...circle the wagons...

I take photographs, often using

[mr-ig]

On the Bardots

As it happens, I recently turned up a small pile of diaries from the nineties, stuffed into a holdall with my old ZX Spectrum, some scart leads and a couple of pink plastic kazoos. By that time, I was, mercifully, beyond documenting my romantic woes in gruesome detail, but I hadn't yet got out of the habit of writing hysterical notes about gigs I'd been to and earnestly noting down a weekly playlist.

As I adjusted to my twenties, that weekly diet was somewhat lacking in fresh ingredients. Random example from 1991: Ministry, God, Terminal Cheesecake, Godflesh, Codeine, Swans, Wedding Present. Gives me a touch of indigestion just thinking about it. It was about to change. Random example from 1993: Insides, Shara Nelson, Metalheads, Seefeel, Orbital. A lightening of the mood, a broadening of the palette, and a great many guitar bands would not survive the cull. One guitar band in particular, however, would still be appearing in my diary's weekly hit parade even in 1997, the last year that I kept.

For a brief moment, the Bardots were the music press darlings of cliché. Entirely unafraid of pomposity and pretentiousness, they were tailor-made for the Melody Maker of the time, and for an indie scene swooning to Suede and hungry for some post-Madchester glamour. They were rewarded with Single of the Week a couple of times, first for the chiming cascade of Pretty O and then for the barbed dream-pop of Shallow. A knack for flowing melody and extravagant melodrama was noted and would persist. They received a full-page interview, a high-profile live review.

My memory suggests that the live review sounded a somewhat disappointed note, complaining of the band's reluctance to engage with its audience, suggesting that success would require a greater generosity of spirit towards paying punters. Honestly, you couldn't have found a way to make them sound like a more perfect fit: for several years, I'd steadfastly (and yes, absurdly) refused to applaud bands, on the grounds that they ought to know whether they were any good or not without my assistance. I didn't want to be engaged with, thank you kindly, and would be delighted to accept the invitation to stand there with my arms folded looking unimpressed in return.

Which I duly did, at the Concorde on Brighton seafront on Wednesday 16th September 1992. "Pristine pop, for once, for always" says my uncharacteristically pithy diary entry. My recollection is that the audience comprised me and another bloke; we had a friendly chat, it would've seemed rude not to. The Bardots delivered their set shrouded in projections of red roses and razor blades, and they did indeed seem largely indifferent to our presence. Not hard to ignore an audience of two, it's true.

To my mind, falling in love with a new band requires that they tick precisely the right number of boxes. Too few and it's all awkward silences, nothing in common; too many and there's no nervous tension to play with. I fell in love. Tried not to show it too much, obviously.

The belief that everyone else would come to love them too has not weathered well. I've tried, God knows. I'm still trying, evidently. A comprehensive history of the band, having detailed its roots at the University of East Anglia and the lightly fey stylings of early material and that initial music press interest, would inevitably hang much upon the fact that Cheree Records went bust at the point of releasing debut album Eye Baby, and that the album therefore received almost none of the promotional fanfare that it deserved. Disastrous timing, cruel fate. We'll never know what might've happened in different circumstances, but I feel that the argument in favour of thwarted superstardom would be on more solid ground if a single bastard one of the countless people upon whom I've foisted the Bardots over the years had shown even the merest interest.

No matter. Perhaps I wouldn't hold them so dear if I'd had to share them. In truth, I'm not wholly convinced about selling Eye Baby to you as some kind of lost masterpiece: it's got a rather one-size-fits-all production, cavernous and cloudy, which doesn't necessarily do favours for its best songs. Those best songs fill up most of the second half and they're remarkable, to my ears: Gloriole, for example, is a hot mess of a thing, constantly stumbling and stalling and then launching itself off again and only just making it over the two minute mark. Caterina begins in a similar vein before slowing down to admire its own elaborate swirls of guitar. The tortured waltz of Obscenity Thing has always been the one for me, descending as it does into an oddly dubby, lightly flagellating middle section before reviving its chorus for one last turn around the dancefloor. It's absurd, and complicated, and ambitious, and sublime. It's everything I wanted indie pop to want to be. Still do.

That first clutch of records gives the impression of a band with songs to burn, yet without a really clear idea of how those songs ought to sound. That never encumbered them live, but the studio can be a treacherous place: even their sole Peel session leaves the sense that the very best versions of these songs stayed in their writers' imaginations. There's no absence of execution: Neil and Steve Cox were a lithe, fluent rhythm section; guitarists Andy Murphy and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, brother of Adorable's Pete Fij, never let pyrotechnics obscure the tunes; smartly-dressed frontman Simon Dunford had a gift for delivering his lyrics as if they were far simpler, and far more innocent, than closer inspection revealed. I saw them twice more, in venues of diminishing size, and they huddled together like an insular little gang before they took the stage. Wagons circled, like they were talking about us, judging us. I couldn't have loved them more.

Bar interim single We Are Fiasco - a delightfully celebratory take on their predicament - they disappeared from sight for the best part of three years. The album which eventually resulted, V-Neck, is one that I cherish deeply…and perhaps all the more for the fact that it's always existed in a total vacuum. The Bardots were, apparently, no more by that point, just a line in their label's newsletter to announce that they'd packed it in. Then and now, I'm not sure that I've ever heard any opinion of that record other than my own. No press releases, no interviews, no reviews, nothing. It's a funny place for one of your favourite albums to sit. Over the years, I've weighed every nuance of those songs, rejoiced in every revelation, dissected every flaw, and it's almost as if it belongs only to the six of us, them and me.

With one line-up change - Yves Altana replacing Andy Murphy on guitar - and some evident stock-taking, the Bardots finally had a sound worthy of their songs. Or mostly, at any rate: there are a couple of moments when the budget evidently doesn't stretch to an actual string section, something that's easy to forgive. But where Eye Baby was all very thoroughly coloured-in, sometimes outside the lines as well as in, V-Neck leaves plenty of room for the listener to do some of their own shading. It's a more minimal, skeletal record, and yet a more vibrant one too, and its use of subtle texture and sly detail and well-judged restraint seems to owe just the right amount to the likes of Magazine and Wire. It sounds like they've taken their self-absorption to its logical end: where once it was rather performative, now it just seems that they've spent months writing and perfecting songs simply to satisfy themselves. Almost nobody else would ever hear them, which is almost everybody else's loss.

When it does want to prowl and pout and preen, to be the Bardots of old, it does so with new-found assurance. It's a record which understands the power of a moment left to linger for a second or two. The Colony Room, for example, saunters lazily down the corridor, leans in the doorway with an eyebrow arched, holds the pose for a line before bursting into the room. Sole single Carrion does the same, screaming guitars held in check for just long enough. Elsewhere, English Lovers bides its sweet time for four minutes before a climax which tastes of summer rain, each element allowed to breathe pure fresh air with arms outstretched. Violent Love is all poison and pirouettes, and it chooses to close its eyes and turn faster and faster until everything becomes a soothing blur. Skin Diving is simply ravishing, and "We'll steal ourselves a car/And take us to the world" has always seemed the most romantic of lines.

It's a record of oblique angles and sudden openings and great tunes, and every song is a slim novella, and every chorus has a counter-chorus, and every line has a little bit of mischief hidden in it. Dunford constantly ties his words into grammatical knots and bows and I've never had much of an idea what he's on about half the time, apart from an inkling that it's probably quite rude. He never had such fun as he does here, his lyrics spinning their way around whatever spiraling guitar lines Fijalkowski and Altana have conjured up. Or maybe they're spinning around him. There's a lot of spiraling and spinning, anyway. They conclude, forever, with Feeling Juvenile - "Stop stop press/Life's complex" - and it fades into silence with one final gorgeous intertwining of all five band members, each flying their own streamer, trailing it into the distance. Not a happy ending, perhaps, but a fitting one.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski would form Polak with his brother, Simon Dunford joined their ranks for a bit; their tilt at stardom didn't quite make it into orbit either. The Bardots reformed for a one-off gig in Norwich back in 2009; I found out about it a month after it'd happened. There's been almost nothing but silence since, until a sudden flurry of social media activity recently leading to both albums being made available on Bandcamp and the usual streaming services. The records finally being out there again may or - oh, if you insist - may not secure their rightful place in history. It does at least give me something tangible to refer you to, something to prove they existed.

Because - and I do appreciate that there are far greater injustices - I find myself slightly alienated by a world in which Suede have ascended to become alternative national treasures and nobody gives a flying toss about Dunford and co. It feels a bit personal, somehow. It requires me to accept that I'm wrong, to swallow my pride, and I still can't quite do it. World domination is too much to ask, clearly, but I'd love it if one person, just one, could find it in their heart to cherish this band half as much as I do.

Perhaps it could be you.

The Bardots

The Bardots formed at UEA in Norwich, 1989. Simon Dunford, Andy Murphy and brothers Neil and Steve Cox built a following on the UK indie m

[mr-ig]

On Bogshed

Yes, the name. Yes. Unavoidable, so let's get it over with. No band has ever conquered the world, or even small parts of it, with a name like 'Bogshed'. Aware of that obstacle themselves, there's an entertaining anecdote, re-told in the notes accompanying a splendid 'Bog-set' reissue of their back catalogue on CD, in which the foursome head to the pub to thrash out a better moniker. After many hours and many pints, they manage nothing better than 'Tarty Lad'. They couldn't help themselves, that's the thing.

And they were widely reviled for it, more's the pity. I do wonder, in passing, if they'd have been quite so thoroughly sneered at if they'd hailed from somewhere less unfashionable (then, if not now) than Hebden Bridge, but they were frequently held up as a scapegoat for all that was wrong with mid-eighties indie: a miserable lack of ambition dressed up as bold independence, a dearth of skill masquerading as an artistic choice. They weren't helped in that by John Peel, who despite being an ardent admirer of the band, hung the word "shambling" around their necks. History insists on telling us that they'd have been long forgotten were it not for an appearance on the NME's C86 cassette.

None of that seems terribly fair, really. Along with Peel, and regardless of the C86 legend, and in spite of there now only being one member still alive, some of us have continued to remember Bogshed with huge fondness as the years have passed. They were an oddity then, they're an oddity now.

What they weren't, however, was wilfully obscure: the mis-labelling of their sound seems particularly frustrating given that, actually, it was remarkably easy to grasp if you bothered to try. Repetitive to the point of making the Fall sound like a free-jazz experiment, the beauty of the perfect Bogshed song is in establishing a simple and entirely logical riff, often led by Mike Bryson's chunky bass and then filled in with Mark McQuaid's spindly guitar before Tris King's drums pin it all to the floor, and then not changing it very much at all for three minutes. If you don't like the first ten seconds, there's nothing for you here. If, on the other hand, those seconds get your foot a-tapping, you're in for a right old treat, my friend.

Pretty much every Bogshed song is a joyous interlocking of those functional drum-bass-guitar parts, a firm-but-fun rhythm section which merrily barrels along underneath Phil Hartley's vocals. Those vocals are bold, sometimes squawky; they're distinguished from the post-punk crowd by a vague air of vaudeville, a whiff of end-of-the-pier entertainment. Even at his shoutiest, you knew that Hartley could be a crooner if he felt so inclined. The lyrics were odd, full of curious characters and surreal references, nostalgic and a bit parochial and occasionally somewhat bawdy, always loaded with Hartley's personality. Even when you didn't know what on earth he was banging on about, there was much to enjoy.

Viewed from the right angle, ignoring the warts and the boils, their essential jauntiness, their geniality, was inescapable. There are very few songs in their catalogue which won't leave you feeling just a little merrier than when they began. Bogshed wrote pop songs for singing in the shower, played them as if people would shake a leg on the dancefloor. Not their fault - name aside - if nobody did either.

Of the box set contents, the disk of Peel sessions is of particular academic interest. As so often, the Maida Vale recordings appear to capture the band as they actually wanted to sound; the rest of their output captures how they could afford to sound. There must be hundreds of bands of whom that's true. The first session, from 1985, finds a band clearly indebted to the muscular sound of the Membranes, on whose label they released a clattering first EP, also included; each subsequent session refines it just a little, fencing off their own patch amid a scene crowded with potential rivals. The different elements become clearer, the intentions less febrile.

Elsewhere, the first album, "Step On It", continues to be a personal favourite, even if its production only seems to have got thinner over the years. Even the cheapest studio can't suck the life out of these wonderful songs entirely, though: the scurrying absurdity of "Fastest Legs", the preposterous glam strut of "Mechanical Nun", the seesaw saaandwiiich-baar lurch of "Adventure Of Dog". A particular soft spot has always been occupied by "Tommy Steele Record", with its gentle trundling bassline and nostalgic tales of chip papers and childhood bed times; no other band of that era would've come up with something so unapologetically warm, so lacking in devilment. It's just a charming song, and it appears to aspire no higher (or lower).

"Brutal", its 1987 follow-up, broadens the palette considerably, but too late to win the wider attention it deserved. There are moments of genuine darkness; there's a punkish anger at play too; Hartley has diversified his range of accents; the differences of opinion that'd make it their last record are pretty easy to spot. And yet there's still a lightness too: "Loaf" releases Hartley's inner crooner to curiously touching effect, "No To Lemon Mash" is knowingly and gleefully ridiculous even by their standards. When they stick with the tried and tested formula, they've rarely been better: "Excellent Girl" is a riotous hoedown of a song, while album opener "Raise The Girl", thrust forward by a relentless chin-jutting riff which just gets more and more insistent for four minutes, would surely have been an indie disco staple if it'd belonged to a cooler band. They never were that band, though. When push came to shove, I'm not sure that they really wanted to be. Not enough, anyway. All four of them came up with that name, none of the four came up with something more sensible to replace it. They were Bogshed, they lived in a cottage on a hillside, they made a jovial racket that you'd never mistake for anyone else. If you succumbed to their charms, you took them warts and boils and all. 

[mr-ig]

On “A Common Turn” by Anna B Savage

I've been thinking about "A Common Turn" a lot lately. It's that kind of record. The more you listen to it, the more it becomes the place where your mind goes in idle moments, either to daydream or to find something to chew on. These days, my Bandcamp shopping cart usually contains an unaffordable number of things to which I can't remember ever having listened, and as I sift through it all every Bandcamp Friday, I'm reminded of how easily my attention flits from record to record, of how little manages to hold me still. I hear more, but I listen less. In my youth, I could've sung every word of my favourite records; now, it's going really well if I can remember what all of the songs are called. But I'm utterly captivated by this.

So captivated, in fact, that I find it quite hard to explain why you should listen to Anna B Savage's debut album. I am Jonah and I'd like to tell you why you too should let yourself be swallowed by the whale. It isn't even as if I have any points of comparison to offer you; I'm sure there are some, but my record collection doesn't contain any of them, and besides, "A Common Turn" is such a singular piece of work, has such a life of its own, that there seems little worth in putting it next to other things.

Perhaps we should start with the voice, since your ears probably will. If you're anything like me, and that record collection leans heavily towards understatement, under-elaboration and, perhaps, the limited vocal range favoured by Peel bands of a particular vintage, then Savage's voice may present something of a hurdle. It is not the voice of someone hiding behind their fringe and staring at their shoes, nor is it drowned in reverb and lost somewhere in a cloud of swirliwhirliness. It is a bold, theatrical, ornate voice, and it dominates these ten songs.

I freely admit that I wondered if I'd be able to live with that voice for long periods of time. A long period of time being fifty-ish minutes, the duration of “A Common Turn”. As it transpires, that equation has been reversed: I find that I'm instead unable to live without it, and that I wouldn't want to hear these songs sung in any other way. No, more than that: that they simply couldn't be sung in any other way. They belong to that voice; it made them and it re-makes them every time you listen.

This is a searingly honest record, sometimes uncomfortably so. It is deeply personal too. It would be easy for it to feel as close and cramped as the confessional booth, or perhaps like being stuck in a lift with that acquaintance who's always over-sharing on your Facebook feed, but there is instead so much space within its songs, so much to explore, that they become little worlds all of their own. That voice finds every corner of them, every nook and cranny. It brings out every nuance of some very fine lyrics. It invites you in, then lets you get lost.

After a few listens - and it does take more than one or two - you find that your head has been filled with its melodies. There are choruses, some memorable ones, but as with any great record, the verses are where it all really happens. Each line seems to extend for as long as it needs, as if it's a train of thought on an idle summer's day; sometimes we sit in the shadow of the line for a moment after it's ended, not quite wanting the next one to begin. One idea, or one image, leads to another; there are stories and memories, but also contradictions, overlaps, arguments. For example, closing song "One" is musically sparse and spare, but lyrically drapes layers on top of each other, perfectly capturing a longing for resilience undermined by nagging insecurity. I've just looked at the words and it feels as if there ought to be twice as many lines as there actually are, for it covers so much so well.

It is not alone. The songs are full of references to music. Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen; memories of albums played in intimate moments; Tim Curry in lingerie as a masturbation fantasy. There's an Edwin Collins owl mug, whatever the hell that is; it's such a lovely phrase that I haven't wanted to weigh it down with an actual object by putting it into Google. All of that personal detail, the clutter of someone's life being lived, makes it feel as if everyone else has been bleaching their songs clean. It makes you wonder why other musicians - who presumably also like music, or at least once did - have stripped all of this stuff away, perhaps in service of a kind of bland universality.

The details are the life of these songs. They make "Baby Grand" feel as if it's the first song that's ever been written about a crisis of uncertainty over someone's affections...which, just in case you've never actually heard any pop music, it isn't. If not the first, then at least one of the best: in so vividly portraying a single evening, in paring away any generalisation and leaving just her own experience, Savage invites you to remember your own equivalent, and the two become fused together. The details make the chorus of "BedStuy" and its image of holding hands on the subway home, trying not to fall asleep, seem profound and monumental, aided by a swelling electro pulse overtaking the acoustic backing as if a memory is engulfing more present thought. They enable "A Common Tern" to capture the loneliness of a relationship breakup, the quiet retreat away from togetherness, while ostensibly talking about birdwatching. There are a lot of birds: corncrakes, swallows, doves, terns. There is so much that's alive here.

You may have noted that I haven't written much about the music, perhaps concluded that it must be rather incidental. Thing is, Savage and producer William Doyle, whose glorious "Your Wilderness Revisited" album sat atop my end-of-year list for whenever-it-was, have between them created music which understands instinctively when to step forward and when to step back, when to fiddle and when to leave alone, when to demand and when to give. By 'instinctively', I mean that it feels instantly right in each moment of these songs, responds to them as if hearing their meaning without needing to be guided. The hard work and the ambition are evident throughout, for there is little here that's simple even when it seems so, but they never drag anything down. There’s a remarkable amount of economy in what often appear to be quite elaborate arrangements.

And of course, the voice responds in turn. Some of these songs have a romantic streak a mile wide, even if that romantic streak is finding life somewhat bitter to the taste, and sometimes they need to throw their arms wide and their head back and soar. In those moments - the sudden electro of "BedStuy", previously mentioned; the stuttering pop of "Two"; the driving guitar of "A Common Tern" - Savage glides over the top, commanding and irresistible, momentary pop star. In other moments, all of it is reined right in and we have nothing but bare bones. "One" recounts a tale of an escaped fling with someone who "said my body was sh.../Didn't like the look of it", and the censorship is hers, and the last syllable of that second line is crisply enunciated with such feeling, with such a pent-up force of hurt and pride, that it almost splits clean in two.

And still I don't think I've captured it all, but I should leave things for you to find. Not having my finger very firmly on the pulse nowadays, I've no idea how many people will hear and buy this record. Not enough, I imagine, although rather more than magnificent self-doubt anthem "Dead Pursuits" suggests with its chorus of "Is anyone listening?" It strikes me as being something that a small but not insignificant number of people will care about very deeply for a very long time. I'm a fifty year old straight white bloke who grew up in suburban Watford and I appreciate that nobody urgently needs to hear my truth, but there's something incredibly inspiring and empowering about it nevertheless.

There's a beacon being lit here, for a certain type of person, for a certain type of life. Yes, that kind of record. The best kind. I hope it's heard by everyone who needs to hear it, that it inspires and empowers them too, that it's treasured as fervently as it deserves to be treasured. It’s a beautiful piece of work.

[mr-ig]

On “Soft Bonds” by Insides

"You won't like them," I was warned. Not sure who by, might even have been one of the band. Nothing more certain to make me love them, of course.

Back then, Earwig were a five piece, soon to be three, playing unmistakeable indie pop with a drum machine underneath. They were not yet jaw-dropping, but there was already something special: in the melodies let loose by Julian Tardo and Dimitri Voulis' guitars, in the way that Kirsty Yates' vocals seemed to peer through the window at the clamour and turn away. They were a little distant, a little aloof, and I've always fallen hard for that.

Even so, there were few signs of what was to follow, as the guitars gradually fell away and left something completely distinctive. 1992's Under My Skin I Am Laughing was an album of skittering loops, shadows threatening silence, complicated minimalism, occasional climaxes. It threw Kirsty's lyrics into far sharper relief, with sharper being the operative word, but it also had real beauty, starkness, elegance. It seems odd now to think how rare it was to hear a record whose influences weren't immediately obvious; especially in Brighton, where every band had a scene and every scene fairly reeked of nostalgia, it seemed entirely and fantastically out of step with what everyone else was doing. It was a record made for bedrooms, for intimacy, for privacy. It was brilliant, even if the years show a little in places when you hear it now.

When Earwig didn't last, Kirsty and Julian formed Insides. The guitars fell away some more, much of the starkness too. The sound became warmer, more generous, full of detail; they stopped needing the climaxes, made it all about exquisite moments. They escaped pigeonholes, escaped their rejection of pigeonholes. Whereas Earwig sometimes felt as if they were pressing their foreheads against limitations - of what an indie band might sound like, of what might be technically and financially feasible - there is very little evidence of those struggles in Insides' music and particularly in their 1993 album Euphoria, released on 4AD off-shoot Guernica.

It was somehow both more accessible and more ambitious. Its finest moments have a lightness of touch, a delight in the apparently effortless, which makes you feel a little giddy. Julian finds ways of playing far less and yet achieving far more, delicate spirals of song thrown into the air like celebratory streamers. It still feels as if Kirsty is offering an utterly withering critique of your life based upon a week of hiding in your wardrobe and reading your diaries; that's the balance, the lemon juice with the sugar. It's a record of literate, imaginative, frequently delectable pop music. One wonders how the hell we ever got into the position where that was some kind of radical artistic statement, but there we are.

They were still out of step, but found some kindred spirits: Disco Inferno, Seefeel, Bark Psychosis. There were common influences - Steve Reich, AR Kane, late Talk Talk - and a healthy sense of picking them to bits. They played with Slowdive, Cranes. They were championed by the aesthetes at the Melody Maker. Post-rock would become the domain of boys with effects pedals, but the possibilities seemed endless in that moment: on the other side of collapsing walls, Moving Shadow were releasing twelve-inches by Omni Trio and Foul Play; Warp Records was assembling the roster for its golden age; you could find common threads wherever you looked. A follow-up to Euphoria came in the form of Clear Skin, a single forty minute piece of glistening minimal ambient dance music initially created so they could be their own support band at a London gig.

Every fan drawn to the fringes will have favourite tales of ones that got away: great records left uncelebrated, great bands felled by circumstance. You'll have a list yourself, and I imagine that the same factors keep cropping up. My record collection contains many, many more bands thwarted by the need to pay the leccy bill than by glamorous self-destruction or internal warfare between competing artistic visions. Insides were one of those that escaped, for the few who held them very dear; other bands in that small, loose scene likewise. Too few followed in their footsteps; the handful who did largely met a similar fate.

(As an aside, there's a sleevenote on a record by Hood, Wetherby's purveyors of bleakly rural post-indie and notable off-spring of that early post-rock scene, conceding that one song is "such a near perfect Disco Inferno pastiche that we nearly gave Ian Crause (DI vocalist/guitarist) a writing credit". Tellingly, Hood ended up on that list of escaped greats too, uncompromised and unrewarded. Also tellingly, perhaps, they were similarly never very comfortable playing live, at least partly as the result of a steadfast refusal to do anything the easy way. That's irresistible to an outsider, but I imagine it's exhausting and ultimately dispiriting if you're actually part of it, permanently swimming against the tide.)

We were all in our twenties then, we're all into our fifties now. We've all changed. Kirsty does stage banter these days. And there's a new Insides album, Soft Bonds. As someone who always wants to hear new music far more than old favourites, or new copies of old favourites, this is a nervous moment. The social media age makes it possible to be in touch with a scattered fanbase as never before, and Bandcamp makes it easier to sell your music directly to that fanbase, but that must come with a certain demand to meet set expectations, and a risk of being perpetually tethered to a particular point in time, to a particular version of yourselves.

But these songs are not those songs, again. They seem to flicker between extremes: minimal and maximal, soft and hard, cold and warm, natural and unnatural, under-worked and over-worked. There's a lot of tension, released judiciously by a vocal melody or a thread of guitar, as if letting bubbles rise to the surface. The closest we get to familiarity are the book-ends: opener It Was Like This Once, It Will Be Like This Again blossoms from a vocal sung so intimately that, especially right now, you almost want to take a step backwards. It feels as if it's still flushed with the possibilities of Euphoria. The same is true of Undressing, whose woozy gorgeousness finishes the record. Imprints, evocations.

Ghost Music, as its title suggests, is barely there at all. Just enough, no more. You feel its presence, a brush of air against your cheek, then gone again. Misericord itches restlessly, anxious and threatening, until you catch it in a certain alluring light. "You distract me..." sings Kirsty as it reaches its climax, invoking Euphoria's Distractions, and we suddenly know where are for a moment. That flickering, that sense of a broken projector, is brought into focus by Softest Bonds Resist Resistance which whirs almost to a standstill halfway in before finding fresh life, unfurling outwards again.

Several of these songs seem to have hinges in the middle, moments at which they turn on you or away from you. Others play with vocal effects, spinning Kirsty's voice off into the margins. Some of these things might easily be tricksy, mere studio cleverness, were it to come with more fluttering of eyelashes, but this is not a flirtatious record: rather, it requires you to peer in, to observe, to pay attention. It'll catch you off-guard if you don't. Insides have released some luscious, immersive music in the past, but this is something else, something new. It's essentially quiet, often eerily spacious, yet rarely still. It isn't restrained. It holds nothing back, but its everything is a little different to yours. It expects you to do your bit.

But it also has a bouquet of flowers hidden up its sleeve. Keen-eyed fans will note that I've skipped over 2000's Sweet Tip with its warm embrace of summery jazz and songs - well, song - about fancying Damon Hill, and so do most other people. Truth is, though, that it contains a couple of their very finest moments, breezy pop songs for playing in the car with the windows open on a hot day. It has imperfections as an album, but there was something rather perfect about making a record so far removed from Euphoria: seven years had passed and that's a long time, especially in your twenties. It was where they were then. They'd moved on. And so the second half of Soft Bonds is what really brings me the most joy, for it connects with those people too, with that band. And I hadn't dared hope for that.

Seven-minute opus - not a word we've used for Insides songs til now - Subordinate begins this sudden flowering. Another hinge: it opens quietly, softly, but then Kirsty takes her vocal down down down, beyond where it's comfortable, and the assembled cast starts imitating a howling wind to the accompaniment of rattling percussion and there are great scraping swoops of bowed double-bass, and we're somewhere else entirely. That somewhere else is the sparsely populated territory staked out by These New Puritans' Field of Reeds, especially its bold sense of theatrical story-telling and its willingness to waltz with the preposterous. Kirsty's voice is joined by a male counterpart, a duet of sorts. "I always..." they intone together, drifting off to who knows where. It's mesmerising, mystifying.

From there into Hot Warm Cool Cold which welcomes you in like a warm bath on a frosty day, light acoustic flourishes and a delicious unfurling of the record's earlier tension. Echoes of Sweet Tip's marvellous Blue Nimbus, with its feeling of sad and happy so you can't tell which is which. It's the only way to feel. A short interlude in the shape of Thin Skin and its "Hold the punk down, kick his face in" sing-song earworm. Then Half Past Four has another hinge, a moment when it appears to dive down a rabbit hole and emerge, rubbing its eyes and asking "Are we sleeeeeping?", as a perfect piece of brightly psychedelic pop music. It is absolutely nothing like I'd imagined anything on this record would sound and I can think of no higher compliment than that. How little history matters, really, ideally.

We close with Undressing - "You've found your bliiisss" - with its irresistible eyes-half-open soft focus, an uneasily soothing dream from one angle, a mournful embrace of mortality from another. Like other things here, it seems to exist as a three-dimensional object; viewed from different perspectives, it's blissful, painful, beautiful, desolate. The meaning of these songs feels liquid, shimmering in whatever light you shine upon them. What a record to have made. What a joy to listen to.

Where do they belong now? Where did they belong then? It seems as if 'dream pop' is the currently-favoured genre, into which they fit as badly as all of the others. It's tempting to say that they're off to the side somewhere, but that isn't it. Above, that's the word. Because what's the point of pop music if it has to be in a little box, somewhere to the right of 'rock'? Why shouldn't it look down on everything else, all of those rather narrow definitions? Why can't it be anything it wants to be, flighty and impulsive and irritable and romantic and beautiful and a bit terrifying and everything else? Why can't it be sandpaper sometimes and velvet others? Hooks and barbs, lip gloss and warpaint, sugar and acid. Why does it have to choose? Why do we have to choose?

We don't, of course, and records like Soft Bonds prove it. We need more of them, even now. Especially now.

Insides, then. You won't like them.

[mr-ig]

Erland Cooper. Unitarian Church, Brighton. 22/11/2019

The Unitarian Church in Brighton's North Laine is a small, square space with high white walls. Somewhat bare and stark, it almost demands that you cast your gaze upwards, and when you do, you almost expect to find a starlit sky rather than a ceiling. Halfway through a sell-out concert, Erland Cooper has turned off all of the lights and we're sitting in near-darkness, listening to music so quiet "that you'll be able to hear your stomachs rumble", and imagining sunrise over Orkney as the sound gradually builds and the lights gradually return. And I have tears running down my cheeks.

It is a truly magical evening. A natural collaborator, Cooper's charming nervousness and generosity of spirit create an irresistible energy. We would've been satisfied with hearing a live performance of his exquisite evocations of Orkney landscapes and wildlife, but we become part of the collaboration ourselves, and an openness to the wonder of it all is our contribution. The absence of a stage breaks down the barrier further; he bounds enthusiastically out into the central aisle at one point and has to apologise to a woman in the third row for standing on her toes. There are jokes, laughter. "It's just music!" he shouts giddily after a mistake. A small community is built in less than an hour.

He's aided in his stated mission to take us on a journey back to his home, back to Orkney, by four exquisite players. The distance between that idea seeming rather trite and it seeming, well, like a memory to be cherished for a lifetime is in their ability to stretch each movement to its very fingertips, to make each phrase and each note matter utterly. The grain of wood, the texture of rippled sand, the sound of waves on shingle; there is so much detail and yet so little fuss. The world has plenty of vaguely evocative music, stuff that doesn't take any chances; here, we're reminded of quite how powerful evocation can be, of how simple and intimate it can seem.

I close my eyes and I'm sitting on my favourite bench in a Cornish cove, with the waves crashing onto the rocks below, with the gulls flying home before nightfall, with a book forgotten by my side.

We have a sense, I think, that music ought to do more than that, that it should be clever and curious and complicated. That it should be used to interrogate the world rather than merely - merely! - reflect its glories. And so it should, some of the time. But we've lost something, perhaps, to that idea. If the sound of a couple of violins, a cello, a piano and a soprano can connect with parts of ourselves that are often entirely out of reach, beyond our everyday existences, then is that not in itself something profound? And if it isn't, should we give a flying toss?

Cooper's music is born of the landscape, and of a particular place, but it comes to life in our collective imagination. It might therefore be just a dream, an idyll, a fiction. In reality, there’s probably someone in Stromness swearing at a malfunctioning broadband router right now. But it is a dream in which there is peace, serenity, overwhelming joy, and in which those things are shared generously. We've built whole belief systems on that in the past. We can afford it a little room now, surely. Now more than ever, possibly.

At the evening's end, the audience rises to its feet in a state of what can only be described as euphoria. The noise of our appreciation seems wild and untethered after so much delicacy and poise. The orchestrator of it all appears a little shocked at the response, and thrilled, bounding out of the room with a delirious leap over the monitors after taking a bow with his quartet. We dry our eyes and gather our things, and return to the outside world, and see it all anew.

[mr-ig]

On Mark Hollis

If there's a sadness at the news of Mark Hollis' passing, it's for his family and friends. It's their loss, really. Whatever he's been up to for the last twenty years, it's been shared with them, not with us. Happily, I hope. I’ve always liked the idea that he was out there somewhere, doing something mundane, getting on with life. Not being a genius.

If we've lost anything, it's that faint dream, somewhere at the back of our minds, that he might suddenly re-emerge from his privacy with fresh revelations. Foolish, perhaps, but you probably wouldn't have come to cherish Hollis' work if you didn't have a tendency towards wistful daydreaming. In truth, though, it's pretty difficult to listen to the records, especially the last three, and conclude that there was anything left to be said. They lead us gently towards silence, and then they leave us. The sense of leaning into that silence to catch any faint echoes was, perhaps, Hollis' parting gift.

So much has been written about the torturous recording processes which produced "Spirit of Eden" and "Laughing Stock". Still more about the refusal to conform to promotional requirements, to carry on playing the game. It's possible to admire the artistic integrity but also to pity the poor sod who was tasked with getting Hollis to do anything that he didn't really want to do. Still more has been written about how difficult those albums are, how much they demand from the listener, how little they contain in the way of tunes to hum in the shower. You could be forgiven for treating them with trepidation.

And then when you listen to them - still, even now - it's as if they have this ability to close the door on the rest of the world and its incessant chatter, including all of the words that've been written about them. They close the door and they fill the space. Really, they've never required anything of the listener except an open mind and a certain level of attention. Given those things, what emerges is some of the most generous, warm, sensual, soulful, spiritual music that you'll ever hear. What emerges are melodies and motifs that you'll carry around for the rest of your life, even if you can't actually hum them. What emerges is something as natural as sunlight.

Timelessness is often over-rated, I think. There's nothing wrong with creating something that explodes in the moment; a record which changes your life probably won't, probably shouldn't, sound the same ten years later. There's nothing wrong with a three-minute pop song, done perfectly. There's everything wrong with reverence, with permanence. The music that Mark Hollis left behind when he retired, and now leaves behind forever, has none of that permanence, requires none of that reverence. It is indeed timeless, but it continues to live and breathe, to creak and strain, to swell and contract, to soar and glide and fall, again and again, always.

We, its blessed listeners, lost little yesterday. He'd already given it all.

Rest in peace.

[mr-ig]

On “Solan Goose” by Erland Cooper

The intersection between post-rock and modern classical, perhaps with a bit of experimental ambient thrown in for good measure, ought to be something of a natural home for me. Has been, in the past, on occasions. But as the quantity of music within whatever-that-genre-might-be-called has grown, my tolerance for it has failed to keep pace, and my patience has worn a little thin. Too much of it reaches for intimacy and intricacy and finds only a kind of polite mundanity, verging on the inane; it's nice music made by nice people, but it has a smell of sandals about it. Too much of the rest billows blankly, a white sheet on which you're supposed to project your own thoughts, an artistic cop-out. Too little of it risks being ridiculous in the hope of attaining the sublime, and, as a Swans fan, that feels like the bare minimum I require.

I admire Erland Cooper's work already. As part of the Magnetic North, he has committed to taking what might easily be a rather patchwork sound and nailing it down, attaching it very firmly and deliberately to a specific place. The results on “Prospect of Skelmersdale” are quite splendid, enough to conjure up vivid images of a town to which I've never been, enough to make a little trip round its roads on Streetview feel like a much more profound journey. While much less grandiose, it reminds me of the first Arcade Fire album, how it told you these vivid, enchanting, entrancing stories from someone else's life story, laced narcotically with idealism and nostalgia.

But he's excelled himself with "Solan Goose", his solo work dedicated to the bird-life of his native Orkney. He's excelled himself and vastly exceeded the established limits of whatever-that-genre-might-be-called too. Remarkably, he's done it without much ceremony: it is not a record which proclaims a new dawn or casts disdainful sneers at its peers, and some of its fascination comes from how an accumulation of relatively small differences can create something so utterly singular. A little extra pause here, a little more emphasis on a melody there; a boldness, an intensity. There is a version of “Solan Goose” which isn't so exquisitely arranged and played, which isn't so intent on holding you by the shoulders and turning you to face the horizon...and which is merely quite a pleasant listen, another one of those records, another background to another car advert. Instead, Cooper leads his compositions to the clifftops and sets them free, and the results are just...well, there aren't really words, and there don't need to be words.

On more than one occasion, I've sat on a train listening to "Solan Goose" and gazing out of the window and found myself close to tears. I've never been to Orkney but I've found a profound peace on the cliffs of the Lizard in Cornwall, a tiny speck of life amid vast skies and seas, and it lifts me up and carries me there, wherever I am. It is for this purpose that Cooper made the music in the first place and it shows in every expressive note. It's an unashamedly devotional record, a pure celebration, the listener as an empty vessel to be filled with the glory of the landscape. It doesn't flirt with its melodies, doesn't try to be clever with them; it embraces them fully, makes them the heart and soul of the piece. It has moments, such as the point at which "Aak" stops soaring upwards and falls away beneath your feet, which are genuinely and knowingly awe-inspiring.

But Cooper understands that while the landscape itself might be vast, your relationship to it is intimate and personal, that it lives within you through memory and imagination. There is always space within this music for you; it never leaves you behind, always has your hand. "Shalder" grows from a foundation of judicious piano notes, suggestive of dark wooden floorboards and well-worn furniture, and expands in scale while never losing sight of home. "Tammie Norie" feels like a lost folk song, something to pass onwards to another generation, and finds echoes in the use of spoken word recollection elsewhere. The abundant humanity here knows its place in the grand order of things, and finds comfort in that place.

And so maybe what makes this such a precious record, and such a unique one, is its sheer generosity of spirit. A solo album, perhaps, but in the act of listening, it is yours and yours alone. It feels like a gift, an act of faith and kindness. My world is better for it. Yours would be too.

[mr-ig]

A farewell to Swans

Later tonight in New York, this particular version of Swans will play together for the last time and then dissolve. Another version of Swans will follow, we are told, but has yet to take a form. Whatever that form, it's impossible to imagine that it won't have to live in the shadow of this extraordinary line-up, that it won't be shaped by its gravity. It's impossible not to see this as an ending rather than a beginning.

It seems like longer, but it's a little more than seven years - 27th October 2010, to be precise - since I had my first encounter with this new Swans line-up, at the Concorde 2 in Brighton. I hadn't been certain about going. I'd drifted away from them in the mid-nineties; I had no appetite at all for a trip down memory lane. I went mainly out of curiosity, my interest piqued by Michael Gira's insistence that this would be something new and distinct. When Gira insists on something, it tends to happen.

That night, you could feel that they were still finding their way. The set was comparatively short, contained a scattering of old material, lacked a really decisive direction. The volume was moderate. Some lines were fluffed, tempers sometimes a little frayed. But in the extended opening of "No Words/No Thoughts" and the elements of what would eventually become "The Seer", I found something elemental, something that I hadn't realised I'd been attempting to live without. In those moments, they raised the tension in the room to the point where you couldn't breathe and then sent it all crashing down again and again and again, pushing themselves to the edge of physical endurance, pushing themselves far beyond the point where any other, any lesser band would stop. In those brutal and ravishing moments, you could feel not diminishing echoes of the band they once were but the rising clamour of the band they would imminently become.

In the intervening years, I've seen them another nine times. That's testament to Gira's relentless work ethic as much as my own enthusiasm. There have been troughs as well as peaks: I recall an especially unsatisfying evening at the Electric in Brixton in 2014, at which the ear-splitting volume seemed to smother any subtlety, almost every key line was fluffed, and the set list appeared in dire need of a re-write. The overall effect was of a band in very steep decline. Less than a week later, they performed exactly the same set list in Brighton with such precise, furious force that you could feel the air trembling. It culminated in the crescendo of "Bring the Sun" which built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built, burning and ecstatic and utterly sexual, teetering on the edge, then finally collapsing spent and exhausted, gasping for air. It was f***ing beautiful. A pure celebration of existence.

They could do that. Not always, but sometimes. And sometimes is better than never, which is what everyone else trades in. Those moments when it felt as if you were sharing the room with an exploding sun, when your body might disintegrate into atoms. Those moments when they'd start to bring the strands of an idea together from a spell of separated dissonance, when they'd suddenly catch a phrase or a movement and you'd think, "That. Right there. Just play that. Play it until it hurts me. Play it until it erases everything else. Play it until it buries us all." And they would, and then some. Those moments when I'd close my eyes and meditate in the middle of the crowd, concentrating on breathing in and breathing out, lost completely in the here and now. They could do that, and I've rarely felt more alive.

A few more things I'll remember always. A version of what possibly became "Screen Shot" which levitated and shimmered in a way that can only be described as gorgeous, redefining what this band was capable of, how lightly it might tread. The way that "A Little God In My Hands" became this unstoppable groove, brassed-up funk hammering down and down, another breathtaking redefinition. The conclusion of a spectacular show at London's Koko, Gira bellowing revolutionary slogans and miming throat-slitting while his band did its utmost to strip the paint from the walls. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Gira leaning away from the microphone and out into the audience at the end of "Cloud of Unknowing" and singing gently to us as if clutching us to his chest, a lullaby, a redemption.

And best of all, that final London show at the Roundhouse. When they'd played there before, it had seemed a little too big for them, perhaps too much of a stretch to muster the required intensity in such a vast space. But somehow, at the second attempt, the sense of occasion lifted them to new heights, and perhaps the relative absence of work-in-progress did no harm too. They play for the customary two-and-a-half hours with such grace and power that it seems impossible to believe that it's the last time; it feels as if every second is made to count, not a single note wasted. They've never been better. They're about to end it all, and they've never been better.  

And there it is. While everyone else was playing old albums in their entirety to the people who'd bought them in the first place, turning rock'n'roll into a museum with a particularly cynical gift shop, here was the alternative. Now thirty-five years old, Swans have not merely added to their substantial history and influence but have done their utmost to eclipse it, to render it irrelevant. In one key sense, they've succeeded: it used to be compulsory to begin every Swans review with tales of volume-induced vomiting and locked doors; they've escaped the pull of those apocryphal tales. They have existed in the moment; the moment has been their sole justification; they depart in the same spirit.

And finally, after all this time, Gira has had the audience he's long deserved, one coming in search of the new and the undiscovered, one willing to listen and to experience. At the Roundhouse, only a couple of people push past on their way to or from the bar over the course of nearly two and a half hours. This, the last time we'll be in a space with the most extraordinary live band we've ever witnessed...it's far too precious for alcohol to blur, far too vital for distraction. We want to be overwhelmed one last time, to drown ourselves in the vastness of Swans' engulfing tide. We're not here to take pictures of it on our phones.

One last bow, then. Christoph Hahn. Thor Harris. Paul Wallfisch. Phil Puleo. Christopher Pravdica. Norman Westberg. He's been Jayne Mansfield. And the curtain falls. And the space empties. And we wonder what can possibly fill it.

[mr-ig]

Blood Sport. The Green Door Store, Brighton. 21/04/2017.

The layout of the Green Door Store means that it gradually empties after each band, an exodus first from the stage area, then from the bar, then through the corridor with the toilets, and finally outside for a fag. The next band sets up in an empty room and has to signal that they've started by, well, starting. So it is that for a few slightly surreal moments, Blood Sport kick off and I'm the sole audience member; we give each other an awkward wave. When they've split up, been posthumously accorded the acclaim they ought to be receiving, um, humously, and then reformed for a sell-out show at the Barbican, I'm going to dine out on that anecdote.

There aren't very many people here. That fact is inescapable and baffling. Blood Sport are absolutely spectacular.

At some point in the proceedings, I realise that if I want to drink my beer without spilling it down my front, I'm going to have to stop moving. I forget about drinking my beer. Blood Sport briskly build up to a shimmering, sensuous crescent of polyrhythm and then just keep it coming, never stopping for a second, never breaking the spell.  There are moments when the whole thing seethes with restless energy, moments when it crests and crests and crests and then collapses, moments when it approaches a precipice and takes a wild leap into the unknown. There are moments, in short.

Over forty-five minutes, they blend one idea into another into another without interval, something that's only possible if your ideas are clearly defined and yet executed with a unifying sense of purpose; it takes on the dynamic of a DJ mix, a single piece with ebb and flow and a relentless forward momentum. Crucially, it is never muddled, never indistinct; it never descends into a cacophony, never indulges in cheap theatrics. Music this intricate could easily be purely instrumental, but the use of vocals changes the dynamic, opens up a channel of communication.

Few points of comparison seem worthwhile. I mean, yeah, there's perhaps a bit of post-punk, definitely some afrobeat, the things that always seem to get mentioned. None of it really matters when you're standing in the way. I'm reminded a bit of Kevin Martin's God, of how they could demand a purely physical, non-cerebral, often uncoordinated response from an audience and how blissful that could feel. I'm reminded of seeing Foals in their early days, of how brilliant they were in theory, of how revolutionary they were in their own heads. Of course, Foals were never that band, in reality: they were an indie band with pretentions and ambitions, and there's nothing very wrong with that. Blood Sport are that band, the band of Foals' dreams. I still feel like I'm selling them a bit short, like I ought to do better. They make me feel inadequate.

It ends too quickly. Drunk and delirious, you want to hear it all again, immediately. I'd buy a t-shirt, but I'm not capable of being that coherent just yet. Their name does them a bit of a disservice, I think: it suggests ear-splitting catharsis and old-fashioned grubby backroom mayhem. Instead, Blood Sport are a pure joy, an instinctive delight, a cake had and eaten. My ears are fine. My head is spinning.

https://bloodsport.bandcamp.com/

[mr-ig]

Kynance Cove, Cornwall. Taken with a Coronet 6x6 bakelite camera onto Fuji slide film.

[mr-ig]

Spent a morning in the darkroom earlier in the week, developing a stack of pinhole shots from the last six months or so. I found a bottle of very old, weary, thoroughly brown developer which helped to process some long exposures. Here's a long exposure from the allotment, looking up at the runner bean poles. It's probably from early summer if the growth of the plants is any guide; from the sun trails, it looks like the exposure was over two or three days. Yes, I really should record these things properly.

[mr-ig]

We're hanging the 'Octet' exhibition at St Mary in the Castle today. It's open from tomorrow (14th October) until 26th. Here's one of my contributions.

[mr-ig]

On returning: Silo

Future generations won't know this moment: standing agog in a record shop clutching something you never thought you'd find. Staring in disbelief, initial shock gradually turning to gleeful laughter. Fellow customers edging away nervously.

Perhaps it's something so rare that you couldn't imagine laying hands on it. Perhaps it's something you didn't even know existed. Either way, that price sticker is a meaningless irrelevance; it's sold, money no object.

I'm in Resident Records in Brighton, a couple of months ago. It's a beautifully sunny, blustery day and we're on a weekend break; I've got a voucher to spend. And I'm holding a new album by Silo, staring at it in disbelief, starting to laugh...

Nowadays, it's pretty difficult to disappear from the radar entirely: Google shines light into the gloomiest corners, any discovery is shared instantly. But it's been thirteen years since Danish trio Silo released two albums on the swim~ label run by Wire's Colin Newman and Malka Spigel. An indication of just how long it's been is that I can recall the thrill of finding that Silo had a MySpace page - status: "workinonit" - offering three tantalising clips of work in progress, proving that they still existed in some form. And then, year after year of silence.

There haven't been many candlelit vigils, it's true. But for a handful of us, Silo really mattered. For me, they were utterly pivotal: I continue to measure other bands against Silo, and I usually find those other bands sorely wanting. They were a benchmark, proof that certain things were possible, certain things were necessary. They were 'alternative' in the fullest sense: another species, another evolutionary path. No-one before and precious few since have managed to strike and hold such a perfect balance between rock music's primal instincts and electronica's obsession with architectural design. Very few have even bothered to try, something which perpetually disappoints me and yet does nothing to discredit the idea. This is not a band whose influence is far-reaching; this is a band whose research is unused.

Anyone can merge rock music with dance music. That's easy. And rubbish, almost entirely. But Silo took no shortcuts at all: their sound remains resolutely fixed in guitar-bass-drums, even if it's sometimes swelled by bass pulses and bleeps. There's no mistaking them for anything other than a rock band, no attempt at dressing up in someone else's clothes. There's no cheating. Pretty much everything sounds familiar here; your first listen to Silo won't make you recoil, and might well make you wonder what the hell I'm getting so excited about. But that's the point: the building blocks are the same, the building isn't.

I imagine that they began with a process of reduction. They took it upon themselves to strip away every last bit of catharsis, every shred of emotion and personality, and leave the bare skeleton of the metal bands they were listening to: Helmet, maybe Godflesh. And then they stripped it down some more, wiping away everything but the rhythm section: the foundation of any great rock band, the basis of all dance music, and the point at which the genres share their DNA. Nothing left but building blocks.

And then, they built something afresh with an engineers's eye. With a laptop producer's ingenuity and craft. Every track is a mechanism, created for its own sake, existing for no purpose other than to exist. Whirring, purring, throbbing. Every track is beautiful for that reason, for same reason as, say, Autechre's best work is beautiful or, more recently, Logos' sparse take on grime. And as fundamentally human as that too, as rooted in a simple desire to see what machines can do. They just did all of that with guitar-bass-drums, with samples of themselves rather than someone else; they just did it with rock music to see what would happen.

If all of that sounds rather dry and academic, then you need to turn it up. Incredibly, for all of that formal experimentation, there's no dilution of an essential aggression: this stuff rocks like an absolute bastard. No post-rock cop-outs here. It remains deeply physical music, robust and tangible, hefty and satisfying. And spectacularly well-suited to being played absurdly loud: particularly on 2001's monumental "Alloy", an increase in volume just brings you closer to the machinery, allows it to vibrate your chest and ruffle your hair; there are no serrated edges to make you wince, nothing which points outwards at all. Turn it up, let it close in around you. Become part of it.

They never belonged to a genre. The small group of swim~ acolytes and a few of the more forward-thinking Wire fans were as close as they came to being part of a scene. I'm struggling to think of any useful reference points: a post-digital Loop, perhaps, or Battles without all of the prog-rock doodling, but neither of those remotely do them justice. Their website profile mentions MBV and Band of Susans, Dalek and Helmet, J-Dilla and Sun-Ra...which are red-herrings too, unless they happen to inspire you to listen, in which case do carry on. They didn't belong anywhere. They were a singular band, out on their own, inventing a future that no-one would live in. I've missed them every day.

Now, without warning, there's a third Silo album, entitled "Work". It turns out that the time elapsed since the last one hasn't made them seem any less singular; there's nothing remotely unusual about creating a rock record on a laptop these days, and yet they still seem just as wholly, fantastically, out of step with what everyone else is doing. Or everyone else is out of step with them. There's always seemed to be something profoundly necessary about Silo, and I've found myself returning to "Work" over and over, just as I did with "Instar" and "Alloy". It satisfies something distinct, a point at which I require something to get my head nodding and my brain working, something to punish and stimulate in equal measure. It isn't like anything else.

It is, of course, very much like Silo. Opener "Filaments" fades gradually in as if it's one of their perpetual motion mechanisms that's been whirring away for the last thirteen years and has only just been recorded. Splendid closer "The Inexorable Sadness of Pencils" sounds similarly as if it might simply continue for ever, looping away in lovely, lop-sided orbits around itself until it drifts out of view. Except that it's chopped short instead. The sound here is warmer and fuller and less brutal than on "Alloy", and occasionally allows itself the luxury of a bit of gentle wah-wahing to fill in some of the spaces; I initially found that a bit irritating, I now find it rather pleasing. The only mis-step - perhaps their only mis-step, full-stop - is "O" with its cooing admiration of MBV, a rare and jarring moment when Silo sound like someone else, like people in pursuit of another band's sound. They've no need.

Remarkably, the best moments are also the least plausible. Whoever thought of getting Anti-Pop Consortium in to rap energetically over a massive, shimmering riff on "Cabinn Fever" can't possibly have imagined that it'd work as well as it does. It's an unholy racket, the delinquent offspring of yesteryear's neatly delineated rock-rap crossovers. Even better, and perhaps even more unlikely, is "Power Points", which is turned by Maria Hamer-Jensen's supple vocals into some kind of mutant R&B monster, just begging for a dancefloor to tear up. This is not a band content to circle endlessly around familiar ground, then, but one with fresh work to do.

As a fellow devotee has written, "they'd have been massively influential if anybody had actually heard them at the time". With sadness, I've come to accept that Silo might not usher in a future in their image. On this evidence, I'm not at all sure that they have.

[mr-ig]

I'm showing some photographs at St Mary in the Castle in Hastings from 14th to 26th October.

As a departure from the pinhole experiments for which I've made whatever 'name' I might have, these are colour photographs documenting and celebrating the growing season at Collier Road allotments up on the West Hill.

I'm pleased with them. Do come and have a look.

[mr-ig]

Pett Level, near Hastings. Summer 2013.

[mr-ig]

Pretty much a year ago, I went for an evening photo-walk with the lovely Ann Kramer, wandering around the Stade fishing beach in Hastings as the sun went down. Then we went to the pub, as you should. I knew something that she didn't: my life was about to change in the most wonderful, irreversible way. That evening, I only took four photos. Not much of a photo-walk, perhaps, but the joy of using medium format film is that you weigh each photo in your hand before you take it; more often than not, it doesn't weigh much and you move on. Besides, somehow, soaking in the mood of the place seemed much more important than committing it to film. And then my life did change, wonderfully and irreversibly. And the film stayed in my camera until last week, when the impulse to take some photos again made me pick up my trusty TLR. Here are those four photos.

[mr-ig]

Some work-in-progress, looking ahead to an exhibition later in the year. This continues some work from two or three years back, taking double/multiple exposures using simple film cameras, in this case a bakelite Coronet 6x6.