MOLLY NILSSON - 'UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES'

Formats

• LSSN097 - LP

  5061041820533

• LSSN097CD - CD

  5061041820540

Details

**BLACK VINYL REPRESS** Un-American Activities is the 11th Studio album by Molly Nilsson. Written and recorded entirely on location in California at the former home of writer, poet and early opponent of the National Socialist regime in 1930s Germany, Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta. An album of experimentation, genre-mashing and, above it all, Nilsson’s instantly recognisable melodic skill and empathy, it continues the songwriter’s explorations of power, freedom, oppression and its opposing force, a love unbound. After accepting an artist residency as part of the Villa Aurora program, Nilsson began work crafting a new album from scratch in a new environment, afforded the freedom, space and time to challenge her practice and take her music into new territory. The resulting work, Un-American Activities, is a love note not only to the artist who was among the very first to be declared an “enemy of the state” by the Nazi regime but also to both the eternal struggle he fought and the human spirit that pervades all of Nilsson’s best work. It is also a double-pointed poison pen letter: a critique of the new forms of oppression wielded by her temporary adopted country of the USA but also an acknowledgement of the promise it always offers but never fulfils. Along with the novel use of colour and photography in the artwork for Un-American Activities, there are swathes of new techniques, genres and timbres new to Molly Nilsson’s music in evidence, 16 years into her music career. On Jackboots Return is an icicle-cold New Beat track that deals directly with the current situation in Germany and the resurgent Nazi-affiliated AfD. The question the song asks is, what’s the timeframe we’re talking about? Is this the 30s, or somewhere a lot closer to home? The beat is picked up on The Communist Party, Nilsson’s deepest bow to House music, evoking the early 90s Rave pioneers, Belgian 80s music and Vogue-era Madonna. Here the lyrics are direct quotes from the McCarthy-era, anti-Communist pamphlet 100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A. The Beauty Of The Duty does to pounding Electro what Nilsson’s last album Extreme did to Metal: subsume it into the Molly Nilsson aesthetic. It goes hard. While Un-American Activities finds Nilsson experimenting, creating instinctive music on a first-thought-best- thought basis there are still “classic” Molly moments liberally spread throughout. Excalibur feels like the Molly of old, an absolute star of a chorus refrain smudged with the vaseline of fuzz and hope, Red Telephone is wide-eyed, slathered in reverb and chorus effects, distorted with soaring melody, a heart-tugger that tugs the body upwards to the heavens with each evolving wave. Glistening digital tones wash through the album, providing a Y2K etherealness to Nilsson’s audacious Stars and Stripes reference to Wetcheeks. Perhaps the album’s standout, however, is Palestine (Somewhere Over The Rainbow), which is suffuse with empathy, solidarity and, in referencing the classic socialist-penned canon song from The Wizard Of Oz, speaks directly to the tradition of fighting oppression with full hearts of hope.

Tracks

1. Prologue - Proud Destiny
2. Excalibur
3. Palestine
4. Jackboots Return
5. Wetcheeks
6. Red Telephone
7. Naming Names
8. The Communist Party
9. The Beauty Of The Duty
10. Point Doom

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RURAL FRANCE - 'SLOTHS'

Formats

• SSH061P - LP (COLOURED)

  820200154678

Details

**INDIES ONLY PURPLE VINYL**Much like the duo’s music, the story of Rural France is both mundane and magical. Tom Brown (also of transatlantic janglepunks Teenage Tom Petties) and Rob Fawkes moved to London in their mid-twenties. Despite living under the same roof, they never picked up a guitar – except for one drunken, failed attempt at writing a Spoon song (“Big Chops” …don’t ask). It was only after both separately relocating to Wiltshire and starting families that they began assembling songs as a way of meeting up. Tom had amassed a pile of sprightly slacker jams that were calling out for Fawkes’ messily melodic guitar lines. Rural France was born. After a debut album on their hero, ex-Lemonhead Nic Dalton’s Half-a-Cow Records, they retreated to a garage to record their next two albums: RF (2021) and Exacamondo! (2024), both released on much-respected jangle label Meritorio Records. Despite being lo-fi in the truest GbV sense, both records were warmly received by the DIY indie blogosphere, with their short, scrappy, but supremely melodic songs landing on numerous AOTY lists. RF even won Album of the Year at Janglepop Hub. Raven Sings The Blues probably summed up the sound best: “With drunken visions of Beach Boys harmonies playing in the back of their heads and hooks that consume Teenage Fanclub cheeriness with the same beautiful brevity that drives Tony Molina, the pair have knocked out eleven rumpled classics.” Album four, SLOTHS, arrives via Meritorio Records and Safe Suburban Home Records on 08/05, and is a slightly different beast. For one, it’s been mixed by a professional – Rob Slater (Westside Cowboy, Yard Act, Thank) – giving the guitars and drums room to breathe. It’s easily their most high-fidelity record to date. It’s also their jangliest, most baroque and thoughtful album yet. But alongside added organ, horns and mellotron – and drums from Tom’s Teenage Tom Petties bandmate Jeff Hamm – it still retains the buzzes, hums and little freak-outs that stick to the duo’s original “Pavement playing Teenage Fanclub” mission statement. “Rob and I both wanted to do something a little slower and a little more melancholy,” says Tom. “We resisted our usual urge to hit the distortion pedal and made something that fitted where we are now and celebrates how we still listen to Meatloaf when we get drunk.” SLOTHS is also the most thematically consistent Rural France record to date. While it wouldn’t be right to call it grown-up, it definitely has homeowners’ insurance. From the Silver Jews-esque Americana of “Slab” and mid-life rallying cry of “Thirty Seven Forever”, to the horn-embossed loser anthem “Lonely Heart Pyramid Scheme,” the songs celebrate (and rail against) the absurdities of getting older, forming a band in your thirties, and the strange phenomenon of time passing. Because no matter how slow you move, everything else goes fast. SLOTHS.

Tracks

1. Slab 2. Thirty-Seven Forever 3. How You Gonna Get Even 4. Someone You Forgot 5. Lonely Heart Pyramid Scheme 6. Soulseeker 7. Jukebox Weepie 8. Casio 9. High Hopes (Ballad of Rural France) 10. Electrical Tape

Press

RIYL: Teenage Fanclub, Pavement, Silver Jews, GBV...

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TOMO KATSURADA - 'DREAM OF THE EGG'

Formats

• FDR02 - 10"

  N/A

Details

"Dream of the Egg" is the debut solo album by Tomo Katsurada, known for his work with the Japanese psychedelic band Kikagaku Moyo. This project is a unique fusion of music and visual art, inspired by the Japanese 1920s children's book “Yume No Tamago (Dream of the Egg)”. It reveals a deeply personal journey, reflecting Tomo's dreams and the numerous rebirths experienced in 2024—a year marked by profound new beginnings in every facet of his life. This mini album was driven by a passion for raw and immediate expression. Every song was crafted and recorded with only the materials available to him at the time, embracing an organic and handmade atmosphere. By eschewing rhythm clicks and standard instrumental tunings, a spontaneous sound emerged, capturing the essence of both uncertainty and immediacy. Adding to this distinctive sonic landscape, guest musician Jonny Nash (UK) contributed ethereal guitar sounds on the first and final tracks, enriching the record's dream-like quality.

Tracks

1. Moshimo 2. Zen Bungalow 3. Interlude 4. Inner Garden 5. Dream Of The Egg

Press

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GUTTERSNIPE - 'EXTINCTION BURST!'

Formats

• LSSN103 - LP

  5061041822032

Details

Extinction Burst! is the new invocation in album-form by Guttersnipe, Leeds’ premier and pre-eminent XFCER (XFCER: Xenofeminist crisis-energy rock)* duo. Slamming at full speed to multi-dimensional oblivion, Extinction Burst is the most full, hi-definition lurid dream-mare yet spewed out by Uroceras Gigas & Tipula Confusa. Engineered and mixed by Ross Halden at Hohm Studio in Bradford and mastered by Rashad Becker, Extinction Burst follows 2018’s My Mother The Vent, which garnered universal critical adoration. Nevertheless, this long-awaited follow up is more extreme: it is wildness beyond reason, splitting new tears in the reality gauze, ultimate hallucination through sound ecstasy. 2026’s Guttersnipe are evolved, mutated by 8 years of touring together and with the labyrinthine network of groups both Guttersnipe members are involved with - Tristwch Y Fenywod, Nape Neck, Petronn Sphene, Yexxen to name a few. On Extinction Burst, as with previous material, the duo are heavily augmented with technology. Tipula Confusa's drum kit triggers chasm-causing synth pulses with thumping low end attack.. Strafing from all over the stereo field the constant shatter of the cymbals and toms feel like Sunny Murray or Rashied Ali in full flight during a John Coltrane session in 1967. Uroceras Gigas’s guitar + synth storm is by-now similarly an instantly recognised tool kit in underground music. Switching from screeching guitar atonality to intricate riffs from the black metal/Voivod hinterland to ultra-distorted synth meltdown, it’s an utterly overwhelming, essential and vital pouring-out of the full emotional spectrum. Both artists vocalise, ecstatic and primal, drawn out or yelped in pain or pleasure or panic. Alive On Tuesday begins with some of the only space on Extinction Burst!. Digital crackles and tight-delays blow out into a full-throttled death-dive into sweet opaqueness, offset by the duo’s vocals. There’s a popular believe that Guttersnipe is chaos, but over 9 mins here the group are clinical in their control of the simulated entropy. Mincing while the Maelstrom Churns’s guitar is modulated into jagged atonal atonement, duetting with the virtuoso drum patterns before it thuds into gear at quadruple the speed. Threads Of Radical Unaliveness veers close to the extreme Metal influences with blast beats and guttural vocalisations until the track exhausts itself into unaliveness. Keep Honking summons a demonic digital panic, with the duo re-incarnating in real time as haunted versions of themselves, almost translating the lurid, ultra vivid, simultaneous hell+heaven of being alive in this dimension. Primordial Invagination harnesses No Wave’s dissension of normality before the structured collapse of Skräckblandad Förtjusning, in which Tipula Confusa’s accelerating drums simulate a bouncing barrel of brimstone descending into a primordial gunky ooze, a respite in the middle before the record splutters to a stuttering finale, both members’ vocals out there in the neon realness, alive with crisis energy. There is nothing on this cursed earth like Guttersnipe. For over 10 years they have whirled in a wiggliness both woebegone and wonderstruck on a mission of radical mutant exaltation using rock music weaponry loaded with a queer hysterical ammunition to rupture the fabric of the known Rock universe and unleash a tendril-soft hallucinatory violence; thrumming with the bracing vividness of insect bodies, crazed with alien synaesthetic emotions, harnessing jagged excoriating illogic as a face meltingly snazzy affront to redundant macho mediocrity with the hope to break minds, squeeze hearts, explode pelvises and maybe even reset the parameters of reality.

Tracks

1. Alive On Tuesday 2. Mincing while the Maelstrom Churns 3. Threads Of Radical Unaliveness 4. Keep Honking! We're Stuck In A Memetic Bottleneck 5. Primordial Invagination 6. Skr?ckblandad F?rtjusning

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JOHN HAYCOCK - 'WHAT REMAINS'

Formats

• RR003 - LP

  5061041822360

Details

‘What Remains’ is the new album from John Haycock featuring Daniel Bridgwood Hill and produced by resonance founders Matthew Williams and Adam Kahan, mastered in Berlin by Arnold Kasar. It’s a long way from its West African origins, but John Haycock’s relationship with the 24 stringed Kora began by hearing it on Market Street - Manchester city centre’s bustling/chaotic heaven/hell. ‘You couldn’t miss it bouncing across the buildings. It had a Pied Piper effect. It drew people in, creating this bubble of tranquillity and somehow separating you from the consumerist chaos of the city centre’. The busker (if we can rather reductively call him that) crafting this compelling quietude was Gambian griot and kora master, Jali Nyonkoling Kuyateh - playing a near 100 year-old instrument handed down through his family. Transfixed, John struck up a conversation and persuaded an initially sceptical Jali that this late teen was serious in wanting to learn the instrument. John immersed himself in the doubled bridged harp/lute hybrid. Jali’s mesmeric Mancunian street corner masterclass made him see its potential. During 15 years of practice, he dreamed of combining the instrument with electronic and woodwind elements. Informed also by Kora masters like Toumani Diabaté and Ballaké Sissoko (‘they're just on another level’) he has integrated the sound into his own hybrid ambient, minimalist and spiritual jazz fusion. ‘I'm influenced by people outside of the West African tradition of the instrument too. Tony Scott, Wacław Zimpel, Alice Coltrane, Alabaster DePlume, Nico Georis - people working with tone, repetition, and a kind of meditative quality. Also Domenique Dumont. Nils Frahm’s approach is entirely different but has had an equally great impact on me'. It’s a contemplative and ethereal sound with added dub-inflections which is enhanced in live performance - where the mix is always fresh and fluid. There are no computers involved and any emerging sequences are either hand played or are effects generated analog loops. There’s a feeling of the ancient and mysterious Popol Vuh of In Den Garten Pharaos. Perhaps Tangerine Dream at their most serene, but an otherworldliness emerges from the combination of light, sound and setting which has its own dimension. ‘What Remains’ features Daniel Bridgwood Hill and was produced by resonance founders Matthew Williams and Adam Kahan. It was recorded live at Hope Baptist Chapel in Hebden Bridge in 2023, and alongside the kora itself, features clarinet, violin, guitar and electronics. The recording was then ‘worldized’ at Todmorden Unitarian Church. This is a a term coined by acclaimed cinematic sound designer, Walter Murch - meaning to play a previously recorded sound through loudspeakers in a second real world setting, re-recording the output though multiple carefully placed microphones in order to capture the natural reverberation and acoustic architecture of secondary live spaces. The release also incorporates ‘worldized’ performance elements from Wainsgate Chapel, Hebden Bridge, The Portico Library in Manchester and the former Post Office sorting house in Todmorden. It’s an ongoing exploration which will always evolve. The album is the culmination of 3 years of events and experimentation - folding in John’s live musical reactions to the refracted light and natural reverb within the spaces themselves. Everything is in flux. Gates are always open. John’s debut release was "Honey Mango // In a Bloopy Mood" a digital EP with an accompanying 7 inch. This was supported by the Steve Reid Foundation and crafted in collaboration with Emanative and Sarathy Korwar. Next came "Didymus" , a collaboration with former Cinematic Orchestra member John Ellis, released on Limefield Records. His first solo LP, "Dorian Portrait” was released on Second Thoughts Records in March 2023. ‘For me it’s about reacting to what's happening around me. When I was developing the music, it was very much in response to early shows where light and the refractions in particular spaces got me thinking: what happens if you refract sound in the same way? The idea became about splitting and spreading the music itself - letting it move across the stereo field in a way which mirrors the visual. It's less about imposing something and more about reacting to the space, the people in it and what's already there’. Thinking about the power of particular places and their impact on the music, John adds, ‘I was born in Manchester but found my home in the Calder Valley where many of the recordings were made. I’d like to think the music somehow reflects a particular mindset here. 'This record really comes out of being in this area. It's about moving here and just being receptive to what I'm feeling around me - the people, the ideas, the environment’. Central to the project are Matthew and Adam - founders of the resonance live shows and resonance recordings label. Matthew studied music from a young age at school and college, attending the same Popular Music and Recording degree in Salford as did John Haycock, although in its inaugural year. He has worked as a composer, sound engineer and producer, writing TV, film and theatre music. On the other hand, Adam has dived in and out of the rave scene from the early noughties, originally working for a dnb promoter at university. He lived in Berlin and then in London before settling in West Yorkshire, working in theatrical institutions as an Art Director and Designer, such as the Old Vic and National Theatre. He plays the guitar, and hosted radio shows over the past decade, dj’s his unique sound journeys mostly at ambient music gatherings. John Haycock's last album, Dorian Portrait, garnered praise and support from BBC 6 Music’s Maryanne Hobbs, Manchester DJ’s Luke Una and Ruf Dug - along with open-minded NTS Radio adventurer, Ross Allen. Luke himself describes it as ‘an extraordinary moment of astral perfection’. What Remains is a culmination of 3 years of live performances and re-recording in some of the most interesting acoustic spaces in West Yorkshire. As a nod to the 1970s concept album, it is a heartfelt journey through acoustic performance, aural architecture, analog electronics and innovative recording techniques blended into a continuous sonic story. An album both highly contemporary and deeply rooted in the history and mysticism of the Calder Valley.

Tracks

1. Tuning 2. resonance 3. Solstice 4. Flow State Part 1 5. Flow State Part 2 6. Seraph 7. Supra Infra 8. Embers

Press

?An extraordinary moment of astral perfection? - Luke Una on John Haycock's Dorian Portrait.

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