It Looks Better From A Distance

 From decades old psychedelic veterans Mercury Rev at The Ritz on Friday night to two young and unknown bands on Saturday night at Low Four on Deansgate. Low Four is a recording studio/ gig space, two connecting rooms with a bar. We were there on Saturday night to see Wing!, an artist/ band recommendation via Daniel Avery that Martin from The Flightpath Estate picked up on. I wouldn't say the three of us were the oldest people in the room but we were in the top four and there was then a large, several decades gap to the rest of the crowd. The support act, Surprise!, were ridiculously young, two young men and a young woman, two guitars and keys, occasionally drum machine and three way vocals. When they clicked, the three singers all in unison with the softly strummed guitar chords, they had a definite sound, reminiscent of The Orielles quieter moments. 

Wing! are from South London and are also very young, a little older than Surprise! I think, in their mid- 20s maybe. Wing! are built around Adam Swan and his laptop, layers of ambient techno chords, wordless vocals and noise. In the room on Saturday night Adam stands on the left, headphones on, bringing in chords, music and static drones from his device. In the middle is Kai Charlton, laid back but nimble bass guitar work and occasional synth, and on the right drummer Joe Killick who is a revelation, a seriously good drummer who manages to sound both like an 808 brought to life and a very real human being who can switch from jazz to techno in an instant. 

Post- hip hop, post- rock, post- techno, post- trip hop post- everything.... they make a massive, entrancing sound, beat driven electronic music with nods to jazz, instrumental hip hop and Detroit. They've had a few EP releases. This is It Looks Better From A Distance from earlier this year which sounds like Tortoise and Carl Craig getting it on at a trip hop night. 

Wing! were very impressive on Saturday night and went down well with the small but enthusiastic crowd. The sheer force of the live sound- layers of atmospheric laptop textures and the kick and swing of the drums- was very persuasive. 

They've played at the Green Man festival and won the Green Man Rising award. Last year there was an EP at Bandcamp called Missed It Just the Once, four slices of rhythm heavy instrumental music that sound like samples and loops played by a live band. Get it here. The Worth Scanning For EP came out this year on Memorials Of Distinction and is at Bandcamp here. 

Explodes Like A Fractal, Pops Like A Light Bulb

Mercury Rev are touring to celebrate twenty five years since the release of All Is Dream, an album that came out on the day of the Twin Towers attacks. 2001 is a long time ago now and in some ways All Is Dream doesn't seem like an album that's a quarter of a century old although the time it was released into was a different world in all sorts of ways. I can distinctly remember buying it in September 2001, an album that for me was in the space between Isaac being in hospital a lot (two bone marrow transplants in 2000 and a year in isolation afterwards) and Eliza being born (2003). It got played a lot in that time. Revisiting it recently, it struck me that it's as good as 1998's Deserter's Songs, the album that is uaually held up as their masterpiece. The band had planned to record All Is Dream with Jack Nitzsche but he died just before they were due to begin and in part they attempted to record what they thought he might have done with the songs. They were also down to a core of singer Jonathan Donahue and guitarist Grasshopper. 

The support act at The Ritz on Friday night was former Bad Seed Mick Harvey with Mexican singer Amanda Acevedo. I only caught the last three songs of their set but the last one, built around a Mick Harvey one chord rhythm guitar clang, had the DNA of The Bad Seeds running through it. They have an album out, Psychedelia In White, which might be worth checking out on the basis of what we heard. This song as far as I know wasn't played but comes from a 2024 Mick Harvey solo album and is very touching, a tribute to those from his youth who have gone. 

When We Were Beautiful And Young

Mercury Rev start out with some psychedelia, a Ravi Shankar cover, as is their way. Donahue prowls the front of the stage gesturing to us, 60s beatnik cap and reefer jacket, every inch the poet/ frontman. They don't do the obvious thing and play All Is Dream in full and in order, but dip in and out, pushing that album's orchestral sounds, fever dream poetry and psychedelic chamber rock to the limits. From Deserter's Songs they play the quirky The Funny Bird and follow it with a surging, dark Hercules, All Is Dream's closing song, which is segued into There's Always Been A Bird In Me (from last year's Born Horses). The songs all flow into each other, no gaps between them. Donahue breaks off from the mic to conduct the group, arms waving around, throwing the music from side to side, leaning ver the drumkit to encourage the drummer. It's theatrical- there's something about Mercury Rev that always reminds me of 1940s Disney, the overblown symphonic melodies, the weirdly trippy Fantasia psych and at times the singer could be the 1940 Fantasia film version of Mickey Mouse, dressed as a 60s beatnik, breaking off from throwing shapes and conducting his colleagues into forlorn vocals. 

Lincoln's Eyes is a treat, powerful and spooky, overblown chamber psyche that halts suddenly on the line, 'comes to a dead stop', a jump scare even though you know it's coming. 

Lincoln's Eyes

They go from there into a long cover version of The Modern Lovers' She Cracked. After that they lose me for a while with a section where they play a medley of Dream Of A Young Girl As A Flower, Patters and Runaway Raindrop (none from All Is Dream), their 1940s cinema/ psyche going prog including a drum solo, and finishing with Donahue throwing in the Tears In Rain monologue from Blade Runner via a children's voice changer toy. 

They recover for the ending, the final four songs a Mercury Rev masterclass, Grasshopper soloing and the band (two synth players and the krauty drummer) on fire. They summon all that early 21st century energy and darkness with Tides Of The Moon...

Tides Of The Moon

...and then hit us with two Deserter's Songs classics, Holes and Goddess On A Hiway, both sounding glorious, before finishing with All Is Dream's magnificent opener The Dark Is Rising, a song that I can clearly remember listening to back in autumn 2001 (and since) and being affected by it more than once- it finishes with Donahue singing the line, 'I never dreamed I'd lose you/ In my dreams I'm always strong', centre stage, foot on the monitor, arms raised either side of his head in mock body builder pose. 

The Dark Is Rising

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was In total darkness, or a very large room, very quietly.

I responded with bands I'd seen in large rooms- Lou Reed, Nick Cave, The Charlatans, Bob Dylan, Beastie Boys and Prince, and also with Jamie Xx and John Talabot. 

The Oblique Saturdays community chipped in with Gram Parsons, The Deep Dark Woods, Fatima Mansions, Cave In, Rage Against The Machine, The Youngbloods, Bonnie Prince Billy, Idlewild, Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls, The Twilight Sad and The Durutti Column. Thanks to Ernie, Rol, Chris Yardley, Al G and Mrs G, SRC, C, JC and Eddie Largely Anonymous. 

This is Pauline Murray and The Invisible Girls in 1980, Martin Hannett on production, Vini Reilly in the band and Peter Saville on sleeve art. 

Screaming In The Darkness

This week's card says this- Get your neck massaged.

I mused on this for a while and came up with nothing much.  I decided to engage my housemates (wife and daughter) into the Oblique Saturdays world and said to them, 'I'm going to say a phrase and I want you to tell me what song or songs it suggests.' They responded as follows-

Wife- 'Nothing'

Daughter- 'Nothing'

Wife- 'Stress'.

Stress Waves

Oneohtrix Point Never in 2010. If you're stressed it's good to try to find ways to relax. Here come Frankie...

Relax (Sex Mix)

Listening to relaxing music helps too, especially music with a vocal sampled from a relaxation tape. Maybe Love Corporation can assist. 

Palatial 

Feel free to drop your own responses to Get your neck massaged into the comments box. 

Post script: Spencer sent this to me earlier this week. I'm adding it here as an Oblique Saturday extra. It's from an interview Brian Eno gave in 1980

'The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude." 

The first Oblique Strategy said "Honour thy error as a hidden intention." And, in fact, Peter's first Oblique Strategy - done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that - was ...I think it was "Was it really a mistake?" which was, of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he'd kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know...there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they're now used by quite a lot of different people, I think.''

Nocturnal Stealth Mode

Techno albums as tributes to much loved cats are thin on the ground- the genre has been expanded a little by the release last week of The Adventures Of An Amazing Boy Cat by M- Paths, out on Mighty Force. Across thirteen tracks M- Paths explores the range of electronic sound- techno, drum 'n' bass, ambient and vocal samples, all expertly brought together into a whole. 

The first track is just seven seconds long, the cat of the album's title saying 'hello'. It's followed by M- Paths revisiting his own Emotivated track, a Kennedy sampling track from December 2025, the former President's, 'we do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard', speech accompanied by headspinning electronic melodies and thumpy techno. The eight minute Forever In Our Hearts is a centrepiece, a vocal sample FXed and chopped up and laid over sleek, gliding Berlin techno. On Boy Cat's Nocturnal Stealth Mode the drums get tougher and distorted, dub space and scratchy synths sounds competing with more cut up vocals, sometimes not much more than syllables and parts of words dropped in. 

Sirens arrives, disruptive and in your face with rapid fire drums and speaker bothering bass. Towards the end of the album Climbing rides in on a machine rhythm and skittering synth FX that dance across the top, layers of sounds repeating as snares fire off and clatter away. Climbing (Part 2) brings the drum 'n' bass drums back with more sampled speaking voices and intense synth squiggles. At the end Play & Rest calms things down with some ambient techno chords (briefly) before the drums kick in. After a couple of minutes, the drums disappear, the ambient chords resurface and then it fades to static and the sound of waves hitting a pebbled shore. A most satisfying ending. 

The album can be found at Mighty Force here.

Nayar

Four years ago Tigerbalm released an album called International Love Affair, a record in love with the possibility of sounds from other places, a trans- continental dance record combining London with Bali, Africa, New Zealand, Brazil and Morocco- house music and global sounds jammed together in a completely organic sounding way by Tigerbalm (Rose Robinson). Apart from anything else, it was a massively fun album. Riad De Lister sounds like Tom Tom Club pitching up at a 21st century basement party in Dalston. 

Riad De Lister

A remix album followed with new versions by a slew of artists including The Emperor Machine taking on Riad De Lister and then by way of return Tigerbalm remixed The Emperor Machine on an EP of tracks from his Island Boogie album (that also included a pair of Hardway Bros remixes). Tigerbalm's remix of La Cassette with Severine Mouletin on vocals, is day glo, sci fi/ Afro- pop, dub disco. Impossible not to enjoy. 

La Cassette (Tigerbalm Remix)

Between that release and this autumn I lost touch with Tigerbalm's music but found it again recently. By happy coincidence Tigerbalm released an album in June this year, Bubblegum Discos, that opens with this infectious and vibrant piece of futuristic Latin/ synth pop, Nayar (recorded with Napoli resident Giorgio Lopez). 

Nayar originally out as a single in July 2025 and was followed by two more singles- Pura Vida and then Coco Makako. Those and the rest of Bubblegum Discos can be heard/ bought here. 

Queer The Pitch

Rich Thair has a main job in Red Snapper, a role as a member of Sabres Of Paradise live band, a spin off duo with Sabres bassist Nick Abnett (Spraycan) and a Red Snapper offshoot called Number with his long term musical partner Ali Friend. You'd think all of this would keep him busy enough but he also has a solo project, Dicky Continental, based out of his studio Buntys in Swansea. Dicky blurs trip hop, dub, soul and breakbeats, an urban and after hours sound. The first album Un... came out on Acid Jazz in 2023. Last year he had a track on Sounds From The Flightpath Etstae Volume 2 and this year has released a single and been involved in some remixes, all leading up to a new album, Queer The Pitch. 

Queer The Pitch came out recently on Margate label Ramrock. Dicky reunites with singer/ songwriter Jo Sims (from Un...) on opening song The Grain, an echoey, breakbeat affair with crunchy drums and an acoustic guitar, and vocals that drift in and out. It works very well as a lead in and sets up what comes next. Across the rest of the ten tracks that make up the album Rich provides the musical backdrop for a range of young vocalists, singers, rappers and poets- Tia Zakura, Ioan Omar, Laila Woodward and Asher Carroll, drawn from a local youth project and talent pool Rich leads called Future Blood. 

Tia Zakura's laid back, easy delivery doesn't hide the personal nature and unsettling feel of the words- Rust is coming from an uneasy place, examining the world and Tia's place in it, being young and black in 2026 Britain. 'Thoughts drive me insane so I've just been thinking thinking', she says on Rust. Tia returns on the summer single Hostile Environment, a fantastic dub/ blues spoken word/ poetry track. 

Big Red Button marries live jazz and trip hop with Ioan Omar's voice. His voice is also on the fractured hip hop of It Was Just You and the synth bass and electric piano, soulful sounds of Flying. Asher Carroll sings on Take A Deep Breath And Let Go, a cinematic song that suggests a world of underground clubs and basement cafes. On Yeah We Do there are seagulls and a long horn note, drums and the voice of Laila Woodward, who brings a folk/ ambient hypnosis and haunting to Queer The Pitch. 'Save your soul for another day', she advises. 

Pirate Love arrives halfway through Queer The Pitch, a tribute to pirate radio with fuzz bass, strings, FX and a rare groove radio sample, and the alubm finishes with Sweet Equity, a late night jazz/ blues track, more cinematic sounds with bass by Andrew Wal Coughlan, to whom the album is dedicated. 

Rich has pulled off something really special on Queer The Pitch, a showcase for some young and emerging talents- singers, songwriters, rappers and poets- whose voices and words find a home in and among the experimental and evocative tracks Rich has created as Dicky Continental- 21st century, South Wales, dub/ spoken word blues. 

You can find Queer The Pitch at Ramrock's Bandcamp page and at Dicky Continental's website. 

Luster

Back in April 2025 4AD released an album by Irish musician and songwriter Maria Somerville, an album called Luster. At the time I slept on it a little, not giving it the time it deserved (despite a couple of people raving about it to me. Then, about a year ago I caught up and became mildly obsessed with it. Now, a year on I go back to it every now and then and find something new in it every time. 

Maria is from Connemara, Ireland, and picked up singing and playing guitar at an early age from family members. She uploaded some songs in 2013 and got some attention and then self released her debut in 2018. She got a show on NTS radio (a station who are very on the ball with leftfield and non- mainstream music, DJs and selectors) and she would weave field recordings and spoken word tracks into her selections of folk, ambient, shoegaze and dreampop. This in turn seems to have fed into Luster, an album which found its way to the right home with 4AD. 

In just under forty minutes Maria pulls together the sounds mentioned above- folk, ambient, shoegaze, dreampop- with some seriously emotive and affecting music, songs that have an indefinable quality but that also speak straight to you. Most of them, I don't know what they're about as such, but I feel as if I know exactly what she means. 

There's something mythical about the songs on Luster, something otherwordly and in tune wiht the elements and nature. Halo sounds like its coming in from out at sea, drifting in on a sea mist- a gauze of drones and FX and an unseen choir, an abstract ambient/ shoegaze sound that the words seem to appear out of and then disappear into. 

Halo

On Trip the metal strings of the guitar chords clang away, coming roughly through the amplifier and an Irish folk influence is there, part of the vocal melody, a nod to the past. 

Trip