Russell Jennison makes music as Postmodern Machine and let me say that the name of the project is just 100% on point. The piano dialed up with electronics, gotten moving by lively rhythm sounds different, yet still very moody and interesting.
Having said all of that, it's just so surprising that it's not a typical neoclassical Moderna release. The description calls it "a veritable ambient / electronic / neoclassical tour de force" with the whole album enriched by a multitude of inspirations, including dream pop for example. The soundscapes here are very far from being static, instead they heavily rely on rhythm and movement, the electronica really transforms the piano compositions into something much bigger, with some other kind of charm to it.
In 2011 I discovered the Austrian band of Our Ceasing Voice and their When the Headline Hit Home quickly put them alongside iLiKETRAiNS at the top shelves of my music taste, labeled as effing dark heavy music to feel things to. Now, after almost a decade since the previous release, the Innsbruck-based band is coming back with the 4th album and I was very curious how much of this fascination remained in me. And it turns out that it's quite a lot.
Yes, of course The Origin of Everything is closer to 2017's Free Like Tonight: it's less of the depressing, slow pace and the crushing weight of music and more about melodies and vocals (BTW, Reinhard Obermeir's voice is what stroke me first, I didn't remember quite how overwhelmingly intensive it is). Still, it doesn't mean there's none of the attractive darkness in their compositions. Not at all. The guitars feel so massive, even when they feature in songs that are melodic bangers like Diamond Eyes. What I like the most, though, are the moments of chaotic madness at the end of some of the compositions, especially in Chival.
The band is aware of this double nature in their music. Indeed, they are rather proud of it. "Our Ceasing Voice have always existed in the in-between. Between post-rock and post-metal, between vast soundscapes and heavy crescendos" and yeah, I'd say between the melodic guitars and crushing guitar avalanches. There was a time I didn't like this change of direction, with the new album I rather enjoy it.
My blog became the official media partner of the 5NDREAS Festival and my task is to fill in the remaining 3 weeks of wait with something interesting. And what could be more interesting than reading about the bands that are about to play on the stage at Feierwerk Kranhalle in Munich? Yeah? This time it's one of the headliners so strap on!
The British band Telepathy grows from album to album: starting from the post-metal oozing with the teenage angst to now produce music that merges genres and delivers some interesting messages. Their latest album, Transmissions features synths, electronic sounds and tons of samples, including one from a Polish statesman from a hundred years ago.
I had a long chat with Albert and Richard about the Polish elements in Telepathy's music, their sound evolution and how John Travolta (almost) defined the band's future. Dig in!
ŁŚ: Albert, you play in Telepathy alongside two brothers, Piotr and Krystian. It’s quite a unique situation. How do you like that?
Albert Turek: Good question. Let me first and foremost say that, even though Richard is not blood related, he is essentially a brother from another mother. Before we started playing together, I heard Richard's riffs and thought to myself: “oh, hang on, this guy has something up his sleeve!”. And then I got my brother, who I was doing a lot of music with throughout the years, and then that's kind of how it formed. Without Richard, Telepathy definitely wouldn't have come to be as it is.
But do I like it? Yeah, I love it! It adds a form of understanding without saying, without words that you can't have sometimes with someone you haven't grown up with or you're not related with. And it's a double-edged sword, of course, because that also means that when we clash, it's probably twice as painful sometimes, you know?
And I guess I might say as well that I'm quite fortunate that I do have really good rapport and sort of like friendship essentially with my brothers because I know that not everybody does, people tend to go different ways.
And it was quite interesting how we grew up together, even though there's quite an age gap between myself and Piotr and Krystian. So you would think that it would create a gap between us, but not really. We grew up together and I used to hang out with their mates more than with mates of my own age. I used to just be that annoying little brother, you know, that they didn't want to have around, but I was there and they had to deal with it.
Richard Powley: Yeah, I think we've been in the band for so long and I know the guys so well. It's like I've been adopted. I've got two families instead of one, if you know what I mean.
Richard shows off the Polish influences in his refrigerator (it's pierogi)
AT: Well, that's the kind of magic that my mother has on people. You know how Polish hospitality can be. It was like: “you know, you're now one of my sons. So you better eat up and get used to it!”.
ŁŚ: Just take off the shoes right before you enter.
AT: Yeah (laughs)
RP: I'm between Albert and Peter in age, which means that we all had similar musical touch points. If one of us said: “oh, this sounds like a Tool riff” or “this sounds like a Deftones part”, everyone knows what they mean. It's second nature at this point and I don't really think about the fact that they're all brothers, you know?
ŁŚ: They're more like band mates than family.
RP: I would probably say more like family than band mates.
ŁŚ: Rich, does it mean that you're exposed to Polish culture?
RP: Just by osmosis, really, and just being around them, I'm probably more aware of Polish history than the average English guy. I'm more aware of Polish food. I suppose if you ask the average guy walking down the street in England, have you heard of Acid Drinkers? They're going to say no, but I'm well aware of Acid Drinkers and Coma and bands like this, you know?
ŁŚ: You're aware of Coma?! Do you like them?
RP: Not the worst thing in the world (laughs).
Coma - not a band I've ever thought would feature on my blog
AT: And it works both ways. British people are a bit like the ocean. They're not so straightforward. If a Polish person doesn't like you, they will probably tell you. And if they have a dark joke, they'll just throw it. British people are slightly more like coming in waves and slowly eroding you. And if you don't adapt to that, they eventually leave you alone, but that also means they exclude you, which then leaves you kind of isolated. This wave motion, it's the current that kind of pushes you away at first, but it actually draws you back in. I found this out because I moved to England when I was 13. And when I went to school here, it was quite a shock. I didn't realize that by making all these jokes, taking a mickey out of me, people actually wanted to bring me in.
It was inevitable. I feel like this is my second home for sure, in fact, when I go back to Poland, Poland often feels more exotic to me than Britain.
ŁŚ: Let’s finally get to your music. I was thinking about the name of your band. A common definition of telepathy would be something like “direct transmission of thoughts without using means of speech or other known channels of communication”. Would you agree that instrumental music would be some kind of telepathy in that way, because what you're essentially doing is trying to transmit some kind of emotions or even ideas through means that are not usually used to do that?
AT: I think there are two answers to this, the PR answer is: yes, absolutely!
RP: That's what we’ve had in mind all along!
AT: The more transparent answer is that the name of the band came from the telepathic experiments by a Rupert Sheldrake Krystian was kind of researching at that time. He was trying to predict how many times a person will recognize who's calling them when the call comes through. And the studies show that more than 60% of the time relatives could guess who is calling them. I think the initial idea for our name was Telepaths but then our good friend sat with us and said: “no, that doesn't sound great. How about just Telepathy?”
Rupert Sheldrake and one of the questions he ponders over
I really actually enjoy the fact that we come from a place of total discovery rather than some sort of pre-engineered, predestined way of looking at music. Richard came from this indie punk zones of aggressive riffs and just going a bit crazy. I loved it. I picked it up. We came from this more, I would say, thrash metal scene with Piotr. We wanted to make a bit of angry music at first, something different a bit, a little bit effed up. And then, it slowly started becoming more mature. With time, we became slightly more apt at transferring different emotions into music, not just teenage frustration and anger.
RP: I think I've not really heard it put the way you put it, Kuba, I really liked it. But I think I'm sure Albert would agree that naming a band is the hardest thing to do when you start a band. The hours we spent thinking of different names and then this one just stuck.
AT: I was trying to remember some of the names we thought we would call this band. And I remember that there was something about John Travolta.
RP: It was going to be called just Travolta. Thank God we didn't end up with that.
Travolta - Transmissions (2025) from the alternative universe where the band ended up with that.
AT: In our defence, we were also massive movie fans. There were essentially three topics between us at first: music, films and, again, probably music. What you also might find interesting is that a lot of people are very surprised when we tell them the name of our band. It's apparently a very rare word that they haven't heard in ages. “How do you spell that?!”
But there are slightly weird people as well, those who believe in questionable theories, perhaps. We do get some strange emails sometimes, I admit.
ŁŚ: Last year you released Transmissions. I feel like there is some kind of theme behind this album, which I don't fully grasp. Can you explain what it is about?
AT: The theme was, to put it in the most simplest form that I can, trying to encapsulate the feeling of everything that's now become ordinary not being that. That essentially every discovery we've made eventually became so adapted into society that it became just taken for granted.
There was this moment I sat down with Krystian, Richard and Piotr and discussed this concept. And we were listening to plenty of these old radio recordings and we listened to the radio recording of Józef Piłsudski [“a Polish statesman who served as the Chief of State (1918–1922) and first Marshal of Poland (from 1920)” - author’s note, taken from Wikipedia] speaking out and kind of being fascinated with the voice recording technology. And, to him at the time, it felt kind of ridiculous. What's this? What's the real purpose of this?
I mean, how many times in history did people feel like this? Something being on the precipice of discovery is, I guess, the theme of this album. And life being like this in general, whether you are taking out the trash in the morning or having your coffee or playing the gig you've always dreamed of, whatever the moment is, it's some form of discovery and you're on a precipice of something that hasn't happened before yet we very quickly forget and normalize all that.
RP: The other thing was that with the sense of discovery come excitement and fear and they are really very similar emotions.
I think quite a lot of what we do, especially when the band plays live. It's a very visceral experience. It's really happening, you know. If we're present now, then we can be aware that these things are great, these things are actually happening.
ŁŚ: I love the inclusion of Piłsudski’s speech on A Silent Bridge. It made me listen more carefully to what he's saying, and it shocks me that he poses questions like “I'm recording my voice now, does it mean that I still own it? Or whose property does it become?” It’s crazy that we are saying the very same things now with the advent of AI technology.
AT: What he was saying applies pretty much all the time, every time, everywhere. And at the ending part of End Transmission, there is a bit of a dialogue that mentions that if you stay in that place long enough, you may be perceived as a madman. The point of it is not to just stay there.
I think Piłsudski embraced the moment fully. I think it's very much a worthwhile thing to embrace the moment meaningfully and have a bit of a reflection on it. And recognize that no moment is ordinary. So yeah, maybe it's a bit cheesy actually, live in the moment.
ŁŚ: Transmissions, besides the theme behind it, is also interesting because it proves what you already said earlier, that your sound is constantly evolving. It is quite a complex album sound-wise. Was it a conscious decision or is it more like something that happened organically?
RP: I think it was more of an organic thing. Over the years, all of us have had different projects that are more electronic. We came to a point where we were comfortable enough composing in other ways than just like guitar, bass, drums. We finally felt we could bring it into the Telepathy world. We all felt after the last record we did, Burn Embrace, that we wanted something fresh. And that just happened to be how it came out. I think the beautiful thing about it for me is that it's closer to what I imagined the band could be when we started. If you had told me 10 years ago you're going to have an album like Transmissions, I would have been thrilled. But I think at the time we didn't yet have the capability to do it.
AT: Yeah, there was definitely a lot of learning to do. And we owe a lot of that to the people we've worked with over the years. You could say they schooled us on a lot of this stuff, because, like I said, we had just angry, crazy riffs to begin with and we just laid them down. We had a lot of reviews saying “this is a mess” but some people said “this is a fantastic mess” too.
We learned more about music, more about instruments. So it definitely evolved our way of writing music and making sense of melodies and how they progress. Another thing is that, as I mentioned earlier, we were fascinated by music and films. And that became extremely apparent for myself and Piotr especially, who ended up doing his degree in composing music. We wanted to make our sound even more cinematic because what we started making felt epic. And a lot of people started saying: “oh, I could hear this in a movie” or “I could hear this in a video game”. That probably makes sense because we love film music.
So that caused a lot of sound evolution. And yeah, synthesizers have helped with that a lot. They created another kind of layer that was just so fun to explore for us.
ŁŚ: But the evolution of the sound, well, just like any evolution, doesn't stop, right? Do you think that you're going to go in a particular direction with your sound in the future? And what direction would it be?
AT: Now that we've established that we can merge these two worlds, the metal and the synths, which we were kind of a bit scared to do at first, we've got proof we can do this. So now I want to go back and give some love to the old stuff that we used to do, which is the riffs and the bollock that the music had back in the day. And I would personally like to ramp that up. Whether that's going to translate, we'll see, because it's just my thinking.
But we haven't yet started properly going into the next album phase. We're still enjoying Transmissions. We're still exploring the album ourselves, because that has been the case with pretty much every album we’ve ever done, especially Tempest. It felt like three years of touring it and we were just putting in new twists on top of the compositions and learning that maybe some different ways of playing sound a bit better. Ultimately playing live is what really gave us the kind of the feelings we aimed for.
RP: And we're already working on something quite new in the scene when it comes to sound development. We're working with a company called TiMax. They do audio installations, for example in the Royal Albert Hall. We're trying to make a spacial sound version of the record and we're going to do a couple of special concerts with 16, 24 speakers. As an audience member, you'll be inside the record as we play it.
TiMax Spatial Studio in London
ŁŚ: It’s a good thing that you mentioned Tempest and this evolution of sound, because it’s just been announced that you will be releasing a remastered version of this album. Does it mean that it's actually based on the experience from the live shows like you said?
RP: Essentially, when we started touring Transmissions, we wanted to update the older material that we'd be playing. And Piotr wrote the synthesizer arrangements for those as we were preparing to go on tour. The album was coming up for a 10 year anniversary and, as we still love playing these tracks, we thought: “okay, it's been out of print on vinyl for a while” and we talked to Pelagic, they were into re-releasing it.
We wanted to include the new versions of these two songs. And yeah, the way they've been written and constructed is a result of getting that material ready to play live.
AT: There was too much of a contrast in the way it felt to play some of the old songs that people really liked. Hiraeth, for example, is a big one across our fan base and people love to hear it. And we love to play it, but we wanted to bring it into line with Transmissions.
ŁŚ: In one of your interviews, Rich, when you were asked about potential collaboration with other artists, you said that you prefer to have everything done internally within the band. But this year, you released an album with remixes made by some big names.
RP: Yeah, yeah, totally changed my mind. When I was a bit younger, I was a bit more closed off to working with other people maybe. And I think in the years since, I've had a great time working with other people and being able to learn from what they do.
Transmissions having such a kind of varied sonic palette, and almost a new identity for the band, it felt really interesting to give parts of these songs to maybe more electronic-focused artists and see where they could take it and really expand what we wanted to do as a band.
And it's been a great experience. We worked with Jo [Quail - author’s note] on the previous record, Burn Embrace, and she was playing acoustic cello, because that was really a kind of earthy sounding album. And for this remix EP, we've rebuilt the song as a beat-focused, almost trip-hop sounding track, with her playing electric cello. And it's amazing.
ŁŚ: Please tell me that Jo is as amazing in real life as she is on the stage.
RP: Yeah, yeah, she's a wonderful person.
AT: We had the pleasure of working with her for the Burn Embrace album as Richard mentioned. She actually had injured her hand just a week or so before and she still came to the studio and still did like 6 hours of cello playing for us.
So not only a wonderful person but also very committed and just extremely professional. I’d like to make people aware that on Burn Embrace, the title track from this album, the last bit that you hear Jo Quail playing is her first and last take. She came to the studio and I said to her: “just play something over that bit”. And she did. Jaime Gomez pressed record, pressed stop and that’s all. And we were just mesmerized. This was one of the most beautiful bits we've ever heard.
RP: And for this collaboration track, we sent her the remix, she said “oh, I love it. I want to be part of it”. And what we got back from her was about 36 different tracks of cello, loads of ideas. And some of these tracks I wish people could hear because they sound completely alien to what you would imagine a cello could sound like. Some of them are in the track that we released, but no one's ever going to know this was a cello. She's a master of her instrument.
Jo Quail, not only wonderful person, but also extremely professional
ŁŚ: You're coming to the 5NDREAS festival in Munich. What's the most important thing for you when performing live? What's the thing that you like to focus on when you're on the stage? I'm asking because this will tell us, the audience, what to expect, if there's anyone who's never seen you performing live.
RP: For me a live show got to be an emotional and kind of physical version of the record. Just dialed up more than you can get from listening at home, if you like. The most important thing is the connection between the band and the crowd. As a performer, when you're halfway through the first song, you can kind of already tell this connection is there and it's working. I want to feel the music as much as hear it when I go to a live concert.
AT: For me, I get surprised at which point certain people tend to switch on to our music. There are bits that are the big hits that we know people like the most. But actually sometimes I'll be playing along and I love this particular bit, but I feel like it's underheard. And then suddenly out of the periphery, I see someone absolutely rocking the shit out to that bit too. And I'm like: “that person gets it”.
Another thing is that I always try and make sure that I'm a bit more relaxed because it's always nerve-wracking. Any time I go up on stage, it could be the smallest or the biggest show, I’d never say “oh, I've done it, 500 times”. No. Every time it’s more like “oh shit we're doing this!”.
RP: Still, we're so f*cking lucky that we can go on tour with Long Distance Calling, play in some amazing venues and then finish it off playing in Munich, a place we've never been to before. We've been invited to headline this first day of this festival, and it's an incredible thing to be able to do. Just as a person, I feel honoured to be able to do that. 🦢
16 October has to be some kind of saint patron of post-rock's day as on this date, several great names within the genre released their new albums. But even though some of them were REALLY great names (like Caspian or Ranges), the album that really caught my attention came from the Italian outfit Threestepstotheocean and it's no surprise as it's just a continuation of their fantastic and well-leveled discography.
It's already 6 years since Del fuoco was released (the one with Dispersi, one of my favourite post-rock tracks ever) so I was curious if the band can keep up the level of intricacy and emotional content on their new album. And I was not disappointed, not in the slightest. This is the kind of post-rock that may not impress with the level of noise the audience is receiving but that's not the point: the point is to create artful compositions woven out of various elements to become a coherent piece. Sometimes i sounds like guitar-heavy post-rock, sometimes it's closer to electronica and trip-hope vibes. I like all the ways the band employs not to stand still. And it's not only the feature of their sound, in fact, the band dedicates the entire album to the idea that "much of what we consider stable or permanent is bound to shift, dissolve, or disappear". Movement and change.
And yes, the intriguing sound also means interesting collaborations like the one with a Sardinian vocalist Dalila Kayros on the very trip-hoppy and folky Black Syrup or with the Italian band Moonilt in the dense and meaty Every Time I Dive. Not the one with Conny Ochs, but everything else is really, really good.
Is my favourite new dreamy indie rock band coming from Sweden? Very possible. Kallsup made my list of favourite things already with their debut album last year, but they didn't want us to wait long for another treat and went ahead and released the sophomore Alldeles för nära already 1.5 year later. And the moody hits they create certainly deliver.
The slightly hidden and dispersed vocals with the dense guitar music (there are 6 people in the band and you can hear it) hit you like a tank. The band creates music that is both loud and extremely melodic, the way they write hit songs like Kino or Undantagshelgen tells you something about how talented they are. But the thing is that the album does not only contain the melodic bangers, but also some tracks the purpose of which is to create the oneiric and slightly melancholic atmosphere with psychedelic compositions like, especially, the one in Min största vän.
I could point to several songs worth checking out (Imma, Fritt fall, but I'm gonna be a banger sucker this time and tell you to go and listen to the radio hit and a single track Kino (... and it's so interesting that this is the second Swedish band with a song called Kino after Star of Heaven who started as a Kino (pop-rock band from the east) cover band as it was revealed in my interview with the Swedes).
Archie Ingram makes his music as Stone Anthem and he certainly knows how to blend genres together to achieve a melancholic and beautiful mix. The ambient and slowcore and dream pop and singer/songwriter, everything has its place on the 9th (already!) album by the Coventry-based artist.
"My work kind of lives somewhere between a glitch and memory fragments of detuned voices field recordings processed until they feel fictional rhythms that almost repeat but never quite land the same way twice..." the artist describes his music before adding something that really got to me: "Imagine music that feels like it’s remembering itself incorrectly." Yes, that's it: not only does the sentence encapsulate the dreamy atmosphere of the ambient pop on the album, but also how it was created with the repetetitions and loops. The intimate, lo-fi atmosphere adds to this unreal, oneiric vibe.
By the way, while describing the artist, the label states that Ingram started the project in 2019 when he was... 12 years old. That can't be right, right? RIGHT?!
Project that creates "post-industrial, ambient, noise" music that goes so far that it basically becomes post-rock played in weird way. But it sounds SO GOOD! The French duo looks like experimental electronic musicians on the stage but they sound like dunk!festival regulars and they just released their debut album with some interestingly psychedelic cover.
Those psychedelic and space-focused themes seem to be the main drive of the two artists known as Astrocyte Jfi and Sid negativv. The motives here are interestingly described as the love of "antiquity-retrofuturism, space-time labyrinths". The sci-fi cinematic works (most notable Dune) that marry the future with the concept of the evolution of civilization(s) seem to prevail, but the sound of music is not entirely what I'd describe as the space post-rock (like the one from Beyond the Event Horizon). The psychedelic guitar post-rock is what I'd describe them, although... I don't think they even use guitars. Instead, the drums are accompanied by "Korg MS 2O instrumentation, the Osmose next-generation instrument" which I have to quote from their biography as I have no idea about any technicalities regarding synthesizers. But I guess it's important.
What is important to me, though, is the ease with which the duo creates the soundscapes that feel both cinematically vast and brutally powerful without compromising the melodic side of their compositions. It's the kind of music that isn't million miles away either from sci-fi soundtracks (I'm thinking The Invincible video game for example) or psychedelic, desert-like heavy instrumental music. Really, the best of two worlds (or planets if you will).
