Our moderators listened to every track we were sent this week and have picked their favourites for your listening pleasure this weekend:

Listening Post: Batch 558

sounds

Tricksters triumph over the serpant and eat good.

Swamp Rabbits

Mandi: Friulian farewell; attributed variously as a diminution of “m'arcomandi” (“I recommend”), or the Latin “manus dei” (“hand of God”), or the Italian mani di deo (roughly, “may you stay in the hands of God”).

Mandi is the debut album from UK-based Canadian saxophonist David Zucchi, which explores a collection of reel-to-reels recorded by his father’s family in 1959 on a Geloso G. 255 recording device. Elaborations on and reconstructions of the words, songs, and music of these tapes, along with the glitches inherent in the recording process and the deterioration of the reels form the basis of the musical material.

Full album available here - https://peopleplacesrecords.bandcamp.com/album/mandi

Salve Regina

The most radically altered song on the album. Fittingly in last place, it has it's own sound. The original song was guitar-based and had lyrics about stumbling around on Eglwysilan Common up in the valley above Treforest, chasing your mind's eye.

Crashing doom-laden piano chords, synth bass, end of the world trumpets, a guitar sound like Johnny Marr joined The Cure, a coda leaning into 90's rave. What's not to like?

Apprentice Green

Butterfly Brain

Deal out meds eyes burn red
Numbs the pain takes off the edge
Sign off more judgement’s flawed
An addiction in the law

Hooked up and scared this pain impairs
Screaming for help and they just sell
And they just sell

Try break free spell they weave
You’re in fear because they deceive 
This repeats you feel defeat
They prescribe feelings deplete

Hooked up and scared this pain impairs
Screaming for help and they just sell
And they just sell

In your skin the pain within
Time to heal is not a sin
To move on and too belong
Take control this pain be gone

Hooked up and scared this pain impairs
Screaming for help and they just sell
Hooked up and scared this pain impairs
Screaming for help and they just sell
And they just sell

Lyrics - Lynn Booth-Robinson and Thomas Booth-Robinson 
Music - Thomas Booth-Robinson

© all rights reserved 2024

Hooked

Hello everyone this is our third song.
Please, if you like it, listen to it on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1YYo9ID6jDB1uOxWd2ZMZf

Video for this song: https://youtu.be/vmIikhfD2-s

Leafage - Unicorn

....I hope he will forgive the presumption...
____________________________________________________________________

This little project only stirred into life when graced with the pulse of Debbie's wonderful accompaniment and the breath of David's visionary arrangement and production.  Thank you both, dear friends.

Find Debbie's piano music here: https://soundcloud.com/debra_buesking
and David's guitar music here: https://soundcloud.com/david-dunhamuser589535203
_____________________________________________________________________

.... Inspired By Mr. Pärt's Spiegels

Dear God, just look at the state of you - what the hell happened?
Did time do that all by itself?
Chiselled and scraped with gentle, temporal strength?
Yesterdays now patterned well with telling tales of wear and tear.
Always took such good care that you ticked every health kick box
But all the ticks collect their tocks, bundling up the time we thought was dangling spare.

And wrinkly skin comes out to play, crafting plots with crumpled neurons badly frayed, and
Liver spots about the edges worn of happy recollections,
Waltzed away, invisible to the swinging of that penduled clock.
Take your eyes off it for just a minute and you’ve lost a day, 
And then a decade’s worth of wry reflections,
Lovingly to fold them up and let them lie in memory’s pocket.

Those lines that contour of your brow, a biography of creases now
And all cut down so very deep.
Each epidermal void crevasse life’s stylus tracks a scratching past
Evinces of a record no mortal hard re-format could delete.
And of your eyes, sallow yellowed at the margins, framed by corvid feet
Rigid-set to well outlast whatever bargained span of life your good Lord deems replete.

As if your face lampoons of age itself, wrecked and bent
Of scars that trace minutiae, carved in master sculptors’ stone
And none too soon, for just that task and that alone, recording compressed of the past..
We both know well which ones are smiles and which the pain that heaven sent,
The former few, soft of the flesh, the many others sunk unto the very bone,
The harshest welt of any sole upon the universal cobbler’s last.

But does it help to so reflect, or but to hurry time’s neglect?
Of such consideration circles wrapped in worry tearing down
All edifice of self respect, the towering pit of pity comes once more to town,
Parades a circus fine of talents, self deprecating jestered clowns
And galloping horses all the while stampede about the rounded ropes
Vespered peace forever sought, just out of reach, concedes of futile, now confounded hopes.

So what of forward self projection, folding the creases back behind
And out of sight to speculation on future solaced peace of mind?
Perhaps again the crashing wall of fast reality, solid bricked
Determines upward focus but to fall, as if to gravity’s grounded truth 
Tricked of consequential solitude, rimed of age, aching of the aged sick
No respite there nor rectitude as once you found in torrid youth.

But perhaps I’m speaking out of turn and out of place,
For though your memories sear and burn as if to carbonise some worthwhile trace of validity
On that unholy visage lit by lives lived long before….
It matters not and changes nought, not a jot nor yet a thought
For you and I know better than to seek a settled score from comment fair
After all, you are I, staring back at me from the mirror mounted there.

.... Inspired By Mr. Pärt's Spiegels ... With Debra Buesking and David Dunham

Pretty Papers

The third record from Oxford's BarrelHaus.

Tracks 1, 3 & 5 written by Marc Challans
Tracks 2 & 4 written by Ian Mitchell

Guitars, bass, drums, percussion, vocals, backing vocals, and production by Marc Challans.

Guitars, bass, vocals, and backing vocals by Ian Mitchell.

Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Marc Challans. Recorded at Glass House Studios, Cumnor, and BH Studios in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

All tracks performed by BarrelHaus.

Special thanks to Grace and Alice.

All rights reserved.

Black Tar

12/17/2024

What I Want To Tell You

Emerald Spiral - Valentino

Lay Me Down

Deep Down (Radio Edit)

'Gathering Storm' is the first track to be released from Christof's forthcoming release 'Requiem For A Lost World' (String Quartet 1)

Released to mark Earth Day 2025 'Requiem For A Lost World' is Christof's first String Quartet. This non-traditional String Quartet features a live string quartet recording of the written piece that has been slowed down and routed through effects to give a haunting and mesmerising sound. 

The first three movements reflect on the catastrophic state of the climate and the environment (and the journey to get to this point) while the final movement asks whether there is still time to save our world. 

By using slowed down recordings (something which Christof has explored previously on releases 'Until I Take My Final Breath' and the score to the feature film 'Messalina's Offer') a unique sound quality is acheieved where you can hear the nuance of the performers playing, producing a very textured sound. 

Presave at: https://tinyurl.com/CDQuartet1
Find all links at: linktr.ee/christofrdavis

Gathering Storm

I thought a revised version of one of my songs would make an excellent Eurofest submission.  I played it for my son.  His response? "Terrible song, Dad." To which I replied:  "Have you ever listened to a Eurofest song?"

A Living Hell
Music and Lyrics by Mike Krath
artwork from hotpot.ai/art-generator
artificially enhanced using SUNO

Lyrics

I look forward to burning in hell,
With you by my side, I’m sure, as well,
We’ll scream and shout and let out a wail,
And no one around us will care
Not there, in hell.

And you’ll wail with me, I'll wail with you,
And you’ll scream with me, and I'll scream with you,

I look forward to our time in hell,
No kindness, no goodness, no laughs to share,
Just moans and groans and thoughts of despair,
And no love between us as well,
Not there, in hell.

I look forward to our tears in hell,
That wash away hopes of life elsewhere
And flood us with streams of past despair
And no break from this mem’ry cell,
Not there, in hell.

And you’ll wail with me, I'll wail with you,
And you’ll scream with me, and I'll scream with you,

And our days on earth will never grow pale,
those fights we had will always assail,
And this we’ll remember as our final knell:
Hey look! We did it! No chance to dispel.
We’ve turned our lives into a living hell

And you’ll wail with me, I’ll wail with you,
And you’ll scream with me, and i’ll scream with you,
And our days on earth will never grow pale,
We’ve turned those days into a living hell.

A Living Hell

Two Raven

Fresh On The Net is a music blog hosted by Tom Robinson and Team Freshnet, offering independent artists an open door and a level playing field for their music. Our inbox is open at http://freshonthenet.co.uk every Monday to Thursday morning - if you share a track with us there it will be heard by every member of our moderation team.

IMPORTANT: 
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Indie, Acoustic & Psychedelic music from The Western Isles of Scotland.

Hidden away in the windswept landscapes of the Outer Hebrides, flakebelly shapes songs that wander between psychedelic indie rock, folk-jazz, and the quiet strangeness of the everyday. Acoustic warmth, blues-stained guitars, jazz-streaked piano, and dreamlike textures fold into each other, creating music that drifts between clarity and haze.

His track In Parks Of Tall Trees found its way to Tom Robinson’s BBC 6 Music Introducing Mixtape, a small ripple in what has become a steady tide of restless ideas. From first picking up a guitar in the late 90s and stumbling through those formative songs in the early 2000s - many of which later resurfaced on Apprentice Green - flakebelly’s path has been one of constant diversion and reinvention. The early singles collections - The Orkney Tapes (2022) and The Christmas Morning Outcome (2023) - were restless, experimental documents of sound-searching, sketchbooks where ideas were tested, broken apart, and pieced together again in the pursuit of a voice. Those experiments fed directly into the indie-folk EP Behaviours (2022), the rough-edged Lo Fidelity (2024), and the kaleidoscopic album Apprentice Green (2024), described by SNACK Magazine as “like being Alice in Wonderland, transported through a maze of moments in flakebelly’s imagination.”

Now comes The Boy In The Diving Bell - out now - a 17-track reckoning with past ghosts, unfinished business, and the fragments of memory that refuse to settle. It is a psych alt-folk soup of acoustic laments, fractured tape loops, and warped dreamscapes. Much of the sound was dragged through the teeth of a battered 1960s reel-to-reel, used not as a recorder but as an instrument - reels halted, jolted, rewound, coaxed into blurples, screeches, and ghostly echoes. Mistakes are left in, first takes are preferred, imperfections celebrated. The result is an antidote to the sterilised sheen of digital perfection and the creeping spread of AI-reproduced music: deliberately irregular, defiantly human.

The Boy In The Diving Bell is only the beginning - the first of three interconnected albums, the demos for which are already written. Yet even as that arc unfolds, flakebelly has begun detouring into a very different landscape: a new project built from vinyl samples, drum loops, and dirty guitars driven through vintage outboard gear, cassette recorders, and battered mixers. It is dark, abrasive, and deliberately uncomfortable - sound pushed to the point of collapse, distorted tape glued together with transformer saturation, live mixes through old delay units, dials twisted until frequencies scream. If The Diving Bell trilogy is haunted by memory, this parallel work dives into raw sound destruction and the strange beauty of degradation.

True to his solitary instincts, flakebelly writes, records, and produces everything from his home studio. The result is music that feels lived-in and handmade - always shifting, never fixed, and forever searching for new shapes in the sound.

All socials: @flakebelly //

"Extensive and wildly eclectic sonic adventures" - Tom Robinson, BBC 6 Music

"flakebelly is ultimately the sort of the artist we need more of – a genuine weirdo-auteur carving his own path purely for the love of the game." - Lewis Wade, Is This Music?

"Refreshingly individual and very likeable" - Neil March, Trust The Doc Media

Butterfly Brain

flakebelly

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