Malarial Dream
Mexican Institute of Sound & Meridian Brothers, New Radio Alhara mix, Primavera Sound Festival, Alvarius B.,Ibrahim Alfa Jnr, Hannah Peel & BeiBei Wang, Damaged Bug, a new playlist and more..
Hey all,
So another Primavera Sound down and that means we are halfway through the year, which is insane. Of course with that and a few more trips here and there, I came back to a mountain of half-listened music. There’s quite a lot that I wanted to write about, but could only get through four because I don’t want to make this mail longer and overwhelm you sissies. Next one will come quicker than you can say Primavera!
Oh, and I wrote a review of Primavera Sound for Bant Mag. It’s in Turkish for the first time in a while and you know what: it felt good, maybe I should continue!
♩MEXICAN INSTITUTE OF SOUND & MERIDIAN BROS.: (Tropical, Cumbia, Experimental Electronics) — Ruido Tovar · 2026
If you’ve been following Undomondo for a minute, you know that I’m an unabashed fanboy of Eblis Álvarez & his Meridian Brothers since 2012 [Salsa Caliente]. On this album they are paying tribute to the late Rigo Tovar and the psychedelic Mexican cumbia era. Camilo Lara’s electronic tropicalism meets Álvarez’ eccentric humour to produce a genuinely fun Summer album. It surprisingly includes Beck as a guest on two tracks, which with the loosely-strung guitar riff makes it unmistakably Beck. I guess he was a fan this whole time too?
♩HANNAH PEEL & BEIBEI WANG: (Neoclassical, Electronic, World Percussion) — The Endless Dance · 2026
Northern Irish composer Hannah Peel and Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang met working on Manchester Collective’s NEON in 2023. The Endless Dance is a diverse collab between electronics and unconventional percussions; with glitches, looped vocals, samples, prepared piano drifting in and out. One of the most artistically curious albums I’ve listened to this year. Ranging from a proper Villalobos-style house to the word-salad electronic of the single “Awaken the Insects” Listen to this from head to toe, to get the breadth of it.
RIYL: Asa-Chang & Junray, DAT Politics, Jon Hassell
♩ALVARIUS B.: (Psychedelic Folk, Middle Eastern, Avant-Garde) — Malarial Dream · 2026
Alan Bishop: big brother of Sir Richard Bishop, 1/3 of Sun City Girls, founder of the mythical Sublime Frequencies label, and member of acts like Paris 1942 and Master Musicians of Bukkake.
After Hakim Bey, Muslimgauze, and Sun City Girls’ own Charles Gocher are all gone, he is indeed one of the last remaining avant-garde figures still getting nourished by, and adding to, the Middle Eastern tome of knowledge (without colonizing it).
Malarial Dream was recorded in the cradle at Cairo. Mostly instrumental and original compositions with two obscure covers, taking what could have been teethless ECM world-jazz into dark, smoky opium-den blues territory with the help of the usual suspects like Maurice Louca and Sam Shalabi (from The Dwarves of East Agouza) and others. I find it closer to the spirit of Sun City Girls than some of his past work as Alvarius B.
Big Takeover Interview
RIYL: Xylouris White, Secret Chiefs 3, Land of Kush, Bill Laswell’s Hashisheen album.
♩IBRAHIM ALFA JNR.: (Techno, Broken Beat, Ambient) — Infinite Black Inside · 2026
I don’t exactly know at which point Ibrahim Alfa became Ibrahim Alfa Jnr. Was it perhaps his return to Brighton and sobriety in 2022 after a pulmonary embolism and two heart attacks?
I remember the early leftfield techno experimenter from my own early days in techno right around the end of the 90s, when he was releasing on Force Inc. et al - then the bible for us nerds. He was already quite leftfield back then which I guess sadly not helped his career.
However he seems to be reborn these days: getting a cover feature in The Wire, getting praises from The Guardian as British Techno’s great survivor and finally a good comeback. With Infinite Black Inside he once again surveys techno’s own distorted history with fractured pulses, and cybernetic synths printed over vanishing snapshots of jazz, funk, trip-hop, broken beat, dub and ambient, made with real proficiency, sitting at the exact edge of what techno is allowed to do. And thank god for that, because the world doesn’t need any more melodic techno (or hard techno for that matter).
Check “Marine” below which conveniently played on my headphones while I was in the airport last week and would be equally well as a heist-cutscene cue in a future Mission: Impossible, or some 90s Amiga cyberpunk adventure game like Another World.
The Guardian: Ibrahim Alfa Jr, British Techno’s great survivor.
In Sheep’s Clothing: In Conversation with techno visionary Ibrahim Alfa.
RIYL: Cristian Vogel, Justin Berkovi, Neil Landstrumm, L.I.E.S. Records.
♩DAMAGED BUG: (Psych-Rock, Lo-Fi, Experimental) — ZUZAX · 2026
Damaged Bug comes from the John Dwyer universe (Thee Oh Sees, Osees), so at this point you’re either a fan of Dwyer or you’ve already written him off. It’s their first release since 2020’s Bug On Yonkers an album of covers of Minneapolis lo-fi eccentric rock guitarist Michael Yonkers who just passed away this year, aged 78.
ZUZAX is built from seven years of orphaned unfinished tunes recorded between 2018 and 2025. Different than the modern-day OSEES (who also released a new album, which I haven't gotten around to listening to yet) weirder, smaller, more patient, like the mid-2000s iteration of OCS maybe?
📖 I saw this interesting take and a subsequent conference on the rise of ambient music over at one of my favourite mags: The Attic. I myself have been listening to more and more ambient/drone in the last decade, but I had never thought that I might have been overwhelmed by my internet consumption.
But what drove this massive shift? Did the music itself change, or did our collective nervous system simply demand a shelter from an increasingly overwhelming world?
The conference positions ambient music not just as an aesthetic preference, but as a global phenomenon, a trauma response, a mechanism of attention regulation, and a tool for sonic care.
I made a new playlist inspired by some latinx techno we listened to at the Plenitude stage at Primavera. There’s a healthy dose of dub techno, indeed I put two tracks from K Wata’s new album - which is something I rarely do -. Some material from Verraco, Nick León, DJ Python as the Latin techno inspiration. Gigi Masin’s new album which surprisingly has Detroit techno adjacent stuff with beats, and some other late night bangers from this and last year. It’s an upbeat playlist, feel free to dance to it!
I have the new episode of my Radio Alhara show which I cheekily named Fifth World, after Hassell’s 4th World played out? It’s live tonight at 20:00 Barcelona time, or 21:00 Bethlehem time. You can stream it at Radio Alhara. For the first episode head over to Soundcloud, I will post this one tomorrow if you miss it.
📖 Over at RA I read a feature called No Music on a Dead Internet. There’s a lot going here about how digital media is getting lost via “atrophied archives and decaying UI”.
Which brought to mind The Vulture Mag article “The Feed is Fake”, this is the machinery behind the dead feed, the whole hubbub about fake fans and viral campaigns of acts like Geese and the PR agency Chaotic Good a few weeks ago. This is exactly because the platforms have so much power over what we listen to.
So is there a way to keep grassroots, indie and avantgarde music alive? or Is it too late to create a sustainable music industry? asks Resonate. Of course there are a lot of alternative takes because everybody is fed up with corpos and algos, but in this David vs Goliath situation, unfortunately the network effects are too powerful.
Here’s where the real numbers are: Indie faves Los Campesinos! has broken down their tour accounts: next time you think about the economics of tours and festivals: remember this.
One structural alternative to these as mentioned by the Mixcloud blog recently are community-owned venues. Another is this article about “how bands sleeping at venues to make tours work” (which admittedly sounds VERY SAD, but no it’s not like that.
Unfortunately the reality is that today “Musicians aren’t just expected to create content anymore, they’re expected to become content themselves.” and yes, it is a form of class war.
Anyway we might be swimming upstream, but at the same time the world is healing thanks to the young ‘uns.