Moon Wiring Club

Losing slowtime to Moon Wiring Club, the best dressed sleeves in town. Imagine Stuart Maconie's Freakzone show on 6 Music, compressed and slightly de-boned, de-clawed from the occasional lapses of jazzspunk and run through with some Quatermass imaginings (i.e. what people like me who have never seen Quatermass imagine it's like). It's a world which ground to a halt sometime during the 3 day week.

A world of teeth grinding and blank colours. A world definitely, definitively pre-punk and proud.

Obviously, there's now a whole scheme to fit this kind of thing into and I guess this sits most neatly alongside the Mordant Music take on the H word rather than the TV noodles of Belbury Poly (whose latest I'm just not sure about - in part, their best work, in part their worst). I guess MM's Dead Air is the most obvious reference point - though this is smoother and less hurried, less frenetic, less needing to lurch towards the next surreality or soundbite. Moon Wiring Club have a grainier soundfield and this is reflected by their League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-like cover (contrast with Dead Air's angularities and dead spaces)...

It's also the closet any of the Hauntological clan have come to Hip Hop; some of the longer tracks could easily be an alternate universe take on the kind of sludgy instrumental hip hop that DJ Spooky saw off back in the late 90s, just this time the samples are the kind that sound like a just-dead Johnny Morris, sending a thought-shiver to Valerie Singleton.

This is the kind of thing that Ian Penman heard in Tricky's Maximquaye.

Picking up on the DJ Spooky, Olive axis, Illbient works better for theseguys. There's a woozy illness to lots of Moon Wiring Club's music, a sort of benevolent disease, one which sees you under the covers, watching the taught surface-tension struggle between Calpol and air, hooping coughs into the air and waiting for them rebound off the walls.