Hey friends,

Apologies, I've been a little quiet on here while settling into the PhD. It's been a little overwhelming at times but I'm hitting my stride and reading extremely cool shit every day. Might share some of that with you once I've got a handle on things and can get these out more regularly, but for now I've got some very exciting news!

I'll be back in Manchester this weekend, soundtracking The White Hotel's first opera, Tiresias 2.0, and a label I've been working on with Alex Egan, from Utter Records, is about to land after a good few years in the works, with a 4-track EP of esoteric dancefloor gear from Nottingham producer, Coralie. Narr shows to catch up on include an amazing guest mix from Translucent Blonde, exploring a nexus of queer maximalist music and porn cutups, a really fun b2b session with Zoe Pea from my summer trip to Outlaws, and an unapologetically occult blend of horrid noisy stuff for Samhain. Next one's this Sunday, on a jazzier, US-centric tip, inspired by re-reading Naked Lunch. And finally, next Half Edge is booked in at SOUP for January 27th, with a guest I've wanted to book for years! I'll follow with full info very soon but save the date...

Tiresias 2.0

TWH's first ever opera and you know after the massive success of the Kantos Choir events, it's going to be special. I've only seen clips online (which look incredible) so I'll leave the description to them:

"Tiresias 2.0 is a one-woman experimental chamber opera; mixing live electronics with voice, strings, brass and Ney, a 3D printed replica of a 30,000 year old ancient Arabic wind instrument originally made from a vulture bone.

Tiresias 2.0 finds us in the far future where an AI variant of the prophet Tiresias is the last being on a barren earth; a seedling growing awakes the human element from the machine that has been broadcasting a repeating message for millennia.

Composed by Dominic Matthews with libretto by Sam Redway."

I'm especially excited because I'm sharing the bill with Lupini, who's supporting with a new live set of field recordings and electronics 'marrying the medieval and the modern.' Nina's one of my favourite DJs, a fellow advocate for antique futurism, and someone who's as comfortable easing you into the mornings on NTS as shredding dancefloors at 160+, and what I've seen of her recent forays into live performance has been so brilliant.

It's gonna be wicked, grab your tickets here.

Coralie - Barney's Maze (QUOTH01)

This has been a loooong time in coming. In the dark days when I worked at Phonica, I had a rare and lovely weekend running away to Bristol to play with Bruce on his Get Loose show on Noods. Larry's selections are always brain-ticklingly brilliant, but listening back in the Phonica office with Alex, this one track screamed out at us. It turned out to be an unreleased track by Coralie and we reached out immediately to see if we could put it out. I don't need to do the whole 'pressing plant delays, releasing records is hard blah blah' stuff, but I'm so happy this is finally coming out! This is what I wrote for the press release:

"‘Barney’s Maze’ is the work of Nottingham producer Coralie (aka Steven Randall). It fell on our ears strangely dislocated from time and place. Its sound world is utterly modern, technical and weird; mangled sonics slip deftly out of reach of easy categorisation. But the spirits evoked feel ancient, spectral resonances of a psychedelic continuum older than memory.

Haunting voices predominate: human, not too human, but captured and distorted by technology, cut from any source of context and voided of meaning. The sonic spaces conjured here are cavernous; great cathedral-like structures resonating with the collapsed centuries of digital time. Broken techno rhythms roll echoing in an artificial void with synthetic voices, raised to synthetic heavens. Strains of the sacred glimmer within a form that’s entirely profane, the most human of constructs.

It’s a stunning EP - moody, atmospheric and gorgeous, each track a world unto itself, but fully primed for the dance. We recommend it wholeheartedly.

Coralie tells us it’s dedicated to his dog."

Vinyl out tomorrow and digital on 9th December.

Here's the Bandcamp x

Narr Shows

Really excited to have been a part of this.

Translucent Blonde is the alter ego of Manchester-based artist and porn archivist, Jodi Venca. Her work explores the artistry and sleaze of the porn industry and its attendant culture, and probes the intersections between material culture, technology, and sexuality.

This orgiastic feast of a mix is one part paean to the erosthetics of queer maximalism, drawing lines between the transgressive noise of Throbbing Gristle and the sweat-drenched sleaze of club tracks by Patrick Cowley and Soft Cell.

It also includes some of her own work, using cut-up techniques indebted as much to William Burroughs as to musique concréte, to repurpose and recontextualise material from vintage pornos, queer cinema, and text-based digital interactions with various characters in porn-site comment sections, rendered into audio in the voice of the inimitable Zoe Filthy-Rich.

Proper sleazy listening, hope you love it as much as I do.

This one's a live recording from my b2b at Outlaws with the wonderful Zoe Pea. I'd hoped to play with Zoe for a long time, endlessly impressed by their iconoclastic electicism, rock'n'roll approach to DJing, and fine-tuned ear for weird and idiosyncratic sonics.

We swung through lots of percussive and dubwise downtempo bits, industrial drum workouts, sweet and sexy pop inflected house, broken up with a couple of big left turns with Patti Smith and Comus. Really hope we can do this again :)

I never really need an excuse to get scary, but for Samhain I leaned right into it. Bookended by recordings of Aleister Crowley, there's a pretty unapologetic occult theme, bringing together Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Body Without Organs, and the theme to Suspiria. A fun and sinister warm up for the amazing Lancashire Witch Trials show with the Kantos Choir.

Hope to see some of you this weekend and as ever I love to hear from you.

All love,

Mike xx