Category Archives: Luminous

It’s out!

Organising Space is out today. ‘A superbly conceived and executed release,’ said Andy Hamilton in the WIre magazine!

New Sloth Racket album! Live dates in October!

The fifth studio album by Sloth Racket is out next month on Luminous! Recorded in April at Lightship 95 in London, then mixed and mastered by Alex Bonney, Organising Space will be available to pre-order from 23rd September as a digital album and CD. The physical format features a risograph-printed sleeve designed by me and printed up by Footprint Workers Co-op in Leeds. We’re all really happy with how the album has turned out, and I can’t wait to send it out into the world.

The band are out and about to celebrate the album with three live dates, including an album launch at Cafe Oto on 10th October. Tickets are on sale for all three dates: links can be found on the Sloths website. Join us…

Sloth Racket at Cafe Oto this October

A quick post to make you aware of the just-announced Sloth Racket album launch at Cafe Oto on 10th October! Tickets are on sale now for this special night – our first gig at Oto – where we’ll celebrate the release of our next album. The as-yet-untitled album is currently in progress and I’m very happy with the direction it’s going…

(Also pleased with the new collage-y image above that I put together for this gig!)

Hold Music out today!

It’s out there! The cr-ow-tr-io album was released today on Luminous. I’m really pleased with how this has turned out. Available as a CD (with one-off hand-printed sleeves) and digital album…

cr-ow-tr-io – Hold Music available to pre-order

Ahead of our performance at hcmf// next week, the first album from cr-ow-tr-io is available to pre-order from Luminous today! It’s a collection of short tracks carved out of long improvisations that Tullis, Otto and I recorded in 2019. You can read more about the trio and the album on the Luminous website – and pre-order the album as a CD and/or digital album over on the label Bandcamp site. You’ll also find three tracks streaming there, so have a listen…


For the CD sleeves I’m experimenting with stencilling and a set of neon paints to create a few different colour options. Each sleeve has its own unique variation of the design and I’ll select one randomly when you order. Pre-ordered CDs will arrive in time for release day on 10th December.

Guest presenting The Efpi Show – 21st June 2021

I’m very happy to be a guest presenter on The Efpi Show, a fortnightly radio show from the label Efpi Records – home of the first album of my own compositions Quadraceratops back in 2014. The show goes out today, Monday 21st June at 5pm on Camp Radio, and will be up on Mixcloud afterwards. [Edit: the Mixcloud player is below! And the page is here.]


Below is a complete tracklist from my episode, and I’ve included links to places where you can buy the music either direct from the artists or from their labels. Sometimes I couldn’t find the track/album in question, but I did find a place where the artist was selling other/more recent work, so I included those links. Some of the tracks are old pop songs that are widely available in the usual places…

Also on the show is an unreleased Ripsaw Catfish set recorded over JackTrip earlier this year, and an interview with Dee Byrne about her new Deemer + 1 album on Luminous.

Hope you enjoy the show! I had a lot of fun putting it together.

The Efpi Show with Cath Roberts, 21st June 2021

Camp Lo – Luchini AKA This Is It (from Uptown Saturday Night, 1997)
Andrew Weathers Ensemble – A Mountain Of Snakes, The High Plains, A Knee In The Earth (from The Thousand Birds In The Earth, The Thousand Birds In The Sky, 2020)
Rogue Three – I Really Kronenberged Up The Whole Place (from No Meat On Bumblebees, 2018)
Elliott Smith – Condor Avenue (from Roman Candle, 1994)
Okkyung Lee – Two Perfectly Shaped Stones (from Ghil, 2013)
MF Doom (prod. Flying Lotus) – Lunch Break
Deemer + 1 – Clear Seeing (from Aftermath, 2021)

[Interview: Dee Byrne]

Deemer + 1 – Kinetic Frenetic (from Aftermath, 2021)
Veruca Salt – Spiderman 79 (from American Thighs, 1994)
Silence Blossoms – King Of Everything (from Silence Blossoms, 2014)
Nut Club – Cheekbones (from December 2013, 2014)

[Ripsaw Catfish – Unreleased JackTrip set, February 2021]

Left-Handed Tapedeck Mix
(originally side A of a cassette mix for Sophie Cooper’s mixtape exchange in the first 2020 lockdown)
Ryoko Ono – pAq (from Alternate Flash Heads, 2015)
Georgia Anne Muldrow – Never A Day In Vain (from Early, 2009)
Laura Cole – Outgoing Vessels (from Enough, 2018)
Stephanie Richards – New Moon (from Fullmoon, 2018)
The Breeders – I Just Wanna Get Along (from Last Splash, 1993)
The B-52s – Dry County (from Cosmic Thing, 1989)
Max Tundra – Lights (from Mastered By Guy At The Exchange, 2002)
Scarub – Wishful Thinking (from Savvy Traveller, 1999)
Beck Hunters – Yes And No (from Has It Been Found?, 2019)

New Luminous website and Deemer + 1 release

It’s done! I’ve been working on a website for the Luminous label for quite a while – and it’s now live at luminouslabel.co.uk. The label has been going for six years, so it feels good to give it an independent online presence as well as its collection of nested Bandcamp sites. Along with the new mailing list (see previous post), the site will be the primary place for all label activities. Speaking of which…
The new album by Deemer + 1 is available to pre-order today, in advance of its 4th June release on Luminous. They are also doing a live show on release day to celebrate the album, which is a collaboration with Johnny Hunter. Head to the Deemer Bandcamp site to order these things…

New mailing list for the Luminous Label

I haven’t been blogging much recently – apologies – but I’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes work with not much to show for it yet! Some of this has been working with Dee on the label, and we’ve got some nice plans for the rest of this year. It feels good putting some more energy into Luminous, and one thing that I *can* point to now is that we’re setting up a new mailing list for the label. This will be a dedicated email list for updates on releases and any other label-related activity. So if you’re interested in hearing about what we’re up to, you can subscribe now using the shiny new form I just made. There will be a first email relatively soon announcing some exciting stuff….

Out today! Exabout: Live in Ramsgate

A new Sloth Racket live album is released today on Luminous! Obviously 2020 hasn’t quite gone as we’d planned, and so instead of touring this year we are putting out this lovely recording from our 2019 tour.


It’s the full set from our gig at Arco Barco in Ramsgate, hosted by our friends Extra Normal Records. This was a really great night at a brilliant quirky seafront venue (accessed via a ladder!), where we shared the bill with Evan Parker playing a solo set. Anton Hunter was on recording duties and Alex Bonney has mixed it for this special live release.

The album is a digital-only release, our first one ever and mainly to keep costs down during these ‘times’. However, I had always planned to do new Sloth Racket shirts in 2020, and even with no tour I’ve gone ahead and got them made. There are three colours to choose from and a brand new scribbly logo design. The shirts are organic cotton, printed with eco-friendly inks by I Dress Myself in Frome. I’m really happy with how they came out – they are really soft and the print quality is excellent. The mockup image below shows the colours – head to the Bandcamp page for a size guide.

Hope you enjoy the music! I enjoyed listening through last year’s tour in the process of making it. Here’s to the slothtours of the future…

New duo album with Dee Byrne: DISEMBARK!

Disembark! is out today on Luminous. It’s the first duo release from Dee Byrne and me – I’m so happy to see it out there after the release (and a tour that was supposed to happen earlier this year) got derailed by the pandemic. It’s available now as a digital album, the thirteenth release on the label, with amazing cover artwork by Dee. I hope you enjoy the music! And keep an eye on Luminous over the course of this Autumn, as we have a few more things up our sleeves….