Eighty nautical miles from the Athenian port of Piraeus lies Sifnos. Covering an area roughly seventy four square km with a population of less than three thousand inhabitants, it is a beautiful island whose very essence could be the definition of Stillness.

I visited the island in June for a dear friend’s wedding, and amidst a number of joyous celebrations there was plenty of time to settle into a deeper and slower pace of life that was in great contrast to how I usually spend my days.

Surrounded by arid hills and valleys leading down to cerulean shorelines (contrasting beautifully with the cobalt blue of the numerous domes of tiny churches scattered amongst the hills) that would turn to a deep amber and russet magenta haze at sunset, I felt like I was moving through a Cycladian Earthsea.

One thing that struck me whilst on the island was I didn’t actively listen to a single piece of music whilst I was there; the desire to do so just never materialised.

In many ways I didn’t even think of music there - with the exception of some of the evenings bars we ended up in it just wasn’t really much of a presence.

It was almost as if the part of my perception that is naturally drawn to music was channelled into something else. The ‘soundtrack’ to the island consists of the sound of the sea lapping against the shore, the occasional thrum of a moped or car making it’s way through the winding, tight streets of Apollonia, a sea-breeze rustling between the wind-chimes made of sun-bleached, near-translucent sea shells. It felt like a true Elsewhere. By this, I mean somewhere that felt truly different to any other place I’ve visited, and not just in terms of physical beauty, or culture, but also in atmosphere. I feel like the lens of how I interpret the world has shifted in it’s frame, and the heat of the environment slowed not only my movement but also my thinking.

Something about the still, ascetic pace of days (I don’t think I’ve ever visited somewhere so uncluttered by the avarice and distraction of modern life, not to mention the sun and heat making phone use very minimal) provided contrast to how much I use music regularly as a balm or salve to soothe the more fractious undercurrent and static of city living, but that this in turn can sometimes lean more towards a distraction or even addiction.

Time away gave me pause to assess what is truly nourishing in an overstimulating world. I think perhaps I have been overconsuming music as a means of chasing that nourishment. Having this kind of break, and learning to appreciate how important silence and a non-soundtracked life are, has meant that late summer has been the chance to really connect again to particular albums and my overall creativity.

Sunn O)))’s t-shirt famously asks "Ever breathe a frequency?”, whereas Sifnos asks “Have you ever really heard the air?”.

Hymn to Light

After returning to England I spent a few weeks readjusting to the regular routines and callings of everyday life, the transition partly helped by one of the many heatwaves across the UK this summer, disembarking to a Manchester that was the same temperature as it had been when I left Athens.

I was mindful of not wanting to fully throw myself back into my regular pace of things, to try and observe what I felt had come back with me from the island and how I could integrate it into life at home. Long, ambling walks and low-key catch ups with friends allowed for a gentle resettling.

During that time I realised there actually was one record which manages to gesture, ever so gently, towards the atmosphere of what I experienced on Sifnos and it is this beautiful work by Jon Porras, simply titled ‘Arroyo’ (a small stream or brook in Spanish), “…a rumination on simplicity and simple truths, a work of complete immersion and continuous motion where separate elements coalesce into an ever-changing whole”.

Unwinding across four pieces each of which are centred around one chord, the album’s austere and melodious combination of piano, flecks of droning guitar and subtle, vaporous synths create an atmosphere of understated, contemplative presence. It’s one of my favourite ambient records and a work of truly brilliant minimalism. Ambience not just as a lulling, background wash but as something that serves as a conduit towards somewhere else. A means of attuning one’s senses and inner world to a quieter and deeper alignment.

For me it feels fitting for that time on the island as I believe trying to hone too keenly on depicting or providing an all-encompassing expression to describe or summarise Sifnos undoes the entire magic of it as a place. To look too attentively, to be too focused on finding the what or it of a somewhere runs the risk of losing that particular thread of Elsewhere that runs though it - like a dwindling lantern flame snuffed out by a sudden sea breeze.

“In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.”

A Wizard of Earthsea

Today marks 20 years since Cult of Luna released their fourth album Somewhere Along the Highway, a record that stands as one of the keystones of my life and who’s resonance has only become keener and deeper as time passes.

Following the monolithic, crushing onyx of The Beyond and the contrasting snowblind beauty of 2004’s Salvation, Somewhere Along the Highway saw the then eight-piece Cult of Luna withdraw to a wooden barn outside of Umeå in Northern Sweden to lay down a record that took post-metal into it’s most expansive, austere and human form.

Encompassing ley line-wide instrumental passages, shimmering electronic haze, sparse, desperate vocals and grounded by a rhythm section that are the embodiment of the word ‘superlative’, it is a record that is the perfect demonstration of a band knowing that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.

Two decades on it has never been bettered and I think now really stands apart as a singular work; one with it’s own unique texture and topography.

The Road

For an album that is so emblematic of my own personal and musical journeys it’s interesting reflecting on my initial thoughts upon first hearing it after buying it fresh on release day on CD from a record store in the sunny laines of Brighton in 2006. On first listen I liked it but felt there was a certain lack. It wasn’t as heavy as I was expecting, there were less discernible ‘big’ moments and didn’t seem to quite have the heft of Salvation that I’d previously fallen in love with.

This now feels amusing to ruefully look back on as I feel like Somewhere Along the Highway is one of the most emotionally-affecting and weighty albums in my life but I think it shows both the impatience and passion of my early 20’s, and how much time a record takes to really unfurl, for your ear to adjust - for you to actually deeply, fully listen.

That unfurling really started to happen as it became the tour soundtrack of various bands and adventures I went on. Taking it’s title completely literally, I, along with my bandmates in Efrafa and other friends along the road, would fully subsume into all of it’s agrarian beauty. I am sure many, many others have done the same.

Watching the world go by in the liminal, contemplative space that only tour can provide (and driving through a lot of farmland across Western Europe), moments and textures of that rural atmosphere started to emerge and bloom. It’s demonstrative of the album’s perfect pacing that once you’ve started it you want to listen to it fully as a complete piece.

When you realise that as a listener it’s not trying to bludgeon you constantly, a sense of the loose but steady and muscular gait of the songs starts to step forth. It’s influence upon me as a bassist, as well as lover of music, is everlasting. It has irrevocably changed how I listen to music and how I feel it.

I’ve hinted at my writing before that I don’t tend to just listen to records, but inhabit them.

Somewhere Along the Highway is my North Star of this kind of embodiment. I still to this day hear new elements within it such as strange guitar textures, reverb on hi-hats and subdued synth melodies. It’s rewards seem to be endless.

Eviga Riket

As mentioned earlier, …Highway feels like post-metal as it’s most human; stripped-down to it’s essential elements and letting the performances and dynamics of the band as a collective serve as a conduit for emotional catharsis.

It is 1 hour, 4 minutes and 44 seconds long and during that run time I would say less than ten minutes has vocals. It is heavy because a human is hitting a string or snare with that much force; it is restrained because of a band holding back as if taking a deep breath. Amplifiers hum with a warm, resonant tone, filling the space of a recording that although sparse and ascetic never feels stark; life beats within. It is honed to a point of utmost clarity, but never overproduced.

The initial tracking of the record happened over just seven days, with the band playing live together in the same room, a very different production process to Salvation which seemed to be a far more involved, separate and laborious process. Something of that fleeing temporality is present in …Highway and it’s what gives it it’s trudging pace of steady momentum.

Cult of Luna as a band are comprised of stellar musicians but this feels like the appropriate time to single out drummer Thomas Hedlund and bassist Andreas Johansson as …Highway’s mooring centre. They are responsible for the majority of the album’s expansive weight, the heavy-lifting being done primarily by Johansson’s use of bass chords as guitars weave alongside in vaporous, psychedelic bursts.

Hedlund’s drumming meanwhile is the beating heart of this album, it’s flowing contractions and expansions linked to his meticulous hi-hat work, the restraint and sense of space in the open and heavy sections, and a masterful sense of control and timing. Examples such as the oft-kilter but propulsive tempo change that comes in at 4:03 in Finland, the ‘playing through the bar’ drum fill towards the end of Dim, the impelling hi-hat strikes of Back To Chapel Town matching with the downstrokes of the bass and guitars to create one of the album’s most churning and driving moments are the kind of musical flourishes I can return to again and again, and find thrilling every time.

The three guitarists, Johannes Persson, Fredrik Kihlberg and Erik Olofsson, alongside keyboardist/electronics genius Anders Teglund, all deliver incredible performances as well, playing with a restraint and gracefulness that you would more associate with a Songs:Ohia or Low album than one of heavy fury. Their playing really focuses on ‘serving the song’, alternating between arpeggiated melodies, washes of reverb and strange effects, EBow drones and, at times of maximum impact, crushing power chords.

As a complete piece of music it is comprised of two ascents or arcs. The first goes from Marching to The Heartbeats to Back to Chapel Town, a brief respite in the hushed And With Her Came The Birds and then the second arc with Thirtyfour through to Dark City, Dead Men. That second arc is just under 38 minutes of music, awash with moments of fleeting, tender hope; sun-flecked magenta and orange, as dusk then approaches.

Dark City, Dead Men is the only way to close out an album like this, it contains all the elements of what has come before and combines them into not only one of Cult of Luna’s best songs but arguably the greatest final track of all post-metal records ever.

That most of it’s tension comes from the use of one harrowing chord from the 06:10 mark never ceases to amaze me. A stark, wailing air raid siren peeling across the landscape as the rest of the band build up around it into a devastatingly melancholic conclusion, replete with two drummers driving the track forward with grim inevitability.

From a Distance They Come Alive

Somewhere Along the Highway was released in a very different era, one in which social media platforms hadn’t become the primary source of information about new music and releases from bands, perhaps best encapsulated as the ‘Myspace’ era. Bands had Myspace pages but they were all sorts of works in progress, a place to host some music and pics and blogposts and bulletins, but also tangibly more ramshackle and experimental, miles away from the very organised digital communications and content schedules of 2026.

From this, Cult of Luna launched a bit of an experiment which I’m happy to recreate here. In August of 2006 they hosted an instrumental remix of Marching to The Heartbeats on their Myspace music player which was available for download for a few days and then removed - something that Teglund said was an experiment to see if the track would be “kept alive” by file sharing and peer-to-peer networks.

They also did the same with a track from the sessions that was never released and has not to my knowledge been placed on any music streaming platforms, titled Ascension From Below.

I, being the massive nerd that I am, had downloaded both during this time and kept them on external hard drives over the last 20 years and in the spirit of the original intention to keep them alive by sharing in peer-to-peer networks have included both below:

‘Heartbeats’

‘Ascension From Below’

Heartbeats works beautifully as an ambient track with echoing, ethereal piano melodies and strange samples entwined.

Ascension From Below is the more compelling of the two, I just love how unnerving this track is, from it’s beautiful opening haze (that droning sunset-washed Boards of Canada synth part is just heaven) to crushing riffs and then a much more disquieting second half of eerie paranoia, instilling a sense of getting further and further lost in the woods.

I wonder if this perhaps served as inspiration for …Highway’s follow up, Eternal Kingdom, as there certainly seems a bit of a connecting theme there. As a track, it is fantastic but I also understand why they didn’t include it, it feels like there is nowhere in the track-listing it would be really suitably placed in an album with such instinctive flow. Sonically it occupies a similar space to Back to Chapel Town so might have felt like a jarring overkill.

Regardless, it’s great to have these two little curiosities out in the world after all this time and I hope you enjoy listening to them.

The Silent Man

Somewhere Along the Highway is one of those albums that we are lucky to experience. The conditions that lead to it’s creation are not easily replicable and I think it’s best to see it as a record that really embodies a particular time and space.

I want to finish this piece with a bit of a reflection on the overall theme of Somewhere Along the Highway, which is that of ‘Male loneliness’ which has come up from various interviews with the band around this era, and inevitably is something that is a huge topic and worthy of far more thought and discussion than I’m available to write down here - I do however feel it’s necessary to look at in 2026 in which a lot of discourse is bubbling away online around the ‘Male loneliness epidemic’ and what this means in terms of a wave of ongoing gender-based violence.

I spent a huge amount of time wrestling back and forth about how to best write about this topic in the context of heavy music and subculture, and realised it is going to take more time and nuance than I currently can make available. I decided instead to share to share some notes of when I was first writing about this subject in relation to Cult of Luna for a podcast I did several years ago and hope it provides a bit of a guiding direction for where I’m going with these kind of thoughts:

“And having that catharsis is so essential - and to have this band who articulated and centred that frustration and anger in my late teens, through my 20’s and still do it into my 30’s is just amazing. I have to reflect on it alongside being socialised and raised as a man, and definitely white and middle-class, and all the privileges and dynamics that that entails whilst also navigating my own struggles. That is still something I’m going through and to centre back into their idea around ‘male loneliness’ and men imprisoning themselves within and not articulating their emotions or feelings, just burying it inside. and it is essential that men do more and get better at opening up about our mental health and general emotions with other men. It is genuinely life-saving and has to be viewed alongside taking responsibility for ourselves and the burden off the care-givers and listeners in our lives,- emotional labour has become a horribly overused phrase but it’s central idea still feels useful in terms of analysing anyone who’s viewed ‘traditionally’ or socialised to be seen as ‘feminine’ and thus as a carer or to deal with men’s bullshit basically. i.e. women, non-binary people, queer, anyone outside of traditional stoical, straight men.

I find those categories around ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits really restrictive and not helpful but we have to take the world as it currently is and unfortunately, a lot of the world still sees things in terms of that really strict binary and so part of the work and effort to undo that is in around these really broad stereotypical ideas of ‘men aren’t good about talking about emotions and stress and mental health’ and turning them on their head and undoing them, by becoming good at talking about emotions and stress. It also doesn’t need to be this huge deep-dive of psycho-analysis or therapy or self-help but just learning to actively listen and be there for people. A form of everyday empathy that takes people where they’re at, at that time and isn’t necessarily about ‘fixing’ or being solutions-based, again, quite stereotypically masculine traits. It’s easy to see these as problems to be solved and sometimes it’s more just about letting someone be actually heard.

It shows the power of music and how much it can heal.

What CoL do is provide that ability to shut out the world, to be annihilated by sound and able to enter this contemplative space and to process and channel a lot of emotions - in order to then return to the world, to go back outside, with a more focussed clarity and confidence. That is the journey they take you on, and how it can inspire you on to live a more authentic & honest life. They make You return to yourself.”

The lyrics of Somewhere Along the Highway very much focus towards this topic, and one that looking upon many years later provides a new sense of interpretation. That the angst and turmoil of our early 20’s is not destined to be repeated, that we can change those circumstances, we can use the wisdom and reflection of prevailing years to go in a new direction - fuelled by the galvanized inspiration and excitement of our youth with the experience that comes from life’s broadening horizons. Time remains a non-linear subject that creativity will always gesture towards.

In that spirit I thought I would end this edition of The Ansible by reversing the arrangement of the lyrics of Dark City, Dead Men and Marching to The Heartbeats. What on initial reading might seem like the collapse of a relationship with an other, be they romantic or platonic, I think takes on another meaning when focussed on the alignment and rediscovery of the internal and the self:

This will be the end of me

I let go, and fall deeper

You haunt me in my dreams

Further down, the steps get steeper

Memories wither, they are all gone

These pictures slowly fade

You don’t recognise me

The landscape has changed

We were the ones who marched and fell

When you saw me you saw yourself

The sun, the light…

Thanks as ever for reading x

M.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.

• The World Is Too Much With Us - William Wordsworth

Architects of Troubled Sleep

The start of the year can feel like three months of endless Mondays. The slowly returning daylight often marred by gloom and rain, with everything feeling like it takes an extra amount of effort.

Using the slower days and almost animal-like impulse in Winter to hibernate with less activities and early nights, I’ve been spending a bit of time trying to align a series of different thoughts and ideas, primarily around our relationship to one another, the ‘world’ and how this world/s is mediated to us via social media, the internet and ongoing news-cycle of ever-increasing catastrophes.

For a few months I’ve had a sort of subdued, internal churn that feels beyond language and outside of my fingertips, something that I just can’t quite grasp - like the heady humidity of an overcast day, tension with no release. Fundamentally I feel that how we live currently is insane, perhaps never more so. The way in which we understand ‘events’, how we relate to one another as people, how we relate to our sense of place and time.

I didn’t expect to find myself at the age of 41 living in an perpetually upended world of geo-politics that represents that of Metal Gear Solid 2, yet here we are. ‘Memetic Psychological Warfare’ is the kind of phrasing that sounds like it would be an excellent opening track on an early 2000’s Crust record, but this isn’t a conceptual framework with just the right amount of well-read punk snark; this IS reality.

Earlier in the year I’d been glibly saying that we now live in a ‘Robocop Future’ but I do also think Paul Verhoeven was astonishingly prescient in his satire in both Robocop and Starship Troopers, so much so that I think in 2026 we find our age as one that could be described as Verhoeven-ian, one bearing the following characteristics:

• The gawdy and salacious poverty of synthetic media

• The sycophantic glee of a whole swathe of pathetic, emotionally-castrated men getting to act out their Fascist action-movie fantasies

• The sneering disdain at empathy and the common good

• The biggest losers in the world deciding that the rules no longer apply to them

• Eternal War as profit-incentive for condos and seaside resorts on the mass graves of dead children

The schism between the channelled online realm of feeds and our own material world around us has never felt so stark and schizophrenic. I also think this schism cannot be fully explained just by geo-politics, economics or journalism but something on a less defined, less rational, philosophical level.

Sovereign Self

A phrase that has presented itself to me as I’ve been picking apart these thread of ideas is ‘Necessary Distance’ - the feeling that a sense of distance or space has been lost in the perpetual on-ness of the world.

The world felt more exciting when it seemed like a patchwork of different threads of experiences and discoveries interconnecting, literal ups and downs; rather than a flatlined, unending horizon with no peaks or troughs. The space and time to have surprising, confusing, upsetting, illuminating encounters and challenges, to learn new things, to be bewildered and humbled. Unsurprisingly, this really first came into focus for me in the context of my own life with the discovery of DIY Punk Culture and Zines, ‘Another world is possible’, etc.

As time went on the internet also used to provide a realm of mystery and have a presence of somewhere else, a truly other world/series of worlds which felt delightful to stumble upon - message boards, strange websites, blogs and so on.

The early era of Instagram also felt like this - by focusing just on images and little snapshots of life there was a chance for a more creative means of connection, something ineffable and alluring, but also separate, and was a welcome relief after The Facebook Status Update Era became overbearing, over-worthy and wearying in equal measure.

Compare this to how broken Instagram is currently, in essence a very bad marketing platform with so many ‘talking to camera’ videos on it that I think it’s provoking a form of empathy fatigue that feels draining and dispiriting. I miss when it was just pictures!

It is now the real world that provides an actual sense of mystery and magic, yet also utterly, starkly brutal eruptions as well. I have the sense of emerging from a long and distracting fever dream - like the world has been through something dreadful and we’re only now just starting to realise that perhaps consensus reality shattered sometime in November/December 2024 and that we are now wading through the wreckage and try to rebuild a sense of ‘world’ that is both personal and communal, one free from the instant synaptic assaults of a perpetual global event cycle.

This is where Necessary Distance has sort of emerged from, an ongoing series of ideas and thoughts that are still fermenting but feel like they’re gesturing towards a new way of living, one that has a better understanding of what this sense of flatlined horizon does to us as humans, and what we can do to regain our sense of presence.

It’s possible that living in a system that is hardwired towards the attrition of convenience that we are some of the first generations who have to now actively make our lives less convenient, taking a slower and more patience approach with things, delaying gratification and trying to perceive the actual length of time, space and distance of our world and collective experience.

With the ongoing affects of the current conflict in Iran/The Middle East still not being resolved, nor the actual weight and cost of disruption yet landing (let’s see what it’s like in a few weeks, buckle up?), there’s perhaps also never been a better time to start undertaking this kind of work. Let me know if you’ve had any similar thoughts or ideas!

To Live In Discontent

Whilst dwelling on these ideas I’ve gone back and read quite a few interviews with Adam Curtis across the years and have selected two for you to explore further, should you so wish. One is more recently from The Idler in 2021 and the other is from part 1 of an e-flux interview in 2012 (which is 14 years ago but sort of feels like a weird-era of un-time).

As ever there’s hit-and-miss elements to his work but I always enjoy re-engaging with it, if only for seeing which ideas now seem very prescient in our current context and which do not. There’s also something that feels quite old-school and fun about hunting down these old interviews and snippets, taking a bit of time with longform reading and reflection in a way that harkens back to the early 2000’s of online culture - something that was a far more text-based means of expression than the visual content we now consume.

The quote below from the 2012 e-flux interview I think is really interesting, particularly in the way that we have developed a novelist’s description of our own interior lives:

“Right. I think the new sensibility is beginning to shape itself out of the limitations of just experiencing things for yourself. But that’s not going to go away, that desire. The desire of the individual is still at the center of our society at the moment. If you go into a bar tonight, and you listen to the conversations, you will hear men and women describing to each other how they feel about someone else, or how someone else they know feels about someone else. Inner feelings are everything. They’re talking like a novelist’s description. They’re saying, “well, what he felt was that she crushed him somehow. And therefore, it was sort of a terrible destructive thing that she was doing to him, because she was, like, blanking him off.” What you hear will be like that. That’s like a novelist describing someone from inside their head. That fixation on the primacy of individual experience and feeling is not going to go away. But we’re beginning to realize two things: first, that this individualism is limited, and second, that when things get tough economically, socially, and politically, and you are on your own, you feel isolated, and you feel weak. And actually, there are other collective ways of experiencing things, and thus acting, which need to be recaptured.”

Honing in on that idea of collective experience, I think a more pronounced set of creative activities around documenting life and culture offline are already starting to take shape. The return of zines, photography and longer-form writing, the documentation of scenes alongside more physical media and an ethos of creating an ongoing living archive of musical culture are feeling more prominent and exciting.

What may seem like small efforts are in fact all part of remaining curious and creating means of connection that are not just fleeting and transactional, lost in a draft of digital ephemera, but something more congruent and lasting.

In that spirit, below are some albums that I’ve been enjoying as I’ve put together this edition of The Ansible, please check them out and if you like what you hear try and get yourself a physical copy somewhere.

Dishes - Drama

Composed of experienced lifers and long-time friends of the DIY Europunk community who spend their time living, organizing, hanging out and practicing in Amsterdam, Drama is 10 tracks of driving, anthemic and wistful indie powerpoppunk. Having spent the last few years touring and honing their own particular take on a genre which feels both classic and contemporary, Dishes show that the tunes can remain timeless but lyrically they couldn’t feel more relevant or present for our current situation in 2026.

Fuelled by a zephyr of frosty and melancholic guitar leads and lyrical and sardonic vocals, they carry the torch of Scandipunk heroes Massyhsteri and Terrible Feelings, and the album carries a slight biting chill down from the North Sea across its run time.

Taking ‘the personal is political’ back from hollow online performativity and returning it to a point of connection and solidarity is no mean feat, and this really feels like a soundtrack for the strange, sad world of unending events we find ourselves in. Endlessly scrolling and watching horrors on our phones as consensus reality dissolves around us, Dishes also remind us that the only way out of this mess is with each other and that we need community, connection and organizing more than ever.

Moloch - Bend. Break. Kneel. Crawl.

February saw the release of the third album by the UK’s best band, a caustic breeze block of a record that is emblematic of not only their refusal to be swayed by any trends but also of the sound of the UK’s ongoing tension and decline. Sludgey riffs of obsidian cade merge with corrosive vocals and crawling drums, all harnessed with the sensibility of a hardcore band who’ve been doing this for a long time.

It’s also undoubtedly their best record yet, having a real sense of flow and managing to capture the crushing experience of seeing them live in all it’s muted, asphalt bleakness.

Aruspex - The Death Instinct

Nine tracks of Blackened Crust from the Sierra Nevada Foothills, Arüspex are bringing this genre, alongside Malatesta and Encierro, back to the desperate fury that made it so intoxicating the first time round.

Icy, melodic riffs alongside fast d-beat is always a winner but it’s the vocals with an incandescent, aching ‘barely-can-get-the-words-out-fast-enough’ grindcore intensity that make the album really harken back to the likes of Accursed, Kontrovers and other bands on Putrid Filth Conspiracy.

Burned Up Bled Dry - NEXT STOP…DEAD STOP…

Like an edition of HeartattaCk brought kicking and screaming back to life 20 years after it’s demise, this is just a perfect distillation of rummaging through distro boxes and collecting 7inches of random hardcore bands, in their own words “…mixing crushing down tuned Mid-South heaviness and intense power violence blasting with the clarity, hooks and direct edge of 80’s hardcore punk.”

Serving as a reminder of how much work it takes to write and refine songs into a hardcore punk record that you want to listen to repeatedly, having taken 29 years to write and record this album, it feels like both a sonic time capsule and a laying down of the gauntlet.

If you are at all into the likes of Born Dead Icons, Look Back And Laugh, Diallo, Artimus Pyle, Talk Is Poison, Slap-A-Ham records, going at great lengths to describe what ‘thrashcore’ was and buying compilation cd’s that had 60+ tracks from random Euro distros at gigs you will absolutely love this.

Nondi_ - Nondi…

Switching gears away from the guitars, Nondi… is a hazy and lovely lo-fi record of washed-out electronics and footwork/2-step/UK Garage that just has a beautiful atmosphere and fluidity to it that I can’t get enough of.

KMRU - Kin

One of my fave sound artists with a longform, droning album that feels like a return to some of his more heavy material, enveloping and cascading outwards.

Oh yeah, and one of the best bands to have ever existed also dropped the surprise album of the year/decade, on a day which was basically like Christmas for bald/bearded men of a certain vintage, but that is going to be the subject of another longer piece.

Thanks again for reading x

M

About a decade ago I returned to England after having spent just under three months traveling the Pacific Northwest of the United States, making my way from Oregon to British Columbia, and back again, via Seattle and Whidbey Island. It was the journey of a lifetime - and one only possible from the kindness of friends and friends of friends, contacts from DIY touring and Punk and Metal all generously hosting me, taking me for beautiful hikes, letting me crash in their basements for weeks at a time and showing me an amazing part of the world.

Dubbed ‘#CascadianPoshCrustTour2k15’/A Plaid Odyssey, I was fully living out my fantasies of seeing some of the landscapes and forests that helped influence Cascadian Black Metal. Some of the hikes and trails will stay with me forever in my internal landscape, certain tracks and guitar riffs will always bring back the sense of being present in those vast vistas and plains.

The trip served also an entr’acte between one phase of life and the next - I had left Brighton and was preparing to move North to Manchester in the January of 2016. The trip in many ways was a foreshadowing of the journey I would make when home, celebrating the friendships and contacts I’d made from playing in bands, booking shows and contributing to DIY community efforts, and heading out somewhere new with the all the excitement and trepidation that going the path less travelled entails.

All Relics of the Path

When looking back at that time I’m struck by how much more open/brazen/confident I felt in going to places unknown, trusting that things would work out, having a sort of inner ‘quiet Good Faith’ within the wider world. The following decade has been a great time of establishing a new life in Manchester, making friends and community, settling into a career I enjoy, exploring the surrounding landscapes and countryside, in many ways slowing down a bit. With this slowing down I think there has also been a slight dimming of that brazen, inner flame on my 20’s - perhaps it was growth and maturity, or perhaps, over-cautiousness and anxiety, a slightly paradoxical sense of the world both expanding and contracting. Certain certainties I’d had previously, were now, not so certain.

The last couple of years have been a time of slowly re-emerging from that dimming period, the 2019 election and subsequent Covid lockdowns being a particularly low era, and in hindsight I see that it has really taken a few years to reconnect with the horizon of possibility that being more open to the world provides.

This sense of internal shift really became clear over a few weeks of November in which I was extremely lucky to spend time in the Peak District and Calder Valley with some of my oldest and dearest friends, appreciating the depth of friendships that endure across decades and having a sense of contentment I’ve not had in quite sometime. The different spheres of my past ‘worlds’ have converged and become more aligned and integrated, something I really noticed beginning in the Spring with my visit to Roadburn.

Year’s End

As I was wrapping up last month’s piece on Silksong (link here if you missed it), I was starting to think that 2025 was ‘done’ in terms of albums and new music, that it was now time to sift back through the year and see what has really stuck. I was mistaken as from Halloween onwards there was a late Autumn burst across three weeks of a ridiculous amount of new music unleashed into the world, and it’s been a lovely few weeks of making my way through them all.

In lieu of a Best Records of 2025 list I’ve decided to instead just present a selection of those late Autumn releases, arranged around similar atmosphere and sounds, all being records it’s worth spending some time with over the darker months.

Pallbearer - Foundations Of Burden (2025 Redux)

Pallbearer’s debut album Sorrow and Extinction was one of the albums I had on constant repeat during my trip to the PNW. Soundtracking several bus rides between different cities and one spectacular fog-drenched Amtrak ride up the coast to Vancouver from Seattle, it’s an album that really sits within a particular moment and time for me. Over the years Pallbearer have become probably my favourite contemporary metal band (perhaps alongside Elder?) in the sense of ‘Band who I discovered after the 2010’s’.

Their second album Foundations of Burden was also fantastic, crushingly heavy but with enough of the Warning yearn to make such winding tracks feel focussed and propulsive. However, the final mix was never quite there in terms of really letting the material shine.

This very recent 2025 Redux (the band going back and doing quite an extensive amount of restoration and refinement to the original stems before remixing and mastering) is like a beautiful and extremely tasteful restoration of an old photograph or film print. The songs were always incredible but here they really breathe and have an air of expansive weight that was slightly clipped in the original mix. This time the bass is so much more present and the true foundation (sorry) of the rest of the band’s sound, further accentuating the clarity and shimmer of the guitar leads - Foundations of Burden now sounds maximally glorious.

Listening to The Ghost I Used To Be compared to it’s original mix and you can instantly hear, and more importantly, feel the difference. A truly great band to return to yourself with.

Bell Witch & Aerial Ruin - Stygian Bough: Volume II

A nice pairing to the above is the second volume of Bell Witch’s collaboration with acoustic/folk artist Aerial Ruin. It wastes no time in opening with a beautiful vocal harmony and almost archetypical “sad and great” riff, them very much playing as a keenly-focused three-piece band across the album’s nearly 60 minutes. There was no way I wasn’t going to love this.

I hadn’t quite locked into Volume 1 of their collaboration in 2020 but after spending a lot of time with Bell Witch’s masterpiece Future’s Shadow Part.1: The Clandestine Gate I was immediately drawn in here. This feels like a full collaboration rather than a reductive ‘folk vocals over Bell Witch tracks’ approach, and it’s awesome to hear mournful guitar leads intertwining with Dyland Desmond’s bass lines, alongside Erik Moggridge’s plaintive vocals.

This is an album that just lets you steep in gorgeous, enveloping melancholy, only to then be blind-sided by what I consider to be 2025’s most uplifting riff at just before 03.00 minutes into King of the Wood. One for many a wistful walk.

One of Nine - Dawn of the Iron Shadow

The realms of black metal and Middle Earth have always crossed paths with J.R.R. Tolkien’s world-building and mastery of language providing near infinite material and inspiration for band names, music, lyrics, and artwork.

From Summoning’s discography to Black Metal’s Most Infamous Nazi Fuckhead, Burzum, (‘Darkness’ in Tolkein’s Black Speech), it’s a genre who’s very sound seems to be conjured by Nazgûl, riders dressed in black shrieking with regal malice.

One of Nine (what a name!) have taken it upon themselves to continue this tradition and on Halloween released the best contemporary fantasy black metal record since Stormkeep’s Tales of Othertime in 2021.

An album of absolutely perfect second wave black metal worship, with shards of dungeon synth and stomping blackened punk breaks gleaning the songcraft ever sharper. My own first deep dive into black metal as a teenager was via Emperor, Satyricon and Ulver, all of whose sound is very much present here, alongside the aforementioned Summoning and some mesmerising Dissection-esque guitar leads pushing the dark triumphant majesty of Dawn of the Iron Shadow to the horizon of The Undying Lands.

“Pure Tolkienian Sorrow” indeed.

Yellow Eyes - Confusion Gate

I’d previously written about Yellow Eyes in my piece Sumer is icumen in July in the context of the Skarstad brothers’ other projects Sunrise Patriot Motion and Ustalost, so to receive a new full length this year was nicely serendipitous. As with their previous material a period of deep listening was needed to let the magic really unfurl.

Confusion Gate feels like the album Yellow Eyes have been hinting at across their discography, the frantic density of previous records now hewn into something more spacious and crepuscular, rich with emanating melody. For a genre infamous for it’s orthodox trappings they manage to craft songs and riffs with a really unique sense of place and character, still sounding unmistakably like a black metal band. The interludes, synths, ambient field recordings and vocal samples only further serve to root this music in a specific, mystifying landscape.

If I was to associate one specific association with Confusion Gate it would be ‘Gloaming’; the enshrouding dusk that descends as the sun sets beneath a leaden, winter sky. Unsettling and magnificent, this is the metal record for seeing in the Winter Solstice with.

Ragana & Drowse - Ash Souvenir

With the memories of my PNW trip being a little more at the forefront of my mind recently, to see Mt. St Helens on the cover of this collaborative album by Ragana & Drowse I couldn’t help but smile. Initially a collaborative piece commissioned by Roadburn in 2024, it’s fantastic to hear this as a full record with both artists complimenting each other perfectly.

Ragana’s austere guitar and drums black metal accentuated by Drowse’s textured shoegaze, fills their combined sound into a broader sonic palette that feels appropriate for the record’s themes of grief and place. In Eternal Woods Pts.1-3 could actually be the ultimate Ragana track. Crystalline guitar leads, ambient brume and impassioned, anguished vocals all combine into a great record that feels like an echo of my adventures amongst those rain-drenched woodlands and mountains of Washington state.

Greet - I Know How To Die

Changing tack here a little and moving into things with a little less distortion but certainly not lacking in atmosphere and other forms of ephemeral 'weight’, we have the debut album from Greet - the harmonium-driven solo folk project of Matthew Broadley, and one absolutely riddled with Penninian magic. Taking the promising work from a couple of previous EP’s, I Know How To Die is a full-throated and rich exploration of texture and sound, especially on it’s second half with the run of The Seer, The Dig, The Battle and Eulogy.

Perhaps akin to One Leg One Eye in the wielding of the new and the olde into something else, this serves as a lovely companion record to the doom and black metal posted above, and one I will be playing plenty of as we shift into the New Year and the ever-lengthening days.

Hilary Woods - Night CRIÚ

After two instrumental records Hilary Woods returns to incorporating her bewitching voice across seven songs of hushed, eerie dream pop with bowed strings, sparse percussion and the slightest hint of low-end ambient malice just beneath the surface. A concise but enchanting album.

Spiracle - Ossiphage

Walking in the same woodland clearing as Night CRIÚ, Spiracle’s new release on Rope Or Guillotine is a work of beguiling and ethereal goth ambient with scattered piano, droning industrial synths and gorgeous vocals interlacing across six tracks. I’ve had this on heavy repeat the last six weeks and hope that ROG continue to discover and release more experimental releases in this vein as I can’t get enough of this!

Andrew Black - 5115

Andrew Black has been an artist I’ve been following for a while, and as an associate and live musician with PNW ‘wholly doomed black metal’ titans Mizmor, have always been intrigued by his own work as I’m always curious to see how musicians from ‘heavy guitar world’ develop and build electronic music.

5115 immediately caught my ear as amongst the shimmering haze and ambient textures there is a pulsing backbone that immediately makes me think of Andy Stott’s genius experimentation with dub techno and Autechre’s skittering electronica. Black’s work is by no means a carbon copy or derivative, there’s a clear craft and incorporation of other elements going on, it’s just really nice to hear how the influence of electronic music from the North of England works it’s way to the misty Northwest of the US. I would love to hear this material thundering out of the White Hotel’s sound-system one day.

Sulk Rooms - Rewilding

Rounding off this list is the new release from Thomas Ragsdale/Sulk Rooms, who produces and releases a huge variety of electronic music and soundtrack work via his label Frosti and also plays in post-rock faves Pijn.

Rewilding is a record that crafts a particular form of ‘Luminescent electronica’ with the dynamics and glacial, tremolo melodies of post-rock and metal. A sense of seasonal-shifting occurs over nine tracks with opener Let’s Choose Our Worlds Carefully feeling like the thaw on a bright, frost-tinted morning, as the record moves between brooding down-tempo tracks and more cathartic, energetic ones like the shimmering, squalling Innellea.

Bringing to mind the later works of Rival Consoles, Boards of Canada and 65daysofstatic’s more experimental (and in my view most interesting material) Wreckage Systems releases, this is an album of brilliant, agrestic audio immersion.

Steering The Craft

This rounds off another year of The Ansible so I’d just like to offer, as ever, a sincere thank you for reading and any kind words or sharing of my work that you do!

Of late I’ve been thinking of how to develop and promote this newsletter beyond the realms of social media/the internet in general so do get in touch if you have any thoughts or ideas around that.

Wishing you a peaceful end to 2025 and great things ahead in 2026.

x

M

Hello!

Welcome to this edition of the Ansible and sincere apologies for the delay. Late Summer going into Autumn resulted in a lot of back and forth and just finding the time to sit and write has proved more challenging than expected.

I started drafting this in September but life very much got in the way (absolutely nothing to do with the release of a hotly anticipated Metroidvania, honest) and as I began writing, ideas and themes sprawled. It’s a long one, with a lot of audio and visual content, and likely to be truncated by your email provider but if you click on ‘View entire message’ you should be able to read the whole thing. Let me know if you can’t!

Enter Pharloom

The announcement at the end of August of the imminent release (i.e. a fortnight later) of Hollow Knight: Silksong caused the gaming quarters of the internet to explode, reacting to the news of the release of the sequel one the most successful indie games of all time with the same fervour as metal fans finding out a long lost or secret album from a favourite band was about to be released.

Updates from Silksong’s creators Team Cherry had gone completely dead over the last few years with some starting to worry that after 7+ years of development it might never be released. To then out of the blue be told, “Oh yeah, it’s out in 2 weeks” was like Christmas had come early.

How did an indie game launched on a modest Kickstarter of AU$57,000, created by three people (and one brilliant soundtrack composer) go on to sell 15 million+ copies and who’s sequel is now the most wish-listed Steam game in history do it? Is Hollow Knight in fact one of the best indie creative achievements ever? And can Silksong avoid a sophomore slump/the gaming equivalent of Difficult Second Album Syndrome?

At a time where the fallout from Monetized Hobby Influencer Oh-Please-God-No-More-Face-To-Camera-Videos is crashing headlong into Generative AI’s ‘Everything must go!’ Speculative Asset Fire Sale, can a passion project really still exist which manages to balance both commerce and independent creativity? Can you still be creating just for the love of it, trusting that if you make something meaningful to you that people will not only stumble upon it, but also be willing to pay for it? Can we still have nice things?

Taking a little side quest for this edition of The Ansible I wanted to do a bit of a deep dive into some classic video game soundtracks of years gone by and also what the development of Hollow Knight: Silksong says to us about creativity in 2025 in an era where so much creative output is entrenched with both AlgoRot and completely unreasonable expectations from ‘Fandom’ or ‘The Community’.

A Link to the Past

I was seven years old when the SNES was released in 1992 and spent my childhood sharing that console with my older brother, as well as visiting friends who had the rival Sega Mega Drive - a true ‘pick your side’ format war and one which feels very at odds with the fluidity and availability of games across different consoles and systems these days.

Blowing static off of cartridges before slotting them in with a satisfying thunk, alternate goes of ‘one level, one life’ when playing platformers and a very limited time window to play due to it all taking place on the family TV, added to the ever-alluring power of this world of colourful sprites and glitchy melodies.

‘Videogame’ soundtracks were I think my first actual impressions of music outside of TV and film, and certainly my first experience of music that was focussed entirely on instrumental melody and rhythm. In some ways it was the first form of music I felt excited to hear, or I felt changed the atmosphere of the environment around me in some way.

Hardware limitations meant that the technical spec of creating music for 8-bit consoles was tiny, but this restriction lead to incredibly inventive song-writing. Most themes or motifs were under a minute long, would repeat on a constant loop and in some cases there would only be one throughout the entire game.

Truly brilliant games combined these musical loops with compelling gameplay to make an feverishly addictive combination - perhaps the perfect example being Tetris on the Game Boy and it’s masterful use of of the melody from traditional Russian folksong Korobeiniki. The maddening brilliance of the music and the ongoing, unending challenge of the gameplay are fully intertwined; the moving and rotating of the puzzle pieces as they constantly descend seemed to syncopate with the melody. There is no way it would be such a success if it had a different soundtrack in my opinion.

Alongside this were the stirring ‘Overworld’ theme of the original The Legend of Zelda (a theme so exhilarating that nearly 40 years on it still conjures a tenor of adventure and triumph, the thrill of setting out to lands unknown) and Super Mario Bros’ playful and mischievous score, all soundtracks which were an interwoven fabric of what made the games so enjoyable to play, overcoming hardware and graphical limitations to produce worlds rich in atmosphere.

There were of course other era-defining creations during this period, especially as the upgrade to 16-bit consoles ushered in better sound chips for the Mega Drive and SNES. Composers such as Koji Kondo, Yuzo Koshiro, Yoko Shimomura and Masato Nakamura were responsible for some of the catchiest and most memorable soundtracks ever, establishing video game themes as as recognisable and fundamental an element to the emotional experience of playing a game as traditional scores were to TV and film.

A short but by no means complete list includes:

• Super Mario World

• The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past

• Sonic The Hedgehog 1, 2 , 3

• Super Castlevania

• Street Fighter 2

• Streets of Rage 2

Only being able to hear these soundtracks when playing their respective games was also a form of scarcity that undoubtedly added to the mythos around them, layering into adolescent memories and fond recollections as the idea (or means) of listening to video game soundtracks as form of musical recreation had not yet come to pass.

A Place of Greater Safety

Fast forward a few more years and the original PlayStation was entering it’s late 90’s endgame with some truly legendary releases from ‘97 onwards. The likes of Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy 7 took gaming forward a massive step, imbuing their creative worlds and sophisticated gameplay with cinematic flourishes, full musical scores and narratively-rich, character-driven storytelling that made the player feel like they were the protagonist.

The repetitive melodies and loops of earlier games gave way to more subtle and sophisticated audio landscapes - sometimes provoking unease, nostalgia or nervousness as much as they did excitement or elation.

How could a game make you feel scared? By mastering tension and release, by making you fear ‘quiet’ periods as much as you felt overwhelmed by combat and action - and there was no game better at it than the original Resident Evil 2 on the PlayStation.

RE2 had a perfect sense of rhythmic pacing as it balanced it’s horror, action and puzzle-solving sections with an ongoing sense of unease once you’d cleared a particular location of zombies and monsters and were left to explore them in a state of disquieting ambience. The spacious and austere soundtrack meant that every jolt, crash or other form of unexpected sound would make the skin prickle and you as a player even more skittish.

This mild panic would only alleviate when you would find one of the intermittent ‘safe rooms’ (i.e. the only areas of the game which enemies cannot enter) where you could save your progress using the RCPD’s typewriters and change any items you might be carrying, to be met by the gorgeous Lynch-ian keys of Masami Ueda’s Secure Place.

(yes I did spend ages to find the video that had the PAL edition artwork)

This experience was beautifully echoed decades later once I started playing the original Hollow Knight, in which upon entering a new area the player is effectively blind in terms of their whereabouts and location until they purchase a map of the area from Cornifer the Cartogropher (Hallownest’s friendly map-maker) - locating him often being easier said than done. Entering a room after countless others filled with daunting enemies and environments alike, to hear Cornifer’s cheery little hum just off screen provides a moment of genuine relief as you searched for him, knowing that doing so would make the journey ahead a little easier and you would be granted a brief repose.

Kingdom’s Edge

If you’ve read previous editions of The Ansible you know I have a bit of a thing about atmosphere and melody when it comes to music, and Hollow Knight has it in spades.

As a game, it’s a masterpiece - The game design, world-building, animation and soundtrack are so finely tuned and complimentary to one another, it is a true example of how a game can teach you how to play it rather than tell you how to play it. There is very little exposition or ‘GO HERE’ instructions, the gameplay is a razor sharp loop of trial-and-error as you descend further and further into the long-abandoned halls, pathways and catacombs of a once mighty bug civilization, encountering friend and foe alike.

An achievement of real skill and talent from three incredible game developers, and one that feels almost reverential if you grew up in the 8-bit/16-bit era - especially in it’s upholding of incredibly challenging and precise platforming and combat sections, alongside a difficulty curve that could be described as semi-antagonistic.

The Mantis Lords

The subterranean kingdom of Hallownest is brought to life in stunning 2D animation, all sombre blues, greys and purples and the sense of pensive atmosphere and melancholy feels truly unmatched. It brings to mind a heady mix of Studio Ghibli, 70’s Disney and classic Don Bluth animations whilst retaining it’s own unique sense of character.

Alongside the beautiful visuals and super tight gameplay is the work of Christopher Larkin, soundtrack composer for both Hollow Knight and Silksong. As with those classic games I discussed earlier, Hollow Knight’s soundtrack is an integral element, accompanying everything from the most dramatic moments and battles to peaceful interludes. As striking as it is visually, it is a 2D platformer featuring warrior bugs, and Larkin’s work adds the necessary pathos and weight. The sense of decay and grandeur is really carried by the different themes for each area, be they terrifyingly labyrinthine spider nests or neo-Victorian abandoned cities and tramways.

Comprising mainly of piano and strings, with occasional flourishes of other instrumentation, Hollow Knight’s team briefed Larkin to create something of “dark elegance” with a focus on minimalism and his efforts speak for themselves. Larkin is a master of leitmotif, using reoccurring musical themes for different characters and events to anchor the soundtrack as one of the key drivers of the narrative and player experience.

Upon entering the very first section of the game, Dirtmouth (‘The Fading Town’), an immediate sense of poignancy is felt as the delicate piano keys lead a plaintive melody, soon joined by a wistful viola. My first time playing made me sit up and feel an internal “Oh, this game is something different”, and it really sets the tone of what is to come as you begin your initial descent to Hallownest.

Several beautiful themes for the initial areas of the game then follow, all establishing their own sense of place and character (I’m a big fan of Greenpath and it’s gentle harp and plucked stings evoking a sense of calm wonder at such a green and lush environment that slowly rachets up the tension in it’s second half) but for me the BIG musical moment of Hollow Knight comes after about 10-12 hours of harrowing gameplay in which you as a new player have really been through a gauntlet of scything talons and chitinous horrors, as the game mercilessly teaches you to play by enforcing some very precise and hard (yet fair) gaming mechanics that you have to relentlessly repeat to get better and better.

That moment is when you finally emerge into a towering, rain-drenched gothic city as the theme of City of Tears begins.

The use of a semi-operatic/choir vocal (something that will be utilised a lot more in Silksong) makes the theme standout from the previous wholly instrumental ones and it’s such a lovely piano line as the vocals and strings develop - there is a sense of real peace and calm, but also aching sadness amidst the walls of this once-majestic city. It really feels as a player that you’ve been through a real challenge to get here, a tangible quietude that follows as you take stock of your surroundings and begin to realise just how vast, nuanced and layered this beautiful game is.

With something that has so much atmosphere and love put into it it’s creation, how do you even begin to go about trying to create something like this again?

Weaver of Pharloom

The answer is, you take your damn time.

Just over 7 years since the release of the original Hollow Knight, Silksong somehow has cast off all fears and emerged as a sequel that improves upon everything about the original with a steely conviction and confidence that is incredibly rare in a time of weighted expectations and instantaneous critical feedback from social media.

It is one of most finely-crafted creative endeavours I’ve experienced in the last two decades (I’m including albums, novels, artwork, films and TV series in this), a fervent palingenesis that retains elements I so loved from the original game but somehow inverts and weaves itself into something so much broader and richer. It is also bloody hard.

I just want to take a moment to appreciate just how insanely beautiful this game looks, and how it’s expanded colour palette makes these environments fully come to life, even in static screenshots. To experience them in motion is akin to playing a part in a beloved animated film from your childhood.

LOOK at how stunning this is

ARGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Whereas Hollow Knight was based upon descent into the greater depths of Hallownest, Silksong is based upon ascension as you play as Hornet (a boss and side character from the first game) traversing your way through the games’ multiple Acts - from the relatively peaceful green calm of Moss Grotto, up and up and up through the corners of Pharloom, amidst areas strewn with bells, weary pilgrims making their own journey upwards, fellow warriors and friendly (and not-so-friendly) merchants and countless enemies, leading to the vaulted doors and baroque opulence of The Citadel itself and beyond.

Merging the cinematic, religious and ceremonial, Larkin’s score reflects this sense of adventure, melancholy and grandeur so richly, with many more orchestral strings, brass, organs and choirs incorporated alongside an even sharper sense of emotional focus and resonance, and increased clarity and spaciousness in it’s production.

There is some truly awe-inspiring music throughout this game, nicely reflected in some wonderful puzzles and side quests (particularly the search for the Vaultkeeper, Conductor and Architect’s Melodies), all of which sit perfectly in the game’s narrative as you traverse ever higher in a gigantic, sprawling Theocractic City-State rich in terrible majesty and corruption. Even one of the leitmotif’s incorporated throughout the score by Larkin is the 13th century Latin plainsong melody Dies Irae (listen out next time you ring one of the giant bells throughout Pharloom or The Citadel) for God’s sake!

Choosing just two tracks to highlight here has proven incredibly difficult but I’ve selected the two which hit me most on initial listen and who on multiple, repeated listens just seem to get better and better.

The first is Greymoor, a particularly downbeat and obsidian-grey area of Act 1, rain-swept and inhabited by hundreds of cawing birds, it’s theme serves almost as a counterpoint to City of Tears from Hollow Knight but much darker, the depth and space it inhabits with some tenderly sad strings gets me every time.

The second is Choral Chambers and I am entirely serious when I say this has been one of the most emotionally-affecting pieces of music I’ve heard this year, and one in which upon first hearing was basically struck dumb by and had to steer Hornet to a quiet ledge so I could just listen to it on repeat a fair few times over.

Opening with one of those piano melodies that you know within 3 seconds is going to be incredible, soon joined by choral vocals and at 0:40 a trumpet (or perhaps clarinet?) adding a moment of enchanting poignancy as strings interweave and ascend, it returns to the piano and choral melody and then at 01:51 a swell of deeper choruses and cello which is just astonishing. I get shivers every time I listen to it, especially on headphones.

It was whilst making my way up through a particularly intense section of Choral Chambers that I had a real revelation of “I know now what this game is doing”. Using all of Hornet’s skills and agility to traverse, leap and dive whilst fighting off multiple enemies (and using them also as contact points for various acrobatics to go higher and higher) I understood that combat in this game wasn’t just a collection of attacks and movement sets - it was a dance.

Eternity In An Hour

Over the last two months Silksong’s gameplay, score, atmosphere and my own skills and reflexes have all merged into one of the most (ongoing) fulfilling gaming experiences I’ve ever had.

In it’s stark difficulty curve is an eternal truth - to truly develop craft and skill in something, you need to put the time in, there are no quick work arounds or shortcuts.

Each frustrating death, each infuriating missed jump, each moment of confusion or getting lost within a bellicose kingdom that is ever expanding and ascending is in fact you whittling at, training and honing your ability to play this game, and in turn, getting better and better each time.

This makes Silksong the closest experience I’ve had in recent years in what it’s like to learn a musical instrument. The precise timing, the sense of sometimes (often!) being overwhelmed and frustrated, of your fingers and responses not being able to keep up with what you want to do, it’s all there. And, like a musical instrument, it’s only when you finally beat a particularly difficult boss or traverse a precise platforming section that you have the space to look at back and see how far you’ve come and see how incremental your progress has been. You have to practice. You have to give it space and time.

The scale of the challenge is what makes the reward and sense of accomplishment so worthwhile.

Extending this idea even further, what this tells us about the creative process is that to create something truly meaningful you have no choice but to just put in all those frustrating hours.

At this point I’d like to direct you to this great interview Team Cherry gave just as the release date of Silksong was announced as it highlights what a unique achievement I think this game is so please click the link below to read -

Why Silksong took seven years to make (Bloomberg)

“We’ve been having fun,” Gibson said. “This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.”

In essence, Team Cherry were incredibly fortunate to have made one of the most successful indie games of all the time - they simply didn’t need to do any of the things people thought they should do because they were under no financial pressure or deadlines. There was no need to offer constant updates, or a marketing team to constantly appease, or senior managers with KPI’s. It was three people (alongside Larkin and some extra devs input here and there) enjoying themselves making a video game and trusting their own, intuitive creative process to hone and craft it until it was exactly as they wanted it. I appreciate this is a luxury that is incredibly rare these days, be it in video game development, the world of music or any other creative industry - however, it also reinforces something really important.

If you spend time making something that is exceptional, or more simply, the most embodied and fullest version of the thing you wish to create, it will find it’s audience and people to love it. People will discover it. People will appreciate the level of craft behind it. They’ll appreciate that the time was taken to make something truly special. They may also take some time to discover it, even years perhaps.

It is also stands as an important bulwark against entitlement, with gaming fans (it sometimes seems a coin toss between them and music fans as to how much artists and creators owe them in terms of ongoing updates on the creative process) being a particularly vocal online contingent, with seemingly unending demands from ‘The Community’.

We need to re-remind ourselves that things take time - we have access to an unending supply of content but how much really sticks with you? How much alters how you look at the world?

We are in a period of unparalleled ‘prior expectation’ with fewer and fewer avenues of spontaneity and surprise. Creatives are under pressure to do constant self-promotion across social media but how much of this is just an ephemeral distraction, how much of this takes away from the creative work itself? Or, more pointedly, would you rather have a drip-feed of things to ‘look forward to’ or the unexpected surprise of discovering and engaging with the art for yourself?

I truly believe that taking our time back from these processes; ring-fencing, protecting and not uploading all those frustrated hours as we work stuff out is the first step of having art and creativity work on our terms and began to re-inhabit an actual sense of presence and congruence in the world.

For myself, I’ve been trying to block out Friday afternoons as a space of creativity, without any fixed outcomes or results but I do have to do something that keeps my creative process ticking over - be it writing words or music, going to a gallery or exhibition space, spending time with an album whilst walking in nature, basically anything that keeps the creative topsoil nutrient-rich and regularly turned over. Like all new disciplines it’s taking some time and work to get in place but I’m trying to view it as essential as going for daily walks, staying hydrated and eating lots of dark green veg.

This edition of The Ansible has taken me ages simply because I had to wait for the time for the different threads to all weave together - in doing so I’ve been able to also see what distractions or obstacles get in my way. It’s a really fun, and sometimes very frustrating process but I enjoy it very much so just wanted to finish this piece thanking any of you who have subscribed or shared my work - it really means a lot!

Thanks for reading x

M

If you’re keen for some really in-depth musical analysis of Silksong’s score from people with much better understanding of music theory than me, I really recommend both of these wonderful videos:

It actually feels like we’re getting a proper Summer this year in the UK. After several years of large swathes of humid, overcast days filling the months of June to September, to have had what feels like near constant sunshine since the middle of March feels like it’s both rewired my brain chemistry and reconfigured my sense of time. Summer could sometimes feel like it was swept away in a compacted, harried rush, whereas this year the Solstice was only a few weeks ago and it feels like there is a large expanse of time ahead and several months before the nights start drawing in.

This is delightful news, especially for me, as despite being the prime target audience for a Neurosis Enemy Of The Sun t-shirt, I’ve been loving spending as much time outside as possible, and with various walks and train journeys it feels like there’s an extra charge within the air when listening to music.

Talking with friends it seems there is a consensus that this one feels different to previous years, that the prolonged sunshine (and Vitamin D) reignites life around it, that it’s a time for new habits and means of living, both in small routines and deeper questions of what it is to really be present.

Summer of course also can have it’s darker side - the disorientating, headache-riddled effects of too much sun, the buckling of failing infrastructure in prolonged heat, overly intoxicated and dehydrated crowds, getting caught out exposed to the elements with neither shade nor relief, there can be moments where it is starkly apparent how fragile this sense of bliss can be.

Don’t-Don’t-Don’t-Don’t - Look At What’s In Front of You

This darker side of Summer was beautifully encapsulated in 28 Years Later - a reeling, spirituous trip of a film, something far closer to the 80’s subversive anarchic strain of old issues of 2000AD and White Dwarf than it is to traditional Horror or Zombie movies. I loved it and came out of the cinema with my mind blazing. I feel like it’s a film about myth, and what happens when the myths that a person (or group of people), tells about themselves, begin to ebb and recede. When they extend beyond what we create and think of them, and how they wax and wane in strange ways when a society no longer moves forward.

Myth of protective father, myth of an island community, myth of Nature, myth of Nation.

It is also beautifully shot, a lot of the tension coming from scenes with the Infected unfolding in broad daylight (with the exception of the stunning ‘Causeway’-scene) - the whole thing comes across as a parched, heat-stroke-induced fever-dream, a grim inversion of the cosy parochialism of Detectorists that also isn’t neatly compartmentalised into Folk-Horror either. It sits in it’s own phantasmagorical enclosure; both Wyndham-ian and Punk Rock. A strange commons of history, imagination, landscape and biting humour as the only means of dealing with present circumstances. It’s also possibly the only film I’ve seen in a cinema that had me thinking simultaneously of William Blake (the gigantic Alpha zombies having a touch of his Four Zoas, themselves the result of the fall of primeval man, Albion, in Blake’s illustrated mythology) and old Anarcho and Peace Punk bands.

The Fields Are Covered In Blood

With the light of the longest day now behind us, I wanted to hone in on some artists and records that feel like they have some alignment with the atmosphere of 28 Years…

First up is a record that I feel perfectly encapsulates that heliosistic, disorientating feeling of having ‘caught too much sun’, Black Fellflower Stream by Sunrise Patriot Motion. An eerie and unique amalgamation of stompy post-punk, industrial, dungeon synth and traces of black metal, it is in their own words “…a portrait of obsession and torment set entirely in a single isolated field where a man in the throes of mania believes he is capable of digging a hole deep enough to reach oil.”

Driving and paranoid in equal measure, direct comparisons to other artists is somewhat difficult but there are some definite nods to The Cure, Killing Joke, even perhaps Amebix if they traded the high-contrast black and white for an oversaturated technicolour haze. For more contemporary references I actually feel like there’s flickers of Self Defense Family across the album, an alternate timeline in which Patrick Kindlon had been tasked by Alan Moore to write a comic melding There Will Be Blood and A Field In England and being driven slowly mad from the endeavour.

It comes as no surprise that Sunrise Patriot Motion has the Skarstad brothers of excellent black metal band Yellow Eyes writing and composing the music, you can hear the essence of their particular form spidery, discordant and mystifying guitar melodies all across the album.

As a couple of companion pieces I really recommend Yellow Eye’s Rare Field Ceiling (there are a lot of fields in this piece eh?) as you can hear some definite similarities in their sound, although this is unquestionably a black metal record albeit one that feels arid, disquieting and insolate, as opposed to grim and cold.

The other is from Will Skarstad’s solo project Ustalost which develops those anxious, skittering guitar parts alongside some more prominent synths and driving bass to carve out something that is just different enough to Yellow Eye’s discography to stand by itself. Consider it the Midsommar to Ulver’s Autumnal Bergtatt and you may get an idea of the bucolic delights it has in store.

If you want to jump into more of Yellow Eye’s work I recommend this excellent piece that bandcamp put out last year and I’m really keen to hear the new record which hopefully will be out sometime this year.

Tomorrow’s Harvest

As a bit of balance to all the riffs and distortion I’ve selected some electronica and ambient albums that are unquestionably melodic but still have a slight edge of haunting melancholy to them.

First up is the latest from Rival Consoles and a great return to form after a few albums that didn’t quite hit the highs (and excellent pacing) of 2018’s Persona. This matches that record’s ability to hold both glitchy and skittery tracks that really build, and beautiful ambient interludes. There’s a bit more of a focus on rhythm and staccato melody this time, and some excellent creative flourishes (I love the feint that opening track In Reverse does at 1:50) that keep the whole record really engaging.

If you fancy a techno-adjacent album to have alongside Landscape From Memory that matches it’s excellent pacing, then I really recommend the album that Barker released this Spring, Stochastic Drift.

For more droned-out, hazy atmospheres then Prime Vertical channel a sense of the Ballard-ian horizons that Boards of Canada really developed on their last album, the second half of the record in particular dwelling in it’s post-apocalyptic splendour beautifully.

Finally as I round things up I have to mention the incredible oddity that is Trhä - an insanely prolific (there’s almost too much material to delve into, hence why I’ve picked this single track out) black metal ambient project that seems to communicate in it’s own language and feels like a perfect amalgamation of the artists and atmospheres I’ve described above. This is music that feels like it really slips between different points of consciousness and madness - drum machines, synths and guitars all weaving in to and out of one another, it can be beautiful but is also extremely abrasive.

That’s it for this month, wishing you a great rest of your Summer.

Thanks for reading

x

M

“Outside the walls of civilization lies a wilderness beyond belief and without end!!!!!”

Caustic guitar tremolo squalls as cymbals shimmer above tolling bass notes. Bryan Funck, vocalist of Thou, screeches to a packed Skate Hall of exhausted but happy Roadburners - a catch-all term for the ragtag black-clad hordes that descend on the small town of Tilburg in the Netherlands each April to revel and celebrate in heavy, experimental music and it’s surrounding creative culture/s.

Thou’s secret show on the last night of the festival sums up the weekend perfectly - everywhere are joyous grins and fists in the air, the tiny skate park packed out and enthralled by a band who are worlds away from the ostentatious humourlessness of Metal ‘live rituals’, keeping one foot in DIY’s playful “We make our own fun and we’ll play anywhere” origins, whilst simultaneously having destroyed the main stage the night before with a masterful headline performance.

In this moment, this very moment, is everything that makes Roadburn such a special and amazing place. In it’s own words, “Roadburn is a leading light in the world of heavy music. Unrestricted by genre, Roadburn has an underground ethos that is coupled with big-league production values that allow us to champion scene-defining bands and pioneers alongside up and coming artists.”

In Love With An Apparition

Festivals can be a strange beast, an odd mix of the inebriated and blissful ‘escape from your nine-to-five/trappings of the modern world’, an Adult playground to be lost and dissociated within, yet also slightly haunted by those external pressures and responsibilities of Real Life creeping at the edges, fuelling even more of a reckless ‘tomorrow never comes’ attitude which can make things turn really gnarly, really quickly.

In ever-challenging economic circumstances (and weather patterns), festivals are finding it harder to survive amidst a cost of living crisis and a broader music industry that seems determined above all else to make sure that music and artists’ work is devalued to the point of being little more than algorithmic cigarettes, a view that can be echoed in just how disposable a lot of broader festival culture can feel.

Roadburn definitely has a sense of escapism to it but it’s not pure distracted hedonism, it really does feel like a coming together of like-minded people to share in something special, more like the annual meeting of a community project than somewhere to get off your face for four days.

A gathering or assembly, rather than a space of abandonment.

Festivals are also dependent on two major factors - Crowd and Sound, with larger ones having difficulties with both. There’s nothing quite like having a set of one of your favourite artists ruined by washy sound dominated by piercingly loud kick drum as those around you offer an ongoing running commentary on the performance/their particular thoughts in an ongoing real-time monologue.

Fortunately at Roadburn both Crowd and Sound are exemplary. I’ve genuinely never been at a festival where the sound has been so crystal clear, perfectly-suited to the nuances of a particular artist or band’s work, and with fellow attendees who are just as appreciative. You could hear a pin-drop in the almost-reverential silence in the crowd for Pygmy Lush and Cinder Well’s sets, yet it is also not ridden with an overtly self-conscious ‘Fun Police’ atmosphere for the heavier stuff where there is a lot of energy and joy in abundance.

If you’ve ever wanted to attend Roadburn but feel like it’s slightly pricey, know that the cost not only includes the line-up but that you’re also getting the audio quality and fellow compatriots of sound to make the most of such performances. They’ve also just started experimenting with an instalments payment system, which you can read more about here.

All The Arms We Need

Something I really want to highlight here is the way in which Roadburn brings people together in such a nurturing and collective way. The sense of mutual care and respect for one another there really is something very tangible, and it feels genuinely mutual - reflected back and forth between attendees, performers and festival staff.

Becky, Walter and the other organisers and everyone who works on the festival really have created something very special in this, it is not something there is an exact formula to or that you could just replicate easily - it’s an understanding of people on the individual and collective level, and what might motivate them to come to somewhere like Roadburn in the first place. The commitment to diversity and a creative, experimental line-up isn’t just performative window-dressing (grumblers on internet forums be damned) or overtly ‘arty’ flamboyance (louder for the grumblers in the back), but actually the very core of what makes it such a special festival.

It’s particularly noticeable because one of the things that sucks about shows as you get older is it’s very hard to actually spend relaxed time at them. Perhaps due to having spent so many years with shows and gigs being my main form of socialising, there is now a slight flickering tension between wanting to pay attention to a performance and also just be in a space with other like-minded people. The weekend provided the chance to be a part of big crowds and for it to feel like a reclamation of presence, to really be somewhere and not be so distracted.

My own anxiety or restlessness in larger crowds is certainly something I’m more aware of as I get older, I sometimes wonder that my appreciation for smaller and smaller scenes and venues is slightly linked to this sense of needing more space, that my sense of feeling uncomfortable in larger events is to do with the lack of control within them. To try and recalibrate this, to let more spontaneous moments back into my life and not hold it in such a tight grip was something that has really stayed with me, many weeks after returning home from the Netherlands.

The paradox of being part of a community centred around noisy, passionate, abrasive music, played and celebrated by a bunch of people who are lovely, introverted nerds, whilst being at a stage in life where more and more you'd like somewhere quiet to sit down and chat, is not lost on me.

In terms of venues it’s great to have two main areas of the festival, the 013 Concert Hall (and smaller Next Stage) serves as it’s Main Stage, and then across the road is the incredible Locomotief Boulevard which has The Terminal, The Engine Room, Hall of Fame and Skate Hall. This whole area is aligned next to the railway and so has a variety of bars, eateries (and the best public Library ever) built into what was the old engine sheds and repair warehouses of the steam railways.

The Locomotief Boulevard is also an amazing place to sit, grab a drink, people watch and have plenty of space to chat and catch up with people between bands and it’s promenade-like atmosphere definitely contributed (along with the amazing weather) to the special feeling of the weekend. Another example of the amount of care put into the festival is the booking and timing of different performances, it always felt like there was enough time to get across to different venues, and on the rare occasions when there was a clash it felt incredibly easy to watch the first half of a set at one venue and then nip across the road to another.

Part of having such a strong sense of connection at Roadburn was seeing lots of different friends from years of touring across the Mainland and there really was a sense of camaraderie with the DIY Elders there - across the weekend we talked about how it felt nice to be somewhere where that sense of community is still present and leads to feeling a bit less shy or out of place at shows, a shared mutual reflection on what it’s like to still be part of or adjacent to subcultures where the primary audience is half your age. I don’t think it’s necessarily a strict binary or anything but there is something there about how comfortable one can feel as you get older, or begin to wonder “Is this still for me?/do I actually still enjoy this?”. Have we all gotten old? Have we seen too many bands?

My views on weaponised nostalgia are pretty well-known so I won’t repeat them; I feel most alive when I align with the subconscious manifestation of the type of curiosity that first lead me to those music communities and scenes in the first place, and how I can continue to create conditions in my life so that I remain curious has been a very powerful realisation over the last few years. I’m very protective of that groundswell of creative joy and memory, both communal and personal, because it is my fuel for life. I think that when too much prevalence is placed on trying to recreate The Good Old Days it can somehow undermine the importance of what has happened, tarnishing it almost. It can also just feel really sad!

When instead you attend the kind of event that makes you realise that all that time, all those years you were sewing the seeds and making connections that are only just now really blooming into life, it is an incredibly powerful and grounding feeling. Punk/DIY often could become too inward and self-focused, and to feel like it’s ethos and attitude has been given a little room to breathe and go down new avenues is just so, so inspiring.

It says a lot I’ve written so much about the festival and haven’t even touched on the musical performances yet, which kind of gives an idea of how much impact attending this year had on me, echoed really nicely in this video below from Walter:

Musical Performances

Highlights in no particular order:

• Envy’s performance of A Dead Sinking Story in full - perfect sound, three guitarists, Chain Wondering Deeply transforming into an astonishing crescendo, this really was completely transfixing and flawless. At points I was taken back with whiplash intensity to the Summer of 2005, being obsessed with this record and All The Footprints You’ve Ever Left…

• Pygmy Lush and Cinder Well both delivering astonishing sets with audiences that were so respectful and attentive - quietude that made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

• Thou performing Umbilical on the Saturday night and dropping in some serious deep-cuts at the Skate Hall show. Never thought I’d hear the Pygmy Lush covers live and Their Hooves Carve Craters In The Earth (also unleashed at their Glossop show), reminding me how much I love that era from them.

• The surreal experience of watching a mesmerising One Leg One Eye performance and then nipping across a corridor to see OXN on the mainstage - two Lankum side-projects back-to-back and both were amazing.

• Watching Oust cause complete mayhem in the Skate Hall as vocalist Sanne’s 30 metre-long mic cable meant NO ONE was safe to wall hang at the back, this was a mandatory participatory punk rock event.

• Steve Von Till & Thomas Hooper: Resonant Horizons - I’ve not even really touched on the exhibition space or discussions that happen at the festival but hearing Steve Von Till speaker about his ongoing creative process, his poetry and his work as a teacher and volunteering in youth support was incredibly inspiring. Unquestionably a Lifer when it comes to how many years he’s put into this, it was just amazing hearing his wisdom and deliberations. This little video that Evil Greed put out at the festival really draws it all together I think:

Healing Through Sound

As I wrap this up I think the best thing I can say of Roadburn is that it allowed me to sit fully and congruently in a place of mindful appreciation for all the things music has, and continues, to bring into my life.

Avoiding the melancholic undercurrent of nostalgia, the unsettling shift when things don’t connect or hit in the way they once did, or the wistful sense of ‘maybe this isn’t for me anymore’, as a festival and place of meeting others it provided something else - a way of seeing where all that experience and love of creativity and music can still go, not as a circular inward-looking drain but something more expansive and open.

More directly it answered the question ‘Was all that time and energy wasted?’ with a simple ‘No’.

This year’s edition was easily the best music festival I have ever been to, as a festival and institution it breaks open the possibility of Independent Creative Culture and takes it into new uncharted territories whilst never forgetting it’s roots.

As Thou close out their set as a gigantic rain storm thunders outside, I look around at the weary, grinning crowd and think to myself “It was all worth it”.

Recommended Listening

Thou - A Young Person’s Guide To Thou

Released as a tour-only LP for their recent UK dates (with some copies of the US pressing available from Thou themselves), this is a comp of re-recorded versions of some of Thou’s earlier material that still appears in their live sets and is a perfect selection of the more vitriolic and aggressive side of their extensive back catalogue. It’s really nice to have this to throw on the turntable when I want a concise and punchy listen as I get through my emails, and pairs very nicely with last year’s Umbilical.

Forged Relics - Portal

I was very kindly asked to write the Bandcamp blurb for this new project from my friend’s Jaka and Jaka, formerly of Slovenian Sludge Punks Leechfeast and it’s an amazing piece of work, “Hinting at the baleful works of Profetus, Abandon and Mournful Congregation and also the stark, ceremonial beauty of Kali Malone and Sarah Davachi.” You can read the rest of my description by clicking through to their Bandcamp above and grab an LP whilst you’re at it.

Maria Somerville - Luster

A beautiful and mesmerising mix of droney shoegaze and singer-songwriter ambient, distilling a variety of ‘sounds of the moment’ into something that feels like it’s been a classic of the last couple of decades yet also so vividly present and contemporary. Place alongside the most recent Slowdive album for those long summer night drives.

Rainy Miller - Joseph, What Have You Done?

An intoxicating and mystifying local release here, combining elements of hip hop, rap, ambient, experimental pop, drone and noise into something that’s beautifully refined but also surprising. More abrasive and noisy than adjacent ‘sad boi’ genres, there’s a playful skittering fluidity between genres happening but always in service to the track, and a lovely, deep listen on the headphones.

With the punx in Baltimore, 2009

Hi, and welcome to this month’s The Ansible.

I turned 40 last month. As personal milestones go it’s been one that’s been on my mind a while, ever-present and lurking just beyond the corner of my vision for a few years but now that it is here, or more accurately, has felt like it’s been here for a while I’m pleasantly surprised by how calm and good it feels.

Spending a near month celebrating and surrounding with dear family and friends has left me feeling extremely grateful! One thing I’ve made sure to commit to is to never take this, or any bit of life, for granted. It has however meant it’s taken a bit of time to get back into the swing of writing this so my apologies.

Amidst the discord and noise of 2025 so far, alongside a Nostalgia Industrial Complex that is already 5-10 years past it’s sell-by-date, the timing couldn’t be better for a reactionary emotional crisis - one that screams “nothing is a good as you remember, everything you loved is a hollow simulacra of the things that you loved and had meaning and worth in your 20’s, and that is only because you were discovering them for the first time. Everything turns to dust.”.

And yet that crisis hasn’t hit. And I don’t think it will. On the contrary, I feel more than ever that I can truly appreciate the two decades’ worth of experiences, adventures and memories of my life being fully intertwined with music, and it feels great. The Elder Millennial Mountain of resentment and bitterness remains unscaled. My switch to the Grifting Productivity Optimizer podcast-sphere will just have to wait I guess.

“Things aren’t how they used to be” - of course they aren’t. That isn’t to say there aren’t things to lament or be deeply worried about, nor that there aren’t things from the past that would be useful to take another look at and perhaps try again. The strict binary view of either progression or regression isn’t helpful here, nor is it a useful lens for the rapid complexity and confusion of the world today.

Mainly I’m just trying to pay attention to what feels most congruent to me in terms of how I spend my time, and if there’s one thread I can identify across the last 20 years it has been about investing time in things that foster creativity and community. In essence, to put time and energy into the things that I want to exist in the world.

Punk Rock In The Wrong Hands

I’ve been spending of time trying to plan out what I wanted to do as a general ‘theme’ across this year of The Ansible, and it’s culminated around one band in particular who best represent where over two decades in aggressive and DIY/Independent music can take you - Baton Rogue’s irrepressible Thou.

Partly responsible for forcing my hand to commit to going to this year’s Roadburn in about two weeks time (itself quite an interesting experience around anxiety and getting older, which I will detail in a future newsletter), just spending some time sitting and thinking about for how long I’ve listened to Thou has provided some really useful timelines of life, what was I doing in 2007? 2015? 2024? and so on…I practically lived in the first Thou black ‘bat' t-shirt I got a few months before the US Fall of Efrafa tour and as a band logo it’s one of my all-time faves.

There is plenty to say about these metal-punk miscreants, and all in due course, but as I was starting to plan out various ideas for pieces for the Ansible I started to feel like I wanted to try some longer-form writing as well, and some of it not to be published on the internet but instead as a zine.

I realised that Thou provide the best lens to write in a bit more length about different moments of life, from my HeartattaCk/CrimethInc vegan punk 20’s to drone-loving start-of-my-40’s, there has been a lot in between and at least one moment wherein a new Thou record brought me out of a period of severe depression. It also is prompted by Thou’s own thoughts on their latest record, last year’s Umbilical, as detailed in this great interview from The Quietus - “Essentially, it’s a diss record,” says vocalist Bryan Funck. “But I’m dissing Thou.”

With a back-catalogue as intimidating as theirs I also didn’t want to do a simple album-by-album retrospective, but more of a personal winding path and really go deep on not only their music and lyrics, but also their artwork and full ‘vibe’ as a band and what it is to for them to straddle the orthodoxies of both DIY Punk/Hardcore and Metal, all with a trickster’s wry grin.

So, all being well, there will be excerpts of that writing posted in The Ansible throughout the next months, but the majority of it will be for a zine that I will put together over this year, with more updates here as and when that comes to fruition.

I’m also getting to see them this weekend in a vegan pub in Glossop in a room this big, the lyrics "“After destroying the decades of our youth, after being crushed under the pillars of heaven--the bonds we make and the bonds we break ever come crashing down.” potentially taking on a whole new meaning here:

CONCRETE AND STEEL

Finishing off with some album recommendations, the three below represent the emergence from the last slog of Winter into the sudden burst of sunshine and Spring that always feels so welcome but is also slightly disorientating!

Wren - Black Rain Falls

An absolutely brilliant record of austere and icy Post-Metal, over a very concise 35 minutes Wren craft some really unnerving and bleak tracks on a record that felt perfect for the seemingly unending gloom of February. This genre works best either when reaching for the pastoral OR the urban and on this they really captured the atmosphere of the latter.

There is a lot here that reminds me of Sweden’s Switchblade, especially their 2006 and 2009 records, alongside elements of His Hero Is Gone, Godflesh and Through Silver In Blood-era Neurosis. I had the pleasure of seeing Wren live just over a month ago and they were fantastic, thoroughly recommended.

Forest Swords - Bolted (Deconstructed)

Ambient reinterpretations of tracks from Forest Sword’s magnificent 2023 record? Basically a total no-brainer for me, really great to listen to on headphones and explore the more atmospheric textures of that record - I always love the remix tracks FS puts together so I hope there’s a vinyl compilation of all this material to come in the future.

Habak - Mil orquídeas en medio del desierto

Tijuana’s Habak released this last Friday and with Mil orquídeas en medio del desierto, I think they have produced their best album yet. An incredibly passionate fusion of All The Footprints You’ve Ever Left…-era Envy with Crust Punk and barked Spanish vocals (still arguably the best vocals for this type of music), it has all the desperation and sadness you’d expect of such a combination whilst also finding moments of hope, with some lovely extra creative elements to make it not just a paint-by-numbers exercise. If ever a contemporary band was to be the inheritor of Stonehenge Record’s ‘Anarcho-Emo-Punk’ tagline it has to be these guys.

Highlights for me are Desarraigo with a riff straight from Ekkaia’s best work and Dejemos hablar al viento which wastes no time after it’s shimmering post-rock intro to drop into an Epic Crust Banger complete with beautiful crescendo to end the album in suitably triumphant fashion.

As their album before this one said so beautifully - “No Wall Ever Managed to Stop Spring”.

Thanks for reading x M

Hi, and welcome to the first The Ansible of 2025 - I hope wherever you’re reading this you’re doing well and fighting off the last pangs of Winter!

I’ve been using these darker, colder months as a period to reflect on what I’d like from the year ahead and it’s been an enjoyable and quiet time. One of the key things I’ve been thinking about is creativity in terms of my writing, The Ansible, my use of social media and assorted life perspectives and thoughts around all of that. In essence I’m planning to try and really make The Ansible my main vessel for communicating and connecting with people online and try and really wind down both my use of and presence on social media.

The reasons for doing so are numerous, undoubtedly one being the state of most social media platforms these days. Seeing the unedifying assembly of Tech Billionaires standing to rapt attention at the Trump Inauguration like suit wearing protein supplements gave a pretty clear line of the direction of travel, even before Zuckerberg announced the new policies for content moderation (or lack of) on Meta’s platforms. Again, Twitter/X felt like a foreshadowing of this last year but I’d argue it’s now gone up a notch with Tech Broma Invicta banking on the fact that despite all the slop, bullshit, Nazism, pornography (real and synthetically generated by AI) and other nonsense, that these platforms are still too useful for people and companies to really consider properly quitting them. “Let them hate, as long as they post” Caligula might have quipped, slipping in his AirPods before delivering a conference call on getting back to the office 5 days a week.

I’d argue however that actually these platforms are really not as useful as they once were, their ability to allow us to ‘connect’ with one another has never been more crippled and that they’re flooded currently with some of the most asinine content the Griftercariat can muster. They make me feel like I’m getting dumber and angrier, and the days in which I loved Instagram for it’s lovely and austere approach to just hosting photos and as a means of being in touch with friends near and far, but not as our main means of communicating, are a distant memory.

In many ways one of the biggest personal hurdles I want to overcome is removing the need of ‘News Feed Life’ from how I spend my days, no longer immediately scrolling through a feed of events that are happening in order to figure out “what’s going on out there?”. What do I do with that information? Does it actually impact my daily life in any useful way? Can I remember any of it from two weeks ago?

So although I don’t plan on making any lofty declarations of ‘quitting’ social media my plan is to try and step back from it as I do a sort of mini Butlerian Jihad on myself i.e. trying to have less interconnected devices and try and see things like my computer and phone as tools for particular jobs as a means of reclaiming a sense of space in my life, mentally and physically, to not be ‘connected’ all the time. Undoubtedly the dopamine notification addiction is going to take a bit of a hammering as I do this so please wish me the best of luck.

Lost Wisdom

As an almost a perfect example of how scattered my thinking is on this, when first joining Substack last year I subscribed to a ton of different accounts and basically replaced one feed with the next. Since last month I’ve been unsubscribing and refining these massively but I just want to bring your attention to one which has been really fantastic - Obsolete Sony.

Obsolete Sony’s Newsletter

The Rise and Fall of the Sony MiniDisc: Why It Failed

When Sony launched the MiniDisc in 1992, it felt like a glimpse of the future. Smaller than a CD, tougher than a cassette, and capable of recording your favorite songs in digital format, it seemed designed to solve every music lover’s problem at the time. Sony didn’t hold back in promoting it, either—there were flashy ads, in-store demos, and a lineup o…

Read more

2 years ago · 115 likes · 14 comments · ObsoleteSony

This newsletter is a delight, offering great little reads on the development of different Sony products, particularly the ones which were just a bit too ahead of the game/the world wasn’t ready for and some really beautiful technology. Reading it reminded me of a period where technology and hardware had such an exciting presence, the ways in which you could listen to music on the move, having to be selective with what you could listen to due to storage limitations, which records or albums were good for a journey, and so on.

Format Wars are a fun thing to reflect on, why do some succeed and some fail? The piece above on MiniDiscs really made me think about the pre-MP3/streaming era as there was such a lovely tactile physicality to having music stored on a format that was so small but that could hold so much. One thing I loved was being able to have three albums on one disc, an almost comically small amount these days but it created such a wonderful sense of focus. I distinctly remember one disc which had Relationship of Command, The Shape Of Punk To Come and Sing The Sorrow all on it as a triptych of Post-Hardcore brilliance that was a cornerstone of my mid-to-late teens .

With this in mind I may try and copy this format with future music recommendations, three being a magic number in terms of selecting albums and artists that compliment one another, and is also a little bit more digestible. Even with me refining the amount of music newsletters I subscribe to there is still simply too much music to keep up with and so I hope this less-is-more approach works out and you get to discover some cool things that you might not yet know of.

Here Is No Exit

The start of 2025 brought a lot of snow and ice to Manchester and most of the UK, reminding me of when I filled in on bass on the Sand Creek Massacre/Boredom Tour in January 2011 and it was freezing. Anyone who’s slept in the band room of Kopi in Berlin will know it’s pretty rustic at best but I don’t think I’ll ever forget going to sleep fully clothed, in thermals, hat and scarf in a sleeping bag as I watched my breath mist indoors.

Truly that was an era of ‘separate devices’, I didn’t get a smartphone until the end of 2012 and I’m pretty sure we still used Sat Navs then! There was a true sense of being away when on tour that I don’t think it’s possible to recreate now. Anyway, please enjoy some pics of the tour below:

DIY EuroPunk Touring Life in one picture

Burning Cold

Rounding off this edition of The Ansible I wanted to hone in on three albums that sit in their own wintery hollow, ready for the last month or so of cold as the days grow longer and the sun returns. They all sit in a space nicely adjacent to ‘Punks playing metal’, but one with it’s own slightly more atmospheric, primitive and sludgy niche, something that I wonder with the Kylesa reunion shows happening this year may spark a bit of a resurgence of this particular style, let’s see!

Zerum - Nana Korobi Ya Oki

Having stumbled across this album at the tail end of last year and having once caught an earlier version of Zerum in Nijmegen I was pretty sure what to expect in terms of sludgy hardcore, or in their own words “dark and angry tunes from Berlin”. Knowing they had previous members of Insuiciety (who we were honoured to have play the last Fall of Efrafa show) in their ranks was already enough to make me curious but upon hitting play and hearing the unmistakeable vocals of Insuiciety vocalist Ajka I was immediately drawn in.

Undoubtedly a reflection of my listening habits more than anything else, over the last few years I’ve felt there has been a bit of a lack of unique style or presence in terms of punk/hardcore/metal vocals, but Ajka’s are a wonderful reminder of hearing that distinct difference and help the songs of Zerum breathe in their own way. Sludgy, dark and melodic, with a really interesting mix of melancholy and more bluesy riffage, satisfying repetitive rhythms (so awesome to hear a really powerful and leading bass presence as well!), this album immediately takes me back to countless basements, squats and social centres of touring days and left me with a huge grin on my face.

Morne - Asylum

Continuing that theme I’ve been revisiting this 2011 album from Morne which I must admit at the time completely passed me by even though they were awesome live. Expansive, heavy and mesmerising songs, I think me having gotten into classic Peaceville bands like My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost in the intervening years has made Morne make much more sense to me and in particular the synth work has really unlocked something so this is a great record to see out the grey of February with.

Malachi - Wither To Cover The Tread

Finally we have this beautiful album from Malachi, an underrated gem in my record collection and one that really carves out it’s own unique sense of atmosphere. Despondent and down-tuned riffs, stark flickers of cello and a palpable sense of restraint means that it’s more explosive moments and vocals hit with real force. The instrumental track that opens the second side, Desert Rift is a gorgeous moment amidst all the gloom, the soundtrack to an apocalyptic Dystopian Western evoking wide and unforgiving skies.

That’s it for this month, thanks so much for reading!

I’ll leave you with this moment where DeepSeek inadvertently generated a Thou shirt back print - a little clue as to what some future The Ansible’s will be about.

x M

This is just to say a short thank you for subscribing to The Ansible, it means a lot!

Rather than a more orthodox ‘top 10 of the year’ I thought I’d use this space to highlight a couple of my records of the year via pieces I’ve written and include some links to those records I’ve not yet had the chance to do a deep dive on.

Without much further ado, here are my records of the year:

Dödsrit - Nocturnal Will

Undoubtedly the record I listened to most this year was Nocturnal Will, a regal and majestic record of crust-flecked icy black metal. The soundtrack to many a trudge across 2024, I wrote about it (and the band’s previous records) at length back in May, Hiking Metal Punks - Forever!

Pijn - Low Beams of Hope

Manchester’s best band released a powerhouse of an instrumental post-rock album, undoubtedly worth the wait and a wonderful example of ploughing your own furrow and doing things your own way.

My longest piece of writing for The Ansible (so far!) - Come On, Die Young

Drew McDowall - A Thread, Silvered and Trembling

Rafael Anton Irisarri - FA​Ç​ADISMS

My two favourite ambient/drone records of 2024, read about them both here - Ambient Nihilism

Thou - Umbilical

I was hoping to do a write up of Umbilical at some point this year as Thou are a band of incredible importance to me, but as ever, life got in the way. Instead they will be the subject of what I hope will be a few essays and entries next year, especially as I’m returning to Roadburn in April.

All you need to know for this is Thou unleashed one of their leanest records in years, a scathing evisceration of where they currently stand from the perspective of their younger selves and with riffs and breakdowns that engage the dormant troglodyte in us all. Almost like they got sick of people not moving and moshing at their shows and this is the result. It takes real talent to make music this ignorant!

Paysage d'Hiver - Die Berge

Lock in for the colder months with this lengthy and immersive winter wonderland.

Spectral Voice - Sparagmos

Atmospheric and crushing in equal measure, this is Death Doom that lingers.

Sarah Davachi - The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir

Venerational and subtle work from the wonderful Sarah Davachi, which alongside All Life Long by Kali Malone provided for all of my organ/choral/modern Chamber music needs for the year.

BIG|BRAVE - A Chaos Of Flowers

Montreal’s best DronePunx continue to delight, with this being their most restrained and beautiful album so far.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - "NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD"

GY!BE surprised the world with this back in October, showing they’ve very much still got it when it comes to Apocalyptic Splendour but with less of the sprawl and deluge of earlier works.

That’s it! Thank you so much and see you in 2025

x M

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.

It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad - worse than bad - they're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

The infamous ‘I’m Mad As Hell’ speech from 1976’s Network, delivered masterfully by Peter Finch, has been echoing across various corners of the internet for the last decade as the intensity of world events and the stratification of social media started to really ramp up. It’s terrifyingly prescient, and an absolutely brilliant piece of dialogue which is just asking to be (and has been) sampled by a swathe of bands - my personal fave being Mouth Of The Architect’s ‘Hate and Heartache’, as featured below:

November had certainly been A month with what felt like about a week of collective reeling from the US election results and then a deluge of hot takes, analysis and editorials unleashed into the information eco-sphere. I’m not actually going to write much about the result itself but my position is one of complete lack of surprise and also a BIG amount of worry as to what next year/s are going to look like.

What I am going to write about briefly is the unhinged state of social media at the moment and it’s consciousness-splintering affect of making world events somehow both appalling and banal, a sort of distracted, distanced reflex that contributes to a mood of what I dub Ambient Nihilism.

I think you know the feeling, a sense of resignation hangs over most discussions these days. The realisation that things are not going to get better, that everyone is a hypocrite and cynical (which in turn only spurns on more “A-ha! Got ya!” moments on different platforms as a means of combatively adding to the discourse), that ‘brain rot’ is the Oxford word of the year, and we are subject to ever ongoing enshittification of services, both online and in IRL social infrastructure. Things in the real world seem no better as more venues, festivals, art spaces, cafes and clubs close and it seems quite a bitter irony that just as we’re coming to the conclusion that vast amounts of the internet is becoming obsolete and unusable, there’s not much remaining in the real world in terms of accessible, creative culture to rally around.

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X I think has accelerated what was already pretty unstable but just about useful in terms of keeping tabs with what was going on in the world into a hyper accelerated form of proto-Fascist information gruel and things have gotten VERY weird on there since the election.

Users are moving to Bluesky and Threads, although the latter also seems pretty demented in terms of aspects of ‘extremely online behaviour’ and engagement farming, and at some point just becomes another platform that doesn’t work very well and is full of stuff you don’t really want to see or engage with.

All is not lost though. I’m also going to talk about two ambient releases that have book-ended the year that I think offer a necessary salve and remedy to Ambient Nihilism. See it as a companion piece to my one from January, Muted Compulsion.

A Thread, Silvered and Trembling

The latest album from Drew McDowall (former member of the legendary Coil) and released in March of this year is a starkly beautiful and unsettling record, an eerie and skittering form of solemn ambient music.

Comprised of four tracks and unfurling over a lean 35 minutes, there is an array of shimmering electro-acoustic techniques used to create a work that is dense and layered, but never cluttered. To my ear I hear strings, harp and horn amidst the murmuring electronics, the orchestral textures transmogrifying and weaving between shadowy synths and drones, calling back and forth.

The feel of the album is one of uncanny reverence, from the splintered, staccato melodies of opener Out of Strength comes Sweetness to the incredibly unsettling air raid siren-esque drone that beckons across album centrepiece And Lions will Sing with Joy. Moments of serene immanence are soon transformed by darker, ominous tidings.

The LP cover perfectly reflects the music within - an ascetic and consecrated record that brings the beauty and pain of the world into arresting focus, quietly contemplative and elegant with the sharp bite of winter just beneath.

FA​Ç​ADISMS

“Amid the chaos of 2020, while exploring the stark world of brutalist architecture and inspired by the false fronts of Potemkin villages, a vision started to take shape: FAÇADISMS. Composed over three years, it’s a late capitalist lament of simmering electric despondency.”

Released 3 days after the US election, the sense of foreshadowing within Rafael Anton Irisarri’s latest is almost too portentous but if you read more of the liner notes in the Bandcamp link above it’s clear that a huge amount of time, work and thought has gone into FAÇADISMS, and is also easily his best album to date. I really recommend this long interview he did with CLOT magazine in October of this year, which really gets into his practice, creative process and artistic philosophy in a lot of depth:

“This album carries a duality: while it’s about the unravelling of the “American Dream”—or, as I find it more fitting to call it, the “American Myth”—it also delves into the façades we’ve all built in the age we live in. Think about the personas we project online; the hyper-curated, manicured lives many present to the world through social media are not that different from the Potemkin villages designed to impress Catherine the Great. So, what happens when these façades start to crumble? These are the things I’m really interested in exploring, whether it’s the eroding trust in the institutions that uphold our “democracies in the West” or the façades of freedom we’ve been told we enjoy. Are we truly a free people? Who does this “freedom” serve? Is it just a red herring served up by the ruling elites? Why are we all essentially enslaved to algorithms pushing us “content” 24/7? I’ve been seeing these things for years and questioning not just why they’re happening but who they’re benefiting. It feels like it’s all a façade masking a much more disturbing reality.”

Comprised of eight tracks and clocking in at just under 50 minutes FAÇADISMS feels like the purest distillation of Irisarri’s sound, distinct as both album and a continuous piece of music. Layers of guitar and synth unfurl in a gauze of mist across the album’s opening, punctuated by more brooding and weighty textures in Control Your Soul’s Desire For Freedom which really push into the low-end beautifully.

The record’s centrepiece is two absolutely stunning back-to-back tracks - The Only Things that Belong to Us are Memories and Forever Ago is Now which up the emotional intensity and sub-bass appropriately, basking in plaintive crescendos that sit somewhere between film soundtrack and post-metal festival (whilst listening I was sometimes taken back to the Oceanic: Remixes & Reinterpretations that ISIS released in the early 2000’s).

There’s a thread of the more experimental and restrained work by Sunn O))) or Nadja running through them as well, whilst album closer Red Moon Tide (featuring the amazing KMRU) gracefully finishes the record in unmooring and contemplative fashion.

Many ambient/drone records can settle into a slightly lackadaisical flow, flittering inwards and outwards, but FAÇADISMS sits within that intermittent space of almost unconscious, undistracted attention that has no sense of formal or traditional song structure, whilst also not descending into a listless haze. It’s a record with a real sense of narrative.

Although perhaps not a surprising comparison, both albums really remind me of Love Streams-era Tim Hecker, existing in a space that gestures to an emotional landscape that feels ineffable and unseen, something being just beyond your field of vision but with a presence of place that is distinctive.

Comparisons to Love Streams don’t come lightly either as it’s a record that elevates ambient/drone music to an atavistic and melodic state of real, ritualistic power - also with it’s altered and reconstituted choral samples, a “…transcendental voice in the age of auto-tune”, it uses a variety of methods to embed the liturgical into spaces of communal experimental music.

A Thread, Silver and Trembling and FAÇADISMS now sit alongside it as singularly beautiful examples of the sacred and the profane. Perhaps the best counterpoint to Ambient Nihilism we can muster is finding new and ongoing ways to embed the communal and contemplative into everyday life.

Thanks as ever for subscribing and reading, and wishing you a peaceful end to 2024 and start of 2025!

“And that music is so powerful that it's quite beyond my control and, uh, when I'm in the grips of it I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally.

Do you understand what I'm talking about?

Have you ever, have you ever felt like that?”

Across this spring and summer a number of seminal and highly influential post-rock releases hit their 25 years+ mark, which are as follows:

• Sigur Ros - Aegis Byrjun - 25

• Mogwai - Young Team - 27

• Mogwai - Come On Die Young - 25

• GY!BE - Slow Riot for Zero Kanda - 25

• GY!BE - F♯ A♯ ∞ - 27

Those 3 artists above provide possibly the blueprint for all post-rock and post-metal (or any bands utilizing a slow, quiet build up to loud crescendo) that was to follow over the preceding years and are usually still the most common reference points for all things instrumental, guitar-based and pretty/sad/”epic”. It’s interesting to revisit them as undoubtedly great records, to hear the origins of a sound before it got slightly flattened by ‘shimmering tremolo harmony’ overkill.

What struck me about these anniversaries was recalling where post-rock sat in my musical history in terms of it being a pre-internet discovery. Hearing Like Herod blasting through my older brother’s bedroom walls was certainly an experience, a huge contrast to the pop-punk/grunge/nu-metal I was listening to when growing up.

In the pre-internet, pre-vinyl revival era, the CD was king. It allowed 74 minutes of uninterrupted audio and thus could capture the sprawl and expanse of those albums in all their glory. To my teenage self the very notion that an album could have songs over five minutes long, let alone 20-30, was mind-bending and actively made me listen to music in a new way.

Likewise, the often very minimalist layout and packaging of the albums with zero band information, confusing and obtuse track-lists and song titles, beautiful artwork and touches like embossing and letter-pressed covers, meant there was a real sense of mystery and gravitas to the genre. The discovery of actually finding albums to buy in a music shop, again, pre-internet with no ability to just buy online. Similar to punk, post-rock provided another world for my teenage brain to be beckoned towards.

Dead Flag Blues

All of those elements combined into music that felt incredibly and earnestly profound, aligning with the angst of teenage years and a sense of almost euphoric abandonment - this was different, this music meant something, it wasn’t like pop, this was ART. An audio landscape that you could pour yourself into, something that felt beyond and outside of yourself in a way that you couldn’t really put into words.

In the post-post-post-post ironic 2024 it seems almost painfully naive as to how serious post-rock fans were. It is definitely arguable that for such an expansive sound, post-rock’s fanbase was pretty inward-looking and it was only really Mogwai who had a sense of humour. That all being said, it was also a hell of a time to have music affect you in such a way and I loved the horizon-expanding, po-faced sense of drama to it all.

Post-rock’s ability to make the ordinary and hum-drum seem beautiful, the world now awash with cinematic pathos and significance was perfectly-timed with the ending of adolescence, entering a world that was bigger, stranger and more complex than you could imagine. Self-awareness was not something you were necessarily going to be cultivating in your late-teens (even if if it felt like you were), but the oncoming tragedies and triumphs of adulthood now had their soundtrack.

When the actual disasters came however it suddenly didn’t seem quite so beautiful.

That soundtrack would turn out to score two decades of war and social crises, including but not limited to 9/11 and the War on Terror, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, Austerity, Brexit, the COVID19 pandemic, ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, not to mention other conflicts across the world.

The genre’s post-apocalyptic splendour fades quite quickly against such a backdrop, “The skyline was beautiful on fire, all twisted metal stretching upwards…” has a different resonance when you’re not living under daily airstrikes or occupation.

The Sky Suspended

On the subject of album anniversaries, it’s been 15 years this summer since Fall of Efrafa recorded and released our final album Inle.

We decided to go out on a bang with our longest record and one in which we leant fully in to our slower influences. Written over two years with a lot of material jammed out in our practice space in Brighton, it was us at our most expansive and regal.

Holed up for a week in the Devon countryside we finally had a chance to take our time with the recording process as previous records had been made under much tighter deadlines (which give them their own ferocity and tension that I’m a fan of!). Inle was recorded live, with us all playing in the same room with I think an extra overdub of each guitar. This gave us more time for vocals which was a first for us as poor Alex used to have to cram them into the end of our sessions (and always delivered), but it was nice for the last album to have a sense of us catching our breath and letting it have it’s own pace. I’m really happy to have a document of us playing so well and an accurate capture as to what we sounded like live in that last year as a band.

We released the record that summer, did a last European tour, a final couple of shows in the winter and then Efrafa was put to rest.

I think it’s understandable that I then moved away from all things ‘post-’ for a while, I think partly to take stock of the band ending but also I think because of how much I inhabited the material as we were writing it. Perhaps it’s the nature of being a bass player, or just how my brain works, but I felt fully entwined with those bass lines and songs. Embodiment, flow, congruence, absorption - whatever you wanted to call it, I didn’t know where I ended and they began . When you’re someone who uses music as a bit of a refuge, and when you’ve put so much of yourself into something having some breathing space is essential.

The previous five years had been made up of a co-dependent relationship with bands like Cult of Luna, ISIS, Envy, Pelican and then later Neurosis. Endless stretches of motorway on tour, or late night hangouts were spent in their company. Labels such as Hydra Head, Level Plane and Robotic Empire were releasing records by bands that Heartattack zine rather snootily referred to as “…having too many guitar pedals” but to my ears it was great to have that sense that ‘post-’ music could exist in small venues and DIY spaces, that actually being able to play slow, atmospheric songs amidst a throng of people was one of the best experiences you could have and that genre-orthodoxy was far less important than attitude and passion.

However, nothing lasts forever, from the start of 2010 I was finding it harder and harder to generate or feel that same level of excitement and passion for a musical style that I’d been obsessed with. Had I simply heard too many bands? Those that I loved had either gone on hiatus, or were releasing albums that just weren’t doing it for me as much. Had the genre and style become rote and tired rather than instinctive to my ears?

My tastes broadened towards Cascadian Black Metal (no surprises there!), Doom, Classical and Ambient/Drone, an amplifying of my internal audio landscape and perhaps just a reflection that my time with post-rock and post-metal was drawing to a close.

Or so I thought.

The Doorway

Manchester’s Pijn released their second album From Low Beams Of Hope on June 28th of this year. Six years on from their previous record Loss, they’ve delivered an album that is a real testament to taking your time with things. Bucking all trends by existing on a timeline that feels completely separate from most things happening in the UK scene, they’re able to play with a variety of more abrasive acts but only sounding like themselves. Which, for an instrumental heavy post-rock band is quite an achievement.

Melding a variety of different instruments, as well as extra percussion, electronic samples and textures, Pijn have made an album that is both intimate and expansive, honed with adroit instinct and confidence. Weaving songs with a dynamic sense of rhythm, and utilising repetition in a way that the genre is famous for, there is however always a sense of direction and momentum to From Low Beams Of Hope.

‘Post-’ music can often write itself into a bit of corner, wherein if it’s too repetitive it becomes a kind of dulcet sludge and if it shifts too much it loses sight of the thread of the song and the instinctive ‘yearn’ that makes this genre so satisfying, and Pijn avoid both of these with real conviction.

Agrestic and pastoral guitars and strings merge with driving bass and drums, the heavier moments unleashed discerningly such as Carved Expanse’s transformation from lilting cadence to John Williams thunder. Side B of the album feels more post-metal with my two favourite tracks on it, On The Far Side Of Morning hitting a particular emotional highpoint for me of exultant guitars and keening strings, a fine example of the ‘melancholic triumph’ I’ve discussed in this newsletter before.

A Thousand Tired Lives closes the four tracks in suitably despondent manner, cycling through winding tense moments before lurching into an absolutely crushing final section as guitar and woodwind ignite into crimson balefire, the autumnal hues of Times Of Grace and A Sun That Never Sets just over the horizon. It ends a record that feels perfectly paced.

So Did We

I met Joe Clayton, the creative force behind Pijn and also recording engineer at No Studio when recording my vocals for Morrow’s The Quiet Earth. We immediately hit it off with a shared musical background and touring experiences (and appreciation for some of South Manchester’s best pubs), and found we had much to talk about.

One subject we‘d always return to was the impact of labels like Hydra Head and Constellation Records had on us, championing artistic independence and freedom, but also having a cohesive ‘sound’ or vibe to them. As well as an admirable commitment to making releases with beautiful and creative artwork, to make records that felt complete, and weren’t solely focused on the transactional bottom line of how many units and products had been shifted.

It’s no surprise then that in the build up to the release of From Low Beams Of Hope that Joe set up his own label, Floodlit. Serving not only as a home for all things Pijn, it is also “…dedicated to supporting artists that inspire.”, and I think over time will develop a really interesting roster. Alongside this is the almost unspoken agreement/credo of doing things DIY/fully Independent which is no one will take as much care or time about this as you will so it might as well be you.

It’s really lovely to see how the care taken with Pijn’s music is reflected in how much care has been taken with the design and production of layout and artwork across different formats, all masterfully handled by Fraser Briggs at Misc Print Co. It is also incredibly cool that they “hid” an ambient album in the artwork for the first month of release.

All of this combines into a record that feels for me like a beautiful melding of past and present, carrying the inspiration and passion of youth into a more sage and perceptive maturity. That perhaps it’s not that music is not hitting me in the same way that it used to when I was younger, just that I am taking a bit more time and appreciation with it, that the space and distance between increases connection.

You can purchase copies of From Low Beams Of Hope from Pijn’s bandcamp

https://www.nostudio.co.uk/

https://www.floodlitrecordings.com/

CODA

Also, just when we needed them most, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have a new album out on October 4th.

Welcome to the latest The Ansible and apologies for the slight delay!

A busy June of various travels and festivals meant that finding the time to sit and write for this edition proved difficult and I often found ideas and snippets slipping away from me but we’ve got there in the end. It feels appropriate for the start of Summer to be slightly disjointed this way and after such an agonizingly long Winter I’m just happy to be feeling suddenly busy and like life is flourishing, even if that in turn has meant The Ansible has taken a slight backburner. Rest assured though, more editions are brewing but over the Summer months they may seem more intermittent. 

With that all said, the subject for this edition also feels Summer appropriate, the time of festivals, travels, music and celebration. The question of “What happens when the punks start playing folk?” has been much on my mind of the last few years as a collection of artists have started to emerge who have taken folk down an interesting path. 

It should be noted that this is a distinctly different entity to Folk Punk, although it shares similar roots. Although I am thankful for experiencing it in my youth (and still have a soft spot for early Defiance Ohio and the first Against Me! album), I’d say as a genre it has not aged well and is perhaps best left as a font of fond memories, and most importantly, the cornerstones of initial contacts in DIY and Punk touring circuits that crossed a lot of continents. Certainly in the UK the ‘House Show’ scene of the mid 00’s has resulted in lifelong friendships and was a lot of people’s first experience of realizing they could play, record and tour music by themselves and without full bands. 

Anyway, I digress, and return to the original question of “What happens when the punks start playing folk”, so not transposing punk songs onto acoustic instruments, but instead approaching folk with a keen and whittling eye, understanding the histories and origins of songs and people and bringing a sense of punk’s stripped-down focus (and wild-eyed experimentalism) to a genre that can occasionally become orthodox, overproduced and overperformed. What then?

Well hopefully the following artists may help answer that question.

One Leg One Eye

Started as a lockdown project by Lankum’s Ian Lynch, (you can read more of it’s origins here), One Leg One Eye goes further into the drenched undergrowth and mulch of the subconscious,  a space in which far deeper and darker feelings emerge.

The windswept eeriness of this album is so evocative, conveying the atmosphere of being by the coast, fell or plain as clouds gather and skies darken. It’s saturated with the prickling ‘un-feeling’ just before a storm breaks, when you’re in the thrall of the elements, beholden to things much more powerful than you.

Opening with Glistening, She Emerges which sits between cinematic score and the droning echo of an atavistic black metal song recorded deep, deep in the earth …And Take The Black Worm With Me unfurls over the course of five long tracks of utterly harrowing and beautiful experimental drone-folk, a record that sits uniquely in the space that it inhabits. Tracks are composed of a number of elements, instruments and field recordings with that wonderful uncanny feeling of uncertainty as to the origins of certain sounds, be they acoustic instruments, electronic texture or samples.

Amidst them all is the keen knell of Lynch’s astonishing voice, singing with solitary, spacious clarity. The album’s 2 longest pieces, Bold and Undaunted Youth and I’d Rather Be Tending To My Sheep, provide the sense of startling, dumbfounding awe that I’d previously thought only the most ‘epic’ of music could provide and so to bring it back down to the power of the human voice is really affecting.

Lynch is also the creator and host of the fantastic Fire Draw Near, ‘a monthly podcast and radio show which investigates Irish traditional music and song in all of its myriad forms.’, which does something with the podcast format that really elevates it from what can be quite a banal medium into a proper audio study and document of its subject matter with a lot of history and good humour as well. It’s a brilliant audio cartography of the intertwined migration of people and song, well worth a listen.

Whilst you’re at it please, please, please also read this astonishing essay by Eoin Murray: 

Anois, Os Ard

Exploring the drone in Irish music

Ar aghaidh is ar aghaidh is ar aghaidh…

Read more

3 years ago · 16 likes · 3 comments · Eoin Murray

Cinder Well

Cinder Well was the first project I was thinking of when searching for inspiration for this piece but I've been finding the ‘thread’ elusive and slightly tricky to grasp. Many mornings I have tried to sit down to write and the moment has escaped me. I think partly because Cinder Well’s music has a quality that can feel elusive and hard to pin down, almost as if the more you ‘try’ to write about it proves harder to do so, and so instead I’ve tried to be patient and wait for the moment to come to me.

I wonder partially if this is also because Amelia is a good pal and there’s that slight self-awareness around describing a friend’s music but then on the other side of the coin, future editions of The Ansible will have me covering friends’ music and there will be a far bit of subjective bias so I should just get over myself and get on with it!

So, we return to the difficulty of trying to write about Cinder Well. Perhaps we should start with a bio of sorts, Cinder Well is the musical project of Amelia Baker, an amazing musician and songwriter who has done her time in the trenches of the DIY Punk International Touring circuit and was a member of the legendary Anarcho Folk Punk Collective Blackbird Raum (and also the Gembrokers) and so is very much in the spirit of what I’m trying to cover here.

Moving back and forth between California and County Clare where she studied traditional Irish music, she has developed her own particular form of austere and captivating songcraft. Drawing a thread through Americana, folk & traditional song she has weaved together a music that resonates for anyone who’s taken a different path and the road less travelled.

Over three excellent records Amelia has tempered Cinder Well’s sound, with the most recent, 2023’s Cadence, being my favourite. Centring her incredible voice in the middle of expansive arrangements that include strings, drums and bass but all played with a restraint that borders on the ascetic, Cadence is an album of pensive beauty. Don’t be fooled by how gorgeous this music is, however, as there is a rueful and wistful air to this record, the sense of when a quiet morning walk suddenly chills amidst big, wide skies. 

I’ve listened to Cinder Well countless times and it feels like there’s a kind of magic in her music, that by shining a light on some things that feel very old, like the ability of a human voice to quieten a room, that there’s a way to carry these songs and moments through a maddening and hyper-accelerated world.

Seeing her and our friend (and regular touring bandmate) Marit perform together in the tiny front room of the Fox and Goose in Hebden Bridge a few years ago was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to and I had the following refrain from Old Enough echoing in my head for months afterwards:

“I am golden in the evening

We are bolder in the morning

And the long grass, it is grown, over the steps

of the door”

(the Fox and Goose on a recent lovely summer evening)

Jacken Elswyth

Finally, just a little mention of At Fargrounds by Jacken Elswyth, a London-based banjo player and member of Shovel Dance Collective.

Although I’ve not had much chance to listen to this beautiful record as much as I’ve liked, a few listens have fully confirmed it belongs alongside One Leg One Eye and Cinder Well in this column and I’m looking forward to spending the rest of the Summer letting it work it’s magic.

At Fargrounds is an array of instrumental banjo compositions, often accompanied by reedy strings and low thrums and drones of organ and pump box, and a combination of traditional songs and more improvised pieces. It’s a record of quiet beauty and grace.

Please also check out the lovely tape label series that Jacken curates, Betwixt and Between tapes, ‘…an occasional series of split cassette tape EPs exploring sympathetic resonances and complimentary contrasts across traditional, improvised, and drone / ambient musics.’ All home dubbed and with gorgeous DIY screen-printed woodcut artwork so unquestionably fitting with the audio and aesthetic tastes of this newsletter.

“Marching on

Rain or shine

Mammoths of the forest

Worlds collide

Hiking metal punks

Forever!”

Hiking Metal Punks from Darkthrone’s 2006 album Dark Thrones and Black Flags, serves as a bit of a clarion call, as both song and statement. For myself it’s a tongue-in-cheek personal ethos and catchall aesthetic for the ‘outdoorsy’ punk lifestyle. Between the realms of early 2000’s DIY Crust Punk, Cascadian Black Metal and its older Scandinavian forebears, Doom, Drone and Folk - a particular thread exists that is starting to become clearer and more resonant for me.

It weaves and embroiders particular moments of my life and hones in on an austere and contemplative atmosphere, something that regardless of musical genre or written form, feels like an undercurrent or inner landscape that I find myself returning to again and again. 

Over the course of my writing for The Ansible I want to try and hone in on this aspect, and highlight artists past and present whose art and music feels richly embedded in particular time and place/s. It feels like collectively and socially a moment is happening, with the burgeoning ‘Great Outdoors/Local Folklore/Olde Britain’ zine scene of the likes of Weird Walk and Hwaet! prompting more interest and curiosity in the layered sediments of landscape, history and storytelling on this strange, rain-drenched island.

There has never been a better time to lace up your boots, don your patched-up Carhartt jacket and step out into the wider world.

A New Dawn Fades

Over the last few years I’ve noticed a change in my listening habits, tending to listen to less and less heavy music when at home, and focusing instead on when I’m traveling, either by foot or public transport, to really spend some time listening to heavier material. I’m still an avid record collector, and am trying to focus more on the times when I want to listen to punk and metal at home that I’m giving it my full attention. One of the downsides of music streaming and the general unending wave of new releases (for all genres, but Punk, Hardcore and Metal have been unrelenting of late) has been a sense of not really giving a release its due attention and focus.

I also want to give music the space to brew and incubate, to have time to digest and to let myself be drawn to it. 

For all these reasons, and also just because it’s so enjoyable, I have really taken to walking and listening to a full album, start to finish. Close to where I live is the Chorlton Ees Nature Reserve, a 58 hectare site designated as Site of Biological Importance, a mixture of winding woods and meadows with the River Mersey flowing through.

Observing the seasons change whilst walking and spending time really subsuming into albums is one of my favourite things to do here. It allows music to embed within me on a deeper level (see my piece on Bell Witch for one such example), as well as spend more time in the external and internal landscape. 

There is something about the combination of both observing and being within the woodland, the driving melancholy of the music and the pace of my footsteps, the sensation of experiencing and perceiving on a deeper level that makes me feel like I’m connecting to a more genuine aspect of myself. 

Black Horizons

There is one band I’ve listened to on more walks around the Ees more times than I can remember, Dödsrit.

Answering the question “Can a band really combine black metal’s sense of desolate grandeur with hardcore punk’s direct energy?” (many have tried and failed.) with an empathetic YES, they have always compelled me to experience their music outside, chill air matching frosty guitar leads across songs with a sure, strong sense of spurring momentum.

Forming from the ashes of Totem Skin (who were starting to show a bit of a knack for heroic melodies on their last record), Dödsrit initially started as the solo project of Christoffer Öster, and developed an extremely-refined and icy form of melancholic crust punk with a ton of black metal influences, bringing to mind the the bleak sadness of early Martyrdöd and Acursed, (and even further back to Wolfpack) but with a stately flair for harmonized guitar sections that feel right out of The Somberlain-era Dissection and 90’s Swedish Melodic Death metal greats. 

Second album Spirit Crusher expanded song-lengths and musical horizons, with longer, moodier instrumental sections, as well as really locking in their ability to switch their dynamics from mid-paced crushing heaviness to d-beats, blast beats and back again.

By their third release, Mortal Coil Dödsrit had developed into a full live-band (based in Amsterdam and comprising members of Destructo, Nuclear Devastation, Ainsoph and Wolves of Hades label founder Georgios co-writing material), distilling their sound into a leaner beast and really progressing in terms of songcraft. The crust punk elements are still there, but used sparingly and brilliantly, aiding the sense of spiriting haste and driving weight that resonates across the whole album. Emerging even more strongly across the album is a self-assured sense of classic Metal song-writing and harmonised twin-guitar melody.

Opening track The Third Door is possibly the song I’ve listened to most over the last 3 years, it somehow managing to combine every particular element that I adore of black metal and crust punk but without a second of overindulgence or chaff. Dödsrit have always been excellent at album openers but they really took it up another level here, with the d-beat section in particular reminding me why I fell in love with that particular sound and style so many years ago. Desperate and all-consuming.

Mortal Coil was released May of 2021 and is very much seared into my memory as a Lockdown record and one that feels embedded in my experience of that time. In essence, I was doing a ton of walks around the Ees alone (for various periods during the UK lockdowns you were allowed outside for exercise only once a day), listening to Spirit Crusher on repeat, and then Mortal Coil once it was released. To say that I know both albums inside out now is a bit of an understatement and I think I did a huge amount of processing and reflection during that horrendous, lonely time.

I think there’s something in them that really made me finally see how wild the years of touring I’d done in bands had been, the places I’d been to and people I’d met. The astonishing strangeness and vastness of the DIY community, so many memories and moments reignited by those records. At the back of my mind was also the questions of whether the world would ever ‘go back’ to ‘normal’, would international travel ever be possible on the insane scale it was operating at pre-Pandemic, would people make it through this with hearts, minds and communities intact?

The emotive power within those albums I think will stay with me forever - so much sadness and anger, but also a sense of resilience and keener focus on the things that really matter in life.

OF WOLF AND MAN

In late March of this year they released their latest record Nocturnal Will and their metamorphosis into a defiant and life-affirming metal band is now complete.

Supplanting the crust punk of earlier albums (but still channelling it’s energy and raw fury) with a determined, mid-paced stride feels like a completely natural evolution for them and I think the only path they could take without repeating themselves.

The distinctive element to Nocturnal Will is their forging of regal and triumphant guitar parts, a sound that feels as old as metal itself, razor-sharp and exultant. Opening track Irjala wastes zero time with a blast of imperious dual-guitar melodies and raging drums before weaving in and out of different tempos and dynamics, but running alongside is always that driving sense of purpose and determination. Most bands would kill to have an album’s worth of the riffs they pack into this one song and as a statement of intent it couldn’t be clearer. The rest of the album continues at this ferocious pace, with them alternating between blast-beats and valorous gallops with deft and grace. They balance on a fine knife/sword/claymore-edge of embracing this almost euphoric sound and understand the fun of it’s theatrics without ever falling into parody or ridicule.

(me every time I listen to album closer Celestial Will)

I think no other band provides such an embodied and emotional synthesis of pretty much all the aggressive music I’ve listened to since I was 15, from skate punk, Metallica and melodic death metal (hi In Flames and Darkest Hour) on to crust punk, black metal and beyond. As ever, it is in their sense of ineffable, instinctive melody and song-writing that Dödsrit strikes a chord within, an almost indefinable sense of “...this feels right, I feel home here”.

Whereas their previous records were brilliant encapsulations of melancholy and inner turmoil, there is a change in the air with Nocturnal Will - something more hopeful and experienced, looking to a new vista and broader horizon.

It has been an incredibly long and miserable winter, with March and April remaining cold and rain-swept, the sky feeling like it was perpetually leaden and ashen, and life felt dimmed. However, the evenings are starting to get longer, the world is slowly re-emerging, and I now look forward to long walks and travels with this astonishing album.

"Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;

Remember the wisdom out of the old days:

Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,

And the winds that blow through the starry ways,

Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood

Cover over and hide, for he has no part

With the lonely, majestical multitude. - Yeats

Nocturnal Will and other Dödsrit records are available at Wolves of Hades

Hi All!

Sorry for the slight delay in getting this issue of The Ansible out - hopefully returning to the more regular format over the coming months, I’ve have had some inspiration for some longer-form pieces that will start to take shape over the next months and develop this format a little bit. I still plan to record audio versions of these but have just not quite found the time just yet!

Whilst waiting for inspiration to strike and my next series of longer pieces to take form, I’ve spent the last weeks mulling over Radio and all things broadcast media. Namely, how it can provide both some relief from, and a keener focus on, a world that is feeling increasingly frantic, hemmed-in, angry and despondent.

“Books, records, films – these things matter.”

You may have recently read articles and pieces on ‘the return of owning physical media’, be it films on VHS and DVD, music on a wide array of physical formats (including the likes of tapes and minidiscs), old video games and so on. I will try and go into this a bit more in future posts but the reasons for doing this is I think a combination of pragmatism and nostalgia. We are slowly beginning to realise that streaming services can remove the music and films we enjoy at any time, and that this prompts some much broader conversations on preservation and archiving (will your local library, if it’s still open, have a copy of all the things you want?). There is a ton of amazing music in the world that will never be on streaming services.

Plus, stuff rules. Having stuff rules.

I loved this piece by Stat Significant on renting DVD’s, and think it’s a lovely summary of the general ‘return to physical media’ ethos so please give it a read:

Stat Significant

Why I Started Renting DVDs Again: Quantifying a Silly Thing

Intro: Wait, Why? Late last year, I began collecting DVDs. My rationale was simple: Movies have been a big part of my life, and I want to own the things I love in material form. Friends and family were sympathetic to this new hobby, with reactions like…

Read more

2 years ago · 36 likes · 11 comments · Daniel Parris

And so, we turn to Radio.

An astonishing broadcast medium, somehow both vast and intimate, bringing the huge contours and spiked edges of the globe into your own home (or with you on the move). Similar in many ways to reading, it offers a sort of inverse mirror to being in the world - a sense of grounding in a world that feels increasingly off-keel, confusing and overwhelming. A necessary distance to things.

To feel more present in the world, looking and listening with a keener perspective, is for me a key aspect of navigating and living in 2024.  We are arguably now in the strange position of having to deliberately remove choice from our lives, to add some ‘life grit’ and barriers to our own habits in order to create a way of being that is more satisfying. 

Discovering NTS over the last few years has widened my musical taste and also changed the way I listen to music. Founded in 2011 by Femi Adeyem for an “…international community of music lovers”, NTS is a digital radio station/platform that broadcasts from studios in London and Los Angeles.

In their own words, NTS is “music selected by people, not algorithms”, with a variety of shows and mixes covering literally every genre under the sun.

Radio provides structure and difference to my week, in a way that unlimited streaming of music does not.

Quite simply, I sometimes don’t know what I want and being spared that option paralysis can feel like a blessing. Instead, just dipping into radio, touching the dial, seeing what’s out there gives me a more balanced sense of being in and of the world.

It’s for this reason that I decided to becoming a paying supporter of NTS, so I don’t know if this now counts as an Advertorial?

McMurdo Station, Antarctica, home to the most remote radio station on the planet. Courtesy National Science Foundation/Spin magazine - https://www.spin.com/2022/01/antarctica-most-remote-radio-station/

The ease and passivity of not really paying attention to anything crops up more and more if I’m listening to an algorithm-generated playlist, whereas a radio mix created by an actual person with their own sense of flow and pace, just feels really different.

Interestingly, I both pay more attention to and zone out more to radio, but it feels like I’m attending as a guest, to someone who’s guiding to me something unexpected and interesting, rather than a self-directed subject who has selected the most optimal ‘choice’.

PAID ATTENTION

‘Intentionality/Living with intention’ is the new mindfulness buzzword du jour but there is something worth exploring within the act of focusing and paying more attention. Again, the Wellness Industrial Complex does a fantastic job of approaching this by selling you more goal-oriented planners and exercises to sharpen and retain your focus, but I feel like this misses the point. 

What feels more instinctive for me is having more space and activities in my life that are specifically UN-goal or outcome-focussed, instead letting my intuition and curiosity just be and to go where it likes. Curiously enough, I feel like I am more attentive, experiencing things with a keener depth when I do this, compared to if I was feeling like I was forcing myself ‘be more attentive’.  I suppose it’s like the difference of having an activity or hobby that you feel you should be doing, rather than just finding yourself doing those things because…well, just because. KPI’s may be useful in the world of work but they’re no way of organising the things that make your life meaningful. 

With that in mind, please enjoy a choice selection of some of my favourite NTS shows and let your mind wander. Hopefully you’ll find some music and sounds you haven’t heard before, or didn’t quite expect. Thanks again for reading,

x

Mikey

Golden Ration Frequencies - Every second Saturday of the month from Noon until 2, Alex (aka Ahrkh) delivers 2 hours of soothing ambience, perfect for starting off the weekend with -

https://www.nts.live/shows/golden-ratio-frequencies

Spa-Time with Tim Hecker - Sporadic shows from Tim Hecker, I thoroughly recommend the episode from 21/11/2023 which is a collection of his unreleased works -

https://www.nts.live/shows/tim-hecker

Otaku - Soundtracks from Anime and Video Games, sublime. The Save Room and Winter levels episodes are SO good -

https://www.nts.live/shows/otaku

Dimension Door - Dungeon Synth and Black Metal. Goblin Music that got me through the Winter months -

https://www.nts.live/shows/dimension-door

Kali Malone - Beautiful organ, choral and baroque mixes. Her Christmas Eve mix from 2020 is now an annual ritual for me to really get into the festive spirit with -

https://www.nts.live/shows/kali-malone

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”

In honour of one of my favourite writers, and because I also wanted to test out the functionality of Substack’s audio features, I’m doing something a little different for this month’s edition of The Ansible. All being well, I hope to narrate future editions of The Ansible so you can listen, as well as read.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a searing and brutal parable, one whose provocative impact far outlasts it’s brevity. Reading it aloud only increases it’s resonance. I am struck by something new each time I read it, and I’ve been thinking of it a lot the past few months.

On Saying the unsayable.

And Who gets to speak/Who gets to be heard/What could be different.

“The earth isn’t dying. It’s being killed and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”

Something really interesting happens when a seminal Punk record turns 20 - it becomes ageless. A cultural artefact who’s origins lies in youthful rebellion and creative destruction weathers the passing of time, of weary cynicism and despondency, to re-emerge as a chronicle of both wide-eye enthusiasm and rueful experience.

Vengeance’s influence and legacy is aeonian. On this record Tragedy issued an unceasing call to arms, rich with despondency and defiance. It could have been released in the heyday of Anarcho-Punk in the 80’s, it could be released today, it could be released 20 years from now and would still sound as devastating and incredible as it does now.

It’s made me think - how can a record be truly ageless?

Is it just the sound it contains, or is it a full aesthetic whole, a complete work that carries its subculture’s past within it whilst also signalling to a new dawn, a future yet undiscovered?

Something that embodies past, present and future all at once?

No Doves Fly Here

With the passing of two decades one thing I feel is important to acknowledge is the romantic mystery that surrounded Tragedy and their albums and lives shows. It seems almost trite to point out how Tragedy’s complete lack of an online presence added to their reputation, but it was a genuinely thrilling thing to try and find out anything about them.

No website, releasing their albums on their own label, very few interviews - there was a sense of secrecy around the band’s world, almost a hidden path that your late teenage/early 20’s brain got completely hooked on. Who were these unknown musical revolutionaries? What other possible worlds exist below the surface of this one?

Alongside this was the surrounding shadowy culture of DIY Punk spanning the globe, filtering down through zines and extremely rudimentary websites for bands and labels. The whole thing felt scattered and diffused, requiring you to fill in the gaps and develop your own internal landscape of connections - and the more you discovered, the more you could piece together your own ‘map’ of bands and styles.

This extended further to the myriad collectives, autonomous spaces, squats and venues of the International DIY punk scene, broader Anarchist subculture and the era of the ‘movement of movements’ across the Anti-Globalization protests of the early 00’s (your well-thumbed copy of No Logo was never far from reach). A time of minimal online presence of these kind of initiatives, and certainly no smartphones or Google Maps. To find them you had to hunt.

Tragedy would fully embody this era for me and an undoubtedly massive aspect of this is their astonishing iconography and imagery. The infamous Tragedy ‘Bird’ logo, stitched across the backs of thousands of denim jackets and black hoodies, itself a stark refinement of the classic Anarcho-punk/Peace Punk symbol, is an emblem not only of the band but an entire subculture and way of life.

The way that certain symbols, logos and icons of bands, bootlegged and reproduced countless times in xeroxed monochrome, can draw you in as some sort of lodestone never ceases to amaze me.  Calling out from a small rainy island in the North Sea to the furthest reaches of Eastern Europe, the United States and South East Asia. Tragedy’s icon is almost sigil-like for me, gesturing towards a space of possibility and creation, but also recollection. The excitement and curiosity of seeing it in my early 20’s, to a wry smile and fond memories whenever I see it as I’m approaching 40. It is undoubtedly one of the greatest Punk logos of all time, and for me is my ‘Four Bars’ of Black Flag, or the equivalent of the Crass symbol. 

Other classic designs included the ‘Today’s Pig, Tomorrow’s Bacon’ t-shirt (complete with pugnacious THE WAR IS ON back-print), and my personal fave, the ‘Survival’ Wolf:

The Nightmare Continues

In terms of sound, Vengeance takes the ferocity of Tragedy’s self-titled debut album and amplifies the mournful, and solemn atmosphere tenfold. Engulfed in Stygian guitars, an austere channelling of the dusk of early 90’s Swedish Death Metal, the mood of the album is one of unending and blackest night.

The whole spirit of Vengeance is that of a band taking Hardcore Punk to it’s ultimate aggressive endpoint without it becoming Metal, and never stepping outside of the rhythmic cornerstones laid down by their mohawked forebears. It is this feral, barely-restrained intensity that makes it such a compelling record. The explosive snare-rolls on the intro of The Lure or that strike constantly throughout Beginning Of The End are just a few examples of how Paul Burdette’s thunderous drumming is the Lycanthrian beating-heart of the album. D-beat always feels instinctive as a desperate cadence to this style of music and paired with the refined song-writing it just accentuates the lean, gleaned-to-the-bone spirit of Tragedy’s music.

Guitars and bass meld with the perfect amount of grit and heft with no buzz-saw HM2 distortion that would come to fully oversaturate the “blackened crust” genre 10 years later, and making full use of space in the mix without a hint of over-compression. It somehow retains the natural feel of a band recorded live in a room, whilst also being absolutely crushing. I think partly this is what makes it so timeless, there’s nothing in it’s production that could age it. That it was recorded in just under 80 hours is insane.

The ‘Tragedy sound’ is one of sombre melody and although sometimes much derided by dull gatekeepers, this style would influence literally countless bands and new subgenres such as Neo-crust, Emo-crust, Melodic Crust, ‘Crust De Salon’ for our Gallic friends and so on. Regardless of the naysayers, the way that Tragedy managed to merge gloom and darkness with desperate driving power is still electrifying to this day.

Conflicting Ideas demonstrates this perfectly as it’s opening chords give way to a pounding, tribal drumbeat that merges with one guitar holding feedback for near 40 seconds as the other plays a belligerently primitive punk riff pushing the tension to breaking point as the track explodes into life. The vocals (those vocals!) then erupt, alternating between Todd Burdette’s bellicose roar and bassist Billy Davis’ unhinged garbled bark, like the ravings of a mad man. The track stops halfway through with a split second of silence before it’s broodingly melancholic slower section marches forward, eliciting total despair:

“As experts scratch their heads

As doctors shake their hands

And wonder what we've done”

It continues from this point laying down track after track of ferocious defiance, Call To Arms, The Day After, To The Dogs - all contribute to an album who’s pacing is perfect. All of these songs are embedded deep within me, along with lyrics that further convey a sense of grim desolation such as the bridge of The Day After:

“All that remains are the stacks and stacks of radiated corpses.

All that remains are the piles upon piles of our excessive debris.

All that remains are the skeletons of the once alive…all that remains…

Serving as monuments to an era of humankind, the error of humankind.”

Arise!

Between the proclamations and defiant statements of its records, ethos, aesthetic and culture, and the then often disappointing reality of the world that that culture has to exist within, Punk has always been awash with it’s own contradictions and tensions. Constantly shifting between “This is how the world is” and “This is how the world could be”.

Is another world really possible?

Is it even desirable?

Punk in so many ways HAS to exist outside of reality, it works better when it’s gesturing towards a yet unseen destination or horizon. The way certain albums fully represent a specific era or epoch in terms of cultural, social, musical and personal themes means they’ve always been better suited to be thought of as novels, rather than instruction manuals of revolution. By the very fact it exists Punk is already compromised and corrupted. Yet it has, and continues to inspire so many people.

Within Vengeance’s defiance is a paradox - one of hope and defeat. It has served as the soundtrack to thousands of miles travelled, the background to countless load-ins and soundchecks, of meals cooked and shared, friendships forged - this album and everything I associate with it is the last time I really thought that Punk could change the world, and yet I’m also still completely galvanized by it, and not just from the consolation of nostalgia. The closing minutes of No Words still provoke an inner emotion that is almost impossible to articulate, as if a clenched fist within me opens.

That ongoing tension has never been expressed better, and it’s why Vengeance is not only a masterpiece but also why if I could only choose one record as a summation of the life-changing impact Punk has had on me, this would be it.

“What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code?...Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”

I’ve been thinking about this quote from Tim Hecker’s New York Times interview as 2023 drew to a close.

Using Spotify recently I’d noticed an increase in adverts for more ‘soothing’ mixes, direct promotion of apps like Headspace, and a series of podcasts and pieces of music to help ease anxiety, develop more resilience and to become more mindful. Suffice to say I have absolutely zero interest in this, particularly from a corporation such as Spotify pretending they have a vested interest in my mental health. When I listen to music the last thing I want is for it to be arranged and funnelled into such a coddling and paternalistic form of consumption. This feels almost *too* on the nose in terms of the Hecker quote above but I do really see it as a form of Ambient music as pacification. But pacified for what? And from what?

Far cleverer people than I have done a ton of research into the intense digital infrastructure that governs our daily lives, but there are sometimes those brief moments that take you out of your regular routine and give you pause for thought. For me it can be the sense of extreme frustration of waiting for a data file to refresh or load, or trying to find out a piece of information on my phone as a myriad of alerts and updates happen at the same time. These things shouldn’t frustrate me as much as they do, yet they do. I feel hemmed in, constrained. Trying to focus on and unpick one area only reveals how terrifyingly all interconnected it is, alongside a slight feeling of rising anxiety, not quite knowing how it all crept up on us. It just seemed that one day it was all just…there.

This ongoing tension, between pacification and productivity culture Vs. noticing the ineffable, uncanny strangeness of our current lives is fully explored in the most recent records by my two favourite experimental/electronic/ambient artists - Tim Hecker and Forest Swords.

They share some interesting parallels: 

Firstly, they both have a refreshingly disengaged approach to social media and promotion, using it just to say when they have a new record out or are going on tour. This is something I wish more artists would do. Retreat to the wilderness/fringes of the digital content sphere for years at a time, focus on the creation of their work and only return when it’s ready to be released.

Secondly, they had both previously released records which had a more expansive, melodic and colourful take on their respective sounds (Tim Hecker’s Love Streams from 2016 and Forest Swords’ Compassion from 2017 - I never quite gelled with the more recent Konoyo and Anoyo from Hecker), both moved into soundtrack work writing scores for dance performance and documentaries, and both have now re-emerged into the world with albums that feel far more monochromatic, muted and contained. Considering the nature of world events for the last five or so years, this shift in sound is pretty understandable. They are still immersive and gorgeously embodied albums, but with a more tense, fleeting and anxious atmosphere to them.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

Tim Hecker has been instrumental in developing my musical taste over the last decade, his work expanding my musical horizons and attuning my ear towards a rich world of ambient texture, cavernous sub-bass and befogging harmony. The trajectory of my listening habits moving from experimental metal towards ambient drone is not surprising, but there has always been a particular element within his music that I find especially arresting and engaging - I feel like it makes me more attentive towards aspects of the world that can sometimes be hard to put directly into words. Almost a ‘crisis of presence’, experiencing something that your subconscious tries to distract you from looking at too keenly.

No Highs feels more ascetic than the magenta choral melodies of Love Streams or misty organ dirges of Ravedeath, 1972. Focusing on synthesizers and saxophone (played by the brilliant Colin Stetson) rather than the more intricate layers of piano, organ, strings and human voice that he expansively re-mixed and re-edited into his former works, it is an austere and subdued record.

The album is structured around three longer pieces lasting around eight minutes each, interspersed with shorter tracks that find Hecker in elegiac and plaintive form. Opener Monotony could induce one of the most beautiful panic attacks you will ever experience, occasional shimmers of gorgeous harmonics floating in and out of each other atop an ominous rhythmic pulse that thud-thud-thuds like an anxious heartbeat, or series of shallow breaths. 

During these longer pieces I envision long, wide tracking shots of vast data centers sprawling across remote locations, sometimes in remote beautiful wilderness, others in unending industrial areas on the borderlands of cities but all just out of sight and out of mind. Portentous. Ominous. Ever present. 

There is a pensive mood across the whole album, though not without moments of real beauty (Winter Cop for example is practically uplifting). This austerity and restraint allows my favourite aspect of Hecker’s work to shine through, namely his ability to convey such atmosphere and emotion without aligning to traditional musical structure. The arrangements and layers of sound have moments of shimmering, weaving melody, but it’s never a focal or fixed moment, they’re far more ephemeral and fleeting. A sort of eerie ‘just at the edge of your fingertips, beyond the corners of your vision’ mood permeates this record, as if something lurks beyond the frequencies a human ear can recognise.

As an album it is a great demonstration of the act of refinement and restraint. Your ear attunes and re-focuses, you learn to deeply listen again. Hecker’s wry humour is also a presence throughout, with album closer Living Spa Water being just one example of his mischievous derision of “... the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue” whilst simultaneously creating one of his most beautiful and relaxing tracks in several years. The irony I think is not lost on him for creating a record that encourages a sense of focus that is far, far beyond being simply more efficient at your day job. Instead it asks what and for who you are being compelled to be more efficient for. 

You Are My Angel 

The work of Forest Swords, aka Matthew Edward Barnes, will always feel intertwined with my time living in Manchester and the North West. Having moved here in 2016 his debut record Engravings was on fairly regular rotation but it was 2017’s Compassion that cemented him as an artist I would listen to semi-religiously. It felt appropriate to have a soundtrack for late night bus rides and early morning walks composed not too far away over in the Wirral/Liverpool, particularly as I was heading out to more dance and ambient nights.

Forest Swords combines trip-hop, dub, post-punk and Warp Records/Ninja Tune-esque ambience into the moody and sublime, and in the most non-parochial way possible, feels distinctly ‘UK-ish’. A couple of obvious reference points would be Massive Attack and Burial, however, like both of those artists his work takes a myriad of styles and influences in order to transcend and step beyond genre limitations and exist in a more singular and unique space. There is something quite timeless about Forest Swords’ material, in that it could have been released any time over the last two to three decades and would still feel contemporary. I also hear in Bolted the faintest, faintest echo of Two-tone, as though the spectre of the Specials’ Ghost Town and The Beat’s Mirror In The Bathroom are also somehow present: 

Mirror in the bathroom, I just can't stop it

Every Saturday you see me window shopping

Find no interest in the racks and shelves

Just ten thousand reflections of my own sweet self

Bolted was released in the late Autumn of 2023 and immediately became one of my albums of the year. Honing in on a more tightly-wound atmosphere, all the elements of previous Forest Swords albums are present, but as with Hecker there has been a real process of refinement and distillation. Album opener ‘Munitions’ combines lilting guitar textures with a bassline that could have come straight off of Mezzanine, along with *those* particular vocals samples - ageless, mournful, eternal. It sets the tone for the rest of the album, with vaporous synths and other resonant dubby textures to produce tracks that are just as beautiful as his other work, but with a more fleeting and tense atmosphere. The drum production and steely, stark rhythms provide this wonderful sense of tension amidst the more melodic instrumentation and samples. This is perfectly demonstrated on the The Butterfly Effect where Neneh’s Cherry astonishingly haunting vocals help make it into one of the album’s best tracks. Despite its forlorn atmosphere, Bolted also has moments of real, joyous beauty on the likes of Caged and Hjope. Album closer Line Gone Cold brings the previous 30 minutes worth of material to an understated but extremely affecting close.

Amidst the hazy, muted wash of genres is an almost visual atmosphere of rain-drenched industrial areas, a synaesthesia of sound system bass bins, post-punk reverb and dancing figures. This is also reflected in the album’s artwork of monochrome cages and statues with splashes of neon green. Sparks and stabs of inspiration and creativity amongst the drab and the leaden.

2024 will be a hell of a year, and music can seem astonishingly irrelevant in times of global conflict, resource degradation and increasingly fatalistic political ‘solutions’. Having said this, I think it can be useful to think of some artist’s work as not merely in a cul-de-sac reflecting the stagnancy and pessimism of our current age and political climate, but also offering the capacity, perspective and intuition to move beyond these pacifying tendencies and try, once again, to foster real community and solidarity. No Highs and Bolted feel like useful albums for the task ahead.

In 1983 Metallica’s debut album Kill ‘Em All erupted into the world merging heavy metal swagger with punked-up aggression, unleashing several thrash metal anthems and beginning a career that would result in some of the most famous and critically-acclaimed metal records of all time.

Fusing Classical melodicism with clenched-fist power, Cliff Burton brought a charged, pounding, low-end to Metallica’s youthful ‘pile the riffs up high’ early compositions. It was Kill ‘Em All’s instrumental track (Anesthesia) - Pulling Teeth, however, that hinted at the direction Metallica would take on later records, with Burton playing a baroque, Bach-esque unfurling melody which soon unravels into a scrawled, wah pedal-screeching bass and drums jam.

Burton’s Classically-influenced approach to songcraft and bass-playing refined Metallica’s ability to write epics (where would metal be if The Call of Ktulu or Orion were never written?) that would make up their next 3 records, honing their ability to craft songs rich with an aura of ‘melancholic triumph’ that still resonates and influences to this day.

40 years since Kill ‘Em All, Bell Witch’s The Clandestine Gate (Full title: Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate) takes the melodic ley lines Cliff Burton first brought to light and expands and develops them into fully expansive landscapes. The Clandestine Gate is an 83 minute single-track record awash with the melancholy, rumination and reflection of troubled times. It is my favourite album of 2023 and the most emotionally-cathartic metal record I’ve heard in several years.

Hailing from the misty and rain-drenched Pacific Northwest, Bell Witch are a duo consisting of bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer Jesse Shreibman. They’ve released several albums of crushingly heavy Funeral Doom, with The Clandestine Gate being the first in a trilogy of new records. Using layers of distorted bass and cascading drums to create a particularly mournful form of metal, previous records, although excellent, could sometimes overuse their knack of layered, repeating riffs for long periods of time.

Where The Clandestine Gate feels different to those previous records is in its sense of restraint. A full composition, 83 minutes and 15 seconds in length, this is not a ‘song’ or just a series of repeated riffs but a full movement. It commands you to pay attention and absorb it, almost in complete contrast to how we tend to listen to music these days in more distracted, staccato ways, viewing records as ‘content’ to be consumed as opposed to actual albums to be consumed by.

Repetition is still an important part of their musical discipline & craft, but like everything on this record it has been refined and honed to a keen edge. Repetition now feels like it’s being used to convey a particular emotive expression rather than just the result of a particular musical technique or limitation. One that embodies feeling rather than analysis.

The sparseness of the album is enriched with the increased prominence of organ samples and ambient textures, and it’s here that I feel Bell Witch have really conjured a ‘third instrument’ that compliments their sound perfectly and makes their material even more emotive. There is an undercurrent of shimmering haze and murmuring organ throughout the record that feels both comforting and unnerving.

In terms of pacing and dynamics, Desmond and Shreibman play with a sophistication and sense of intuition that shows the full range of their musicianship . The slight cliché of ‘the quiet sections have never been more austere and the heavy parts have never been been heavier’ (or even more simply, ‘less is more’) feels apt, but it’s also in their particular approach to heaviness this time round, with a forbearance to when they choose to unleash the really heart-breaking melodies that makes this album so affecting. There is a sense of ineffable presence here that I don’t get from many heavy bands, it feels eminently human. 

Having said that, several patient listens are required, it was only by the tenth that I started to fully connect with this record. It feels appropriate to be writing this as the leaves have turned for the Autumn, with over six months to really digest and inhabit the landscape Bell Witch have created. Its pacing seems to match perfectly with my footsteps around the woodlands and alongside the river Mersey near my home. 

If you are at all a fan of Asunder, later Corrupted, Warning or Mournful Congregation, as well as the minimalist organ work of Kali Malone and Sarah Davachi, you will absolutely love this. The worlds of Doom and Ambient exist fully symbiotically here and it’s an album that is rich in atmosphere and melancholy.

Melancholy has of course been an intrinsic part of Doom since its inception as a genre but I feel there’s sometimes a deeper undercurrent that particular artists or bands can tap into. I adore the likes of the first Ulver albums, or Katatonia’s Dance of December Souls, but those records convey a bit more of the restless angst of youth (as is appropriate for records written and recorded by teenagers!), whereas for me to connect with heavy material now it has to really strike something within and reflect a broader life experience.

The Clandestine Gate’s sense of weight is what makes it so compelling. My own personal experience of depression is one I’ve always felt was imbued with this sense of weight, both physical and mental, and having an audio landscape to fully subsume in has made this record feel very personal. Its expansive opening 20 minutes, including the gorgeous ethereal vocals rising like brume on an overcast dismal day, can give the impression that the whole album will be awash with pining or longing, but this is not quite the case as it shifts into something much deeper and subconscious.

As the record continues, disquieting bass-notes meld with unsettling ambient electronics, and this is where it really evokes what depression actually feels like. Not just the brooding wistfulness of a melancholic disposition but the actual feeling of repeating internal stagnancy, anxiety and disgust with oneself.  That sense of self-disgust is only heightened by the guttural, bucolic roars of Shreibman about 40 minutes in, alongside some of the murkiest and densest riffs on the album. The repetition of these riffs continue, holding you as a listener in a sense of stasis - this sort of unending, ploughing fury within that excruciatingly slowly starts to move forward. Just as the sense of suffocation becomes almost total, organ notes and human voice peal out, signalling a sense of calm acceptance of what is to come. From here on Bell Witch unleashes one of the most emotionally-devastating sections of music I’ve heard in years, somehow conveying anger, heartbreak, acceptance, awe and perseverance all at the same time.

To have an album represent those repeating cycles of rumination and hyper fixation, moving from a depressive state step by painful step to emotional catharsis and personal breakthrough, is the embodiment of what I mean when I think of Metal as ‘melancholic triumph’. 

A close friend once said that the best Doom records sounds like “To Live Is To Die from ...And Justice for All played at 33rpm”, a description I’ve always loved and is fitting as Burton was credited posthumously for writing Metallica’s most heart-breaking dual-guitar melody.

The Clandestine Gate embodies this credo fully. Everything has its cost, and living is no different. The internal path of self-discovery, of expanding and refining your own sense of self, to lament and accept the parts of yourself that are no longer helping or have changed, is the path everyone must take at some point. It is a lifelong endeavour. 

As the ghostly, spectral bassline and hushed cymbal swells of the record’s final minutes echo out to the stars, it’s clear that Bell Witch have created an album that not only fully expresses the weight and pain of living, but also that which makes life so very meaningful.

https://www.bellwitchdoom.net/

Welcome to The Ansible - a monthly newsletter about music. Perhaps some other things as well, but mainly music. Namely, why it matters and why it’s worth paying attention to.

Although useful for staying on top of new releases and tour information, the ongoing collapse of different social media platforms means it’s harder and harder to find out information on things you’re actually interested in. It’s feeling like a lot of it is now incredibly, irreparably broken, awash with ads, brands trying to be your friend and very unfunny work memes.

My main use for social media was to stay in touch with friends near and far whom I’d met through music, and to share what I was listening to. It feels harder and harder for that to happen now. Or maybe it’s just less interesting? I’m not sure, but I’m tired of feeling so dissatisfied with something that was marketed to create and maintain ‘connections’ with people, so now I’m trying something a little different.

This is a space for me to take pause and slow things down a bit. My passion and interest in DIY Punk and Hardcore in my teenage years and early 20’s inspired me to write for zines and I really loved that, alongside all the people I met through doing so. Zines were an amazing way of ‘meeting’ people pre-social media, a really fun means of developing your own voice and forms of self-produced media, and I sometimes miss the privacy and sense of discovery that was entangled within that whole creative subculture. 

The Ansible is my attempt to try and claw back a bit of that sense of discovery whilst recognising the substantial changes over the last 20 years as to how music is created and consumed. To have space for longer discussions, to shine a light on some less popular artists or scenes and to bring some connections and ideas together that maybe take a little bit longer to digest.

I hope you enjoy reading and please just get in touch if you’d like to.

x

M

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