Yang Boi - Kief Marroquino EP (DSRPTV)

Another storming release from this Brazilian label, who've been so productive during 2026. Yang Boi's merging of urban Brazilian and Moroccan influences results in a vibrant, unpredictable listening experience.

The EP is mastered by the excellent DJ Rotundo and its five tracks take us through a whole range of influences from funk to carioca and back again. I'm playing Patience Kontroll from the EP in my FSK show this month. Kief Marroquino comes out today and you can get it here. While you're getting it, I'd recommend checking out the following:

Yu ft Klyn - Flawless

Golden Kong - Simply Happy

Shelf Life: Anders Bodelsen - Freezing Point (1969)

It's a pattern: striving to achieve something, the exhilaration of achievement followed by the restlessness that comes with having achieved then the urgent need to discover a new challenge. Freezing Point takes that desire and places it in a scenario where eternity has suddenly become a human possibility. Yet patterns are, by their nature, recurrent: a life of promised freedom becomes one of constantly recurring disappointment.

In Anders Bodelsen's novel, the protagonist Bruno, a man with incurable cancer, is frozen down until a cure is discovered. Just before entering his frozen state, he meets and falls in love with Jenny Hollander, a ballet dancer. The desire to see her again lies at the route of a quest that can only end in disappoint and, because scientists have now discovered a way to unlock eternity, it's a disappointment he must endure again and again.

It's a nightmarish novel, populated by characters all enduring crises unearthed by these new possibilities. Hollander herself desires to be frozen down until her spine can be fixed and she can dance again, only to encounter despair in the repetition of exhilarating pirouettes that turn immediately to failure. Dr Ackerman, who oversees Bruno's freezing, is reduced constantly repeating the same line about candles. The son Bruno and Jenny has brought into the world exists in a state of perpetual depression.

The magnificence of Bodelsen's writing is underpinned by the recurring images Bruno recounts through the book: from the seeing hole he prods through the ice at the beginning of the novel to the metaphor of a skating rink that cracks a little more each time you skate, in whichever direction that ends it. It takes the book beyond its dystopian message and imbues it with a kind of beauty that, we must understand, has value only because it is temporary.

This is a thought-provoking work of rare brilliance whose message, you feel, has only gathered further weight with the passing of time.

Peel Back September 2026: June Tabor/Half Man Half Biscuit/PJ Harvey

This month's Peel Back... selection in my Dandelion Radio show takes us first back 50 years ago, to the September 1976 session broadcast by June Tabor. Soon after, the punk bands would begin to barge through the doors of Maida Vale - more on that next month - but Peel never lost his appreciation of those artists who continued to offer vibrant and innovative music of whatever genre or no identifiable genre at all.

Tabor is a case in point. This was the second of six sessions she recorded for John Peel, the latest of which was a collection of cover versions in 1990. That's also well worth revisiting when the time comes but this Pull Down Lads, which features John Gillespie on keyboards, is as good an introduction as any to Tabor's bewitching vocal style. The version featured in the show is the one from her Airs & Graces LP.

The second featured track comes from that worrying period during which it seemed Half Man Half Biscuit might be about to quit for good, the demands of a working band impinging too much on Nigel Blackwell's schedule of long walks, football matches and daytime TV. Fortunately they would eventually decide to return but there's a treasured brilliance to tracks like The Best Things In Life made all the pertinent for the threat that hung over a band who Andy Kershaw once labelled 'the greatest English folk band since The Clash'. Recording in 1986. this is from their fourth session for the show: the fifth would come following their reformation more than three years later.

Finally, we feature a track from PJ Harvey's fourth session for the show, a track that would later appear as a Harvey/John Parish release. That Was My Veil was from the 1996 session recorded at Peel Acres and marks the period when Harvey's recordings were beginning to outgrow the Peel environs: not by choice but because, as Peel later commented, it became much more difficult to secure approval from the bigwigs who began to oversee her recording career at this point. Like HMHB, she's remained consistently interesting and innovative ever since, of course and, for Polly herself, Peel remained a valued mentor until the end.

Periodolia Paranoia/VX/Charlie is Girlie/Bloodstained Blondes/Weak Ends at Commune, Liverpool

Sometimes it's good to immerse yourself in other people's obsessions. No, I'll rephrase that: it's always good to immerse yourself in other people's obsessions. And that's exactly why I was at the tiny Commune venue in Liverpool last night.

Admittedly, I was primarily there to see VX, who of course have been featured numerous times in my Dandelion Radio show and did a session for us earlier in the year which you can still hear here. But VX (kit below) was one of six acts (sadly, I got there too late to see Fledgling Swift), all of whom work in the idiom of electronic and industrial noise, or in fact any noise. The result was a skull-splitting delight.

I got there just as Weak Ends were on the floor (literally), producing a mesmerising racket from keyboards and laptops, before Bloodstained Blondes took the stage, a harsh noise extravaganza gradually fading into a news report on Kennedy's Assassination. Charlie Is Girlie (below right) was a sensation, a backdrop of a melted Frank Sinatra LP almost blending into shocking (in the best sense of the word) noise intrusions.

Then came the mighty VX, blending pitch alterations with white noise which somehow managed to crank up the noise levels still further. Then he got the drill out. Finally, Periodolia Paranoia added discordant sax and the evening, somehow, seemed complete. And yet, heading into the backstreets that Commune calls home, you knew that any future exposure to these astonishing practitioners of the art of noise will take us into still more spheres of sonic exploration and greater levels of noise terrorism.

All worth checking out. Use these links as a starting point:

https://charlieisgirlie.bandcamp.com/

https://vxmusic2.bandcamp.com/

Google is telling me the others don't appear to exist, but I can assure you they do.

The Ale Trail: The Pocket (Islington)

Another trip into London for footballing reasons allowed me to spend a few hours in what has recently entered my shortlist of favourite pubs in the capital. This is not surprising as another pub on that shortlist is the Southampton Arms in Kentish Town and the Pocket was designed to resemble the former with almost eerie precision when it opened on the site of the old Four Sisters pub.

There are eight hand-pulls and the ale selection prioritises independent breweries, so the place is immediately ticking all the right boxes as soon as you enter. It's also dog-friendly (tick) and the service is first class (double tick). Having chosen an intriguing stout, the barman advised me it was nearing the end of its run and, aware it may not be at its best, offered it me for nothing if I chose to risk it.

Instead, I went for the Tring Mansion Mild, at 3.7% a steady option for afternoon drinking, followed by the Howling Hops Saddle Up and Kirkstall's Abbey Ale followed by a return to the Mild. We had a game of chess in there with a few pieces missing so, fuelled by the ale, it quickly began to resemble that scene from Bottom, before chatting with fans from the opposition, many of whom congratulated us on our choice of boozer given the wide range of options available in that part of town.

I can only advise that, if you're a stranger to London, you turn right out of Highbury & Islington station and keep going until you turn left on Canonbury Road when you'll see the pub standing unobtrusively before you. Go in. You won't be disappointed.

How Du - Metal Will Reign (Pressure Dome)

Don't be put off by the title - Metal Will Reign is not a celebration of long-haired anodyne stadium rock and doesn't feature anything definable as a guitar solo, or even a guitar. How Du is a Bristol-based producer whose work is rooted in dub techno but moves from dark vibes to melodic flourishes taking in broken beats and moody textures and rhythms along the way.

How Du has appeared on a couple of Pressure Dome compilations but this is his debut full-length and it's a corker. You can hear C Gate in my FSK show this month, but Metal Will Reign is one of those releases you really can't judge with a single fragment. Immerse yourself in the whole thing and, if possible get hold of the cassette version, which has an exclusive B-side not available in the download.

You can pick up either format here. 

Drift - Violence For Your Furs (God Unknown)

The God Unknown label has put out so many good releases in recent years I made room in my shows whenever I get wind of a new one. This mini-album from Drift, which is out tomorrow, is certainly no exception. I now find that this London-based four piece have been active for over ten years and am once again in that wonderful position of being able to check out the back catalogue of a truly outstanding band of whom I was previously unaware. It's not the first time God Unknown have provided me with this opportunity and I fully expect it won't be the last.

Their Rough Rider track features in my Dandelion Radio show this month: it's a thrilling cacophony based around a wonky synth riff that vocalist Nathalia Bruno overlays with the kind of understated delivery which adds to the mood rather than wrecking it with the kind of performative singing that destroys too many promising intros. If I still went in for those music polls that were such a feature of my youth, Nathalia would be on a shortlist for 'favourite female vocalist', no question, but that's certainly not to undervalue what the rest of the band do, producing the kind of motorik chug I'll be in my cold, cold grave before I ever tire of.

Get the album here and join me in checking out the rest of the band's releases after you've done it.

Xmal Deutschland - Peel (The Complete Peel Sessions) (4AD)

The early-to-mid eighties 4AD roster was a magical one. Alongside those incredible Cocteau Twins releases, came a whole load of intriguing names that sprang off the pages of the music press and impelled me to check them out: Dead Can Dance, Clan of Xymox, The Wolfgang Press...

And of course Xmal Deutschland. If the release of Incubus Succubus in 1982 brought this Hamburg-based band some richly deserved attention, it was far from the whole story, as this collection of Peel sessions shows. It brings together the four sessions the band recorded between 1982 and 1985. 

Although they continued to perform and record until 1990, the period bookended by that first and final Peel session represents the band's golden period. By 1987, only singer Anja Huwe remained from the original line-up. Despite a major record deal with Phonogram and a support for The Stranglers at Wembley, the band's best years were behind them and these sixteen tracks recorded for John Peel represent the work of a band who truly demand more serious investigation than they have perhaps been given in the years since. 

Get it here. You can hear tracks from the album in both my Dandelion and FSK shows this month.

It's also worth checking out this compilation of the band's earlier work.

Tiiva - This Could Be A Start (Blue Tapes)

My favourite labels tend to fall into two broad categories: those that give me what I want, no messing about, with uncanny regularity and those that challenge any pre-set expectations lurking in my ageing brain by offering me something very different with each release.

Blue Tapes fall into the latter category. They've pushed me in the direction of so much music that I love over the years: selected highlights include the Soft-Bodied Humans/Swordman Kitala link-ups, Katie Gateley's incomparable Pipes and the magnificent Estonian project Threes & Will. There's no common ground underpinning any of those projects and that's kind of the point. Like the wonderful French label Kythibong, Blue Tapes manage to throw up something different with every release and that's why I love them so much.

This new album from Tiiva is a case in point. 'So you don't much go for stuff tagged as ambient?' it seems to say. 'Try dismissing this fucker, then.' And I duly admit that, if this is ambient, then the ambient tag provides for fertile musical territory than perhaps I had credited it with. But the main point, really, is to ignore the tags and, if I find myself not abiding by that crucial principle, Blue Tapes are here to correct me.

Tiiva takes those expectations and feeds them through some kind of electronic mixer that has pop at its entry point only for something that defies easy categorisation to come out the other side. While you're waiting for this release to become available it's worth checking out the release history at her bandcamp and bracing yourself for the kind of musical journey that's both thrilling and beguiling.

This Could Be A Start will be available here in download or cassette form from 25 September. You can hear I Keep Falling in Love at the Blue Tapes bandcamp and I'm playing the album's final track - the magnificent Crush in my FSK show this month, now available to hear on demand here. 

The Spook School - Falling (Alcopop!)

I was fortunate to be present at one of The Spook School's earliest gigs to witness the stirrings of a band set to become loved by several of us at Dandelion Radio, culminating in an appearance at number 15 in the 2015 Festive Fifty with Binary. Then, just as it appeared world domination (or at least some kind of impact) was on the horizon, they announced the split.

Suddenly, they're back with a new single on Alcopop! and an album - Like A Heartbeat - to follow in a few months' time. One listen to Falling puts to bed any thoughts this may be the kind of pipe and slippers return you get from some re-formed bands. They've lost none of their energy: indeed, they sound like they might have discovered some more from somewhere. You can hear it in my September show on FSK, now available on-demand here. 

Will the rest of the album live up to its promise? Given the individuals responsible for it, it's hard to imagine it won't. There's an early chance to check out some of the tracks if you can get to their reunion show at The Old Blue Last in London on 3 October.

Paul Rooney - Axing For It & Other Stories (Owd Scrat)

No one does spoken word narratives like Paul Rooney. Now, the creator of masterpieces like Lucy Over Lancashire and Lost High Street is back with an album that reaches into that method, explores it, plays with it, dissects it and ultimately leaves with a ten-track album that, as has become the case with Rooney's work, doesn't sound quite like anything else.

I may have said this before but I'm going to say it now anyway: the Liverpudlian's art resembles that of James Joyce in the sense that both only produced masterpieces. I keep fearing the day when Paul Rooney's work begins to dip below the almost impossibly high standard he's set but it's still never shown any sign of arriving. I'm beginning to be convinced it never will. 

A track like Write Here Write Now plays with the idea of narrative the way Joyce played with the interplay between language and consciousness. The protagonist journeys down the M6 while a mysterious author writes up his life as a medical spy thriller. Perhaps the greatest achievement is none of this ends up sounding too high brow or in danger of disappearing into its own nether regions. Rooney's work continues to be an accessible listening experience despite refusing to make any concessions to commercialism. The title track of the album features, among other things, a postman called Franz and a self-loathing tree. There's much to entertain here as well as enthrall.

In my Dandelion Radio show this month (hear it on-demand here), I'm featuring To Havana Have Not, which originated as a soundtrack composed back in 2005. Another thing that's great the way Rooney digs back into his own history in this way, recycling previous adventures and breathing new life into them. It's almost Proustian, but I realise I'm in danger of over-intellectualising the whole thing when what you really want to do know is whether it's a good listen or not.

To be clear, then: yet it is. A bloody good listen.

Get it here. 

V/A - Sink The Rich

28-track long compilations rarely deliver in terms of consistency. Many felt the three-volume Into the Light compilation I put out in aid of Pussy Riot many years ago compromised quality to a degree and, on reflection, I think they were right.

So I approached this compilation - released in aid of the Good Law Project - with anticipation tempered by realism. I expected a rollercoaster ride of the good, the bad and the semi-unlistenable and, when I saw that the first track - from Resistance Resistance - was over 26 minutes long, it did nothing to blunt those expectations. Still, I figured, discovering half a dozen tracks of genuine quality while contributing to an excellent course was going to be worth the bumpy ride ahead.

The ride, however, turned out to be one with all the thrills and few of the expected bumps and bruises. Not that this is easy listening by any means: industrial noise mingles with blistering electronica and the pretty much undefinable so if your tastes tend to the more melodic you might be tempted to avoid it. I'd advise you not to, though, because it'll do you good. Forget your inhibitions and just dive in.

Anyone familiar with my Dandelion and FSK radio shows will presumably have encountered VX before: this side-project of Neil Whitehead's Vert:X feature here, as do the mysterious New Wives of Bath, who you can hear in session on my Dandelion Radio show before the year is out.

For now, you can hear three tracks from the album in my current FSK show: now available to hear on-demand here. It wasn't an easy choice as pretty much everything on here deserves unleashing on a world that badly needs waking up and this album seems to have all the necessary tools to do that. In the end, I went for Kinver Pond's Tentacled Bigot Devouring Creature Finally Locates Your Evil Billionaire Yacht, partly, I admit, because it's the best title I've encountered all year, yet also because the quality of the track more than does it justice. It encouraged me to check out their album Sparkles Are Back, which came out last year, and is certainly worth your attention.

You can also hear Tear The Place Down by the wonderful DJ Fitnote on the show, plus Deborah Fialkiewicz's Bloodchild, a superb slab of noise that is perhaps the best representation of this collection's general mood, if anything can be said to do so. Find more of Deborah's work here. I wished I'd known about her Tale of Xmas Radio when I recorded the festive section of my December show last year. Perhaps this year.

But inevitably, three tracks can only take you a small part of this gloriously noisy ride: strap yourself in and go all the way here.

The Ale Trail: Cork n Cask (Bromley)

What a find this was. There I was, stumbling back to my hotel after watching my beloved Manchester United Women dismantled by London City Lionesses and, seeking liquid solace, I happen upon this place, a great micropub on Masons Hill.

Like some other micropubs (Stratford-Upon-Avon's excellent Stratford Alehouse is another). the ale is dispensed directly from casks behind the bar rather than out of hand-pulls. Duly tempted, I had a couple of pints of Westerham's British Bulldog, a rich, satisfying 4/1% ABV ale that made me forget my troubles until I woke up this morning and remembered them all again.

The pub offers four changing ales and was known as the Bitter End before reopening in 2023 in its current form. Aside from the quality of ale, it was great to have some comfortable seating at the back end of the bar on which to rest my aching bones. 

There's a good chance football will take me back into the area again so I'll definitely be calling in, hopefully on the back of a better result next time.

Goat Hill Clippers - Secrets Suck (Damaged Goods)

The Humber Estuary is quite a unique place. For a start, despite frequently heard claims to the contrary, there is no River Humber. Unlike the Mersey, Severn or Thames, the Humber is an estuary that just appears when the Ouse and Trent reach the end of their respective journeys.

I'm not sure why I mention this, other than that the Goat Hill Clippers come from that part of the world and it's something I've been pondering while listening to their album - which I've been doing a lot recently.

The Clippers are guitar/bass/drums three piece who answer what is, for me, the age-old question of how to deliver songs that are unmistakably rooted in a classic late-seventies template yet sound fresh and invigorating. I still don't know the answer to that question, but the Clippers manage to do it anyway. The tunes merge with various sonic intrusions such as squawking peacocks, cartoons and TV advert samples but don't come away with the idea that the band needs these to supply something that' missing from their sound. That couldn't be further from the truth. If you need convincing, listen the excellent Brawlers and Bastards which opens my Dandelion this month (you can now hear it on-demand here), or Yellow Ball Express, which I'm playing in my FSK show this morning (shortly be available on the Dandelion Mixcloud too).

Or you can just dive in and get the album here.

In Session September 2026: Jack Hayter

It's always a pleasure to have Jack Hayter in session. He's back again in my latest Dandelion Radio show, which has been streaming since yesterday and which you can now catch on-demand here. It's the start of what I hope will be a regular run of session guests over the next few months, stretching as far into 2027 as we can manage.

They'll have to be good to keep up the standard set here, five tracks that almost manage to do the impossible and showcase the enormous breadth of reasons to love Jack's music. There are many other reasons and for those you'll need to check out the full history of his releases on his bandcamp site. It may take a while but it'll be worth it.

For the uninitiated, or partly initiated, hopefully the session tracks will provide a good introduction:

1. It Will

A new version of a track that appeared back in 2016, then with ex-Hefner bandmate Antony Harding on drums. 'People seem to like it,' says Jack. 

2. Lily From Church

Another new version of an old track, this time from 2023 about a gruesome double murder in Gravesend in 1961: 'You'll find two graves/And one inscription on a heart shaped stone.' The gruesomeness of the subject matter somehow seems enhanced by the plaintive beauty of the delivery.

3. Mayflies

A new track also set in Gravesend, set in the planned London East Airport, which never saw the light of day.

4. Sisters of St Anthony

The oldest track in the session, this was the title track of the Sisters of St Anthony subscription series of singles, all of which can be heard here on the 2013 album of the same name. 

5. Gravytown Bellybones

Last year, Jack released this along with his version of Sylvia Plath's Balloons - 'my favourite poem by anybody,' he says. We don't get the Plath song in session but we do get a very different version of the other track on the single 'in the more rollicking way that I do it in the local pubs,' says Jack. The song is 'about the aftermath of a strange Tuesday night desperate struggle...with a woman I'd never met and who I'm unlikely to see again.'

All fantastic stuff. Massive thanks again to Jack for the session and to Jamie from Audio Antihero for his help in making it happen.