With the latest enigmatic addition to their esteemed recording canon looming just over the horizon, we took a moment to catch up with The Academy Of Sun’s erudite frontman, Nick Hudson, in order to find out which musical gales fill the billowing sails of TAOS.

A monthly traipse through the latest dark & esoteric soundscapes (plus a smattering from yesteryear). Links (bandcamp where possible) to cop the music from each artist are below. Help 'em out, they probably need it now more than ever.

T. Gowdy might well refer to his work as “ambient electronic music” but Therapy With Colour does not sit cosily amongst the gentle washes of new age ambience. This isn’t a soundtrack for a chill out room, a relaxing spa-meditation, or suites for a yoga retreat. It’s an altogether different creature. One with sinewed muscle and matted fur.

Cathedrals, shrines, temples, and other places of worship have been increasingly co-opted for musical ventures over the past decade or two so, it stands to reason, that this would further extend to the sounds typically reserved for those spaces too. In keeping with this, Markus Lake – the man behind the Markus Floats moniker who, himself, is no stranger to blurring boundaries & genres, having participated in a broad spectrum of Afrofuturist, punk, post-punk, and experimental outfits...

A little tribute to Tri-Angle Records (RIP) following the sad news this past weekend.

“Nature will give you clues if you are brave” In 2017 the artist formerly known as Madeline Johnston/Sister Grotto re-emerged with a new moniker – Midwife – and blew my flimsy little mind. Like Author, Like Daughter somehow managed to lock into a deep part of my psyche and then proceeded to lovingly unspool it over 51 delicately crafted minutes of reverb-doused guitars, hauntingly distant drums, and an enveloping sense of mysterious familiarity.

Intentionally or not, this debut EP from sound artist, Ell Kendall, appears to interweave the two tracks making up its runtime with reflective ideas of life cycles, frailty, and the transience of existence. Both pieces are portraits of two seemingly different people. The former, ‘Marlen’, captures the energy and life of a dancer whilst the latter, ‘Nuha’, focuses on the rapid physical and mental degradation of a woman diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Sidling away from the atmospheric dream pop recordings of Still Corners and the experimental psych of Modern Nature, multi-instrumentalist Jim Wallis has taken to the world of modern classical with a treatise on life, death, and that whole wobbly stretch of existence that straddles the two. Europa is formed of pieces designed to accompany (and share the name of) a film that tells the true tale of an asylum seeker who takes his own life.

Last seen (heard?) upsetting the locals with their dread-ravaged score to the sinister and affecting folk horror film – Hagazussa – MMMD have since returned to the studio and carved out another low end wonder of equally distressing proportions. At times the reloading chug of their strings bring to mind the darkest valleys of hailed drone overloads, Sunn O))) (particularly during their Black One sessions).

Whilst we’ve been sat on sofas, sweating out Chinese takeaways and scrolling through a smorgasbord of not-for-right-now options on Netflix, The Salford duo of Hyperdawn, comprised of Vitalija Glovackyte & Michael Cutting (both impressive experimental artists in their own rights), have been busy constructing a palette of sounds that are both intriguingly odd and familiar enough to latch on to with relative ease.

This quote, which, at various times, has been attributed to the political theorist Frederic Jameson and also to the philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, really hammers home both the parasitic and apocalyptic nature of our modern political realm.

There seems to be a thread running through the albums that I’ve gravitated towards this year. One of a sort of wary hopefulness. Things may have been tough, they will inevitably be tough again but there is a sense of perseverance laced throughout. The world may feel like it’s taking two steps forward and one and a half backwards at any given moment but through this we are left with a choice: give in to the mounting gloom or battle to find some light emerging from within it.

I was a bit slack at watching films this year. A boatload of 'em passed me by. Anyway, for what it's worth, here are 25 that I thought were decent.

“We are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, 1985. Knowingly or not, we all seem to have acquired additional elements of technology that we now include in our daily lives. Some of us wear glasses. Others, hearing aids. Most walk around with headphones on or earbuds in. There are those with prosthetic limbs, pacemakers, and digital tattoos.

Off the back of last year’s divine Homes, Shida Shahabi has seized time as if it is a tangible commodity and forged this short but affectingly delicate EP with the help of cellist Linnea Olsson and engineer Hampus Norén.

Ushering aside the noise pop of his previous Dead Gaze project, R. Cole Furlow has extended his limbs into more arcadian realms for this, his first release under the Low Variety moniker. On first listen #1 could easily be mistaken for a series of simple yet entrancing, guitar-based folk instrumentals. Conjuring images of sunlit melancholy, pastoral cavorting, simpler times. But you don’t have to scratch too deep for this idyll to distort. Cracks appear, images phase in and out.

Pyroclasts begins with deep sounds unfurling like the wings of a quetzalcoatlus in the morning light. Wings that beat their first and heaviest, causing trees to bend, buckle, and all manner of avian habitats to skitter and tumble to the earth. Dust kicks up in a whipped pool. Fur and scales shrink back into underground hollows. Each flap of a wing is enough to strobe light into night for the world beneath. Borne out of improvised sessions beginning or closing the day’s recordings, these 4 heavi