterproof: Sam Hoyek's Demonstration 01: Anomalous | The Quietus

For Sam Hoyek, the decentralised songs on Demonstration 01: Anomalous are inflicted by sounds which seem to transgress interior/exterior borderlands. They creep in from outside. There’s a porous sense of exchange. Of ideas lost and gained. Of sounds encroaching on a destabilised core before dissipating away. The result is a constantly shifting record which rattles through styles and genres quicker than a Reform councillor collecting their P45.
The Tonearm •

'Power to Consume' and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Afterlife

In July 1975, Lou Reed released Metal Machine Music. It followed on the back of his most commercially successful album—Sally Can't Dance—a record that Reed despised so much that it hasn't been officially reissued on vinyl for nearly 40 years. Speaking to The Varsity in '76, Reed described Sally Can't Dance as "a piece of shit from beginning to end," adding that "the worse they [his albums] get, the more they sell." After three weeks on the market, Metal Machine Music was withdrawn from sale.
The Quietus •

Irked – The Grievance | The Quietus

In the 2004 rockumentary Dig!, Portland psych-janglers The Dandy Warhols turn up to the aftermath of a debauched, drug-fuelled party at the home of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and position themselves as participants in the antics for a magazine photo shoot. This type of posing and mimicry has been rife in music for decades, with bands and musicians attempting to present themselves as something they’re not in a bid for kudos, clout, cool points and, ultimately, cash.
The Quietus •

Melvins & Napalm Death – Savage Imperial Death March | The Quietus

Something is in the water. Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2025 opus Tom’s Crossing follows two teenagers who steal a pair of horses and ride into the fictional Isatch mountain range of Utah. Boyhood, David Keenan’s latest novel, features a scene in which four purloined horses are fed acid and raced through the midnight streets of Glasgow. And a third act of equine larceny now takes place during the unholy Melvins/Napalm Death alliance – Savage Imperial Death March.
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