Erasure are an English electropop duo formed in London in 1985, consisting of singer and songwriter Andy Bell with songwriter, producer and keyboardist Vince Clarke, previously known as co-founder of the band Depeche Mode.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about truth and storytelling and the way that stories and truth change over time according to who’s telling them or who’s listening to them,” says Kate Stables. “How personal stories accidentally become representative of bigger stories. How as groups and individuals, as humans, we use and need the stories we tell.”
Ten years and four albums deep, the story of This Is The Kit — the musical project that holds Stables at its heart, is itself one of time and change and careful listening. It has carried Stables from Winchester to Bristol to Paris (where she’s lived for the last ten years), across tours and festivals and the adoration of her peers: Guy Garvey, The National, Sharon van Etten among them. And it leads her now to Moonshine Freeze, her Rough Trade debut, and her most stunning and accomplished and compelling album to date.
Moonshine Freeze began in the immediate wake of its predecessor, Bashed Out: days after coming off tour last November, Stables and her band (Rozi Plain, Jamie Whitby-Coles, Neil Smith and Jesse D Vernon) headed into the studio in Bristol. “This time I really wanted to make sure that the band was fully involved from the beginning,” she says. “They’re three of my favourite musicians, and what they do with their separate projects and what they bring to This Is The Kit is brilliant. It’s really amazing that they are still up for being in the band. It’s no mean feat of endurance.”
Stables enlisted John Parish (PJ Harvey, M Ward, Perfume Genius) to produce, having worked with him on the band’s debut, Krulle Bol. “He is just an excellent human,” she says. “I love being in his company and learning from him and seeing the way he works. It felt like a good time to work with him again, and see how everyone’s grown or changed or stayed the same. It’s nice to have those cycles.” Aaron Dessner of The National also joined proceedings to feature on six of the album tracks.
Though the album’s songs were already written, Stables says she had no fierce vision for how they should sound, preferring to let them take shape with the input of her band and Parish. “I’m not yet someone who says ‘I want this album to sound like an 80’s French nightclub’,” she says. “All I can do is write the songs and then step back from them and see what themes or patterns there are, then bring those patterns out so it’s a coherent piece of work, sonically and in terms of feeling.”
The themes and patterns that emerged in Moonshine Freeze encompass ideas of folklore and oracles, memory, language, secrets, superstition, lives out of sync, and “the strange accidental fortune telling nature of the writing process.” Ideas fed by the writing of Ursula Le Guin and Alan Bennett, the African folk stories collected by the ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey, by grey coastal days and the taste of blood and copper coins.
If these ideas seem disparate on paper, it is Stables’ great songwriting gift to draw together such diverse fragments to reveal something of intense beauty and wisdom. On All Written Out in Numbers, for example, she seizes on ideas of astronomy, numerology, echoes of the song Green Grow the Rushes, faith and mathematics to explore the notion of human beings trying to understand both the universe and their individual place within it. Or on Easy On the Thieves she is examining wrongdoing and personal responsibility, the want for blood, the desire to consume, our appetite for sensationalist tabloid stories as a way to avoid ourselves. “As artists we end up writing about stuff that we’re trying to decode or come to terms with, the tough stuff,” she says. “It’s how can I untangle this mess? A lot of songwriting is untangling.”
Sonically, Moonshine Freeze is a beguiling mixture of great musical sophistication and something more guileless — children’s games, songs, incantations and snatches of nursery rhymes. Somewhere between them, between the extraordinary accomplishment of the closing piano swell of Solid Grease or the arresting banjo line of Empty No Teeth, and the buried rhythms of long ago, This Is The Kit create something quite mesmerising, a sound seemingly unbound by time or place. Stables’ voice too is a remarkable thing: in its angles there lies an exquisite strangeness reminiscent of Will Oldham, Magnolia Electric Co, Robert Wyatt, Karen Dalton.
Speak to Stables about her songs and she’ll describe them not in terms of structure or instrumentation but in more evocative and esoteric terms, of how the sound of title track “is a big clumsy creature lumbering it’s way towards you. It’s the past present and future coming to get you.” Or of how Riddled With Ticks sounds like “an exceptional day in an exceptional place.”
“There are certain images that pop into my head when I’m writing songs,” she says, “and with a lot of these songs I can picture them all in the same environment, the same colours and the same lighting. They all happen at night where there’s a small amount of light in a dark place.” With the track Hotter Colder, for instance, she thinks “about Durdle Door at Lulworth Cove, where you swim out under this archway and it’s just insanely deep dark water teeming with seaweed, and it’s very easy to get totally freaked out by what is under the water. Those colours and that light is in throughout the album I think. Shadows in the darkness and not quite knowing what you’re looking at. Things, creatures, ideas, leading you through situations.”
The album’s title, Moonshine Freeze, is an echo of that same feeling, and comes from a clapping song taught to Stables and her daughter by a friend. “At the end it goes ‘moonshine moonshine moonshine freeze!’ and everyone has to stop moving,” she explains. “And it really pierced me somehow.” Stables, a musical magpie of sorts, found herself unable to resist putting it into a song. “I think there are certain lines and melodies and little rhythms that hook into you and send your brain in spirals. Certain chords or words or rhymes or jump out of the music and spark our brains, they release a chemical and make you want to hear that sound again. And that was one of them.”
Stables has always been an exceptional songwriter, a gifted storyteller, a thoroughly unique voice. But with Moonshine Freeze there comes the rare and thrilling sensation of an artist truly taking flight, as if these are the stories she has long been waiting to tell: songs of great beauty, of wonder and illumination, that hold, still, something dark and teeming and shadowed; music you swim out into, songs that lead you through.

Disintegration is the eighth studio album by British alternative rock band The Cure, released on 2 May 1989 by Fiction Records. The record marks a return to the introspective and gloomy gothic rock style the band had established in the early 1980s. As he neared the age of thirty, vocalist and guitarist Robert Smith had felt an increased pressure to follow up on the group's pop successes with a more enduring work. This, coupled with a distaste for the group's newfound popularity, caused Smith to lapse back into the use of hallucinogenic drugs, the effects of which had a strong influence on the production of the album. The Cure recorded Disintegration at Hookend Recording Studios in Checkendon, Oxfordshire, with co-producer David M. Allen from late 1988 to early 1989. During production, founding member Lol Tolhurst was fired from the band.

Released on Paul Epworth’s Wolf Tone label via Polydor. Control demonstrates exactly why pioneering artists including Adele, Little Simz, The Invisible, Jamie Woon, Kwabs, Ady Suleiman and Ghostpoet have fallen for her talents. It’s an album that breaks loose from the confinement of expected genres - you’ll hear echoes of James Blake, The Weeknd, Laura Mvula and The xx in her original synth-soul soundscapes - and Lowe’s personality is also a pivotal part of the experience. Produced by Lowe with Dave Okumu (Jessie Ware, Paloma Faith, Kwabs, The Invisible). Previous singles ‘Right Thing’, ‘Who’s That Girl?’ and ‘Worry About Us’ all feature alongside a wealth of new material.

Ace tidings abound - Lucy Rose has announced her third album ‘Something’s Changing’. The record’s out on 14th July, and comes after she shared The Staves-featuring ‘Floral Dresses’ - the album’s lead single.
The record as a whole is mainly inspired by a slightly bonkers trip Lucy took to Southern America, after a tonne of fans there asked her when she’d be visiting them to play. “If you book me a gig, I’ll come and stay,” she told them, and ended up falling back in love with music along the way.
Accordingly, Lucy Rose’s album comes alongside a fly-on-the-wall documentary, filmed along the way. “The documentary is a big part of this record and I think it explains why that trip was important and why it lead to me making the record that I’ve made,” she explains in a press release. ”The trip gave me confidence to do things like record in just one take and the songs came more easily. The songs just came more naturally after that trip, and from feeling good, and from learning so much about myself. And it’s also that I feel the most comfortable in my own skin that I’ve ever felt in my life. So there is a lot of searching but there’s been a lot of discovery which is on this record as well.”
‘Something’s Changing’ features The Staves, Elena Tonra from Daughter, Bear’s Den’s Marcus Hamblett and Matthew and The Atlas’ Emma Gatrill, and sees Lucy Rose joining Communion Records. She’ll be taking the record on a cinema tour later this year, starting in - you guessed it - South America.

Marmozets: the story of how two sets of siblings battled against the odds to fully deserve their reputation as one of Britain’s brightest new hopes. To the outsider, the rise and rise of Marmozets might feel like an overnight sensation following their recent signing to Roadrunner. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and you’ll discover their shared commitment to their music.
“We’ve been together for years. We’ve sacrificed so much and we deserve this opportunity. We’re not taking it for granted. This is just the beginning,” affirms vocalist Becca MacIntyre, whose whirlwind of energy is the focal point of the band’s incendiary live shows. “We’ve worked hard at every single aspect of the band,” concurs her brother, Marmozets guitarist Sam. “Even when we started we were training ourselves to write songs all the time, and practising at least three times a week for four hours a session.”
Completed by third MacIntyre sibling Josh (drums) and the Bottomley brothers Jack (guitar) and Will (bass), Marmozets debuted in 2011 with their self-released ‘Passive Aggressive’ EP. Its fiery blend of scintillating punk energy and dizzying time changes was heightened further with the technical prowess of the following year’s ‘Vexed’. With growing critical acclaim, tour with the likes of Funeral for a Friend, Young Guns and Four Year Strong, and festivals sets at Download, Reading and Leeds, Marmozets were powering towards a major breakthrough. But then the teenage quintet stepped aside to rethink their approach.
“We were writing really technical stuff like Dillinger Escape Plan on crack and I loved that, but’s it’s just not us,” affirms Becca. “So when we wrote Born Young And Free and then Move Shake Hide, we realised we could write amazing choruses and melodies too. It just turned everything around completely for us.”
Move Shake Hide was produced by former Hundred Reasons guitarist Larry Hibbitt, whose enthusiasm for Marmozets and own experiences in a touring band prompt both Becca and Sam to describe him as a father figure for the band. So after Marmozets became the first British band to sign to Roadrunner in years, Hibbitt was the obvious choice to guide them on their journey.
Marmozets started recording their upcoming debut album in November 2013 in Castleford and eventually finished this January. “We talked about doing it over in America, but we’re a UK band, it’s our first album and we wanted to do it in England,” states Sam. “Going abroad would’ve been a big distraction, and we didn’t want to treat it as a holiday.”
What should’ve been an experience of a lifetime for Becca turned into weeks of frustration. The boys progressed as planned with their instrumental parts, but just before she was due to record her vocals, Becca was struck by a lingering fever. The illness didn’t pass and doctors were initially baffled by the cause of the problem. Eventually, with an endoscopy followed by antibiotics, she was fit and raring to go. She stepped up to the vocal booth. Her time was now. And then the studio was hit by an ongoing power cut.
“I decided right then to head back to London,” she says, audibly grimacing at the memory. “The magic happened and I managed to deliver exactly what I wanted to do.” Indeed, Marmozets’ unconventional double sibling line-up helps them face any challenge head-on. As Sam explains, “We obviously squabble but we’re family and we always make-up in five minutes. Also we can be very very honest and we don’t have to hide feelings from each other. We see other bands who struggle to talk honestly and it does build problems.”
Such challenges go back to band’s early days when they were considered dropouts because they were so dedicated to the band – they didn’t have jobs and were only sporadically in education. “We knew that something good was going to happen, so we just kept going and going,” recalls Becca. “But we never had a Plan B. We were in and out of music college, but there was never anything there for us. They pretty much tell you that none of you will make it in the industry.”
It’s a classic case of proving the doubters wrong. Marmozets aren’t just making it in the industry; they stand on the cusp of becoming one of 2014’s most vital breakthrough bands. The debut album emphasises their growing skill in developing a broad range of styles, including the snappy, punk attack of ‘Cover Up’, the brooding dynamic contrasts which feature on ‘Captivate You’, the visceral aggression of ‘Why Do You Hate Me?’ and the soaring progressive epic ‘Cry’. In essence, it stands true to their initial sounds while also remaining sufficiently accessible to crossover to a wider audience.
“The only way you’re going to go up is to keep training yourselves, both individually and as a band,” concludes Sam with the steely determination that has allowed Marmozets to grow from self-confessed “crazy, cheeky kids” to a band who really matter to a growing army of devotees. “We haven’t come from out of nowhere, we’re not pissing about: this is our career.”

“You could just listen to that forevermore, couldn’t you?” – MARY ANNE HOBBS (BBC 6MUSIC)
On Hidden Orchestra's eagerly anticipated third album, producer and composer Joe Acheson conjures an intricate yet expansive world of sound, built around a collection of birdsong and other field recordings captured over many years in diverse locations around the UK and abroad. Rich in detail and character, these snapshots intertwine with bass, drums, percussion and eclectic instruments - including piano, electro-harp, zither, Turkish mey and cello - for an emotive and transporting listen that Acheson describes as “a kind of personal audio diary, time capsule or memoir”.
Each track on the album is set to a different one of Acheson’s dawn chorus recordings, these magical snippets of nature providing effects both percussive and melodic, and sparking evocative journeys. Album opener “First Light” features the first ever full dawn chorus that Acheson recorded, on a 5am walk in December 2009 amid a blanket of crisp snow.
“Listening to an old field recording is like looking at an old photo”, says Acheson; “Close your eyes, and you're immediately transported to the time and place you made it. I remember exactly how I felt and what I was doing, who I was with, my full surroundings”.
All the elements of this deeply personal album draw links to Acheson’s past travels, homes and projects in some way. A dripping drainpipe in Innsbruck, an extractor fan in Tallinn, and wildlife in the Outer Hebrides, sit alongside cutlery, crockery and a fizzing gin and tonic in Brighton. Excerpts from sessions with many musicians include core Hidden Orchestra players Poppy Ackroyd, Tim Lane and Jamie Graham, as well as harpist Mary MacMaster, cellist Su-a Lee, and clarinettist Floex, their influences ranging from Shetland folk music to abstract experimental soundtrack work.
Woven into the fabric of the music are ideas and extracts from tracks that Acheson has written over the last twenty years. Some were originally conceived for commissions: the heavily percussive and playful “Serpentine” was written for BBC Radio 3 and the Serpentine gallery, and features noises from an exhibit being set up as well as water, horses and birds in Hyde Park. “The Lizard” builds on 2016’s “Marconi & The Lizard” EP, born of an artist residency at radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi’s hut on Cornwall’s Lizard Point, which was commissioned by The National Trust and British Library; radio static mingles with a dawn chorus recorded by Acheson at the hotel where Marconi had stayed before him in 1900.
On “Long Orchard”, Acheson achieves a poignant feat of sonic time travel: “My uncle is playing my grandmother’s piano (in the left speaker), recorded by my father on a domestic reel-to-reel machine in 1966; I am playing the same parts (in the right speaker), recorded on the same piano almost exactly fifty years later, just before it was sold at auction”, he explains. Another vintage accent comes from the British Library Sound Archive, with a 1947 recording of a wren that closes the album with a crackle on “East London Street”, named for his old studio address in Edinburgh where Hidden Orchestra began.

Like master painters exploring a subject over a lifetime’s work, Kevin Martin and Dylan Carlson – The Bug and Earth, respectively – have each been mining and defining their genres for more than 20 years. They’re united by an interest in – really an obsession with – heaviness. They search for, examine and break the boundaries between beautiful and ugly, minimal and maximal, light and dark – but The Bug and Earth always make music that is heavy in the most thrilling of ways.
Earth, and its founding member Carlson, first appeared in the early ’90s, and came to prominence with their Sub Pop release "Earth 2". An exercise in SLOW distorted droning minimalist riffage, their debut was the blueprint for what Dylan coined at the time "ambient metal,”– a style still being pushed forward on his latest Southern Lord release "Primitive And Deadly.”
Kevin Martin's career spans the same timeframe. Techno Animal, Ice, God, Razor X, King Midas Sound, and of course the The Bug moniker. All of which explore(d) the fringes of experimental and heavy music. With his recently released "Angels & Devils" LP receiving high praise across the board, he once again put his sonic stamp on the here and now with his collaborators Liz Harris (of Grouper), copeland, Miss Red, Gonjasufi, Flowdan, Death Grips, Justin Broadrick (Godflesh/Jesu), and Warrior Queen.
These two uncompromising outsiders met via the visual artist Simon Fowler (Angels & Devils.) Simon arranged for Dylan to come to a King Midas Sound gig, but Martin’s trademark use of a powerful strobe light meant that the epileptic Carlson couldn’t enter the room. Undeterred, Carlson featured King Midas Sound’s music in a podcast, and the pair eventually decided to collaborate around “Angels & Devils.”
The anglophile Carlson had long admired Martin, and other British sonic experimenters like Spacemen 3 or Pentangle. In turn, Martin understood the genius in Carlson’s deconstruction of metal, and Earth’s boiling down of the genre to its core, elemental riffs. Martin saw that he and Dylan were both “wanderers,” and “misfits in the world we live in.” They were both huge fans of dub and the Velvet Underground, and they discussed how those influences could provide a combined template for something entirely new.
When they finally began to record, it quickly became apparent that the music they made together needed room to stretch out and “drone,”– to be its own thing. Two tracks eventually emerged, "Boa"&"Cold," and were released as a standalone EP, with Dylan's signature guitar sound weaving seamlessly around some of Kevin's most destructively heady bass explorations. Martin had decided to exclude those songs from ‘Angels & Devils’, as he felt “They had developed a singular life of their own, outside of the identity of that album.”
Ninja Tune asked The Bug and Dylan Carlson to perform live in LA around the label’s 25th anniversary, and Martin and Carlson took the opportunity to further the recording project in person. So The Bug vs Earth project holed up in Daddy Kev’s legendary LA studio, with DJ Nobody engineering, for two very long days. Those recording sessions have resulted in the masterpiece that is “Concrete Desert.” Inspired by J.G. Ballard’s urban dystopias, and the Californian dream capital’s sordid, fragmented underbelly, Martin says that the album is in some ways a Los Angeles-set companion piece to “London Zoo.”
The record’s beautiful, chiming melodies are like shards of sonic light, glowing in currents of heavy bass darkness. There are pulsing soundscapes, ambient pinks and whites, and irresistible grooves. This is music that grips you entirely, and catches you in its lava-flow – an astonishing, primal album of vast depth.
In making it, Martin decided to break from The Bug’s obsessive study of groove, tone and texture, and think more cinematically. The result is a wondrously visual album, akin to finding oneself wandering amongst the rocky red hills of the Californian deserts. In fact, he says, the album could be understood as reflecting a ‘mistrust of “Hollywoodisms,” and the shadow of Hollywood fantasy that looms large over life in LA, and the USA in general. “Dylan’s a master at amplifying the flavour of America,” he says, “but not the side we see in this Trump climate.” For Martin, the “American dream is like a nightmare under Trump” but Dylan captures the “best side of that dream, a utopian openess.”“I hear the writing of Cormac McCarthy in his music. His playing conjures deserts, and wide open spaces.’ In “Concrete Desert,” Earth’s sonic landscapes, its far horizons and vast spaces, are underpinned and propelled by Martin’s ear-worming rhythms and percussive genius.
With live shows for The Bug and Dylan Carlson planned for April 2017, this is just the beginning of The Bug vs Earth project. The record might be one designed to ‘document alienation,’ but one listen is enough to show it, equally, to be a brilliant meeting of two kindred musical souls.

Budget-priced comp of the best solo works by this studio great who has contributed to albums by Fairport Convention, Mary Hopkin and Bert Jansch. Approximately 77 minutes long, it features 24 tracks, including 'Streets Of London', 'Hesitation Blues', 'Girl On A Bicycle' & 'Clown'. 1997 Kaz/Castle release.

The British club/dance act's 1999 album that is out-of-print domestically. Featuring guest appearances from Iggy Pop, Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream), Jim Reid (Jesus & Mary Chain), & Dot Allison. Nine tracks. Deconstruction/BMG.