As summer dribbled away, dark clouds more befitting of 2020’s mood scampered into place along the British skyline. Concurrent with this meteorological shift arrives J Zunz’s Hibiscus. One half of the hypnotic psychonauts Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, J Zunz (real name Lorena Quintanilla) has eschewed collaboration this time in favour of a deeply personal delve into her own psyche. What emerges is something nuanced, confident, and throbbing with paranoia.

A monthly traipse through the latest dark & esoteric soundscapes (plus a smattering from yesteryear).

A monthly traipse through the latest dark & esoteric soundscapes (plus a smattering from yesteryear).

“In eastern Washington, the territory around the Hanford reservation is promoted as the last stand of original shrub-sage habitat in the Columbia Basin, yet periodically deer and rabbits wander from the preserve and leave radioactive droppings on Richland’s lawns.” – Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and Plutonium Disasters, Kate Brown.

A monthly traipse through the latest dark & esoteric soundscapes (plus a past blast or 2). Links to cop the music from each artist below. This time, I'll donate a £ for every play until the end of the month to NAACPLDF https://www.naacpldf.org

There’s something both cinematic and vista-encompassing on the latest effort from Sarah Lipstate (Noveller). Arrow appears to have drawn from her a keen urge to paint vivid pictures with her sounds, images that would not feel out of place in the works of Terrance Malick, Scott Barley, or Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

“Everywhere we shine death and life burn into something new, Rise up like perfumed nebulae through the jubilant road flowing beneath our feet.” Death, as a subject matter, rarely strays far from an active mind. But right now it’s barging its way to the forefront of conversation, debate, and thought. Be it the spiralling death rate of a global pandemic or the callous brutality of racist law enforcers, it’s everywhere that we choose to turn...

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.