A new four CD reissue package, including fabled lost album reveals a triumphant portrait of the gruppe, says Alastair Shuttleworth, no matter how short-lived

When Fall Heads Roll came out in 2005, nearly 30 years into their career, The Fall were finally experiencing some proper goodwill. Their longtime champion John Peel had died the previous year, marked by a characteristically unsentimental Newsnight appearance from bandleader Mark E. Smith, but the baton had already been handed off to a raft of new supporters in the media. BBC One’s Final Score started using ‘Theme From Sparta F.C.’ as its theme, BBC Four produced the first proper documentary on the band, Skinner & Baddiel inducted viewers of ITV into the band’s world, and…

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Iztok Koren & Raphael Rogiński

Nocturnal Consolations

Širom’s banjo and balafon player joins the Polish guitarist and composer to create a map of the folk unconscious, treating tradition as a field of forces in which sound drifts between memory, matter, and imagination

Nocturnal Consolations by Iztok Koren & Raphael Rogiński

The music of Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński and Slovenian multi-instrumentalist Iztok Koren finds its fullest expression as a practice of attentive, high-resolution listening. In a world of overstimulation, Nocturnal Consolations operates through a logic of reduction. Intensification emerges at the point of sharpening. Every gesture, every vibration of a string, every resonant surface exists in suspension. Meanings arise only through the relations between sounds.

The idiom developed by Rogiński reaches an almost crystalline form here,…

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The record emerged from a live collaboration between the two artists last year

Actress and Suzanne Ciani are releasing a new album together, titled Concrète Waves.

Marking the first joint release of music by the two artists, the record was born from a live collaboration between the pair last year, which was co-commissioned by London’s Barbican and Barcelona’s Sónar festival. The two performed together at both last year, in addition to appearances elsewhere, such as Braga’s Semibreve festival.

They had first begun discussing each other’s work and the possibility of working together in 2024, according to press materials, with the music on Concrète Waves, which is the first in a new series of records from Actress’ Werkdiscs label, offering a document of what…

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Congolese collective build sonic starships ouf of the scrapyards of Africa, transforming ritual into auditory assault

All photos by Violaine Morgan Le Fur

Kinshasa isn’t the kind of city that waits for you to be ready, the city just takes over your experience. It is a metropolis of staggering contradictions, where the ghosts of Belgian colonialism collide with the relentless, vibrating hustle of hyper-capitalism. To attempt to capture the essence of this place on tape seems like a fool’s errand, yet this is exactly what the Kinshasa-based street art collective KINACT have achieved with their debut LP, Kinshasa in Action. Founded in 2015 by Eddy Ekete, KinAct first made their name not on stage, but in the gutters, markets, and intersections of…

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Taupe

Waxing | Waning

Glaswegian trio summon a lurching, many-limbed beast in a state of restless permanent flux

waxing | waning by taupe

For her latest show Lunartic, the sweetly surreal comedian Lucy Pearman plays the role of the moon. She dresses up in a giant silvery disc and puts on a performance about how it’s lonely up there in space. Various audience members are recruited to fulfil the roles of potential lovers, tickle-recipients, the earth, a cow, a cat with a fiddle, a dish, a spoon… You can see where she’s going with this. She boasts that she’s in control of tides, wolves, and periods and, at one point turns sideways and scrunches her disc to replicate a moon either waxing or waning,…

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Half a century ago – between the release of Sad Wings Of Destiny and Sin After Sin – Judas Priest were engaged in a revolution of image and sound… one that would cement the heavy metal aesthetic for good

“He said in the cosmos is a single sonic soundThat is vibrating constantlyAnd if we could grip and hold on to the noteWe would see our minds were free”Judas Priest ‘Dreamer/Deceiver’

Heads bang, speakers shake and the earth, lost in a wasteland of nothingness, grinds slowly on its axis. The pursuit of life as a metalhead most often feels very much like being part of a vast primeval continuum. For almost its entire history, heavy metal has been forced to endure derision, incomprehension…

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Tim Burrows explains how a conversation on a park bench led to an inventive film about a unique, much missed voice in political philosophy and cultural criticism

We are making a film about Mark Fisher. That much is true. The idea came about in October 2024 while we were sitting on a park bench in the south Essex commuter town of Rochford. I had been talking to the artist and filmmaker Simon Poulter about the parkland that surrounded us, which was created using money provided by Section 106 funds from a developer. During our visit, a succession of dog walkers adhered to an allotted path running alongside an abundant, all but untouched stretch of grass; all of them were moving towards…

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In this month’s Low Culture Essay, Natalie Marlin explores how a under-regarded soundtrack became part of understanding her evolving trans identity

Hanna does not live with music to guide her, at least at first. Her life is scored solely by the openness of the tundra, the crackling of fire. The stillness of open air, of onyx-drenched night. A dwelling shared only with her father, far from any others, from any chatter or clamour. No incandescent hums or white noise whirrs or industrial thrums to speak of. Hanna will not find music here, not until the world beyond this one encroaches. Not until she finds her tune beyond the silence she has known.

It’s a curious start for a film scored by one…

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Spatial, No Problem arrives almost five years on from the dub pioneer’s death

Photo by Constantin Carstens

Lee “Scratch” Perry’s final album is due to be posthumously released this June, almost five years on from the dub pioneer’s death.

Titled Spatial, No Problem, the eight-track record was produced in collaboration with Mouse On Mars at their Berlin-based Paraverse Studio in December 2019. The album name is derived from a conversation that the duo had with Perry about Spatial Audio.

In a statement, Mouse On Mars’ Jan St. Werner said: “We hardly spoke about what we were doing. We met and got going. He was laughing a lot and we laughed along. We also cooked and ate fish soup and papayas.”

The album will be specially…

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The debut self-titled album from Doublespeak features analogue synth takes on songs by ABBA, The Carpenters and more

Vince Clarke has launched a new project devoted to cover versions, together with Benge and Blancmange’s Neil Arthur.

The trio are known as Doublespeak, and are lining up their 11-track self-titled debut album for release in May. It features analogue synth covers of songs by ABBA, The Carpenters, Young Marble Giants and Fad Gadget, among others.

“I knew so little about some of these songs that they were like demos to me,” Clarke said in a statement. “They felt like brilliant new songs that you want to get your hands on. I’ve had people do cover versions of my songs and honestly there’s no better…

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