No-one else makes music like this: devilishly complex but warm and intuitive, stirring together a dizzying assembly of outernational and outerspace influences, whilst retaining the subby funk-and-hot-breath pressure of Shackleton’s soundboy, club roots.
The result is an evolutionary, truly alchemical music — great shifting tides of dub, minimalist composition and choral song (Five Demiurgic Options); ritual spells to ward off the darkness (Before The Dam Broke, The Prophet Sequence); radiophonia and zoned-out guitar improv (Seven Virgins); even the febrile, freeform psychedelia of eighties noise rock (Sferic Ghost Transmits / Fear The Crown).
Over the five years since Music For The Quiet Hour, Vengeance’s vocal and lyrical range has rolled out across this new terrain. Throughout these six transmissions he’s hoarse preacher, sage scholar and ravaged bluesman; blind man marching off to war, and exhausted time-traveller warning of impending socio-ecological catastrophe.
Six dialogic accounts of our conflicted times, then, expanding beyond the treacly unease of the duo’s early collaborative work into something subtler and more emotionally shattering — its shades of brightness more dazzling, and its darkness even murkier.
“We almost didn’t hear it when the foundations went.”

Shackleton’s most expansive, ecstatic and hallucinatory music to date. Four extended excursions channeling Congotronics way to the east, with an aura of restrained mania reminiscent of the feral pomp and gallows humour of Coil’s moon-musick phase.
The pairing with Tomasini is a match made in heaven. Swooping from deep growl to piercing falsetto, his four-octave voice both heightens the taste for the theatrical that’s always been integral to Shackleton’s music, and makes explicit the latter’s kinship to the occult energies of the UK’s post-industrial underground.
As the title suggests, these are shadowy songs rich with allusions to bodily ritual and psychic exploration, with Tomasini’s lyrics framed by luminous whirls of hand-struck drums and synthetic gamelan, bells and tumbling organ melodies, all earthed by dubwise bass. You Are The One escalates from delicate choral chant to full-bore psychedelic organ freakout; Rinse Out All Contaminants is a slow incantation, to purge all negative thoughts; the melodies of Father You Have Left Me are smudged like early Steve Reich, then burned out by snarling subs; and the magnificent Twelve Shared Addictions balances elliptical melodies like spinning plates, gradually unfurling into a breakneck storm of voice and hammered keys.

Demdike Stare and Andy Votel.

Zany, Alaskan, harmonica-led electro-pop, with a case of Krautrock-and-the-Moroders, originally released in 1980.

Her debut, with Jolene — finally on vinyl.

‘An unshackled mind melt of amorphous Berlin School electronics, glistening guitar tones, snatches of disembodied voices and rumblings of percussive melody… an invitation to introspection, turning sky-seeking kosmiche towards a resonant, contemplative core… too busy to be ambient, too zonked to be rock, instead resting on a modern psychedelic perch of its own somewhere in between.’

Improvisatory, personal recordings made on various synthesisers between 1989 and 2017.
‘Amazing music that moves between abstract electronic experiments to melodic, DMT bent sounding, classical contemporary music and futuristic soundtracks from non-existing sci-fi movies you’ll wish you could see. It time-warps you from here to there then freezes the moment… very focused, unpretentious and highly emotive music . A wonderful and dreamy sound garden’ (Tako Reyenga, Music From Memory).
‘Chateauroux is mighty… A proper zoner. Flung on earth’ (John T. Gast).