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See jpegs of recent articles on Walter & Sabrina in October's Wire magazine here, and Rock a Rolla here.

Eric Lanzilotta on "We Sing For The Future", Bixobal, January 2008.

"...Instead of taking this backwards into the avant-garde classical idiom that Cornelius moved away from, Walter takes this into the present world of experimental music. An experimental music that is not the typical, as it really goes into territories that some people might find difficult because of its mixture of pretty vocals, from the duo of Celia Lu and Mette Bille, on the chorus with orchestration which is decidedly unusual in its arrangement of the elements. It seems to me that I may have heard some things by Jim Stanley and Eric Belgum in the past that might be in a similar realm, but overall this seems to chart its own territory..."
 

Mike Wood on "We Sing For The Future", Foxy Digitalis, December 2007.

"Like a chorus of eunuchs standing over you on your deathbed sending you off to hell with jews harp and squalid tunes from children’s plays—or like outtakes from a Diamanda Galas Mass, in which the choir tries to have fun with the libretto to keep from killing themselves-- Walter & Sabrina makes us fear them and fear for ourselves on “We Sing For the Future.” The title track is a cover of the Cornelius Cardew piece (CC being Walter’s father and huge influence) which sets the stage for a whimsically somber meditation on the horror of war and the seeming carefree ignoring of war until the horror is too huge to ignore. “Sad Days/Bad Days,” “What Have We Done” and “Our Sometimes Fathers” round out this short but emotionally disorienting set, with the occasional guitar, sax, cello and piano joining that haunting chorus in its relentless search for form in the midst of chaos.

Walter and Sabrina are not ones to shy away from the horrific, but they do so more to hold up a mirror than to wallow in the excess. This a moral work that doesn’t preach, nor care to. “We Sing For the Future” is a record to ponder, run from, then ponder some more. They are merely worried about and pissed off by these ugly times, and are fearless in their facing that ugliness. The hope they offer is that one at least become aware of the mess we’re in; reaching out or in is up to the listener. 9/10"
 

Rigobert Dittman on "We Sing For The Future", Bad Alchemy 56, December 2007. This article was written in an idiosyncratic style of German difficult to render in English. Click on the link to the right to see the original.

"The hymn We Sing For The Future (Danny Dark Records, DD1120, mCD + video), recorded by Frederic Rzewski together with Thälmann Variations for New Albion, is a typical later work of the committed Cornelius Cardew (1935-81). He himself had explained the piece, that was as much a rejection of the avant-garde as to the No-Future-defeatism of punk:
'The song is for youth, who face bleak prospects in a world dominated by imperialism, and whose aspirations can only be realised through the victory of revolution and socialism. In the framework of a solo piano piece lasting about 12 minutes, something of this great struggle is conveyed. The music is not programmatic, but relies on the fact that music has meaning and can be understood quite straightforwardly as part of the fabric of what is going on in the world.'
About that, what happens in the world, Cardew's diagnosis- 'unlimited decadence and parasitism... all-sided crisis with economic at the base... spiritual and cultural devastation...' ­ stayed actual. The remedies/cure ­ 'proletarian struggle... the brilliant future of communism' - WALTER & SABRINA, (who are Stephen Moore & Cardew's son Walter), nethertheless are trying consitently to continue Cardew´s difficult heritage, consistent, that means different.
To begin with Walter & Sabrina Play Pop; Walter & Sabrina Play Classical (1994) and Sadness & Life (as Sabrina 1996) and with a second approach (on Chioma Sings Tales of Danny Dark (2003) as Danny Dark Group together with Horace Cardew, W & S intensified (sharpened) the frequency of the attack with Chioma SuperNormal - The Dark Album, their 3-CD-Opus maximus from 2006 (Dan Warburton's exhaustive characterization: Art Bears-meets-Zappa-meets-Penguin Cafe Orchestra-meets-Eisler-meets-Residents-meets Alternative TV post-prog post-punk cantata oratorio rock opera), and with Rock ‘n‘ Roll Darkness (2007). Keith Moliné was in The Wire (July 2007) so impressed of von W & S collision pathos (???), that he drew a comparison to Scott Walkers The Drift and he certified Cardew & Moore 'as proscriptive as...Cardew‘s father...in his final Maoist phase.' Only that W & S visit consequently the “popular” in aesthetic shadow zones(??). Cyber-decadence that is illustrated with trashy pornography, with bizarre Musica Supernova, manneristic quasi-kind of rock, arranged for a small ensemble. With vocoder-singing (?) of the multi-instrumentalist & samplingartist Cardew himself, the Lolita-soprano of Celia Lu and the alto of the danish softjazzsinger Mette Bille. Finally the “art songs” sound so naturally like the should, like they should sound in my wildest dreams.
Brittens Our Hunting Fathers crossbred in a radical Update with Trout Mask Replica, Kew Rhone or News From Babel. Only like that as a rough course/direction and wild association. The catchy tune coverversion of Cardew sen., that illstrate the wobbly picture video with tears, the faces of Celia and Mette during the session and the mouth of a abominable snowman, who sings the descant strophes, W & S put their songs Sad Days Bad Days and What Have We Done by the side. With lines like: 'These are sad days Baby Optimus / Long cold empty days, lean, defiant, surly days' or 'Under mask bacchanal / Vices, defects, blemishes / Maliciously noted / The laughing moralist: What have we done? / We got drunk, went on a real bender / Now it’s time to sober up.' Who wouldn´t be reminded of the fall of the Western Empire? With Dagmar-Krause-Sound, that is in for it now. The motherless Cardewsons were nursed with spurge and Art-Bears-milk. Finally Stephen Moore recites, only accentuated by Bells, Our Sometime Fathers. Fathers and sons.
What‘s the point of trouble? ...the bright side, explored, Found empty... a claim to some future, unknown...

Has everything to become different, to change something? The famous dead father as a pricke/thorn for psycho-archaeology and the liability to nekro-realism to be put aside. It´s a exciting forming (formgiving), that impresses/captivates.

Moliné is right, music, so brave and ambitious is looking for equals."

Massimo Ricci on "We Sing For The Future", Touching Extremes, December 2007:

"Difficult not to remain perplexed at first, fascinated at last by the artistic vision of Walter Cardew and Sabrina (Stephen) Moore, a duo who’s getting a growing exposure in recent years and, based on this 25-minute disc which constitutes this writer’s personal premiere of their work, deservedly so. Walter & Sabrina’s artwork includes old pictures of themselves as kids, modern abstraction and porn imagery, the latter a sort of trademark as far as I could see. The lyrics are beautiful, provided that you don’t ask me about significance: I will always refuse to comment on someone else’s words (too complicated to explain my view here). But what really counts in the final judgement is the quality of the music, which in this release is symbolized by a congruous diversity of scope and the intense focusing on determinate issues of composition that might even be defined staggering, both for sheer number of complexities and the ironic twist that quite often Cardew and Moore apply to the material, splendidly rendered by a “small chamber ensemble” orchestration featuring male and female vocals (at times filtered). The title track, of which the enhanced CD contains a QuickTime video version, is an obvious homage to Cornelius Cardew (Walter’s father), a well-known hymn that gets dismembered and reinterpreted with intelligence to spare, voices and instruments a unique amalgamation of deformation and purity. The subsequent “songs” are an uncontaminated heritage of RIO and “elaborate” progressive (think Henry Cow, Art Bears, Motor Totemist Guild, Lindsay Cooper’s solo production just to assemble a very vague conception) yet there are sections, most notably in “What have we done”, where a Michael Nyman-meets-Slapp Happy feeling appears from nowhere to project the playing towards an unconscious look-ma-no-hands vibe. The record is ended by a brief declamatory piece, Moore’s voice over Cardew’s bells, which only augments an already high degree of rational bewilderment. Substance prevails everywhere."

Nicola Catalano on Walter & Sabrina and "We Sing For The Future", Blow Up magazine, December 2007 (translated from the Italian. NB some passages have been translated from Engish to Italian and back to English again):

“Our songs are songs of proletariat fight, revolution and sacrifice. Come and sing for the future, the victory of the revolution is on the horizon.” [from “We sing for the Future”]

The surname is an important one, even though is hidden under a phantom duo, whose name evokes the inoffensive rock’n’roll of some couples like Jan & Dean, John & Jackie, Bruce & Terry and similar ones...

However, it’s a completely different story and, since Sabrina is just imaginary, Walter Cardew is the only member of the duo. As we said before, he has an important surname, as his father, like Horace’s father too, is Cornelius Cardew, who is considered one of the most significant contemporary composers by many people. read on...

Keith Moliné on "Chioma SuperNormal. The Dark Album" & "Rock 'n' Roll Darkness" in Wire magazine, July 2007:

"You'd be hard pushed to find a more formidable body of work than that of Stephen Moore and Walter Cardew. Its musical intricacy, thematic complexity and shady subject matter feel like nothing less than a confrontation, a challenge aimed at the pathetic, puny listener to see if they can deal with such concentrated intensity. The texts and accompanying visual materials, including some particularly dubious QuickTime movies, are full of sociopolitical abjection and riddled with sexual imagery of cloying, misahthropic degradation. The printed lyrics make Céline read like PG Wodehouse.

A three hour descent into hell, Chioma SuperNormal is a massive undertaking, not least for the listener.The byzantine structure centres around an 'album within an album', in which various narrative characters re-enact their fall from grace. The music is closely composed but performed with earthy, messy gusto, resembling Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler performed by John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett. Rock 'n' Roll Darkness is more instrumentally assured, distilling some of Cardew's excellent ensemble chamber writing, which also features on parts of Chioma SuperNormal, into just-about viable song structures that recall Tim Hodgkinson's longform experiments with Henry Cow. Moore's spoken lyrics, delivered in a mockney sneer that adds yet another level of alienation, are perhaps even more harrowing than those on Chioma - and that's no mean feat.

Ultimately, Cardew and Moore have pursued their singular vision to such an extent, and in the face of such incomprehension, that they seem to have lost any interest in connecting with an audience. The shock-horror transgressions of power electronics at least pack a visceral punch, and Scott Walker's The Drift offers its constituent parts for the listener to try and piece together. Walter & Sabrina, however, have slammed the doors and boarded up the windows, operating by principles every bit as proscriptive as those of Cardew's father, composer Cornelius Cardew, in his final Maoist phase. Nevertheless, Cardew and Moore's originality deserves praise; certain passages of this work represent some of the bravest and most ambitious music around at the moment."

John S on "Rock 'n' Roll Darkness" in Rock-A-Rolla magazine, May/June 2007:

"Hot on the heels of the recent triple CD Chioma SuperNormal, the hardest working man of the moment Walter Cardew (son of avant-garde composer Cornelius) offers another set, a three-song and one movie piece entitled Rock 'n' Roll Darkness. And much like his previous output this is just about the strangest piece of music you are likely to hear. Stripped down and with severely avant-garde tendencies, the pieces - part spoken word, part singalong and mostly built around flutes, clarinets and the like - have few points of comparison, all delivered with a dark sexual imagery on the cover art and the accompanying film that makes matters even more confusing. Nudity, spoken word, nipple rings - ultimately, any discussion as to what exactly is going on here are fruitless, and maybe that's the whole point."

Dan Warburton on "Rock 'n' Roll Darkness", Paris Transatlantic May 2007:

"Just when I was finally getting over the impact of the monumental triple CD Chioma Supernormal reviewed in these pages a couple of months ago, here comes another helping of Walter Cardew and Stephen Moore's idiosyncratic Art Bears-meets-Zappa-meets-Penguin Cafe Orchestra-meets-Eisler-meets-Residents-meets Alternative TV post-prog post-punk cantata oratorio rock opera. If you took the plunge and forked out for a copy of Chioma, you won't be all that surprised by Rock'n' Roll Darkness, nor its cover art with the strategically defaced soft porn imagery, but newcomers to the world of Walter & Sabrina expecting some kind of dirty Stooges apocalypse could be disappointed. Moore's lyrics might be full of whores, piss, sweat and semen but there are no whammy bars or fuzz pedals in sight in the band ­ instead there's glockenspiel, trombone, violin, and that most un-rock'n'roll instrument, the oboe, and not much groove either in Cardew's odd, polyrhythmic universe. An acquired taste, perhaps, but the music of Walter & Sabrina, despite its obvious stylistic precursors (see above) sounds like little else in today's new music. If you find the album cover umm titillating, you might also be interested to know there's a bit more full frontal nudity on offer in the Quicktime movie the disc also contains to accompany its title track, but this odd homemade DV (shades of the new and ever so disappointing David Lynch offering, and Moore and Cardew's chicks don't even get to sing "The Locomotion") doesn't add much; the music works perfectly well without it."

Nicola Catalano on "Chioma SuperNormal. The Dark Album" and "Rock 'n' Roll Darkness", Blow Up magazine, May 2007 (translated from the Italian):

"Let's make things clear. First of all Walter & Sabrina is not a duo and Sabrina does not exist. Walter does and his last name is Cardew. He is the son of Cornelius, a peculiar cultivated composer, who died an untimely death in 1981, who at some point quitted a bright career and the golden and elitist milieu of the avantgarde to devote himself to folk and protest music and especially to a Marxist-Leninist militancy which even led him to jail (see the recent album Consciously edited by Laurie Baker for Musicnow featuring recordings of post-Scratch Orchestra ensembles: People's Liberation Music, Fight Back Band, Progressive Cultural Association). It is hard to make this connection while looking at the aggressive Hell’s Angel look, including tattoos and military boots, and the obsessive interest for extreme-explicit sex. And the music? It is certainly dark, as the titles of the two albums released within a short time suggest. The first is no less than a monumental triple album with 45 tracks and almost 3 hours of music, of crabbed art-rock (or avant-rock if you prefer) as we haven’t heard since the golden age of rock in opposition (Henry Cow and Art Bears remain the best comparisons). A sinister, awkward and almost cruel beauty emanates from the overflowing trajectories offered by Cardew and friends (above all Stephen Moore, the co-author, as well as a large ensemble playing strings, brass, harpsichord, jew’s harp, vocals, etc.): askew expressionist cabaret atmospheres, music which is difficult to handle and sometimes hard to digest, so that occasionally, with symptoms of migraine appearing, we surprisingly find ourselves wishing the musicians an acute form of arthritis, and maybe even a laryngitis. The other, much shorter album, is not very different (featuring Walter’s brother, Horace, playing clarinets and saxophones in the first track): unstable, elusive, ‘hold-less’ music, with the addition of a 15-minute video which is as dark and grim as the musical contents and is full of female nudity, of expropriated and desperate bodies which are far from being erotic. Grades: 7 to both."

Scott McKeating on "Chioma SuperNormal. The Dark Album", Rock-A-Rolla magazine, March/April 2007:

"Triple albums are hard enough to get through without the listener being dragged through the unpleasant underbelly of pity and degradation along the way. The Dark Album is well named; this is like witnessing the unpeeling layers of a city's sexual dysfunction, rage and misanthropy at close quarters. These songs don't even attempt to consider a catharsis through the other side of the protagonist's self-censure; the anger just becomes a solemn, ugly internal thing as it progresses through the forty-five tracks here. Snapping between biting sharpness and awkwardly flowing rants, these cheerless vignettes of modern life are backed by live jazz styled instrumentation. This group backing intermittently reveals a melodic discolouration, taking left turns into Waits and Magazine-type pop devolution. This post-punk-violent-jazz subterranean opus is a genuinely grimy experience wrapped in damaged pop and faux theatrics. Rather than follow The Tiger Lillies route of comedic punk opera with a wink, these monologues of cockney malice and layered choruses stack up into a heavy listen. Unfortunately though, that's about all this Walter Cardew (son of Cornelius, the noted avant garde composer) led collective has to offer. No pot of gold, glint of redemption of elbow-in-the-ribs stirring diversions, just a selection of gnarled and rutted lyrical slides down into a sewage outlet. Maybe this excessive trawl is just another part of the artist's theory on existence - in real life things can get bleak, and then they can get persistently bleak."

Tom Sekowski on "Chioma SuperNormal. The Dark Album", Gaz-Eta February 2007:

"The 3 CD set that comprises "The Dark Album" is one of the more messed up and chaotic affairs you're bound to hear this year. Composed and arranged by Walter Cardew [Cornelius' son] Stephen Moore and played by Walter & Sabrina Group, this package contains some of the darkest stuff I've heard in a long while. Considerably Artful, these guys go on to spend nearly three hours ranting and raving about decay, death and the human remains. I'm not sure how one is supposed to approach their music. With a grain of salt or is this really sombre stuff? How sombre, you ask? Take "Things Fall Apart Live" for instance:

"Once, I schemed.
My fingers damp, around, behind, inside her knickers.
Why? Drawn together in lust
We find something missing
That fills our souls.
Together, alone,
I cup your breasts.
We fill our mouths
It's hopeless, pointless
We move to death."

This has got to be possibly the saddest description of love gone pointless I've ever heard. Examples such as this one are endless. It's all about depravity, human cravings, emptiness and utter despair. Delivered in an almost operatic fashion, the vocals sound like they're a latter-day Dagmar Krause, while the music is part rock, part opera and all high art. Best thing is, these guys sound like a fully coherent band. Real instrumentation, choruses and everything is rehearsed and properly presented. My only concern is much of this stuff is too dry to withstand repeated servings of this sort of gruelling exercise. Without a doubt, one of the most demanding releases I've heard in a long time. Recommended to those with masochistic tendencies."

Dan Warburton on "Chioma SuperNormal. The Dark Album", Paris Transatlantic January 2007:

'The 45 tracks on this extraordinarily (ridiculously?) ambitious triple album are performed by the Walter & Sabrina Group, a six-piece band featuring Walter Cardew (voice, various instruments), Matthew Dungey (voice, keyboards, oboe), Mette Bille (mezzo soprano), Nima Gousheh (voice, guitar, santur, Persian translation), Dave Baby (Jew's harp, swanee whistle, kazoo, clap) and Celia Lu (soprano and Mandarin translation), augmented where necessary by members of a 14-strong instrumental ensemble. Walter & Sabrina Group was the brainchild of Cardew and Stephen Moore (who writes most of the extraordinary lyrics) and was formed back in the early 90s when Cardew was studying for a Master of Music degree at Goldsmiths College. The members of the group, with the exception of Dave Baby, were Cardew's fellow students.

Just in case you were wondering, Walter is the son of the late Cornelius Cardew, but "any influence he had on me has taken unexpected forms," he explains. "I played with him in the Progressive Cultural Association band in the year before he died. And although I came to realise that the politics of that movement were abhorrent I think it is from that music that I derived the strongest influence. It always surprises me now how similar Walter & Sabrina lyrics are in style to those political songs (although I don't actually write our lyrics ­ Stephen does)." Cardew came to music "through jazz and pop rather than classical music (which came later), playing various instruments but mainly drums. Cornelius of course encouraged our musical involvement and would sit at a table on a visit and make a more or less instant transcription of our latest favourite jazz tune, and arrange it for sax (played by my brother Horace) and trombone (me), with transposed parts. We used to spend holidays in Cornwall with my grandfather, uncle and cousins, and musical evenings there would range from arrangements of Frescobaldi to Louis Armstrong via 'Colonel Bogey'." Though his first "big loves" were jazz drummers ­ "Buddy Rich and Elvin Jones ­ Cornelius used to take us to see them close up at Ronnie Scott's (I looked older than I was)" Cardew eventually developed an interest in rock and soul. In the late 80s he played for a while with The Pasadenas, but left the group to study composition at Goldsmiths, where he started working with Moore on "some very rough and ready recordings, often using home-made instruments. This eventually became Walter & Sabrina and we produced our first album in 1995. Stephen came from an arty/rocky background and turned me on to tons of stuff from Howlin' Wolf to Throbbing Gristle."

By way of putting the Cornelius connection to one side so we can concentrate on the album at hand, it's worth quoting briefly from the huge, sprawling essay cum prose poem cum autobiography cum manifesto that accompanies The Dark Album's 173 minutes of "hymns of hate [..] bedded in songs designed for others to sing": "Forever overshadowed by pseudo famous Father, who died, run down on snowy hump outside Leyton station, before became even less respectable and successful. A grimy supermarket carrier bag knocked from his hands, skid on ice into the gutter."

Cheery stuff, eh? And the opening "Archaeology Part 1" sets the scene nicely: "And it's all dead all dead ­ everything you see / Everything you hear and eat / Everything you touch just seems to rust / Useless useless, everything useless, never a thing / that you can smell / That doesn't reek of death.." And so on. But behind the verbose Oedipus Schmoedipus noir rhetoric of both text and lyrics, all pain, porn and self-doubt projected out into poisonous guilt trips, this is an oddly attractive if often user-unfriendly collection of "heightened, expressionistic folk" songs. Several of them ­ "Archaeology", "Mr Pain", "Self Harm" and "Susan Cure" ­ come in pairs, with one version featuring the text intoned over the instrumental ensemble by Cardew, spitting out Moore's tough spiky lyrics with Cockney venom (Alternative TV's Mark Perry inevitably comes to mind, and a passing reference to "Sniffing Glue" ­ Perry's legendary punk fanzine, though that was spelt "Sniffin'" ­ would seem to indicate they're aware of the reference), and the alternative take setting the words to elaborate angular melodic lines. If this album had come out a quarter of a century ago it would probably have been released on Chris Cutler's Recommended Records ­ it's sort of Art Bears meets 1930s Paul Hindemith with strategic doses of The Residents and Trout Mask Replica thrown in for good measure. Drop the needle (as it were) just about anywhere and you'd be hard pressed to find any of the trappings of 21st Century New Music ­ there's no laptop drizzle, no sleek post-techno glitch, no dreary New Weird folk noodling, no stoner metal. Or any kind of metal. God knows how a track from it ended up on a Wire Tapper compilation. Instead there's a strange, colourful array of acoustic instruments, mostly traditional / classical, in a set of arrangements that wouldn't sound all that out of place on an early Mothers of Invention album. Primitive ­ but effective ­ electronics sit side by side with carefully scored charts, gnarly Zoot Horn Rollo guitar and odd twangs of harpsichords and Jew's Harp. And Cardew's tortured declamations, whose matter-of-fact narration contrasts brutally with the sadomasochistic viciousness of the texts. He reads "I watched someone being brutalised" as if he was discussing the football results in the taproom of a pub on the Isle of Dogs.

For all its charms (sorry, even if I'm not supposed to enjoy it ­ "it is SuperNormal, relentlessly, boringly, tragically, pretentiously dull" ­ but I do!), the ear begins to tire by disc three of the set, which is a shame as there are some scorching live versions of songs heard earlier. One wonders whether two discs might have sufficed. But then again, the full power of Moore's bleak vision - forget Neil Hannon, this is the Divine Comedy - is perhaps best appreciated if you grasp the nettle and OD on the whole package.'

Louis Pattison on "Chioma SuperNormal. The Dark Album" in Plan B magazine, December 2006:

"Walter Cardew (son of Cornelius) helms a six-part goth-industrial orchestra built from wet horns and shrill, detuned strings. Songs creak and squelch like pandrogynous curves in old leather; sensuality is the aim, but this love affair is made of gastric kisses and punctured flesh."

Normanrecords.com

on We Sing For The Future, October 2007

Walter & Sabrina: 'We Sing For The Future' (Danny Dark). Some Marxist-Leninist pop across four tracks with a quick time movie of the title track. On first listen it sounds like a wonky foreign choir singing weirdly translated carols over pompous sounding orchestration. Dig a little deeper and you'll realise the agit-prop aesthetic in the lyrics and the so-called avant-garde music as written by Cornelius Cardew and arranged by Walter Cardew and Stephen Moore. It's like the music you hear in experimental film/theatre, just not sure which or whose future they're singing for. It'd be album of the week if I had my say. Who the fook are Stock Aitken and Waterman?

on Rock 'n' Roll Darkness, March 2007:

"Here she is again. WALTER & SABRINA with their cover star, bare chested and parading her pierced nipples off. If they think they can irk some lesbian tendencies in me they got to be joking but why a short pink nurses outfit as well???. Anyway to the music. Well this is their umpteenth thing I've reviewed from them and today we catch them in almost a musical mood. First 2 tracks are chuffing too weird and disturbing with references to smelling spunk. However I'm on Track 3 and it happens to be my favourite thing they've done as they almost get a rhythm and tune together. They've got some lovely ingredients with flutes and clarinets and all sorts of percussion going on. The variety and mix of genres is wild to be highly praised and whilst the male voice is so bad its not bad; as a musical moment its worth a bite."

on Danny Dark Records, November 2006:

"This week we've got the back catalogue from Danny Dark Records and there's some strange fruits here. I'm reviewing the triple CD by WALTER AND SABRINA entitled 'Chioma SuperNormal - The Dark Album'. Its a weird and wonderful mix of spoken word,strange eerie sounds, avant rock and modern composition. It's such an eclectic mixture of theatrical ramblings and verse that it turns into a strange aural journey with each disparate section weaving into the next. Its getting a 'pretentious' suggestion from elements of the office and the band do admit its 'open to ridicule' but let's keep our judgmental hats in the drawer and appreciate this for all its innovation and bravery. They describe it as 'A performance inside a theatrical room that is inside the bigger locked building that is Supernormal'. So there. Also worthy of note is the fantabulous WALTER AND SABRINA PLAY POP WALTER AND SABRINA PLAY CLASSICAL which is them being more mainstream ????) kind of. Also we have a label taster called DANNY DARK RECORDS TASTER (contains audio and video). 'Sadness and Life' By SABRINA and 'Chioma Sings Tales of Danny Dark' by DANNY DARK GROUP. Listen to the whole lot back to back and you'll end up chewing your own ear off. Nutty"

Keith Moliné on "Chioma Sings Tales of Danny Dark" in Wire magazine, January 2006:

"A vibrant mixture of avant-rock, modern composition, jazz and experimental electronica, this mysterious album has been circulating for a while now and deserves to be heard.Put together by Walter and Horace Cardew (sons of Cornelius), and featuring the instrumental input of various ex-Loose Tubes and Billy Jenkins alumni, it interleaves electronic textures, treated vocals and thorny, angular composition that is strongly remininiscent of Art Bears around the time of Hopes And Fears.The album also includes material created in workshops for young people, and fantastically morose lyrics by Moore, transmitted through the heavily treated voice of Laura Pooley, who sounds like a ringer for Dagmar Krause in places. The fact that it's clearly taken a superhuman act of will to bolt all this disparate material together is what gives the album its strange, edgy charm. Walter Cardew's abrasive sheets of guitar and brother Horace's dry, insinuating tenor sax are the dominant voices on this powerful album."

Louise Gray on "Walter & Sabrina Play Pop; Walter & Sabrina Play Classical" in Top magazine, November 1995:

"Walter Cardew, half of Walter and Sabrina Play Pop. . . Play Classical (WS), follows Eno in welding experimental techniques to format. A collection of songs and instrumentals, this album jangles along with all the verve of the Residents or Eno circa Tiger Mountain. It is also, and here’s a word under-used in the vocabulary of modern classical criticism, fun."