At long last, Narcolepsia returns Caroline K's beloved, lone LP, Now Wait For Last Year, to our hands with a brand-new vinyl pressing, perfectly reproducing the original. Initially issued in 1985 by one of Great Britain's few female industrial music pioneers, encountering her stepping into uncharted realms, this genre spurning gesture rests within a singular territory at the borders of ambient tribalism, kosmische, the Berlin school, and electronic experimentalism. Nearly 40 years on, it remains as captivating as the day it was made.

While slightly marginalized beneath the shadow of the punk and post-punk that emerged during the second half of the 1970s, the Industrial music and proto-noise that appeared in Great Britain during roughly the same moment can be viewed historically as one of the most radically experimental collective efforts in countercultural sound practice of the late 20th century. At the centre of this movement, which included Nurse with Wound, Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse, Coil, Psychic TV, and numerous others, was Caroline Kaye Walters, who initially appeared on the scene within the legendary project, Nocturnal Emissions, alongside Nigel Ayers, before co-founding the equally noteworthy Sterile Records, which issued seminal albums by S.P.K., Lustmord, Maurizio Bianchi, Controlled Bleeding. Alongside adjacent projects like The Pump and Unit 07 which expanded the primary project’s line up to include Daniel Ayers, brother of Nigel and future husband to Caroline, Nocturnal Emissions represent the bulk of Walters’s output, but in 1985 she released a lone solo LP under the name Caroline K, the widely beloved cult classic “Now Wait For Last Year”. While it’s been reissued at various times over the years, it almost always sells out and falls out of print as fast as it appears, making the Portuguese imprint Narcolepsia’s brand new vinyl pressing a much welcome event.

Alongside artists like Danielle Dax, Paula P. Orridge, and Cosey Fanni Tutti, Caroline Kaye Walters was one of only a handful of women active on the early British Industrial music scene. Born in 1957, between the late 1970s and 1990 - when the project morphed into a solo project for Nigel Ayers - she worked almost exclusively with Nocturnal Emissions - one of the most fascinating, experimental, and arguably intellectually engaging projects on the scene, creating a remarkable body of work with Ayers that slightly stands apart from the pack.

By the mid 1980s, both members of Nocturnal Emissions had largely become disillusioned with heavy handed aesthetics and culture of the Industrial scene, and began to allow their creative interests to drift further afield, particularly toward more experimental extensions of ambient music and synth driven pop. While this was already beginning to present as early as the band’s 1983 LP, “Viral Shedding”, Caroline refined it into what was arguably its most striking and visionary form with her lone solo LP, “Now Wait For Last Year”, issued by Earthly Delights in 1985.

A cult favorite, originally issued in a tiny edition that has been hotly pursued by collectors and fans for decades, “Now Wait For Last Year” is a stunning, genre spurning debut. Drawing its title from a 1966 sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick, the album’s five tracks have regularly been simplified with associations to industrial, minimal synth, proto-techno, none of which make an easy fit. The album sits more comfortably alongside roughly contemporaneous efforts of Pier Luigi Andreoni, Francesco Paladino, Richard Horowitz, Marc Barreca, Craig Leon, Deux Filles, and Anne Gillis, hybridizing avant-gardism within a zone of ambient tribalism, peppered with touches of kosmische and the Berlin school, that evolve from the tense, looping drones of the sidelong opener, “The Happening World”, across the howls and rhythms of "Animal Lattice", before coming to rest in the icy, electronic expanses of “Tracking With Close-Ups” and “Leaving”.

A truly visionary accomplishment, years ahead of its time, “Now Wait For Last Year” is a cinematic sound world entirely its own. While Caroline Kaye Walters would remain active in Nocturnal Emissions for another five years, the album would remain her only solo venture, preceding a retreat from public life in the years that led up to her untimely passing in 2008. It’s a true shame that she isn’t with us to witness the full swelling of love that her masterstroke eventually came to receive.