One Key Magic – ‘One Key Magic’
‘One Key Magic’ is the second album by One Key Magic, a duo comprising of political geographer Michael Mulvihill and electronic producer Chris Tate (Score, d_rradio, Salisman). Following 2021’s ‘Worldy Noise and Electronic Atmospheres’, this new album continues the duo’s exploration of electronic phenomenon produced by RAF Fylingdales, a Ballistic Missile Early Warning station on the edge of the North York Moors. The album features field recordings by Ivor Novella award winner David de la Haye and is an immersive mix of electro-acoustic improvisation broken by moments of soaring melodic guitar. OKM is part of Mulvihill’s research looking at the clash between electronic music and electromagnetic military technologies for an Arts and Humanities Research Council project called ‘Turning Fylingdales Inside Out’ at Newcastle University.
Katie Gerardine O’Neill – ‘Into The Beyond’
‘Into the Beyond’ is the new album from Dublin based artist and musician Katie Gerardine O’Neill. Spanning 12 tracks composed using a variety of tape recorders, reel to reel archival tapes, digital software, and more, O’Neill presents a follow up to her mysterious existential musique-concrete meditation ‘Message Green’ by diving even deeper into the sublime mystery of the universe with ‘Into the Beyond’. Fans of O’Neill’s deeply textured ambient noise art will be pleased to hear this work develop further sonically on tracks such as ‘Matrimony’, ‘Stormy Wobble’, and epic string drenched ‘10 Voices’. O’Neill returns to wordier self-expression on tracks such as ‘Vacuum’ and ‘Sleeper’, made when O’Neill spent a day with a Roland MS-20 in now disappeared JaJa Studios. Epic ode to the void and the importance of self-compassion ‘Animal’, is a Broadcast-esque slow-core ballad championing overcoming strife through determination and wonder. The track ‘Talk’ sees O’Neill lean into a dubby trip-hop reflection on love and loss that displays her poppier abilities. The closing track ‘Vue de L’Intérieur’ reflects an ever-present theme in O’Neill’s work; an unbreakable hope, joy, and romantic fascination with all things mysterious and unknown.
Austin Cash – ‘Judsonia’
An evocative slice of ambient Americana, told as a hallucinatory radio drama, based on Austin’s experience of living and growing up in rural Arkansas. “I recorded Judsonia in a room which had one chair and one lamp. I had a notion that it would be sort of a radio drama that played through the speakers of a car which was passing through that small town in Arkansas. It came together over a period of a few months where I was collecting sounds and recordings which didn’t clearly relate to one another until it was time to assemble them. At that point, the various pieces fell together into one long piece that now makes me think about liminality. Being in between political boundaries, inside and outside, old and new, sleep and consciousness, town and country. When I made it, I was reflecting on several years (maybe a lifetime) of making decisions that were not in my best interest in one way or another. It’s not exactly an original thought, but it seemed like the essential quality of at least my own behavior was a persistent push and pull between self-preservation and self-sabotage. Sometimes we get to live in that space in the middle.” – Austin Cash
Halalchemists – ‘Annihilation Men’
Shadowy North East England noise-makers plunder and rework archive material from mid-2000s performances and a classic 1983 The New Blockaders show at Newcastle’s Morden Tower.
Ddrome – ‘Power City’
Jamie Davis is the drummer with Dublin improv group Zeropunkt. ‘Power City’ is his second outing as Ddrome for Cruel Nature, following 2021’s ‘Beyond The Thunderddrome’. ‘Power City sees a shift away from the long format tracks of its predecessor. The familiar drum/drone collision still being in evidence augmented at times with more space and the bare bones of melody.