5 Tewns Vol.9

It’s been a slow week on the blog front — sorry, but I’m not paid for this. The prodigal son’s turned up from Berlin, and we’re going to wander around the mountains while he waxes lyrical about Deutschrap and rating his favourite kebab shops. I still love you though, dear reader — so here’s my tippity-top five for this week. x

Winkles – Semi Stretches [A Sky Full of Numbers]

Long-time friend Winkles finally puts some of his music out — and let me tell you, it’s fucking great. The debut release from Manc/Tokyo imprint A Sky Full of Numbers rests somewhere between the hypnotic techno ambience of Astral Industries and Voices from the Lake, and the sci-fi wonk of the Radiophonic Workshop. Full review to come.

Automatic – Mercury [Stones Throw]

Taken from the band’s album Is It Now?, Mercury has everything this chubby dad could hope for: organ stabs, saturated breaks, lacklustre dreamy vocals drenched in reverb, and some intermittent breakdowns that would make the best Beck releases jealous. Avant-garde pop doesn’t get much better.

Ghost Dubs – Into the Mystic [Pressure]

Taken from the forthcoming Head to Head, Implosion by The Bug and Ghost Dubs, Into the Mystic is a masterclass in control from one of my favourite producers around at the moment. It’s deep, it’s hypnotic, it’s brooding, it’s modern dub perfection.

Misty In Roots – Man Kind

Continuing the mystic, misty theme, I’ve been revisiting this classic. To celebrate their 50th anniversary, the legendary Misty in Roots are reissuing their back catalogue, including ’79’s seminal Live at the Counter Eurovision. If you’ve never seen them live, you really should.

Sessa – Vale a Pena [Mexican Summer]

It’s Friday, life’s good. The beauty of autumn has truly set in here in the valley, and I’m standing on the veranda, watching the rain — the fog rolling in off the mountain range — shedding a tear to this beautiful slice of melancholic tropicalia from São Paulo’s Sessa. Life is beautiful sometimes.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Lifeworld

5 Tewns Vol.8

Read Time: 3 mins

Friends, Romans, Country Fans,

It’s been a stressful old week here, and I’ve not had a massive amount of time to enjoy new — or even old — music. Like any true fan, I’ve also been dedicating an awful lot of my time to basking in the light that is D’Angelo (RIP). Nonetheless, there are some other lovely bits of music I want to share with you — and, of course, a killer D’Angelo concert, which you will watch in its entirety!

Erang – Feelings While the world Ends [Self Released]

Melancholic, introspective dungeon synth from France, made with the express aim of helping us “to face the darkness and, if not overcome it, at least cope with it.”

Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan – Renewal and Regeneration [Castles In Space]

Heroic, time-bending synth business, taken from Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan’s sixth album on the ever-wonderful Castles in Space. This one gives me hope.

David Byrne – Everybody Laughs [Matador]

My littlest, Idris, was banging this out this morning on his little portable radio before school, and I can’t think of a better way to start my Friday than with the strange, Sesame Street–style skewed pop that David Byrne delights in here.

Robert Lax – Living in the Present [TAL]

I’ve been obsessing over this Zen-laced spoken-word album from minimalist poet Robert Lax since I was sent it by my mate, Dangerous Dave Kenney. Taken from an archive of recordings for the film, Why Should I Buy a Bed When All I Want Is Sleep? His prose is embellished with otherworldly field recordings and subtle instrumentation that sends me flying.

D’Angelo & The Vanguard – Live At North Sea Jazz

Since D’Angelo’s passing, I’ve been fervently watching videos of his live performances and obsessing over his brilliance — you know, like normal middle-aged men do. I missed out twice on seeing the master live, and now I’m filled with regret. All I can do now is watch this, and bask in the vibe. God bless D’Angelo.

Read our Jammos love letter to D’Angelo here

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Black Messiah — A Love Letter to D’Angelo

Read Time: 8 mins

Music comes and goes. There’s good music, there’s mediocre, and there’s bad. But if you live long enough, every so often something comes along that’s truly life-changing — music that shakes the foundations of who you thought you were; that drags you, kicking and screaming, downriver like an underwater current to somewhere you never imagined you’d end up.

Now, I write a lot about rave culture, acid house and other related bits on this blog, but in 1995, when D’Angelo released Brown Sugar, I was fourteen — full of teenage anger and pubescent malaise. My dad was in the army and, having just been kicked out of school, I was back living with my family in Gütersloh, Germany. My life there revolved mostly around MTV, and my taste in music was still coloured by the last three years in the Midlands: Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, PWEI, Faith No More, The Cure — mixed with the obvious classics: Hendrix, The Who, The Sex Pistols.

My mum, a scouse soul girl, was always banging out rare groove and early-’80s synth-soul classics — The Whispers, Alexander O’Neal, that kind of thing — but up to that point, R&B in its modern form hadn’t really appealed. Then, one night, watching MTV after a particularly nonsensical episode of Beavis and Butt-Head, the video for D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar came on.

Brown Sugar (1995)

In the opening scene, D’Angelo appears with an elderly man in a flat cap, riding an old New York–style lift. The man has that old-school jazz-cat vibe, like a character from a Spike Jonze joint, regaling the young lads with stories of conquests past:

“I’m not talking about that brown sugar you bought at the supermarket, brother. I’m talking about the real brown sugar.”

D’Angelo, all smiles, laughs and says, “A’ight, Pop,” before stepping out of the lift.

“Okay, see ya,” the old man replies in his out-of-time jazz slang, then adds:
“Hey, you goin’ to the same place I am? That’s alright then. Cool.”

A passing of the baton, perhaps. A time-bending moment. Is the old jazzer just another D’Angelo from another time? I don’t know, but I’m fourteen, and I’m locked in.

Brown Sugar begins — a smoky room, jazz clichés abound: red velvet curtains, you know the sort of thing. D’Angelo, slumped over a Wurlitzer piano, starts to play the opening hook. I can only describe what happened next as something approaching a teenage crush — I was smitten. His over-cool, cartoon-cat drawl:

“Brown Sugar, babe, I gets high off your love, don’t know how to behave.”

The sound of that piano, all tremolo, was transporting me. It dripped with soul, echoing a thousand heartbreaks in a thousand bourbon-stained dive bars, the acrid air thick with weed and perspiration.

Brown Sugar hit me like a factory reset — a massive U-turn from everything I’d ever heard before. Hearing D’Angelo for the first time was like taking a sandblaster to every preconceived notion I’d had about R&B and music in general. Listening to him alongside Hendrix opened a cosmic portal in my mind — a doorway into psychedelic soul, P-Funk and jazz that had been hidden from me until that moment.

A few months later, when D’Angelo played Later… with Jools Holland, it blew my tiny mind. That performance quickly spiralled into an obsession — not just with his music, but with the instruments themselves. Things began to fall into place. I felt the funk and wanted more. I changed the style and pace I drummed at and began discovering music I’d probably never have considered before. I found Portishead simply by trying to learn more about the Rhodes and Wurlitzer pianos that featured so heavily on Brown Sugar, which in turn led me to Lalo Schifrin and a host of others.

Most of Brown Sugar was produced with a kind of hip hop–meets–jazz aesthetic — live keys and guitars over 12-bit breakbeats — a sound that opened up a whole world of releases on labels like Acid Jazz and Talkin’ Loud, as well as the jazzier side of hip hop (Souls of Mischief, Pharcyde, A Tribe Called Quest, and of course Jazzmatazz). This wasn’t the first time I’d heard soul music; as I mentioned, I’d grown up listening to Marvin, Isaac and the later synth-soul contingent, and I was already into Prince in a big way. But there was something different about D’Angelo — a kind of lazy street soul, suave yet authentic. There was no big act, no costumes, no themes — just a lad in street clothes being the coolest, most talented motherfucker on the planet as if that was nothing.

Voodoo (2000)

Things went quiet for a bit. My record and CD collections grew in all directions — buckets of R&B, hip hop and jazz. By sixteen, I was hearing D’Angelo in everything that had a groove, from Sabres of Paradise to Coldcut. Obviously, now I’m a forty-four-year-old tubby father of two, I know most of that music shared samples or references. But back then, in the time before the internet, sitting in a damp bedroom in Ceredigion reading sleeve notes, it wasn’t so easy. By eighteen, I was mixing records on shitty Soundlab belt-drive turntables and had a tidy little collection of hip hop, house and early breakbeat. My taste had turned; I wanted something sleazy, funky and dark — and once again, like the Milk Tray man, D’Angelo appeared as if from nowhere, answering my prayers with 2000’s Voodoo.

Voodoo was the album of 2000 for me — gritty, sexy, jagged and dark. Opening with a short voodoo ritual that fades quickly into Playa Playa, with its staccato drums and bass stabs — all rigid and skeletal — Questlove playing his best J Dilla–style off-grid rhythms and D’Angelo’s vocals looming like heavy smoke. Devil’s Pie was mind-blowing, produced by DJ Premier; its rolling bassline lifted from Teddy Pendergrass and pitched down to a demonic growl. Voodoo had something for everyone. Send It On, a reworking of Kool and the Gang’s Sea of Tranquillity, had the diggers in a tizzy; The Root was funky and filthy; and the voyeuristic video for Untitled (How Does It Feel) left me with an awful lot of questions about my own sexuality– Naughty, naughty. Did I want him, or want to be him? Sadly, I never had the body of a Greek god, nor did D’Angelo return my emails. Moving on…

This tidal wave of unwanted sex appeal left D’Angelo self-conscious and uncomfortable with his fame — or, better put, what he felt he was now famous for. Worried he’d become just “that naked guy in the video”, he pretty much disappeared, and after a while turned to drink and drugs. By 2005, most people in his circle had left him behind, and things went dark for a while.

Black Messiah (2014)

Then suddenly, in 2014, as I found myself in a shit personal situation, like the aforementioned Milk Tray man, D’Angelo appeared again — this time with what I genuinely believe to be his greatest album, his What’s Going On — Black Messiah.

Black Messiah was darker, rockier and wiser than anything D’Angelo had released before. He dialled back the smooth, sexy jazz and replaced it with raw analogue guitar soul in the vein of early Sly and the Family Stone. It was unmistakably D’Angelo, but stained with the anger and frustration of its time; remember, this was the year Eric Garner was brutally murdered by NYPD officers. Black Messiah took all that anger and transmuted it into art. Track two, 1000 Deaths (my personal favourite), had me checking my stylus more than once — its distorted funk feels as though all its parts have been squeezed unceremoniously through a Big Muff (the guitar pedal — get your mind out of the gutter).

Though considerably darker than previous releases, such a shining light was D’Angelo that he couldn’t stay in one mood for long. A man whose soul was rooted in love could never not make something like Really Love — its plodding, warm bass and acoustic guitar and string cuts teasing your ears as D’Angelo croons:

“When you call my name, when you love me gently, when you’re walking near me, I’m in really love wit’ you.”

Black Messiah had an edge — a layer of grime that made it a perfect swansong for a man who’d flown too close to the sun, but it had hope built in too. Like Marvin, like Prince, D’Angelo shone a light on the world as it truly is — all its weird anger, sex, love, sadness and passion. I wish it could go on forever.

Tragically, on 14 October 2025, cancer took D’Angelo away from us. But I’ll forever be thankful for everything he made, and every road his music took me down.

RIP D’Angelo x

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5 Tewns Vol.7

Read Time: 2 mins

Another week passes by. It’s 28ºC here, and I’m still in shorts. I’m not complaining, but it’s a little odd. I suppose, as long as Taylor Swift can fly for 14 minutes on her private jet, it’s worth it if we never see the rain again. I mean, who needs fruit? Not me — I sustain myself entirely on cake.

Here’s this week’s tip-top five at our frontier outpost in the Portuguese mountains.

Galya Bisengalieva – Alash-Kala (The Bug Reflection) [one little independent]

Apocalyptic dub of the heaviest kind on this incendiary re-imagining of Galya Bisengalieva’s beautifully sparse original. Intense and brilliant.

LSD and the Search for God – This Time [Cellar Door Tapes]

An accidental click threw up this gorgeous, wobbly tape-head shoegaze band, and this tune in particular, which, like a mythical portal, transports this old man back to listening to Ride and Spacemen 3 on a Welsh mountainside, in overly sized trousers. Excellent band name too!

DJ Strawberry – Tekk tekk [Kool Switch Works]

Wile out, high-paced business from Germany’s DJ Strawberry. Complex, fidgety rhythms stutter and spray under a veil of dubbed-out sound effects. Something in this reminds me of Chris Carter’s TCR Productions (the breakbeat one, not the Throbbing Gristle one).

SDK – Ogygia [All City Records]

I wrote an in-depth review of this one here, so I won’t repeat myself, but it’s beautiful and has become my “staring at mountains” tune for the week.

TERM3 – Sha (this) [Termina]

Beautiful, broken dub experiments from Berlin’s Termina Label. I bought the 7″ a few years back and have been bumping it a lot of late.

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SDK – Going Back to the Unknown

Read Time: 5 mins

Going Back to the Unknown, is the result of a collaboration between post-punk and experimental music pioneer Stano (The Threat), whose anthology Content to Write in I Dine Weathercraft was released on All City’s archival label Allchival in 2018, and singer-songwriter David Kitt (also known as New Jackson).

The project began with a chance encounter that brought the two artists together in Kitt’s studio, where they experimented with layers of guitars, effects, drum machines, recordings and tape delays to create an EP of strange, smudged and frenetic music. It marks Stano’s return to vocal work and adds another dimension to the wonderfully broad output of David Kitt.

Across five tracks, Stano and Kitt preach with madman abandon in a broad church of sonic possibilities, rewarding the headphone listener at every turn. The opener, Too Long Everything Dublin, sets the scene: its scatterbrained rhythmics and waves of reverb-soaked guitars drift left to right across the sound picture. Stano’s gravelled voice laments “Ghost Ships, Ghost Life” over glitches and guitar vamps that recall the angular post-punk funk of bands like Orange Juice or XTC. There’s a faintly hauntological scent of the Bergerac theme about it. The bass pulses steadily, perhaps the only constant in a sea of angular licks and clicks. Clocking in at 14 minutes, Too Long Everything Dublin does what the great Kosmische tracks by bands like Neu! or Ashra do: it goes on and on like a cyclic mantra, a kind of musical edging that takes you to the verge of monotony, playing chicken with your brain, until around nine minutes in, it drops into an odd dub-funk hybrid. All tape echo and L–R pans, as Stano whispers, “Who’s gonna get it now?” the rhythm drifting away into layers of guitar and effects.

Something Missing recalls the sounds of Robert Hood, though chopped, dubbed and squeezed through a Basic Channel sausage machine, with drums played on a half-step. Stano narrates this psychic journey, telling us to “Always remember” — a visitor from another dimension, a sage through the mirrorglass of dub. His voice snakes through the tape delay, a serpentine spectre rising, distorting, fading away. Around four minutes in, everything changes; the grid shifts, and we find ourselves drowning in a world of cold Casio digi-dub, its loop slightly out of whack, disjointed and out of time, switching rhythms with utter disregard for any grid.

Ogygia ushers in a warmer, more melodic vision. Shades of early Autechre are deftly combined with a droning violin that’s as strange and discordant as it is beautiful. In keeping with Stano’s tape-recording backstory, I’ll make an educated guess that this is a field recording of sorts — perhaps some kind of folk music? It doesn’t feel as though it was recorded for the piece, right or wrong, the tonality and atonality of the violin merges beautifully with ghostly Eno-esque pads to create something rich and moving with a heart full of glitches.

Stano and David Kitt

The warm, nostalgia-tinged emotion doesn’t last long, as the unrelenting kick drum and rhythmic noise of Towns Being Ripped Apart start up. Stano’s vocals, in backwards-forwards formation, ask “How do you know where you are?”, its a good question. This is techno music at its most Krautrock — abandoned-warehouse incantations climbing endlessly like Sisyphus until they collapse into strange signals and drones. The journey is everything.

Going Back to the Unknown ends with Fireworks, where the previously mentioned Eno-esque pads return, hauntingly layered over a half-step rhythm of kicks and flanger-soaked snares. These glitch into strange polyrhythms, with the melody acting as the anchor for rhythmic flourishes. Over time, the pads transform into something altogether different — an organ, perhaps, some seaside optimism from a bygone era. Traces of another world, heard through one of Stano’s tape recorders. This eerie nostalgia evokes comparisons with compositions by Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange, or The Caretaker, but dragged kicking and screaming into a twisted acid future by Kitt.

This sense of timelessness runs like a river through Going Back to the Unknown. It’s neither nostalgic nor futuristic, instead flickering between worlds — like a Pepper’s Ghost illusion projected onto the present. At times, it feels politically charged; track titles such as Too Long Everything Dublin and Towns Being Ripped Apart seem to allude to the current state of affairs in Tech-Ireland™. Kitt, after all, has been very outspoken about the housing crisis and the government’s role in it. Whatever it is, there’s something in the sound of Going Back to the Unknown that reeks of frustration and discomfort, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out. Let’s hope they make a follow-up.

Going Back to the Unknown is released on 6 October 2025 via All City.

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5 Tewns Vol.6

Read Time: 2 mins

Aye aye chicken pie! Pinch punch, first Friday of the month? I dunno, here’s a little rundown of my favourite bits this last week…

Rafeal Toral – Measurement of Noise

My absolute favourite track from Rafael Toral’s 2020 album Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance: soft, undulating drones that grow strange and sinister.

Mick Harvey – We Had an Island

I went to see Mick Harvey last night at Amarante Cine-Teatro. He was every bit as excellent as I had hoped and played a stunning version of this track from last year’s Five Ways to Say Goodbye on Mute Records. I would have loved to stick around and bend the poor man’s ear, but alas, I have children to care for—woe is me.

Wagon Christ – Can’t Stop [Don’t Stop]

The inimitable Kernow legend that is Luke Vibert returns under his Wagon Christ moniker for another fun-packed smorgasbord of classic samples, breaks, soundtrack snippets, vocal cuts, and sample-clearance headaches. Also over the moon to see more beautiful artwork by Celyn Brazier

Music Liberation Front Sweden – Watson is in Heaven now

I stumbled across this track by accident this afternoon, and I’m so glad I did—gorgeous, spiralling Kosmik brilliance.

BEAK> – Brean Down (Live at Zebulon)

Absolutely belting live version of “Brean Down” from the group’s newly released Live at Zebulon, Los Angeles, April 2nd 2025.

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Total Recall: The Sabres of Paradise – Haunted Dancehall

Cover of haunted dancehall by sabres of paradise, superimposed on an image of mars

Read Time: 6 mins

Originally released in 1994, the Sabres’ follow-up to the previous year’s debut, Sabresonic, reached No. 57 in the UK album charts — significantly lower than its predecessor. However, I would argue it’s the best album they ever released. Formed as a three-piece (Andrew Weatherall, Jagz Kooner, Gary Burns) in 1992, The Sabres of Paradise emerged from the Sabresonic warehouse parties. While ’93’s aptly titled Sabresonic was undoubtedly a brilliant document of rave hedonism and smoked-out after-parties, its follow-up contrasted hugely, sounding like an ice-spine comedown: a dry tongue on a beer can full of cigarette butts, The Ipcress Files, or some weird ’70s British paranormal horror playing on a television set with a broken cathode. And that, dear reader, is precisely my cup of tea.

Haunted Dancehall is the group’s Ghost Town: a brilliant reflection of 1994 in all its weirdness. If 1988 was our second Summer of Love, then 1994 was its first of many breakups. A year when the twelve victims of Fred and Rose West were uncovered, and when we got another glimpse of the British government’s authoritarian bent with the introduction of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act — a blunt instrument the state and police would later use to crush the free party scene, forcing most dance music back into government-taxable clubs while displacing and criminalising the entire Traveller culture. More than most records, Haunted Dancehall doesn’t just reflect its time in space; it distils it into a fully fledged psychogeographical experience.

Press shot of the Sabres of Paradise, left to right: Jagz Kooner, Andrew Weatherall, Gary Burns

The Sabres of Paradise

Haunted Dancehall opens with “Bubble and Slide,” where effervescent rhythms modulate under an ambient collage of long, dreamy pads and — you guessed it — slide guitar, setting the scene for a very London-centric sci-fi spaghetti western of an album. Westworld for the acid generation. It transitions through metallic chops and effects into “Bubble and Slide II,” where robotic mid-tempo breakbeats and 808 bongos create a kind of cybernetic funk that contrasts brilliantly with soft Rhodes samples — reminiscent of the keys in Aquatic Ambience from Nintendo’s “Donkey Kong Country”. There are precursors to early Big Beat here, but darker and more textured.

“The Duke of Earlsfield” fuses classic digidub sensibilities with a sleazy double bass. It’s not far from contemporaries like Red Snapper until about two minutes in, when a weird marimba-like sample takes things in a completely different direction: unhinged, bizarre, eventually descending into industrial bass distortions and phasing drum breaks that give the track a fever-dream quality.

“Flight Path Estate” draws on minimal Kosmische Musik, its echoic percussion creating a cerebral march over looping arpeggios, its perpetual rhythm taking precedence in Nyabinghi fashion. Although a distinctly unfashionable term, Planet D seems to be a literal translation of Trip Hop: dusty, pitched-down Rhodes stabs hang like David Lynch’s red velvet curtains over distorted breaks and intermittent industrial noises. A perfect soundtrack to the cheap squidgy-black Ceredigion couch lockdowns of my youth.

As the smoke clears, the heads-down vibe is replaced with the chest-puffing Balearic dancehall-centred dub of “Wilmot,” its skanking hi-hats, snare rolls, and deep bass carrying you off to some mystic island. The horn sample from calypso legend Wilmoth Houdini’s love letter, Black but Sweet, drifts in. At the risk of sounding old, you won’t find bliss like this today.

“Tow Truck” marries rolling bass, breakbeats, Hammond stabs, and a surf-sleaze guitar line that would make John Barry blush. Delayed timbales punctuate the rhythm as sirens wail. If you listen to it three times, surrounded by candles, Raymond Burr appears.

“Theme” continues the cop-show/spy-movie vibe to its logical conclusion. A wall of wah guitars, heavy breaks, percussion drops, and rising horns create a logical callback to early work on Flowered Up’s seminal Weekender, with vapours of 23 Skidoo’s F.U.G.I. I spent many a teenage afternoon in Borth drumming along to this.

On “Theme 4,” the Sabres discard the cop-show stylings altogether, thrusting the listener into a clinical futurist environment where robotic bleeps drip like digital honey over FM bass drops and ghostly triads. This thread continues in “Return to Planet D,” its alien funk laden with chirps, Solinas, and time-stretched elements, sounding more like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop than anything in clubland.

Back in ’94, I had no frame of reference for the kind of music presented in “The Ballad of Nicky McGuire.” It changed everything for me. As a spotty-faced drummer, I could always get on board with Jungle or Hardcore, but “electro? Drum machines? No mate!” Up to that point, I had no idea machines could have so much soul — those tinny hats and sharp kicks driving soberly, like Crockett through Miami under that soft, whining synth line. The way everything builds on itself incrementally blew my tiny mind and changed my world forever.

“Jacob Street: 7AM” fills the air with a sense of doom. Odd, caged bird sounds create a rhythm over circulating bass and synths, like Primal Scream on a digital comedown — weird and hauntological. But just as almost all hope is lost and the icy comedown takes over, optimism returns with “Chapel Street Market 9AM,” where everything oscillates. Waves of pads float like cumulus as melodies build and phase in and out. My jaw hurts even thinking about it.

Haunted Dancehall closes with its title track, where ill-founded optimism is jarringly replaced with John Carpenter-style horror. Arpeggios climb in quick succession over throbbing distorted bass — an education in music for me.

I was 13 when Haunted Dancehall hit the shelves of my local Woolworths, more indie-kid than raver. I was deep into the Stone Roses, the Mondays, Flowered Up, and some of the floppy-fringed Camden-crawl rakes (I’m looking at you, Suede). Most of my musical education came from the cassettes my art teacher used to play during class, and I doubt I could tell the difference between Ebeneezer Goode and Everybody in the Place. I picked up Haunted Dancehall purely because I liked the cover and wrongly assumed it was some cool, sleazy indie band. A life-changing punt that has served me well for the last 31 years — and one I’ll forever be thankful for.

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5 Tewns: Vol.5

Read Time: 2 mins

Hello again — it’s been a long time (I shouldn’t have left you, without a dope beat to step to). So here are my five tippedy-top tunes for this week:

Cerys Hafana – Carol Mynydddog

Physically, I’m sitting in a town in northern Portugal, on the veranda, staring out at the Marão mountain range in the distance, tears streaming down my face. Spiritually, I’m flying over Borth to Talybont. Saudade? Hiraeth? I tell myself Ceredigion is everywhere. I don’t know, but I wish my Cymraeg were better. Nonetheless, I can’t think of another artist who has moved me to tears more than Cerys Hafana. Heart-wrenchingly beautiful, ‘Sad Welsh Harp Pop’.

DJ Haram – Voyeur

Wild, industrial, and very naughty. If you aren’t moving to this, go see a doctor — you might well be dead.

Horse Lords & Arnold Dreyblatt – Advance

The first track taken from the forthcoming FRKWYS Vol. 18: Extended Field is truly spectacular: ever-growing astral harmonics that will set up your day nicely. It does mine, anyway. I’m looking forward to the full release.

Tin Man – Lucidité

Taken from Tin Man’s 2023 album, Arles on Hamburg label Bureau B, this luscious dollop of acido-tranquillo has been following me around all week and I’m all the better for it.

Dom Salvador & Abolição – Hei! Você

Not a new one, but sometimes the classics are just unbeatable. As my knowledge of Portuguese grows, so does my love for the Brazilian music I’ve been listening to all these years. Taken from 1971’s Som, Sangue e Raça, Hei! Você is a thing of unfaltering beauty.

Cheers my lovers!

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