About

Stephen EvEns highly anticipated new album Here Come the Lights is set for release on March 29th. The album, self-produced and mastered with Sean Magee (Abbey Road), will be released via Onomatopoeia (Hurtling, William D. Drake, Crayola Lectern) and comes off the back of the recent success of his limited-edition vinyl only release, Smoking Is Cool (recorded with Steve Albini).

Here Come The Lights takes a step into the future, as indie-rock vignettes are interspersed with psych rock and post-punk sensibilities amidst swooping and motoric guitars, sound effects and metronomic happenings, in these textured reflections on life. The album features a whole host of Brixton Hill Studio collaborators, including former Echobelly/Curve bassist Debbie Smith, Cardiacs alumni Bob Leith and William D. Drake, plus Hurtling and My Bloody Valentine guitarist and keyboard player Jen Macro.

A wonk fest glittered with a dirty glam sound that reminds me of Brix & The Extricated. LTW
new wave poetics, dry, surreal and amusing, against music that matches cheap tech with post-punk skronk, The Arts Desk

**Gagarin**
Emerging from the free improv scene of the late 70s, Graham Dids Dowdall joined cult post-punk group Ludus in 1980 as their drummer before being recruited to join the legendary German artist Nico, with whom he spent seven years writing and performing. This tenure included the acclaimed John Cale produced studio album Camera Obscura, and in turn Cale's own Artificial Intelligence album, both released via Beggars Banquet.
During the 90s, Dids felt the need to create an outlet for his electronic creativity, As Gagarin, he has since issued several acclaimed albums and EPs and performed innumerable live shows utilising a combination of hardware - samplers, drum pads, synths - to interpret his compositions in an improvisatory context and his work has been played regularly on BBC Radio 3 and 6 Music. For the last twenty years Dids has also been an associate then full member of the acclaimed rock group Pere Ubu, writing and performing on their last four albums and touring extensively as electronicist and electronic drummer.
Most recently Dids was invited to soundtrack a film about Nico, Solitude, that has yielded a drastically different version of the 1981 single her Saeta which will feature on the latest Gagarin album Komerebi which started life as a commission for the Wonderdusk dance event on Box Hill. The album was fleshed out during 2023 whilst Dids recovered from chemotherapy treatment for advanced bladder cancer.
Optimistic and forward looking, Komorebi conveys no sense of doom; rather, local field recordings (a Gagarin trait) feature alongside aching melodies, moody atmospherics and glitchy beats. Veering from blissed out ambience to a noisier strangeness, its ten tracks are tied together via the loose Komorebi theme of lighter melodic sounds filtered through a shaded lens.

**Fane**
Fane is a Brighton-based Gnostic wanderer and explorer of devotional sounds creating folk music from the furthest, taking inspiration from natural landscapes and local places of interest to create drones, ambient sounds and rhythmic primitive guitar driven soundscapes. Think Albion primitive rather than American primitive.