A Bad Diana - The Lights Are On But No-One's Home

First time vinyl pressing of Diana Rogerson's A Bad Diana album, originally pressed to CD in 2007 and first released via one of the United Dairies offshoots. Most reading this will know Rogerson for her centrality to the Nurse With Wound universe, as performer, organiser, and, as Optimo astutely put it, matriarch (literally and figuratively). As an artist in her own right she deserves a fair bit more acclaim than she's probably been afforded. There's multiple confounding works in Rogerson's catalogue, unusual sounds that often play like their own updating of the NWW list, though The Lights Are On But No-One's Home feels especially notable given it's relatively late arrival in her career, an artist who'd already been at it a while making some of her most unique work. Given the context in which Rogerson operates, it's natural to interpret these seven songs as a part of the post-industrial/neo-folk continuum - indeed, even the photo that adorns its front cover is suggestive of the same industrial-folk aesthetics that characterised the presentation of 20 Jazz Funk Greats. But if it exists within that world, it also seems to foreshadow more contemporary developments, too. You can hear trace elements of any number of outliers from the Editions Mego orbit, or such contemporary sound designers as Klara Lewis, Inga Copeland, Brannten Schnure, Nik Colk Void et al, subversive electronic compositions underscored with a rural uneasiness Funny this should arrive the same week as the new Anne Gillis, for it feels born of the same spooked-out mindset.