When set against the maddening delirium of the flipside, Urals is a more composed and so too contemplative affair, its insistent tick and nuanced flashes of coruscating synthetic allowing for meditative thought as it swells only to swiftly recede like impermeably pixelated frothing sea foam. But as it drifts into and out of focus, if it may undulate into and out of the periphery of earshot, then never does it fade into the background as it maintains a remarkable concentration for a purely instrumental composition spanning a smidgen over nine minutes. Expansive and yet at once introspective, it’s another work of ecstatic refinement from a duo who only appear to be burgeoning as a positively synergic force.

Urals / I Can’t Give You Anything But Love is released on 12″ as a limited run of 300 July 29th via the duo’s very own Ecstatic imprint.

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An impromptu Pussy Riot interview is earlier delivered inside the Southbank Centre by two of the insurgent Russian punk-rock activists’ number (they don balaclavas and articulate their antagonistically revolutionary notions on activism, worldwide rebellion, and so on via voice anonymisers) while outside, “punks have taken over.” An air of unshakable ’80s therefore prevails with perma-leather all-pervasive, vertiginous creepers as standard and bluish black hair dye battling valiantly with those pesky thinning greys beneath. Retrograde as it may feel, there’s an unmistakable sense of revolution present about the South Bank this weekend – incongruous herb garden notwithstanding – which, if not entirely reflective of Britain’s capitalist kernel across the Thames, completely pervades the heterogeneous compilation of Ono’s curation.

Entering into the ‘Centre, a supposed punk sits pensively mulling over an overpriced chardonnay. Sharpening an already keen paradox, she’s dolled up in suggestive American Apparel although a considerably more polished portrayal of the punkish finished article, Viv Albertine – once of The Slits – brings us bang up to speed with a modernised take on mellowed rebellion. The fishnet tights continue to cling to her svelte frame, protruding from spangly frock although as was always her wont it’s the music and not the appearance of the self-professed “MILF” that strikes that most resonant of chords this evening. Her childlike delivery frequently punctuated by jejune onomatopoeia, she makes conflicting quips concerning love with the blithe insouciance only age and (mis)understanding can bring. Quite how convinced even she herself may be of her impassioned condemnations of all emotion (“it’s a temporary madness” she chirps of an effervescent If Love, having kicked off with the wickedly wry I Don’t Believe in Love) remains uncertain however, although it’s an unprecedentedly excellent and explicitly introduced Needles which most acutely cuts her clean open. Initially written with regard to The Heartbreakers’ penchant for opiate substance, the song has since adopted a newfound significance with her crackling croaking of “Needles, needles/ So many needles” now sung in reference to in vitro fertilisation. As to whether or not her daughter would approve of such a prelude I’m similarly suspicious, and in light of the area’s continuing gentrification her perfectly eloquent Muswell Hill beginnings sit a little contradictorily with the whole punk ethos with which the evening is so remarkably imbued. In that same vein, she’s probably too musically proficient to cogently purvey such a portrayal but what cannot be refuted is the calibre of her songwriting: privately sentimental and quintessentially British, whoever Albertine might be these days and whatever she may or may not stand for, she really ought to be savoured.

A lengthy interval then ensues. Sat within hurling distance of Gary Numan and throwing distance of Thurston Moore who’s sat next door gorging on Cibo Matto, socialites line the aisles. There’s patent evidence of enough monochromic dye to drown an already reputedly soggy Download Festival, whilst those a little higher up in the balconies flail their arms like World Cup final inflatables. Though irrespective of seating arrangements, the anticipation for Siouxsie’s first show in some five truly exasperating years is palpably universal. Thus with unplanned plastic surgery consultations abruptly interrupted, it’s down with the shutters and on with the show. Emerging one by one with a Machiavellian swagger, the setup may be minimal but the rapture Sioux & co. receive is fully maximised.

She looks less like the commensurately androgynous Robert Smith this evening, and more a Tim Burton-imagined cross between Kate Bush and Hilary Devey as she materialises in a puritanical flow of white PVC. Instantly, and indeed unanticipatedly celebratory, Siouxsie proves compelling from the word go. That word is “this”, and this is Happy House. Its foundations so apparently built to last, it might well have undergone some substantial renovation since first released in 1980 – its tender guitar lines tonight sound intense enough to affect insentient stadia, while its hulking bass approaches an animalistic brutality – but it has consequently been impeccably revitalised with the expiring of time.

But “nice” as it might allegedly be to reconnect with her rabidly adherent, all is not as it seems. “It’s not a hit show. Now, it’s something else” and as she slips into a perfectly dirgeful, if sporadically turgid Tenant which tonight incidentally sounds equivalent in timbre to much of Numan’s composing, notions as to what may be about to occur begin to mentally coagulate. “This is something we’ve never done before. I think by now you might have a clue” she mischievously continues and as they dust down a brash Trophy, it’s all but transparent that they’re to reinterpret Kaleidoscope so as to make it sound all shiny and new.

The issue with the album retrospective is that it inevitably lacks a sense of spontaneity and similarly, unless we’re talking a work of immutable consistency, the consequent shows can have a tendency to sag in all those truly unfortunate places. But as we gaze again into Kaleidoscope, it becomes ever more evident that Siouxsie and the Banshees’ third full-length can quite conceivably be deemed their finest.

The shutters then unfurl and come hurtling down, Siouxsie instilling a tingly sense of fear with her aptly lugubrious banshee moan. Indeed, so enthralling is this trashy thrashing of a warped Trophy that she’s awarded a blood-red bouquet midway through, which she gingerly places upon the drum riser. Indicative of there being a positively compassionate heart happily housed within the bewitching gothic exterior, it’s an intimate show and she is so too a connecting individual. She has that allure of the otherworldly to her and yet for all the hairspray, bondage straps and polyvinyl costuming, her accent has a decidedly earthy English quality to it. Like a still soiled potato, it’s a dead lumpy giveaway to her earthly belonging but it’s to London she’s most closely bound, and tonight we bond in marginal peripherality. “You’re a misfit of me; I’m a misfit of you” she sneers during Hybrid but she appears to be the perfect match for the hordes of impersonators and aficionados here congregated.

Thus although we might have been forgiven for initially fearing the show to have potentially fizzled out after such an explosive opening salvo, there’s no room for any negligence of the sort for each song pertains to such hypnotic rigmarole that we’re swallowed whole by her every one. We fall helplessly down the rabbets once so diligently carved into them like Lewis Carroll characters tumbling down a fathomless hole, only reawakening once we’ve hit the run-out groove. Each therefore feels an enticing nightmare we’ve not even the slightest desire to depart though that we’re forever fated to, and with each a concise pop song in length, we’re consistently left bloody well baying for more. Though not only is Siouxsie’s performance aurally consummate, but it also astounds visually: a profoundly involving masterclass in both pomp and show, where Albertine lacked a sense of spectacle Sioux has seemingly perfected the art of megabuck production on a relatively modest budget and as the Venetian blinds clatter and slat into and out of place with growing frequency, it all proves proportionally iconic to the naturally chameleonic performer herself. Equivalently, whereas Viv’s voice was at times questionable in its consistency, hers is considerably more faithful than most waxwork replicas, or indeed largely dubious surgical reconstructions.

And when held up to the revealing light of the contemporary, so too Kaleidoscope itself holds up pretty powerfully: Clockface, a militaristic call to arms devoid of the English lingo, serves as an Adam Antsy standout with those weapons of choice of course off-license liquor and eyeliner, while Red Light brings to the fore a phoney photographer as Sioux whisks her skirt off to swirl it overhead like a prepossessing macabre matador possessed. Its schizoid twitches and disquieting glitches glimpses into an avant-garde nonpareil, Numan looks on seemingly more than a little envious although almost as striking is the reality that Siouxsie remains a primarily cultish concern, even in spite of the innate crossover appeal located within this recording alone. A perfunctory look around the room reveals there to be very few newcomers, with the entirety of the stalls apparently previously acquainted and as they so incessantly natter amongst one another (“you can hide your genetics under drastic cosmetics” but not even Siouxsie can shut them up), even after such a trying pause of half a decade it seems less a case of all they’d waited for and more, and more one of simply being able to say they were there when she so magically reappeared.

Which is pretty lamentable really, not least as the latter half of Kaleidoscope is just as formidable as the first. The show therefore grows in intensity all the while, with its ringleader warming to it well although a reservation persists, and that is thus: for all the volatile, if eternally accessible qualities intrinsic to the album, it is by nature a little at odds with such a salubrious setting. We’re seated – or rather we should’ve been – in a relaxed, if culturally tensed centre of multidisciplinary excellence and in keeping with punked up hysteria, here we are all crammed down the front. It does little to cramp her style, but it does just seem a strange location in which to witness such a pertinent return. I’m already made fearful for the Southbank Centre and so too its on duty security guards, for Iggy’s due next week…

But to the venue’s credit, it does her sound and so too the overall spectacle a wondrous service and the propinquity of her dressing room benefits every last one of us as she only ephemerally disappears to “sponge” herself down. Reappearing to the slithering riffage of Israel, her resonant bellows ripple in the glaring whites of her eyes – the piercing jellies of the beholder of that forever elusive it. She’s got oodles of it, even if “Pompeii finally comes to London” only for Cities in Dust to sound rather a lot like a prototypal Coldplay. Her vocal a little awry, it becomes rather more illusive still but she gets away with it – the one dodgy delivery in twenty-one. She’d get away with anything and indeed everything on a night like this, inclusive of accented Radio Ga Ga referencing during Dear Prudence.

Nonetheless no matter how electrifying an extended coda comprising a couple from ’07 LP MantaRay may be, tonight is all about one and only one album. And as we’re constrained to revisit the prismatic Kaleidoscope, we leave with a better understanding not only of that particular record, but also of its author. Which, as a relative newcomer, may be no bad thing for the perpetuation of such pulsating, nostalgia-addled jamborees as this. For seen with fresh eyes, Siouxsie is as though a punk vulture: perennially hungry and painted with an oily smoothness, never is she the same twice. For not only one of the punk-rock genre’s irrepressibly glamorous greats, she tonight proved herself to have developed into a supreme performer on a keel even with most contemporary popstars. “What in the world is happening?/ What in the world could this be?/ I’m on the verge of an awakening/ A new kind of strength for me” she caws during Into a Swan and as she completes her transformation from cathartine to cygnine species, she becomes the archetypal black swan Andrés Heinz surely first had in mind.

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There’s not even a faint whiff of the outwardly conventional when it comes to the responses to the inquisitions here posed, although we’re skipping ahead of ourselves – Katie Harkin of Sky Larkin, and she who indeed articulated the above, is yet to arrive as I earlier encounter drummer Nestor Matthews in a nearby McDonald’s. I’m offered a chip or two, and awarded a Ghold tape before we relocate to a nearby knoll around the reverse of The Garage. In Matthews’ case, it’s a quite literal returning to the roots of the band as we perch upon unprecedentedly verdant blades last graced ahead of Wichita’s aptly designated 10th anniversary celebrations. It was then Wichiten; it’s tonight their final night supporting slacker doyen Marnie Stern, of whom they’re apparently supremely fond. Nestor twiddles daisies nonchalantly, and is initially accompanied by spangly, newfangled guitarist and self-professed “starfish boy” Nile Marr, who was incidentally incorporated into the band at this very venue that same day.

He’s in turn been newly reincorporated into the fold, having hacked off the tip of an index finger on the rotary blade of a rampant blender a month or so ago. “It’s grown back!” he quips with only a slight sense of surprise at what has been, to all intents and purposes, a visibly miraculous recovery. He later proves himself to be overtly capable of working his away around the affliction with a Reinhardt-esque dexterity, and so too the band did a supremely proficient job of returning to work with only the one guitarist when last seen at the Scala some weeks ago – not least once taken into account their newly assumed aural divergences in an altogether more intricate direction. “It did feel a bit weird” Matthews pacifically proffers, “although Nile was very stoic throughout, and never wanted to make it out to be a bigger deal than it really was. So cancelling those shows would’ve almost spun it out into even more of a drama! I mean we missed the hell out of him, but still…”

It’s a perceptible truth, but that’s not to say that it showed up in support of Dutch Uncles that day. Indeed, you could make an incisive case for Nile to have been the one to have felt that most acute of creative pains, having been a self-professed über fan of the band long before his integration a couple years back. “I’d seen these guys as a three-piece so many times that I knew it’d work without me, but it was weird going down to practice and having to leave them to get on with things. It was only three weeks, and in three weeks my finger grew back so I’m now basically just jazzed to be able to play again!”

It thus becomes strangely suitable that Sky Larkin have, as a band, undergone some fairly major cosmetic reconstruction since last seen and so too heard from, in that they’ve since assumed not only the similarly appositely named guitarist Marr, but so too their this afternoon absent bassist, Sam Pryor. All of which prompts the question: beyond the now prerequisite necessity for new press shots, how has this fleshing out of the band affected things beyond the purely aesthetic? “I guess there’s less pressure on myself and Katie these days” Nestor reckons, “in that there are now eight hands! Eight hands, and however many fingers so it’s meant that we’ve had to do less individually to complete each song. That in turn allows us to actually do more, and gives us a greater sense of freedom I feel. Inevitably the other two bring new ideas too, ’cause everybody hears things differently and of course having two guitars is great, as you’ve then got that parallel of ideas. And obviously you can create a lot more noise onstage, in the sense that you’re then capable of a far greater volume!”

The boys’ every response punctuated by the multilayered tweeting of sparrows and larks swooping overhead, it for more or less a first time this year verisimilitudinously feels like the onset of summer, and that unshakable sense of new beginning is thus all but all-pervasive. It’s a sensation which was transparently reflected in the bristling complexities intrinsic to Motto – the solitary new piece of recording we’ve been treated to thus far – and congratulations are unquestionably in order here not only in terms of the recording itself, but so too the hugely positive reaction which was so instantly accredited to it. “It happened naturally, rather than us wanting to necessarily wig out for the sake of it. But we were really blown away [by the reaction]! ‘Cause obviously we’d been gone for nearly two years, and so we sort of sheepishly put a track out but the way in which people warmed to it we found really endearing!”

And it was the evening of its understated unveiling that I first saw Sky Larkin live. As a three-piece of course, and they’ve since developed (or maybe even redeveloped) in that by tonight, they’ve evolved into a full-on four-piece once more. One might wonder as to how you make an already flawless live band better yet, and the answer is apparently to swill in a measuredly reckless Manc-via-Portland guitarist (à la Marr) and only hope to be able to harness the sheer uproar incurred. Yet with regard to his and Pryor’s comparatively recent incorporation, there’s not even a shadow of pretence nor preciousness over previous material receiving a through twice-over.

Nonetheless, it’s that which kickstarted their imminently beginning next campaign trail, Motto, which this evening brings a raucous halt to proceedings and continues to stick long after they’ve gone: rendered a multi-layered leviathan barely contained by the immoderately branded four walls of the venue, lacerating salvos of snare tear through its protuberant chorus and yet in spite of such pomp and show, it’s that striking dual guitar onslaught aforesaid which so sharply pricks the ear. The song is one of the standouts of this year thus far, and a firm 2013 highlight of a variety musical or indeed otherwise, as it above all picks out Harkin’s keen ear for a devastatingly sardonic rhyming couplet. Amongst it all she is, needless to say, considerably more present although in the same way that she hides inscrutably behind oversized Wayfarers once arrived this afternoon, she similarly conceals herself this evening as she cowers behind all manner of massive matter. From the foamy coating encasing her microphone to her immense Hagström guitar, little of her is really all that readily visible. She’s slight, and subdued but never without a clandestine self-confidence. And within the context of the live show, only she is able to articulate the band’s collected thoughts, feelings, recollections and so forth.

Although to again return to the moment, extraterrestrial vibrations then emanate quite eerily from Matthews’ pocket, prior to her imminent arrival then ensuing. Present and at last correct, we revert to the Motto that matters: there’s a truly refreshing timbre to it, which ipso facto insinuates sensations of rejuvenation. Harkin responds: “It was actually one of the last songs that we wrote, and the pushes and pulls within it are really evocative of the four of us as players. We really developed as we wrote that song, and really grew into each other. For want of a better word..!” But to redirect to the point in question, as they got back into the supposed swing o’ things, acquiring new members and assuming new material all the while, the fluttering of butterflies and with them apprehension may be anticipated alongside the pure agitation to get back into the lead-in groove. Not so though, with Sky Larkin: “Given that we’d had that time off, it felt really liberating to return to one another because there really was no real expectation. We had the time to craft something that we really wanted to put out at that particular time, so I don’t think there was really any agitation whatsoever” Nestor affirms. “And it’s funny, ’cause Sky Larkin was obviously our first band but then by taking a break and working with other bands [Harkin notoriously toured with Wild Beasts during said interim period] meant that when we came back together, we realised that we had what people in the ‘real world’ would call transferable skills! So the thing which really brings us all together is the fact that we’re all chronic collaborators” Harkin later corroborates. Mischievous smirks abound, as well they might as a somewhat chasmic gap appears to be opening up: the dearth of old material showcased on recent tours, with a hulking reliance thus thrust on more recent material, signals a divergence to insinuate a disconnect between Sky Larkin past, and Sky Larkin present.

It therefore makes for a seemingly concerted distancing from their previous histories – the band allowing for bygones to be bygones, as it were. Though do they perceive themselves to be a totally different beast these days? “Well, I guess now that we’ve got a new line up, it all kinda feels like a rebirth, really” Harkin testifies. “It’s more a feeling of us being the band that’s about to put out this new record, and we’ll then bring in some older stuff as and when it feels like it best fits. We’d never want to try to crowbar it all in, or anything! And obviously Nestor was still in high school when we first started the band; I was barely out of it. We’re… getting older…” Her words slow to a senile lull, before Nestor resuscitates that same thought process: “Essentially, it’s just fun to play old songs with new people – Summit, for instance – but even then, you’re sort of shoehorning those same people into a band that they don’t necessarily belong to…”

So it can be supposedly deduced that the Sky Larkin of The Golden Spike can be considered different to that of Kaleide, and then again in terms of the as yet untitled third around which Harkin confesses to there already being “a strong excitement. There was a kind of sense that I hadn’t necessarily felt before, in that when we initially came together as a band, we really had no idea as to what we were doing. Whereas now, we’ve really got more of a focus which made it all feel new and invigorating again.” And to run back to Motto as I’ve done so recurrently over the past month or so, it’s apparently apt that a track so immediate should’ve materialised in an unanticipated instant of an otherwise unremarkable afternoon in early May.

There was no foofaraw preceding its arrival, allowing instead for one of the year’s most consummately crafted compositions to woo us with its irrefutable artistic merit alone. “We never wanted to return to some ‘Sky Larkin, presented by Enron’ shtick” Harkin satirically claims. “And the way that I’ve loved albums, and the way I feel good albums fit together is for them to be really catchy when at their most immediate, and yet completely inhabitable at their more expansive.” As her words gather gusto, so too does the chirping of the larks overhead. The air palpably alive with positive enthusiasm, it’s impossible not to glean an impression of Sky Larkin growing itchy to get back to full-time business. “I’ve always wanted for people to be able to listen to our records and feel ensnared by them instantly, but then to also be able to live within them if they feel they need to. I want people to be able to listen to our records for a whole summer, or a whole winter; a whole breakup, or a whole romance – whatever it may be.” A band for all emotions and so too seasons therefore, they do without doubt intimately befit the inherently sweaty gigs summer brings with it.

Although a concern all year round is that of the actual age of immediacy we all now inhabit: like it or loathe it, we belong to an epoch in which everything is critiqued, and in most cases condemned in certain corners within moments of emerging. Indeed in this instance, Motto is something of an anomaly given the universal acclaim attributed to it, but have they been able to sense a change in musical culture since they were last active?

“I mean I would be sickened if it hadn’t changed!” Harkin pragmatically chirps. “I would be really upset if we’d come back and nothing had happened.” But with regard to the widespread consumption and general digestion of music, even at a first glance technology has since overwhelmed us: SoundCloud was then only a greyish shadow of the lurid orange force it is today, and we’ve reached a stage (of saturation, perhaps) whereby we’d doubtless struggle to trudge on without its now fundamental existence. “But none of that changes the way you should release and write music! I can’t say I’ve written any of the new stuff with a view to it being an instant hit on SoundCloud, and is SoundCloud really all that different to MySpace anyway? It’s accessible, which is great, but…”

But whatever its impact and our impressions thereof, it can’t help but have an effect on release scheduling and the formats they subsequently take. The significance of the physical form, for instance, continues to contort itself on a more or less annual basis: “I mean all that ties into whether you agree with music being a commodity or not” declares Harkin deadpan. “We all need to eat! And we all know that some people still really value those more physical formats, but the songs are in our heads, and then they’re on tape, and then they end up elsewhere. If you like the songs, you’ll do whatever you can to get ahold of them. If you like them enough, then you’ll still hopefully buy the record.” True enough, it’s a fact well reflected in that the two most prominent independent record stores in their native Leeds – Crash and Jumbo Records – remain northern realities, and you therefore can still pitch up and purchase recordings of Motto’s calibre. “But it’s not the people who will hopefully like our band that’ll be put off by these sorts of changes – we’re not exactly aiming for the 17,000 people who would buy the CD single from their local Woolworths on a Saturday morning. They were never gonna like us in the first place, so we don’t really need to worry about them!”

And into these notions of presentation and shape play some rather more moralistic concerns – the perception of music as a general commodity, etcetera. Harkin et al. would needless to say never consider it such, although we’re constantly shifting – quite worryingly – toward an eternal intangible, so to speak: we download weightily anticipated releases the moment they leak, in some instances extolling and in others executing via any available social media stream, while we increasingly choose to access the live experience via media visual mediated by those same computer screens through which we ostensibly see everything, although more feasibly see almost nothing of even the most minute importance. “But how intangible is music to begin with?” Harkin counters. “I mean you hear it floating down from an open window, or pumping out of a car. I think that people are very aware of music being treated as a product, and I think it can be really patronising to try and browbeat them because we all know that music costs money to make. We’re past that stage now, or at least you would hope we are! But it’s all to do with the transparency of the industry: in theory, the popstar was always intended to sell a million copies, and the hope was that some of that [financial clout] would trickle down to the independent subsidiaries. But the question now concerns whether that’s still happening, or whether it’s all coming from the ground up – from the Kickstarter’s, and whatever else.”

Hers is the kind of necessarily progressive mind the industry so drastically lacks although to go with a more elementary outlook on that same typically problematic topic, and from the external perspective of that onetime fan-cum-fundamental member, “You heard it here first, but MP3s suck! You never get to hold the artwork; you never see how things were originally intended; you miss the point.” And Nile himself has a point, even if it may well be one which is albeit mildly contradicted by his chief employer in kind: “When I hear a song in my head, it’s still just as intangible as an MP3 so I think that provokes a kind of weird romance when it comes to vinyl. I’ve never sat down and thought about the crafting of a product. If I were to make a chair, I would definitely be thinking about that aspect but no matter how much I enjoy artwork and physical releases, there’s an attractive translation of thought to digital data there.”

It’s yet another pertinent point, in that without the inherently intangible, there can be no release – physical, or in the case of this confab so too mental – whatsoever. “That’s why we’ve put out singles as watches and things, because the idea is far more important than the actual physical object. [Beeline was of course released as a transparent Swatch-like analogue watch back in 2009.] That’s the bottom line and no matter how cool that physical object might well be, the idea and the songs are essential. So there’s a paradoxical element to it all, because equally I mean I love vinyl, but I really hate object fetishism. It’s so grim!” A double-edged sword, or perhaps rather a record with two sides in that everybody these days wants vinyl, but at that same time wants to be seen listening to it in the same way that we so often strive to be seen at certain shows, as opposed to being there to hear, immerse ourselves and indeed fully experience them.

Their ultimate goal, though, is considerably more simplistic and to a degree one-dimensional: “Essentially, I don’t think you’ve made it ’til you’ve been played out of a phone on a bus” Katie admits. “That’s as big as you can be now. I mean I wish we’d been played out of a phone on a bus! If someone wants to annoy other people with your music on a bus, and they love you so much that they don’t care, then that’s the ultimate compliment. Totally, right? It’s like when you see teenagers on school buses who play stuff off their phones – they’re considered the coolest people in the world, and that’s the market that everybody wants to tap into! But then I’d like to think that we can have both – your 180g heavyweight vinyl, and your cellular phone replay…”

A far cry from the passing number 19, however, snarls Seattle stateside where they again relocated for the recording of their latest. It’s a place they affirm now has “a really nice familiarity to it” which is perhaps less than surprising, for not only has the city been astoundingly accommodative toward the band – both The Golden Spike and Kaleide were also recorded there – but so too can it be considered the birthplace of their unerringly alluring sound. “It’s a nice flight, but there’s now a kind of ritual element to us making a trip of it which means that we’re just so focussed” Harkin contemplates. “We were out there for three weeks, and we only went out on Election Night ’cause you know, we couldn’t not witness it! We were on the celebratory red, white and blue Jell-O shots that night, but with the record we wanted to trap the same sort of energy we project during our live shows. I didn’t want for it to sound like we were 9–5ing it and then just fitting it in around whatever, ’cause you can really hear if you’re having to squeeze it in around afterwork drinks here, and a birthday party there. The prerequisite trip to Tesco’s…”

The multinational may be mercifully yet to infiltrate the Washington seaport city, and personally speaking they to this day feel devoutly Loiner. It’s described as something which “never leaves you” but collectively, their identity is stranded somewhere a little more transatlantic betwixt the two, with their lightly grungy fare a considered amalgam as far as style, substance and sonic belonging may be concerned: “Pretty much the only stuff that I was really listening to in the buildup to this record was American post-hardcore born of peripheral cities – Austin; DC; Portland; Seattle. They’ve always been the sorts of bands I’ve been attracted to by default, and the same can be said of the British bands I’ve been drawn to. They were always post-punk, female-fronted outfits: Delta 5, and Life Without Buildings. So that’s Leeds and Glasgow, and I was only really able to diagnose that being the stuff I was listening to while we were writing once the record was all done.

“And I’ve waxed lyrical about this before, but I feel there’s a really potent exchange between the north of England and the Pacific Northwest, in that people are tough yet friendly; laid-back, but still have a strong work ethic about them. And we’re outdoorsy, without ever being really beachy! So yeah, it’s a kind of laid-back/ tough, friendly/ get-the-job-done-yness that assimilates the two.” And the sound of things to come is itself in no way dissimilar to that of previous endeavours, as there has been a remarkable consistency thus far not only in terms of standard, but so too stylistic mode. Though simultaneously, we’ve been able to gauge a very distinct sound of progress across the discography and were each album to be mapped out on graphic axes, the trajectory would doubtless be of a positively linear persuasion. “The word I always think of [when describing the evolution of our sound] is ‘saltier’” Harkin ponders, again realigning Sky Larkin a little more intimately with Seattle. “And it feels like it’s all fun now! It’s not a confidence, but more a sense of us having eased into things again. We’ve taken our time to work out our sound, and we’re all set!”

With a Big Mac cooling and potentially maturing, we part. Doubtless to reconvene soon enough, however, when I’ll gladly be “the guy in the white t-shirt. Again…”

Sky Larkin’s as yet untitled third full-length is anticipated this autumn, while they return to London on June 22nd to play The Old Blue Last.

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War has, however, been publicly waged by onetime wife Kim Gordon: the very nucleus of Sonic Youth apparently irreparably split, in a recent and rightly lionised interview with Elle, she told of Moore’s conversely inseparable intimacy with one of his literary collaborators and it was this which eventually forced the wheels from their once holy matrimony. That said stone in the road was, and seemingly still is, Eva Prinz by the looks of it as the pair are seen the following evening sipping on slushy cocktails and choking on cigarettes outside the Southbank Centre. (The couple now even share a surrogate child in the insentient form of the Ecstatic Peace Library, which was reputedly formed as far back as 2010.) But to refocus our attentions on the evening in question, in light of the above it goes without saying that if emerging from a shattered marriage of some twenty-seven years will always be an affair stickier than most iced margaritas, then to at more or less that very same moment fabric a band in the shadow of another as seminally esteemed as Sonic Youth doubtless only intensifies the cultural pressure currently placed upon Moore. He tonight washes up on British shores with his newly formed Chelsea Light Moving creation – who this evening most closely resemble a band, as luck would have it – for their début UK date, and he himself is fairly fortunate for the acolytes are out in force.

There are those that proverbially jizz over the mere sight of his iconically dilapidated Jazzmaster, whilst an hysterical admirer flails wild forearms right under his nose throughout. He’s lavished with odds and sods too, which he duly collects: surreptitious messages scrawled on tiny scraps of garbled paper; furtive stares of uninterrupted awe; a newly pressed 12″. And indeed hallmarks of his previous perhaps inevitably remain: his lofty mic stand that towers some six feet tall, and the largely unemployed lectern which sits beside him almost as though a crutch stand out as immediate exemplars although to an extent, it’s his legendarily cult status that carries him through anyhow.

A louche, nigh on lazy Frank O’Hara Hit certainly sounds as though it could do with propping up but as it sways whimsical as a Shoreditch drunk, it instantly vindicates the by now all-pervasive adoration with Moore’s sneery reciting of what seem diary entries resonating with an intriguing sense of deviant affinity. It’s sludgy, and so too slack although proves tightly inviting at that same time. And the same can be said of the show itself in general: they arrive by no way of an introduction, other than to inaudibly mumble between one another whilst the sound is commensurately loose for the duration. Nonetheless, it’s Moore’s inimitable ability to regiment such lackadaisical musics that can debatably be deemed his most readily identifiable calling card.

And although he can at times seem a somewhat peripheral figure, he’s this evening positioned out front, if never centre. It’s thus quite unmistakably the Thurston Moore show, and even though he may be the only one armed with a microphone his freshly assembled troop prove utterly indispensable, too: bassist Samara Lubelski, or she of “a powerful thirst” according to Thurston, staples down the lower end with aplomb while her rhythmic counterpart, John Moloney, adds a jazzy idiosyncrasy to her prominent strolls around the fretboard. Essentiality notwithstanding though, they look to him for both guidance and encouragement at most sonic turning points.

There are of course umpteen of these throughout the supremely erratic, and invitingly vortical Empires Of Time: heavily indebted to carefree Californian guitar lines one moment and Seattleite sludge the next, their every nifty shift in dynamic is executed with an ocean spray-fresh crystallinity but a little contradictorily, their decibel level ostensibly belongs to this weekend’s Download Festival. It’s devastatingly loud beside the speakers, as they emit a rattling pandemonium to make your ribs recoil and turn to puncture your lungs in revolt. And if more consistent and so too considered than Sleeping Where I Fall, it’s this which witnesses Moore’s reversion to brattish charmer. In doing so, he so convincingly belies his age – he’s now fifty-four, but he here seems fifties going on fifteen. He’s the look of a narked teen to him, albeit one with decades of unequaled technique under his belt: whether this should manifest itself in his smothering of the second fret with a left thumb or his unerringly regular windmill motioning, he remains a strikingly aspirational figure and, for all that, tape still decorates the neck of his resolute Fender.

Indeed as the show wears on, he grows into it as one might organically distressed denim and even becomes something of a poseur. From the strategic pouting to the concerted stares; the cocking of his head to slur sweet spite, to the petulant ejection of his tongue from his jaw his performance proves impeccable as their sound feels purposefully imperfect. And if Groovy may well be done with Linda, Groovy & Linda sees him spit the sort of vitriolic bile traditionally anticipated of, say, Angus Andrew as antagonistic glints flicker in his incisive eyes. It ends in a hailstorm of savage battery, its militaristic salvo of “Don’t shoot!” delivered as though a desperate plea to an armed Gordon.

A terse Lip meanwhile, “a protest song for Pussy Riot” two of whom are incidentally interviewed this very weekend at the Southbank Centre no less, feels positively phat and resolutely scatty as Chelsea Light Moving relocate to a scrappy punk aesthetic, and with a mellow middle eight squidged in for added texture, never more precisely does Moore resemble an intemperate giant.

However it’s arguably previously unheard material which proves most enlightening in our quest for a better understanding of the oft inscrutable colossus before us. “Don’t worry – it’s not a poetry reading” he reassures us ahead of a radical musical reimagining of “fucked up poet” John Donne’s The Ecstasy. “If any, so by love refined/ That he soul’s language understood/ And by good love were grown all mind/ Within convenient distance stood” he recites from his regularly neglected lectern (“we refuse to learn the lyrics to songs we didn’t write” he vows somewhat insurgently) and, stood in such close proximity, Moore here appears considerably more lover than Lothario. Similarly, although he’s been known to freely dabble in his poetic fancies to a sometimes egotistical degree, this setting to song feels infinitely more rewarding still.

A dizzying, slowly accelerative and appositely euphoric piece, it revs us up for the punitive feedbacking and deeply incongruous dance-punk grooves to another new one in Sunday Stage. This and that thus proffer an auspicious impression as to that which is yet to come in the wake of the eponymous début though engrossing as these may be, it’s only during a stilted Alighted – one which itself seems strangely tricky to really get into the swing of live – that you really notice a true stasis to have stagnated offstage. Akin to a volatile giant, an infidel, a Lothario and a lover all in the one evening therefore, by these mucky closing moments he so too comes to bear semblance to the mythic cockatrice for stare too long, and it’s as though we’ve been petrified by his sobering presence. And yet despite this apparent inaction, a strange sense of unification is allowed to culture.

“You’re never really alone” Moore intones, his vocal growing increasingly grizzly as it here turns barbed and hooky. He’s not wrong either, for we came to get enlightened and to bask in his indelible distinction, and it’s this which remains undiluted even when he’s witnessed salaciously grinding an unbranded amp in a linen shirt rendered translucent with sweat by the ferocious process. “We’re called Chelsea Light Moving, and we’re from London” he rallies and although not strictly untrue since his migration to Stoke Newington, there’s little doubt lingering to suggest we’d rebuff the opportunity to promptly embrace them as our own…

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Brian Alfred.

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Of course, this neuronal reaction was once more rapidly kindled by musics of a more organic persuasion, with laptops and other intricately soldered gadgetry widely deemed as sterile as they to this day remain insentient. But it’s only with the wearying of time that those Brits aforesaid have been able to bring a real warmth to electronic music, and this is arguably as yet Gold Panda’s greatest strength. His unrelentingly instrumental outpour instantly identifiable, I’d ostensibly reckon this to be due to the inimitably inviting and indeed discernibly human, if forever distant and exotic timbres intrinsic to so much of it. And with sophomore full-length Half Of Where You Live now wholly amongst us, none of this indisputable allure shows sign of turning either lukewarm or stale any time soon…

Derwin first drew back the curtain a touch with the schizoid-cum-strangely calming Brazil, which saw him once again voyage far afield for necessary inspiration. Nonetheless where he would previously have determinedly set coordinates for Honshu, he this time went the other way and to São Paulo. And for a time, I must admit, I felt somewhat discombobulated by such an apparent shift in focus for gone were the Asiatic twangs, instead usurped by an albeit appositely muggy humidity. The heat thus lingers, although it may in this instance be of a more meteorological, as opposed to emotive variety. Similarly, the scintillating synthetic glimmering in the backdrop has kept well but with this one arriving already a few in, I struggle to hear beyond it being an alien recording both within the context of the back catalogue, and indeed of the album itself.

Although Half Of Where You Live ultimately fails to inhabit as acute a niche as that carved out by its predecessor, as it conversely basks in a more cosmopolitan outlook on life and so too style. The hyphy synths and hip hop vocal samples to comprise Community combine to make for a commensurately far cry from past successes, and intimate toward Derwin evolving from early evening soundtracker, to early morning saviour. However, the overarching effect here conjured is unfortunately one more closely affiliated with the themes of devolution for whilst it might witness a spiced modification to his trademark matter, it’s all too analogous to much of the stuff to have seeped out of SoundCloud in his protracted absence.

Variation is similarly incurred by Derwin’s seemingly increasingly jet-set custom: the becoming ambiences and chandelier-like twinkles of An English House sit beside the external Brazil, which is in turn situated right next to a track entitled My Father in Hong Kong 1961. We’re here transported not only to a remote place, but so too a dislocated time for four minutes of resoundingly sublime beauty that could be quite seamlessly incorporated into Pantha du Prince & The Bell Laboratory’s sensational Elements Of Light LP. Yet whereas Hendrik Weber then worked alongside a vast host of Norwegian aural scientists, it’s worth remembering that Derwin has only a horde of vinyl at which to hack. That is to say that pieces painted from his palette of predominant black ought to sound significantly more one-dimensional than the multi-textured, and sonically polychromic collection we’re here presented with.

From the giddying, distorted arpeggi of S950 – its incidentally antiseptic name derived from a vintage AKAI sampler of that same catalogue number – to the bursting freshness of a consummately developed We Work Nights; the choppy, heady grooves of an unspecified Junk City II to the idiosyncratically muffled Flinton, Half Of Where You Live is a work which flitters between such vividly contrasting elements and consistencies that it suitably feels of no fixed abode. What this lattermost number exhibits, however, is again Derwin’s increased dexterity in the practising of atmospheres keenly attuned to nocturnal exercises: the wistful jitter of what sounds a zither returns, but it’s here intermingled with an itself mangled drum machine pattern which builds to a crescendo that if not quite devastating, is certainly one of his most rousing to date.

All of which drops us off in a particularly intriguing brace, beginning with the unassuming, if finely nuanced Enoshima. A flashback to an enduring fascination with Japan and the country’s admittedly mesmeric culture, it’s perhaps aptly that which best represents all that Dicker has bred thus far. But as this ends abruptly and so too all too soon, it segues into another entitled The Most Liveable City. Unlikely indebted to Gold Panda’s once natural habitat of Peckham, nor his parents’ now local Chelmsford – an of course grossly commercialised notch in the banker belt he deems to be teeming with “cunts”, and the sort of godforsaken shitehole which, if ever visited, will doubtless lead you to fully sympathise with his longing to leave the UK behind in favour of, say, Berlin – it’s apparently inspired by the German techno haven he (at least for the time being) knows as home. Bristling with a considerably more Hi-NRG bpm to much of his previous, it becomes immediately evident that the city has had a profound effect on him as both a person, and so too a producer.

Where man and his doting machines go from here is anyone’s guess, but if Half Of Where You Live should be another stamp in his proverbial passport then it’s one I can’t foresee him wanting to scrub out any time soon…

Released: June 10th, 2013 [NOTOWN Recordings / Ghostly International]

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Noble Savage’s SoundCloud.

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II is out now on Jagjaguwar, whilst Ruban et al. return to play Camden’s Electric Ballroom November 7th.

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Fort Romeau’s SoundCloud.

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Up first, or rather next, is the primarily instrumental sprawl of an appositely unwound Valium. First things first, it sounds a heck of a lot like those most sedate moments of Oshin although if you, like we, are yet to really get over that particular record, then its lilting shimmer will surely tide you over ’til Cole comes back around.

A moist and hypnagogic love song, it segues into the by contrast bittersweet Above Us, on which tumbling guitar lines intertwine with a vocal loveably dishevelled as a tousled mane ruffled by morning pillows dappled with discernibly West Coast lustre.

Onwards, and we’ve the oddly familiar In The Sun which, a faithful recreation of this putatively summery season formed from faded recollections of terms past, the tightly coiled sprightliness of Beach Fossils and the blithe abandon of, say, Barcelona, proves a belated highlight.

And last but by no means least, Michel figuratively hurtles off into the sunset to the lulling doze of a right ol’ doozy in Motion. Less a fullstop than a foreword on further brilliance doubtless yet to come, Dots & Dashes don’t do EPs. But if we did, then Dunes would doubtless feature right up there among the upper echelons of those experienced thus far this year.

Hibou’s SoundCloud.

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