Utility Fog

Monday, 7th of October, 2024

Covering ground from Iranian-American beats to English shoegaze-loop-pop, IDM, nu-skool-jungle, bass-heavy noise and noisy bass music, Middle Eastern-influenced electronic psych rock, the ever-cheeky Aphex Twin's ambient masterpiece orchestrated, postrock and sound-art. And that's just a taster!

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Maral - retrofit (feat. YATTA) [PTP/Bandcamp]
Maral - big hands reggaeton [PTP/Bandcamp]
Patience (​ص​ب​ر​) is the new collection from LA-based musician Maral, a varied mix of tracks from throughout her musical life, going back as far as 2013, often referencing her Iranian heritage. I discovered Maral circa her 2020 album Push, but her significance was solidified with her incredible remix of original anarcho-punks Crass the following year - so it's notable that among the tracks here are her forays into punk, albeit filtered through the beat-making lens. And that's a Crass sample in the last track, "big hands reggaeton". Rather than her usual home of Leaving Records, Patience (​ص​ب​ر​) is released on Geng's ever-relevant activist label PTP, and on our opening track tonight, Maral is joined by another PTP artist, the multi-talented Sierra Leonean-American YATTA, whose multi-layered vocals add an extra aura of disorientation to the proceedings.

Elsa Hewitt - White Mirror [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 first single "Equinox" features a lovely b-side, "Poiselle", which brings in a more rhythmic elements in the second half. "White Mirror" is the b-side of "Good To U", the second single, which will be out soon. At its midpoint Hewitt starts cutting the loops rhythmically, and brings in some folktronic beats as well under her warm vocal layers.

Ammonite - When You Don't (Salamanda Remix) [Ransom Note Records/Bandcamp]
Ammonite - What If I Knew Me (Dot Never Remix) [Ransom Note Records/Bandcamp]
Also from the UK is singer Amy Spencer, whose Ammonite alias produced an excellent album, Blueprints, earlier this year on Ransom Note Records. Spencer samples her voice, repitching it to create uncanny vocal synth pads, and builds almost-songs out of repeated fragments of lyrics. That original album is truly lovely, and it's now birthed a remix album, Blueprints Revisited. Appearing here are David Holmes, Midori Hirano and Franz Kirmann of Piano Interrupted, as well as the two I played tonight. Korean electronic duo Salamanda (aka Uman Therma and Yetsuby) turn "When You Don't" in an electro-trip-hop number, while eclectic indie/electronic London band Dot Never take an ambient passage from "What If I Knew Me" and scatter drill'n'bassy beats all over.

Mattr - Dicentra [Mattr Bandcamp]
London-based producer Mattr has been creating smoothly melodic IDM tunes for a while now, and "Dicentra" is another single he's snuck out on Bandcamp, with skittering jungle-ish beats supported by low pads and twinkling melodies.

Arcologies - Silent Lights [Lightless Recordings]
Finnish drum'n'bass legend Fanu does a lot of mixing for electronic musicians, as well as online training and mentoring. As such, he's reactivated his Lightless Recordings label to release a compilation of up-and-coming drum'n'bass, jungle and breakbeat artists. Breakbeat Brigade covers plenty of ground, and highlights some great talent. Here we have Chicago drum'n'bass & jungle artist Arcologies with some dark & atmospheric jungle.

Leon Mar - Acellular [Subviral/Bandcamp]
In 1997, one of the greatest drum'n'bass albums was released - the self-titled album from Arcon 2, which took the template of techstep, which was just beginning to take over the drum'n'bass world, but built dazzling complexity into the beats, among swooping basslines and atonal pads. Arcon 2 was the drum'n'bass alias for Leon Mar (real name the inverted Noel Ram), who had worked with Future Sound of London in their studio (FSOL released one 12" from him under the name Oil). So anyway, at his Subviral Bandcamp you can find the Arcon 2 album and various 12"s remastered, along with some collections of d'n'b/jungle productions - but here we have an entirely new jungle tune, released as "Leon Mar"! "Acellular" is fierce and relentless, just what we needed.

RXM Reality - See All [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
RXM Reality - Sway So Yel [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
RXM Reality - Sammy [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year Mike Meegan released an album as When 2 on Blorpus Editions, featuring deliciously disorienting Carl Stone-influenced glitch-rhythms. Meegan is best known as RXM Reality, and his latest album for Hausu Mountain (which is co-run by Blorpus boss Max Allison) is out now. No. 1 in the World covers the ground RXM Reality has previously paved - breakcore/drill'n'bass beats to the max, feints at metal, references to vaporwave or new age whatever... but more, more MORE! Clocking in at just over an hour, the album's 24 tracks cover 58-second indie vignettes ("Sway So Yel" played tonight), screamo metal, plenty of breakcore and assorted uncategorizableness. It's honestly really, really good.

the body - Removal [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
There's always been a strange synergy between the energy of extreme metal/hardcore punk and breakcore, as well as doom metal and dub; but nobody embodies that better than the body, each of whose albums takes them in 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, released on November 8th, will be 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, and you can hear that in the rolling collapse of "Removal", where huge crashes, distorted drum machines and descending basslines are what accompany Chip King's distorted wailing, until eventually some mid-frequency beats come in along with churning industrial noise. Never less than brilliant.

Deaf Squad feat. Flowdan - Collateral Damage [Deaf Squad Bandcamp]
The Bug - 'Deep in a Mud' ft Magugu [Relapse Records/Bandcamp]
Deaf Squad x Nah Eeto - Nikushuku [Deaf Squad Bandcamp]
Via The Wire Tapper 66 that came with the current November issue of the magazine, here's new London duo Deaf Squad, who combine crushing dubstep/dub beats heavily indebted to The Bug with guitar noise and textures claiming Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails as their forerunners. On their debut EP Black And Red they've enlised two frequent collaborators with The Bug, Flowdan and Warrior Queen, along with singer/producer Thryn and UK-based Kenyan singer/MC Nah Eeto. These songs take pleasing left-hand turns, so while the Flowdan feature suits his grime creds and many Bug collabs, the second half slides into a kind of shoegazey haze with guitar melody and swathes of enveloping distortion. With Nah Eeto there's a Tricky-like trip-hop vibe of the dirtiest kind, with post-dubstep beats and jackhammer drum fills. Very fine.

mHz - Copper (Matmos) [Room40/Bandcamp]
New Zealand-based Iranian sound-artist Mo H. Zareei calls himself mHz (milliHertz) - how could you resist with those initials? His debut release was 2019's Form, formed around pure electronic tones - a set of clicking and shuffling and strobing tracks a la raster-noton and Ryoji Ikeda. Another strand of his work, however, deals in electroacoustic work and the expression of electronic programming through physical media. His new album on Room40, Material Prosody, is based around his sound sculpture called the Material Sequencer, which features an 8-step sequencer that controls a solenoid that whacks itself against a sold block that's attached to the circuit board. It exists in limited editions with five different materials: aluminium, copper, wood, steel and brass - but for this album an additional concrete edition exists, which was used by mHz to create his piece. The other five materials were handed out to Nicolas Bernier, Loscil, Matmos, Zimoun and Alba Triana, with as wide a range of tracks as you'd expect, from Triana's literal documentation of simple clicking-on-wood to highly processed numbers. Of course Matmos are old favourites of Utility Fog, and dab hands at using physical objects in their work, so their work with the Copper edition as entertaining as ever.

FOUDRE! - Visions from Zūrūtetsu [NAHAL Recordings/Bandcamp]
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, who 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. The full album's out at the end of the month and I look forward to playing something else from it then.

Aphex Twin - rhubarb orc. 19.53 rev (unreversed) [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Biggest reissue of the week, if not the year, is the deluxe edition of Aphex Twin's staggeringly original, iconoclastic lysergic ambient album Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, affectionately known as SAW II since its obsessive analysis in the early days of the internet, released as it was in 1994. At the time the total tracks were just over the length that would fit on 2 CDs, so there were annoying differences between the tracks available on the UK CD and the US CD, differing again on the vinyl. So the Expanded Edition released for the album's 30th anniversary is welcome in finally bringing the full set to 3CDs and 4LPs, in handsome box sets (I haven't received mine yet!) The mystique of the music comes from its deliberately lo-fi nature, with synths artfully detuned, beats hovering under hiss and static, each track hovering in hazy repetition until its time is up. Remastered here, there's some detail and fidelity improvements, without altering the nature of the sound. The story goes that Richard D James had been experimenting with - or at least experiencing - lucid dreaming, and the music here is his attempt to recreate those states. All RDJ/AFX stories need to be taken with a grain of salt, but there's no doubt that the feel of this music is of altered mental states. Many people - me included - have found themselves waking from weirdly unsettling dreams after this music lulled us to sleep.
Anyway, one of the bonus tracks on the expanded edition is "rhubarb orc. 19.53 rev". This needs a bit of unpacking: the original releases had no track titles, instead using a set of colour wheels with indistinct photos. One or more people in the IDM mailing lists in '94 gave the tracks titles based on those little pictures, and Richard obviously ended up taking them as the default names, hence this orchestration of track #3 is "rhubarb". Internet sleuths believe this was recorded by an orchestra in Poland during a rehearsal, but Rich can't help his cheeky nature, so the version released is reversed. It's uncanny and beautiful, but when unreversed (i.e. re-reversed), the way it tracks the original piece is in my opinion even more lovely - despite the rather unfriendly stereo mixing and tape distortion. It's classic Aphex, however you look at it.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL [Constellation Records/Bandcamp]
From the very start, Godspeed You! Black Emperor (or Godspeed You Black Emperor! as it was originally styled) wore their politics on their sleeves: "The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel", says the spoken voice at the beginning of "The Dead Flag Blues". There have also been Jewish references early on - see the cover of the Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada EP. Many members of Godspeed, Silver Mt Zion and related acts are Jewish, including the members of experimental klezmer band Black Ox Orkestar, and they have long expressed their non- or anti-Zionist politics, whether implied or explicitly. Indeed, I recall when I interviewed Efrim in - hard to believe! - 2003, we discussed the difficulty in reconciling our Jewishness with the actions of Israel, and I remain thankful to them; the presence of Jewish voices of dissent has always been important for me in understanding my own identity.
So their latest album was always going to be a response to the last 12 months of grief and horror. "NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD" is particularly cutting, as the ever-increasing number of dead in Gaza now exceeds 40,000 and the invasion of Lebanon carries on with a mounting toll of innocent lives lost and destroyed. As ever, instrumental music can only express what's already in our hearts, but the shortest track on the album, "BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL", with its collapsing minor-key string loops is a touching work of mourning.

Ida Duelund - Misi Miamo [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 very lovely "Misi Miamo" is the first single from the album, and while it doesn't seem to be on the artist or label Bandcamps yet, a freaky video has been released for the song.

Glen Rey. - tomorrow once the rain stops [.jpeg Artefacts/Bandcamp]
Eora's Mitch J.G. Reynolds, fka Bluetung, releases his second pair of tracks under the Glen Rey. moniker (full stop included) for Naarm-based .jpeg Artefacts. Somewhere between low-key lo-fi indie songs and the more abstract guitar-manipulations of Bluetung, these unassuming pieces hold the promise of more beauty to come.

David Chesworth - Metals [David Chesworth Bandcamp]
Agéd though I am, Naarm/Melbourne musician David Chesworth hails from long before my time, debuting with the electronic experimentation of 50 Synthesizer Greats in 1979, and around the same time founding the idiosyncratic postpunk band Essendon Airport. With a large archive of older works on his Bandcamp, he's able to slip out occasional new works like the two tracks that make up Sun Rocks and Metals. No information accompanies the release, which contains the 15-minute "Stone Chamber" and the 7-minute "Metals"... Interestingly, I just discovered that when I downloaded it, the tracks were "of rocks" and "of metals", and the first was only 10 minutes. I've re-downloaded and the first track's ominous drone is extended out and begins with a resonant gong tone as well as more emphasised bass. "Metals" is much busier, with rattles and clangs in amongst the horn-like tones which overlap dissonantly. In fact, electronic horns, flutes, organs and strings evoke modern composition as much as musique concrète or electroacoustic sound-art. What a nice surprise turning up unannounced on Bandcamp Friday!

Rafael Anton Irisarri - Red Moon Tide (ft. KMRU) [Black Knoll Editions/Rafael Anton Irisarri Bandcamp]
The roots of Rafael Anton Irisarri's new album Façadisms, due on Nov 8th, 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 here enlists Kenyan sound-artist KMRU to build unsettling drones from the wreckage.

Taylor Deupree - Looming Brittle [Nettwerk/Bandcamp]
With his quietly influential label 12k, with his mastering skills, and most importantly with his own music, Taylor Deupree has been an important name in ambient music and sound-art for the past 2+ decades. He recently signed to Canadian label Nettwerk, who in the '80s and '90s were known for industrial and electronic music, but who've branched out more broadly since the '90s. So Deupree's forthcoming Ash EP will come out through Nettwerk (it's the second in fact, following last year's Eev). The first single is gorgeous, full of sonic detail from field recordings, acoustic and electronic instrumentation.

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Monday, 30th of September, 2024

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Alan Sparhawk - Heaven [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
Alan Sparhawk - Black Water [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
It's almost 2 years now since the wonderful vocalist & drummer with Low, Mimi Parker, passed away from ovarian cancer. The core of Low was always Parker and her husband Alan Sparhawk, and the soul of the band was their otherworldly vocal harmonies. However immeasurable her loss was for all of us fans, it was achingly personal for Sparhawk, and naturally his first solo album White Roses, My God is imbued with grief. These songs came out of playing with their kids' drum machine and synth setup, and Sparhawk made the interest choice of contrasting the couple's vocal harmonies by harshly processing his voice with vocoder & auto-tune. This can make the songs a little difficult to warm to initially, but the consummate musicianship shines through - especially, I feel, on a track like "Heaven" which does develop into yearnful harmonies. Elsewhere, the beats gain an almost jungle-like denseness - but listen a few times and you'll tune into the pure emotion.

Moin - Guess It's Wrecked (feat. Olan Mill) [AD93/Bandcamp]
Here's the first appearance of UK postpunk/breakbeat/electronic duo Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead aka Raime tonight, here with their trio Moin. Moin finds them officially joined with percussionist Valentina Magaletti, who contributed drums to many of the Raime releases. Previously, Moin has been a kind of ersatz postpunk thing, with jagged, minimalist guitar riffs and taut rhythms embellished with Raime's characteristic sampled vocal jabs. For the forthcoming album You Never End, they've invited singers to guest on about half the tracks, drawing the music further into postpunk "band music", although Olan Mill's singing still finds itself interrupted (or hyped?) by little vocal snatches.

Gazelle Twin - Two Worlds - Keeley Forsyth Mix [Invada Records/Bandcamp]
An unexpected single this week came from Elizabeth Bernholz aka Gazelle Twin, whose 2023 album Black Dog brought a more personal touch to her processed vocals and experimental electronics. The second remix from that album comes from the force of nature known as Keeley Forsyth, whose dramatic vocals and skeletal arrangements transform "Two Worlds" into a mysterious duet.

Nubya Garcia - Triumphance [Concord Jazz/Bandcamp]
Odyssey, the second album from London-based saxophonist Nubya Garcia, is garnering praise from all around, for good reason. The album features brilliant performances from the cream of young British jazz players, along with sumptuous arrangements for strings and collaborations with women from the jazz world (Esperanza Spalding) and soul (Georgia Anne Muldrow). There are joyous, catchy jazz pieces like the incredible piano-led single "The Seer", but Garcia's love of reggae also shines through on the last track, "Triumphance", where the jazz chops fly over low-skanking dub bass and drums.

Ulrich Troyer - Latzfonser Kreuz feat. Mamadou Diabate & Hamidou Koita [4Bit Productions]
On his latest 7" preceding the Transit Tribe album due later this year, Viennese glitch-dub artist Ulrich Troyer brings us a tune featuring, and co-written by, the legendary Mamadou Diabate on vocals and talking drum, along with Hamidou Koita on vocals and djembe. Both are originally from Burkina Faso and now based in Vienna, teaming up for what the three describe as "dubbed-out Nyahbinghi-style electro-beats". It's an inspired combination, showcasing the nimble percussion and sweet vocals of the two guests.

BANKERT - pick’em up eat’em up [BANKERT Bandcamp]
BANKERT - ~osc [BANKERT Bandcamp]
The artist/s behind BANKERT prefer to remain anonymous - in fact, hilariously, if you go to bankert.world and click "Info" and then click "hello, my name is", you'll get a different random name for the roles of "Music Producer", "Web Developer" and "Graphic Artist" each time. Their music is a mixture of idm, glitched bass and deconstructed club across their now seven "ol" releases, so from ol06 we segue'd out of the previous dub tunes with some hip-hop-sampling post-dubstep, and then some more sparse glitchy beats'n'bass from ol07.

Isaka & TRYCE - Slang Overload [SFX/Bandcamp]
The second release in 2024 from Zoë Mc Pherson & Alessandra Leone's SFX label comes from Berlin-based Isaka, five years after her last. In keeping with the label's interdisciplinary approach, this release has a website of its own in which the deconstructed bass music is integrated into a video game-like interface - it might have more features once more tracks are available.

Yally - Payday [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
Powell's Diagonal Records is celebrating 10 years of releases with a big 4 x 12" compilation, but also some bonus bits like this - Yally is Raime's alias for more explicitly jungle and bass music - and Raime are also Moin in collaboration with Valentina Magaletti, as heard earlier. Here they've contributed a taut piece of minimalist jungle, and because warped vocal samples are their thing, there's a dramatisation of, they claim, some early email exchanges they had with Powell.

Tim Reaper & Kloke - Wildstyle [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Few could lay claim to being as central to the contemporary jungle revival than Tim Reaper (real name Ed Alloh), whose many collaborations on his Future Retro London and elsewhere have brought together many of the names in new jungle and originals too. Recently he's had a very fruitful partnership with Naarm/Melbourne-based Kloke, so it's rather lovely that it's their duo that brings the first full jungle album to the legendary UK bass label Hyperdub. In Full Effect is full of rinse-outs and rattling subs, breakdowns and perfectly crafted breaks.

Djrum - Codex [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
If Tim Reaper is the patron saint of new jungle (and it's fair to say that there are a few other contenders), then Felix Manuel aka Djrum is one of the most important names guiding jungle into the future, with an inimitable style that blends dubstep, house, techno and jungle with influences as broad as classical and jazz - but when he gets going, his slicing & dicing of beats is dazzling, as is his ability to somehow keep it focused on the dancefloor as well as the belly, heart and mind. It's very nice to see him signed to Houndstooth for Meaning's Edge, his first EP in 5 years, which will be out on November 22nd - with more on its way. This new music gains from his studies in ethnomusicology, specifically adorned on this release with various flutes from the Indian subcontinent, Japan and the Western Classical tradition.

Klara Lewis - Top [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
Around 10 years ago, Klara Lewis emerged as one of the most exciting young creators in the experimental electronic field, with the Msuic EP on fellow Swede Peder Mannerfelt's label, and the Ett album on the legendary Editions Mego. This sums up her approach perfectly: the playful but uncompromising sonic destruction of Mego and the dancefloor perturbations of Peder Mannerfelt. Since then Lewis has collaborated with Mannerfelt, the great Simon Fisher Turner, Nik Colk Void and others, but tragically Peter Rehberg, Editions Mego's founder and impish driving force, passed away suddenly in 2021. The artists involved with the label were keen to continue the label's operations, although initially the aim was to get all the music slated for the label released. Lewis' new album Thankful may have been in the queue in some form, but has turned out now as a rather touching tribute to the label head and artist. Indeed, there's a track on there that's a direct tribute to Rehberg's infamous & beloved "Track 3" from the Get Out album, an 11 minute track that embodies his spirit, turning an orchestral Ennio Morricone loop into a harsh noise drone track. Elsewhere on the album there's a sweet ukelele appearance which morphs in the last track into another hypnotic drone-noise etude, but there's also the cheeky industrial beats on "Top", a track that's named for one of Rehberg's favourite words. Lewis is intimately familiar with the aesthetics of MEGO since its late-'90s inception, and gently guides it into the fast & loose genre-dismissal of her generation with love & affection.

Uniform - Permanent Embrace (Nightmare City Mix) [Sacred Bones Records/Bandcamp]
I've played New York band Uniform before courtesy of their two electrifying collaborations with the body (here and here), in which Uniform's hardcore punk-meets-industrial energy met the body's black metal/doom expanding into experimental electronic and corrupted pop. Only a couple of months ago Uniform released their cathartic American Standard album, an impassioned howl in which singer Michael Berdan fights the internal and external pressures on his mental health as he suffers from bulimia nervosa. While the album is characterised by harsh vocals, heavy drums and guitars, there's an electronic undercurrent that carries a lot of emotion too, so it's pretty amazing to hear the synthwave backgrounds stripped of the industrial elements on Nightmare City. If this is ambient it's very unsettling, and it's a dramatic contrast to the album proper, but not just background stems for music nerds. You don't need to be into industrial metal or punk to appreciate these pieces.

Robert Curgenven - AGEN_SIS [Cloudchamber Recordings/Cloudchamber Bandcamp/Robert Curgenven Bandcamp]
For many years, the work of Robert Curgenven - originally from Sydney, then based in Europe & Ireland - has revolved around two interests: environmental field recordings and the recontextualised, powerful sound of the pipe organ. I'm doing him a disservice here as there've been many other elements in his work, including repurposed turntables, guitars feeding back, piano and more. Still, it's notable that his forthcoming album Agenesis builds on these fundamentals: there are field recordings from the contrasting locations of Katherine, NT and Akihabara, Japan, and there are Irish pipe organ recordings, and there is feedback from a no-input mixing desk, dubplates and acetates. But there's also the imposing sub bass pressure from location recordings of bass played through a Funktion One soundsystem in Poland. This bass focus displaces Curgenven's more academic-seeming longform sonic explorations into spaces more attuned to club deconstructions, while also gesturing at his early twin loves of grindcore and 20th century orchestral works. The documentarian nature of his field recording works and his site-specific pipe organ and dubplate recordings is repudiated here: "agenesis" describes a situation in which some element is absent. Thus the early tracks pair throbbing sub bass with discordant drones, while later field recordings flow over and under the bass and discords, only to be replaced with snarling electronics, and all that sturm und drang is felt in its absence in track 6's organ drones. There's a wealth of detail across all tracks, and the gradual contrasts draw the listener's ear to different elements each time you listen.

Mark Templeton - Impossible/Bottle [Faitiche/Bandcamp]
I've played Canadian sound-artist Mark Templeton a fair bit over the years, and most recently only in June, when his detourned and decontextualised loops of religious meditation tapes appeared on enmossed. Two Verses marks his first release on Jan Jelinek's Faitiche, a label that combines meticulous sound-manipulation with playfulness. For this release, Templeton asked Faitiche regular Andrew Pekler to select unreleased material from Templeton's old hard drives, which were fashioned into bifurcated pieces in AB structure - one loping, looping work sliding into another, often contrasting audio environment. These unusual structures, which somehow emphasis asymmetry despite their dual nature, do capture that Mark Templeton mystery in which fuzzy, unstable tapes are manipulated in the digital realm and vice-versa - an aesthetic clearly in sympathy with Jelinek's Faitiche. Disarmingly compelling.

Başak Günak - Canon Bee [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Başak Günak - Wings [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Turkish musician and sound-artist Başak Günak is best known for her electronic productions and collaborations under the alias Ah! Kosmos, but here branches out under her own name for the incredible Rewilding album on the impeccably curated Subtext Recordings. This is very much an electroacoustic work in which electronics interact with and manipulate sounds of instruments including the halldorophone, organ, piano and bass clarinet, as well as some vocals and site recordings of installations. In amongst this, Günak works in deconstructed Anatolian folk-song, and personal sounds (whispers and murmurs), developing her theme of (auto-)rewilding in various ways, not always as you'd expect: so the more grounded acoustic performances are set free via electronics, and her own installation work and compositions are transformed too. Music to get lost in.

Colin Riley, Gareth Davis and Rutger Zuydervelt - Of birds with songs of coiled light [Squeaky Kate Music]
Two artists quite familiar to Utility Fog are invited here to interpret a hybrid work by UK composer Colin Riley. Written as part composition and part improvisation, it's more of a collaboration with the Dutch musicians Gareth Davis on bass clarinet and Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) on electronics. These two are longtime collaborators, so there's an alchemy to the interactions between the acoustic instrument and the electronics, but it does find itself in a particular avant-garde space via Riley's compositional input.

Malcolm Pardon - The End [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
The second album from Swedish musician Malcolm Pardon follows on conceptually and musically from his solo debut Hello Death from 2021, where he took inspiration from a health scare to look death in the face and respond with equal parts good humour and seriousness. Pardon was one half of Roll The Dice with Stockholm club/pop maverick Peder Mannerfelt, whose analogue synth-based sound took in acoustic piano refrains with motorik krautrock as much as they feinted towards dub or the outskirts of clubland. Pardon's music on these two solo albums also brings piano in alongside his synthesizers, approaching "The Abyss" with more peace than foreboding. Just lovely stuff.

Mara - At Every Corner [Pure Space/Bandcamp]
A new full-length from Sydney sound-artist Mara Schwedtfeger is always welcome, and this one comes from the Home Listening series from Pure Space, the usually-club-focused label from ex-FBi DJ Andy Garvey. Mara's practice brings in recordings from travels - field recordings and found sound, but also recordings of her own performances repurposed for these works. Her viola appears on some tracks, but the title track is based around audio from Seoul and other parts of South Korea, weaving in snippets of conversation, her own voice, traffic and twinkling electronics. The more closely you listen, the more rewarding this album is.

Tom Allum - Tension Expanded / The Break Collection [Tom Allum Bandcamp]
Western Australian sound-artist Tom Allum frequently works with field recordings and recordings of sound in particular spaces. He's just released a single track, "Tension Expanded / The Break Collection", which isn't about drum breaks at all, but rather it's a piece that's been created in response to an exhibition from Luke Aleksandrow called The Break Collection: Sounds of the Tropics. The breakage here is ceramics that were broken in the tropical rainforest of far north Queensland. So Allum is still working with the sounds of nature along with the sounds of humanity, and interestingly the ambient track he's created harkens back to the ambient techno of the early '90s, even it's not harnessing sampled drum breaks!

Alex Jasprizza - Throw It In [Alex Jasprizza Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney saxophonist Alex Jasprizza has been trickling tracks out here and there, always engaging music accompanied by the sounds of nature. "Throw It In" is the first single from his forthcoming Waterways, in which his saxophone is embedded in processed field recordings, and lovely prepared piano sneaks in halfway through. Keen to hear what else he has up his sleeve.

Seaworthy & Matt Rösner - Whispered Surfaces [12k/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, Sydney's Cameron Webb aka Seaworthy and Perth's Matt Rösner released a 22-minute track for Andrew Khedoori's Longform Editions called Bundanon. These two expert ambient artists are longtime proponents of combining music and field recordings, and have previously collaborated on an album in 2021. Their follow-up, Deep Valley is again released on Taylor Deupree's 12k, and like the eponymous track, it was recorded during a residency at Bundanon, the beautiful estate in the Shoalhaven that used to be the home of Arthur Boyd. The landscape that Boyd painted is deeply embedded in the tunes here, where any musical performances can take minutes to enter. In these pieces, the birds, insects, frogs, waterways and foliage are equally important as the guitar, piano and electronics. Truly lovely.

Dialect - Overgrown Song [RVNG Intl./Bandcamp]
Andrew PM Hunt, drummer in the phenomenal & bizarre hypnotic kraut/postrock band Ex-Easter Island Head, has made music as Dialect for at least 10 years, mostly released by RVNG Intl.. His new album Atlas of Green is an electroacoustic delight, reminiscent of the heyday of folktronica, with pitch-shifted acoustic guitars, synth pads and piano in the mix. It's really reminiscent of certain Four Tet remixes circa 2003-4 and The Books' first couple of albums, which coming from me is the highest of praise.

Mazza Vision - Monogram (excerpt) [Sub Rosa/Bandcamp]
Claude Pailliot and Gaëtan Collet were both members of Tone Rec, the eccentric experimental electronic/postrock band who released a few albums on the great Brussels-based Sub Rosa label in the 1990s. They then then took a left turn into a kind of electro-clash as DAT Politics, which I never enjoyed as much as Tone Rec, so it's interesting to find the core pair with a new project called Mazza Vision, which turns back to weird noise-rock-tronica. That combination of glitch, krautrock and drone makes Ohm Spectrum a perfect match for a particular thread of Utility Fog music. Love love.

Listen again — ~205MB

Sunday, 15th of September, 2024

A mixed bag tonight, from experimental indie-jazz to krautrock, post-industrial to electroacoustic, percussive beats to ambient beatscapes, doom dub to d'n'b to noise metal to electroacoustic sound-art to jazz-folk and back to experimental indie.

LISTEN AGAIN, second time's a charm! Stream on demand on FBi's new website, or podcast here.

Wendy Eisenberg - Viewfinder [American Dreams Records/Bandcamp]
Wendy Eisenberg - In the Pines [American Dreams Records/Bandcamp]
Starting with the avant-garde songwriting and contemporary jazz of Wendy Eisenberg, a talented and unique guitarist working in the jazz & improv worlds, with solo albums of aleatoric improv and extended techniques a la Derek Bailey, but also songwriterly albums of spiky, lo-fi songs the closest comparison to which I can find is London-based American musician Ashley Paul. Eisenberg's latest album Viewfinder is released by the impeccable American Dreams Records, and is one of the songwriterly albums, but brings in more musicians so Eisenberg can expand their arrangements with bass, drums, horns, piano and electronics on various tracks - and some of those tracks are very long! The middle pair of tracks are 22 minutes and 12 minutes long, ranging from fully composed to improv sections. The album arose from Eisenberg's experience with laser eye surgery, the disorientation that comes with seeing the world with new clarity, and the questions that remain about the ways that seeing imposes the see-er's assumptions upon the visual world. Hence "Viewfinder", the title track of which appears as a sparse 4-minute work for voice and solo trumpet ("Viewfinder (Intro)"), and then a 4 minutes of grinding distorted guitar interleaved with that avant-garde trumpet, percussion and bass, with Eisenberg's vocal melodies not quite sitting in key with the rest. But the best is saved for last, after all this chaos... For over two minutes, "In the Pines" begins with the soft, warm plucked double bass of Tyrone Allen II, before falling into a slow waltz-time jazz-blues, with Eisenberg's two-note guitar chords, and Booker Stardrum's brushed snare all that accompanies Eisenberg's heart-pulling vocal melody. And then the second verse adds Andrew Links' piano, a gorgeous moment that opens the song up while keeping the Andante tempo and the general sparseness. And then on into a completely restrained trombone solo from Zekereyya el-Magharbel. "In the Pines" is one of my songs of the year, and I've already listened to it half a dozen times. Pure poise and gentle bittersweetness. "God what a lonely / lonely point of view... Can you be / can you be / can you just be?"

Clark - Head Phone Hospital [Throttle Records]
Clark - Blood [Throttle Records]
Last year's Sus Dog and Cave Dog from Clark found him singing for the first time. He's now back with another soundtrack, In Camera, which expands on the cues he wrote for Naqqash Khalid's film of the same name. The IDM beats are toned down in favour of electronic arrangements that echo the classical orchestrations of some of his recent work, but it's nice to hear his voice appearing - not only on the rather lovely cover of "Superstar", a song originally popularised by The Carpenters, but also across the album, often used texturally like we heard on the two tracks here - reversed and twisted but still emotive in the way only voice can be.

Mazza Vision - Sun Riser [Sub Rosa/Bandcamp]
Claude Pailliot and Gaëtan Collet were both members of Tone Rec, the eccentric experimental electronic/postrock band who released a few albums on the great Brussels-based Sub Rosa label in the 1990s. They then then took a left turn into a kind of electro-clash as DAT Politics, which I never enjoyed as much as Tone Rec, so it's interesting to find the core pair with a new project called Mazza Vision, which turns back to weird noise-rock-tronica. That combination of glitch, krautrock and drone results in slow burners like the first track here taken from their debut album Ohm Spectrum, the rest of which we'll get to hear next week.

Lint - What's wrong with that sentence [Lint Bandcamp]
Lint - Curb Cloud [Lint Bandcamp]
Mitch Jones is a founding member of Sydney industrial/electronic originators Scattered Order, and his wife Dru Jones has been involved either making brilliant art or with noisemaking too since the early '80s. Despite this, it's only for the last 5 years or so that the two have released music together in duo form, as Lint. Mitch solo is the little hand of the faithful, and Dru is Skipism. Together they weave the artistic, sample-collage of Dru's iPad-mediated work with Mitch's further sample deconstruction and strangely contemporary beats - but I feel like Mirror of your own hopes sees the duo finding its own character more than ever before, something quite freeform, almost sinister at times, but also quite humorous.

Martina Berther - Obertone [Kit Records/Bandcamp]
Martina Berther - Mini Gong [Kit Records/Bandcamp]
Martina Berther x Vic Bang - Arco [Kit Records/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, UK label Kit Records released a very idiosyncratic album from Swiss bass player Martina Berther. Bass Works: As I Venture Into is performed on Fender Jazzbass, but you can hardly hear that on many of the tracks, where the instrument is stretched into drones or compressed into chipmunk riffs, or played as percussion. I discovered this album through an EP of remixes by Argentinian sound-artist Vic Bang, who transposes "Bass Works" into Brass Woks, disassembling and rebuilding Berther's sounds into two tracks of furious activity that's as much IDM as it is electroacoustic or musique concrète.

Nídia & Valentina - Nasty [Latency/Bandcamp]
London-based percussion Valentina Magaletti seems to be everywhere these days, doing everything from postpunk dub to indiepop to experimental improv, and now she appears on French experimental label Latency collaborating with Afro-Portuguese dance producer Nídia Sukulbembe. Nídia's club-tooled kuduro is already all about the rhythm, but here it's tempered with Magaletti's own drums as well as melodic percussion like marimba, while Magaletti also contributes melodies on flute and synth. Tom Halstead of the duo Raime, who collaborate with Magaletti as Moin, edited and mixed these contributions into their final shape. Estradas means "roads", and the cover shows the burnout marks as Nídia and Valentina speed off into the distance, while we follow in their wake.

gi - Weir [world of knots]
Dina Rocaille - Seuvrage [world of knots]
A few weeks ago I played the incredible debut album from Eora/Sydney's Gigi De Lacy, released on Naarm/Melbourne's Absorb. But gi has been putting together her own label, and this coming week sees the first compilation from world of knots. Gi herself contributes a piece of her organic, busy IDM, and she's gathered a troupe of like-minded producers from around the world. Tellingly, the album is "not intended as a collection of songs but as a singular listen", with ambient pieces and more techno/d'n'b-influenced pieces all sharing a certain aesthetic of organic grime and musical abstraction. I'm not sure this genre has a name yet, but the artists here are at the forefront of it. As well as gi, I played Lyon-based Dina Rocaille's skittery beats which emphasis bass and bar-lines a little more than the label boss.

Harvestman - Clouds are Relatives (The Bug - 'Amtrak Dub Mix') [Neurot Recordings/Bandcamp]
The Bug - Floored(Point of impact) [Relapse Records/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, Steve Von Till of post-metal heroes Neurosis - who are behind the essential Neurot Recordings - announced a Triptych of albums under his instrumental Harvestman alias. Harvestman is one expression of Von Till's "rural psychedelia", mixing folk traditions with the electronics of Neurosis' alter egos Tribes of Neurot, and making concrete the links between the low-slung, slow-moving genres of doom and dub. Each of the three albums feature a long doom-folk-psych track that's reprised in a dub version - and who better to provide the third dub than The Bug? Kevin Martin has roots going back decades in metal and punk, having booked some of the earliest Godflesh gigs and then partnered with Justin K Broadrick on a run of groundbreaking albums as Techno Animal. The pair still work together now, and in the wake of Relapse's reissues of two '90s Techno Animal albums, the label has signed The Bug. The first release is Machine, an album-length collection of heavyweight tracks from the five Machine EPs that Martin released on his own Pressure label between late 2023 and earlier this year. These tracks were created to push his massive Pressure soundsystem to its limit (I've bathed in its sub bass glory a few years back in London), and I'm glad to see that all five EPs are available in a 2CD set alongside the 12-track vinyl release.

Braille - Dirt Fam (Maude Vôs Rude Remix) [Hotflush Recordings/Bandcamp]
Hotflush Recordings released the full Triple Transit album from Praveen Sharma aka Braille last month, preceded by a string of singles, and the album continues to give, with the first EP of Triple Transit Remixes out now. The album surfs garage and rave sounds and avoids the slower climes of dubstep, so LA experimentalist Maude Vôs dubs out the vocal stabs and dense production of "Dirt Fam" into a kind of dub techno/dubstep hybrid complete with wub-wub bass and sweeping synth clouds.

Mako - Direct Source [Metalheadz/Bandcamp]
One of the most-anticipated drum'n'bass albums of the year comes from Mako, who runs Bristol's Utopia Music but also has a long connection with Metalheadz. Oeuvre Part 2 does indeed follow Mako's 2020 album Oeuvre, also released by Metalheadz, and is full of high-energy d'n'b, looking back at the genre's history while also nodding at more recent hybrids with footwork, other bass musics, and the resurgence of jungle. The constant rhythmic invention of "Direct Source" is jungle at its finest.

KK Null - Ghost Dub Awakening 02 [No Rent/Bandcamp]
Circling back towards metal & noise we join KK Null, whose highly influential band Zeni Geva combined noise rock with elements of prog, metal and hardcore. But Kazuyuki Kishino is just as well known as the extremely prolific KK Null, and has moved between guitar and electronic noisemakers, and has a unique style of dense digital sample destruction. Ghost Dub Awakening, released on Pennsylvania's No Rent Records, throws breakbeats into his digital blender, resulting in something that sometimes has rhythms you could dance to without breaking too many bones.

The Body - End of Line [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Meanwhile, recent Wire Magazine cover stars The Body have made their own journey from blackened doom metal to something all their own, mixing metal with industrial, dub and just about anything else. The Crying Out of Things which is out in early November on Thrill Jockey, promises more glorious negativity, more mashing up of genres into a industrial metal stew with Chip King's high-pitched screaming and all-consuming guitars, Lee Buford's massive drums and various guests, all tied together with the electronics and ultra-saturated production of Seth Manchester. Gird your loins and save the date!

Ghost Phone (uncredited) - DARKNESS FINDS HOME WITH U [Ghost Phone]
It's not entirely possible to identify the artists on Ghost Phone releases, even though the name is sometimes used for remixes - it's an anonymous collective as far as I can tell, and GHOST PHONE 008 is named as V/A. It's four tracks of various types of bass music from Bristol, r'n'b edits taking in weightless 160bpm, Jersey Club and footwork-laced jungle, before finishing up with wispy Bristolian post-dubstep on "DARKNESS FINDS HOME WITH U".

Elio Martusciello / Ossatura - etèrico [Elio Martusciello Bandcamp]
Elio Martusciello / Ossatura - sottrazione immateriale [Elio Martusciello Bandcamp]
The new album from Italian sound-artist & composer Elio Martusciello, AKOUSMA-MOTHER - subtitled "umbilical cord" - serves as an autobiographical document, channel-jumping through an array of genres from electroacoustic improv to songform, experimental rock to grainy cut-up piano. It's also a tribute to Martusciello's late mother, describing the pre-natal world as "amniotic and acousmatic": the term "acousmatic" was used by Pierre Schaeffer and others to describe music reproduced electronically with the original source obscured. Much of the material on the album is derived from his long-running trio Ossatura, with Luca Venitucci on piano/electric piano and electronics and Fabrizio Spera on drums, and on some tracks the full band is clearly heard, while elsewhere Martusciello obscures the sounds through processing and editing. As much as it's a conceptual album about the cycle of life and our sensation of the world, there's beauty here and humour too. Right in the middle of the album, the song "etèrico" appears, and the warm vocals from Martusciello have the demeanor of Tom Zé's modernised samba, for all that it's sung in Italian with deconstructed drums and wisps of guitar accompanying it. It's really charming.

Build Buildings - Scattering Shreds of Wickerwork [laaps/Bandcamp]
Ben Tweel makes electroacoustic music as Build Buildings, processing acoustic instruments and household sounds - on the album Ecotone, released by laaps, he's using the iPad app Samplr, which allows for processing audio using the iPad's multitouch screen. The results are glitchy yet smooth, shifting layers of sound that are constantly moving but peaceful. On tonight's track, "Scattering Shreds of Wickerwork", the sounds of Tweel's daughter Mia on clarinet are fed into the sampler.

Adrian Myhr Trio - Begynnelse [Øra Fonogram]
It's always nice to include some purely acoustic music among the hybrid sounds, and there's a wealth of this on the first album from Norwegian bassist Adrian Myhr's eponymous trio (out shortly on Norway's Øra Fonogram). After 2 decades playing with ensembles in the Norwegian jazz scene, Myhr leads his trio through a different kind of hybrid music from our earlier electroacoustic works, melding folk with jazz and contemporary classical along with influences from Indian raga and Albanian vocal music. Myhr wields his bass as a melodic instrument as well as holding down basslines, while Rasmus Kjorstad brings his folk music experience on both violin and the Norwegian droned zither called the langeleik, and Jan Martin Gismervik switches between drums, a hanging vibraphone and harmonium. This chamber-folk-jazz is something of a speciality in Norwegian music, beautifully applied here: you can hear tight-knit string harmonies between harmonium, violin and double bass, with melody handed between the instruments, or folk violin sawing over rhythmic bass, or vibraphone chimes resonating over plucked bass and violin... Somewhere in here you can hear comparisons with Norwegian acts on the Hubro label, or Swiss musicians like Andreas Söderström or Tape, or the chamber-folk-jazz of Tin Hat Trio - all of which is to say, this is wonderful stuff worthy of seeking out.

My Brightest Diamond - I Saw a Glimpse [Western Vinyl/Bandcamp]
Shara Nova's music as My Brightest Diamond has covered a lot of ground in the 18 years since her debut album Bring My Workhorse was released on Sufjan Stevens' Asthmatic Kitty label. Like Sufjan himself, Nova applies classical rigour to indie rock, draws on electronic music and on her evangelical upbringing, and ends up with an incredibly rich body of work. I'm particularly fond of the album she made with New York contemporary classical ensemble yMusic, All Things Will Unwind. Her new album Fight The Real Terror is out now through Western Vinyl, and is some of her rawest music, forged in emotional times and inspired by the late, great Sinéad O'Connor. Nova's demo versions of most of these songs ended up forming the basis of the album, with additional orchestrations and enhancements added on top, so it's held down by grungy guitars, simple and direct. Of course with a musician and songwriter as talented as Shara Nova, a raw directness can be magical, not least on the closing track, which presents as a traditional folk song mourning today in hope for a better tomorrow, and right at the end the declamatory guitar swirls in a fug of distorted drones caught in a delay loop the decays for almost a minute before tailing off.

Listen again — ~204MB

Sunday, 8th of September, 2024

Indie/folk/rock takes us into some beautiful crunchy indietronica, shoegazetronica and contemporary out-rock, before we move into dub & bass-oriented beats, some first class contemporary drum'n'bass, glitchy ambient/idm and decentred ambient of various ilks. There's also some industrial post-club spoken word weirdness, and later some newer & older approaches to post-classical, as they probably don't call it.

LISTEN AGAIN and oppose duality! Stream on demand at fbi.radio, podcast here.

Ned Collette - Little Hans [Ned Collette Bandcamp/Poison City (Aus-based vinyl)/ever/never Bandcamp (US-based CD & cassette)/Sophomore Records Bandcamp (US-based vinyl)]
Naarm/Melbourne musician Ned Collette has been with us since almost the beginning of Utility Fog. The much-beloved indie/postrock band City City City put out two legendary albums between 2003 & 2005, with Ned on guitar and also eventually singing, and the great Joe Talia on drums. Ned's music has floated between avant-garde and classic rock/folk/pop for those 2 decades too, with a few great albums with Wirewalker, his trio with Joe Talia and another City City City alumnus, Ben Bourke. Ned's been based in Berlin for a while, but I'm pretty sure he's around Oz quite a bit too. His latest album Our Other History continues with his catchy songs and melancholy delivery, always recalling Leonard Cohen but I also see Roy Harper namedropped, and Nick Drake - as well as the subtly-avant-garde-informed pop of Jim O'Rourke. The album's released in various formats through various peeps as you can see in the listing above.

Glen Rey. - coming out of coles [.jpeg Artefacts/Glen Rey. Bandcamp]
empress - homeward sounds (remixed by styrofoam) [555 Recordings of Leeds, UK and then Flagstaff, Arizona]
styrofoam - i will try if you need it [styrofoam Bandcamp]
Mitch Reynolds has released music as Bluetung for a while, but has just renamed himself as Glen Rey. The Eroa/Sydney musician is inaugurating this moniker with a small single on Naarm's great .jpeg Artefacts, one live collaboration with Luke De Zilva and one low-key gorgeous cover. "Coming out of Coles" is originally by the partially-Aus-based UK duo New North Wales, aka Nicola Hodgkinson and Chris Coyle, who were previously the core of the fragile, minimalist indie/tronic empress. This enabled a nifty segue, because I wanted to play something from the "new" release by Belgian indietronica artist Arne van Petegem aka styrofoam. The titled of The lost album (previously unreleased recordings 2000-2001) is slightly misleading, since some of the tracks were previously released, between 2000 & 2003 or so, so I know a few of the tracks. But a few were on very obscure vinyl releases - "I will try if you need it" was originally titled "This Is All Wrong", from a split 7" with Dntel in 2002, and it's a lovely slab of melancholy melody and glitch-beats. The connection? The great 555 Recordings of Leeds (later Flagstaff, AZ), run by Steward Anderson, released the legendary (to me) compilation chihuahuas and chinese noodles in 2000, with indie/postrock/idm/experimental artists remixing each other, and Styrofoam did a beautiful, minimalist, glitchy remix of Empress' "Homeward Sounds". Pure crunchbliss.

Belong - Crucial Years [kranky/Bandcamp]
In 2006, artist/producer Michael Jones and electronic producer Turk Dietrich released their first album as Belong. October Language has gone into some kind of legend, possisbly because of scarcity, and a few years ago it was re-released on vinyl by Spectrum Spools. I knew of Dietrich from his connections with Joshua Eustis & Telefon Tel Aviv (with whom he'd later form glitch/techno duo Second Woman). Belong always adopted the shoegaze aesthetic, even if in a more granular/ambient vein, and their third album (in 18 years) Realistic IX is explicit in its major 7th chords and whammy-bar guitar bends at times. But it does also like its granular, digital deconstruction, as heard in the vignette here.

Good Sad Happy Bad - Shaded Tree [Textile Records/Good Sad Happy Bad Bandcamp]
Previously Micachu and The Shapes, Good Sad Happy Bad named themselves after their last album under that name. Now Raisa Khan takes on lead vocals as well as keys, while Mica Levi is still in the band along with Marc Pell aka Suitman Jungle on drums, and CJ Calederwood on sax, vocals etc. They have an album called All Kinds of Days coming in November from French indie label Textile Records, and the lead single shows that the mix of jangly indie, homemade beats and genre-plasticity of Micachu's original material still drives their new material. Can't wait!

Party Dozen - The Righteous Front [Temporary Residence Ltd/Bandcamp]
It's fair to say that Party Dozen are a force unto themselves. The multi-talented Jonathan Boulet plays drums and samples, while Kirsty Tickle's saxophone roars (even when she's not yelling through it). Their latest album, Crime In Australia, focuses on the dire time in Australian politics when the corrupt Joh Bjelke-Petersen government ran QLD - but in an instrumental band, what is the music really about? Well it has heaps of energy and it does sound quite dark. The track I've chosen has an almost trip-hop feel, but still brings the noise.

Jay Glass Dubs - Blue Plate Special [Digital Edition on Bandcamp, extended CD available from yr favourite retailers]
Dimitris Papadatos has made highly idiosyncratic music as Jay Glass Dubs since 2015, spread across various interesting labels. DJ Humble was a project from last year that claims to be influenced by jungle and drum'n'bass, although heavily filtered through the Jay Glass Dubs approach to decentred dub. There are certainly rhythms that suggest drum'n'bass, albeit sitting more in a 4/4 space - and there are drum breaks scattered throughout. There's now an extended CD edition with more tracks in this strange vein. Music for alien dancefloors.

Pearson Sound - Twister [Hessle Audio/Bandcamp]
As one of the co-founders of Hessle Audio, David Kennedy has had a substantial influence on the UK bass music scene. To my ears, both as Ramadanman and as Pearson Sound, he never fitted comfortably into dubstep, and you're more likely to hear 4/4 kickdrums with unusual basslines and squiggly synths - but he started off DJing drum'n'bass, and the jungle influences are up-front in the two preview tracks from his new Which Way Is Up EP. "Hornet" had programmed broken beats and that insectile buzz, while "Twister" mixes jittery drum machine breaks with a constantly moving bassline and insistent kicks at an almost-d'n'b 165BPM.

Ocean Dawn - Wax Cool [Future Retro]
Damon Kirkham is best known as Jon Convex, one half of autonomic d'n'b pioneers Instra:mental, and also Kid Drama. Ocean Dawn is his new moniker for expansive jungle, and he has a new EP on Future Retro, the label of jungle's most enthusiastic proponent Tim Reaper. Just a very nicely done piece of contemporary jungle.

John Rolodex - Seeing Around Corners [Over/Shadow/Bandcamp]
Canadian d'n'b hero John Rolodex has released a lot on his own Machinist Music (which also releases other artists, mind you), but he's recently had a digital release and then one vinyl/digital on Metalheadz. He can craft a pure d'n'b tune with machined tech-step beats and basslines, but there's usually also some crazy beat-fuckery going on too, which brings us to the title track of Seeing Around Corners, his new EP for Over/Shadow. Pure darkness Arcon 2 style. If you like the moodiness of dark drum'n'bass but the complexity of jungle, this EP's a must.

Objekt - Ganzfeld (Djrum Remix) [Kapsela Records/Bandcamp]
When Objekt's first 12"s came out in 2011, they were among the most creative music in the post-dubstep world, electro/techno full of gnarly syncopation, weird edits, great basslines. As he's continued, at times sporadically, his music has spread out into sound-designy territory, at least on the albums, but his music is still closely attached to the dancefloor. The early 12"s were self-released, and his two albums came out through Pan, but now he's returning to self-releasing in a slightly different way, with a label called Kapsela. The first release revisits an obscure track from ten years ago, one side of a split 12" with electro heroes Dopplereffekt. His track is reprised here, along with a few new remixes. I'm intrigued to hear the one from Ulla, but who better to kick things off than the extraordinary Djrum, who as is his wont encompasses quasi-classical faux-jazz, drum'n'bass, halftime and more, all while maintaining a tenuous hold on the original. Another mind-bender from the man.

KASHIWA Daisuke - Infrared [Virgin Babylon]
Only a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about being surprised that KASHIWA Daisuke had a new track out, only a few months since his latest album Ice came out. That track, "Green", is very much of a piece with this new one, "Infrared" - both have minimalist piano with skittering glitchy beats. I love this sound, so here you go!

Ran Slavin - Dawn Four [Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings]
Here's an electroacoustic soundscape that falls somewhat into the "fourth world" ambient aesthetic. Tel Aviv-based Ran Slavin is known for his creative film work as well as experimental audio works that have been released by Crónica among others. Following Oolong: Ambient Works, released by Mille-Plateaux earlier this year, New Dawns takes a different approach to "ambient", with acoustic bass walking through granular samples and the detritus of easy listening music.

Murcof - All These Worlds Part. II [InFiné/Bandcamp]
When his first albums appeared in the early '00s, Mexican producer Murcof was at the forefront of a new generation deconstructing classical music through minimal techno or micro-house. Many years later, he's abstracted his sound further into ambient and sound-art, but the micro-grooves are still there in this first single from Twin Color Vol. I, out on Nov 15th through French electronic label InFiné. Those warm, crisp bass tones are delicious.

Comatone - Carpenters Towers (2012) [Feral Media]
Celebrating 20 years since his debut release, Katoomba's Greg Seiler aka Comatone has been releasing a series of C-TONE 20 EPs featuring mostly-unreleased music from across his history. There's a lot of tasty IDM, broken beats, basslines and the like. The 6th and last EP (they're currently only available on streaming services) looks more to the ambient side of things, but that's not to say it's devoid of beats. This 2012 cut bubbles murkily with pitched-down loops until the beats straighten things out halfway through. Cyberpunk vibes. As we're at the end of this Comatone celebration now, I've got to mention the incredible dubstep/trip-hop remix he did of my band FourPlay String Quartet some years ago - listen here.

Rita Revell - Pretty Ugly [Nice Music/Bandcamp]
Rita Revell - Persus [Nice Music/Bandcamp]
Great to have something new from Melbourne's Rita Revell, a couple of years since her Depozit. As usual, it's hard to pigeonhole these strange electronics, which draw emotion from crackling old tech: lo-fi samples stretched into new shapes; shuddering distorted beats and pretty synths; weathered choral tapes struggling through static; sparse drones and echoing bass guitar samples. Gorgeous stuff, and Nice Music have kindly done a limited CD edition too.

EPRC - DARK RED [Stray Signals/Bandcamp]
Deep listeners to this show will know I'm a huge fan of Elisabetta Porcinai's duo Aperture with her brother Emanuele. When I heard the two tracks on SOMETIMES from her duo EPRC with Roberto Crippa I immediately connected it with Aperture, before realising it is in fact Elisabetta's voice. A visual artist, her spoken word adorns both groups, along with industrial-leaning electro-acoustic audio. EPRC's debut album BODIES is out now, and the two tracks from their debut SOMETIMES appear here in slightly different form. Desolate synths, pummeling industrial electronics, and Elisabetta's spoken and occasionally half-sung words. A winning combination.

claire rousay - ily2 (Maral 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 more eaze and Patrick Shiroishi featured, it's released in early November. The first single sees Iranian-American beat-maker Maral setting rousay's answering machine & vocoder pop to a kind of trip-hop beat, keeping it as off-kilter as the original.

Razen - Lazy Lazy Eye [TAL/Bandcamp]
Ameel Brecht and Kim Delcour have formed the core of Belgian minimalist troupe Razen since 2010. Both play multiple acoustic instruments, and augmented by players of hurdy-gurdy, Ondes Martenot and other unusual instruments, they've created uncategorizable, hypnotic works that feel plucked out of time - ensembles from centuries past puzzling their way around post-industrial, post-club musical forms. Every album is different, so on Rain Without Rain, their first on Stefan Schneider's TAL label, wheezing recorder melodies rise up out of guitar amp noise, primitive electronics and the natural reverberation of an abandoned pedestrian tunnel in Düsseldorf, where it was recorded late one night. An evocative story for evocative music.

Laurence Pike - The Undreamt-of Centre [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
Laurence Pike - Orpheus In The Underworld [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
I've played a couple of previews from the new album by Eora/Sydney drummer/percussionist/producer Laurence Pike, and it's now out in its entirety. In The Undreamt-of Centre, Laurence's usual drums, samples and keyboards are augmented by the Sydney Philharmonia Choir's VOX choir (made up of 18-30 year olds), with the gravitas of a requiem - which it kind of is, memorialising his father-in-law's decline and death during the Covid lockdowns. But the texts are drawn from Rainer Maria Rilke's poems inspired by the myth of Orpheus & Euridice - hence we have here "Orpheus In The Underworld", where he goes seeking his lover. The blending of the choir's harmonies with electronics, set apart from Pike's drums, makes for a poignant, otherworldly experience.

Max Richter - A Colour Field (Holocene) [Decca Records/Online Store]
Max Richter - Life Studies IV [Decca Records/Online Store]
Max Richter - Only Silent Words [Decca Records/Online Store]
Max Richter - Life Studies V [Decca Records/Online Store]
I first played Max Richter on this show in *ahem* 2004, when his second album The Blue Notebooks was released on Fat Cat's 130701 imprint. That album was re-released in 2018 with bonus tracks & remixes, and as it now reaches 20 years old, Richter has returned to the contemplation of, well, books, but also to a series of dualities: acoustic sounds & electronics, classical music & electronica, the human & the natural world, and ultimately life's big questions juxtaposed with the small pleasures of life. Thus each of the album's compositions, which do range from classical strings & piano to Enoesque electronic studies, are separated by a series of "Life Studies", incorporating field recordings found sounds, including crackly old recordings. It's lovely, thoughtful, and genuinely unpretentious.

Listen again — ~202MB

Sunday, 1st of September, 2024

A few important albums came out this week, so we're doing that Utility Fog thing of multiple tracks from the same artist/release. And it's allll great. Of course.

LISTEN AGAIN for your soul's sake. Stream on demand at fbi.radio's new home, podcast here.

Kim Gordon x Model Home - razzamatazz [Matador/Bandcamp]
Less than six months after her album The Collective came out, Kim Gordon's back with a new single that's just as crunchy and weird as the last 2 albums. This time it's a collaboration with weird rap duo Model Home, whose collab with Wolf Eyes from last year is excellent too. Gordon's speak-singing fits well with Model Home's rapping.

Patio - Inheritance (Mandy, Indiana Remix) [Fire Talk]
One of my favourite bands of last year, Manchester's Mandy, Indiana, here deliver a beefed up, noisier version of the song "Inheritance" from their label-mates Patio. The New York band use the tag "pastel post-punk" on their Bandcamp, although equally they fit well into the '80s/'90s all-female indie rock space. The original song is from their second album Collection, which comes recommended if you're into that kind of stuff (think Throwing Muses, The Breeders etc).

Seefeel - Multifolds [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Seefeel - Lose The Minus [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Coming a mere 13 years after their last release, which itself came some 14 years after their first run, Everything Squared is immediately utterly Seefeel. The "band" is now pared down to Mark Clifford's production, with mailed-in vocal samples from Sarah Peacock, who's now based in Berlin. It's really just an EP, but an absolute pleasure to have them back anyway, with pulsing fragments of vocals, dubwise bass and micro-melodies. As I said a few weeks ago, they've always had a temporally displaced sound - constructed entirely through digital technology but somehow analogue, even organic sounding. They could just give us... more?

Christopher Chaplin - The Feathered Girl [Fabrique Records/Bandcamp]
British composer Christopher Chaplin's music works contemporary classical elements into experimental, post-industrial and krautrock-influenced spaces. His latest EP Door 1 Door 2 is out later this month, exploring how myths are part of collective memory, with spoken word by Carmen Alt-Chaplin.

Chelsea Wolfe - Dusk (Ash Koosha Remix) [Loma Vista/Bandcamp]
Chelsea Wolfe - Whispers In The Echo Chamber (Forest Swords Remix) [Loma Vista/Bandcamp]
The latest album from Chelsea Wolfe, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, found her in her most electronic setting yet, albeit still with her usual gothic metal vibes. Six months later comes the Undone EP, with remixes from the likes of ††† (Crosses), Justin K Broadrick, Full of Hell and Boy Harsher, to give you an idea of the breadth. But tonight I played a glitchy take by Ash Koosha and a deconstruction by Forest Swords, both of which play with slow-fast beats.

Flower Storm - World's Creator Is My Ally (Aceed Mix) [Flower Storm Bandcamp]
Disapora Iranians (like Ash Koosha above) Sepehr (NYC) and Kasra Vaseghi (London) formed Flower Storm in 2023 with the aim of recontextualising the sounds of their culture with the club styles they love. Together they created a huge sound library with traditional Persian percussion and string instruments, sampled vocals and more, which they cast into techno, house, drum'n'bass and so on. Do O Nim collects three mutated versions of tracks from their first 2 EPs, with the "Aceed Mix" here taking "World's Creator Is My Ally" into skittery junglish acid.

gyrofield - Lagrange [XL Recordings/Bandcamp]
With previous releases on drum'n'bass labels like Critical Music and Metalheadz as well as more experimental works, Bristol-based Hong Kong producer gyrofield lands on XL Recordings with a bang with their four-tracker These Heavens. It's drum'n'bass with ambient and hyper-pop influences, continuing pushing the trajectory of d'n'b into uncharted waters.

Reeko - Urmah 2 [Samurai Music/Bandcamp]
The most unexpected forays into drum'n'bass/170bpm in the last 2 years have come from longtime techno mainstay Reeko, aka Architectural, aka Spanish producer Juan Rico. The Berlin-based Samurai Music has already been exploring the space where minimal drum'n'bass meets techno, and perhaps for that reason Rico sent them a demo which became his first EP for the label, Confront the Serpent, last year. This was followed by Tomorrow Doesn't Exist earlier this year, and now the incredible six-track mini-album Urmah. There's a lot of dub techno in these head-nodding tunes, but also explosive percussion and breaks. It really is a hybrid style like no other, dazzling at its best.

Tigran Hamasyan - The saviour is condemned [naïve/Project website]
Tigran Hamasyan - The curse (blood of an innocent is spilled) [naïve/Project website]
Tigran Hamasyan - Postlude after seven winters [naïve/Project website]
The new album from Armenian jazz piano virtuoso Tigran Hamasyan is a whole project, featuring the stunning artwork of Khoren Matevosyan. Yes, it's a double album (double CD and somehow fitting on 2 vinyl records), but it's also an online video game and multimedia stage production and film. Titled The Bird of a Thousand Voices, it reworks an old Armenian legend called Hazaran Blbul, and so the album follows the story from start to completion. Musically it's everything Tigran always offers - insane time signatures, bewitching melodies, those gorgeous Armenian harmonies, incredible piano playing and incredible supporting musicians on drums, bass, violin and vocals, with heavy metal and electronic influences. I played a couple of energetic early tracks plus the beautiful coda.

Laurie Anderson - This Modern World [Nonesuch Records/Bandcamp]
Laurie Anderson - To Circle the World [Nonesuch Records/Bandcamp]
Laurie Anderson - I See Something Shining (feat. ANOHNI) [Nonesuch Records/Bandcamp]
Laurie Anderson - Take-off [Nonesuch Records/Bandcamp]
Laurie Anderson - Aloft (feat. ANOHNI) [Nonesuch Records/Bandcamp]
Laurie Anderson - Road to Mandalay [Nonesuch Records/Bandcamp]
Laurie Anderson - Lucky Dime [Nonesuch Records/Bandcamp]
Only four years after Landfall, her album with Kronos Quartet about the the flooding of New York City by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Laurie Anderson returns with another concept album. Amelia follows the doomed last flight of the pioneering airplane pilot Amelia Earhart, whose plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean three-quarters of the way through her attempt at circumnavigating the globe. It's taken 25 years to be completed in this final form, performed by Anderson in her speak-singing style, playing violin & viola and some electronics, while ANOHNI takes care of the more melodic singing, with a band featuring Marc Ribot and Kenny Wollessen, plus Rob Moose, Nadia Sirota and Gabriel Cabezas' Trimbach Trio on strings and the Filharmonie Brno on orchestral duties. Despite this loaded crew, it's a surprisingly low-key, un-showy album, with passages depicting the peaceful monotony of Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan's travel. The sound of the motor, and its imitation by sliding strings, returns throughout the piece, which is bookended by the words "It was the sound of the motor I remember the most". It's a masterful work, at times joyous, often soothing, and more than a little haunting.

Lia Kohl - Ice Cream Truck, Tornado Siren [Moon Glyph/Bandcamp]
Lia Kohl - Tennis Court Light, Snow [Moon Glyph/Bandcamp]
Chicago cellist and sound-artist Lia Kohl has built up a gorgeous catalogue of odd, inquisitive and considered sound works over a very short period of time, with releases on Skeletons' Shinkoyo, Longform Editions and American Dreams. Her new album Normal Sounds is released by the adventurous Portland (Oregon) tape/vinyl label Moon Glyph, and the album title is a nice description of Kohl's practice (as are the track titles). As well as field recordings and the sounds of "normal" human activity, Kohl likes to incorporate the randomness of a radio scrolling through frequencies and settling on whatever happens to be on the airwaves. And of course there's her cello, which along with electronics can slip into the mix and transform everything. It's not always clear even from the titles what we're hearing ("Tornado Siren"?) but Kohl is second to none in melding these real-world "normal sounds" with her layered, processed instrument and synths. Another beautiful work from a unique artist.

Daniela Huerta - Fondo [Elevator Bath/Bandcamp]
Daniela Huerta - Seqvana [Elevator Bath/Bandcamp]
Long-lived Texas label Elevator Bath encompasses musique concrète, electroacoustic sound-art, noise and drone... at least. Label boss Colin Andrew Sheffield has kindly shared the debut solo album from Berlin-based Mexican artist Daniela Huerta, which comes out in late October. Huerta is one half of Huerta Ensamble with Concepción Huerta (I think no relation!) and DJs as Baby Vulture at venues like Berghain and CTM. Soplo bears some aural indicators of contemporary experimental electronic, but draws as much from musique concrète and electroacoustic music. The album opens with the dripping and flowing water of "Seqvana", which is combined with muted, pinging synth tones and clanging sounds. There's always a clear sense of space. Water sounds percolate through the whole album, joined with blurred voice, trembling organs, reverberating choirs and more. So when we reach "Fondo", the album's seventh track, it's a surprise to hear an almost march-like two-note bassline underscoring lurching synth horns (and bubbling water). Halfway through the bassline disappears and the synth tones are engulfed in increasingly resonating pink noise. Soplo is an artful album of sonic illusions, concrète music as it was always intended.

Andrew Tuttle & Michael Chapman - At Seventy-Three Miles [Basin Rock/Bandcamp]
Michael Chapman - Untitled #7 [Basin Rock/Bandcamp]
Andrew Tuttle & Michael Chapman - A Third Revision (Or Evolution) [Basin Rock/Bandcamp]
British guitarist and singer-songwriter Michael Chapman worked across many genres up until he passed away in 2021 aged 80. His latter-day following was confirmed in the Tompkins Square-issued compilation Oh Michael, Look What You've Done: Friends Play Michael Chapman, featuring Lucinda Williams, Meg Baird and Thurston Moore among others. One Australian fan was Brisbane's Andrew Tuttle, who's made a career around electronically-mediated banjo and acoustic guitar-picking soundscapes. By luck, Chapman's partner Andru had been enjoying Tuttle's album on Basin Rock, Fleeting Adventure, in the years after Chapman's passing, and so Andrew Tuttle has had the privilege of expanding on and reworking the unfinished final instrumental recordings of Chapman. The album Another Tide, Another Fish is out through Basin Rock and features the original recordings on a second disc, allowing us to hear just how sensitively Andrew has transformed the original works. Each of Tuttle's track titles contains numbers that allow us to reference them to the originals, so I played "Untitled #7" after Tuttle's "At Seventy-Three Miles". Chapman already takes his beautifully assured fingerpicked guitar into spacey electronic waters, and Tuttle dives deep into the currents with granular processing, timestretching and other techniques, as well as adding his own banjo. A pretty remarkable project altogether.

Loop Year - Heel Turn [Loop Year Bandcamp]
Tim Koch this week alerted me to Loop Year, a new ambient/IDM project from Adelaide's Cailan Burns, who was one half of seminal Aussie electronic experimentalists Pretty Boy Crossover with Jason Sweeney. Sweeney appears here on "Bass guitar noodles", which Tim suggested makes this an ersatz Pretty Boy Crossover revival, and Tim added cymbal splashing and mixing know-how. It's lovely electronic (g)loopiness as per the original PBXO.

Connor D'Netto - Witness [Room40/Bandcamp]
Last week when I played some material from the brilliant duo release Material from Connor D'Netto x Yvette Ofa Agapow, I mentioned that a composition of D'Netto's was caught up in a controversy recently. Pianist Jayson Gillham has been performing a series of concerts with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and at a recent MSO concert, as an encore he performed D'Netto's composition "Witness". The piece is dedicated to the journalists of Gaza, although the work more generally refers to the idea of recasting doom-scrolling as "bearing witness" to the horrific images we are seeing not only from Gaza, but "from Ukraine, Congo, Sudan, the riots in Bangladesh, school shootings in the USA, and closer to home the treatment of First Nations People in incarceration". When Gilham performed the piece a couple of weeks ago he drew the audience's attention to the appalling number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in Gaza (a number already far too high before October 7th). In response, the MSO management (it's not clear who) immediately cancelled the remaining performances by the orchestra. There was widespread outrage, and a campaign by my union, MEAA, who represent both Australian journalists and Australian musicians, called for the decision to be reversed. Surprisingly, this did happen - the MSO claimed "a mistake" was made, and now there will be an independent review into the orchestra's decision-making, led by Peter Garrett(!) Nevertheless, this speaks to the horrendous censorious situation in the arts and beyond, worldwide, when it comes to any speech sympathetic to Palestinians. So it's pleasing to find D'Netto's touching piece - performed by Gillham - now available via Room40, with all proceeds to be donated to PARA - Palestine Australia Relief and Action.

Saoirse Prince - Earthy flavours envelop my tongue and slide down my throat [Saoirse Prince Bandcamp]
We finish tonight with another piece of delicate piano music, from new Sydney artist Saoirse Prince, whose debut album Late Winter is her personal take on the "neoclassical" piano genre, drawing pleasingly from the likes of Sophie Hutchings as much as any of the big international names. I'm particularly attracted to the pieces that complicate the piano sound with electronics, such as the persistent delay throughout this track, mushrooming into distortion before petering out.

Listen again — ~201MB