Jon Buckland

For the past 4 years, Alina Church (AKA Distraxi) has been diligently firing out some of the most incendiary harsh noise and power electronics available to tape deck owners. She’s prolific. Notching up releases for the likes of experimental powerhouses Outsider Art, Eggy Tapes, Death To Dynamics, Hard Return, and Summer Interlude Records. Her live shows are formed from acts of violent catharsis, smashed scrap metal, ruinous feedback, and an apparent lack of care for self.

On August 20th 1977, the Voyager 2 space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA. A little over two weeks later Voyager 1 followed. Sealed in aluminium cases and attached to each device were the Golden Records: audio-visual discs containing photos of Earth and its lifeforms, scientific information, recordings of greetings in 55 different languages, and a selection of music, ranging from classical and jazz to folk and rock & roll. The discs serve as a time capsule and a message in a bottle, sharing a little bit of what it means to be human with any lifeforms that the Voyager space missions might chance upon. With All Worlds the forces of Croatian Amor and Lust For Youth have united once more to spread a little hope and joy of their own.

Life is a constant state of flux. Even when we think we’re stagnant or stationary, we are shifting, growing, and regenerating on a cellular level. This sense of transformation, of movement between states, lies at the heart of Emil Saiz’s “Cycles of Disappearance”.

Saiz’s first solo full-length follows on the back of 2024’s 18-minute “Affect/Reflect”; a recording which hinted at the path ahead, but it is this inaugural release on the freshly minted Ruby Harvest label where his intentions duly reveal themselves.

The tracks that make up “Cycles of Disappearance” started as manipulated guitar improvisations, carefully drawn out, then composed and recorded in a single take with no post-production. They’re kinetic. They never stay still. The notes tumble and writhe as if they’re coming apart, fluctuating from one form to the next, twisting and looping, even occasionally reversing and almost always deteriorating in a sea of caustic static. Pining sheets of guitar wail out through waves of distortion. Each undulation sizzling into the transient shapes of disintegrating bonfire embers.

Sprawling, finger-picked vistas, such as those on ‘Sometimes the Moon’, aren’t immune to this approach. Saiz’s time-skipping synthesis juddering the notes along as if they’re the afterimages of clashing tectonic plates. ‘Grounding Phases’s slightly off-tracked fretboard runs careen from right to left, before vast, rasping drones bulge into view like great mushroom clouds of sound.

With this work Saiz is focused on track obliteration. He’s working through emotions, memories, and ideas. The deconstruction of an idea appears to be just as essential as the initial idea itself. The recordings sink into digital quicksand, roaring a guttural, primal howl of over-cranked gain as they slip beneath the surface. And the cycle begins once again.

— Jon Buckland, April 2025

Five albums in for the five-pronged psych rockers and that, by my maths, has them crying “Wee! Wee! Wee!” all the way home. But they haven’t done that. If anything they’ve pushed further afield than ever before, enlisting legendary producer, rapper, and one half of Run The Jewels (El-P) for an eviscerating verse on Death Hilarious’s centre-piece ‘Glib Tongued’.

Karl O’Connor seems to be enjoying getting his old bands back together. Last year he reunited with Surgeon for the long-awaited British Murder Boys debut and now he’s linked up with David Sumner (Function) for Sandwell District’s second full-length after a casual fifteen-year hiatus. I won’t say silence as, over the past year or so, they’ve treated us to a box set reissue of their masterful, scene-defining debut, and dropped an archival collection titled Where Next? late last year.

“I like art where the blood is streaming and the flowers are blooming like hell.” – Peter Brötzmann

Pitiful royalties. Chronic ticket gouging. Shuttered venues. Charts clogged with nepo babies. Generative AI. Slashed arts funding. Brexit red tape. If you’re looking for signs that music is struggling, you hardly need 20/20 vision. Fortunately, that’s not the whole story.

For music to survive all you need are two things: someone to make it and someone to take it seriously. In Scottish author...

1929, New York City. six months before the crash. Edward Bernays, inspired by the work of his double uncle Sigmund Freud, paid women to smoke cigarettes whilst marching in the Easter Sunday Parade. He called them ‘Torches of Freedom’, as if every puff were a hammer blow to the shackles of patriarchal oppression.The idea was to both break a social taboo and to increase the number of female smokers with a casual flick of a lighter’s flint.

As the 21st century roared into view, so did Room40. 

What started off as a pre-millennium zine cobbled together in Brisbane grew into a series of carefully curated shows promoting the type of artists very rarely seen in North East Australia, and has now evolved, a quarter of a century later, into a home for some of the most vital, compelling, and dream-like experimental records. Included on Room40’s discography are artists such as Kevin Richard Martin, Grouper, Tim Hecker, Alan Lamb, Celer...

“He watched the pale, speed-driven teenagers shiver around the dance floor. Droplets of light sprayed onto their faces and T-shirts. In alcoves, couples were frozen in the trance of foreplay. The beat was too quick to dance to, almost too deep to hear. It was like the roar of water in an underground cavern.” – The Window

Lifted from a particularly harrowing short story by the British author Joel Lane, the above paragraph depicts the initial meeting place of a burgeoning sado-masochistic sexual relationship. It could also double as a description of the notoriously selective Berlin nightclub where Decius’ Meat Divine first caught a taste of electronic music’s throbbing abandon.

Certain music lends itself particularly well to specific physical media. For instance: Black Sabbath on vinyl, Autechre on CD, Aaron Dilloway’s tape manipulations on cassette. I don’t know if it’s due to the rugged, physical performances or the nagging sense that this is a fly-on-the-wall recording of a live jam session, but something rooted in Deep Cabaret’s Matchless demands the innate tangibility of analogue formats. It’s fitting then that this jazzy desert blues album, initially released on...

After seducing a portion of the planet's population (and largely reviling the rest) with the mawkish and cynical chart hit 'You're Beautiful', James Blunt reaped more than ample rewards.

No sooner has the artist formerly known as Bass Clef reinvented himself as Myriad Myriads, he’s immediately put out two slabs of electronic brilliance, barely a month apart, on twin taste-making labels The Trilogy Tapes and Wrong Speed Records. The latter of these is All The Hits and it is executed, much like the swiftly delivered back-to-back releases, in a flurry of swift one-two jab combos.

I swear these years are whipping by quicker and quicker. There’s a theory that a year feels shorter as you get older because 12 months are a smaller slice of your entire existence. So, in percentage terms, you’re dealing with a slimmer slither compared to those school days when the long summers seemed to stretch out way beyond the glittering horizon, almost into infinity. Endless, some might say. Christian Fennesz ought to write an album about that. Anyway, despite knowing all of that, this year flew. Here we are at the end and I’m once again writing that thing I do around this time each year… although I’m still not entirely sure why.

Recently, a friend generously shared a fairly rank video in a group chat. It featured an open manhole cover with a length of blue piping descending into an underground tunnel system. After a moment or two of faint gurgles and twitching hosing, a huge stinking brick of toilet waste sludged its way through the narrow duct like a giant faecal slug. It clogged up the entire opening, causing mud-coloured discharge to rise to the brim and threaten to spill out into the road. A series of flatulent sounds...

Amongst dangling chains and pink-lit tiling, a man appears. He’s bare-chested save for a leather waistcoat which, combined with the latex gimp mask he’s sporting, gives him the same air of nocturnal menace as ‘Machine’, the bloodthirsty on-screen killer in Nic Cage’s snuff film whodunnit, 8mm. This man is Richie Culver AKA Quiet Husband.

Back in the winter of ’06 a piece of music crawled under my skin and has remained there ever since. It was on the Mary Anne Hobbs-hosted Breezeblock: a weekly late-night slot on Radio 1 where she blended avant-garde electronics with fresh cuts of grime and early dubstep. Around twelve minutes into the episode Hobbs introduced the Multipara Remix of ‘Removed (Vacuous Movement)’, by No Movement No Sound No Memories, as “proper white-knuckle stuff” and she was not wrong.

Sometimes music can perfectly capture the sensation of something beyond words. A feeling or emotion that writers futilely dance around, never successfully skewering. Jabu’s A Soft and Gatherable Star is one of those records.

For the past eighteen months The Bug has been regularly releasing quickfire instrumental assaults on Bandcamp in a series known simply as Machine. The time has come to gather up these ‘floor weapons’ and discharge them in one coordinated strike.

Why the military language? Put simply, that’s what these propulsive compositions of industrial sub-bass bring to mind.

In Ben Wheatley's 2013 folk horror film, A Field In England, there's a central scene in which Reece Shearsmith's character, having been tortured whilst under the influence of psilocybin, emerges from a tent in a stupor with his face locked in a demented palsy.

The former Sonic Youth guitarist invites us into his own dreamworld of grinding guitars and dappled lightIn 1988 the artist Jamie Nares painted an image titled Samurai Walkman which featured multiple tuning forks sticking out of a helmet. That same year Sonic Youth released the double album Daydream Nation with Gerhard Richter’s painting Kerze (‘Candle’) on the front cover. Thirty-six years later Samurai Walkman has been realised as a physical sculpture for the album artwork of Flow Critical Lucidity, Thurston Moore's ninth solo record.

Around 12 years ago there was an outpouring of both excitement and outrage when two bands from my formative years announced plans to reform. Refused were accused of selling out, having infamously promised that they would “never play together again”, but then delivered a tour of electrifying concerts followed by albums of diminishing returns.

Seefeel sprung up in 1993 with the release of their debut album off the back of a series of glittering EPs. With each record their style and sound shifted, confounding journalists and record labels alike. They were initially lumped in with shoegaze, post rock, and then IDM, largely due to their Warp and Rephlex associations. Yet none of that quite captures the truly engrossing blend of ambient electronics, pop-adjacent melodies, and mangled but uplifting guitar-slinging that Seefeel were creating.

The None have history. 'Matter' might be their first release, but each member of the quartet is well-seasoned in the machinations of music making: Between them they’ve played in Bloc Party, Blue Ruth, Cassels, Youth Man, and Frauds. Based on that, you might think you have an inkling as to what they sound like. You’d be wrong. Without intending a slight on any of those earlier projects, The None are far greater than the sum of their parts.

In the early 2000s, whilst I was inhaling silly quantities of cannabis and playing music-related video games such as Frequency and Guitar Hero, Brian Gibson was working for Harmonix as the lead artist on those exact games.

The Lightning Bolt bassist quit the computer game industry back in 2015, yet he hasn’t been able to stay away entirely. In 2016 he recorded the soundtrack for cult rhythm-violence video game THUMPER and, more recently, the spatial audio score for VR assault THRASHER.