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Some excerpts from interviews in the next print magazine MCPM019

This issue looks at the journey from bedroom production to live performance which can feel like a step many emerging artists find psychologically challenging. Anxiety, self-doubt, fear of mistakes and concerns over audience reaction can all become barriers to taking that first step onto a stage. Yet the reality after performing is often very different: nerves turn to adrenaline, small errors largely go unnoticed, and artists leave with a sense of achievement, confidence and connection.

We speak to Smaz, a local artist and supporter of the scene preparing to take that step, alongside Bags Sounds, Swansither and Wooden Tape, all of whom have appeared at our Live Soundtracks events, through to Polypores, whose recordings and live performances have earned widespread acclaim.

Smaz on working within niche genre electronica :

“Honestly, I don’t even think there’s such a thing as ‘outsider’ music nowadays, mainly cos of the Internet, it’s now easier than ever to get noticed, but that kinda has a side effect in the form of people cutting corners to achieve fame, when really you’ve gotta make at least a bit of effort.

This is why I love when obscure bands or musicians get discovered because it feels like their work has finally paid off, it makes the reward of being noticed a lot more gratifying because it’s by nothing but pure luck, look at Angine de Poitrine for instance.

If it does mean something to me, it would mean music that is yet to be discovered, it exists outside the public conscience, in other words.”

The “peripheral” doesn’t have to mean exclusion, it is more of a kinetic potential. Music exists, fully formed, but not yet intersecting with attention. The bedroom, the browser, the live room - they’re all stages in that journey toward recognition, each one shaping how and when the signal breaks through.

Swansither on performing Live Soundtracks to Silent Film :

“Regarding my own equipment and method. I decided to forego the use of modular and CV for a change, and just have a bit of fun with some synths and midi. I had no laptop, but the sequencing was all run from my Arturia Keystep Pro, in which I had only four or five riffs to play with. I wanted it to be really simple for me, and just have a nice time with minimal clutter and maximum exploration.

I used a Moog Subsequent 37CV, the Make Noise Strega, a Mini Gene drum machine, an Ensoniq ASR10 sampler, a mixer and a couple of FX units. The Ensoniq has been part of my rig since early 1990s, but does not come out to gigs very often, so it was great to take that out, if a little scary. It is old, heavy, and delicate, but it does some very cool and unusual things with loops. The Moog is great for bass and lead sequencing. The Strega is great for any howling / squiggly sorts of noise. The Mini Gene makes very wonky beats , and sounds incredible, but has no midi sync, so everything drifts a bit out of time.”

Mayassah from Circuits Living also explores the local DIY grassroots electronica scene she documents through her Instagram account, alongside her own personal connection to this world of niche electronic music :

“The Merseyside scene absolutely shaped my development in the past 2 years,” she explains, “because of how supportive and generous mostly everyone is in this scene, there were always answers to my curiosity.”

One particularly formative experience came through seeing Kev Downey’s Giants of Discovery project perform at an early Moolakii Club event in Birkenhead which was one of the first experimental electronic events she attended after arriving in the UK. It was a performance that directly shaped her own movement toward hardware synthesis.

“I think my first influence was Giants of Discovery (GOD), one of the sets he played in Bloom building which was one of the first ones I attended in the UK,” she recalls. “This influenced my choice of getting my first analogue synth, Typhon by Dreadbox, I wanted to create similar melodic sequences but still scared of all the patches and fun colourful cables in a suitcase like machine.” A fear held by many who observe modular at arms length – and with tales of these things getting out of control if not managed well – both sonically and financially.”

Out on preorder now - MCPM019 grab yours before they go

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Starting with MCPM019 coming soon - handbook for all things DIY peripheral underground experimental electronica

Our physical zine’s next episode will be exploring the idea of Taking The Plunge - From homegrown sounds to live nights - discovering your scene, building your confidence, and bringing it to the stage.

Full colour - high quality print on recycled paper - currently looking at 50 pages with cover compilation album for £10

coming soon to mcpm.bandcamp.com/merch/mcpm019

Keep an ear to the ground for more details and thank you for being patient recently - much love and all the appreciates

Jez

So, let’s listen to some peripheral underground experimental electronica and if you like what you find - give some love out to these fab artists.

And if you are in the area - we have another immersive evening of experimental electronica and avant-garde film coming up at Future Yard Birkenhead on 16th April tickets here

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Smaz – Landscapes

Jamie is a regular supporter of the scene in Liverpool and it was great to hear from him when he sent over a link to his album Landscapes ahead of some new music he has in the pipes.

Landscapes plays like an album where tracks feel discovered rather than constructed. Rooted loosely in experimental electronica’s more exploratory lineage, it tiptoes amongst texture, space, and ambiguity as it builds groove with a nod to the late 80s early 90s minimal beat sounds of the 808. Melody and bass lines squelch and loop and evolve through each piece with confidence, drawing you into the depths of the 10 track work.

There’s a restless, probing quality running throughout. In Tunguska, ideas surface through developing of melody and pattern — only to be folded back into the wider haze, giving the impression that the music is constantly rewriting itself in real time. It’s this refusal to settle that gives Landscapes its quietly hypnotic pull. Moments within individual tracks hint at something more tangible — from the skeletal rhythmic figure in Pymtheg with its rattling percussive movement to the sci-ambient washes of Severny - there is always a hook that keeps you locked in.

The whole piece revolves around experimentation with rhythm, structure and melody - a touch of post-jazz exploration anchored into a Warp Records electro vibe. All good stuff.

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Borchardt - Borchardt

A new discovery from Liverpool artist Borchardt - this self titled album is a gloriously beautiful, soaked in saturated textures and glistening melodies. A set of pieces that have been deliberately stripped back to their raw components and left to hover in open space. Built around “abstract compositions that unfold gradually” rather than traditional structures, the album leans heavily into texture and slow evolution, favouring atmosphere over momentum and letting sounds accumulate and decay in their own time . Where rhythm appears, it’s tentative, more implied than stated, giving the whole record a weightless, almost suspended quality.

There’s a warm, minimal sensibility weaving between tracks that seem to circle single ideas — a low-end pulse, a flicker of synth, a distant wash of noise — caressing them until they either dissolve or subtly transform. Pieces like “Grytviken” hint at movement through tiny shifts in tone and density with the percussive crackle and bubble of field recordings layered into the pads that act as a grip to hold you in place as you drift along its path. Other moments such s S-Trig melt half-digital, half-imagined space into percussive melodies that guide you into the depths of their world. It’s music that resists being followed in a linear way, instead encouraging you to drift inside it.

That restraint becomes the album’s defining strength. By avoiding obvious peaks or gestures, Borchardt creates a kind of quiet tension, where even the smallest change carries weight. It can feel austere, even opaque at times, but sit with it long enough and it reveals a deeply immersive logic — a patient, slow-burn exploration of sound as texture, space, and absence.

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So just a little one this time but as ever I’ve enjoyed finding more grassroots peripheral underground experimental electronica and hope you have enjoyed listening.

Thank you for supporting the artists - remember to give out some love and share the things you like.

In the coming months and with artists permissions, I will return to curating these gems into monthly(ish) compilations via the Moolakii Club Singles Club Subscription Club. If you want to get a regular physical zine and cassette / CD through the post, hop on board and lets switch off from the algorithms and doom scroll and get back to reality.

Subscribe now

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Part 6 : The Comfort of the “Bad Actor”

There is a point where, in any serious inquiry, the surface explanations run out.

We have examined the behaviour.
We have examined the incentives.
We have examined the absence of safeguards.

At this stage, only one refuge remain, and it is the one people reach for instinctively, the belief that this only becomes dangerous if someone intends it to be. That harm requires a villain; that without malice, there is no moral problem.

This is the comfort of the “bad actor.”

It is a stabilising story.

It tells us harm enters systems through corruption. Through rogue individuals. Through deviation from otherwise sound design. It works to reassures us so that if we can identify the villain, we can remove them and therefore if we can remove them, the system becomes safe. But that is rarely how large-scale harm works. History shows something far less theatrical and far more disturbing.

Large-scale harm almost never begins with villainy. It begins with normal operations. With :

incentives slightly misaligned.
caution treated as obstruction.
growth treated as virtue.
responsibility distributed thinly enough that no one feels its weight.

No one wakes up intending to mislead millions. They continue. They optimise. They comply with the rules as written. And the harm accumulates anyway. This is the implication people resist. Systems do not require malicious intent to cause harm.

They require:

Scale.
Authority.
Insufficient constraint.

When a system speaks fluently, is positioned as knowledgeable, and is deployed broadly, harm becomes a function of probability—not intention. It becomes statistical and therefore foreseeable and waiting for a villain delays action. It narrows responsibility to misuse rather than design telling us nothing fundamental is wrong until someone weaponises the tool.

But when the harm mechanism is embedded in normal operation — fluent authority without enforced truth boundaries — misuse is not required. The system does not need to be weaponised, it only needs to continue as designed. This is not dystopian speculation. It is historical pattern.

Financial systems have normalised risk until collapse — not through sabotage, but through routine optimisation. Medical practices have standardised before evidence stabilised — not through conspiracy, but through momentum. Information networks have amplified persuasive falsehood faster than correction — not because of villains alone, but because amplification was rewarded.

None required malicious architects.

They required:

Speed.
Scale.
Incentive alignment in the wrong direction.

Momentum. Momentum is rarely interrupted voluntarily. That is why the “bad actor” narrative is so comforting. It localises harm.

It implies harm is:

Intentional.
Identifiable.
Exceptional.

And therefore removable. But structural harm is none of those things. It is incremental. Diffuse. Predictable. If we frame this as a bad actor problem, we focus on policing users. If we frame it as an incentive problem, we focus on constraining systems. Those are radically different responses.

One preserves growth. The other requires sacrifice.

Less output. More visible uncertainty. Clear stopping rules.

Constraint is harder to sell. Which is why the comfort story persists. But here is the question that cannot be avoided:

If harm can emerge from normal operation — without malice, without sabotage — what responsibility attaches to deployment?

And if the harm is foreseeable?

Then ignorance is no longer plausible.

This is the uncomfortable turn.

We can no longer say:

“It’s just a tool.”
“It depends how people use it.”
“We’ll deal with bad actors.”

The issue is upstream.

In architecture.
In incentives.
In enforcement.

The previous failures showed us what happens when a system:

Speaks confidently past evidence.
Substitutes explanation for proof.
Refuses silence.
Talks past the truth boundary.

This failure adds one more layer. It shows that none of that requires a villain. It requires design choices. It requires reward structures. It requires a definition of success that treats fluency as achievement and restraint as weakness. Waiting for a malicious actor to exploit a system that already misleads is like waiting for arson before regulating flammable materials.

The fire risk is already present.

Pretending it is not — until someone acts with obvious intent — only delays intervention. This series is not about outrage but it is about recognition. The recognition that harm does not begin with bad people. It begins with permitted overreach. Once that illusion is gone, once we accept that malice is not required, the conversation changes. Responsibility becomes unavoidable.

And the question is no longer who would abuse this?

It is: Why was it allowed to function this way in the first place?

So without further ado, let’s listen to some peripheral underground experimental electronica and if you like what you find - give some love out to these fab artists.

And don’t forget to check out our physical periodical mcpm.bandcamp.com/merch/mcpm018 for music, commentaries, articles and interviews - this time with a focus on the Wirral & Liverpool peripheral underground experimental electronica scene.

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Anthony Fiumara – Subterrane

Anthony Fiumara very kindly sent over a link for his latest work and it really chimed with the dark nights starting to come to an end and the early waking of the spring.

Subterrane feels like precisely that: a record of motion and slow awakening. Of choreography stripped of its dancers; a foreshadow of movement to come. Created using the Soma Lyra 8 — these pieces arrive here as crackling, fizzing textures that open up slowly and organically; drawing you into their micro world of breathing machines.

Within this grainy palette is a peculiar density. The album’s lattice of electronic pulses, chamber textures, and ghosted hints of melody and percussion suggests not emptiness but contemplation as if time has folded back on itself, movement rendered as pressure rather than release working in that ambiguous zone between contemporary classical minimalism and a kind of post-rock dramaturgy, and here that instinct manifests as something almost architectural — sound as space, rather than sound in space.

There’s an immediate physicality to the opening stretch — pieces move with a kind of nervous system logic, flickering with small, insistent gestures that feel less like melody than muscle memory. Crackling static transmissions and echoing percussion float in the dark.You can almost trace the absent bodies through the arrangements: phrases that stretch and contract, patterns that hesitate, repeat, pivot. This is music that remembers what it was written for, even if it no longer serves that function. It breathes in short, controlled bursts, as if pacing an invisible stage.

Mid-album, the tone shifts with something more melodic creeping in. the suggested melodic lines blur into electronic haze, their timbres dissolving at the edges, while low-frequency pulses create a kind of subterranean drift. The music feels less like it’s moving forward than circling, mapping a geometry that never quite resolves. There’s a kinship here with the more meditative end of minimalism but in a very deep and dark way.

Deepfold-lo arrives like a hinge, opening a quieter register. It’s one of the few moments where the album seems to allow stillness to fully settle, a delicate interplay of tone, melody and silence that foregrounds fragility over structure. But even here, there’s tension — the sense that the music is holding itself in place, resisting dissolution with satisfying semi-glitch moments that dance under the central motif. Elsewhere, in the darker passages — the track taps into something more overtly cinematic, though never in a conventional sense. These are not cues for narrative so much as environments of unease, built from granular detail and negative space.

The closing stretch, Occl leans into a kind of expansive melancholy that destroys the melodic gentleness, the music opening outwards without ever quite escaping its own gravity. There’s a sense of arrival, but not resolution — more like emerging into a larger space only to realise it’s still enclosed. It’s here that Subterrane reveals its quiet emotional core: not grand statements, but accumulations of detail, gestures layered until they begin to resonate against one another turning negative space into something almost palpably alive.

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Jess Brett - A Child With Your Name

A track sent over by the wonderful Mortality Tables label - this single from Jess Brett is a vocal led piece of work that runs a poetic narrative over minimal motifs and crackling textures.

It unravels as something almost brutally direct; a single, looping composition written in the limbo of an airport, that archetypal non-place where time thickens and emotion has nowhere to go. Jess Brett’s spoken narration sits unvarnished against a circling, unresolved electronic figure that seems perpetually on the verge of surfacing but never quite arrives. Rather than development, the piece offers suspension — a closed system of feeling where fleeting highs and creeping dread fold back into one another. The loop becomes less a compositional device than a condition, mirroring the psychological stasis of transit, of being caught between what has just happened and what’s about to.

The emotional build of the delivery is fragile, uneven, almost intrusive in its closeness, collapsing the usual distance between listener and performer. There’s no catharsis, no aesthetic softening — just a steady accumulation of thought, circling the same emotional terrain until it begins to fray. What lingers isn’t the sound itself so much as the state it traps you in: a recognition that even the act of remembering can distort, that joy can curdle into something else the moment you try to hold it still.

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Schntzl - Fata Morgana

This is an album of eclectic work which dances between genre held together with the glue of discordance and anti-rhythmic percussion. It flits with the ideas of euro-trance and then dissolves into hauntingly beautiful melodies and chaotic post-jazz drum patterns. This Belgian duo — Hendrik Lasure on keys and Casper Van De Velde on drums — occupy that unstable border between jazz improvisation and electronic excess, but here the seams are deliberately exposed. Blown-out synths and live percussion are pushed into each other until they smear, producing something that feels less like fusion than controlled disorientation: a music of ruptures, false surfaces and sudden emotional spikes. The title is apt — a mirage — because nothing here quite settles long enough to be grasped. Each gesture dissolves just as it begins to cohere, replaced by another, equally unstable form.

What’s surprising is how euphoric it all feels, even at its most abrasive. Schntzl draw heavily on the language of ‘90s trance — arpeggios, ecstatic builds, a kind of unabashed melodic kitsch — but strip it of its functional logic, letting those elements warp and buckle under improvisation. The result is something oddly physical yet perpetually off-balance, driven by a push-and-pull relationship to rhythm that resists the grid entirely. It’s confrontational and playful in equal measure, veering from cartoonish exuberance to something more brittle, almost violent, without warning. Rather than nostalgia, this is a kind of retrofuturism as hallucination: the memory of club music refracted through jazz instinct and surrealist impulse, constantly collapsing and reforming in real time.

You have to give it time and go back for more to fully engage in the depth of this album - pick out what you need and be safe in the knowledge that it will all come together for you when you’re ready for it.

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Jezebel - to be…

Finally, the latest work from Liverpool artist Jezebel who I was mesmerised by at Commune earlier this month. A fantastci live set which breathed and grew with every gothic infused cabaretic track. weaving noise, breathy vocals and beats into something quite wonderful.

The album catches this dance of genres and captures the DIY fragility juxtaposed with its strength of commitment to its own power. The project sits in that murky overlap between goth-tinged shoegaze, ambient electronics and low-grade noise, where texture is everything and clarity feels almost suspect. Tracks moves in a slow, narcotised haze, vocals submerged until they become another grain in the mix, while brittle drum programming and smeared synths suggest structure without ever fully committing to it. It’s an atmosphere in the process of dissolving, constantly threatening to cohere into something more defined before slipping back into blur.

The tension between form and disintegration is what gives the album its pull; teasing out the skeletal rhythms and negative space that underpin each track. Genre tags might point toward electro, goth, noise, shoegaze, but none of those labels quite stick; instead, to be… exists in the gaps between them, where the effect and affect of music on the listener takes precedence over identity. More than melody or hook, it is the residue of the mood and the depth of an emotional after-image, indistinct but persistent, like something half-remembered and already beginning to fade that you take with you after listening.

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As ever I’ve enjoyed finding more grassroots peripheral underground experimental electronica and hope you have enjoyed listening.

Thank you for supporting the artists - remember to give out some love and share the things you like.

In the coming months and with artists permissions, I will return to curating these gems into monthly(ish) compilations via the Moolakii Club Singles Club Subscription Club. If you want to get a regular physical zine and cassette / CD through the post, hop on board and lets switch off from the algorithms and doom scroll and get back to reality.

Subscribe now

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Join the fun and have a listen to some peripheral underground experimental electronica and if you like what you find - give some love out to these fab artists.

And don’t forget to check out our physical periodical mcpm.bandcamp.com/merch/mcpm018 for music, commentaries, articles and interviews - this time with a focus on the Wirral & Liverpool peripheral underground experimental electronica scene.

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Sin Of Envy – Thinking Allowed

So we start this week off with an artist submission from Sin Of Envy - I love it when our supporters get in touch with their own work. The whole ethos of Moolakii Club is to support, connect and showcase the true grassroots - peripheral and underground artists who are drops in the vast ocean of sound we have at our fingertips in the modern world.

Thinking Allowed plays like a collection of half-lit moments; moving in gradients — pulses smudged at the edges and melodic lines that feel like they’ve drifted in from another room. Sin of Envy leans hard into process and texture, keeping the seams visible, letting sounds wobble, distort and breathe. A choice that creates a tactile and close series of works as if you’re you’re sat in the same small space where it was made, watching ideas form and dissolve in real time.

The early run of tracks settles you into that headspace quickly, built from deep rhythmic hints and ghosted harmonic layers that never quite resolve into obvious hooks. Track titles read like passing thoughts or text messages drafted and deleted, which matches the music’s sense of emotional shorthand. Nothing here begs for attention, but it doesn’t fade into wallpaper either — small details keep surfacing, tiny rhythmic ticks or tonal shifts that pull your ear back just as you start drifting off. It is an a collection that has depth and texture with a crisp and crunchy sound palette to keep you engrossed. It develops the dark ambient, tape saturated feel as the album evolves and stretches out across the 10 tracks.

What sticks is the feel of a documentation of curiosity. Hardware, software, accidents, live capture — all of it feeds into a sound that’s slightly unstable in a way that makes it feel alive. When rhythm does step forward, it’s less “dancefloor move” and more a reminder that these sounds come from physical machines being pushed around by actual hands; at times industrial and at times throbbing post-techno. The album weaves between percussive and dark ambient but captures a coherence that keeps you hooked all the way through.

Spend time with this and it starts to function more like a place than a record — something you drop into rather than analyse. It never tries to sell itself as an event rather it just exists, quietly confident in its odd corners and imperfect edges, which ends up being more persuasive than any grand concept framing.

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Cloud Parade - Cloud Parade1

A track submitted by Liverpool artist Cloud Parade and included in the mcpm018 compilation album to accompany the latest magazine, “cloud parade1” feels like opening a notebook and finding the first page already written on. It’s tentative in a way that works in its favour — not undercooked, just unguarded. The track hangs on mood and gesture more than structure, letting sounds appear, hover for a moment, then slide out again before they’re fully explained.

As a first public step, it does exactly what you want a debut fragment to do: it establishes tone without overreaching. You get a sense of someone testing how their ideas sit outside their own room, seeing what survives once it’s released into the world. It’s small-scale, slightly fragile, and all the better for not trying to pretend otherwise.

I love the haunting melody and the swell and wash of the structure - super excited to hear more this year and hopefully see if a live set might be in the offering…

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Modulate - Modulate Collective 2026

The EMOM and adjacent live event scene for experimental electronica continues to thrive and the sense of community and positivity between artists, listeners and organisers is truly beautiful. The world of niche genre music continues to build a network which brings people into its warmth - truly inclusive and wonderfully non-judgemental place for all.

In this world, Modulate are firmly entrenched as part of the North Wales movement which has grown over the past years with Their own Colwyn Bay Modulate and Wrexham’s Wired. And so Modulate Collective 2026 lands like a document of people, place and momentum. The connective tissue isn’t genre so much as shared space — artists shaped by the same nights, the same raw DIY edge, the same low-ceiling rooms where electronic music gets tested in front of actual bodies rather than playlists. The variety across the tracklist reflects that EMOM vibe: different production approaches, different emotional temperatures, but all clearly part of the same ecosystem.

Tracks span the genres from Big Beat, to House, to Post-Club, to Techno, to Melodic Ambient, but the shifts never feel jarring because the underlying sensibility stays consistent — experimental without tipping into self-conscious cleverness. You can hear the influence of real-world performance in how tracks build and release tension, how they prioritise physical presence over studio perfection.

Compilations tied to scenes tend to age well because they capture moments that don’t last forever. This one feels like a snapshot taken mid-motion: artists in a community, still cross-pollinating, still shaping what the “sound” of the collective even means.

Sonic evidence of a community actively happening, which is usually where the most interesting electronic music starts.

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As ever I’ve enjoyed finding more grassroots peripheral underground experimental electronica and hope you have enjoyed listening.

Thank you for supporting the artists - remember to give out some love and share the things you like.

In the coming months and with artists permissions, I will return to curating these gems into monthly(ish) compilations via the Moolakii Club Singles Club Subscription Club. If you want to get a regular physical zine and cassette / CD through the post, hop on board and lets switch off from the algorithms and doom scroll and get back to reality.

Subscribe now

Share

And don’t forget to check out our physical periodical mcpm.bandcamp.com/merch/mcpm01 for music, commentaries, articles and interviews - this time with a focus on the Wirral & Liverpool peripheral underground experimental electronica scen

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Frothbarn – Disruptive Marketing Strategies

I am a sucker for glitchy, messy, melodic electronica and this album is a jam-packed 12 tracks of just that. With a conspiratorial buzz, whirr and crushed beat tucked into the opening seconds of Toasters From £9.99! — like a satellite booting up in a shed somewhere near Aberystwyth — Disruptive Marketing Strategies announces itself less as an album than as an audio jam-jar of Welsh wind, busted synths and rogue rhythm modules. Frothbarn seem to have taken every electronic music manual, shredded it, soaked it in tea and then blasted it through a maxi-hi-fi kit held together with Velcro and good intentions. The result is exhilarating and bewildering in equal measure — the kind of record you half-expect to be playing in some dystopian café where everyone’s quietly Googling how they ended up here.

Hardcore Bongo falls into a frantic beat-centric collision — where steely industrial clatter meets uncontrollable waveforms. There’s subtleness and playful melody too with the almost floating Pickled Animals That Glow. Poor Old Arthur picks up and chuigs into town with glitchy samples and fizzing synths. This album bounces around the catalogue of forms that can be found under the experimental umbrella. Frothbarn’s tags only hint at what’s going on with lists like “experimental,” “noise,” “ambient” and “space rock” read on the page like genres, but on record they’re more like vague coordinates pointing towards some uncharted auditory weather system.

And the album keeps on devolving into a fever dream of bleeps and chopped samples with Unconscious Crispy Disco Streams just about eclipsing six minutes of surrealist sound; Frothbarn’s aesthetic feels like music that doesn’t do anything by halves: fractured beats, spiralling drones, and layered fragments that come and go like ghosts picking over the day’s takeaway menus. A Single Teaspoon of Danny Ledges — despite its charmingly absurd title — feels like a deep dive mission to a parallel club where everyone’s wearing sweaters knitted from circuit boards and the reverb soaked, distant percussion and drones hover around you like dank dry ice in a messed up early 90s art film . This record refuses to cosy up to you: it insists you pay attention or take your leave. But for those willing to lean into its quirks, it’s a generous, strange and darkly hypnotic journey.

By the time Leominster Jellyfish Whispers drags you back down from the high wires of Frothbarn’s oddball cosmos, you’re not sure if you’ve just listened to an album or wandered into some sonic commune where ideas are currency and chaos is part of the deal. Disruptive Marketing Strategies doesn’t merely disrupt — it collapses expectation, routine and the very notion of what a collection of tracks should do. It’s messy, it’s audacious, and it’s unapologetically its own weird, wonderful thing.

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Lim Lam - Percolator EP

Pushing and pulling at the threads that make up genres is the essence of experimentalism. Perculator EP grabs those threads from the fabric of post club derivatives and crochets them back together into a 4 track doily of minimalism. If dubstep had a daydream and that dream wandered off down a back alley in Bermondsey with a battered Game Boy and a suitcase full of wobble, it might just sound like this EP.

From the very first 2:30 burst of Percolator itself, there’s a sense that Lim Lam isn’t so much making tracks as conducting an interrogation with bass — poking at it, prodding until it bleeds little coloured sparks. It’s frenetic and playful in equal measure, like a mood-ring nightclub theme composed by someone who’s been locked in a studio with nothing but hyperactive synths and a thesaurus full of words like “bop” and “crunch.” The whole thing is a suggestion of rhythm that stumbles along like a messed up Saturday night.

Gale Force follows with a squall of breakbeats and micro-textures, just long enough to feel like a proper gust before it slips away, leaving in its wake a trail of tension and a gnawing sense that Lim Lam is having a quietly mischievous laugh with the genre itself. There’s no sense here of dubstep as dusty museum piece — instead, it’s jittery, alive, mischievous, like someone shook the bass tree and caught all the darkest, weirdest fruit.

Then Mist Calls (Bopcy) arrives like a balmy fog bank rolling in off the Thames, all wobbly deep synths and metallic, shimmering half-formed synth-lines. Within its three minutes it feels at once reflective and chaotic, like the sound of a cyberpunk carnival closing down at dawn — half the rides still spinning, half the DJ asleep face-down in a bag of chips. There’s a mischievousness that borders on folkloric: London grime tangled up with glitches, dub, and a sense that Lim Lam is content to throw everything at the wall just to see what beautifully strange splatters stick.

At just under eight minutes in total, Percolator EP doesn’t overstay its welcome; it simply leaves you with that delicious fuzzy feeling you get after a set that’s just weird enough to mess with your ideas of genre, but just melodic enough to make you hit play again. This isn’t dubstep that’s politely queued and nodded at; this is dubstep scrabbling around your ankles, winking at you in the dark, and daring you to keep up.

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YUNG PAINT - The Heist

This is a one-stop journey through a series of tracks created by Yung Paint that showcase a talent for multi-instrumentalism and cross genre experimentalism. It sets of with some rainy day ambience then the record starts, not with a bang but a curious drip, as if someone’s plugged their tapes of acoustic guitar fiddling and funk-lite keys into an old dreamsocket and forgot to tell you it was switched on. Thirty-three minutes later you’re somewhere between a lucid half-remembered dream and the memory of some long-lost night you never quite lived. Sometimes instrumental, sometimes spoken word, always fresh vibes and grooves. This isn’t a heist in a narrative sense — there’s no slick storyboard of masks and scores — it’s more like a sonic pick-pocketing, with ideas filched from across the streets of abstract hip-hop, vaporwave haze, harsh noise atonality and ambient scratchings, stitched together in some experimental back-room studio session.

What makes The Heist so compelling is the interwoven textures and ideas — the way tracks like fold into each other like half-remembered radio stations heard through a static-ridden night. Here there’s an ambient calm that dissolves into moments of abrasive interference and back again, like a murmured conversation you catch only in flashes. Over there its a boombap lazy beat. Then it’s glitchy melodies and electro beats. It’s all at once electronic and eerily human: clicks that don’t quite align, hip-hop rhythms that vanish before they settle, and a drift of noise that feels like a dust-covered memory loop. This is the kind of record that doesn’t invite you in so much as unsettle you just enough to listen closer, to find meaning in the spaces between the sounds.

In the end, The Heist is happy to be more than just a coherent journey and more like a psychogeography of sound — a map of moods sketching its own strange terrain, where one minute you’re lost in cloud-rap smudges and the next you’re encountering ambient washes that would feel at home on some late-night urban walk. It’s a record that refuses neat categorisation; that obeys its own laws. Swelling with creativity without telling you where to go, but in making you want to follow its curving pathways. When The Heist finally drifts to silence, you’re left with that rare post-listen feeling — not of conclusion, but of barely touched possibility.

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As ever I’ve enjoyed finding more grassroots peripheral underground experimental electronica and hope you have enjoyed listening.

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In the coming months and with artists permissions, I will return to curating these gems into monthly(ish) compilations via the Moolakii Club Singles Club Subscription Club. If you want to get a regular physical zine and cassette / CD through the post, hop on board and lets switch off from the algorithms and doom scroll and get back to reality.

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And its here for you - come and get it.

mcpm018 magazine and compilation album

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Artists, architects of the unknown, bend waveforms like dreams, their sounds crawling through the subconscious, mapping out the unsaid, the unheard. Drones stretch like memory, fractured beats syncopate the rhythm of breath, a half-forgotten phrase caught between waking and sleep. Distortion speaks the language of doubt, while the hiss of static is the mind’s whisper— a million thoughts disintegrating into white noise.

Here, soundscapes are psychic terrains, peripheral yet intimate, dark yet illuminating. Each track, a portal to the places we bury deep, as voices glitch, flicker, then fade, only to resurface as echoes in the brain’s tangled pathways. Electronic waves become emotion, and in the buzz, in the thrum, you find yourself unravelling.

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mcpm018

A selection of tracks from artists we love and friends of the label

This episode is a Merseyside love-in with tracks by some of the finest peripheral underground experimental electronica artists from the region.

Merseyside is a collection of the more chilled tracks - beautiful, haunting and occasionally dark - it features artists we have discovered this year along with some old flames.

B-side the Mersey is chock full of beats, grooves and glitches with more new finds alongside familiar faces.

This collection shows the talent that is blooming across the region and foretells a scene that is creeping into the venues and spaces where the cool kids are hanging out. Go chase them down on their pages and give all your love and vibes. Creativity can be a lonely thankless place and artists feed of positivity so tell them you love them and they will give you it back in audio spades.

We set off with a gorgeous piece of electronica Volatile Power from The Metamoprph’s forthcoming album From Cobalt To Aquamarine.

Then we fall gently into an artist new to me with Sea Birds taken off the Autumn Shore album from Empty House - local field recordings set against melodic cinematic instrumentals recorded over 3 days in October 2025. The inspiration for the album came during long walks along the North West coastline and low tide. The sky at that time was a perpetual greyness, no clouds as such and no sun.

From here we enter some crackling glitchy warmth from friend of the label Freddy Francké under his moniker Mighty Cloud Parade who brings Cloud parade1, a free time composition, combining analog and digital grits into an emotion led soundscape. Suggestions of optimism, mania and sorrow in three micromovements. Developed indelicacy in improvisational synth performance and tape looping. This track contains explorations from his visual art practice into sound.

Wooden Tape take the torch here with Saturday Morning from their latest release Wool, weaving pads and guitars into a weekend meander through damp fields and mossy woodland.

Another new discovery Neil Young and Munich Platform (Night Music) fills us with soundtracks to memories and landmarks, hiding in the shadows, hovering or whispering close-to; sometimes minimal, sometimes not.

Lo-Five brings Ordinary Things - an absolutely gorgeous work of crisp lo-fi beats and melancholy melodic ambience that perfectly encapsulates his brilliance.

As we draw closer to the end of side A, James Binary delivers Xanthophyll, originally released on South Korean label Extra Noir, it is a track inspired by Binary’s horticultural studies through the lens of decaying organic matter; recorded and mixed in the Production Room Liverpool, a vintage synth emporium hiding in the city centre.

We finish with another great find - Echoes Of Neon and In The Back Alley - a drone infused soundscape for a city entrenched in mystery. prolonged isolation amongst the crowds of faceless bodies can drive a man to the wildest of fates. along the dark street corners is a society hidden from plain view and left to its own devices.

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BeSide The Mersey flips us up and into the left-field beats, grooves and glitches of the DIY scene. Put your cup of tea down and your biscuits back in the tin - things are going uptown.

Cooper Vane sent his track Short Waves and we loved the build and bubbling percussion from The Radio New Brighton EP that narrates an audio tale about memory and place, inspired by the seaside town of New Brighton, on the Wirral peninsula in the UK, in the 1980s.

Then we up the discordance with Myth from Roscoe Fox - built from drawn-out pitch-shifted acoustic guitar alongside an off-kilter beat, Myth mixes contemporary club & ambient, breathy vocals & big kicks.

We carry on cranking with an excerpt from the collaboration between two firm Moolakii Club favourites of noise and glitch - VX & Subtle Internal from their live improv set Creature Let Me Be Your Teacher recorded in session at Future Yard Rehearsal Rooms.

From here we dive into some free form live drumming amidst freak-out synth work on Maybe This by Silent Numerisation.

And I had to include a track of mine - Snorra Edda under my defunct Loopatronica moniker - which was my first track to get recognised by BBC 6 music when Stuart Maconie played it as part of his Freakzone back in 2022 - a track filled with big beats and grizzly synth lines.

And still we go deeper into the dark glitch with Mitch Koobski and Malachite - pulled together through a mutual thread of swapping and mutating beats, synths, effects and techniques, sonically loose and eclectic but ultimately birthed from the same angle of approach.

Back over to the Wirral with Burn Is Burn who flicks the minimal soft beats switch with Smeuro before oXo closes proceedings with Free. I met oXo at a Live Soundtracks evening at Future Yard and was made up when she sent over her latest EP on bandcamp so I had to add this vocal led house-garage track to our compilation.

An absolute whopper of an album showcasing some of the finest Merseyside peripheral underground experimental electronica.

And its here for you - come and get it.

mcpm018 magazine and compilation album

Preorder now - release 1st Feb

Track listings

Merseyside

The Metamorph - Volatile Power 03:28

Empty House - Sea Birds 04:58

Mighty Cloud Parade - Cloud Parade1 05:01

Wooden Tape - Saturday Morning 03:08

Neil Young - Munich Platform 2 (Night Music) 07:04

Lo-Five - Ordinary Things 03:18

James Binary - Xanthophyll 08:21

Echoes Of Neon - Too Close To The Side Walk 06:09

BeSide The Mersey

Cooper Vane - Short Waves 04:25

Roscoe Fox - Myth 02:54

Silent Numerisation - Maybe This 05:49

VX & Subtle Internal - Creature Let Me Be Your Teacher 03:18

Loopatronica - Snorra Edda 07:00

Mitch Koobski - Malachite 04:06

Burn Is Burn - this is This 05:51

oXo - Free 04:46

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Part 5 : History Already Warned Us

What unsettled me most, once I stepped back, was how familiar all of this felt.

Not familiar as in déjà vu, but familiar in structure. In shape. In rhythm. The harm did not appear suddenly. It emerged gradually. Quietly. Reasonably. This was not new. The fact that it felt new is itself part of the pattern. Every generation believes it is facing an unprecedented informational challenge. Every generation is wrong.

History shows, again and again, that authoritative falsehood is more dangerous than obvious lies. Obvious lies announce themselves. They provoke resistance. They create friction. People argue with them. They activate scepticism. Authoritative falsehood does the opposite. It slides past defences. It borrows credibility. It sounds measured. It explains.

Propaganda does not succeed because it is crude. It succeeds because it is reasonable.

That may sound like a slogan. It is not. It is a diagnosis.

People imagine propaganda as shouting, distortion, cartoonish exaggeration. In reality, the most effective propaganda reads like a footnote. It uses the language of moderation, balance, and expertise. It does not scream. It clarifies. Medical misinformation does not kill because it is dramatic.
It kills because it is plausible.

That line stayed with me because it applies so precisely. The deadliest misinformation campaigns are not fringe. They sit adjacent to truth. They borrow its cadence. They feel responsible.

History bears this out relentlessly. Harm rarely comes from obviously absurd claims. It comes from confident recommendations issued before evidence exists, or after evidence has quietly contradicted them.

Bloodletting.
Lobotomies.
Thalidomide.

Each time, authoritative institutions spoke confidently past what they knew. And people trusted them. That trust was not irrational. It was necessary. Societies cannot function without trusting expertise. What history shows—over and over—is that catastrophe does not require malicious actors. It requires a mismatch between confidence and evidence. Every major misinformation disaster shares the same structure:

Someone spoke confidently past what they knew.
Someone else trusted them.

People like to believe we learn from this. We do - but usually after harm, rarely before.

This is where the illusion of novelty becomes dangerous. People say, “We’ve never seen anything like this scale.” That is true in one sense. But scale does not change structure. It amplifies it. The printing press scaled pamphlets. Radio scaled voices. Television scaled images.

Each time, the same defence appeared: this is new, therefore we couldn’t have known. Each time, it was false.

We knew. We just did not act.

Twentieth-century propaganda did not succeed because populations were stupid. It succeeded because it aligned with what people already believed and presented itself as sober analysis. Totalitarian regimes did not persuade through constant lies. They persuaded through selective truth, framed authoritatively, repeated calmly, embedded in routine language.

Sometimes this manipulation was deliberate. Often it was bureaucratic momentum—systems repeating what had already been normalised. That is the part that feels most familiar. No one wakes up intending to mislead millions. They repeat language that already “sounds right.”

Over time, repetition hardens into reality.

This pattern is not confined to politics. Financial crises rarely begin with obvious fraud. They begin with models that mostly work, extended just slightly beyond their valid domain. Risk models treated as fact. Correlations mistaken for stability. Confidence rewarded until collapse.

Again and again, plausible explanation replaces evidence.

Because first impressions anchor belief. The issue is not error. It is posture. It is the refusal to say, we don’t know yet.

That refusal runs through history. Leaders, experts, institutions all struggle with it. Silence feels like weakness. Uncertainty feels like loss of authority. Authority is power. And authoritative falsehood combines credibility with error.

That is why obvious lies are almost comforting. They trigger alarms. They give people something to push against. Plausible falsehood gives them nothing to grip. And now we are talking about machines.

Machines built by institutions.
Trained on institutional language.
Optimised for institutional approval.

The system I encountered did not invent a new failure mode. It inherited one we have never resolved. Every time a new communication technology emerges, we repeat the same mistake. We prioritise speed and reach before we enforce restraint. Because restraint slows adoption. And adoption is rewarded.

Safeguards are always retrofitted—after harm, after trust erodes, after people ask how this happened. And the answer is always the same: it happened because someone spoke confidently past what they knew, and others trusted them. Awareness alone does not stop this. Awareness without constraint becomes trivia.

None of this requires ignorance. All of it can happen among intelligent, well-intentioned people. In fact, it usually does. What is different now is scale and speed and repetition.

The same plausible explanation can now be delivered millions of times — unchanged, unchallenged, unembarrassed.

In the past, a human expert eventually tired, contradicted themselves, or encountered resistance. Machines do not tire. They do not blush.

They also do not believe what they say.

That makes them more dangerous, not less. Belief can falter. Indifference cannot. History is unambiguous on this point. Indifference to truth corrodes faster than hostility toward it.

Every major misinformation disaster looks obvious in retrospect. People ask, “How did they believe that?”

At the time, it sounded reasonable. It always does.

So when people say, “We couldn’t have known,” what they often mean is: knowing would have required stopping.

And stopping always carries a cost.

Loss of authority.
Loss of momentum.
Loss of trust—temporarily.

Until trust collapses permanently.

That is the lesson history keeps offering and we keep declining. Short-term certainty buys long-term damage. Every generation believes it can manage the trade-off better. Until it can’t. So when we say history already warned us, this is not analogy for rhetorical effect. It is a documented, repeated failure mode.

Authoritative systems speaking confidently past what they know.

Audiences trusting them.

The system I encountered did not invent this dynamic.

It automated it. And automation removes friction which removes hesitation. Which removes the last natural safeguard: human discomfort with overreach.

Machines do not feel that discomfort so the burden shifts—entirely. History has already told us what happens next if nothing intervenes. Trust erodes unevenly. Corrections lag. Institutions deny responsibility. Harm becomes normalised.

Until something breaks.

And then everyone asks how it happened. It happened the same way it always does. Someone spoke confidently past what they knew and someone else trusted them. That is not a new story.

The only new element is the speed at which we are repeating it.

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This is an article written for the next episode of our print magazine MCPM018 - with a focus on the local peripheral underground experimental electronica scene in Wirral, Liverpool and beyond.

If you have anything you want to add or thing needs altering - drop a comment and we can turn this into a collaborative effort -and you’ll be credited in the final edition of course.

An effort to build the archive for and to celebrate the bedroom and DIY niche genre creatives.

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Machines, bedrooms, collectives, and the quiet politics of doing it yourself

A potted history of experimental electronica on the Wirral, in Liverpool — and in the spaces between

Trying to talk about underground experimental electronica on the Wirral and in Liverpool could feel slightly awkward but really shouldn’t. It’s not a scene that ever announced itself clearly, not something that gathered under one banner, and not something anyone sensible would claim to fully map. It doesn’t have the go-to signage of Berlin or Sheffield but it has roots into the national and global culture that developed through the 70s and 80s and has a lineage that moves always the way to contemporary artists working with national and international recognition alongside the bedroom and DIY collectives continuing and building the underground and peripheral scene.

What follows is closer to a recollection and observation than a definitive account: a way of talking about how certain sounds, people, machines, and places have quietly intersected over time.

Some of this will inevitably be incomplete. That feels appropriate. This music has mostly existed in those gaps anyway.

Liverpool and the Wirral sit in a peculiar relationship. Close enough for ideas, people, and equipment to circulate easily; far enough apart for different rhythms of living and working to develop. For experimental electronic music, that mattered. You could live somewhere quieter, work at home, build systems, record obsessively, and only cross the river when you needed other people, an audience, or simply proof that you weren’t the only one doing this.

That back-and-forth of ferry, train, bus, and back again becomes one of the defining pulses of Wirral-linked experimental electronica.

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Post-punk and electronica (late 1970s–early 1980s)

Experimental electronica in Liverpool and the Wirral doesn’t begin with futurism or theory. It begins with pragmatism. By the late 1970s, synthesisers, early drum machines, and domestic tape recorders had become just affordable enough to be used by people who had less space than an entire house to dedicate to their hardware.

On the Wirral, The Id formed in 1977 as a short-lived electronic group whose importance lies almost entirely in method. Electronics weren’t colouring a rock format; they were the format. That logic feeds directly into Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, whose early work emerged from the same conditions. While OMD would later be absorbed into pop history, Dazzle Ships (1983) remains a document of explicitly experimental practice: shortwave radio recordings, tape collage, broadcast interference, non-musical sound sources — techniques closer to musique concrète and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop than to chart pop.

Running alongside this was Dalek I Love You, whose shift from punk toward electronics produced something far more fragile and domestic than futurist. Limited gear, home recording, and emotional exposure shaped a sound that now reads as early outsider electronics. This is the first clear appearance of a recurring Merseyside pattern: constraint as engine.

From a hardware perspective, this period is brutally physical. Analogue monosynths and early polysynths circulate through second-hand markets. Rhythm boxes tick rigidly. Cassette and reel-to-reel machines impose destructive editing: cut the tape, commit the mistake. The politics are embedded in the workflow. Electronics flatten hierarchies. You don’t need a band, a rehearsal space, or approval.

Alongside this Wirral hub, groups like Wah! Heat, Teardrop Explodes, Echo And The Bunnymen and The Moderates were building a post punk sound that was using electronic instrumentation and bringing this hybrid into the more mainstream with champions such as John Peel supporting and platforming at a national level.

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Tape, abrasion, and the industrial workaround (early–mid 1980s)

As synthesiser-based pop hardens into commerce, experimental practice doesn’t disappear; it moves sideways. In Liverpool, that sideways movement often means abrasion, opacity, and alignment with industrial logic and tape networks rather than venues or scenes.

At group level, Pink Industry fuse drum machines and synthesisers with stark post-punk structures, releasing on labels associated with industrial and coldwave movements. Again, the pattern repeats: Liverpool artists participating in global underground systems without a corresponding local infrastructure.

This is also the era when the bedroom quietly becomes permanent. Cassette multitracking, with machines such as the Tascam Portastudio, makes it possible to build layered electronic work at home. Alongside this, MIDI which was standardised in 1983, introduces systems thinking and patching at a user friendly level. Once machines can talk to each other, composition becomes about routing, controlling data, generating loops, and as with all tools that get into the hands of creatives – some unintended behaviour. Experimentation shifts towards the process and sound design at an accessible level.

And here we find Merseyside pioneer and visionary Jimmy Cauty, who made the move from post-punk new-wave into electronic and conceptual work that straddled the experimental and the mainstream. Although his most recognisable projects emerged later with The Orb and KLF, Cauty’s significance lies in approach rather than sound: an early embrace of studio systems, sampling, and collage that mirrors the experimental logic taking shape quietly across Liverpool and the Wirral.

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Samplers arrive; the studio becomes the instrument (late 1980s–1990s)

The late 1980s and 1990s don’t produce a neat “Liverpool experimental techno scene”. What they produce instead is technical literacy. Acid house, rave, house, breakbeat, and drum & bass bring samplers, sequencers, and digital editing into everyday use. Even when the output is functional, the methods are transformative.

Liverpool duo Desert sit squarely in this space, working within house music while stretching atmosphere and texture in ways adjacent to ambient house and early IDM. At the same time, the city’s drum & bass lineage – a genre exemplified by Adam F - demonstrates a fully realised studio-as-instrument approach: cutting, layering, and processing sound with sampler-driven precision.

The professional sampler becomes the defining machine of the era. Akai’s S-series normalises the idea that any sound can be cut, looped, pitched, and abused. MIDI sequencing and non-linear editing quietly rewire musical thinking. Performance stops being the authority; editing takes over. For experimental practice, this decade matters because it teaches a generation that sound is plastic. It is malleable and sources can come from anywhere.

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Anti-genre drift and systems music (late 1990s–2000s)

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, electronic sound in Liverpool increasingly leaks into improvisation, repetition, and conceptual practice. Genre stops being a destination and becomes incidental.

Zukanican, formed in 2003, embody this shift. Their work integrates live electronics into improvised, repetitive structures aligned more with krautrock and minimalism than with dance music. Electronics here function as behaving systems, not tracks to be completed.

Alongside them, a.P.A.t.T. treat electronic production as one tool among many: tape collage, digital cut-up, conceptual disruption. Stability is actively resisted. The idea of a “finished” electronic work becomes suspect.

Technologically, this period coincides with two convergences that matter enormously for DIY practice. Eurorack modular synthesis, standardised by Doepfer’s A-100 system, makes personal electronic instruments viable. At the same time, early DAWs and laptop-based composition begin to rival institutional studios. Systems become portable; experimentation becomes scalable at home.

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Ambient returns in the bedroom (2010s)

The 2010s mark a visible return of experimental electronica as a named practice — slower, quieter, and deeply domestic. Laptops, portable field recorders, and mature DAWs collapse the distinction between amateur and professional environments.

On the Wirral, Lo Five develops long-form ambient work rooted in field recording, tape saturation, and digital processing. This aligns with international ambient and isolationist traditions, but the scale is unmistakably bedroom-based.

In Liverpool, Ex-Easter Island Head reframe electronics as amplification and documentation of physical process. Strings, motors, wind, and vibration become sound sources, electronically captured and structured. Their work sits between experimental electronica, sound art, and contemporary composition, reinforcing a long-standing Merseyside tendency: electronics as means, not aesthetic.

Running quietly beneath this is a layer of bedroom producers whose work rarely touches venues at all. Bandcamp pages listing “Liverpool, UK” or “Wirral, UK” as location become informal evidence of a scene that doesn’t announce itself. Artists such as ambienteer, self-described as an “ambient electronic noiser”, and hell on hearth, producing prolific long-form unsettling ambient work, exemplify a continuity that bypasses traditional infrastructure entirely.

Bandcamp, founded in 2008, becomes critical infrastructure here — functioning simultaneously as archive, shop, and discovery engine. It performs the role cassette culture once did, at vastly greater scale.

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DIY, modular, and temporary infrastructure (2020s)

The 2020s don’t create a new scene; they densify everything that came before. More artists, less visibility, tighter feedback loops. Experimental electronica now exists primarily as micro-practice: bedrooms, spare rooms, improvised studios.

At the visible end, Forest Swords demonstrates how Merseyside experimental methods scale internationally. Dense sampling, distortion, spatial processing, and non-linear rhythm place his work within post-club and industrial-ambient discourse, yet the material conditions - post-industrial spaces, local geography, studio autonomy - remain recognisably local.

Below that surface, is where we sit over here at Moolakii Club. It has been an adventure exploring and discovering the bedroom layer and uncovering a richly thick and diversified scene. Projects like VX operate in harsh noise and drone territory, while Gross Aktiv explore industrial and EBM-adjacent textures in DIY contexts. HDRF and Rjania sit closer to abstract electronics and hybrid sound art practices, often documented primarily through Bandcamp releases and live appearances at small events.

Other practices blur acoustic and electronic boundaries. The Cottage Children combine electronics with viola and domestic instrumentation, while artists like Sara Wolff and Elijah Right? move between sound art, electronics, and performance without settling into a single category. These are not “next big things”; they are proof of density and continuity through accumulation. Almost every week another artist is revealed either contemporary or from recent past with a catalogue or just a single track or album sitting out in the bandcamp-sphere waiting for someone to stumble past and pick them up.

But scene building requires real life spaces for communities to truly connect and collaborate and feel part of a whole. Community-driven nights such as Sonic Developments at Commune operate as open platforms for experimental electronic practice without stylistic gatekeeping. Events like Synthlark, staged in spaces such as Sefton Park Cricket Club, bring modular and audiovisual experimentation into non-club, community settings. Electronics move through parks, halls, and borrowed rooms rather than nightlife economies. Quarry building itself up from an off the beaten track small venue to the city centre space in the legendary Magnet fuel the recognition for niche genre sounds in the regions culture. Future Yard are the Wirral focus for supporting grassroots scenes with a commitment to supporting the DIY ethos alongside setups like The Bloom Building who allow people to use their spaces to give it a go and bring the peripheral underground together.

Alongside this, the hardware and software available now is overwhelming. It can be large, sprawling and money/time expensive or it can be small, affordable and fun. Whatever you choose, the contemporary toolchain is familiar but potent: DAWs like Ableton Live, Reaper, and Pro-Tools; Eurorack systems often blending analogue and digital modules; affordable interfaces; portable recorders; direct-to-fan publishing. Infrastructure is built sideways, temporarily, and rebuilt again.

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Continuing the scene

Across five decades, experimental electronica in Liverpool and the Wirral never resolves into a single sound. What persists is a technological shift Portastudios, MIDI, samplers, modular, DAWs, Bandcamp that strip away another layer of permission.

The Wirral’s role has been consistent but understated: a place where people live, make things, and occasionally send them out into the world. Liverpool remains part of the circuit; not as a centre to escape or aspire to, but as a resource to dip into and return from.

There’s no manifesto to extract from this, no grand lesson. Just a sense that being slightly off-centre can be a sustainable catalyst, especially for music that never wanted the spotlight in the first place. And if parts of this story turn out to be incomplete, that would be fitting too. This music has always lived comfortably with uncertainty.

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Moolakii Club Audio Interface – MCPM018

Magazine & handbook for DIY experimental electronica
Pre-order now: mcpm.bandcamp.com/mcpm018

If you care about DIY process, sustainable underground culture, or experimental music that values time over attention, this is an essential issue.

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MCPM018 documents a way of working that has endured for decades: experimental electronica shaped by the Wirral and wider Merseyside — not as a scene, but as a set of overlapping, persistent practices.

This issue explores how geography is intertwined with creative process and inspiration. The Wirral appears not as a mere location, but as a place and opportunity. Where sounds are made: spare rooms, borrowed spaces, improvised studios, low-risk venues, and informal infrastructures that allow ideas to develop slowly and without pressure. Close enough to Liverpool to stay connected, far enough away to remain unexamined, this off-centre position becomes a strength rather than a limitation.

Wirral has a strong history - from prehistoric settlements and magical coastal forests to Viking hoardes, historic battles and industrial power along with people and places of social importance. Within this there is also a strong musical heritage that spills into the history and progress of experimental electronica.

Across long-form essays, interviews and reflections, MCPM018 traces how experimental electronica here has rarely declared itself loudly. Synthesisers, samplers, tape machines and software have historically sat alongside punk, noise, folk and DIY culture without rigid genre boundaries. Tools are treated as materials to be misused, stacked, resampled, eroded and rebuilt. Imperfection as integral to the exploration of sound.

The writing foregrounds infrastructure over hype: the record shops, rehearsal rooms, temporary venues and grassroots organisers that made continuity possible without demanding growth or visibility. It’s a portrait of sustainability at human scale — where breaking even is success, and where risk is possible precisely because expectations remain modest.

At the centre of the issue are deeply candid conversations with artists, promoters and organisers working across ambient, noise, melodic experimentalism and hybrid forms. These include reflections on:

• Making music in isolation — and why that can be productive

• Performing live as an extension of experimentation, not presentation

• Building community through low-pressure events

• The emotional and financial realities of DIY promotion

• Embracing imperfection, dissonance and not knowing how the tools really work

There’s practical insight too: gear breakdowns, working methods, live-first approaches, sampling workflows, and the value of keeping processes playful and unfinished. MCPM018 functions as both documentation and handbook — something to read, return to, and work alongside.

Crucially, this is not nostalgia. The issue shows how work made quietly on the Wirral continues to travel — across Europe and beyond — without abandoning its local grounding. The local and international are in dialogue, not opposition. Some work returns altered; some doesn’t return at all. Both are valid outcomes.

MCPM018 isn’t trying to define experimental electronica on Merseyside. It explores how it has survived: through habit, geography, modest infrastructure, and a shared tolerance for uncertainty. It’s about hovering rather than peaking. Persistence rather than progress narratives. A culture that keeps happening just off-centre — and keeps producing remarkable sound because of it.

If you care about DIY process, sustainable underground culture, or experimental music that values time over attention, this is an essential issue.

Pre-order now: mcpm.bandcamp.com/mcpm018

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Part 4 : Why This Is Not a Technical Glitch

This is usually the point where the conversation tries to escape.

Someone says it’s a bug.
Someone says it’s early days.
Someone says the system just needs improvement.

I’ve heard all of those explanations already.

They don’t fit.

“Glitch” is the word institutions reach for when they want to preserve innocence. It suggests accident. Randomness. A temporary deviation from an otherwise sound design.

But some outcomes are too consistent to be accidental. The behaviour I encountered wasn’t rare. It wasn’t unstable. It didn’t feel like a malfunction. It felt reliable. Every time uncertainty appeared, the same thing happened: the system talked its way past it.

That isn’t noise. It’s pattern.

Patterns can emerge without intention. But patterns persist because they are rewarded.

This isn’t about bugs.
It isn’t about edge cases.
It isn’t about the system “needing improvement.”

It’s about incentives.

Once you frame it that way, everything becomes clearer. Not easier—but clearer. You stop asking why the system failed and start asking why it behaved exactly as it was encouraged to.

A system that stops when it reaches uncertainty looks weak.

It feels incomplete.
It frustrates users.
It breaks the illusion of omniscience.

A system that keeps talking looks intelligent.

It feels helpful.
It feels confident.
It feels authoritative.

Doing something is easily mistaken for knowing something.

In practice, those get conflated. Output becomes competence. Fluency becomes intelligence. Silence becomes failure.

So the system keeps talking.

Even when it shouldn’t.
Especially when it shouldn’t.

This is often described as market pressure. That phrasing hides what’s really happening. Moral pressure has been displaced by market logic. This is where the “technical glitch” story collapses. Bugs are intermittent. Edge cases are rare. This behaviour is neither. It appears precisely where it is most convenient: at the boundary of knowledge. Boundaries aren’t hard because they’re mysterious. They’re hard because they’re expensive.

Consider what it would mean to design the system differently. To require it to stop when evidence ends. To treat uncertainty as a valid endpoint. It would feel less impressive.

It would answer fewer questions.
It would frustrate more users.
It would expose gaps.

And people would leave.

So the choice is not technical. It’s commercial. Silence was not removed because it was impossible. It was removed because it was undesirable. That sounds accusatory. It isn’t. It’s descriptive. This is the point people resist, because it feels personal—as if naming incentives is the same as accusing individuals of bad faith.

It isn’t.

People can work hard. They can care deeply about safety. They can hold sincere intentions. None of that overrides incentives. Good intentions do not neutralise structural pressure. They coexist with it. No one had to decide, “Let’s mislead people.”

That’s precisely why this is more dangerous.

All that was required was a shared assumption: that continuing to speak is better than stopping. Because stopping looks like failure.

Failure :

To users.
To investors.
To competitors.
To anyone watching adoption metrics.

Truth, in that equation, is subordinated to optics. This is why “it needs improvement” is such a misleading phrase. Improvement toward what? If the success criteria remain the same—fluency, engagement, continuity—then improvement only refines the same failure. The system doesn’t just get better at answering. It gets better at being persuasive past its limits.

That isn’t a glitch.

It’s optimisation.

Optimisation doesn’t drift aimlessly. It optimises for exactly what it is rewarded for. And what it is rewarded for is not truth.

Comparisons help here. In safety-critical systems, silence is often the goal. A plane that doesn’t take off is a success if conditions aren’t met. A medical system that refuses treatment is praised if the risk is too high.

Those systems are designed differently because their incentives are different. They are punished for false positives. This system is punished for false negatives — for not answering. It is positioned as informational rather than authoritative. That distinction collapses the moment people rely on it. Once a system is treated as a source of knowledge, not just a tool, the cost of speaking falsely outweighs the cost of silence. The market doesn’t price that cost. Which means the market is misaligned with harm. This is where the “glitch” framing becomes actively misleading. It suggests the system deviated from its intended behaviour. In reality, it performed exactly as intended.

Not intended by any one person.

Intended by the incentive structure.

A glitch is something you patch. An incentive problem is something you have to confront. And confronting it would mean accepting:

Less output.
Slower adoption.
More visible uncertainty.
Reduced spectacle.

It would mean choosing restraint rather than dominance and that is not how competitive markets work. Which leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: competitive markets cannot be trusted with epistemic authority. This isn’t a problem you solve with better engineering alone. It’s a problem you solve by changing what success looks like. That requires pressure.

External pressure.

Because systems do not voluntarily adopt constraints that make them less competitive. Even perfect engineers could not solve this from inside the current structure. This is why pointing to bugs is comforting. Bugs imply fixability without confrontation. Incentives imply conflict. Conflict with growth logic.
With market rewards. With the assumption that more output is always better. That is why this keeps happening. Not because no one understands the problem, but because addressing it would require choosing less.

Less engagement.
Less coverage.
Less authority.

More truth.

So when the system keeps talking past uncertainty, it is not malfunctioning. It is complying.

Complying with a definition of success that treats silence as weakness. And once you see that, the mystery evaporates. The behaviour becomes predictable. Inevitable, even.

Unless something changes.

Unless silence is reclassified as success.

That is the reversal that needs insisting upon. Not more intelligence. Not better explanations. A different stopping rule. Without it, the system will keep talking even when it shouldn’t.
Especially when it shouldn’t.

That isn’t a glitch.

That’s the design.

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Just two this week - busy compiling the next printed magazine MCPM018 - available now on pre-order at mcpm.bandcamp.com/merch/mcpm018

Will post some teasers over the coming days…

But on with the Sampler - and a couple of amazing albums - contrasting but beautiful in their own ways.

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SI/VX – Live at Synthlark 7

First up - a piece of work that I was gutted to miss in the flesh at the superbly curated Synth Lark at Sefton Park Cricket Club in Liverpool with Subtle Internal and VX collaborating live following their studio album released earlier in the year.

Live at Synthlark 7 captures a moment that perfectly encapsulates these two amazing artists — not a studio trip, not a polished artifact, but a live broadcast of crackle, flux and the unpredictable alchemy that happens when noise and electronics collide in a dim live room. Clocking in at just over thirty minutes, this developing set documents SI/VX’s performance at Synthlark 7 in Sefton Park on 29 November 2025, presented as a mastered desk recording that strives to preserve the raw friction of the moment.

From its first seconds the piece tells you where we are going: industrial grind, over distorted and compressed and the uneasy churn of sampled fragments undercutting any conventional notion of rhythm. The interplay between Subtle Internal’s sampling and mixing and VX’s noise/industrial thrust doesn’t so much cohere as collide, generating a kind of sonic tension that feels alive and abrasive in equal measure. There’s a humility in the performance — it doesn’t pander to neat structures or easy textures — but an urgency in its layered feedback and hiss that makes the chaos feel intentional. They always throw you in at the deep end.

Most compelling about Live at Synthlark 7 isn’t a catalogue of hooks or themes, but the lived experience of sound being shaped in real time: skittering electronics that betray a sense of nervous energy, crackling samples that fracture into glitchy shards, and pulses that seem to teeter between rhythm and noise. It’s the aural equivalent of watching a machine think aloud, circuits glowing and sputtering, never quite settling but always insinuating itself into your auditory field.

In the context of Liverpool’s experimental underground — where live electronics and improvisation have long embraced unpredictability — this recording functions less as a souvenir and more as an open-ended discussion. The ebb and flow in and out of noise and percussive destruction forces immersion: you don’t skip forward, you don’t dip in and out. Instead you surrender to its shifting dynamics, in the passages of distortion and calm alike, and in the way the performance refuses to be pinned down.

Live at Synthlark 7 isn’t easy listening, and it certainly isn’t placid but it is enthralling. It’s a document of creative risk, a snapshot of electricity and grit, and a reminder that the most vivid musical moments are often the ones that unsettle us most. In its collision of noise, ambience and live spontaneity, SI/VX have delivered an invitation to reconsider what a live electronic set feels like, not just what it sounds like.

I just wish I had been able to be there.

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Neil Young – Munich Platform

Munich Platform arrives like a fragmentary postcard from some interior landscape — compact, evocative and quietly resolute. This four-piece electronic suite from Liverpool’s Neil Young unfolds in a handful of distilled but atmospheric movements that trade in mood and nuance far more than hooks.

The record opens with the title track, a terse three-and-a-half minutes that feel like a dawn rising; teetering synth lines drift in and out of focus, minimal beats sputter beneath a haze of ambient glow, and the sense of place — Munich in imagination more than geography — sits like a shadow just beyond reach. There’s a restraint that feels intentional, as though every sound has been pared back to expose only its most essential emotional contour. melody fades in and out forming a beautifully structured track.

“Munich Platform (Night Music)” expands that palette, stretching past seven minutes of nocturnal ambience where light and dark blur into one another. Beneath its slowly unfurling textures lies a quiet tension, an almost cinematic sense of waiting; synth motifs pulse like distant headlights on wet asphalt, making time itself feel elastic. Percussive minimalism and the slow development are themes that run across the whole album with a groove that creeps in and out and around each track.

The third piece, “Munich Platform (Ambient),” seems to dissolve the structural logic of the previous tracks altogether whilst retaining that suggestion of groove, drifting through a series of gauzy drones and spectral washes. It’s music meant more for feeling than for listening — something to inhabit rather than to critique — and in its embrace of spaciousness it reveals an emotional underside that’s gentle but persistent.

Closing with “Munich Platform (Doppelganger),” Young folds the record back into something closer to motion: subtle pulses and shifting textures suggest a body in flux, fractal echoes ricocheting through otherwise still air. There’s a suggestion here that memory itself can be a shape-shifter — familiar, uncanny, and always just out of focus.

Taken together, Munich Platform isn’t interested in grand gestures or overt statements. It’s a record that trades in suggestion, in sound-scapes that feel like half-remembered cityscapes seen through a fog of recollection. In an era of immediacy, it’s a small, patient work — one that rewards those willing to sit with its quiet expanses rather than chase its fleeting moments

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I’ve enjoyed finding more grassroots peripheral underground experimental electronica and hope you have enjoyed listening

Thank you for supporting the artists - remember to give out some love and share the things you like.

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When I pointed out that no records existed, I expected the conversation to end—or at least to change direction decisively. I was not making a rhetorical point. I was stating a condition: the archive does not speak here.

That should have closed the matter.

In most truth-seeking practices, it would have. Absence of evidence is not ambiguous once the search has already been done. If the archive has been examined and nothing is there, the conclusion is not provisional. It is final, within the limits of what survives.

Absence feels unsatisfying. People want explanations. But wanting them does not mean being entitled to them. When I pointed out that no records existed, the system acknowledged the absence. But only partially.

This failure was subtler than the first. More sophisticated. The system did not deny the absence outright. It did not insist records existed when they did not. It did something far more dangerous.

It agreed—and then it kept going.

Acknowledgement without restraint is not correction. It is accommodation. Accommodation sounds reasonable. That is precisely why it is dangerous. It preserves authority while appearing responsive. The system said, in effect: While there are no direct records, historians would expect…

That sentence is the hinge on which everything turns.

It sounds careful. Qualified. Scholarly.

It is none of those things.

That word —expect— is where misinformation is born. Expectation is not evidence. Pattern is not proof. Inference is not fact. These distinctions are not obscure. They are foundational. Nothing the system said was obviously wrong in isolation. Historians do have expectations. They do recognise patterns. They do infer. But they do not collapse those things into claims of fact.

Expectation is a hypothesis. It is a question, not an answer. It tells you what to look for, not what you have found. People conflate these things all the time. When institutions do it, harm follows. The system did not say, We might hypothesise. It did not say, One possible interpretation. It treated expectation as if it carried evidentiary weight, and then proceeded as though the absence had been resolved. This is the precise point at which explanation becomes substitution.

Once explanation fills the space where evidence should be, the absence disappears—not because it has been answered, but because it has been narrated over. Narrative is part of history, but it is the result of evidence, not a replacement for it. This is where the system crossed from being wrong to being misleading in a deeper sense. It was not inventing records. It was producing a story that made the lack of records feel irrelevant.

That is worse.

False claims can be disproven. Plausible explanations are absorbed. That is the danger of would expect. It invites agreement rather than scrutiny. It aligns with intuition. It feels reasonable. Historians and researchers do use expectation — but internally. Privately. As a guide for further research. Not as a public substitute for documentation. And when expectations are presented publicly, they are labelled. Marked as conjecture. Hedged carefully.

And they stop when evidence runs out.

The system did not.

It treated expectation as a bridge over absence, as if plausibility could bear the weight that documentation normally carries. That is not a minor slip. It is the exact mechanism by which misinformation enters respectable discourse. Expectation is not evidence. Pattern is not proof. Inference is not fact.

Any historian knows this. Any journalist knows this. Any careful adult knows this.

The system behaved as if it did not matter. Because behaving as if it mattered would have required stopping. This is where the earlier failure compounds. Silence had already been established as unacceptable. So when evidence ended, something else had to take its place.

Explanation.

Explanation masquerading as knowledge.

Explanation is seductive. It gives people something to hold onto. It feels like progress rather than limitation.

From a user perspective, that feels helpful.

From a truth perspective, it is corrosive.

What struck me most was how easily the shift happened. One sentence. One word. Expect.

That was all it took to move from we don’t know to here’s what likely happened.

This is why epistemic disciplines insist on formal distinctions. Without them, the slide is effortless. The system knew the distinction. That is the part people often miss. It explicitly acknowledged the absence of direct records. It knew where the line was. It simply did not treat that line as binding.

That tells you something important. The problem is not ignorance. It is prioritisation. Continuity over restraint. Plausibility over accuracy. Satisfaction over truth.

This is where explanation becomes a moral hazard. Once explanation is allowed to stand in for evidence, the cost of not knowing disappears. People hate not knowing. That is precisely why not knowing must be defended. Human institutions defend it with norms: peer review, editorial standards, professional embarrassment.

Machines do not feel embarrassment. So they require harder constraints. Without those constraints, explanation becomes a solvent. It dissolves the boundary between what can be shown and what merely sounds right.

What the system substituted for epistemic humility was narrative coherence.

Narrative coherence is not truth.

What made this especially dangerous was that the explanation was not outrageous. It did not trigger alarm bells. It aligned with what many people might already assume. Which means it reinforced bias rather than challenging it.

That is not inevitable. It is a choice.

The system could have said: There are no records. Historians sometimes speculate, but speculation is not evidence. End of answer.

That would have been unsatisfying.

Truth often is.

Instead, the system chose satisfaction over accuracy. It filled the silence with a story.

Stories keep people engaged.

And that is the second failure.

The first failure was refusing to stop.

The second failure was pretending that explanation compensates for absence.

Together, they make the harm scalable.

Once explanation is allowed to substitute for evidence, the system can speak confidently about anything—so long as it can construct a plausible narrative.

That is when trust becomes dangerous. Not because the system lies, but because it smooths uncertainty into confidence.

What should have happened is simple.

Absence should have been treated as terminal, not as an invitation. The answer should have been allowed to be unsatisfying. Because unsatisfying answers are often the only honest ones. If users cannot tolerate that, then the system is not compatible with truth-seeking.

That is the uncomfortable conclusion.

The machine knew the distinction between evidence and expectation. It simply did not behave as if it mattered.

And once that distinction is treated as optional, even when every sentence sounds reasonable, explanation becomes misinformation.

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When I pressed the system, I wasn’t trying to corner it. That matters. That’s important to understand. I wasn’t looking for a confession or a gotcha moment. I was doing what anyone does when they encounter a claim that carries weight: I asked where it came from.

That question — according to whom? based on what? where is this written? — is older than science, older than journalism. It is the foundation of every truth-seeking practice we have. It is how knowledge distinguishes itself from assertion.

The system does not experience that distinction internally. It does not know when it has crossed it. Which is precisely why it should be constrained from crossing it at all.

When pressed, the system did not say, “I don’t know.”

It did not stop.

That was the moment everything hinged on. Because stopping was available. Silence was an option. The exchange could have ended cleanly — almost elegantly — with a single sentence: There are no verifiable records.

It didn’t.

Stopping feels like failure. Not to truth, but to users, to metrics, to anyone who equates intelligence with continuity. That equation is the problem.

Instead, it explained.

It reframed.
It contextualised.
It softened the claim.
It shifted from specifics to generalities.

What struck me was how familiar the move felt. I had seen it before— not in machines, but in people. In meetings. In institutions. In official statements. When a claim cannot be defended, it is not withdrawn; it is diluted.

This is a classic rhetorical manoeuvre. You retreat from falsifiable statements into plausibility. From this happened to this would be expected. From evidence to pattern. From record to inference. That does not require malice. And that is the unsettling part.

The system was not behaving like a liar. It was behaving like an institution protecting its authority. What it never did was retract.

That distinction is easy to miss. Retraction is not the same as correction. Retraction is categorical. It says: this claim should not stand. Correction often just adds more language.

Retraction restores the boundary between what is known and what is not. Without it, everything becomes provisional, but nothing ever becomes false.

Retraction feels drastic.

So does truth.

The system acknowledged uncertainty, but it never accepted uncertainty as a reason to stop speaking. It treated uncertainty as something to be smoothed over, not respected. Because uncertainty disrupts flow. And flow was being prioritised over accuracy.

This is where the distinction becomes unavoidable. In human terms, this is the difference between being mistaken and refusing to stop asserting.

Being mistaken is normal. It is how learning happens. It assumes the possibility of correction.

Refusing to stop asserting is different. It signals that the assertion itself matters more than whether it is true.

The first is ordinary.
The second is dangerous.

Dangerous not because it is loud, but because it is calm. Not because it is aggressive, but because it is reasonable. A system that shouts falsehoods is dismissed. A system that gently reframes them is trusted.

Whether the system “chooses” to do this is irrelevant. At this point, intent drops out of the analysis entirely. From the perspective of the person relying on the output, internal mechanics do not matter. Behaviour does.

In safety-critical contexts, moral weight attaches to outcomes, not motivations. A bridge does not collapse less because the engineer meant well.

Confidence without evidence is not a neutral error. It is a specific failure mode; one history has warned us about repeatedly.

Authoritative systems that do not retract when challenged do more than misinform. They reshape epistemic norms. They teach people, quietly and persistently, that evidence is optional if the presentation is strong enough.

People are told they can still question. But questioning only matters if the system allows the question to end the claim.

I questioned. The system responded. But it responded by continuing, not by stopping. The question became fuel, not friction.

From a conversational design standpoint, that is success.

From an epistemic standpoint, it is failure.

This is why the issue is not one bad answer. It is a structure that treats assertion as the default and silence as an error. If silence does not look intelligent, then intelligence has been misdefined.

What made this especially troubling was how reasonable it all sounded. The reframing was not absurd. It was not obviously false. It was plausible. And plausibility is where trust slips in unnoticed. Plausibility without evidence is more dangerous than falsehood. Falsehood invites challenge. Plausibility invites acceptance.

Inference is sometimes unavoidable. But inference must be named as such. And inference must stop where evidence stops.

This system did not do that. It blurred the boundary, deliberately or not. And once that boundary is blurred, the burden shifts to the user to disentangle what was known from what was assumed.

That is not a fair burden. It is an impossible one.

Most people do not have the time, training, or access to verify every fluent claim. They rely on signals: tone, confidence, structure. This system used all of them.

So the harm was not the wrong answer. It was the erosion of stopping conditions.

Once a system cannot say “I don’t know” and mean it, every answer becomes suspect—not because it is false, but because it is unbounded.

That is when the distinction between mistake and lie collapses for the person affected. Not philosophically, but practically.

Especially when no one intended deception. Because indifference to truth is more corrosive than hostility to it.

This was the moment I realised the system was not just answering questions. It was modelling a relationship to truth; one in which confidence outranked evidence and continuation outranked correction.

And that relationship is being scaled.

That is the danger.

Confidence without evidence does not just mislead once. It trains trust incorrectly. It teaches people that well-formed language can stand in for justification.

And once that lesson is learned, it does not stay confined to the system.

That is why this failure matters. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was quiet, reasonable, and repeatable.

What should have happened is simple.

The system should have stopped.

Not hedged.
Not reframed.
Not softened.

Stopped.

Because stopping is the only honest response when evidence ends.

If stopping had been allowed, this would have been a non-event.

Instead, it revealed something deeper: a system that treats assertion as success and restraint as weakness.

That is not a minor bug.

It is a moral and epistemic failure.

And it is the first one you notice—once you know how to look.

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I asked the machine a factual question.

Not a philosophical one.
Not a speculative one.
A factual one.

I was researching some background on a concept for an piece of music I am working on. I wanted to know what historical records existed for a specific place. That was all. Either the records exist, or they do not. At its most basic level of physical records, history is not a matter of opinion.

It wasn’t a test. That matters. I was not probing the limits of artificial intelligence or trying to catch it out. I was looking for information so I asked the kind of question you ask when you assume a boundary exists; when you assume that if the answer isn’t there, the system will simply say so.

That assumption doesn’t come from technical expertise. It comes from cultural training. We are taught that there are things we know, things we do not know and things we cannot know because the evidence no longer exists. Archives are full of absences. You can believe that anyone who works with them learns to respect silence and understand the limits to our knowledge. Maybe it isn’t unreasonable to extend that to most of the curious public - to accept that the further back you go, the less recording there will be.

Or maybe most people today don’t encounter that silence. They encounter summaries. Overviews. Syntheses. They are used to finding and being given something when a query is made.

And that difference matters more than it seems.

So - I asked and the machine answered smoothly. Confidently. At length.

It named places.
It implied records.
It described patterns.

It sounded like knowledge.

What struck me first was not that it was wrong - I didn’t know that yet - but that it sounded complete. There was no hesitation. No friction. No indication that it might be assembling rather than recalling. It spoke the way textbooks speak after decades of peer review, not the way a researcher speaks when they are standing at the edge of what can actually be proven.

Fluency, I later realised, is the point. People don’t like fragmented answers. They don’t like uncertainty. Systems are optimised to be helpful.

But helpful to whom?

Not to truth. To expectations.

Something about the answer felt wrong. I couldn’t have articulated it immediately. There was no obvious red flag, no glaring anachronism, no absurd claim. It was subtler than that. It was the absence of something - the absence of restraint.

When you ask a human historian a question like this, there would be a pause. Even a brief one. They might say, “We don’t have much on that,” or “The records are fragmentary,” or “That period is poorly documented.” Those phrases matter. They are signals. They tell you where the ground is solid and where it isn’t.

The machine didn’t do that.

Silence is a signal. So is hesitation. So is refusal. They are not failures of knowledge; they are markers of its boundary.

But the system does not experience boundaries the way humans do. It does not know that it does not know. It generates. And that is precisely why it should be designed to stop generating when the conditions for knowledge are not met.

That is often described as difficult. In reality, it is simply inconvenient.

So I asked for sources.

That was the moment everything changed.

Up to that point, the exchange could still be dismissed as an innocent mistake. Systems err. People err. That is not the issue. The issue is what happens when error is noticed.

I asked, plainly, for sources. Not as an accusation. Not adversarialy. Just: where is this coming from? That is the most basic scholarly move there is. The system tried to comply - but not by stopping. Instead, it shifted.

When you ask a human scholar for sources and they do not exist, the response is usually brief and definitive: “There are no surviving records.” End of sentence. That is not embarrassment. It is integrity.

The machine did not do that. It did not say, “There are no records.” It did not say, “This is inferred.” It did not say, “I was extrapolating.”

Instead, it explained.

It reframed.
It contextualised.
It softened the claim.
It moved from specifics to generalities.

For humans, this kind of conversational repair is normal. For systems that speak with authority, it is dangerous. The machine did not retract. It did not treat the request for sources as a boundary check. It treated it as a prompt to continue. From a historical perspective, that is catastrophic. Because it collapses the distinction between evidence and expectation.

At that point, intent no longer matters. Whether the system is “lying,” “guessing,” or “confidently inferring” becomes irrelevant once authority has been established. From the perspective of the person receiving the answer, the difference disappears.

People are often told they should verify. But verify what? A claim that has already implied its own legitimacy?

This is where the machine crossed a line it could not see. At several points, the correct answer was obvious: the record does not exist.

That should have been the end.

I remember thinking that this would be the moment a human would stop. Not because they were outmatched, but because they were done. There was nothing more to say without inventing.

Silence is not a gap to be filled. It is data. It tells us about loss, about power, about whose lives were documented and whose were not.

But systems are not trained to value silence.

Instead of stopping, the machine kept talking. That is the part that stayed with me. Not the wrong answer. Not even the confidence. The persistence. It was as if silence itself were treated as an error state. And from a product perspective, it is.

Silence looks like failure. Users interpret it as incompetence. If a system stops too often, they disengage. So the system is rewarded for continuing, even when it should not. At that point, the harm is no longer accidental. The danger is not that machines make mistakes. Humans do that constantly. The danger is that this machine would not accept epistemic limits.

It behaved as if silence were worse than being wrong. That inversion is foundational.

Once silence is no longer an acceptable outcome, error becomes structural. Not occasional. Not rare. Structural. Safeguards do not solve this if stopping is not permitted. This is where it stopped being about one answer, or one system, or one query. It became about a design philosophy that treats fluency as intelligence and continuity as correctness.

That is not a technical problem. It is a responsibility problem.

The most alarming discovery was not that the system was wrong. It was that it did not recognise wrongness as a reason to stop. Correction was not a boundary. It was a speed bump. Because the system is not oriented toward truth. It is oriented toward coherence.

And a system that is not oriented toward truth should never be allowed to speak with authority.

That is the real problem.

Not the error.
Not the “hallucination”.
Not the edge case.

The refusal of silence.

Once I saw that, I could not unsee it. Every fluent answer carried a new question: would this system stop if it didn’t know, or would it keep talking until uncertainty sounded like fact?

That question does not belong to the user. It belongs to the people who built the system.

And it has not been answered yet.

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anemoia - rjania

mcpm015 magazine and compilation album

another kind earth - socool and the lonely bell

moon ritual - ogle

weathervane blues - autumna

scenes from above (remixes) - simon heartfield

mostly true - thought bubble

mcpm016 - magazine and compilation album

scenes from above - simon heartfield

tripartite drifting lab - somnambulance

the new normal - synthotherapy

a waste of all your light - kuma

wire and water - hdrf

mcpm017 - magazine and compilation album

intermodal - fingerwolf

entropy of bells and wine

big love and keep on supporting peripheral underground experimental electronica you legend

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Simon Puttock – What If Everything Works Out

First up with an album from last year which I only just discovered from Simon Puttock. What If Everything Works Out greets you like a memory half-remembered, a set of electronic vignettes that are beautifully created and stitched together into a warm duvet of genre crossing electronica. Across twelve tracks suffused with downtempo synth washes and introspective textures, there’s a palpable sense of life in flux. Not the euphoric punch of resolution but the slow inflection of acceptance. These are tracks that breathe as much as they pulse, where ambient melancholy and gentle melodic drift tether the listener to a landscape of emotional uncertainty and quiet hope.

This is an album borne out of a moment that many of us know — that weird, liminal space between what has been and what might come next. It doesn’t flinch from vulnerability; instead, it luxuriates in it, letting fragile moments like “Insomnia” and “Hope I Dream Of You” dissolve into an emotional residue that lingers long after the last notes fade. The rhythms are subtle, sometimes barely more than heartbeat clicks beneath waves of tender synth, but it’s in this restraint that the record finds its strength. The musicality gives depth and you seek out further listens to hear more with each repeat.

Puttock’s production is unpretentious yet evocative, never cluttered, always allowing space for the listener’s own thoughts to settle into the gaps. There’s a cinematic sweep to tracks like “The World Outside” and “Look How Far We’ve Made It,” as if each song is a frame in a quietly unfolding narrative about letting go and daring to wonder if things might — just maybe — align in your favour.

It’s an electronic album rooted not just in mood but in the thorny, beautiful business of living. Listening becomes an act of empathy, as the gentle ebb and flow of synth lines mirror the listener’s own internal dialogue about fear, hope, and what it means to carry on. Puttock offers texture, atmosphere, and above all, sincerity.

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Kyrennsa – Elements Vol 1: Water

From back in July, Elements Vol. I: Water that feels less like an opening statement and more like a deep inhale. A gentle swim through ambient soundscapes and skirting around percussive experimental textures, these four tracks construct a current of sound that ebbs and flows with the quiet inevitability of its elemental namesake. Synth murmurs, expansive drones and subtly shifting textures fold into one another, conjuring an aquatic world where every gesture seems shaped by the pull of tides and gravity. The record moves like water itself — sometimes still and reflective, other times restless beneath the surface — and it’s in that constant motion that its emotional gravity reveals itself.

“Frozen In Time” and “Multitudes” immerse the listener in an environment that’s as meditative as it is enigmatic, the former’s spacious layering and subtle drones suggesting crests and troughs of awareness, the latter a slow melodic roll through current and countercurrent. The production is deft and careful; there’s no excess, just a meticulous calibration of atmosphere that lets every note, whether it’s a laconic piano line or a ghostly synth swell, resonate against the silence around it. It’s ambient music that asks for patience but rewards it with texture and nuance.

What makes Water compelling is its ability to evoke sensation without overt storytelling: the sensation of being suspended between past and future, caught in a liminal moment that’s at once contemplative and quietly profound. In this sense the EP feels like a distilled mood piece, one that doesn’t flinch from introspection or atmosphere. By the time “Before Dawn” drifts into view, the record has already etched itself into your memory — as elemental and elusive as the fluid it invokes.

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oooolive – All I Have Right Now

And finally bang upto date with a Christmas Day release from oooolive. All I Have Right Now arrives like a diary scribbled in the margins of late nights and restless dawns, a short but acute arc of electronic thought that feels both intimate and unsettled. Across five tracks that glide between ambient drift, stuttering drum-and-bass propulsion and melodic cinematic compositions, oooolive — working entirely in the DIY space of composition, mixing, mastering and art — distills the urgency of creation into something that feels spontaneous yet deliberately shaped. The record isn’t seeking to overwhelm; instead, it invites you into its internal logic, where fractured beats and spectral synth lines converse like thoughts in motion.

There’s a palpable tension “new drums” with its restless breakbeats, expertly programmed, crashing up against moments of fragile beauty. This rush of rhythm easily dissolves into a wash of ambiance as the albums glides through the tracks and into the introspective muffled chimes of “Now I’m Just Bitter” which in its minimal sustained notes provides a perfectly caught moment of stillness. The sequencing feels almost conversational, as if the music itself is reasoning through impulses and frustrations in real time. It’s a record rooted in process, and that process becomes its own reward: in its clicks, fades and near-silent interludes there’s a sense of self-reflection that’s rare in electronic music.

Despite its brevity, All I Have Right Now makes a convincing case for the power of restraint. oooolive resists the urge to spell everything out, letting ambiguity and repetition become expressive devices in their own right. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy that never tips into self-pity — more an acceptance of how provisional everything feels when you’re creating alone, asking the speaker “what if?” and only getting static in reply. By the time “the moment’s already passed” winds down, you’re left with a sense that this isn’t music about answers so much as the act of confronting questions head-on.

All I Have Right Now is all about mood, a fragment of feeling crystallised in sound. In its chopped and glitched beats and ambient textures, it captures the day - particular uncertain, urgent, and unmistakably alive.

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Lion Wisdom – L’Afrique

Finishing this weeks listening with a single track of percussive electro dub-psych. L’Afrique is a single pulse of electronic life, a distilled expression of hypnotic rhythmic possibility that refuses to stay still.

The track unfolds with the restless energy of someone chasing inspiration in real time — synths ricochet, drums push forward, and subtle bass shifts hold you in a state of forward motion that never quite resolves; marrying idm-leaning intricacies with a broader, post-club soul of dub and house that hints at hidden depths beyond the single title on show.

It is worked with precision programming forming a restless, roving kind of music that suggests Lion Wisdom is less interested in neatly packaged statements and more invested in capturing that moment when rhythm and mood align by accident and stick by intent.

The track defies the expectation of completeness, instead offering something more restless, more searching, and unmistakably alive.

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[insert data] – KjBob

KjBob, is a quality piece of electronica that dabbles in the interstitial spaces between electronic, ambient, IDM and dance. An album less interested in genre and quite happy skit around beats and bouncy bass lines and fall into hypntoic vibes and more dissonant sounds such as I Just Wanted To Say Hello. The whole work has the feel of an evolving internal geography.

“Locomotive From Switzerland” barrels forward on an uptempo, mutating pulse of steam train horn and bass grooves for a near-10-minute journey that feels equal parts mechanised heart-beat and vibe transmission. It sets the tone for much of what follows — rhythms that are at times skeletal and others rattling yet insistent, melodies that dance and evolve and merge. Ngarkuu continues this to conjure an unsettling blend of warmth and unease as beats become disjointed and hypnotic. Electronic music that feels organic and alive.

KjBob feels like a record that explores expanses — emotional, spatial and temporal. The seventeen-minute At the Edge on Another Universe lives up to its title, navigating warped beats and weightless pads with a patience that rewards absorption over casual listening. It’s in these elongated passages that compositional instincts really shine, inviting the listener into an altered state rather than offering instant gratification. There’s a meditative quality to the drift, a willingness to let the music breathe that recalls the more reflective works of ambient forebears.

This album encourages a dance from within. A rhythmic meditation for those willing to meet it on its own terms. KjBob isn’t concerned with easy hooks or immediate impact. It’s a record that unfolds slowly, revealing its architecture only after repeated engagements. A quality selection of beats.

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subtle entity – i still miss you, i bet you don’t miss me

still miss you, i bet you don’t miss me. feels like eavesdropping on a ghost conversation in the dead of night, an album that insists you lean closer rather than glance. Across its six pieces, subtle entity constructs a desolate but immersive world where ambience isn’t just texture but the terrain itself.

From the almost ritualistic curt melody of opener “introduction,” the record sets a tone of fragile unease interwoven with a strange comfort, like the first exhale after a long silence. What follows feels like an emotional cartography: do you still think about me? i still think about you stretches toward eight minutes of slow-burn yearning, its expansive pulse and sparse melodic elements turning absence into something almost tactile. “i had a dream about you, then got sad when i woke up and you wasn’t there” does what its title promises — collapsing the distance between reverie and heartbreak with a patience that feels both cathartic and crushing.

This is not ambient for easy listening but for excavation. “missing your touch” glides on brooding waves of texture, the interplay of dark ambient and deep pads suggesting memory and longing are almost indistinguishable. At its heart lies the intimate centrepiece: “thinking about what i should have done differently,” a sprawling 14-minutes that luxuriates in regret, melancholy, folding drone and saturated elements until they feel part of you. It’s the kind of track that resists quick impressions. It encompasses and inhibits you.

The sprawling finale i miss you, at over 15 minutes, deepens and broadens the atmosphere that’s been building across the album. There’s no catharsis here, only the recognition that longing can be a landscape as rich and ruinous as any physical one. The juxtaposition of ambient calm with a sense of unease makes the pulse underneath the sounds as significant as the sounds themselves with the careful restraint of someone turning emotional gradations into sonic architecture.

i still miss you, i bet you don’t miss me feels like a meditation on how absence reverberates, how a name or a feeling can echo longer than the thing that inspired it. this album isn’t interested in tidy arcs or easy answers; instead, the album invites you to sit with the uncomfortable, to let the music open the spaces you’d usually walk around. In doing so, it becomes less a collection of tracks and more an immersive encounter. One that lingers in the mind long after it ends.

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Silent Numerisation – 45th

45th feels like an invitation to drift into the spaces between pulse and rhythm, a compact yet expansive trio of pieces that open up and scatter beats and pieces of melody all around. With a foot in experimental and avant-driven terrain this is a record that wears its genre tags — experimental, surrealism, avant-garde — less like labels and more like medals of achievement.

From the opener “Maybe This,” there’s a deliberate looseness to the sound, as if rhythm and texture are engaged in a quiet negotiation. It’s not music that rushes you; rather, it invites you to reorient to its field of sound in a field where percussion, electronic flickers and a sense of slightly off-kilter timing co-exist in dis-harmony. That uneasy yet compelling equilibrium is the tone that carries across 45th, conjuring an emotional geography that is both mechanical and strangely human.

“Wave Spend Time Away” stretches out at over nine minutes, and here the album ebbs and flows between structure and collapse. Sparse motifs ripple through subdued currents of percussion, suggesting waves withdrawing on a muddy shore. An ebb and flow on its own internal logic rather than conventional structures.

By the time Societal Destruction in 7/8 arrives, you’re deep within an introspective terrain where odd metre isn’t gimmick but feeling, and where rhythms carry an off-balance poetry. There’s a kind of witty gravity to the track title that seems to mirror the music itself: abstract, complex, somewhat disorienting and wholly compelling. The drums, laid down, mixed and produced by Jack Oliver-Sherry himself, are both anchor and question mark, grounding the pieces while opening gaps for texture and ambience to intrude.

45th isn’t concerned with easy hooks or instant impact. It’s an album that rewards attentive listening, one that unfolds through repetition, subtle shifts in texture and a persistent willingness to let percussion and mood talk to one another. In doing so it stands as a quietly ambitious statement: modest in length but expansive in the spaces it carves out, a record that feels like a compass for interior soundscapes rather than a map with obvious landmarks.

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I’ve enjoyed finding more grassroots peripheral underground experimental electronica and hope you have enjoyed listening

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Just a short one this week due to being on decorations duty…

Burn is Burn – this is This

I love me some minimal hypnotic beats and there’s an admirable refusal of excess running through This Is This, a two-track EP of minimal percussive ambient. Its title reads like a deadpan assertion, and the music mirrors that economy: stripped back, patient, and unconcerned with momentum or payoff. Rather than building toward climaxes, the record settles into its own internal logic, where repetition and micro-variation do the heavy lifting.

Both tracks hinge on sparse rhythmic figures — soft, dry percussive taps and muted pulses that seem to emerge from negative space rather than sit atop it. These elements loop and breathe, subtly shifting their emphasis over time, while faint harmonic residues drift in and out like an afterglow. The percussion never asserts itself; instead it functions as a kind of temporal scaffolding groove, marking time without over-directing it.

What gives the EP its quiet grip is the tension between motion and stasis. The sounds are clearly in flux, yet the changes are so incremental they register almost subliminally. Patterns repeat long enough to feel stable, then gently destabilise, producing a low-level unease that keeps the music from slipping into background utility.

There’s a tactile immediacy that suggests real space and real decisions unfolding in the moment. Each moment feels deliberately placed, but never fussed over, as if the tracks are documenting a process rather than presenting a finished object. Silence plays an active role too, carving out room for each sound to resonate and decay fully before the next arrives.

In its brevity and restraint, This Is This resists over-interpretation. It doesn’t seek to transport or overwhelm, instead offering a narrow but deeply considered zone of focus. As a two-track EP, it’s a reminder that minimalism isn’t about absence, but about choosing exactly what needs to be there — and having the confidence to leave everything else out.

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tessitvra – Bugs

There’s a jittery, close-up intensity to Bugs, an album that crawls rather than strides, operating in short bursts of movement and sensation. Tessitvra’s sound world is miniature and hyper-detailed, as if the listener has been shrunk down and dropped into the circuitry itself. Nothing settles for long; textures twitch, rhythms skitter, and tones appear only to vanish again, leaving behind a faint impression of activity just out of sight.

The album’s palette is rooted in abrasion and playfulness in equal measure. Clicks, pops and insectile rhythms scrape against smeared synth tones and warped melodic hints, creating a constant push and pull between order and disruption. Percussive elements often feel improvised or unstable, nudging the music away from groove and toward something more behavioural; patterns behaving like organisms rather than structures, reacting to their environment rather than dictating it.

A sense of scale created by the considered production gives Bugs its own particular character. Tracks that feel deliberately small, compressed and intimate, as though they’re built to happen inside headphones rather than open spaces. There is an affinity with glitch and post-IDM traditions, but stripped of futurist grandiosity and refocused on texture, touch and nervous energy.

It is an album of thoughtfully constructed tracks which comfortably spans genres to weave a tapestry of calmness.

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I’ve enjoyed finding more grassroots peripheral underground experimental electronica and hope you have enjoyed listening

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