An Irish Almanac of Noise & Experimental Music from 2025
(Nyahh) 2xCD $16.75
Noise, acoustic, electroacoustic, electronics, musique concrete, tape music, and drone by multiple generations of artists in the field of audio experimentation, some with academic backgrounds and some total bedroom studio weirdos who don’t get out much. Tracks by Dressing, The Quiet Club, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh, David Donohoe, Hillsongs, Cyess Afxzs, Claire Guieran & Katie O’Looney, Dylan Kerr, Dennis McNulty, Ian Lynch, Susan Geaney, Declan Synnott, David Colohan, Aonghus McEvoy and Adam Campbell, Rogue Spore, Amanda Feery, Karl Burke, Acid Granny, Eimear Reidy, Danny McCarthy, Toll, James King & Caroline Murphy, Irene Murphy & Mick O’Shea, Luxury Mollusc, Feral Torch, David Lacey, Francesca O, Enola Christ Metalizer, Fergus Kelly, Jonathan Deasy, Neil P. Quigley, Diarmuid MacDiarmada.
Dead End Bingo Dry As A Bone
(Burselm Crypt Recordings) CDR $6.75
Speculating on a solution to one of the more relevant conundrums of our times “What is going on here,” Geoff Bigmouth says, “More of the same much of the same more aggravation much earache the sound of hopes trampled into the muck a fair summation I would say if I were not a nothingness floating in the cold hard cup of grim death.” We’re all in this together
It Wasn’t Nothing
(Minimum Table Stacks) LP $23.00
Stripped-down, spiky DIY from Hounslow, England, 1978. Both the band’s EPs, plus four previously unreleased tracks. Kindred spirits with the whimsical, mildly psychedelic Television Personalities and ’60s garage bands like the Electric Prunes. Their quirky lyricism was part Donald Fagen and part Frank Zappa with a dash of sarcastic West London humor. With color insert
Trespass
(Siltbreeze) LP $20.00
Narrator / guitarist Nathan Roche is at the peak of his oratory and string-mangling prowess. His recitation over flared fret work, conjoined with Paul Bonnet’s alchemical electronic stitchery, summons forth a Promethean tableau that’s inexplicably both gothic and futuristic. Imagine if Mary Shelley had created Roxy Music instead of Frankenstein. Trespass burns with a demanding urgency, its majesty sweeping across time from the charnel houses of Ingolstadt, Bavaria, to the Offworld shoulders of Orion.
Habits
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $9.00
A soundtrack to a still life of objects arranged so-so along a skirting board, courtesy of Glasgow’s Rose Dagul (cello), Hannah Ellul (synth and tapes), Ben Ellul-Knight (vocals and samples), and Rebecca Wilcox (vocals and samples). Wafting around the carefully arranged scene in ‘besides bugs’ is a chamber music for the tiny beetles scuttling around the casting of a child’s feet; commemorative plates and a light bulb balanced on a jam jar. Photographs, domestic mutations abound in ‘slimy blobs’ — a shimmer of light from a fountain — lucky coins flipped, horse hair stripped, heard in submerged duet with the clicks and pops of plant life. Ah Ah Ahhh what ‘hangar’ repeats is the scrunch of a crisp packet, textures for dreaming picked apart by anxious hands. With the little bits and pieces re-forming as song particles that only ‘seems like a flow’ kicked up and disturbed in different directions when exposed to the light. Edition of 50
In So Far As
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $9.00
From an old stationary factory in Bow, Shiell played the building as an instrument — a resonant ear to the traffic on the A12, using a geophone to pick up the structure’s response to the constant flow outside. He improvised with it over 24 hours in a kind of trance, listening to the structure vibrate with the residues and histories of this ancient route: once a Celtic crossing, later a Roman road, and the more recent expansion splitting through communities. These timelines fold into one another through the building’s vibrations, echoes and elements drawn out through the improvisation. The resulting recordings became a meditation on the constant drone of the road as interlacing stories arose from the thrum of tyre on tarmac. Worse overlaid his own geographical references from listening to the tracks while walking the roads of his home in Melbourne, using sound to regulate sensory overload. He establishes a sense of location through his listening and his sonic responses explore sounds that support his movement through uncomfortable or overwhelming spaces. Together, these works map personal and collective geographies, listening closely to how bodies and architecture continually shape and reshape one another. Edition of 50
Parasite Expat
(Un Poco Fría) Cassette $11.00
Objects, violin, Optigan, loops, location recordings, electronics, fails videos, thrift store cassettes. With 4pp booklet. c40
That Are
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $9.00
Each piece on this CD is presented approximately as recorded in autumn 2025 at Olive’s studio in Kobe, Japan, with help from a certain amount of editing and superimposition to tighten up the dream logic. If you listen, you will see many things that are. Edition of 50
The Dripping Spirit
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $9.00
Ross Scott-Buccleuch (aka Diurnal Burdens) and Daniel Vujanic from Zebularin return with a somewhat spontaneous, sombre and sometimes splatty sonic stain. Veering from astral cartwheels. The stasis of indelible glue. The planned misdirection of a spectre’s victory lap. It’s that old familiar suburban malaise. Punctuated by perpetually leaking boiler pressure and sleep without rest. Some residue may remain. Edition of 50