Back catalogue: Post Rock/Experimental

Review: Dead Sound is collaborative project featuring Marco Sterk (aka Young Marco) and Berlin-based pop-auteur John Moods, two artists with existing links to the Music From Memory label, Sterk being part of the trio Gaussian Curve and Moods released the 2022 album Hidden Gem with The Zenmenn. The eight tracks here are delicate and atmosphere-laden, drawing on everything from reverb-soaked, harmonic folk - 'Eye In Disguise' - to the Geiger counter rhythm and low-in-the-mix mutters of 'Force of Nature', like an understated Throbbing Gristle if such a thing could be imagined. If you enjoyed Trentemoller's recent reinvention of shoegaze, Scandi synthpop and post-punk on Dreamweaver, then this will be well up your street.

Review: Based out of Melbourne, Australia, Takiaya Reed (better known as Divide & Dissolve) is a one-woman monolithic force of industrial-tinged, neo-classical leaning instrumental doom metal. Originally a duo, 2023's fourth full-length Systemic marked the first effort from the project following the departure of percussionist Sylvie Nehill (of M?ori and White-Australian heritage), with guitarist/saxophonist Reed (of Tsalagi and African-American heritage) embarking on a solo venture from there on out. Her second singular display of overtly political, droning sonic dread comes in the form of Insatiable, which coalesces mercurial beauty with bombastic abrasion, almost as if sonically illustrating the warring of mindsets active in our collective conscious. From drawing ire back in 2018 for their controversial music video for 'Resistance' which featured spitting and spraying urine-coloured water on monuments of colonial figures such as Captain James Cook and John Batman, Reed has made it clear ever since that their punishing instrumentals are designed with the artful intention of "decolonising, decentralising, disestablishing, and destroying white supremacy", which she makes overwhelming ends to accomplish without a single word uttered.