Elijah Minnelli :: Spitting Feathers

The press release for Spitting Feathers is signed by the chairman of an exiles’ committee that does not exist. The cover, it says, shows geese convicted of cybercrime.

Spitting Feathers is out on 13 November 2026 on Breadminster County Council, the label Elijah Minnelli uses for his own records, on vinyl, download and streaming. It has four tracks, mastering by Jack Driscoll and a sleeve by Aleksandra Sandakow. Before this EP came Clams As A Main Meal on his own label, Ball & Socket for Accidental Meetings and Perpetual Musket, released by FatCat in 2024. Minnelli lives in Portsmouth and plays live from behind a mixing desk, taking percussion and low frequencies apart and putting them back together while he sings melodies rooted in folk: the same man gives evidence and tampers with the record.

Breadminster does not exist. Minnelli has built an administration on top of it, a local press that loathes him and now an exile: a group of residents expelled for carrying on putting animals on trial. The satire has a basis in history, though. In medieval and early modern Europe animals really did stand before judges, and at Falaise, in 1386, a sow was executed in public. The titles also come from the vocabulary of English law and administration. “Slap on the Wrist” is the token punishment, and “Quango” the semi-public body that spends money and answers to no one.

“Contested Estuary” reworks “Vandy”, in which a woman waits for a man gone to war and turns away another suitor. Dub enters the ballad with that suitor’s manners: it insists, wraps itself around her, works on the body because words would get it nowhere. The whole contest of the title is fought out here, and each time the echo comes back you wonder how much of the song is still willing to say no. Neither side gives way, the Appalachian melody holds its line beneath the repetitions, and that friction produces the most fully realised track on the EP.

“Clerical Benefit” looks back to early dubstep and presents itself as a playful habitat, with cardboard party horns and a rhythm that chases after reggae. Then you notice that someone is watching. Voices that recall animals act as a counterweight to the beat, and above them rises a voice that passes sentence. Aristotle drew the same line between phoné, the cry every beast possesses, and logos, the speech with which humans decide what is just and unjust. The track turns that boundary into a courtroom, and the title comes from there: for centuries benefit of clergy saved anyone who could read a verse from the gallows, and those left with only the cry were hanged.

“Slap on the Wrist” grew out of nights at Aba Shanti-I’s University of Dub in London. The rhythms bury the four-to-the-floor kick, as if the music had to be carried by the percussion. The keyboards stay at the edges, first with chords and then with a synth that recurs across the EP and seems to read out the decisions of a council. Each time it returns it reminds you that behind whatever brings people together and gets them moving, someone has already made a choice, and that the punishment, as the title promises, will be light only for whoever wrote it. By taking authority from the kick and handing it to that synth, the track stages its own argument, and the body goes on moving all the same.

“Quango” is dub and reggae in a dancehall for the idle. It starts from the Casio MT-40, the little keyboard that in 1985 supplied the riddim of Wayne Smith’s “Under Me Sleng Teng”, and with it digital dancehall: a revolution found among the presets of something close to a toy. The machine keeps running like the agency in the title, and the track moves like an office that opens late and closes early.

Who convicted the geese is still an open question, since their judges have been driven out of the county. The press release leaves them on the cover with their sentence for cybercrime, in a place that does not exist, facing a kind of justice that really did. Minnelli defends them with a bassline to dance to, and the defence holds. Whoever dances takes the geese’s side, and in Breadminster there is no one left to judge them.