Utility Fog

As we wake up to a world that’s just a little (lot) more fascist that it was last week, there’s some righteous anger, some despondency, and beauty for you tonight. Don’t forget, everything is political: dancing is political, crying is political, music is political, standing up to fascists is political – and critical.
OK then.

LISTEN AGAIN – another world is possible. Stream on demand on FBi’s website, podcast here.

the body – End of Line [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
the body – The Building [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Each of the body‘s albums, whether their many collaborations or their single-artist albums, takes them on another path through the beauty of extremeness, and for the last 10 years, the melding/welding of technology into the core of what they do. The Crying Out of Things is their second album of 2024, with their Orchards of a Futile Heaven collab with Dis Fig released in February this year and garnering them the cover of The Wire just last month. Once again this new album is enriched by the Machines With Magnets wielded by Seth Manchester, as you can hear on both these tracks – chopped vocal loops, massive drums, massive glacial riffs. The voice of Felicia Chen aka Dis Fig can be heard on the second track too. As incredbile & crushing as ever.

Bell Monks – Before Dawn [Wayside & Woodland Recordings/Bandcamp]
Bell Monks – Dim The Lights [Wayside & Woodland Recordings/Bandcamp]
On Wayside & Woodland Recordings, the label run by Ben Holton and Rob Glover aka epic45, here’s a quite lusciously beautiful album of OG postrock (think late Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis) from Jeff Herriott and Eric Sheffield aka Bell Monks. Ben Holton says he was taken by this instantly, and I can see why – it’s wonderful, and it’s incredibly suited to epic45’s aesthetic. Sensitively-programmed drum machines, guitars, synths and emotive vocals – highly recommend this.

The Declining Winter – Eyes On Mine [Second Language/Bandcamp]
Another band that Bell Monks clearly recall is one of epic45’s biggest influences, Hood. While that band is long gone (and sadly mourned), their members’s side- and post-projects are many, and the core was brothers Chris and Richard Adams. Rich is now The Declining Winter, and his songwriting and production has only gotten better & better over the years since Hood’s end. Last April is an intimate collection of songs all written on one night, playing through his trauma and grief at the loss of a loved one. Adams’ voice, guitar and piano are almost alone, but joined by his longtime collaborator Sarah Kemp on multitracked violins, ratcheting up those emotions.

claire rousay – Listening to Every Vocal Track on sentiment (Andrew Weathers remix) [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
When I heard claire rousay‘s touching, self-alienated confessional album Sentiment earlier this year, I never expected it to be followed with a remix album. With the likes of genre-crossing experimentalist more eaze, Iranian-American beatmaker Maral and ambient saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi featured, it’s out now. Colorado sound-artist Andrew Weathers has, er, listened to every vocal track on sentiment, and fed them into granular algorithms. With accompanying strings & synths also granulated, it’s strangely touching, like the vocoded second-hand speech on rousay’s original.

Elsa Hewitt – Kazimi [forthcoming on Elsa Hewitt Bandcamp]
British producer Elsa Hewitt inhabits an idiosyncratic space that blurs songwriting with ambient soundscapes, guitars and vocals with electronics. Her new album Dominant Heartstrings, due in January 2025, leans mostly away from “songs”, using the voice and guitars texturally. The upcoming single “Griselda” features a lovely b-side, “Kazimi”, made of stuttery instrumental loops with clickity almost-beats. Much folktronic bliss.

E L U C I D – BAD POLLEN (feat. billy woods) [Fat Possum Records/Bandcamp]
E L U C I D – IKEBANA [Fat Possum Records/Bandcamp]
While we tend to hear more from his Armand Hammer partner billy woods, E L U C I D is just as distinctive a rapper, and a weird & creative producer himself. His latest album REVELATOR is his best yet, with incisive lyrics about this current era, and dense, uncompromising music. “BAD POLLEN” is produced by the brilliant Saint Abdullah, with desolate lyrics and a verse from woods. “IKEBANA” is co-produced by Elucid with Jon Nellen, juxtaposing artful Japanese flower arranging with… I think, feeling out of place or out of step in a complicated world. Intense stuff.

Lewis Spybey – Castle Neptune [Upp/Bandcamp/ eMERGENCY heARTS /Bandcamp]
I’m always drawn to any projects that Edvard Graham Lewis, from the groundbreaking postpunk of Wire to the experimental sounds of Dome, the avant-pop of Hox, the sound-art of his two solo releases on Mego, the psych/krautrock of UUUU and the experimental kraut-punk-tronica of Elegiac with Ted Milton of Blurt and Sam Britton of Icarus (see below). The project Lewis Spybey teams Lewis up with Mark Spybey, another legendary UK musician – as Dead Voices on Air, as a member of influential industrial/drone act :zoviet*France:, and as an inveterate collaborator. So on debut album LEWISPYBEY these two together create dense soundscapes and electronic grooves, manipulated field recordings, decontextualised samples. The album exists in two slightly different forms: a CD from US label eMERGENCY heARTS and an LP from Lewis’ Upp, based in Uppsala, Sweden.

SLUTPUNK! – ursine i see you [caybee calabash Bandcamp]
SLUTPUNK! – ursine imax [caybee calabash Bandcamp]
UK-based caybee calabash releases music under a variety of pseudonyms, one main one being apollo bitrate, and SLUTPUNK! being another. I’m not sure if there’s a massive distinction between them, but self-declared mini-album don’t forget ursine, out under the SLUTPUNK! name, mixes meticulous breakcore & IDM in with lo-res sound design and noise. As is their wont, there’s a surprising emotive quality to this work.
Next week, the Retrac label run by River Everett, caybee’s other half in Bagel Fanclub, releases their RETRAC 5ELEK double LP, which I will most certainly be spinning for you. I just saw them described as “the furry Planet Mu/Not Not Fun”, which is just too good.

Icarus – Gandalf Speedway [Not Applicable/Bandcamp]
This one’s close to my heart. Icarus is the duo of London cousins Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, who started off in the mid-90s making pitch-perfect Photek-styled drum’n’bass but soon strayed into electro-acoustic experimentation and folktronic deviation. The d’n’b/jungle has never really left, though – it just got weirder and weirder. It’s my fandom of Icarus that led me to meet Ollie when he lived in Naarm/Melbourne, and somewhere between then and Ollie moving to Eora/Sydney we founded Tangents with a few other musicians who all admired each other, and the rest is history. Fortunately, despite the two living on opposite sides of the world, Icarus continues (slowly!), and their new album An Ever​-​growing Meridional Entertainment Transgression At The Edge Of The Multiverse is nearly upon us. It’s everything an Icarus album should be: complex beats referencing jungle & IDM, and mad sonic manipulation. Gird your loins.

Coco Em – Kwa Raha Zangu (Emile Papandréou Remix) [InFiné Music/Bandcamp]
Emma Nzioka is a filmmaker and electronic producer from Nairobi, Kenya, known as Coco Em. Less of a club anthem than some of her other music, her new single “Kwa Raha Zangu” is a more contemplative, downcast song influenced by Lingala music. However, it’s released with a remix by Emile Papandréou that takes it back into the dancefloor (although I can’t find anything out about Emile Papandréou!)

Berke Can Özcan & Jonah Parzen-Johnson – A Cloud [WeJazz/Bandcamp]
Finnish label WeJazz has an unreasonable hit-rate at releasing forward-thinking jazz music crossing genres (and not at all limited to Finland!) Here two innovative musicians find themselves utterly simpatico: Turkish drummer Berke Can Özcan often works with samplers & electronics along with myriad percussion, across Turkish psych-rock, electro-acoustic and pop music as well as jazz; Brooklyn saxophonist Jonah Parzen-Johnson stretches the limits of his saxophone and flute, but also combines these with modular synths. On the recordings that make up It Was Always Time, the electronics are woven into and around the live instruments; it’s all part of the one thing. This is highly intuitive improvisation, with expertise both on acoustic instruments and electronics.

Flock – Meet Your Shadow [Strut/Bandcamp]
Here’s some forward-thinking jazz from the UK. Flock is a supergroup of sorts, including among others composer, percussionist and instrument-maker Bex Burch (whose solo album came out on International Anthem last year), and Sarathy Korwar, whose solo albums have fused jazz and Indian music with political urgency. They’re joined by reeds/woodwinds player Tamar Osborn and two keyboardists: Danalogue and Al Macsween. Electronic music, minimalist composition, krautrock, Afrobeat and more inform the music on their second album Flock II, and one can’t help thinking it would rock live.

Tomin – Life [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
Tomin Perea-Chamblee released a series of solo Bandcamp EPs during the 2020-21 lockdowns, and makes his music work around his day job as a bioinformatician. For his album A Willed and Conscious Balance he’s gathered a full band with keyboards, bass, drums, trumpet and TWO cellists, with Tomin on various reeds, woodwinds, brass and synth. This is lively and expressive music, with room for all the musicians to solo, but also well-thought-out arrangements. There’s something about it that’s very International Anthem-esque.

Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz – Invisible Road [Freedom To Spend/Bandcamp]
Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz – Botehcheen [Freedom To Spend/Bandcamp]
It was sad hearing of the death of composer Richard Horowitz in April this year. A celebrated film composer who’d worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jon Hassell, David Byrne as well as jazz masters, I nevertheless knew him best as the husband and longtime collaborator with the extraordinary vocalist Sussan Deyhim. Although I’d heard Deyhim’s voice in various contexts, it was the seeing Deyhim’s extraordinary vocal performance in the installation of Turbulent by Shirin Neshat in an art museum in Portugal which made me a fan. Two years ago, Crammed Discs reissued Deyhim & Horowitz’s celebrated 1986 album Desert Equations: Azax Attra, combining electronics, traditional Persian music, and the New York avant-garde. Now Freedom To Spend are gifting us a whole missing album from the duo, The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985​–​1990. Like Desert Equations, there are beats and electronic funk here which is very much of its 1980s era, but Deyhim’s multi-tracked vocals transcend any time or place, and much of the electronics and arrangements still impress. At its best, stunning.

Ida Duelund – Odisa [Probably available at Initiated Records/Ida Duelund Bandcamp soon]
In 2022 I discovered the Danish duo Lueenas, featuring Ida Duelund on double bass and Maria Jagd on violin. It turns out Duelund had spent some time studying in Melbourne, but is back in Copenhagen now. Her debut solo album Sibo will be out in January on Initiated Records. Duelund sings and plays bowed double basses and picked acoustic guitar, and is joined by Nils Gröndahl’s detuned violins and Liss Wessberg’s trombone, making for a sound that’s by turns murky and precise, lugubriously avant-garde but jazzy. The second & third tracks are either out now or soon – very slow-moving, otherworldly songs.

Mat Eric Hart – Deuil [Objects & Sounds/Bandcamp]
Supermoon Blues – One Evening [Objects & Sounds/Bandcamp]
When Allie Hatch of Ghent-based store and label Objects & Sounds lost her mother in late 2023, she found her grief was profound, and music was part of what helped her feel a little less alone. She had the idea of inviting creative artists to contribute their own expressions of grief, and Sounds on Grief came together as a book as well as an album. The music on the album is very varied, from the strangely peaceful to the dangerously detached to the heart-pulling. On the peaceful but unsettled end is English sound-artist Mat Eric Hart, blending field recordings with drones and rhythms. Supermoon Blues aka Drea, a poet from Botswana based in Amsterdam, reads an evocative poem about memory & loss over beautifully simple piano and electronically-treated sounds.

Antelope Tapes – Banksia Sequence [Antelope Tapes Bandcamp]
Denmark, WA-based sound-artist Tom Allum has appeared on these airwaves a number of times with his sound-works that draw from the natural and human environment in unexpected ways. He’s one-fifth of the instrumental band Antelope Tapes, who began over a decade ago, but were on pause from 2015 or so until last year. Their new Tivoli EP is strange in a number of ways: its four tracks are intended to be listened to while enjoying Tivoli wine, made by a sister of one of the bandmembers. Each track is spliced together from old recordings found on members’ hard drives, plus new bits. For that reason, it’s a little abstracted from postrock as such, but that suits Utility Fog to a tee. I’m sure you’ll agree.

Driftwood – New Moon [Room40/Bandcamp]
Out soon on Room40 is the self-titled album from Driftwood, a new duo of Naarm/Melbourne musician Aviva Endean and nipaluna/Tasmania’s Nick Ashwood. Both have circled around the free improv scenes involving the likes of Splinter Orchestra and Australian Art Orchestra among others. This is a very intimate album of music based around acoustic instruments – in particular reed organs tuned in just intonation, along with Aviva’s clarinets and Nick’s acoustic guitar. It’s uncanny music because of the tunings, but it’s also striking what a natural musical pairing the two musicians are. The full album’s out in less than 2 weeks.

Deepchild – America [Seppuku Records]
Released by Eora/Sydney’s Deepchild just days before the US election confirmed what we’d hoped would not come to pass, Vows/America is Rick Bull in contemplative, yearning mode. Now it feels like a eulogy.

Rafael Anton Irisarri – Dispersion of Belief [Black Knoll Editions/Rafael Anton Irisarri Bandcamp]
The roots of Rafael Anton Irisarri‘s new album Façadisms came in 2016 as the Trump presidency loomed: a diner in Milan intended to mean “The American Dream” was instead called “Il Mito Americano”, or “The American Myth”. Eight years later, as the façade presented by the American Myth is even closer to collapse, Irisarri’s album is finally released just as Trump is ushered in as President once more, with explicitly fascist intentions. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters. Irisarri offers up a collection of uneasy drone-works, filled with minute detail, worth listening on headphones.

Listen again — ~201MB

Crazy mix of stuff tonight, music that somehow has beats when you wouldn’t expect it, that has no beats when you might expect it, that’s entirely acoustic when you’d think it was processed & edited…

LISTEN AGAIN via the FBi website, or podcast here for the distraction you need.

GAISTER – Source [AD 93/Bandcamp]
GAISTER – Conscious Concentration [AD 93/Bandcamp]
Another week, another astonishing, unexpected release from AD 93. GAISTER is a new trio made up of opera-trained Italo-Australian soprano Olivia Salvadori, drummer Akihide Monna of Bo Ningen and experimental post-r’n’b/grime/everything vocalist Coby Sey. And that hardly gives a hint of what’s found within this self-titled album: all manner of vocal emanations, poetic and rhythmic, operatic and murmured; explosive percussion, krautrocky grooves, slow-crescendoing drones; abstract poetry in three different languages… Music that takes you unawares: the best kind of music.

SPIRIT RADIO – RADIANT [Editions Vaché/Bandcamp]
Tamalyn Miller – These Flowers [Tamalyn Miller Bandcamp]
SPIRIT RADIO – DRUUM [Editions Vaché/Bandcamp]
The project of Stephen Spera & Tamalyn Miller, SPIRIT RADIO really does feel like a transistor radio trying to tune into nearly-departed spirits. The weathered, double-exposed, scratched & smudged photography of Spera is perfectly matched by his aural vision, and Tamalyn Miller adds to the unworldliness with her handmade horsehair fiddle as well as her vocals. A couple of months ago, Miller released a solo album – Ghost Pipe – which is also produced by Spera, but finds her playing an array of handmade and non-handmade instruments, found objects (“bird wing”, “deer bones”, “five-dollar dulcimer” etc) as well. There’s a psychedelic folk underpinning, but filtered through a deeply considered sound-art sensibility, sound as storytelling, sound design as discombobulation… On SPIRIT RADIO’s Distract’d by a Kaleidoscope Salesman, deconstructed sounds crawl and creep around the stereo field, somehow just about coalescing into songs – “RADIANT” in particular is a blissful pop song from another dimension. Engrossingly strange.

DIEMAJIN – MOSHI-MOSHI [Drowned By Locals/Bandcamp]
DIEMAJIN – MIZ-KICAZ-IWAZ [Drowned By Locals/Bandcamp]
You don’t expect anything straightforward from Berlin-based producer DJ DIE SOON (Daisuke Imamura) and Tokyo-based vocalist MA: Imamura’s last release for Jordanian label Drowned By Locals found him creating distorted, fucked-up beats for Tunisian rapper Cheb Terro, who sadly passed away just as the project concluded. MA caught my ear early last year combined with the intricate & bizarre glitch-idm of Polish duo IFS on their IFSMA; on a previous album (Shinkai) he worked with minimalist Italian sound-artist Nicola Ratti. With DIEMAJIN, the duo occasionally venture into some kind of industrial hip-hop, but you’re more likely to hear MA declaiming through horror-movie reverb, DIE SOON generating subspace pings or overdriven bass throbs. This degraded, uncompromising music fits in perfectly with DBL’s aesthetic, summed up in their Bandcamp bio as “The raw, unprocessed voice of the barbarians, bandits, marginalized, homeless, and savages, but the delicate at heart”.

Saba Alizadeh – Temple of Hope [30M Records/Bandcamp]
Iranian musician Saba Alizadeh is a master of the kamancheh, a Persian stringed instrument. But his works on Berlin label Karlrecords (Scattered Memories) and Hamburg-based 30M Records (2021’s I May Never See You Again) bring the music and his instrument into a contemporary setting, with stunning sound design – electronics, drones and at times beats. On January 17th next year, 30M will release Temple Of Hope – an audacious theme in extremely dark times. He takes inspiration from the “Woman Life Freedom” movement, incorporating field recordings of crowds and historical radio broadcasts alongside his beautiful instrument, and these human elements are made both alien and more poignant through electronic processing, even alongside bursts of no-input mixer noise. One of the most-antipicated albums of 2025, already!

Colin Stetson – Deceit [Milan Records]
Colin Stetson – Hey! Are you trying to escape?! [Milan Records]
Two soundtracks from virtuoso saxophonist Colin Stetson have recently come out, in the horror genre that Stetson has become synonymous with. Hold Your Breath is a psychological horror movie, and Uzumaki is an anime series based on the cult manga by Junji Ito. Both feature Stetson’s multiphonics, recorded so closely that it sounds like industrial electronics, complete with clicking beats and distorted low-end surges. There does seem to be some multi-tracking too, but only where necessary. They’re both released on Milan Records, the long-established soundtrack label, and the former seems digital-only, but Uzumaki has a handsome vinyl edition too. Soundtrack cues though they are, much the material on these releases is as exciting as Stetson’s studio albums, so don’t skip them!

Atsushi Izumi – Refractive Index [OPAL/Bandcamp]
While his last album, Schismogenesis, was released this May on the venerable Ohm Resistance, I first discovered Atsushi Izumi with his amazing Houzan Archives album on OPAL (formerly Opal Tapes) a couple of years back. It came as no surprise that he’d previously made snarly, techy d’n’b as Anode, but under his own name he branches out into industrial dub, bass-heavy techno and plenty of mind-boggling syncopation, if not actual drum’n’bass. His second album of 2024, Observable, is back on OPAL, offering crushing industrial techno with boomning, shuddering bass and clattering beats. Submit.

Monologue – 015244 Drama Phone [Rua Sound]
Jungle/drum’n’bass producers Earl Grey (Jim Ehlinger) and Aroma Nice (Luke Fashoni) have appeared together or collaborated for a long time, but I didn’t realise that their duo project Monologue has been going for over 10 years. On Earl Grey’s Hyperchamber Music, they released a two-track single in 2013. Nine years later their first EP proper came out on YUKU, and you can hear the YUKU experimental bass fingerprints on this more recent music. Keano Traxx follows now, on Irish label Rua Sound, with heaps of rhythmic invention and syncopating breaks, whether it’s accompanying bounding acid basslines or dubwise head-nodders. Great stuff as always.

Christoph de Babalon – Total Deceit [Sneaker Social Club/Bandcamp]
A sneak peek at the second track from Christoph de Babalon‘s new EP coming on the mighty Sneaker Social Club on November 22nd. The No Favours is vintage Christoph de Babalon, who originated in the proto-breakcore of DHR aka Digital Hardcore Records, Berlin’s early response to hearing hardcore techno and jungle from the UK in the mid-’90s. So, as the label perhaps over-emphasises, de Babalon’s music is never straightforward dancefloor music, whether jungle or breakcore, or sometimes slower-tempo breaks (his real name’s Jan-Christoph Wolter, so it’s a bit weird referring to his nom de plume by surname). There are always dark undertones, uneasy ambient interludes, tape-degraded movie soundtrack vibes… Regardless, it’s nice hearing him on one of the foremost hardcore/jungle labels around, and it’s heavy and full of brilliant drum programming.

Simo Cell – Jesus Suave [Lapsus/Bandcamp]
Wordcolour – Weightless [Lapsus/Bandcamp]
The Lapsus label has been run by Albert Salinas Claret out of Barcelona for 20 years now, and is celebrating with the superlative compilation Vint (which is Catalan for “twenty”). It’s a stacked line-up, with the likes of µ-Ziq, Plaid, Kettel and others from the IDM world, as well as new age synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani and many others. Tonight I played a great near-d’n’b piece from the excellent French beatmaker Simo Cell, and a typically revolutionary piece of jungle/new-age invention from the brilliant Wordcolour.

MJ Noble – Pay The Price (ft. Chemistry MC) [Doom Trip Records/Bandcamp]
Sticking with jungle, I love how LA singer/producer/musician MJ Noble merges drum’n’bass & jungle with her brand of dreampop. Her latest single follows two Halloween-themed cover songs which you should check out too, but here she enlists LA drum’n’bass MC Chemistry MC to push up the pressure.

Riddla – Be Like [DRMTRK/Bandcamp]
Bridging the gap between contemporary African music and grime is Riddla, a musician of Ghanaian descent born in Germany and now based in Nottingham. He’s been working with various South African musicians on his productions. On the latest single “Trumpets” it’s Zulu “mother of Afrorave” Toya Delazy but, great through that track is, I really like Riddla’s own vocals on the b-side “Be Like”.

Serengeti & Jenny Lewis – WTCH [serengetiraps Bandcamp]
Chicago’s Serengeti is not, I guess, Tanzanian, but he (real name David Cohn) is both black and Jewish. His Kenny Dennis character, a middle-aged schlub, is a masterpiece of deadpan comedy, but I’m always somewhat relieved when it’s Geti himself on the mic. At some point lately he’s started collaborating with ex-Rilo Kiley singer Jenny Lewis – perhaps surprising, but he’s also worked a lot with Sufjan Stevens after all! “WTCH” comes all sultry trip-hop with Geti’s murmured raps, and the chopped & looped sounds of Lewis’s voice and guitar. We deserve more than a track snuck out here & there – and there’s now a WTCH “Bonus Track Edition” with their other collabs, with vinyl on its way.

The Future Sound of London – Leafy Suburbs [FSOLdigital Bandcamp]
Here’s a band I’ve been a fan of for decades. I don’t seem to have played The Future Sound of London a lot over the last few years, and maybe what sounded truly “futuristic” in the early-to-mid ’90s is now somewhat more “of its time”, but they started as heroes of rave and acid, and their slightly IDM-ish, breakbeat rave beats are kind of suited to the current times. They’re also masters of mixing their electronics with multifarious samples: the opening track of their new Captures EP (which seems to be preceding an Environments 8 album coming early next year) layers choral vocals in a vaguely disquieting way until the acid synths come in. “Leafy Suburbs” sets peaceful guitars against fidgety beats.

Lechuga Zafiro – Agua de Vidrio [TraTraTrax/Bandcamp]
It’s likely you won’t hear anything quite like Lechuga Zafiro‘s Desde los o​í​dos de un sapo this week. The Uruguayan producer’s album translates as “From the ears of a toad”, and this is amphibious music from South America. Zafiro creatively samples from across the animal, vegetable and mineral realms, and creates rhythms and melodies from them – rhythms of latin music and club music, splashing and squishing, clopping and clunking. Pretty amazing stuff.

Red Snapper ft. David Harrow – Hold My Hand Up [Lo Recordings/Bandcamp]
David Harrow was a key member of the On-U Sound System in the ’80s and ’90s, alongside Adrian Sherwood & co, but his musical interests & talents are broad – from his drum’n’bass as James Hardway to his early postpunk/new wave beginnings with Anne Clark, rave/techno with Andrew Weatherall as Bloodsugar, and of course, dub with Jah Wobble as well as On-U Sound. He recently put out a lovely single (with many remixes) with the gravel-voiced chanteuse Little Annie (a reunion decades after her involvement with On-U Sound), and here he is collaborating with UK trip-hop/jazz fusionists Red Snapper. While we’re here, enjoy this Red Snapper classic remixed by Weatherall’s Sabres of Paradise in the mid-’90s… Anyway, the first cab off the rank from this collaborative EP is very much dubwise music, with a flowing drum rhythm, liquid bassline and melodica melody, but the vocal and the switch-up with the drums in the middle leans more into a psychedelic indie rock vibe. It all feels totally natural, and it could easily be from anytime in the ’90s or early ’00s.

Luke Wyland – Pitch & Bowed [Balmat/Bandcamp]
So, in re Lapsus above, Balmat is a label co-run by Lapsus’ Albert Salinas Claret with the great music writer Philip Sherburne (whose Substack Futurism Restated is highly recommended). Its focus tends to be less beat-oriented than Lapsus, and more experimental. In any case, I’m really pleased that they’ve gotten Luke Wyland to put out an album with them. I loved his avant-pop/indie/electronic band AU many years back, and then his solo album as LWW released by The Leaf Label in 2018. More recently, he formed the duo Methods Body with drummer John Niekrasz, which I highly recommend. And now, a proper solo album under his own name, Kuma Cove. Like most of his work, this is electro-acoustic music: piano cradled in – and dissolving in – billowing clouds of granular processing, or caught in sonic amber, around which stumbling percussion and nebulous vocals might wash. It’s named after a real place in Oregon (Wyland is from Portland, OR) and it does feel like a cove: enveloping, somehow comforting. It’s all performed live through Ableton patches he’s been perfecting for years. It’s so lovely.

Santpoort – Marine Snow [College Music Records/Bandcamp]
Dutch musician, now based here in Eora/Sydney, Julien Mier, makes music that could be called electro-acoustic, or sometimes folktronic. I knew him from before he came here as someone on the outskirts of IDM, but now he makes very pretty stuff with a mixture of live instruments and electronics, and field recordings. This particular track comes from a compilation from College Music Records called PhonoSynthesis, so… electro-organic? The compilation also features Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Prefuse 73 and more.

Beatrice Dillon – Seven Reorganisations I (live) [Hi (Beatrice Dillon)]
The 2020 album Workaround by Beatrice Dillon is one of those perfect works that we have the rare privilege of encountering now and then. That album was based around rhythm – a set of 10 tracks at 150bpm, in a kind of spacious minimal house fashion, with acoustic instruments (and some electronics) from her and many guests. Seven Reorganisations is a very different affair. Although it was commissioned by arch-minimal-beatmaker Mark Fell, it’s a pair compositions for Explore Ensemble, made up of piano, bass flute, bass clarinet, violin, viola and cello. Very interestingly, two versions of each piece are provided: one pair recorded in a studio, with close-mic’d instruments subtly edited by Dillon, and one pair performed live. In contrast to Workaround‘s rhythmic focus, the focus here is on tone and timbre, microtuned oscillations and space. It’s not at all clear that there’s any electronic intervention in the studio recordings, which are composed with a certain amount of choice for the performers. But for me, the live recordings resonate and ring out more warmly.

Cedie Janson – the river (a doorway) [Cedie Janson Bandcamp]
Well look, I only played Cedie a couple of weeks ago, so here’s an adapted version of what I said then:
A decade ago or more, a great experimental rock band from Brisbane called Naked Maja put out a few cool releases. Sometime later, the band’s Cedie Janson started sending me his solo music, mostly electronic music, some skittery beats. His music has evolved in various directions since then – he’s now based in LA, and has been working on film soundtracks as well – and so we come to his 2024 output. For the ambient lovers, I recommend the EP stitched together with magnetic tape, made of grainy, wobbly tape loops. Following that, the lovers single preceded the album the river, which is out now. The tape loop EP isn’t exactly a red herring: the album is more song-oriented, but also very soundscapey, with murmured spoken words as much as soft singing, and if there are some sparse beats there are also washes of wind-like drones. It would be blissful but it’s also slightly disquieting – just the right mix!

IKSRE – Tall Roads (Shelf Nunny Remix) [Hush Hush Records/Bandcamp]
Naarm/Melbourne’s Phoebe Dubar is a violist and singer, and as IKSRE she’s spent the last 5 years quietly building a following for her ambient vocal layering with viola, electronics, field recordings and subtle beats. So she’s now celebrating her album Unfurl from 2019 with a reissue along with remixes, Unfurl/Refurl. It’s released by the Seattle ambient(ish) label Hush Hush Records, so as well as Aussies like Zoltan Fecso, there are remixes from Seattle artists and other North Americans. Shelf Nunny, from Seattle, reshapes swirling grains of Dubar’s vocals with piano and bass, crescendoing grandly and then bubbling away again.

Bonniesongs – Halloween Birthday [Bonniesongs Bandcamp]
And since it just turned November (and ignoring, for now, the real horrors that descended upon the world a couple of days into the month), the wonderful Bonniesongs aka Bonnie Stewart – drummer, improviser, guitarist and singer-songwriter – has released the first track from new recordings that should appear as a new album early in 2025. She loves a bit of a horror-movie-inspired character study, and this one’s a sweet (and ever so slightly creepy) song about a friend of hers whose birthday is on Halloween.

Listen again — ~207MB

Experimental sounds abound, wrong-song to maltreated beats, un-classical to dis-cordian.

LISTEN AGAIN and nourish your soul. Stream on demand via FBi, podcast here.

YATTA – MTV [PTP/Bandcamp]
YATTA – Circle [PTP/Bandcamp]
Last year, Sierra Leonean-American musician YATTA, who I’ve been a fan of since around 2019’s WAHALA, dropped a single track on their Bandcamp, “Fully Lost, Fully Found“. A staggering piece of layered vocals and electronic processing, I loved it a lot, and it appeared in the DJ mix I did for Absorb. Finally now, 5 years since WAHALA and 4 years since their collab with Moor Mother, Dial Up, YATTA has released a new full length, PALM WINE, and that song is on there. Central is YATTA’s beautiful voice, but there’s a lot of variety in the production, with various collaborators throughout. Some tracks have a distinctly West African flavour – the album title refers to both the drink and the musical genre that was the precursor to highlife and soukous. On opener “Circle”, YATTA enlists producer/engineer Myles Avery on a piece that’s sparingly made up of shuffling low-end sounds, mid-range synths and heaps of vocals. Meanwhile the exhilarating pop of “MTV” brings a host of collaborators: So Drove, album executive producer Carlos Hernandez and engineer Maxime Morin. Excellent stuff.

Emma Anderson – Taste The Air (Julia Holter Mix) [Sonic Cathedral/Bandcamp]
Emma Anderson – Bend The Round (The Orielles Blend The Round Mix) [Sonic Cathedral/Bandcamp]
Lush – especially their earlier EPs and first two albums – were among my favourite of the ’90s female-fronted 4AD bands, drawing from shoegaze and heading towards pop. Both Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson wrote songs, and I love them both equally, but some of the most pop were Anderson’s – see “Lovelife” for instance. Anderson formed a band called Sing-Sing that also featured Mark Van Hoen, but it was only last year that she released a solo album – the very Lush-like Pearlies. But perhaps more relevant for Utility Fog is the remixed album Spiralée – Pearlies Rearranged. The reworkings range from straightforward versions with some extra production to a few radical reworkings. Julia Holter arranges “Taste The Air” into something you’d find on one of her own albums – acoustic instrumentation and odd structures, it’s a delight. So is the new blend of “Bend The Round” from The Orielles, an indiepop group who radically reworked themselves last year, and here take Anderson’s song from trip-hop into lovely jungle a la Mono. I also want to note the pulsating krautrock from Mexican duo Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, whose Lorena Quintanilla will be heard later tonight.

Underworld – Ottavia feat. Esme Bronwen-Smith [Smith Hyde Productions/Official Store]
Last year, Underworld dropped the incredible “denver luna acapella” with no forewarning, an incredible piece of work highlighting Karl Hyde’s vocals traced by sparkling vocoded electronics. The acapella sits beautifully within the techno journey that is the full song, and surprisingly both versions appear on the now highly-anticipated Strawberry Hotel. Does the album live up to that expectation? I think so – it’s certainly their best in many years. A couple of collaborations shine: a surprising appearance from Nina Nastasia, and the expressive spoken word of Esme Bronwen-Smith, a classically-trained mezzo-soprano who happens to be Rick Smith’s daughter. Here she speaks from the point of view of Claudia Octavia, wife of Nero. I believe her words are loosely based on Monteverdi’s L’incorazione di Poppea. Bronwen-Smith is credited as co-producer on the album, bringing a bit of intergenerational creativity to the proceedings.
Speaking of, it’s also notable that Karl Hyde’s daughter Tyler Hyde is in Black Country, New Road. Being a nepo-baby certainly brings opportunities others lack, but talent also runs in families.

Circuit Des Yeux – God Dick [Matador/Bandcamp]
Haley Fohr’s Circuit Des Yeux has always been an experimental endeavour, even before she developed her astonishing vocal range. God Dick is a single track that bridges between her last album, -io, and whatever is coming in 2025. It’s Haley Fohr at her most Scott Walker yet – lush and disquieting.

aquaserge – N.I.O New Information Order [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
Every release from French experimental pop band aquaserge is different, but this two-track EP follows closely from this May’s album La fin de l’economie and shares its anti-capitalist theme. The title track is a cover of the sainted Robert Wyatt, from his 1991 album Dondestan. The original features his patented unmodulated synth sounds, and sparse drums and bass, underlining his angelic falsetto. Aquaserge rather gorgeously reproduce the arrangement, but with winds & horns and slightly more jazzy drums, and the delivery of the vocals – adapted in French for the current era – is equally touching. The cover is accompanied by an original that cements the band’s debt to Wyatt in arrangements and harmonies.

Brad Stafford – Burning Sun [Feral Media/Bandcamp]
In the mid-’00s, a duo called The Longest Day released a few albums through Eora/Sydney label Feral Media – here’s the first. The shoegazey indie and spacerock of that band is continued, but in a more electronic fashion, on Brad Stafford‘s The Imperfect City. Here warm synths redolent of Boards of Canada meet soft drum machines and often-buried vocals. It’s lovely, nostalgic stuff.

Moin – We Know What Gives (feat. Coby Sey) [AD 93/Bandcamp]
The various releases by Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead as Raime combined a love of breakbeat/jungle with jagged postpunk riffs. Moin finds them officially joined with percussionist Valentina Magaletti, who contributed drums to many of the Raime releases. Moin bumped up the ersatz postpunk thing, foregrounding guitar riffs and Magletti’s taut rhythms, embellished with Raime’s characteristic sampled vocal jabs. For new album You Never End, they’ve invited singers to guest on about half the tracks, moving further from mechanised, sampled material into a full band. Here, the unassuming voice of Coby Sey is set at odds with the lumbering drums and distorted guitars, but those vocal jabs still shoulder their way in.

kelly moran – Superhuman (Loraine James & Fyn Dobson Remix) [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Early this year, pianist Kelly Moran released her 2nd album for Warp, Moves in the Field, pitting her piano against programmed sequences on a Yamaha Disclavier. Here, her music is further chopped and rearranged by Loraine James, with intoxicating beats from young drummer Fyn Dobson, who’s been performing with James lately. Love this.

Rutger Zuydervelt – Rafting [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Dutch sound-artist Rutger Zuydervelt, better known as Machinefabriek, continues his forays into rhythm with another composition for dance/circus duo Marta & Kim, joined by additional circus performers Felix Zech and Knot on Hands. The fluid movements of the Meander performance are echoed in Zuydervelt’s score (“soundtrack”?): on the opening track it’s motorik beats and marimba-like synths pattering along. There’s plenty of Zuydervelt’s patented sound design here as well.

LTO – Bolt [Denovali, on Bandcamp soon]
One of the members of the mysterious (post-)dubstep crew Old Apparatus, active from around 2010-2013, LTO continues to preserve the mystery – as far as I know, his real name’s not known, but he’s from Bristol. After a handful of fairly underground solo releases, LTO released two very soundtracky albums for the fairly wide-ranging, postrock/post-classical leaning European label Denovali. They’re both lovely (check Déja Rêvé and Daear), but only preserve hints of dubsteppy bass. So it’s cool to hear the first single, “Bolt”, from a new LTO album, The Return, that’s apparently on its way. We’re absolutely in cinematic territory here, but we’ve got a shambling rhythm with diving bass swoops and clattering off-beats, and synth pads that are eventually joined by a (probably synthetic) trumpet melody. Bodes well!

Loop Year – Memory Guests [Loop Year Bandcamp]
Just recently, Adelaide’s Cailan Burns, one half of beloved Australian idm/indietronic band Pretty Boy Crossover with Jason Sweeney, has quietly started putting out ambient/idm music under the name Loop Year. There’ve been a few singles, and now there’s a four-track EP, Memory Guests, inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (echoing the Meemo Comma album released a few weeks ago!) Four tracks of slightly melancholic, shoegazey electronica for your pleasure.

FOUDRE! – Cybernetic Reset [NAHAL Recordings/Bandcamp]
(Adapted from when I played a preview track from this album:) The first self-titled album from French postrock/krautrock/psych band Oiseaux-Tempête in 2013 was a revelation. I suspect I found it after the brilliant 2014 remix album, but I was a firm fan from there on. In the interim I discovered many other projects of Frédéric D. Oberland, many of which I’ve played here. One of those is FOUDRE!, a trio of fellow travellers, based around modular & analogue synths, other keyboards, electronic and physical percussion, effects and vocals. Like Oiseaux-Tempête and related groups, the influence of the MENA region is strong in the music. Along with Oberland, the group features Paul Régimbeau aka Mondkopf, who’s been a member of Oisexau-Tempête at times, and Romain Barbot aka the prolific Saåad, both of whom were present on that remix album back when. Voltæ (Chthulucene) might be the most exciting work from these collected artists for some time, driven by percussion and programmed beats, drenched in psychedelic synths and further energised by north-African and Middle Eastern melodies and samples.
There really are surprising nods to the club here, or the more experimental, deconstructed end thereof. I’m pretty sure UFog listeners will love this.

ESTHER – DFAM [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Audrey Amsellem DJs as ESTHER and runs her own label, Doum Records. After a couple of great EPs on Flore‘s POLAAR label, she now finds her way to YUKU, where her Hungry Claws EP fits the label to a tee – gnarly, snarly bass music, glitchy jitters.

re:ni – PLAYPLAX [re:lax/Bandcamp]
Thousand Yard Stare is the second EP of 2024 from UK DJ Lauren Bush aka re:ni, following Beautysick, released on Timedance. This one’s on re:lax, which she co-runs with Laksa. “Electro” is namechecked as a genre, and it feels a bit too syncopated for that, to me, but even at its slowest it’s too energetic to be dubstep (the BPMs sit around 140-150). It’s fun club stuff with rhythmic smarts and plenty of bass.

TARP – PART [TARP Bandcamp]
Dentaljams + Ezroh are names I’ve vaguely heard from Kaurna/Adelaide’s electronic underground (let’s pretend there is one), and here they’ve officially teamed up under the name TARP. Noting the 666 in their Bandcamp URL and their penchant for heavy black & white imagery: this is industrial techno with a hefty helping of noise. The 16 tracks on TARP I – released simultaneously with the TARP II EP – contains 16 tracks of pummelling noise and randomised kick drums, while the TARP II EP is four tracks of somewhat more digestible industrial techno. A barrage I can appreciate. Submit.

In Spite of Dreams – Tesrec [Misanthropic Agenda/Bandcamp]
Gerritt Wittmer runs noise label Misanthropic Agenda, who’ve released the likes of Boris, Merzbow, Yellow Swans, John Wiese and also more minimalist sound-arty stuff like Giuseppe Ielasi. In Spite of Dreams is a new project from him, labelled as industrial hip-hop (actually “destroyed industrial hip-hop”), and the music on subject:empty may lean more on the “destroyed” than the “hip-hop”, but there are stretched and destroyed vocals as well as crunching beats and delicious bass rumbles. Recommended.

J. Zunz – Four Women and Darkness (Petbrick Remix) [Rocket Recordings/Bandcamp]
Mexican musician Lorena Quintanilla is J. Zunz, under which name she’s released three albums – two on Rocket Recordings. She has just now released a very good remix EP, Re:Volver, with four very different reworkings of her own very fine work. There’s techno and ambient-leaning stuff, and then there’s the mighty Petbrick, the duo of ex-Sepultura drummer (and Soulwax member) Igor Cavalera and Bear Bites Horse studio owner and Big Lad member Wayne Adams. Their noise rock verges on metal but also experimental electronics, and given Adams’ previous life making breakcore as Ladyscraper, it’s not too surprising to hear them in drill’n’bass mode on this remix.
As I mentioned earlier, Quintanilla is also one half of Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, who simultaneously released their own remix EP Remezcla, which I discovered too late for this episode.

John Roberts – Swan [Brunette Editions/Bandcamp]
John Roberts – Lens [Brunette Editions/Bandcamp]
A true deep house original, released on the storied Dial Records, John Roberts has also incorporated piano in his work since the start – as heard on the genius 2010 album Glass Eights. Of late, he’s drifted away from the dancefloor, so the beats on the short album Swan are quite abstracted if there at all. The piano, too, is often subjected to granular processing, but also appears in the clear, with expressive melodic lines. This is really beautiful, essential listening.

Dean Spunt – Confusion Is SysEx [Drag City/Bandcamp]
Dean Spunt – Find Me in the Forums [Drag City/Bandcamp]
As one half of No Age, Dean Spunt‘s made some clamorous noise, and as boss of Post Present Medium he’s released a lot of noise, postpunk and weirdo rock of all sorts. Solo, he can be found making strange cut-ups, primitive punk-noise and lo-fi electronics, and following a collab with veteran noisemaker John Wiese last year called The Echoing Shell, his first solo release for Drag City is out now. Basic Editions is no less experimental than anything else he’s done, but it can be strangely (if woozily) listenable. East listening samples, new agey synths and synth-percussion can float through the mix as much as shards of digital distortion. Even at its most droney, it’s the sound of computers malfunctioning, ambient music gone rotten. In other words: excellent.

Julia Sabra – Hands [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Julia Sabra – Minor Detail [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Two weeks ago I played some beautiful, moving music from Beirut duo Snakeskin, made up of Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal. I spoke then of the destruction being wrought on southern Lebanon and Beirut by Israel, and nothing much has changed on that front, sadly, with the ancient city of Tyre now under bombardment. As far as I know, Sabra and Tabbal continue to support a fundraiser via Tabbal’s Tunefork Studios along with Beirut Synthesizer Centre to help displaced families in Lebanon. Not long after the Snakeskin album, Ruptured Records are now releasing a solo album of Julia Sabra‘s, consisting of intensely raw demo recordings of songs she’s written between 2020 and 2024, many of them deeply personal. You can hear that emotional vulnerability in these recordings, voice accompanied by acoustic guitar and occasionally piano. Only the last track deviates from the acoustic instruments, with synth lines snaking around Sabra’s voice.

Yara Asmar – i am a terrible mathematician (and an even worse clown) [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Simultaneously with Sabra’s album, Ruptured are also releasing a new album from filmmaker, puppeteer, accordionist and sound-artist Yara Asmar. Stuttering Music follows Home Recordings 2018-2021 and synth waltzes and accordion laments, which have also just been re-released by UK label Hive Mind Recordings as a handsome double vinyl set. In any case, Stuttering Music again centres on Asmar’s accordion laments – and metallophone – processed into cathedrals of reverb. Aching music for hard times.

Cedie Janson – love goes on (go-betweens cover) [Cedie Janson Bandcamp]
A decade ago or more, a great experimental rock band from Brisbane called Naked Maja put out a few cool releases. Sometime later, the band’s Cedie Janson started sending me his solo music, mostly electronic music, some skittery beats. His music has evolved in various directions since then – he’s now based in LA, and has been working on film soundtracks as well – and so we come to his 2024 output. For the ambient lovers, I recommend the EP stitched together with magnetic tape, made of grainy, wobble tape loops. An album, the river, is on its way, and the first single is lovers. The tape loop EP isn’t exactly a red herring: the album’s more song-oriented, but also very soundscapey, with murmured spoken words as much as soft singing, and if there are some sparse beats there are also washes of wind-like drones. So when the lovers single features a cover of a classic Go-Betweens song, the jangles are replaced with stretched-out pads, until about halfway through the song, the beats pick up and more instrumentation joins. It’s quite touching.

Listen again — ~206MB

Your weekly mix of experimental electronics, weird fusions, twisted acoustics and more.

LISTEN AGAIN and rise from the murk. Stream on demand at fbi.radio, podcast here.

Third Eye – Terminal 283 [Regular Records]
This week brought the sad news that legendary Australian musician Ollie Olsen has passed away, after suffering for some years with an advancing neurological disease called multiple system atrophy. Olsen’s musical journey began with the Melbourne punk scene in the ’70s, starting with the Young Charlatans, which he formed with Rowland S Howard before he was in The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, Jeffrey Wegener before his long association with Ed Kuepper through The Saints, Laughing Clowns and Ed solo (he was also briefly in The Birthday Party), and Janine Hall before she too played with The Saints. After this, Olsen’s band Whirlywirld pioneered the use of synths and electronics in postpunk, again with many people who continued on to other important Australian acts. Further down the line there was the amazing, abrasive industrial Orchestra of Skin and Bone, and some of the songs from that project were remade when Ollie and various associates formed Max Q with Michael Hutchence (the two had met when Olsen scored the film Dogs In Space, Richard Lowenstein’s film set in Melbourne’s postpunk scene in the late ’70s). The track I played tonight is from Olsen’s first album as Third Eye, which made a huge impression on me in 1991 with its psychedelic, ravey electronics. It’s a kind of bridge from Olsen’s postpunk and new age synth pop into his psy-trance, techno and ambient stuff for which he became quite legendary, especially his work as Shaolin Wooden Men and the Psy-Harmonics label. You can find some of Olsen’s trancey techno and ambient stuff on Bandcamp.

Viiaan – How To Heal (Dub Version) [SUMAC/Bandcamp]
Released on the SUMAC label run by DJ Plead, T. Morimoto and Jon Watts, is an excellent EP of percussive techno with hints of jungle and plenty of dub from New York-based producer Viiaan. There’s a great Cassius Select remix, but Viiaan’s own dubs are also excellent and I’m keen to check out some of her other stuff.

Barking – Our Vices [XCPT/Bandcamp]
Barking – Savigny [XCPT/Bandcamp]
Naarm/Melbourne musician Gareth Psaltis was one half of the postpunk/industrial/techno duo phile, who released one self-titled EP in 2017. His first EP as Barking, Prone, came out the following year, with a mix of industrial harshness and techno precision which continues today. Gareth has been based in Berlin for a while, and his latest album Asylum is released on Italian label XCPT, featuring crunching beats and dark & deadly hardware synths.

Harrison Rae – I Burnt the Butter Again [Midheaven/Bandcamp]
Here’s a rare new EP from Sydney experimentalist Harrison Rae, sometimes known as Beau Ambien or Henri O. R. Asar, and also founder of the Club Moss label, releasing the likes of mara and Bluetung (now Glen Rey.). Harrison’s music runs the gamut from ambient to jungle, and on this EP there’s ambient keyboard odysseys, and there’s some kind of shoegazey trip-hop and there’s crunching beats (the much-sampled break from Led Zep’s “When The Levee Breaks” gets a workout) – all demanding repeated listens.

ZULI – Bathyal [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
xin – On Stone [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
James Ginzburg formed Subtext Recordings in 2004, at the time with Rob Ellis aka Pinch, and after a period of dormancy the label got going properly in about 2011 with an album from Ginzburg’s minimalist techno/noise duo emptyset and a solo album from Roly Porter, who’d previously been one half of industrial dubstep pioneers Vex’d. But because of that early beginning, Subtext are now celebrating their 20th anniversary with a compilation alongside a fiction anthology of the same name, Cybernetics, or Ghosts? The name is taken from an Italo Calvino lecture/essay called “Cybernetics and Ghosts” in which he imagines a future where writing has been solved computationally: what, in that future, is the role of the author? This is particularly prescient in the present moment, and I’m looking forward to the stories, taken from a global group of contributors, which I imagine will offer a new take on cyberpunk. The compilation covers the wide spread of Subtext’s interests, including the electroacoustic sound-art of Başak Günak, the abstract field recording processing of Rắn Cạp Đuôi, African sound-artists KMRU & Aho Ssan and more. Tonight we heard some melodic electronica from Cairo’s ZULI, and the jittery dub techno of xin.

Etch – Clockwork Romance [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
Munich techno label Ilian Tape keep surprising me with the stuff they release, which is silly because they’ve released drum’n’bass from the likes of Forest Drive West and DJ Mantra, and longtime artists like Skee Mask and Andrea often veer into drum’n’bass and other bass music influences. So here we’ve got Brighton bass music explorer Etch, with four tracks and none of them the same. I was pleased that the last track is something like jungle, lovely breakbeaty stuff.

Low End Activist – Self Destruction [Sneaker Social Club/Bandcamp]
Low End Activist – Hope III (Interlude) [Sneaker Social Club/Bandcamp]
Jamie Russell appears on these airwaves quite a lot, courtesy of various of his projects, plus his various labels including the brilliant Sneaker Social Club, BRUK, and indeed Hypercolour. I always tend to point at the Cellular Housekeeping album he released under the Patrick Conway moniker, but his Low End Activist project always brings the goods. It’s all about that “low end”, sub-bass, but it’s also always been an “activist” project, evoking not just his rave roots but also the UK’s class divide. Municipal Dreams is his second album of the year after Airdrop, and this one’s chronicling what it was like growing up in the Blackbird Leys council estate outside of Oxford. This is LEA in weightless mode, which means ambient interludes pulsing with bass pressure, and grime/garage/jungle-influenced beats wafting in & out. Of course it’s very, very good.

Christopher Chaplin – Nineveh [Fabrique Records/Bandcamp]
British composer Christopher Chaplin‘s music works contemporary classical into experimental, post-industrial and krautrock-influenced spaces. His latest EP Door 1 Door 2 explores how myths are part of collective memory, featuring a few guest vocalists. On this track, the bass singer is Tassos Apostolou, but the classical elements that his voice hooks into are interrupted and subsumed under almost industrial, glitchy electronics. Just what we like here at UFog Towers.

Giridhar Udupa – Chakra – The Wheel (Edit) [7K!/Bandcamp]
Surprisingly coming out on 7K!, the classical/ambient part of the multiplicitous !K7 empire, is the album from Ghatam expert Giridhar Udupa, entitled My Name Is Giridhar Udupa – as indeed it is! The Ghatam is a fascinating instrument, basically a clay pot that’s played as a percussion instrument. As you can hear from the vocal rhythms in this track, it seems to produce as much range as the tabla, but this is from the South Indian Carnatic musical tradition. On this album, Udupa has centred the Ghatam, but he’s also recruited Sam Shackleton to bring electronic interventions which subtly support his instrument – so subtly you don’t realise they’re there… until you do. I’m looking forward to the rest of this.

Julián Mayorga – El dia en que el Tolima se hundio hasta el fondo del mar [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
“The day Tolima sank to the bottom of the sea” is how this song’s title translates from Spanish, in which Julián Mayorga is rather gleefully imagining his hometown under the waves. Mayorga takes Colombian cumbia into the future, or some kind of future anyway, with bizarre samples and creative guitar playing. Another album to look forward to soon, and thanks to Glitterbeat for unceasingly bringing weird music from around the world.

Black Pus – So Deep [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
A couple of months back I played something from Brian Gibson, bassist from Lightning Bolt. The other half, Brian Chippendale, is an incendiary drummer, so of course his solo work as Black Pus is driven by relentless rhythm as much as anything else – but the anything else is distorted riffage and even-more-distorted vocals. “So Deep” is comparatively slower, with downwards-sliding basslines and chaotically-sliding guitar noise, but mostly drums that are mostly neverending drum fills, and those nearly incomprehensible vocals.

Chat Pile – Camcorder [The Flenser/Bandcamp]
While Lightning Bolt might be considered metal/punk/noise as pure fun, Oklahoma’s Chat Pile represent the equal and opposite side, sludge/doom/hardcore with its politics up front and centre, whether deconstructing masculinity or – always – raging at this world created by rampant capitalism. There’s a sense of loss, almost – but not quite – of hopelessness to a lot of this, but also, yes, rage. I love this song, but “Masc” must win best video of the year.

Jabu – Oceanside Spider House [do you have peace?]
Jabu – Sea Mills ft. Birthmark & Lorenzo Prati [do you have peace?]
I have at times struggled with Jabu, despite their connection to the post-dubstep Bristol scene as all three have been part of Young Echo in various forms. Thankfully A Soft and Gatherable Star, released on their do you have peace? label, draws me in from the start. A collection of melancholy songs co-written by the three members – Jasmine Butt, Alex Rendall & Amos Childs – and with a title taken from a poem by Childs’ father, the album flows like a dubbed-out Cocteau Twins, strongly postpunk, but swept up in an ambient wave. It’s a strong aesthetic, but it seems to hang together more solidly than the earlier Jabu works. Mad props.

Mariam The Believer – Highest Peak [Repeat Until Death/Bandcamp]
I’ve been a signed-up Mariam Wallentin fan since her work with husband Andreas Werliin as Wildbirds & Peacedrums, and even moreso since her incredible vocal contributions to the Fire! Orchestra albums. But in her solo work as Mariam The Believer, the free jazz and other experimental elements are used in service of pop songs, beautifully crafted by Wallentin and collaborators from the Swedish experimental scene and further afield. Her third album Breathing Techniques draws from kundalini practices, and calls on some of music’s most creative women as influences: Alice Coltrane, Meredith Monk, Stina Nordenstam, Sheila Chandra and Gal Costa are all namechecked in the album’s promo materials, and only a musician and singer as accomplished as Wallentin could carry that off. When reading up on this album I noted that among the great musicians performing here is Swedish pianist Johan Graden, whose astonishing album with Ellen Arkbro from 2022, I get along without you very well, is close to my heart. There’s something of the fragile beauty of that album in the closing track of Marian The Believer’s album, “Highest Peak”.

Midget! – Qui parle ombre [Objet Disque/Bandcamp]
French duo Midget! approach chanson & pop from unusual angles on each of their albums. On Qui parle ombre they’ve somehow conjured a whole orchestra from Mocke’s plucked string instruments (guitars, bouzouki, saz) and Claire Vailler’s harmonium and keyboards, plus her choral vocal multitracks, joined only by flute and bassoon on some tracks. The title track is murky and dramatic. The descending and climbing lines of Vailler’s vocal melody are intensely reminiscent of something for me, but I can’t identify what. Maybe it’s just a bewitching piece of post-classical drone-pop.

Oliver Coates – Apparition (feat. Malibu) [RVNG Intl./Bandcamp]
Oliver Coates – Radiocello [RVNG Intl./Bandcamp]
The latest album from British cellist-composer-producer Oliver Coates, Throb, shiver, arrow of time, is also strangely murky. There are fewer beats than on some of his solo albums, instead finding his cello fed through granular processing on most tracks. It’s some distance from his acclaimed soundtrack to the beloved 2022 album Aftersun, but evokes smudged, uncertain memory in its abstracted fashion. Frequent Coates collaborators only emphasise the murkiness – the spoken/murmured words of French ambient artist Malibu and the tentative choir of the mysterious Chrysanthemum Bear (who’s only appeared alongside Coates, at least under this name). “Please be normal”, begs one of the track titles, but Oliver Coates will never be normal – fortunately for us!

SO SNER – Bus Train Bus [TAL/Bandcamp]
SO SNER – Meteor [TAL/Bandcamp]
Viennese bass clarinetist Susanna Gartmayer and Stefan Schneider aka Mapstation together form SO SNER, a project that marries Gartmayer’s bass clarinet with Schneider’s electronics and percussion. On their second album, The Well, Gartmayer might weave melodies in between reedy drones and tumbling, wandering beats, or the clarinet might squeal and punch its way over burbling electronics. The album walks a tightrope between avant-garde composition, free improvisation and krautrocky electronic music. It’s got a very European sound, and I love it.

Listen again — ~214MB