I’m a psych pop/garage rock solo artist from Coventry UK. I used to be a forest ranger so I’ve swapped loud fuzzy chainsaws for loud fuzzy guitars. I’ve played in several local Coventry bands and after graduating from Lincoln Uni I spent a short stint in my mate Joel’s critically acclaimed Manchester folk-pop band Butcher the Bar. In late 2018 I retired from forestry to focus full time on my own music.

K: a conspiracy of gravediggers, spies, swim instructors and international pop stars. There are hangmen and there are saints. K as a label has released cassettes, phonograph records and compact discs documenting the audio works of over 150 artists. The main focus K of has been artists working in and around Olympia, Washington, where K is based, but has included comrades from across the U.S.A. and as far away as Japan, Scotland, Australia, Canada, Germany and England. Yes, k explodes the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre world-wide.

Colleagues in the International Pop Underground collide at the K vanishing point. The sounds cross back and forth through a number of genres, some known and some less so: punk, hip hop, atom-powered folk-pop, haunted garage, restless singer-songwriter, epic soul shock, noise expirements, blurred-eye visionary psychedelia, roadhouse mod and the silent film soundtracks composed by Timothy Brock, as performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra.

In describing K to a friend, you might say: Hit the streets to the motorbike beat of the cranked and crush crashpop. Raise the standard and hail: a revolution come and gone behind your eyes. Blood and sand and sidewalk. Radio blast the punk pop implosion that is the new breed: a bee in your bonnet, love in a goldfish bowl, zombie rockin behind the iron curtain. Hey, love rocker, pull on your slacks and Mexican army boots, get ready for some sonic pogo action. Jazz the glass, here they come, screaming and clawing, scooters and dune buggies roaring. Bless. Can you dig it? K Collaborators. King loser and teenage underground. Screech and saw. Buzz. Cut. Spin. Slice. Crush. Squirt. Sweaty basement rock and rule. A crown of barbed wire for your hooded throne. Lose it on the ball and chain.

Hey, gravedigger: ignite. 

Cate Le Bon is an artist hailing from Carmarthenshire, rural West Wales. Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or critically acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum as well as 2016s Crab Day and the Mercury Award nominated Reward, Cate Le Bon’s solo work — and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on the recent John Grant album, Boy From Michigan, or  Deerhunter's Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?  (4AD, January 2019) — has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster.

New album Pompeii bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Sonically minimal in parts, its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales.

The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay.

Olle is following