Nocturnal Emissions / Nigel Ayers - Reports of Debris (2026)

 

Here's another greatest hits - kind of - although it's substantially different to the eponymous vinyl double which came out nearly ten years ago and which limited itself to material generated in the eighties. This one picks and chooses from the last four and a bit decades of Nocturnal Emissions as well as that which Nigel issued under his own name, and maintains the sort of thematic consistency you might not expect of a band who've released ninety million albums. Somehow, despite my possession of most of those ninety million albums, I hadn't really noticed that NE were quite so melodic and even the pseudo-ambient tracks border on a sort of minimal classical aesthetic. There's noise, as you might expect, but mostly muted and serving as effect rather than a mallet hitting you over the head, and in addition to being more melodic than I remember, Reports of Debris seems to favour the most emotionally evocative picks from the back catalogue - case in point being Rusting Shells which I still can't hear without getting a lump in my throat. I'm not even sure why. It just seems to say something profound about the human condition and our collective place in a society that's trying to kill us, even if what it says doesn't quite fit into words.

The collection spans the sonic gamut from drifting narrative surrealism to mutant disco to the circuit board rockabilly of the mighty When Were You Last in Control of Your Dreams and Aspirations?; and even with nothing that ever tickled the hit parade and a few things you probably won't have heard if you missed the limited run of a particular cassette, Reports of Debris really does feel like the greatest hits, or failing that, evidence of the Emissions as one of the few weirdy music bands who never got around to wasting your time. There are a few tracks which seem conspicuously absent - No Sacrifice, Going Under, Verdi Gris Gris, maybe the dance version of Imaginary Time - but that's probably inevitable and I'm certainly not complaining. 

Fysisk Fostran - Räkenskapens Dag (2023)

 

I don't know what it is with Sweden but I don't think I've heard a Swedish group I didn't like. In fact with the exception of ABBA, who sounded better when I was fourteen, most of the Swedish music I've heard has been the kind of thing you might justifiably kill to own, and the stuff coming out of Sweden in the eighties (back when we were all plugging drum machines into distortion pedals just to see what would happen) was fucking phenomenal. I first heard Fysisk Fostran - which I believe means Physical Education - on their Vi Behöver Ett Odöpt Barn cassette, and I nearly quacked my pants when I discovered someone had given this material a vinyl release. Vi Behöver Ett Odöpt Barn, or We Need an Unbaptised Child  according to Google translate, came out in 1983. Räkenskapens Dag collects the best tracks along with others of the time, mostly unreleased, and all of it sounding like rehearsal tapes in terms of quality, but rehearsal tapes where they had the balance absolutely perfect so capturing the sort of wild sonic spontaneity which might have been flattened out in a studio. We have mostly regular instruments attacked with raw punk spirit yielding the fried quality of early Chrome and the ill omen of formative Gristle. It's the sort of deal which could have sounded like a bunch of blokes making a terrible racket, but does something more than what you hear preserved on the original tape, somehow communicating the adrenaline rush of the maelstrom as it occurs and sounding loud regardless of what volume you play it at - Hawkwind inheriting the nuclear wasteland, or something in that direction.

I gather they drifted apart after most of this was recorded, a dissolution informed by the non-appearance of a projected vinyl EP, the demolition of their rehearsal space, and the general indifference bordering on hostility of local audiences. The sleeve notes suggest  individual members accepting the inevitability of extinction, rationalising that Fysisk Fostran had been of its time and was as such a success on its own terms. Its difficult to tell where they would have gone from here, so leaving this collection to stand alone as an act which was never followed, and perhaps could not have been followed. This will seem like hyperbole until you listen to this stuff and consider that barely anyone sounded like this in 1984 - sludge metal with something weird and slightly scary replacing the stoner element, he said still scrabbling around for a description that doesn't fall apart once the needle hits the next track. 

Outstanding. I'll leave it at that.

Salford Electronics - Communique (2026)

 

Please take a look at this for my views on overuse of the term dark ambient, because I'm sure Communique will have been described as such at some point, perhaps even by Mr. Padbury himself for the sake of argument. Well, it isn't ambient, and it isn't generically spooky noises through a reverb with the decay time lasting longer than the rest of your life. Much, or possibly all of what you hear is either electronically derived - hence the name - or treated, and the mood is pensive bordering on overpowering, but things happen in sonic terms and there's a feeling of progression. If anything Communique, which I gather is a compilation of the best of the last decade or so from the numbered series, reminds me of modern classical, and specifically Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. All sounds are muted and never obviously mechanical, textural more than noisy, with an occasional suggestion of hope emerging from the drone in the absence of the rays of sunlight which we both know you're not going to get. The music of Salford Electronics - and yes, it is music - often seems to represent something like recovery or reflection, even healing in the wake of trauma. This is obviously just how it sounds, or at least feels, to me, but in the absence of artwork and with just titles to guide us cautiously down this dark alley, one hand compacted into a fist just in case, it doesn't feel like I'm just spewing out words at random - at least not on purpose. We have come to bring rain, claims the mission statement, and even in the event of it being the downpour anticipated by Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, it's also kind of refreshing.

Insane Clown Posse - The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (1999)

 

Going back to the golden age of ICP, we have The Amazing Jeckel Brothers which I've come to regard over time as the It Takes a Nation of Millions... of its subgenre. Some will dispute the possibility of there having been a golden age of ICP, but probably not anyone who bothered to listen to an album all the way though. ICP's most vocal critics are, or at least were, mostly persons obsessed with authenticity in rap from what I could tell, usually old white men working their way through a list of one hundred rap albums you must own from one of those magazines which feels as though it should have Sting on the cover even though it doesn't; but honestly, if you can't tell the difference between ICP and the Kottonmouth Kings, then you're an idiot. They've been on the cover of Murder Dog twice, Chuck D is a fan, and the prosecution rests, m'lud.

This was the album they hoped would break them through to the mainstream. They pulled out all the stops, made the best record they could make, and even had ODB and Snoop Dogg guesting on a couple of tracks. It made number four on the Billboard charts despite a predictably universal slagging from the music press. It elevated their profile, and yet ICP's stock ultimately remained the same only moreso. This is because there's a lot of stupid people who just don't get it, and who probably won't ever get it.

It's neither rap metal, Beavis & Butthead set to a beat, nor novelty music, because while these may be mere strings on ICP's proverbial bow, its one big fucking bow with a lot more going on than you may realise, and the fact of one of them having just tried to shove it up your bumhole shouldn't detract from the power of this deeply stupid and yet emotionally profound album. Of course the clown paint and the werewolf zingers are metaphors for outsider status, or feeling like an outsider - as is inevitable if you're blessed with a working brain in society as it currently stands - but it's populism that actually communicates stuff besides how popular it is, which is rare, essentially dividing the potential audience into the Juggalo adjacent and those considering themselves too good to appreciate a knob gag. The music here is pitch perfect, maybe Mike E. Clark's finest work, rewiring fairground jingles as a distant cousin to Cypress Hill within a broadly cinematic whole which manages to sound expensive while keeping those giant clown shoes nailed firmly and gruesomely to the streets and the music from which it was born. This is ICP's secret weapon, the point that always seems to be missed - the union of opposites with the crudest of gut-busting belly laughs woven seamlessly into what might be termed the music of the spheres, even if the illusion wobbles a little once we realise how those spheres smell and where they're hanging. Another Love Song, which famously borrows from Dylan via Beck's Jack-Ass and somehow sounds at least as sincere if not more so in its lament for love either lost or otherwise doomed, brings us:

I could love you and treat you with class,
And have babies falling all out your ass,
But thinking about that...
I feel I'd rather kill you.

It's funny then horrifying, strangely tender, and even heartbreaking all at the same time; and the whole album does this - righteous truths as we hear on Terrible surfing along on slapstick violence and bags of dog poo set ablaze on your doorstep, and once the laughter has subsided, it somehow feels as though we've been reading Céline.

Maybe you remember how the best art used to do more than just one thing?

The Tubes (1975)

 

With 1979's Remote Control as my gateway drug, I've backtracked to the debut album, mainly because I happened upon a copy in Half Price Books, and Lordy - it's a good 'un. Back when I first discovered punk, I asked my friend Grez whether there were other punk bands aside from the Stranglers, Sex Pistols and the Boomtown Rats. There was also the Damned, he helpfully informed me, and an American punk band called the Tubes. We were about fourteen and sheltered in our small town rural existence but the misreading has somehow stayed with me, possibly cemented by Crass punning White Punks on Dope as White Punks on Hope a couple of years later. True enough, the photographs did seem to depict a bunch of weirdos, and everyone from Joe Jackson to Squeeze counted as punk for us at that age.

I suppose if we really need boxes to stick them in, they were a blend of glam, prog, showbiz, heads down no nonsense boogie, and stadium rock with a touch of underground comix thrown in as seasoning. Stick this on the turntable and it sits quite well next to Lynyrd Skynyrd but for a fair quota of complex proggy arrangements of the kind everyone did at the time, and some of it is so majestic that it could almost be Man Who Sold the World era Bowie, notably Space Baby. What sets it apart from all those genres which it actually isn't, at least not full time, is the spiky edge, the media savvy, and the suggestion that they might be taking the piss to some extent. If it sounds a little like an album which should have featured either a wizard or a nude woman on the cover, their gleeful disdain for all the bullshit of modern living sets it some way apart from Jethro Tull roundly condemning the rising cost of agricultural supplies. It's like stepping into an alternative universe where REO Speedwagon or one of that bunch somehow made a good record, with the fruity guitar and keyboard solos, an operatic rock holler shaking its curly locks, and somehow with not a trace of California muso-stodge. With ingredients at which I might scowl under other circumstances, The Tubes is somehow a perfect debut album and a genuine work of the art - every track a classic and good enough to have been a hit single even with the screwy time signatures. Imagine Devo in sequinned loon pants if that helps.

Nigel Ayers - The Vault (2026)

 

I've a feeling I should probably credit this as the work of Sara Lamb and Nigel Ayers. It's Nigel's sonic counterpart to the paintings of Sara Lamb, recently partnered as something along the lines of an installation in the wilds of Lostwithiel, Cornwall. I'm not sure whether the sound is a response to the paintings, or whether it's the other way around, or perhaps six of one and a half dozen of the other. YouTube footage shows the paintings on display along with a stack of sketchbooks in a caravan of the type once drawn by horses, with this music supplementing the ambience. I'm not certain whether the caravan is the only place the gestalt has been presented, but if so it's something I can appreciate given that neither artist seems entirely aligned with anything you might term the usual channels.

I've had occasion to frown upon persons who make a funny noise, stick it through a reverb unit with the decay set to twenty-five years, then call it dark ambient. The sonic component of The Vault is deceptively minimal with sounds resembling bells repeated as an intermittent organic rhythm against a distant wall of its own delay set to at least a century, the effect of which is neither dark nor entirely ambient. If anything it has the celestial sound of something vast and radiantly bright which is cumulatively overpowering despite the sense of space - akin to watching sunrise in a locale where you can no longer hear traffic. It does the same thing for an hour, or presumably for as long as you want if you visited the installation - which isn't quite the right word but I'm sure you know what I mean. Yet it feels as though it's constantly changing, or maybe evolving, yet might also be deemed timeless. It isn't noise, and it's thematically the opposite of industrial, for those of you who need to know such details.

As I expect I've said before, much of Nigel's work - at least this century - sounds like the result of an almost geological compositional process closer to the spread of lichen across granite than plugging it in to see what sort of scary sounds we can come up with; and Sara Lamb's painting appears to share some of this quality - a channelling which occurs regardless of the broader spectrum of western art, almost regardless of the person holding the brush or twiddling the oscillator—not so much outsider art as true art, something many of us no longer recognise through having become so accustomed to that which is served up by the factories.

In the event of none of the above making sense, it's jolly good.

Summon from yonder portal. 

Dick Hyman - The Age of Electronicus (1969)

 

This turned up in a batch of donations from a very, very old person who, having been left technologically beached by the endless march of progress - or at least the endless march of built-in obsolescence - was no longer able to appreciate all those Mantovani discs. To be fair, of the hundred or so vinyl records, it was a fairly interesting selection with some decent stuff, the strangest of all probably being this. I gather back during the dawn of the synthesiser, specifically the Moog synthesiser, there was a lot of this around - selections of pop hits magically transformed into futuristic cybermusic to be enjoyed by Martini-chugging sophisticates at dinner parties and which now sounds like the music enjoyed by the evil penguin in The Wrong Trousers. Typically, we get a couple of Beatles numbers performed by electronic bees but never mind.

It takes a little getting used to given the difficulty of listening without the mind's eye becoming flooded with images of ironic teenagers, but not so much as you might expect. Dick Hyman was - and incredibly still is at the time of writing - a respected jazz pianist with a great ear for sound dynamics if this album is an indication, and the jazz drums complement the electronics beautifully. The possibly inevitable Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da is about as good as you'd expect and is dispensed with at the beginning of side one, in the wake of which the choices are interesting enough to allow for some sense of individual expression beyond populist novelty robotics. So we get a cover of James Brown, two from Booker T & the MGs and a Joni Mitchell number (which greatly improves on the original) amongst others. The magnetic poles of the record might be Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da at one extreme and Kolombo, Hyman's own composition, at the other. Kolombo with its moody rhythm and pseudo-Arabic melody could easily have come from one of those Cluster albums we all love so much; and with even the familiar titles sharing more in common with Kolombo than with the Beatles' worst song, this is a pretty great record which, for what it may be worth, pisses all over Switched On flippin' Bach.