Stroom Label Showcase - Sergeant, Felicity J Lord and Daisy Ray

The Lubber Fiend loves record labels - there is no better way to discover music. A good record label should coalesce around a scene or a city or a genre - and a great record label should mark out its own world. Stroom does exactly this and has consistently been putting out some of the best music of the last 5-10 years. The label hops from genre to genre and artist to artist but seems to weave it all together into a coherent whole. It's wholly committed to experimental music but does not stray away from an approachable sound that encompasses pop and electronic music as much as it does the avant-garde. We are extremely pleased to announce two bands from the label roster will be joining us in the form of Sergeant and Felicity J Lord, alongside Daisy Ray!

Sergeant

Sergeant makes music like editing an erratic film: cutting, splicing, and reassembling sounds into a whirlwind of unexpected turns. The trio – filmmaker/composer Benjamin Cools, search-singing actor Ferre Marnef, and sonic surfer Geraldine Vanspauwen – strike a delicate balance between post-punk’s jagged edges, krautrock’s relentless drive, and an unpredictable pop energy that keeps your heart racing.

Their sound is a plunderphonic mess of fractured rhythms and clashing textures: always on the move, never in balance. It’s like The Avalanches throwing a party with pagan whistles, distorted bells, and dubby basslines. Flutes squawk as if they’re trying to outrun the beat, and melodies splinter into chaotic joyrides. Imagine Micachu & The Shapes playing hopscotch with Robert Wyatt, or Sonic Youth dissolving in a glass of sparkling water and vodka: fizzy, intoxicating, yet brutally honest at the end.

Live, Sergeant stretch their music to experimental heights, pushing songs into a fever pitch, scrambling them into something even more untamed. The room fills with foolish critique, a controlled stumble, a sound that keeps running even when it’s lost track of where it’s headed.

Bandcamp — Instagram — Spotify

Felicity J Lord

Felicity J Lord is a band, a word which usually means a group of musicians (which is also true) but here means a group of misfits, internet lurkers, poets, polka-dotted ballerinas, CEOs, time travellers, and forever-kids. Felicity J Lord is a company, a family, a video game, a never-ending play in two acts. You are in Act I, welcome. For fans of Dean Blunt!

Daisy Ray

Screwed selections ranging from new beat gunk to lo-fi digidub and grimy noise, somewhere between Petronn Sphene, Lolina and Ace of Bass?! The manic energy that underlined Daisy Ray’s studio set ’Shelly’ earlier this year is fully unleashed in-the-moment on ’Buddies 4 Life’, throwing down six bits of “Belgian art-pop, C86 dreams and screwed dub” from her many years performing in DIY spaces. She struts on a properly Lolina-adjacent flex with the naif digidub nursery rhyming melody of ‘Knock Knock’ and on the Casio taps of ‘Buddies 4 Life’, which also sounds like some delirious Brenday Ray x Ace Of Bass collab. The squashed turmoil of ‘Refuge’snags like Novoline’s distorted flip of 2 Unlimited in the demented bullet ‘Doggy On a Leash’, while the queered synth tone of ‘Birds in Your Yard’ is a cruder echo of DJ Niraha and Christian Love Forum’s noirish enigmas, and the technoid meat motor ‘Detective Walk’ is built of the same sorta substance that goes into Gretchen Aury’s (The Ephemeron Loop/Tristwch y Fenywod) Petronn Sphene gear.