When there is no Sun
Prolapse, Hekla, Marshall Allen's New Dawn, When there is no Sun, The origin of Trip-Hop, Angine de Poitrine, Turkish Diggin Report 2025, Ghost World Transmission IV, RIP Ebo Taylor
Hola!
Welcome to 2026’s first Mondo Times, there are some stuff I missed from 2025’s best of list, like Prolapse, and Icelandic theremin player Hekla, many things happening in the Sun Ra universe and a lot more to watch and read for everyone. Take your time to digest it, and leave a comment if you like any please. Onwards!
♩PROLAPSE: (Noise Rock / Hardcore) Leicester’s Prolapse return after a 26-year studio hiatus with “I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face”, sounding exactly like themselves, messy and confrontational. Double vocals from Mick Derrick and Linda Steelyard over triple-guitar assault and motorik rhythms are just the right dose of anger we need these days.
♩HEKLA: (Ambient, Instrumental) Hekla Magnúsdóttir recorded her third album Turnar in a medieval French castle tower during an isolation period aimed at crafting what she calls “past-future music” - a suitably gothic premise for her heaviest and most gloomy album. The Reykjavik theremin specialist augments her virtuosic solo work with cello, voice, and the church organ of Kristján Hrannar. Might be the best use of theremin that I’ve ever heard.
“Hekla’s greatest triumph is her continued redefinition of the theremin. Long relegated to kitschy sci-fi films and Halloween specials, this versatile instrument has never quite reached its potential. By repositioning the theremin as the lead instrument within the orchestra, Hekla challenges prior assumptions and paves a path for its future use.” Review on A Closer Listen
♩MARSHALL ALLEN: (Jazz) Mr. Allen walked into a Philadelphia studio two days after his 100th birthday to record his debut solo album after nearly seven decades with the Sun Ra Arkestra as a sideman and then Arkestra leader since 1995. Allen finally decides to put his own name on a record and calls it “New Dawn”. What a statement!
The seven-track set also netted him two Guinness World Records - oldest debut album release and oldest album of new material, both previously held by Tony Bennett. Not that he cares!
Another Thought writes:
“The optimism of youth is often dismissed as naïve or misplaced. Cynicism, meanwhile, gets sold as realism. A better tomorrow is framed as unrealistic; you’re told to settle for something more attainable, like a “miserable tomorrow” instead of an “extinct tomorrow.” Add to that all the knowledge adulthood brings—the slow erosion of innocence—and hope can start to feel irresponsible. To have lived through all of that, to know all of that, and still choose hope anyway: that’s what feels genuinely inspiring.
Also, it’s very reassuring to see him still smoking a blunt / ciggy at his age ^^
👀 At the same time, two separate things related to Mr. Allen’s former boss, Sun Ra happened cosmically. PBS premiered Sun Ra: Do the Impossible on February 20th as part of the American Masters series, capturing his role as the godfather of Afrofuturism.
Meanwhile, a project I’m personally involved (albeit slightly), When There Is No Sun was finally announced by Omni Sound. Curated by my dear friend Ayşe Turan & Ricardo Villalobos and produced by the one and only Ahmet Uluğ, it features a diverse cadre of the electronic music elite like Underground Resistance, Calibre, Chez Damier, A Guy Called Gerald, SHE Spells Doom, and Barış K reworking material from the Arkestra’s Living Sky and Sun Ra‘s spoken-word album My Words Are Music.
👀 Did you get this audiovisual delicacy via your YT algo as well? KEXP just published Quebec duo Angine de Poitrine‘s full performance from Trans Musicales 2025. Reminded me of the husband & wife duo Vialka, a band I cherish dearly, sadly lost to the interwebs.
♩The hippest Turkish Diggin’ crew is here once again to go to the edge of the universe to bring you these Anatolian anomalies. Our friends at Zel Zele Records streamed it on their NTS show. Tracklist here on the NTS Page. You can stream it here on Soundcloud. Don’t miss!
👀 Remember the previous issue had another good mini documentary on Dub Techno by Voltage Labs, good going Voltage Labs!
👀 Another mini docu to watch if you have time is “The Drum Machine that Shaped Krautrock”, this was shared on bsky by Mixmaster Morris! Yeah, he’s active, go follow him.
♩After some years, I revived my ambient mix series, Ghost World, for a fourth edition. I don’t know if YouTube is the best place for this - I had generated some alien landscapes and wanted to make an accompanying video from them, but it took too much mental energy and I finally just put it online as is.
featuring sounds from: Billow Observatory, New Mexican Stargazers, Jean-Emmanuel Rosnet, Lena Platanos, Pan American, Night Foundation, Ezmeralda, Nour Sokhon, Doug Wieselman and others.
BTW, Is there a cheaper platform than Mixcloud / SoundCloud? I have a lot of history but I frankly don’t want to pay a monthly fee, because I’m not so active anymore, yet I want to keep the archives online. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.”
📖 Why No One Knows What’s Happening Tonight
This is a love letter to concert listings a la Timeout, which is very timely and needed these days, in a barrage of slop events, and lesser known artists struggling.
When listings began to disappear, many imagined that the internet would simply fill the void—that artists and their fans (as well as nonprofit institutions and their audiences) would find new ways to connect. But a world in which clicks are dollars has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism in which what is already popular must be written about—which increases its popularity, which means it must be written about, which increases its popularity—and a social-media ecosystem in which artists, no longer able to rely on legacy media for visibility, must create content to please an algorithm instead of their fans or themselves.
📖 How algorithms and sameness fatigue are hollowing out electronic music. (Midnight Rebels)
Streaming platforms and social media incentivize artists to create music that avoids skips and goes viral, leading to homogenized “Spotify-core” tracks and prioritizing spectacle over substance. The result is a “genre-defying blend of mellow, mid-tempo, lo-fi” sludge designed to blend seamlessly into the background of your life. It is “wallpaper music” for the digital age, where a jarring key change or a dissonant texture is an economic liability.
Well according to the graph below, this applies to all music, but I guess with a lot of normies now listening to melodic techno / Anyma & Afterlife type EDM with visuals, electronic music is indeed the most affected.
It’s true that even without AI slop, business techno of today is indeed slop music, or electronic chowder, created by celebrity DJs, mega talent agencies, squeezing midrange DJs, producers and venues and turning nightlife into a Live Nation festival.
Platforms like Splice have democratized access to professional sounds, but at the cost of creative individualism. When thousands of producers drag-and-drop the same “KSHMR Vol. 3” snare or “Oliver” bass loop, the sonic palette of the entire industry begins to gray.
RIP
🪦 Sly Dunbar, a lifetime devotee to the drums and one half of the legendary producer duo Sly & Robbie, died in January at 73 years old. Did you know he took his nickname from his obsession with funk and soul? (after Sly Stone of Sly & the Family Stone who died last year as well). He worked with reggae royalty like Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, and Black Uhuru but with his partner Robbie (who has also passed away) he has crossed over and worked with megastars like Grace Jones, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Fugees, and No Doubt. He racked up 13 Grammy nominations, winning twice. Best obit with a lot of songs name-dropped at Wrongtom’s obituary for The Quietus. Also check The Guardian. The tune comes from an album that fellow music nerd Cem Kayıran of Bant Mag mentioned.
🪦 Ebo Taylor, the Ghanaian guitarist and composer also died last week just one month after his 90th birthday. He spent over six decades shaping Highlife and Afrobeat. You’d know about his famous hits like Heaven and Life and Death but did you know Taylor kept recording until 2025 when his final album dropped as part of the impeccable Jazz Is Dead series.
“Reflecting on his own influences, he told the BBC in 2014 that “with the advent of James Brown and funk music there was the opportunity to develop highlife music. Fela did a lot of work introducing the funk into the Yoruba music while comparatively I did almost the same thing in Ghana.” BBC
Thanks for reading! See you on a different addition to the content pile soon.