Yeah this is a day late, $3 short. What are you gonna do? Fire me?

Thanks to the BANDS and the READERS this week. Labels where’d you go?

Keep Heathen Disco going (and read it all) with a paid subscription, only $3 a month or $35 a year, your north star to unadulterated cool music.

Contribute for reviews to PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

BIKINI MUTANTS Let’s Mutate LP (Sealed)

Hard to fathom how every last stone of essential postpunk hasn’t been dug up and repackaged yet, but there’s always one every year that stops you in your tracks, and this looks to be the one for 2026. Bikini Mutants hailed from Somerset in the west of England, had anarcho bonafides alongside The Mob, and played the music in their heads, a bleached-black, disparate and determined mix of high register vocals, scratchy guitar, ESG style beats and a bass player roaming mod-mad meets Pere Ubu all over the fretboard. No surprise, then, that it’s Deb Googe, who’d soon join up with My Bloody Valentine and become the stealth heartbeat propping up all that noise. Listen to her doing scales on the opener “Arcadia” as part of this bony formula creates a disorientation that this music rarely afforded in the pop registers where they reside, and that stays a factor throughout – when I said disparate up there, I’m referring to how far out on their own each member of this band seems to be from their styles of performing, and how exciting it is to watch them daredevil land track after track. Let’s Mutate combines their two cassette demos and collects as much info in its booklet about the band and their scene as we can get. Tracks like “Finale” get up to a near death rock sorta speedy nihilism, to where they start to sound like the Marine Girls throwing a toaster into their bathwater, while the pensive “Question,” with top of the neck notes matching the guitar scuzz over top, aims to predate MBV’s early days by a tiny bit. They start to head to a place with the later stuff that’s a little more dub informed and darker, but everything that worked on the earlier stuff is clearly moving into another gear.

WIZARDMASTER A Dwelling of the Mind Protruding Through the Head CS (Old Technology)

Artist Mark Stramaglia was in a band that played the Mac-based software he and bandmates in Operation: Re-Information developed. O.R.I. (née REVO) made up an interesting corollary to the indie bands I was booking in Pittsburgh back in the ‘90s, and their serious demeanor and lab coated stage presence as they tapped away on their keyboards, faces buried into their monitors, made for a theater to house their notions of Negativland’s uncanned media-music collage protests, and unperformative nervous energies and wit (at one show, a monitor was pre-loaded with firecrackers and detonated). They were about five years ahead of everyone else (think of them as the older, smarter progenitor of electronic acts like Add N to X), and were eventually able to book a demo at the chapel of their machines, the Apple campus in Cupertino, to share their art to the engineers that made it possible.

From the Bay Area, Stramaglia continues on in another vector called Wizardmaster, making psilocybin ear music directed by a generative-performative application he created called WMCP, and (presumably) banks of Eurorack synths, and recorded live. The software does a good job of getting near instrument sounds (oboe/bassoon, vibraphonic percussives, fragile string plucks and the like) and a better job of delaying and layering the compositions that spring up, creating a Theater of Eternal Music-meets-a Fourth World Perrey & Kinsgley sort of ambiance (in dub). It gets way out there, and each of the eight tracks (more than half around or over the 10-minute mark) have plenty of space to keep going, so much so that each work is a closed loop that can essentially stand on its own, and each with an imperative or inner strength that rises up as needed and pulls the music gently but firmly along. It’s virtuosic and compelling and has enough bright, innocent personality to make it really stand out.