edited from the press release with extra words by Ben Hogwood
MF Robots build upon the success of first single Hello Sunshine on their own imprint Good People Records (a joint venture with Republic Of Music) with Children of the World, the Afro-soul-funk fuelled second single taken from the forthcoming album III (three), out Feb 2026.
It is a ray of late summer sunshine for sure, with a singalong chorus that proves difficult to shift after a few listens, and a breezy, funky vibe with Afro grooves added.
Jan Kincaid, co-founder of MF Robots, comments : Children of the World is a freewheeling fun ride, through a hazy summer block party, dancing, hanging out, a neighbourhood homage to simpler times, to innocence but also with a “Go get it, the world is YOURS” message to ourselves to not lose that youthful ,driving energy for life ,the sense that anything is possible ,that we have when we are younger and less burnt by a tricky world….”We wanted this to have a kind of feeling like a freewheeling bike ride at sunset, not really going anywhere In particular but with the sun on your skin ,losing yourself to a perfect moment”… Sunshine is indeed something you could think of a lot with this second single and the album to follow. MF Robots hope you enjoy this release as much as they did making it!
This release follow their 2021 Break the Wall record (reviewed on Arcana here) which was released to rave reviews. Collaborating for the first time while recording and performing with one of the UK’s most successful Acid Jazz bands, The Brand New Heavies in 2013, founder / drummer Jan Kincaid and vocalist Dawn Joseph discovered immediate musical chemistry and began writing songs together right away. They soon left the band to concentrate on their own work, starting MF Robots (Music For Robots) and releasing an eponymous debut in 2018. The album was so well received that the duo soon morphed into a band as they found themselves in-demand at venues and festivals all over Europe including being personally invite on tour across Europe by Lenny Kravitz.
The forthcoming long player III represents a new sonic and song benchmark for Jan and Dawn, reflecting the MF Robots project coalescing and maturing while fine-tuning their material, both on the road and in the studio.
You can explore purchase options for Children of the World by clicking here
Published post no.2,672 – Monday 29 September 2025
TERRA MEMORIA Kaija Saariaho String Quartet Shostakovich String Quartet No 3 in F, Op. 73 plus a selection from 24 Preludes Op 34 Rubicon Classics RCD1218 Release date: 31 October 2025
“I feel when writing for a string quartet that I’m entering into the intimate core of musical communication.” Kaija Saariaho
Following two highly acclaimed composer-led volumes of Tchaikovsky’s string quartets last year, Dudok Quartet Amsterdam returns to another of its signature concept albums with a mix of thought-provoking repertoire. Terra Memoria is the Quartet’s sixth album on the Rubicon Classics label and features Shostakovich’s third string quartet, from 1946, paired with Kaija Saariaho’s second String Quartet Terra Memoria from 2007. It is something of a partner to their 2022 album, Reflections, which paired Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 5 Op 92 with Grażyna Bacewicz’s String Quartet No 4and also featured other of the Quartet’s transcriptions of Shostakovich’s Preludes Op 34.
As a result of the Dudok Quartet’s inimitable and deeply inquisitive approach to understanding and expressing what they discover in these scores, they find that although Shostakovich and Saariaho are very different in their compositional approach, the outcome is similar; both possess unmistakeable musical signatures which empower their communication of imagination and emotion to performers and listeners alike.
Initially, Shostakovich gave titles to the five movements of his quartet No. 3, referencing a range of feelings and responses to the threat and ultimately the destruction and desolation of war. If these titles intended any kind of narrative or explanation, the composer gave no reason for soon withdrawing them and, as Dudok violinist Judith van Driel explains, the force of the music cancels out any need for words; “Playing or listening to the third movement [for example] gives an infinitely more accurate meaning, by making adrenaline rush through your body causing your ears to ring from an unrelenting pounding. Its meaning is manifest in your sense of terror, fear and anger, whether or not you have ever experienced war up close.”
Throughout the quartet Shostakovich uses various compositional techniques to provoke immediate and reactive personal responses that are sometimes ambiguous and sometimes at odds – yet co-existing with each other. From the pastoral opening to the meandering melody searching for meaning in the fifth movement, it is the music that elicits inexplicable – in the most literal sense – and instinctive feelings.
Saariaho expressed a love for the richness and sensitivity of the string quartet sound, although she only composed two works in the genre. The second, Terra Memoria, captivated the Dudoks from the outset when they worked on it with her in 2011 (they were enchanted further by her music when they collaborated in the world premiere of her penultimate opera, Only the Sound Remains, in 2016). Saariaho references the work as being ‘for those departed’, those whose lives are over, with nothing to be added, while those left behind are haunted by dreams and memories and find that the shape of remembrance can change as time passes.
But this explanation is only a starting point for the listener or player to make personal associations through experience of the composer’s sound world. Familiarising itself with her unique musical vocabulary was an absorbing and rewarding journey for the Dudok Quartet as they encountered a variety of unusual playing techniques and inventive musical mutations that include experimental threads of electronic music, minimalist-type repetition and operatic styles. For them, Saariaho’s music evokes a kind of intermediate zone between the known and the unknown, the living and the dead.
The Dudok Quartet is also known for its own transcriptions of works not originally composed for string quartet and rounds off the album with a selection from Shostakovich’s PreludesOp. 34 written for piano, all of them tiny gems which elicit personal stories and associations in the listener and player.
“We aim to show that music affects people; that music can lead us to profundity and connection especially when it provokes friction. The true meaning of music reveals itself in a shared experience in which you, as a listener, play a vital role.” Dudok Quartet Amsterdam
The Dudok regularly performs in the UK and will feature Saariaho’s Terra Memoria in recital with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden in Portsmouth, Sheffield, Macclesfield and Hastings in November 2025, and Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 3 on tour in early 2026 – to the US in January and Scotland in February. Click here for further information.
Terra Memoria Dudok Quartet Amsterdam Rubicon Classics RCD1218 Release date: 31 October 2025
Dmitri Shostakovich – String Quartet No. 3 in F, Op. 73 (1946) I. Allegretto II. Moderato con moto III. Allegro non troppo IV. Adagio (attacca) V. Moderato
Kaija Saariaho – Terra Memoria (2007) for String Quartet Shostakovich – 24 Preludes, Op. 34 No. 1 in C major – Moderato No. 2 in A minor – Allegretto No. 4 in E minor – Moderato No. 6 in B minor – Allegretto No. 12 in G sharp minor – Allegro non troppo No. 22 in G minor – Adagio
Collabs 3000 – Chris Liebing & Speedy J (aka Jochem Paap) -announce the 20th Anniversary Edition of their smouldering collision of taught techno rhythms and sonic abstraction, Metalism,and the release of tracks from their first collaboration in nearly two decades. Metalism will be available in full on vinyl for the first time, and on CD and digitally – both with the original artwork by The Designers Republic – on 14 November. That will be preceded by the ‘2025 EP’, available now on vinyl (limited edition of 500), with the digital following on 7 November, via NovaMute.
The 2025 EP kicks off with ‘Zwart’, a track of driving kaleidoscopic techno burrowing deep into your brain and limbs, and ‘Spiegeling’, where propulsive techno rhythms, and minimal ricocheting melodies coalesce for this essential dancefloor track. Both cuts offer a tantalising glimpse of what these two these two Techno titans have been creating nearly 25 years after they originally joined forces for Collabs 3000. Artwork for the EP is a playful nod to ‘Comedian’, Maurizio Cattelan’s controversial conceptual artwork and references the duo’s “bass banana”, which is passed between them to signal whose turn it is to lead the beats.
Techno innovators, Chris Liebing & Speedy J, began their Collabs 3000 project in 2001, at Frankfurt’s notorious U60311 club. Liebing and Paap, already key players in the European Techno scene, performed an off-the-cuff set that saw Liebing mixing out of a Speedy J live set and Speedy J bouncing off Liebing’s selections behind the deck, creating an utterly unique set.
Soon after that set the pair recorded at Paap’s studio in Rotterdam for a release for Speedy J’s celebrated collaborative series on NovaMute, Collabs. The resulting 12” helped to define the sound of early ‘00s Techno and their chemistry in the studio meant that they soon reconvened to record an album, Metalism.
The 20th Anniversary edition of Metalism has been remastered by Chris Liebing, and comes housed in the original art by The Designers Republic. The eleven relentless, layered tracks that move from brutal tough drums and dancefloor bound techno to more experimental meanderings, combine the pair’s mastery of subversive electronics and peak time techno and have lost none of their sheer power in the intervening years.
The 20th Anniversary Edition of Metalism is available on double vinyl, CD and digitally on 14 November via NovaMute. Pre-order HERE 2025 EP is out now on limited vinyl, and digitally on 7 November via NovaMute. Pre-save HERE
Published post no.2,661 – Thursday 18 September 2025
The Utopia Strong (Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi and Mike York) have shared a new track, the latest to be taken from their forthcoming album, Doperider out via Rocket Recordings on 10 October 2025.
You can listen to their new release, The Atavist, below. It is a wonderfully atmospheric piece, a cloud of synthesized sound with a passing similarity (in a good way!) to Mark Snow’s music for The X-Files:
The life of a psychonaut can take one to many plateaus of reality. Opinions vary as regards which of these are either desirable or optimal. All things considered though, it’s fair to say that once the average cerebral wanderer finds themselves a stoned skeleton on a motorbike, it’s a sign that they’re going places.
Such were the movements of The Utopia Strong, in making their third and arguably trippiest full-length album for Rocket Recordings. As the band explain: “When recording we tend to have books, bits of art and interesting things lying around the place. (Kavus) had recently bought the Paul Kirchner compendium, Awaiting The Collapse. Paul’s character Dope Rider (the skeleton in question) drives around the desert, getting into all manner of high jinx and spouting cosmic philosophy, highlighting the absurdities of life, death and the American mythos. “When we had created that particular track, one of our most beautiful and outré, it seemed to name itself. Certainly, we were looking at the comic strips while listening to it and something about its wide-screen vibes and the beautiful desert seemed to marry together.”
Serendipity has always played a strong role in The Utopia Strong, with the improvisatory approach of Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi and Mike York – as well as the innate chemistry between the trio – allowing them to take extensions through dimensions that frequently end up as much of a surprise to the band as the listener.
The band has summarily found ways to evolve its approach to facilitate the most adventurous exploratory missions possible. In this realm, the band’s formidable history – Steve as a snooker champion and bona fide household name, Kavus as a psychedelic and progressive polymath in the like of Gong, Cardiacs et al, and Mike in his work with Coil, Current 93 and as one of the UK’s foremost bagpipe makers – is transcended and usurped by their combined psychic chemistry.
Yet more than anything else this remains an evolutionary process. “All the pieces on Doperider began as purely electronic pieces, with Mike and Steve on modular synths and Kavus on an analogue synth” the band relate. “We were deliberately trying to not repeat ourselves and, for this reason, made a point of changing the model a little. Not that we’ve ever been necessarily conventional but I think this album goes a little deeper than the previous two studio albums.”
Doperider does indeed take the band down a variety of auditory pathways previously unexplored, and further into the realms of more surrealistic visions akin to the systems-built bliss of Caterina Barbieri, the unforgiving noisescapes of Hiro Kone or the alien soundtracks of latter-day Laurie Spiegel. “Certainly, Steve’s listening habits have changed somewhat since the first album, he has gone deeper into abstract electronica and musique concrete as well as becoming increasingly adept with his modular set up. This seems to have formed a backbone to how the music developed” reflects Kavus.
Hence the coruscating intensity of the title track and the elegiac rapture of ‘Unity Of Light’ showcase a still more moving and melancholic approach to their art, alongside the blissful ‘Harpies’, which features the vocals of Katharine Blake (Miranda Sex Garden/Mediaeval Baebes). Elsewhere curveballs strike such as the strident and stentorian curtain-raiser ‘Prophecy’, which utilises the influence of Magma and Zeuhl music – a longstanding passion for all three members – for the first time in earnest. “It sits better at the start of the album as otherwise it would disrupt the decent into the beautiful hell hole that unfolds” as Steve notes.
Essentially however, the mission of The Utopia Strong remains intact – to offer a transformative pathway to wonders anew. “Well, we are making psychedelic music or, if you will, head music” reflects Kavus. “We put an awful lot of detail into each piece. It’s certainly not minimalist. Often after our shows people will remark that we had made them feel like they were on drugs. That’s the idea really. We’ll take you on a voyage of self-discovery that won’t preclude showing up to work on time the next day. Although really the core message of our music is ‘Quit your job and start a commune.”
As Steve notes: “Hopefully we’ve done justice to the comic book character Dope Rider and that he’d have loved riding along on his Harley Davison on another quest, with the wind blowing through his rib cage, listening to this album. If the audience choose the psychonaut road, then we are delighted to have been of service.”
Doperider is out on vinyl, CD and digitally on 10 October 2025.
Published post no.2,660 – Wednesday 17 September 2025
