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. 

Howl in the Typewriter - Primalore (2026)

 

If you enjoy sentences like, 'Take your cunt-looking face and shove it into your dad's syphilitic arsehole,' that is a fine line between entertainment and insanity. This is but one of many statements delivered by Primalore like prison kitchen slops down those waste chutes on either side of your head. In fact it's a direct quote from track thirteen, identified on the cover as Spilling Processed Peas, although the album is just over an hour of continuous pseudo-narrative barrage without breaks, without pause for breath, and its division into individual tracks seems arbitrary. Elsewhere, Frailty Assessment Area teaches us that:

The sunset's air pollution melts ovary morning celebrations in breast wax and hot labia solvents splashing in dusty socks at cocktail parties of ass-kicking mind-wanking faith denominating a thermoviscous cooling snail in the head from the pre-fright ungulates of mutilated spastics in buried bodies seeping concrete the tourist trap entangled with incomer fashion chasers splitting the G, a coop noob move up north, even if such drink decorations exist there.

As you might imagine, it's difficult to get your head around this one, or it would be if the noise allowed you just a couple of seconds in which to ask, what the fuck was that?!? which it doesn't.

The music is a cut-up soundtrack of DIY synthpop chopped into fragments, most shorter than a second, of which some passages may repeat but I've been thus far too disorientated to tell. I think the point of the music is mainly so we can call it music because it's probably a better fit than anything else. First impressions are of a distant, more scatological cousin to Nigel Ayers' recent spoken word efforts, The Pre-War Noise Encryption Standard and Excavations in Substation. As with Ayers' narratives, Primalore almost makes sense but never quite gets there, leaving the listener forever struggling to catch up. The voice draws us into an ever-shifting unreal environment because we feel it should make sense, or should at least try walking in a straight line for longer than a minute; and yet much of the monologue may seem weirdly familiar but for the proverbial leg bone being inexplicably connected to the analgesic cyclotron bone.

However, where Ayers' hallucinogenic narrative is at least as soothing as the mad stuff that goes through your head when you're unwell and consequently delirious, this is closer to the information overload of Consumer Electronics, albeit without being quite so harrowing. Conversely, Stan Batcow's delivery is often surprisingly amiable, almost conversational, regardless of the onslaught and despite the rapid fire battery of bizarre, jarring images. It sounds conversational in places.

The text comes from Primalore Four, a magazine produced by Mark Reeve and Dr. Adolf Steg (real name - Dr. Adolf Steg), a copy of which is currently going on eBay for ₤24.50 unless you live in Americaland, as I do. Retooled as what I suppose could be termed a fulminating book, I suspect information overload is the method of delivery more than the point in itself. It's not so much that meaning is scrambled and reduced to noise as that there's too much meaning, the ultimate thrust of which perhaps leaks through during the aforementioned Frailty Assessment Area:

Everything must be perfect down the years, so destroy all art, culture and music, blow up this fucking useless planet and remove us from existence. What has the human race really achieved? We have fucked up a beautiful planet and spent billions going to a dead moon as the two percent on the bottom rung of society cause so much harm to the rest, the good people of this world.

If I've given an impression of Primalore as an unlistenable racket, which it may well be to many, that isn't my intention. Rather it's a sort of primal scream, or howl, I suppose; and whatever the hell it's saying, it's hard to keep from getting swept along in its sheer bloody-minded dedication to doing whatever it's doing, and it leaves the listener strangely energised or invigorated in a glow of recovery such as might normally be encountered after a gut-wrenching hangover or a dose of the most powerful laxatives known to man, and also some women. I don't know what it is, or even that I like it, but it impresses the living shit out of me and I don't know why.

Procure thineself a copy yonder.

Onomatopoeia - Irrelevant (1997)

Older cervix havers and bepenised beings may recall Onomatopoeia as the musical wing of Steve Fricker's Cheeses International distribution service and occasional collaborator with Smell & Quim, notably on the formidable Fanny Batter album. I myself specifically recall Onomatopoeia from Anal Almond which I reviewed in The Sound Projector magazine about a million years ago. Apparently I may even have been the only person to review it, which is depressing.  Anal Almond was notable for combining hard, aggressive electronics with the misery of food allergies, thematically speaking, which certainly made a change from the usual stuff about Hitler. Irrelevant dates from approximately the same era but, having been initially issued as a cassette with a fairly limited run, has since been granted a second crack of the whip by means of this beautifully hand-crafted vinyl edition, just three-hundred and each one adorned with a different national flag for reasons which feel as though they make sense even if it's hard to say why.

Onomatopoeia sits loosely within that whole weirdy noise thing but can be distinguished from the herd by its reluctance to tick boxes or tread any particularly well worn path. It's not exactly power electronics, harsh noise, dark ambient, certainly nothing industrial, and to call it sound art might possibly be a bit wanky. Each of these peculiarly titled five tracks seem to comprise sounds derived from a single instrument - hunting horn, piccolo, cymbal and so on - slowed down, sped up, treated, looped, multitracked and the rest to the point of the source being abstracted more or less into oblivion - arguably excepting the bass on Chafed Cervix Coleslaw Cum Chutney Cesspit which goes all Richie Blackmore towards the end. This distortion of the source works exceptionally well, limiting what may have been distracting to yield something which manages to be alternately abrasive, meditative, and - above all - haunting. In fact, the first thing it brought to mind when I slapped the record on was Vernon Elliott's sombre incidental music for Noggin the Nog - so factor that in with a loosely Surrealist aesthetic and whatever inspired all those not quite ambient albums by Nigel Ayers, and that probably amounts to a description. Of all the weird shit I've listened to so far this year, Irrelevant has been one of the most pleasurable.

Enquire within.

Nigel Ayers - Painted by Spirits (2019)

Nigel, as you will most likely know, has been recording as Nocturnal Emissions for several decades now. I'm not sure it's technically possible for a member of a one-man band to release a solo album, but here it is anyway. Of course, this is hardly the first work he's issued under the name to which his council tax bill is addressed; and for what it may be worth, I seem to recall a period during which Mr. Ayers expressed a certain weariness at having saddled himself with the name Nocturnal Emissions and the presumably industrial associations which tend to result from potential listeners failing to have read the memo; and I'm not sure whether this has any bearing on anything, or whether Painted by Spirits should be viewed as distinct from the Nocturnal Emissions back catalogue. My guess would be that a name such as is Nocturnal Emissions might be a bit limiting when attempting to extend one's reach beyond the usual audience.

Nevertheless, here's more of the quality work you've probably come to expect - distinctively identifiable as Nigel Ayers without simply pressing the same buttons out of habit. It's sort of ambient, but not quite, exhibiting that quality common to his more atmospheric works where the washes of sound never truly fade into the background, instead holding one's attention. Here the sounds seem to be derived from mostly conventional instruments and have kept most of their tonal qualities intact whilst being otherwise repurposed, so Painted by Spirits has more of a classical feel than previous releases and could probably be reproduced by a string quartet, albeit a patient string quartet. It's been a while since I listened to Henryk Górecki's third symphony, and too long to say whether there's any actual resemblance, but it at least reminds me of listening to Henryk Górecki's third symphony if that helps. As ever, and as is suggested by the title, Ayers channels rather than plays or composes in the traditional sense, so all of these assorted strings and blowy things have the rhythm of the natural world, calls heard in a forest, the metronomic creak of wood as it dries or stones cooling as the storm breaks. Considering how so much of his work tends to be of a certain type, at least since The World is My Womb, it's impressive how Mr. Ayers never quite repeats himself.

Available here.