Sunday, March 22, 2026

Wild Billy Childish vs UFOs in the Desert and Phantoms Down the Docks

Wild Billy Childish & CTMF ‘House on Fire’ / ‘Keep Mojave Weird’ EP – Damaged Goods Three years on from Failure Not Success, CTMF return sounding anything but rested. ‘House on Fire’ is exactly what the title promises: scorched, restless, and lit from underneath by that familiar Medway voltage. The formula hasn’t dimmed. If anything, […]

Music Boxes, Dead Crows, and Damp Mattresses

RhaD – ‘Ghost Music Library’ – Unexplained Sounds RhaD has always been the place where Raffaele Pezzella lets the wires show. Under his Sonologyst name, he’s meticulous, almost architectural in how he builds sound, but RhaD is the opposite impulse. It’s the part of him that rummages in the dark, grabs whatever is humming, and […]

The Electric Dead Speak!

Various – ‘Electric Dead Speak – Music for Electric Voice Phenomenon’ – Eighth Tower Records When I was little, I remember very clearly that my sister, Tracy, had a flexi-disc featuring not hits of the moment but the voices of dead people. How could she have possibly come upon such an item? She wasn’t much […]

Mark Hjorthoy – The Future That Never Existed

Mark Hjorthoy – ‘Future That Never Existed’ –  ZeroK Mark Hjorthoy’s The Future That Never Existed arrives steeped in the ideas of Mark Fisher, the British writer who spent his career diagnosing the strange temporal condition of late capitalism. It wasn’t an immediate draw to me either, but bear with me. Fisher argued that we […]

Runes Order – No Future

Runes Order – No Future (Eighth Tower Records, 2026 Reissue) Some records don’t return so much as seep out of the firmament like a will-o’-the-wisp, never quite burned out, finally drifting back into view. ‘No Future,’ first released in 1993 in a run of just thirty hand‑numbered cassettes, is one of those artefacts: a tape […]

CBGB – A New York City Soundtrack 1975-1986

Various – CBGB – A New York City Soundtrack CBGB mythology tends to calcify around the same five names – Television, Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, Talking Heads – the pantheon that debuted within fifteen months of each other between 1974 and 1975. Some I love (Ramones, Suicide, The Cramps), and some I’d happily never hear […]