“Time and mortality, life as fleeting as a dream”
Blow Up no. 342: Paolo Bertoni reviews No Ordinary Raconteur by Michael Somerset Ward and Dimidium Oraculi by Adi Newton & Michael Somerset Ward. 8.0.
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In issue 342, November 2026, on page 66, Paolo Bertoni reviews No Ordinary Raconteur by Michael Somerset Ward and Dimidium Oraculi by Adi Newton & Michael Somerset Ward. The score: 8.0.
Paolo Bertoni, a long-standing voice at Blow Up, is the author of Sogni sepolti, the book on Clock DVA published by Tuttle Edizioni and issued in English by NUKFM/PC Press as Adi Newton: Second Sight, in a revised, expanded and updated edition. He is today one of the finest authorities anywhere on Adi Newton’s work and on the sound of Sheffield: when he writes about these records, he writes about a subject he has lived with for decades.
We reproduce the review in full, by kind permission of Blow Up and of its author. The English translation is ours.
SHEFFIELD
MICHAEL SOMERSET WARD
No Ordinary Raconteur — LP / CD Armcomm Europe — 12tr / 15tr — 29:22 — 50:45
ADI NEWTON & MICHAEL SOMERSET WARD
Dimidium Oraculi — MLP Armcomm Europe — 4tr — 27:26
He has been part of the Sheffield scene from its very beginnings, his years in Floy Joy the moment of greatest visibility. Michael Somerset Ward spent a few months in Clock DVA, and it is in his friend Adi Newton that he has found the firmest support for this debut under his own name, on which — electronics aside — he handles saxophones, clarinets, flutes and piccolo.
Newton is on the proscenium at once in Half-Life, a spoken word piece divided into four short parts, in which, with a hoarse, Burroughsian voice, he is charged with leading us into as many paths to follow as the record unfolds. Within seconds we are at the heart of “No Ordinary Raconteur” (‘no time to lose / no time to delay / no time to spare / half a life spent in dreams’): time and mortality, life as fleeting as a dream.
Adi’s part extends into Delphic Response, how Somerset Ward imagined DVA might have evolved, ‘electronic, but with a beating organic heart’, a magnificent, shadowed electro funk run through by an acoustic current and free-jazz splashes. Nor is that all: Newton becomes the guiding spirit of a reinvention of 4 Hours, one of his own classics, in which Michael sinks back into the noir humus that first grew it, with the help of Matthew Bourne’s piano and cellos beneath Karl D’Silva’s effective alternation of recitation and half-sung line.
Other decisive figures from that same era come forward: Glenn Gregory on the sophisticated Harry’s England, vocally an open tribute to Bowie and thematically a passage into a dystopian 2033 where ‘no castles are left in this green and pleasant land’; while through the cybernetic Señor Slippery, a kind of update of the Cabs of “The Crackdown”, Mallinder saunters.
Michael does not hold back from taking the vocal parts himself: on Dead Man’s Coat, shot through with a possessed saxophone; on No Ordinary Raconteur, where he is partnered by Peter Rophone, a song inspired by Scott Walker; and on the magnificent The Future Is Here Today, which observes with great clarity that ‘when there’s less to look forward to and more to remember, the future’s here today’.
Of the 600 copies available, 300 are on CD, a format carrying three further tracks: Future Cartography, voice and words by Newton, written for the radio play ‘Kafka Chic’ and now folded by Somerset Ward into a structure by turns free and noir; Doomerati, with Mallinder returning, over music Michael composed for another radio broadcast, this one about the KLF; and the intimate, spoken Rain Wolves.
The dark twin of “No Ordinary Raconteur” — inseparable from it — is “Dimidium Oraculi”, available only together with the album. Four pieces: Delphic Response (Lower Drop mix), with David Lewin’s industrial techno mix (The White Whale); Last Signal (Somerset reimagined), another reinvention by Somerset Ward for piano and clarinet, overturning an instrumental that had been on Newton’s solo record “Newtones”; Future Cartography Re-Mapped (Newton mix), which Adi makes atmospheric and abstract, and yet tactile; Half-Life Extended (Newton mix), an ashen electronic requiem assembling the four movements of Half-Life.
8.0 — Paolo Bertoni
Review published in Blow Up no. 342, November 2026, page 66. Reproduced by kind permission of the magazine and of its author; English translation by Rizosfera. Blow Up is on newsstands and at blowupmagazine.com.
No Ordinary Raconteur was released on 6 November 2026 in Europe, on vinyl and on A5 digifile CD; from 20 November in the UK and the USA.
https://rizosfera.org/en/shop/armeu009/
Dimidium Oraculi is not in distribution: it is available only from the Rizosfera Europe and Rizosfera America sites.
https://rizosfera.org/en/shop/armeu010/
In the Americas and Oceania, order from Rizosfera America:
https://www.coalescesion.com/product/no-ordinary-raconteur/
