Plutonic Rainbows

Watkins Group is a new project from one half of infamous Crust House vagrants Watkins & Almodovar, taking inspiration from the landscapes, myths and legends of ancient Scottish & Celtic culture. The title of this debut album on the newborn Frequency Consortium label, Beanntan a’ Bhròin (Mountains of Sorrow), might already give an indication as to where we’re headed here; evoking Nan Shepard’s meditations on the Cairngorms at their most isolationist & uncompromising as much as it does the creatures that occupy the crags, gullies & glens of old Caledonia. Watkins Group dive deep into fx-drenched grot and expansive somnambulant driftworks over six tracks, as spacious as they claustrophobic, recalling the works of Deathprod, early-90s Lustmord and at times even the stark soundtracks of Mica Levi. credits

The acclaimed Austrian composer has detailed a new album on the way. It is released on 6th December. This is Fennesz’s most reflective album to date. Composed and recorded at the end of 2023 and completed in the summer of 2024.

Offered as a sort of mediation on displaced, non-linear flows of time in a flatland age of everything-at-once, where the timeline has become ever more elusive, ‘Time For No Memory’ hacks into perception of temporality and time-based art with a really trippy nuance. It was realised during 2023 and now arrives via Berlin’s Vaknar (Mats Erlandsson, Tape Loop Orchestra, KMRU, Kevin Drumm) with a wonderfully disjointed, evocative ebb and flow thru ten vignettes of backcombed, curled tape loops that fray and bifurcate in gently hypnotic patterns.

In an age where the unyielding flow of time often overshadows the deeper resonances of our existence, Daniel Majer’s latest album, Time for No Memory, serves as an evocative meditation on the ephemeral nature of experience. Produced throughout 2023 and released in the latter half of 2024, this collection of tracks swerve through what seems like a cacophony of FM radio frequencies while oscillating between the familiar and the uncanny, leaving us with a sonic landscape that feels both timeless and retroactive yet palpably present.

‘I Dreamed a Beating Heart’ surely reminds us to a Pita classic, and ‘C Pop’ hops out of the box between what sounds like a Chinese ballad, pinging digital decays and screwed field recordings like Carl Stone cutting up a Sublime Frequency grabbed from the airwaves. The fever dream restlessness of his pop cut-up ‘Dressed’ surely conjures comparison with Jan Jelinek and Joseph Hammer’s Pan album, and the tongue-tip thizz of ‘Em’ could almost be one of Novoline’s recent pop abstractions. The relatively straight-played bit of exotica feel like it fell off a V/Vm oddity, and leads to pill-bellied sensation of ‘Divided Heart’ and by extension the proto-vaporwave of 0PN’s Chuck Person on ‘Contact’, with a waking dream-like ‘German Tacos’ that ideally signs it off and leaves one with the strangest, fleeting feels, ready to do it again.

I've just started the new book from Stephen King. For me, he has been a bit hit or miss these past few years. However, I have always enjoyed his short story collections and this new publication of twelve tales is pretty good. These stories are about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen.