Spring Dispatch ‘26

Some news around here, dear readers: after 4 or so years of going it on my own, the head count of resident slow dose scriveners is officially doubling. Legendary tone poet Juho Toivonen is joining the ranks. Long time readers will know I’ve championed Juho’s albums in this newsletter from the outset. And while it’s bittersweet to lose that tradition to what will now amount to a conflict of interest, I promise that it will only be your gain. Anyone who has read his AKTI zine should know we’re all in for a full complement of humour, insight, and hot tips for avant snobby bobbies like you and me.

We’re both healthy omnivores so, with any luck, this whole operation should evolve into a more dynamic offering of contrasting and complimentary tastes and voices. To bastardise the inimitable D & G, “since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd”. Or, more simply, you should expect more to read, more regularly. We’re even threatening to branch out and break off the occasional interview and featurette (keep your eyes peeled for the first such item in a few scant weeks).

Perhaps most confusingly, we’re changing the name of this publication from Slow Doses to Monk’s Hood. A decision which we promise will make more sense in the near future.
For the immediate business at hand, however, let’s just get down to it; the first slew of LP reviews since Sterling put a bow on 2025. Without further ado!

*****

Sterling’s Reviews:

Mind Over Mirrors — Particles, Peds, & Pores [Hands in the Dark]

Hands in the Dark has done well to fashion itself as a sturdy and stalwart way-station for stately avant music. It tends to tip a bit too heavily on to the “wine and cheese” end of the spectrum for me to dive in regularly, but few labels are as reliably elegant and tasteful when it comes to pointy-headed composers and artists. All of which is to say; when it hits for me, it really hits (see: Läuten Der Seele’s Die Reise zur Monsalwäsche or Varby Vokalgruppe’s Solids for Voices).

I’ve spent a fair amount of these last bleak winter months warming up next to Particles, Peds, and Pores, an earthy gurgling programme of synth meditations from Mind Over Mirrors. This is kosmiche bubble bath music for noise rats, and it lives comfortably in a liminal space between dark space travel and new age sunrises. Recommended if big analog synth sounds give you “gänsehaut”.

Excalibur & DJ Spence – Medium Rare [Doo]

I now consider anything sold on tracksplease.com as “buy on sight”. I recently shortlisted SnPLO’s Last Day Cookie in my recent “best of the last five years” round-up, and I’ve kicked myself repeatedly for not acting faster on the subsequent Pin releases of “The Cocaines”, “Ciganisati”, or “Infinity Substance” (all of which cost at least twice the sticker price on secondary markets).

This brings us to Medium Rare. Taken in the context of everything that has now come before on either Pin or Doo (I confess to not fully understanding the precise relationship between the two), this tidy EP of flawless dub techno brilliantly inverts the spatial expectations I think we normally bring to dance music. Other listeners would likely use taxonomic descriptors like “micro” or “minimal” as shorthand for describing what’s going on here, but I’m more prone to think about how close and proximate this record feels. It’s not small or diminutive in any way, but it certainly plays with the dimensions and scales of the sonic imagination (IE, it’ll get ya lost in the club of your miiiiiiiiind, man).

Surface Access – Transfer [Other People]

Speaking of dub techno, this one is far more on-the-nose in its Basic Channel worship. Released on Nicolas Jaar’s Other People imprint, Transfer is crafted to the point of being over-polished, and studied enough to sound clinical. If you’re in the mood (which I often am), and you have your green ears on (which I often do), this should still do the trick. But it doesn’t necessarily take me as far out as I’d like it to. High quality, not essential.

Tuluum Shimmering – Tuluum’s Time Travel Tape Trunk Vol. 4 [self-released]

Ah yes, the ever reliable Tuluum Shimmering. I’ve never gotten to the bottom about who’s behind this project, or what its exact provenance of it all is. I never seem to hear about them performing, despite the fact the “UK” is monolithically listed as their place of residence on bandcamp. I like all the mystery, though, and I haven’t been particularly motivated to dig any deeper to learn more. The TS discography is so immense it almost strikes me as something akin to the neo-psychedelic Collected Works of William Shakespeare. There are “albums” comprised of numerous album-length tracks (see: 2023’s Behind the Cloud Horizon). There is the wonderful and ongoing series of raga “covers” (most recently featuring 2024’s cheeky Donna Summer/Coltrane entry). And then there is the seemingly bottomless and alliterative Tuluum’s Time Travel Tape Trunk archive series (of which this release is the most recent entry). It’s collectively so staggering in the aggregate, I can’t help but wonder if it’s the product of conspiracy. Is this really one person? In many ways it sure sounds like it. And yet the output is so prolific it wouldn’t surprise me to learn this is all the work of many hands operating in a synched up lysergic hive mind.

If you’ve been following along for a while you’ll feel quite comfortable with what’s on offer here; deep time-release mind benders that will certainly entice anyone chasing after more records that sorta sound like Arica, Ariel Kalma, or Darrell DaVore. What’s unique about this particular entry is that, compared to other Tuluum Shimmering “LPs”, it’s just about standard album length. Making it an unlikely, but approachable, entry point to this wonderful and boundless project.

Skee Mask – ISS012 [Ilian Tape]

Another of the underground’s busiest bees, Skee Mask continues his relentless release schedule with another 12” entry in the series of such EPs he iteratively produces for Ilian Tape. As ever, the standard of quality here remains impossibly high, even if this particular offering isn’t quite my favourite. Uptempo and occasionally busy, ISS012 can feel a bit like there are more ideas at work then there is space for (which, considering how often Skee Mask releases both proper records and hard drive dumps, is pretty wild!). If I have any complaints about Skee Mask it’s only about his occasional lack of restraint. This is nitpicking, though, and at the end of the day it still all rolls off as being impossibly danceable, easier to access than it should be, and always unmistakably him.

Sternpost – unworld.afterpop [Concentric Circles]

To my mind, one of the surest indicators that we are indeed living in an age of acute decline is the fact that the Sternpost discography has been almost exclusively pressed at micro scale. His 2016 album, Statues Asleep, is one of the best records of the last 10 years, yet its physical edition was limited to a mere 100 copies. 2023’s Ulrika was initially released in an edition of 200 before being modestly reissued by US label Concentric Circles. By contrast, it’s wild to think that once upon a time Van Dyke Parks’ art-pop template-setter Song Cycle was steered through the vast resources of a major entertainment conglomerate like Warner Bros. Even as recently as the 1990s, major label money still seemed to improbably find its way to chamber pop albums overseen by svengalis like Jon Brion. It’s positively stupefying that a producer, composer, and multi-instrumental as prodigious and visionary as Peter Herbertsson should remain so obscure.

The newest entry in the Sternpost project, unworld.afterpop, is yet another impeccable offering of lush and anachronistic mastery. This is a record simply too melodically elegant, self possessed, and sophisticated for the modern palettes and attention spans.

Chantal Michelle – All Things Might Spill [Shelter Press]

Given this is a Shelter Press record with a typically pretentious pr blurb, I was primed to write this off as little more than self-serious artist residency core. And in many respects, it still is. There are moments, however, where it transcends the severe and restrictive framing it has set for itself. At its best All Things Might Spill has memorable passages of real warmth and intimacy, particularly in the rare spaces when the human voice is featured. It’s also nice that it’s sequenced more as a collage of impressions and sketches than your standard 3 track drone record. The better compositions here are actually the shortest, its weaknest points surfacing whenever the runtime ticks about the 5 minute mark. There is a really good record somewhere in here, but – as is often the problem with any release that willfully evokes both post-graduate degrees and Berlin – All Things Might Spill is ultimately self-sabotaged by an over commitment to cool texture at the expense of vulnerability and accessible expression.

Ben Vince – Street Druid [AD93]

I feel I’m particularly disposed to be hard on this record because it let me down while ostensibly trading in modes and idioms I’m usually fond of. This is a jazz-adjacent LP built on a foundation of looped 4th-world reeds and an industrial-leaning dub palette. So far, so good. And yet, when I close my eyes, the space it most readily materialises is a trendy restaurant in Hackney; aglow with mood lighting, hinge dates, and expensive orange wine.

The strongest part of any track is always the sax and its subsequent looping. It’s everything else that drives me nuts:

Why is there so much digital reverb on everything?
Why are these often compelling compositions backlit by toothless new age soundscapes?
What is up with the digital wah noodling on “deepbluereflection”?
You really shouldn’t be able to hear this much software on a record like this.

Granted, things do get more interesting in the back half, but even there I’d argue the choices around programming and rhythm feel forced, or underbaked. In the end it all plays like a melange of tastes and influences I should enjoy, but digested for an audience and context I don’t wanna relate to.

Velv.93 – Maidstone [STROOM]

Maidstone begins in a deep and cleansing pool of pulsing tremolo before patiently blooming into one of the more dynamic and compositionally interesting ambient albums I’ve heard in some time. Its most identifiable influence is likely SAW2 which, while lofty, is earned. This is an LP comprised of subtle romantic dramas, where compositions are assembled via the counter programming of texture and melody to produce a work that is too detailed and descriptive to be mistaken as somatic. What a stunner.

*****

Juho’s Reviews:

Esse Pi Enne – Chamber Music LP [All Night Flight]

One of the foundations of a meaningful life can be the recognition of a fundamental value that one defines for oneself, and the decision to move towards it. To choose such a value is already to take distance from passivity. To follow it is to accept that change will come. The psychological process of self-reflection that follows from this stubborn, but necessary, way of living does not always feel pleasant. At times it can feel uncomfortable and even alienating, despite the moments of clarity and ecstasy it may also bring.

When a person constantly redefines themselves, the self becomes like a stream. It moves, it changes shape, and it cannot be fixed in one place. The central difficulty is time. How can I define myself when I can only find myself in time, and when I understand the present through the past? Literature and art have tried to answer this question for centuries. Again and again, artists have built structured webs through which a sense of continuity can be created.

Since last year, one such structure has been brought to light by Turin-based Esse Pi Enne. Carrying the previously mentioned atmospheres of clarity, alienation, and ecstasy, Pi Enne’s vision is also smeared with industrial gutter oil and a post-punk a la AC Marias meets-Jandek kind of melancholia.

Like most releases from the esteemed Stockport-based record shop All Night Flight, Esse Pi Enne maintains a certain distance between the listener and the object. This distance allows gracefully the wax to function as all parts of a holy trinity - a mirror, a candle, and a lysergic element. From the mirror arises the question: am I merely a small branch, a physical manifestation of the universe watching itself in motion?

It may be this or it may be that. We can never be certain. But one thing I am certain of is that I recognize Esse Pi Enne as pure force and as a part of that collective plane, the same plane that gives rise to the emotional connection I sometimes feel when I am carried away by the amalgamic force that is described by humans as sound.

Tooper Keps - 1000 Guest Rooms 7”

[South of North]

Tooper Keps has seen it all, spunk stained sheets, bad breakfasts and smells of duty free perfume. Now he sits down with his keyboards and instead of entertaining the rich retirees he blows out Herr Amok-vibed confession songs.

1000 Guest Rooms is a minibar diary recorded after the fifth complimentary gin by the lounge bar. The Yamaha PSR-11 and PSS-360 sound exactly how they should sound: cheap. Presets wobble like the colored lights at the lounge.

As a Finn I recognize something very Finnish in this sadness disguised as entertainment work. You can imagine the audience wanting schlager hits and nostalgia, but instead receiving a totally back-drunk-again-from-hungover inferno type existential audit. Tooper Keps could be in the next Kaurismäki film if it were set in Tenerife.

The production feels rather uncomfortable. It is like elevator music that has escaped the elevator. The Ape Escape of the experimental underground. The arrangements never fully land, which in my books scores more points. Landing would mean satisfaction, and Keps clearly gets no satisfaction.

Side A feels like a bonky arrival to the Canary Islands. Side B is checkout in the morning when you realize that nothing ever happens except for the drowning kids in Bangladesh.

Humor music, but a full blown tragedy. Like a clown who reads physics theory backstage. A parasite in paradise.

Anne Gillis – Eyry [Art into Life]

Do you know that feeling when something repeats so much that it stops being the same? The familiarity of the known slowly fades, and what once felt fixed begins to fucking shimmer. Repetition in life feels safe. It confirms and reassures, but it also carries a great potential to destabilize. It can turn the familiar into something haunting. I think Anne Gillis is a master of that art, and it stands clearly at the center of her ninth solo record, Eyry].

The music is sometimes beautiful, but always raw. There is no polish to make the material easy to digest. She feels like a master of falling down the stairs, like a frozen stiff swan trying to ballet dance.

Her electronics are difficult to trace, at least for someone like me who isn’t a gear head. I can’t map the machinery, nor do I feel the need to. What matters is her sound itself. It reminds me of 80’s blunt electronics, like John Duncan’s Japan era and Cosey Fanni Tutti, et al. But unlike those weirdoes, Gillis has a unique compositional instinct that makes me want to call her, first and foremost, a composer rather than just another random ass experimentalist.

Certain themes repeat until they begin to break apart, or until the listener’s mind bends around them. In that way, the sound psychology of Eyry is almost sadistic and abusive. One might think of Michel Foucault and his idea that power doesn’t always show itself as direct force but as structure. Here too, the power works through arrangement.

One such structure in the history of human behavior was fagging, a traditional practice in British public schools and many other boarding schools, where younger students had to serve as personal attendants to the older boys. I have a feeling some of the seniors at 1800’s Eton College would have appreciated this Gillis record.

Anyways. If you briefly set aside the accidental beauty that emerges, the loops start to train the ear. They create a certain framework within which the listener must function or comply. They press slightly too long and hold slightly too tight. The listener is kept within the structure without a clear exit.

What impresses me the most is the control behind this so-called punishment. Any instability is carefully arranged. It feels like a trap. The collapse never seems accidental. It feels precise. And once you let go of the record, something unsettling remains: the loops tend to continue within you. The structure lingers. You seem to carry the pattern with you. Repetition has done its work.

Anthony Moore – Monkey’s Birthday LP [paragram discs]

There are albums you play casually while cleaning your apartment or making dinner, and then there are albums that make you question the fabric of reality for 40 minutes. Monkey’s Birthday is definitely the latter.

This LP is a condensed soundtrack to a six-hour experimental film by David Larcher. Six hours. From what I understand, the film was shot in the ’70s across Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Turkey. It’s called a road movie, but don’t be expecting highways, stacks of weed and cool sunglasses. Think more: dust in your eyes, drifting thoughts, looping encounters and a tape recorder running.

Anthony Moore is by and large an artist that treats sound like clay. Recording chants, voices, random convos, jam sessions etc. and then he goes about his business and reshapes them. The result feels like somewhere between prayer and a metamorphosis. If software-based fuckery sits at one end of the spectrum, this is at the other.

There are looped and chopped-up voice fragments from his band Slapp Happy. Then you have Heathcote Williams reading some weird ass mystical texts in a tone of dramatics… floating over Islamic chant, field recordings, and tape loops. The whole pack.

What I enjoy most about this condenser is Moore’s attitude. This record does not work as a cinematic pleaser and it doesn’t insist upon itself (ladies and gentlemen, a joke). It doesn’t smooth stuff out. The edits can be traced to a certain part of the sound fabric and are obvious. As we all know by now, the loops can and should wobble. Things collide instead of blend. And that’s exactly why all this works so damn well.

There’s also something beautifully anti-commercial about the whole thing: a six-hour experimental film track turned into an edition of 500 LPs. Monkey’s Birthday is a moving collage - spiritual, chaotic & confusing. It feels like being on a long cubensis ride where you’re not fully sure where you’re going, but you trust your gut and the guiding element anyway. It’s also weirdly reminiscent of the most psychedelically potent side Nordic experimentalism (for example, the Sewer Election & Ån that rocked pretty damn hard) happening around Göthenburg - where my heart belongs.

Not an easy listen. We don’t want to give you those. But a rewarding one for sure.

Lénok - Langue of Tongue LP
[Mappa]

look how deranged and uncompromising I am
look how deranged and uncompromising I am
look how deranged and uncompromising I am
look how deranged and uncompromising I am
look how deranged and uncompromising I am
look how deranged and uncompromising I am
look how deranged and uncompromising I am
look how deranged and uncompromising I am

First of all, this piece of shit mistakes density for depth. The record piles hi-fi glitch, distortion, shrieks, and synthetic pad spasms on top of each other until the listener gets dental caries from their overt sweetness.

And the supposed “wackiness”? It lands like Clockwork Orange eye-lock-level forced eccentricity, the musical equivalent of someone loudly laughing at their own joke. You know this album wants you to feel it’s so liberatingly artsy and unhinged, but you can practically hear the careful curatorial decisions of a juggalo.

The real ”masterpiece” here, however, is the Bandcamp blurb itself. Words like netherworld and deranged disquiet get thrown around so aggressively that I kind of start to root for the guys who want to abolish arts funding.

And then there is Mappa, continuing once again to treat lack of clarity as an artistic quality (excl. two comrades Cucina Povera & Olli Aarni, they are legit & heroes in this house). At this point, really, Mappa releases feel like endurance badges for art school kids who want a golden star, the fucking masochists they are. The label’s aesthetic philosophy seems to boil down to: if it’s quirky enough, someone will call it mesmerising. Instead of nurturing truthfulness as a core value, they often just amplify the feeling of alienation and proclaim it as some sort of vision.

The result? Music that feels steroid engineered for a niche prestige jerk-off ring rather than sincere listening. This album feels like fucking group homework with Pol Pot & Hitler and the homework is math.

Langue of Tongue isn’t horrifying or alien. It’s worse: it’s tediously pompous middle-class-kid shit while insisting it’s profound. The album asks you to lift the rock and observe the writhing life underneath. You won’t struggle to tear yourself away broskis. You’ll just eventually realize you already checked out ten minutes ago. I’d rather watch Salò at McDonald’s.

Sean McCann — Leopard 2CD / 3LP

[Recital]

Recital label head Sean McCann has long occupied a strong position within contemporary experimental music: known equally as a mastering engineer, composer, curator, and publisher. Through his label, over the years, McCann has cultivated a catalogue defined mostly by patience, precision, and an unusually coherent aesthetic vision, especially considering the label’s longevity. The imprint has consistently favored works that unfold with time and reveal themselves only through the deepest of attentions.

His curatorial sensibilities form a necessary prelude to Leopard, McCann’s first opera and arguably the most expansive manifestation of the ideas that have quietly structured the label’s ethos for years. A word I sometimes use as gigantic fuck you, a dismissive shorthand - cinematic - proves to be pretty unavoidable here, but entirely to the material’s benefit.

Rather than adopting the traditional operatic structures - aria, recitative, climax (Google helped me a bit here) - McCann constructs an philosophical and psychological version of it in which the forward pulling momentum occurs on multiple levels at once.

The opening roar of the album functions as an initiation rite. Think of the opening sequence of Come and See: the two boys in the sand discovering the gun, the haunting face twisting - the sense that something irreversible has already begun before the narrative properly forms/unfolds. Leopard operates in this similar way, beginning the trip with a total psychic displacement.

The narrative resonates strongly with ideas articulated by Erich Fromm, particularly his analysis of modern alienation and the self-consuming ways of contemporary society. Fromm described psychological (in McCann’s case also de facto) cannibalism as a condition in which individuals, deprived of authentic relations, begin consuming their own emotional and social structures in order to survive systems that slowly erode meaning. McCann’s opera translates this particular diagnosis into sonic form.

The boat has become a closed system with no escape, a floating society detached from anything external. A cannibalistic utopia. The inhabitants’ pitfall reads simultaneously as both, adaptation to reality and psychotic savagery. When you look at the medium on your sofa before your speakers you slowly get it, in front of you lies the total aestheticization of the unthinkable taboo.

A revealing comparison comes up when Leopard is placed alongside the noise landmark Ottoman Black by Jason Crumer. At first glance, the two works appear to occupy the different poles of experimental music, yet both pursue a strikingly similar objective: the dissolution of distance between the sound and the subject listening to the sound.

This parallel sheds light to the fact that Leopard is actually operating closer to noise music than its surface initially suggests. The opera replaces volume with disturbia, distortion with ambiguity, brutality with inevitability. The effect is no less violent - only less crude in its arrival.

The cannibalistic self-created ”society” is never explained away. Its implications remain uncomfortably close to contemporary existence: communities sustained through total self-exhaustion, cultural systems feeding upon their own rotten past, individuals internalizing survival mechanisms that gradually assault the very self - the ego they, for some reason, aim to preserve.

Well, the macro-meanings can be mapped more clearly through the fantastique libretto formed by McCann. The most fascinating puzzle, yes.