Another Country $$$$ pass Cursed Frame to other hands

Cursed Frame does not get tidier with age. Another Country $$$$, the Manchester duo of Sam Shorter and Oli Knight, released its seven tracks earlier this year, and the deluxe edition leaves all seven where they were, then hands four of them to other people. Harriet Morley takes an edit of awaken_trappedbetweenworlds. Nil00, BUFFEE and FLOCO each take a remix. The additions are worth hearing. They are also the least necessary thing here.

The pair work audio-visually and share live drums, vocals, electronics and samples. They came up through the post-White Hotel Salford scene, and their first record, GRIEF STRICKEN LISTED BUILDINGS, landed in 2020. Cursed Frame followed this year on Spinny Nights, and they call what they do "liminal heavy pop, hopecore breaks, distorted UKG and archival post-dance collage". The description holds up: breaks bent out of shape, UKG pressure underneath, samples handled like archive.

The deluxe edition arrived on 9 September 2026, pressed as a CD and listed as an EP, which undersells eleven tracks. The new material works by mediation: other voices, other hands and other readings of the same parts. Each version changes the shape of the one underneath it.

The sound is soft at the surface and uneasy underneath. Voices come out of fog, close to speaking rather than singing. The drums are live, which keeps the electronics from closing over the top. Repetition does most of the work: a phrase returns until it stops being a phrase and turns into a room you are standing in.

A voice moves through the electronics of "Another Country" with the intimacy of spoken poetry, and the repetitions land as invitations rather than loops. "Body Farm" is the one that gets under the skin: soft, nostalgic, almost weightless, with the flat precision of a machine repeating its own title underneath. That machine names the body without sounding attached to one, and there is something grotesque behind the pleasure. "Tether" refuses to resolve anything. Comfort sits on one side, unease on the other, the human against the machine, and it never picks. "Moth" is the most melodic moment, a theme that seems to belong to memory, with fractured electronics around it. "Cursed Frame" closes the original run and makes what was once odd sound strangely familiar, more a fondness for a version of the future that never arrived than a prediction of one.

Then the second pass, four versions all shorter than what they rework. Morley's edit of awaken_trappedbetweenworlds comes first, Nil00 takes "Moth", BUFFEE rebuilds "Body Farm" into a second volume, FLOCO the title track.

This is for the listener who plays ambient records for the drums and dance records for the dread, who wants the voice kept at the distance of the next room and the low end left alone. Anyone who already owns the original will play it twice: once out of curiosity, once to work out which parts survived the trip.

What does not work is the sequencing of the suite. The record ends on its title track with everything unresolved, then it has to end again, four tracks later, on someone else's reading. Careful readings, all of them, but mediation is not what this music is made of, and a set that refuses to resolve gains nothing from being explained.

Strip the four additions and there is a strange, careful record from a pair who would rather unsettle a room than fill it. Keep them and there is a longer record, half of which is a second opinion. Three and a half.

The tracklist

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