Author Archives: Jammo

5 Tewns Vol.22

5 tewns cover 12/04/2026

Read Time: 5 mins

Another week ends, another weekend begins, and I’m back with another collection of weekly music picks. It’s been a week of insane highs, in the form of heroes returning and the ongoing lows of continual war and misery beamed into every timeline— mine at least.

Stoker of daddy issues and all-around good egg Wes Baggaley, posted this excerpt from an interview with Shane Embury (Napalm Death) today, which perfectly encapsulates the mood:

“music means everything to people with nothing.”

So, let’s get on with it, shall we?

Boards of Canada – Tape 05

I don’t really know where to start with this one. I’m not even sure if it’s an actual song or just a promo clip, but yesterday, like many other middle-aged serotonin-depleted folk around the world, I spent over an hour repeatedly watching the video for Tape 05, with all the goosebumps and tears you’d expect from someone like me.

I believe strongly in the deification of music. You need to feel small sometimes. And as a long list of my heroes have already passed (James Brown, Andrew Weatherall, Brian Wilson, David Lynch, MF Doom, D’Angelo, Prince, and many more), I’m dangerously deprived of awe. Thank the gods for Boards of Canada

Over 3 minutes and 21 seconds, Tape 05 channels a spectrum of dread, reverence, and hope. If you read this blog, I know you’ve heard it, and I won’t blather on about the music, but even if we find ourselves teetering on the brink of the forthcoming apocalypse, I’m glad we finally have a soundtrack…

Wendy Eisenberg – The Ultraworld

It’s been a folk-heavy week, and one of the tracks that has been living rent-free in my head is this complex folk/prog/bossa nova-ish piece from Wendy Eisenberg. Drawn from her latest self-titled album, this stunning track seems to evoke Slapp Happy, Henry Cow, Jim O’Rourke, Lambchop, Caterina Valente, and a touch of Joanna Newsom all at once. The recording is honest and warm, and the arrangements are sublime. There are many stand-out tracks on the album, but this one is my favourite.

Youngsta – Plastic People

Though I’m undoubtedly the correct age, I never went to plastic people. I regret this now, but my natural aversion to London and the fact that I lived in Kernow at the time meant it never transpired. Back then, I liked to think of myself as a kind of Bumpkin ambassador for the sound — particularly dark garage — regularly playing tracks by Youngsta, Horsepower Productions, Reservoir Dogs Inc., and so on to uninterested locals and chatty posh students around Kernow, Devon and Somerset. So, when dubstep pioneer Youngsta’s homage to the seminal clubnight dropped into my inbox the other week, the dopamine rush was immense. The rhythms are tighter than my wallet, the blips full of strange alien soul, and the bass is a growling serpentine monster. Proper soundsystem music, I’ll have to pull the decks out of storage!

Amos – Vanish / Jai Yeng

Taken from Amos’ forthcoming album, Lost a Letter From The Alphabet on West Yorkshire’s Plague Records, Vanish/Jai Yeng is, as the title suggests, a song in two parts. A mad collage of drum rolls and waltzer-ready Trance synths bombards your ears; it’s big, proggy, and has the aura of a Northern English Cannibal Ox, with Amos delivering visceral lines about modern relationships and social media, “It’s like these people want you to know how much they’re in love, more than their partner.” Then, the turntable dies as do the trance synths, and Vanish transforms into Jai Yeng, a more classic-sounding Italian OST style beat. I won’t play sample spotter, but it’s a cracking album, and it comes out on International Workers’ Day/Beltane, so buy it!

Jake Thackray – The Remembrance

Inspired by this week’s incredible guest selection from Stone Club’s Matthew Shaw, I’ve been dutifully trawling my own folk collection, as mentioned — It’s been a while. June Tabor, Nick Drake, Pentangle, there are too many to choose from, but perhaps the most fitting for us right now is Jake Thackray’s The Remembrance. Though adorned with the beauty of his guitar playing, this song brilliantly portrays the cruel irony of pride and its weaponisation by political leaders in the pursuit of power. Regardless of political bent, they try to divide us and convince us that our imagined borders and our beliefs are ours alone and something worth dying for. Worth killing another human for. They want to trick us into fighting their wars.

Don’t get fooled.

Fight War, not wars. Jake Thackray puts it best in the final verse:

“Remember the shock of the ambuscade,
Remember the terrible fusillade,
And how we all looked up to see
The curious face of the enemy, 

Who was young, and shabby, and seemed to be
About as foreign as you or me…
I never did catch what the poor sod said
When he made sure we were dead.

This was a couple o’ shakes before
We got killed in the war.”

Respect in every aspect x

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Soundtrack your apocalypse / Boards of Canada return

It seems we have real confirmation of new Boards of Canada music. We, at fuzzy frontiers, are falling apart over this. Tears flowing, the whole nine yards. Apocalyptic visuals, epic strings, oodles of saturation. It sounds and looks amazing.

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Fuzzy Frontiers Guest Mix w/ Matthew Shaw (Stone Club)

Through standing stones and dolmens, across Bodmin Moor (Goon Brenn) to the Lizard Peninsula (an Lysardh), we beam over the Celtic sea to Dólmen Chã de Parada in Serra da Aboboreira, and over to Fuzz HQ (we’re all connected).

This week, we are more than thrilled to have a guest mix from Stone Club co-founder (alongside Lally MacBeth), megalithic Moog wizard, poet, and all-round lovely person Matthew Shaw. Join us on a magical trip through traditional and psychedelic folk music, featuring music from Bert Jansch, Hawkwind, Mark Fry, and many more. For more info about the amazing Stone Club, please visit https://stoneclub.rocks/

Tracklist

  1. Shirley Collins – Hal-an-Tow
  2. Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick – Lord of the Dance
  3. Mark Fry – The Witch
  4. Incredible String Band – Witches Hat
  5. John and Beverley Martin – Stormbringer
  6. Fotheringay – The Sea
  7. Dr Strangely Strange – Sign On My Mind
  8. Donovan – Catch the Wind
  9. Bert Jansch – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
  10. Vashti Bunyan – Diamond Day
  11. Broadside Hacks – Barbry Allen (Stone Club Remix)
  12. Brenda Wootton – The Mermaid
  13. Nick Drake – River Man
  14. Fairport Convention – She Moves Through The Fair
  15. Hawkwind – Hurry on Sundown
* Wherever possible, we link the track title to the song directly on Bandcamp. Please support the artist directly whenever you can.
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upsammy & Valentina Magaletti – Seismo

Valentina Magaletti - upsammy - Seismo

Read Time: 4 mins

The best collaborations tend to be the most unexpected. The ones with a real sense of contrast, friction, and resolve, and upsammy & Valentina Magaletti’s Seismo, for me, is undoubtedly one of those. It is, of course, no surprise to see drum alchemist, formidable solo artist, and serial collaborator Valentina Magaletti colluding with an artist, having lent her considerable talents to a seemingly endless list of projects, including her work with Nídia, Holy Tongue, Moin, Tomaga, Vanishing Twin, and many more.

upsammy, however, has always seemed a more hermetic artist. Her IDM-tinged hypermelodic sound has long ploughed its own furrow. Instantly recognisable, her power is the creation of music that is intentional, MIDI-centric, yet somehow natural-sounding and full of emotion, a feat that only a handful of artists have ever managed (see Boards of Canada, Kraftwerk, Cluster). This is not a path of collaborative effort, but of singular world-building, and although I’m a huge fan of both artists’ work, I have to confess I was concerned that any collaboration risked obscuring either upsammy’s sound or the raw improvisation that is at the core of Magaletti’s work. 

However, I’m happy to report that I was wrong. Terribly wrong. On Seismo, neither artist is rendered obscure; their powers combine Voltron-like to create a remarkable album that runs the gamut of modern electronic music, showcasing the restraint and design of upsammy’s soundworld and the playful jazz-rooted brilliance of Magaletti. 

The wryly titled opening track, It Comes to an End, does a great job of introducing the journey ahead. First, we hear the distant snares, cymbals, and floor toms of Magaletti’s kit, haunted Jazz, a cosmic storm approaching before cutting into an immaculate music-box like sequence that has become a signature sound of upsammy. This combination of dark and light gives the music a totally new edge, as the organic percussion collides, surrounds, and complements the clinical yet pitch-bent MIDI elements. It’s cute and unhinged in equal measure. 

Tracks like Hyperlocalize and Collide create a darker, ominous feel, twitching with nervous energy. The former is like the sound of a dial-up modem playing Jazz, its three-note piano leitmotif looming phantom-like over the fractured minimalist cadences of blips, toms, cropped vocal samples, and panning drums. The latter swaps the piano for bell whispers as the percussion becomes more frantic, more feral.

Mementoes– possibly my favourite track – balances upsammy’s go-slow arpeggios and microtextures with strange warped vocal edits, minimalist drum elements, chirps, and what sounds like a vibraphone. The melody is so heartbreaking, and the rhythmic elements so scattered and playful, that I teared up while listening to it. Serotonin depletion is a wonderful thing. 

Seismo closes in a smoky, melancholic haze, in the form of Some Unimaginable World, where textural tape-saturated pads float around a circular rhythmic base and pitched-down vocal flourishes which waft in and out like an unintelligible farewell, lost in the mist.

_ Valentina Magaletti & upsammy

A little while ago, my partner cooked Albaloo Polo (Persian Sour Cherry Rice) for me. I won’t lie, I was sceptical at first. Though I’m a huge fan of cherries, I didn’t want them anywhere near my rice. But the sweet-sour taste of the cherries, butting up against the other flavours, blew my tiny provincial mind. Now it’s all I can think about. Similarly, Seismo sees a coming together of two very different energies, which I was equally mistrusting of. But the restrained, detail-oriented sound of upsammy combines beautifully with the strange, fractured beauty of Magaletti’s work, and all I can do is hope for another plate.

Seismo is out now on PAN. 

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BOC-related excitement.

Though we’re trying to do actual work, it’s very hard to concentrate knowing that somewhere, out there, there might be a new Boards of Canada album in the works, being pressed? Who knows. In a half-decade of absolute dystopian misery, it would be fitting now, wouldn’t it? It seems as relevant a time as any to write a ridiculously lengthy essay about Boards of Canada, which we might just do in the near future. In the meantime, here’s a bunch of vids, old and new, that we’ve been raking over for the last few days.

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5 Tewns Vol.21

Read Time: 3 mins

Greetings pobl, I was away last week — chilling out in the hills around Guimarães, exploring the castles and hillforts. It was pretty magical. I hope you didn’t miss me too much. I missed you. Anyway, I’m back now and ready to shout once more into the digital abyss about five bits of music I think you should listen to. This week’s journey takes us through Moment of Truth’s peak-time disco, Multicast’s acid-drenched dub, Crooked Mouth’s mantric folk, dreampop from Deary, and chugging Arabic techno from Simo Cell and Abdullah Miniawy.

Deary – Seadbird

It’s a tough ask to pick a favourite from Deary’s debut album, but I’ll take a punt. Working somewhere on the edges of dreampop and shoegaze, the music is otherworldly and, at times, unashamedly anthemic, as is the case with Seabird: guitars soaked in reverb, great drums, and beautiful, ethereal vocals. You can’t ask for more.

Crooked Mouth – Jaunas Mėnulis

Taken from Crooked Mouth’s excellent Cosmic Folklore album, released last month, this synth-washed Lithuanian folk number — which means ‘new moon’ — is chock-full of mantras and magic. It brings out the bruxo in me and is destined for my Beltane playlist. Pagans Rejoice!

Multicast – Violet Voyeur (In Dub)

Drawn from Multicast’s forthcoming Wired Spaces album — culled from a limited run of demo CDRs given away in 1995 and 1996 via the band’s Oblique Recordings imprint, now lovingly re-released as a gorgeous limited tape via Noir Age — this spaced-out, acid-inflected dub drift has been living rent-free in my head for a couple of days now. It sounds great in the day — I’m listening to it as I write this, staring out at the sun-kissed mountains in the distance — but it takes on a darker feel at night. Value for money; stick it on whenever you like!

Simo Cell & Abdullah Miniawy – The Dala Effect

This belter from Simo Cell and Abdullah Miniawy’s latest album has been doing the rounds in our house for the last week. A masterclass in atmosphere and restraint. The haunting vocals do most of the heavy lifting, with the music circulating around breathy filtered chants and slowed-down, percolator-esque techno. It’s another one for the Beltane pile!

Moment of Truth – Lovin’ You is Killin’ Me (Tom Moulton Mix)

Since hearing this megalithic disco banger on the Superovo show this week, it will not leave my head. It has everything: gorgeous vocals, Schubert-esque piano flourishes, heartbreak, and Tom Moulton’s genius sprinkled all over it. This one could raise the dead.

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Return II the Egg w/Superovo – 09/04/2026

Superovo soundsystem are back to cure your psychic ills with more funk for your trunk. Cosmic Joy from George Duke and Bobby Lyle, classic disco from Moment of Truth and Instant Funk, bookended with the raw sexual funk of Betty Davis and Funkadelic. Music for your mind and your body.

Tracklist

  1. Betty Davis – You Won’t See Me In The Morning
  2. Con Funk Shun – (Let Me Put) Love On Your Mind
  3. Bootsy’s Rubber Band – Physical Love
  4. Fuzzy Haskins – Tangerine Green
  5. George Duke – The Beginning
  6. Donald Byrd – Makin’ It
  7. Instant Funk – I Know Where You’re Comin’ From
  8. Moment of Truth – Lovin’ You Is Killin’ Me (Tom Moulton Mix)
  9. Instant Funk – Hup Two, Hup Two (Get In Line, Say Get In Time)
  10. Harvey Mason – Phantazia
  11. Bernard Wright – We’re Just the Band
  12. Bobby Lyle – I Didn’t Know What Time It Was
  13. Donald Byrd – You Are The World
  14. Funkadelic – Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow
* Wherever possible, we link the track title to the song directly on Bandcamp. Please support the artist directly whenever you can.
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The Velvet Underground Live ’69

Back off my holibobs, the sun’s shining, and the YouTube algorithm presented me with this beautiful clip of the Velvet Underground performing I’m Waitin’ for the Man. It’s a thing of great subcultural beauty and has cheered me right up! I hope it does you.

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