Utility Fog

Look, the year’s coming to a close. What a fucking relief. Let it go, let it go. I mean, obviously 2025’s gonna be a lot worse, but maybe it can also be better in some ways? Let’s make it so.
On the other hand, there’s been so much great music, and it’s still coming! It just refuses to stop. Here, see…
(You can LISTEN AGAIN over at FBi’s website or podcast here)

Sandy Chamoun, Anthony Sahyoun, Jad Atoui – Taha Layl – طاح الليل [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
The last release for the year from Beirut’s Ruptured Records comes from three great experimental Lebanese artists, Sandy Chamoun, Anthony Sahyoun and Jad Atoui. Sandy Chamoun has released some incredible experimental electronic pop stuff, and also leads the postpunk/psych/Arabic free-jazz group SAMAN. Anthony Sahyoun and Jad Atoui both make experimental electro-acoustic music, and have recorded together as NP. The title of their album, Ghadr – غ​د​ر, means approximately “Treachery”, and is clearly affected by the destruction and terrorisation of Gaza that was occurring during its making. Now Israel has turned its attention on Lebanon (again), faux-ceasefire notwithstanding: Sandy Chamoun’s family home in southern Lebanon was destroyed yesterday, I believe. So the all-encompassing noise, from guitars and electronics, is easily understandable here, but the beauty of Chamoun’s Arabic vocals exquisitely offsets these sounds even if we don’t understand the lyrics. There are deep and wide references here, including a quote from an Instagram post by Yousef al-Domouky about the genocide in Gaza, poetry from Paul Chaoul, and on the opening track, a traditional Bedouin folk song. It’s stunning work from start to finish.

Ruth Goller – Often they came to visit, even just to see how she was (M1) [Ruth Goller Bandcamp/International Anthem/International Anthem Bandcamp]
Ruth Goller – Below my skin [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
Ruth Goller – How to be free from it [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
I’ve been a little bit obsessed with the uncanny style of UK-based Italian bassist Ruth Goller over the last few weeks. Goller has been playing with some of the most cutting-edge jazz & improv musicians in the UK, as a bass player – but in her solo work she writes these incredible angular melodies with strange intervals and harmonies, and she performs them on her electric bass, shadowed with her voice intoning nonsense syllables. And it’s spine-tingling.
So, Goller’s solo album Skylla was originally released in 2021 in a CD edition, and a 2nd edition, both of which are now rare as hens’ teeth. BUT the mighty International Anthem, cutting-edge Chicago jazz label, has just re-released it in handsome vinyl editions. Earlier this year, the label released her follow-up, Skyllumina. This album follows Skylla closely, with those bass+vox melodies still featuring, but while Skylla was almost entirely Goller solo, Skyllumina features different collaborators on each track – all of whom are drummers or percussionists (other than Lauren Kinsella singing on one track). This gives the album a sizeable range, from the nimble jazz/postrock skitter of Tom Skinner on “Below my skin” (you’ll know him from The Smile, or Sons of Kemet, but do check out his own solo album on International Anthem!) to the quasi-death-metal onslaught of Emanuele Maniscalo on “How to be free from it”. Notable also is fellow British jazz-fusionist (and International Anthem artist) Bex Burch, playing two types of African thumb piano on “She was my own she was myself”.

Rikuto Fujimoto – Mebuki (Prelude) [130701/Bandcamp]
Rikuto Fujimoto – Intersection 1 [130701/Bandcamp]
Well, speaking of singing doubled melodies, here’s another late-entry standout for 2024, the debut album of Kyoto-born, Tokyo-based pianist and composer Rikuto Fujimoto, released by the ever-reliable 130701. With such a glut of mediocre post-Nils/post-Ólafur “piano classical” out there, aimed squarely at Spotify playlists, it’s always great to hear people doing something different in that space. Not only is Fujimoto completing a composition degree, he takes his pieces in unusual harmonic directions, and his high, androgynous voice is electrically attractive on these pieces. The album is about memory, and the pieces were performed without sheet music. With his vocalisations (which are, like Ruth Goller’s, wordless, or at least languageless), this decision gives the recordings a very intimate feel – you should invite yourself in.

Passepartout Duo – Imitates a Penguin [Passepartout Duo Bandcamp]
Nicoletta Favari & Christopher Salvito take their Passepartout Duo around the world almost constantly, going from residency to residency, and as well as creating dependably lovely music, they create musical instruments, or interfaces. For instance, check out this prototype looper/sampler instrument they demo’d on Instagram recently. Their new album Argot is literally about the interface & relationship between human performance and technology. The duo themselves tend to play piano and tuned percussion as well as synthesizers; here they add strings on some tracks, but the live instruments are often following scores generated by a Serge modular system – infamously complex and hard to control. So you hear piano melodies jumping around strange intervals in strange timings. It’s uncanny music, quite beautiful and rather alien.

Penelope Trappes – Platinum [One Little Independent/Bandcamp]
I believe I’m able to declare this to be a world premiere of the second single from Penelope Trappes‘ forthcoming album A Requiem, her first on One Little Independent, home of Björk, Glasser and many others. Penelope’s art is truly unique, precariously tethered to song but with the art of sound at its centre, the evocation of a feeling or state of being… Just like the chilling first single, “Sleep”, “Platinum” comes with an intense video. This one’s about inner strength – how to find strength in what we know are really difficult times. And there’s more beautiful, scratchy cello here too, courtesy of Maddie Cutter.

BZDB – Water [AD 93/Bandcamp]
BZDB – Stockwell [AD 93/Bandcamp]
It’s just about time that I stop commenting on how AD 93, Nic Tasker’s label previously known as Whities, has moved far beyond the leftfield dance music that was once their core material. Out now is the excellent debut album from BZDB, a collaboration between London/Marseilles-based poet Belinda Zhawi aka MA.MOYO and multidisciplinary artist Duncan Bellamy, best known as a founding member of jazz/classical/electronic crossover band Portico Quartet. The elliptically titled album Jump Ship, Sit Lean, Be Still, Stand Tall very much suits their “sonic poetry” tag, whether it’s plaintive strings, soft piano or plunging electro-dub beats that support and undercut the spoken words.

David August – VĪS (Cinna Peyghamy Reinterpretation) [99CHANTS/Bandcamp]
David August – VĪS (Marina Herlop Reinterpretation) [99CHANTS/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, Italian-German composer/producer/DJ David August released a wonderful EP entitled Workouts, with four percussive, buoyant techno cuts. But his last full album, last year’s VĪS, was quite a different affair, a deeply considered work drawing from Middle Eastern philosophy, combining sound-art and composition – and occasional beats. That album has now been “reinterpreted” by 13 artists, and it’s an excellent line-up, including Aho Ssan, Ulla, Valentina Magaletti, claire rousay and many others. French-Iranian percussionist Cinna Peyghamy is a standout, layering elements from the album with his brilliant percussion. And the very versatile Marina Herlop manages to include classical piano, her own vocals, and manic drill’n’bass programming in her cut.

Cleo AD – Charge Init (feat. Pharu) [YUKU]
Cleo AD – Let You [YUKU]
Here’s YUKU digging up brilliant young artists who you may not find anywhere else. Cleo AD is Sebastian G from Leipzig, who’s been involved with the bass scene for a while, and brings elements of grime and low-slung hip-hop with that deconstructed club vibe, and beats that run from sub-140 to jungle and breakcore. Crazy stuff.

Morwell – This Word, Life (remix) [Spiritual Transmissions/Morwell Bandcamp]
Morwell – Let Us Make (remix) [Spiritual Transmissions/Morwell Bandcamp]
Earlier this year Max Morwell launched his own Spiritual Transmissions label with the album Into the Light, extending his production out from breakbeat-oriented rave into shoegaze, psychedelia, and hints of free jazz and IDM, with many freaky psychedelic voice samples. Just in time for the end of the year, he’s releasing the companion Into the Light Remixes, emphasising the early Orb influences and enticing these tracks back towards the club. So good!

James Adrian Brown – Without A Trace [James Adrian Brown Bandcamp]
Following a successful career as a rock guitarist in Leeds rock band Pulled Apart By Horses, James Adrian Brown has for the last few years been crafting a new space for himself in instrumental electronic music. Earlier this year was the melodic Terra Incognita, but now he’s folding more beats into his music on Without A Trace. The EP also comes with a nice mid-tempo jungle/hardcore version from Leigh D Oliver‘s Faux Soul, usually known more for house & techno sounds.

Belief Defect – Apprehension Engine [raster/Bandcamp]
Desire and Discontent is the second album from Belief Defect, the duo of Moe Espinosa aka Drumcell and Mexico’s Luis Flores. A crunchy, rumbling, energetic fusion of industrial, techno and idm, this is a dark reflection of our current times.

LTO – Gwddw [Denovali/Bandcamp]
Finally the new LTO EP, The Return, is out! 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 widely 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 range of stuff on this EP, definitely leaning back into the bass biz, but also world music and those cinematic influences. An album called Carapace is coming next year – looking forward to it!

Murcof – Tomorrow Part. II [InFiné/Bandcamp]
From the early ’00s, Mexican musician Fernando Corona aka Murcof was a distinctive voice in minimalist techno, often drawing classical samples into his loops, sketching techno’s rhythms with clicks and glitches, underpinning it with sub-bass. He began a decade or more earlier with rock, prog and ambient electronic musics, and as he entered his 50s, he looked back at 1980s synths as an inspiration. Twin Color (vol. I) doesn’t exactly sound like ’80s music, but its take on dancefloor music is less interested in the micro-level, providing cinematic scope and warm nostalgia.

Mayari – Light 2.0 [Mayari Bandcamp]
Mayari – Heal Me [Mayari Bandcamp]
Naarm musician Alison Adriano’s Mayari brings a form of pulsing techno that leaves room for experimental sound and ambient passages, as well as beguiling hints of pop with her own voice. The buzzing noise drones and synth warbles on “Heal Me” keep the choral and melodic voices in check, while “Light 2.0” brings flutes along with the voice to her Four Tet-like upbeat rhythms. The blissful and down-to-earth elements exist in harmony. An exciting talent.

Shugorei – Roboto [4000 Records/Bandcamp]
Let us travel now to Meanjin/Brisbane, where we find the ever-adventurous Shugorei branching out in an unexpected direction. Nozomi Omote draws on her Japanese heritage with a song about a dreamer and a robot that’s hyperpop, but make it ’80s pop – and then halfway through Thomas Green’s day-glo synths are joined by Dan Curro, usually a cellist, playing intense, euphoric slap bass. Wait, I’m being told this is meant to be ’90s electro-pop, but… OK, somewhere in between, yet uncannily now-coded. If the whole album’s like this, we’re in for a treat.

Colourfields – outrunnr [Colourfields Bandcamp]
Now back here in Gadigal country, we find a resurrected project from Microfiche keyboardist Novak Manojlovic and sound engineer George Sheridan. Colourfields‘ 2018 album Body Objects was a colourful mix of electronica, jazz and instrumental r’n’b. On “outrunnr”, the first track from their CFEP out December 10th, the electro-pop hiding in plain sight on that album comes to the fore, with a track that hasn’t entirely lost the jazz roots, but lets the jazz drums pull it more in a postrock or indietronic direction. It’s a very fine piece, and you’ll be able to hear the whole EP in no time.

Matthew Herbert – The Horse Is Not Quiet (aus UMA Remix) [Accidental Records/Bandcamp]
The penchant lately for special editions / deluxe editions that come out hot on the tails of new albums is kinda odd – obviously it comes from the Spotify era, where you can easily update your published version of an album. But releasing brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not so soon, on physical formats? Um… OK.
Anyway, Matthew Herbert released The Horse, his album literally made of a horse (and an orchestra), in May last year, so the special edition is by no means an exercise in indecisiveness. The connection I’m drawing is more that Accidental Records decided to rename the original album as The Horse Special Edition, such that the old album on Bandcamp redirects to the new, and the original physical editions remain attached. The special edition contains a few new horse tracks, plus a bunch of really great remixes, ranging from recent collaborator Momoko Gill‘s electro-pop rendition to Richard Skelton‘s electro-acoustic orchestrations and Robag Wruhme‘s typically stylish and hypnotic minimal techno/microhouse. Robag’s mix was released a year ago, but the way I found out about this re-edition was via Yasuhiko Fukuzono aka aus, a beautiful Japanese producer of IDM, folktronica and ambient music, who’s here with two different remixes. The “UMA Remix” of “The Horse Is Quiet” (except it’s “The Horse Is Not Quiet”) is a kind of footwork-folktronica thing of skittery beauty, with gorgeous string lines joining in the last quarter. On the other hand his “aus Reprise”, dubbed “The Horse Is Quiet Cause Sleep”, is a gorgeous layered thing that slips between minimal electronica and post-classical, all the while hosting clattery field recordings from the original horse bones.

Jules Reidy – Every Day There’s a Sunrise [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Australian guitarist Jules Reidy has created a genre all their own from the eerie resonances of the alternate tunings they use, on acoustic and electric guitar played in ways that seem to draw from folk fingerpicking and Indian ragas, while their voice is equally eerily autotuned into alienness. But Ghost/Spirit, Reidy’s 2025 album coming out on Thrill Jockey, is a transformative album for Reidy, which not only acknowledges their transgender identity, but also heralds a rediscovery of mysticism in the wake of a relationship’s end, so the positive outlook on “Every Day There’s a Sunrise” comes from a turning-outward, finding love in a universal context rather than interpersonal. This one song’s one part of a whole work though, which will arrive in full on February 21st next year.

Winter Family – On Beautiful Days [Sub Rosa/Bandcamp/Murailles Music/Bandcamp]
On Beautiful Days is the fourth album from French-Israeli duo Winter Family, which came out in September via Murailles Music and Sub Rosa. The multi-disciplinary duo, made up of Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine as well as their daughter Saralei, work in documentary theatre as well as what they call “weird wave” or “funeral pop”. They combine elements of chanson with lo-fi postpunk synth, with Rosenthal’s spoken or chanted poetry telling stories of life in Israel/Palestine and France, of women, of conspiracy theories, of capitalism and colonialism, of the “blindness and violence of Israeli society and the indoctrination of its population”, and of the occupation of Palestine. The title track of their new album is sung in French, Hebrew and English, about looking elsewhere from here.
Now please watch this beautiful and heartbreaking video for their track “Gaza”, from back in 2017. The lyrics are in the description.

Listen again — ~209MB

We’re getting towards the end of the year and the new releases are refusing to let up. I take this as a personal affront.

LISTEN AGAIN and get angry along with me at how much great music there is! Stream on demand with FBi, podcast here.

Julián Mayorga – No te comas las blaquísimas mofetas [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
Julián Mayorga – La venganza de las wawas panches [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
Sometimes you just come across something so insane and new that it’s somehow recognizable, as if it somehow had to exist. Hamburg-based label Glitterbeat has form, finding fantastic music from across the globe – but that said, Julián Mayorga is pretty famous in Colombia, for his surreal, madcap humour & satire as much as for his madcap music. Attempting to translate the song titles does mostly result in contextless nonsense-poetry, which is kind of fun, but it’s the music that draws you in – mutated, updated cumbia and other Latin American styles, sharpened with the vinegar of discordant harmonies, sprinkled with weird electronics, delivered into your head with Mayorga’s flamboyant vocal style. And just incredibly fun.

Safety Trance – On 1 (feat. Dorian Electra) [Boysnoize Records/Bandcamp]
It wasn’t until putting the show together that I realisd that Safety Trance is not just a Venezuelan electronic producer: Luis Garbàn is Cardopusher, whose breakcore productions were all over Utility Fog’s first 6 or 7 years. Once upon a time this JoJo-samplin’ slab of overdriven amens and ragga samples was my favourite breakcore track, even. And then he did some dubstep and then moved on to shinier, less aggressive dancefloor stuff as far as I know. And here, now, emerges Cardo as Safety Trance, making a kind of industrial reggaeton. He collaborated with Arca on the first Safety Trance EP Noches de Terror, and the Lágrimas album later that year added Iceboy Violet and Brodinski as collaborators among others. Again with Boysnoize Records he’s now released “On 1” with another gender-fluid collaborator, Dorian Electra. It’s an ultra-stripped down 3-note melody, with hints of amen breaks scattered hither & thither, but nevertheless it has the most mass appeal of anything I’ve heard from Garbàn yet.

Blawan – Fires [XL Recordings/Bandcamp]
After some pretty dark stuff on his last 2 EPs, Blawan returns with the first single from new EP BouQ, which is noticeably brighter, with female vocal samples and splashes of purple through the bass riddims. Always quality.

Ulrich Troyer – VAJOLET feat. Lukas Lauermann, Wolfgang Pfistermüller & Flip Philipp [4Bit Productions]
Ulrich Troyer – LAGO DI GARDA feat. Roger Robinson [4Bit Productions]
Throughout the 2nd half of this year, Austrian glitch/dub producer Ulrich Troyer has been dropping a series of 7″s in advance of this new album, Transit Tribe. So we’ve already heard a few of the lovely dubwise pieces, 4some exclusive b-sides, but here’s the full album, chock full of collaborators including Burkina Fasoan masters Mamadou Diabate & Hamidou Koita, clarinettist Susanna Gartmayer and many others. On our first track we hear from some classical musicians: cellist Lukas Lauermann, trombonist Wolfgang Pfistermüller & percussionist Flip Philipp – it’s an interesting choice for the first track, and introduces the album with a bit of analogue, acoustic warmth. Further along we have a beautiful appearance from British-Jamaican poet Roger Robinson, known for his work in King Midas Sound with Kevin Martin, among many other accomplishments.

Atsushi Izumi & Fatwires – Akagane [Holotone/Bandcamp]
Look, I wrote something about this release last week when it wasn’t out yet, and everything still applies: Released on gregarious Italian label Holotone is the first EP from an enticing new duo. Japanese industrial dub/techno producer Atsushi Izumi‘s latest solo album Schismogenesis came out in May on Ohm Resistance. Fatwires is the dub/bass sound project of bass polymath John Eckhardt, as accomplished with contemporary classical double bass as he is with dub or other genres. They promise a heavy, noisy album next year, but the KISEN KONGOU EP leans into the heavy dub favoured by Izumi, not far off from the sound of The Bug.

Full of Hell and Andrew Nolan – Gradual Timeslip feat. Taichi Nagura [Closed Casket Activities/Bandcamp]
US Grindcore band Full of Hell are not content staying in their lane, although grindcore isn’t a genre that tends to be populated with rule-followers. Full of Hell have many collaborations under their belt: one with Merzbow, two stunners with The Body that bend into postrock and electronics, more doom with Primitive Man, and surprising beauty late last year with shoegazers Nothing. Here they call in UK noise/industrial/punk maestro Andrew Nolan, whose sound is more congruent with Full of Hell than some of these others, and the album is by and large an assault on the senses. But it’s not relentless, with Justin K Broadrick bringing a distinctive Godflesh feel to one track, and Taichi Nagura of Japanese noise act Endon adding vocal pain in the background of the pummeling drums and noises on tonight’s selection.

YHWH Nailgun – Penetrator [AD 93/Bandcamp]
AD 93 are really not content to stay in one place – and long may they continue! There’s still some of that experimental but club-ready electronic music, but here’s another one coming out of leftfield, a single from NYC punks YHWH Nailgun. Is “punk” right? Well, it’s part of the story (and I note that “leftfield” is one of the other tags on the Bandcamp page). The shouty vox come with a jagged accompaniment with guitar riffs and shards of synth work, while the drums careen through drum’n’bass-inspired rhythms. Keen to hear what they throw at us next.

PainKiller – Samsara II [Tzadik]
In unexpected news, there’s something new from PainKiller, the all-star trio of John Zorn on screaming sax, Bill Laswell on bass and Mick Harris on drums. Zorn was long an enfant-terrible of the Downtown New York scene, with his band Naked City doing a kind of Burroughs-ian cut-up thing switching from punk to jazz to film music to who knows what else in careening left-hand turns – and he remains highly influential in jazz, improv and modern Jewish music with his Tzadik label (and before Tzadik he ran the Avant label partially out of Japan). Laswell is a legendary bass player and producer across many genres including dub, jazz, drum’n’bass, funk, ambient, global music and just about anything else. And Mick Harris was the second(?) drummer in Napalm Death, somewhat crossing over with Justin K Broadrick, popularised the d-beat and apparently coined the genre name “grindcore”, before going on to make industrial dub (genuinely proto-dubstep) with/as Scorn, and continuing nowadays to make dubwise beats in various genres. So… PainKiller was initially a free-jazz-noise-punk kind of thing, but with these three as the creatives, it spun off into terrifying ambient dub quarters and more. The return of the band is very much technologically-mediated: the three recorded their parts in their own studios, and Harris’s drums are electronic beats now, with electronics from Harris and maybe Laswell as well. It’s no less energetic, abrasive and hardcore than 30+ years ago though!
Laswell has sadly been very sick for some time, battling various health issues, and being in America, this has been draining his finances so that he’s been at risk of losing his Orange Studios in New Jersey. There’s a GoFundMe which has raised over $100k, but you could do worse than grab some of his massive back catalogue on Bandcamp. (The Quietus gives a very small sliver of insight into some of the material here – recommended!)

Glass Fountain – Forget It [watch on YouTube]
If you don’t recognize Glass Fountain, the Naarm/Melbourne duo used to be called Glass House Mountain. Maybe you remember this excellent & clever video for “Perception” recorded during Covid with the two members mostly separate outside… Their new track was recorded live at Bakehouse Studios in Richmond, and comes with a great video too. The combo of James O’Brien on bass guitar & synths and Benjamin Graham on drums here goes as close to the club as ever, with electronic beats mixed with the drums. There’s a sense of the time when Four Tet went from hip-hop influenced folktronica into house & techno (where he’s pretty much remained), and it’s great seeing the guys doing this completely live.

Simon Öggl – Departure [col legno/Bandcamp]
Simon Öggl – Hibernation [col legno/Bandcamp]
This debut album from Austrian composer Simon Öggl belies a wide-ranging history in various formats: as 1/4 of live electronic band Drathaus, he’s making weird electronic art-pop; he also makes experimental electronic music as {ø_ø} (pronounced Brackethead), and previously made drum’n’bass as Hidden Aspect. So his first released work (from what I can see) as a composer – released on the forward-thinking Austrian classical label col legno – rather slyly blends electronic music with classical, and electronic production with acoustic performance. There’s an ensemble here made up of flute, clarinet, cello, trumpet, trombone and electric guitar, along with soprano Clara Hamberger and countertenor Aleksandar Jovanovic, while Öggl himself plays keyboards and percussion – but you’ll find your perspective shifted as electronics take over from the classical instruments and at times glitchy rhythms lead to passages of drum’n’bass or techno. It’s all very well to dream of this kind of hybridisation, but Öggl has the composing and production chops to pull this off very effectively, so much so that you’ll want to skip back and listen again when you suddenly realise you’re not quite listening to what you thought you were…

Laurence Pike – Orpheus In The Underworld (Live) [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney’s own Laurence Pike transplanted his percussion and electronics into the classical world earlier this year with his album The Undreamt-of Centre adding a full choir to his arsenal. The album was launched with a couple of gigs here in Sydney, and a live recording of one of the performances at Phoenix Central Park is forthcoming. There’s a wonderful feeling of space in the live rendering of “Orpheus in the Underworld”, Pike’s drums ringing out and the choir perfectly balanced. Look out for a new work in a similar vein from Pike, with live dancing and archival film, during Sydney Festival in January.

Pelican Daughters – Dinmango [se Dessaisir Publishing]
Most of us know Andy Rantzen as one half of rave legends Itch-E & Scratch-E with the storied Paul Mac. But, among many other projects, from the mid-’80s Andy had been making strange music with Justin Brandis, originally as Knapp and then Pelican Daughters. Some of their earlier work has been more recently rediscovered/recovered, but It’s time my friend… is a new album, albeit featuring unreleased music from the original era (to my ears). This has a definite feel of postpunk & dub, with some weird ’80s studio experimentation. Enticingly, the CD edition that’s out soon will feature further archival material not found on the digital release.

Lasse Marhaug – Plates [Smalltown Supersound/Bandcamp]
Lasse Marhaug – Good Days Quiet [Smalltown Supersound/Bandcamp]
Norwegian musician Lasse Marhaug has been an important figure in the noise scene for a few decades, but more broadly has been producing work for a huge range of artists including Norwegian indie & experimental pop types like Jenny Hval and Korean-American jazz/improv/noise cellist Okkyung Lee. Being in noise and free music means scads of collaborations too, always worth checking out, but his comparatively rarer solo work is guaranteed quality. 2022’s Context found him on Smalltown Supersound, a label he’s worked with for decades, and to whom he returns now with Provoke. These two are really of a piece, even thought Provoke is deeply affected by the, er, context of Marhaug’s moving back to the Arctic north where he grew up. Certainly this is cold, windswept music. Both albums have more structure than you might find with power electronics or psychedelic noise: this is minimalist, crunchy, sometimes rhythmical music, with sub-bass pings through slow crescendos, groaning distortions but also harmonious passages. Beautiful, and sometimes exhilarating.

Mike Shiflet – Ask Three Times [Mike Shiflet Bandcamp]
Since at least the beginning of the 2000s, Mike Shiflet has also been a mainstay of various noise scenes, including working with C Spencer Yeh‘s much-missed Burning Star Core (Shiflet is a “presence” on “Come Back Through Me” for instance, and appears on the brilliant Operator Dead, Post Abandoned among others). In April this year, Shiflet released two sets of albums of 24 hours each(!), and you should definitely check out Tetracosa Ensemble Volumes 1-4 and Volumes 5-8, for which Shiflet invited dozens of musicians from across the noise, experimental electronic, contemporary classical, improv etc worlds to contribute sounds that he has chopped, edited, and processed into two 12-hour albums (broken into segments of between 9 and 25 minutes). It’s insane, but free to download and full of wonderful gnarly sound.
Anyway, just now Shiflet has released something entirely different. Lisa 2, v. 1.0 (Original Soundtrack) is a soundtrack to a science fiction novel about the horrors of artificial intelligence – well, kinda. It dramatises the anxieties of the current age. Shiflet’s music is creepy and degraded, but also strangely accessible, as with the abandoned-town-fair piano floating through “Ask Three Times”.

Paper Trio – Guttenberg Blues [Time Span Records]
Paper Trio – Litho [Time Span Records]
Here’s an amazing improvising trio calling themselves Paper Trio. They formed when saxophonist/flautist Thomas Agergraad was asked to perform at a Paper Museum/Gallery in the countryside of Denmark, at an event where the extraordinary vocal improviser Randi Pontoppidan and legendary bassist Greg Cohen were also appearing. Pontoppidan improvises with her rich voice and huge range, but also incorporates electronics into her practice. Greg Cohen has worked extensively with John Zorn, but also with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and countless others. I don’t know Agergraad but he’s got 30 years of experience in the Danish jazz scene. The music here is all improvised, and even if you’re not totally into jazz, the textural aspects and the brilliant musicianship make for something beautiful and unique.

Helvetica Noise – Instructions For Frowning [Helvetica Noise Bandcamp]
Speaking of textural, Eora/Sydney trio Helvetica Noise combine spoken poetry, piano & synths, and noise into something all their own. They’re releasing an ambitious series of 6 EPs, starting with Lost in the Dust Factory, from which I’ve previously played the evocative climate change epic “How To Listen To Storms”. Now the full EP is out, from which we heard the touching “Instructions For Frowning”.

Alex Jasprizza – Ripple [Alex Jasprizza Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney saxophonist Alex Jasprizza has for the last few years been honing his craft of electro-acoustic improvisations with the sounds of nature. On “Ripple”, field recordings blend with rippling sax cadences that disappear into fizzling reverb.

Driftwood – Towards The Colour Of The Sky [Room40/Bandcamp]
Driftwood – A Light Filled Room [Room40/Bandcamp]
Out now 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 for some years, but only came together as musicians with this project. 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.

Broken Chip – Auroras [Home Normal]
Blue Mountains producer Martyn Palmer has been plying his trade for at least 15 years now, making rather gorgeous textural, loop-based ambient music as Broken Chip on a multitude of labels (and for a while also making wonky MPC beats as Option Command). I can’t express how pleased I am that Ian Hawgood and co at beloved ambient label Home Normal have taken to Broken Chip with a vengeance. Marty’s been patiently pushing out lovely works on his own Bandcamp, particularly over the last year or so, but among all that, A Distant Blur does seem like some of the most compelling, and just plain gorgeous stuff he’s produced. Highly recommended.

Pefkin – The Rescoring [Nite Hive/Bandcamp]
Gayle Brogan is a violinist & singer from Scotland who has, since the 1990s, played in and with various indie rock and folk-oriented groups, as well as noise/psych-type mysteries. Her solo work as Pefkin goes back around two decades, and I remember her Zugunruhe CDR released on the Sound & Fury label run by the late, beloved Adam D Mills. Penelope Trappes is one of her many fans, and has released new album The Rescoring on her Nite Hive label. This is experimental but absolutely sumptuous music, especially the title track’s fluttering violin and multi-tracked vocals.

Listen again — ~203MB

If you’re looking for avant-pop, avant-Egyptian, sound-art, beat tapes, Iranian electronic, industrial bass, dubstep, idm, jungle, hit em, breakcore, drone, contemporary classical, electro-acoustic or just good ol’-fashioned postfolkrocktronica, you’ve come to the right place!

LISTEN AGAIN and get your bearings. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Maud The Moth – Siphonophores (single edit) [The Larvarium/Bandcamp]
Amaya López-Carromero, born in Spain and now based in Scotland, has been part of the European scene for ages, as part of the band healthyliving among others. Under her alias Maud The Moth, her forthcoming solo album The Distaff is out in February next year, and is announced with a superb first single and a gorgeous underwater video. “Siphonophores” is a dramatic, emotive song featuring Amaya’s high voice and patient piano patterns, bass drum and sweeping cymbal rolls, until distorted synths scream in the first bridge. Also appearing on the album are Seb Rochford of Polar Bear, Sons of Kemet and Pulled By Magnets, and legendary metal cellist Helen Money (aka Alison Chesley).

Penelope Trappes – Sleep [One Little Independent/Bandcamp]
Also out next year (not until April) is A Requiem, the first album on One Little Independent from the UK-based Australian musician Penelope Trappes, whos Penelope trilogy made a big impression between 2017 and 2021. In some ways Trappes upends songwriting, her voice existing in wispy, treacherous ambience. If the first single “Sleep” is anything to go by, the songs on this album are even more restrained, with barely anything except some scraped cello notes and threads of sound at the edge of hearing, until we hear the few stentorian chords that stand in place of a chorus. Watch the incredible video and you’ll understand the song’s evocation of sleep paralysis in the person of the “sleep hag”.

Abdullah Miniawy – Fall down wiseman يسقط الرأي الحكيم (Awrah) ﴾عورة﴿ [Hundebiss/Bandcamp]
Abdullah Miniawy – Jayhano Al Kawahi جيهن الكوهِ [Hundebiss/Bandcamp]
Egyptian vocalist, poet, trumpeter and producer Abdullah Miniawy has been responsible for a remarkable range of music for some years: the kraut-dub of his work with German trio Carl Gari; the mutant bass music with trumpet & vocals with French producer Simo Cell; the cross-cultural experimental work with Copenhagen-based DJ Hvad; and the brilliant sax-trumpet-cello jazz with Miniawy’s spoken & sung poetry in Le Cri Du Caire. But new album NigmaEnigma أ​ن​ي​ج​م ا​ل​ن​َ​ج​م is an entirely solo affair: other than some electronic experiments and poetry self-released a while ago, this is Miniawy’s first solo album. It’s very much centred around his voice, often singing melodies bare of any musical accompaniment – with field recordings, amelodic electronic textures and vocal processing. Some tracks are made of murmered spoken word with fragments of melody; at other times there are rhythmic proto-industrial scrapes and clunks. This is very avant-garde stuff, but also deeply moving, even for those of us who don’t understand Arabic.

Taylor Deupree – The Anthology of Fragments [Nettwerk/Bandcamp]
The Ash EP from Taylor Deupree, now out in full, is the third in a series following Eev and Aer, released on the Canadian indie label Nettwerk. There’s so much depth to Deupree’s music, fine control over sonic detail – not surprising as he’s a highly respected mastering engineer. The ideas of “Ash” and “fragments” seem apposite here, a sooty residue revealing the shape of sounds now gone.

Church Andrews & Matt Davies – Aquilia [Health/Bandcamp]
As usual, the best way to appreciate the alchemy of Church Andrews & Matt Davies is to watch them perform this stuff live: the cut-down drumkit of Matt Davies somehow feeding into the minimal modular synth to create very organic electronic beats. Their latest EP Aquilia also features two more tasty tracks available only on the vinyl.

Unknown Artist – أنا لحبيبي (I am for my lover) [Metro Beirut Records/Bandcamp]
Unknown Artist – علينا نغير (We have to change) [Metro Beirut Records/Bandcamp]
Beats From The Levant – A Tape For Support is exactly what it says – a beat tape made by various unnamed artists from the Levant. Proceeds are split 50/50 between various relief efforts in Lebanon, and Medical Aid for Palestinians. There are plenty of head-nodding beats here sampling from usual hip-hop fare, but the most interesting tracks use samples of Arabic music, chopping them into beats for the heads.

Rojin Sharafi – Kavire Queer [PTP/Bandcamp]
Out of an incredibly rich peer group, Rojin Sharafi has consistently been one of the most notable – and uncompromising – young artists from Iran (whether in the country or the diaspora) in the 5 years since her debut on Ata “Sote” Ebtekar’s Zabte Sote in 2021. Admirably, Sharafi has never stuck to just one thing. She will make challenging pieces of noisy abstract electronics, but then haul us back in with almost-danceable beats, or on 2021’s KARIZ, electro-acoustic pieces featuring santour and prepared piano. O.O.Orifice follows three years later on the mighty PTP, but at the end of last year we heard a wonderful new trio, HUUUM, featuring Sharafi’s electronics with the vocals of Omid Darvish and Astrid Wiesinger‘s saxophone. Her new solo album, though, is possibly her best yet, again jumbling up noisy electronics, experimental beats and microtonal instruments – as well as Sharafi’s spoken word, which was a revelation on her incredible collaboration with Kœnig, ج​ن​گ​، خ​و​د​ِ ح​ق​ی​ق​ت ا​س​ت​‎ (war is the unveiling of the truth). Essential.

Atsushi Izumi & Fatwires – Ga [Holotone/Bandcamp]
Here’s the first track from a new duo collaboration on gregarious Italian label Holotone. Japanese industrial dub/techno producer Atsushi Izumi‘s latest solo album Schismogenesis came out in May on Ohm Resistance. Fatwires is the dub/bass sound project of bass polymath John Eckhardt, as accomplished with contemporary classical double bass as he is with dub or other genres. They promise a heavy, noisy album next year, but the KISEN KONGOU EP leans into the heavy dub favoured by Izumi, not far off from the sound of The Bug. Prepare your bassbins!

Delta – Doorstop [99cts/Bandcamp]
There’s still room for ye olde skool dubstep though, here coming from Birmingham producer Delta, with syncopated, hammering beats that veer between grime and dubstep, and plenty of wub-wubs.

Mattr – Field [Mattr Bandcamp]
I’ve been waiting for a while to play this single from Birmingham’s Mattr (now London-based). He’s had a great run of slickly-produced IDM gear, and “Field” does not disappoint on those stakes, with skittery drill’n’bass beats and lovely melodic synths.

Shadow Club – Phaedra 2 (Midnight Dubs Remix) [Echo Chamber Sound]
New Zealand producer RQ is releasing 3 EPs on the Naarm/Melbourne label Echo Chamber Sound under the name Shadow Club. It’s very accomplished jungle-inclined drum’n’bass. Here’s a remix from fellow Aotearoan Midnight Dubs.

EPROM – Thank You, Dream Girl [Tabula Rasa Records/Bandcamp]
EPROM – The Search [Tabula Rasa Records/Bandcamp]
Gaszia – Big Hit [Tabula Rasa Records/Bandcamp]
One of the less interesting things about Thank You, Dream Girl. is that this compilation and the semi-joke genre “hit em” were inspired by a tweet from Drew Daniel, back in July, when the platform was already in an Elon Musk-triggered death spiral. And now, just in time for the promised compilation to come out, having done the job Musk required of it and helped elect a fascist government, X is being abandoned by most right-thinking individuals (come join me and Drew on Bluesky!) Anyway, if you didn’t already know, Drew, aka The Soft Pink Truth and one half of Matmos, tweeted:

had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called “hit em” that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds thank you dream girl

and it immediately went viral and inspired a wide range of people to try their hand at this breakcore-adjacent genre. One such person early on was EPROM, who not only dramatises the tweet at the beginning of this compilation, but contributes one of the best tracks. Not long afterwards, Travis Stewart aka Machinedrum suggested a compilation of hit em tracks, although a bunch of my friends and acquaintances actually beat them to the punch. Nevertheless, some four months later, the promised compilation is sweet and nicely varied. After EPROM, I decided to play one of the less beat-focused tracks, from Salt Lake City-based Gaszia. Also note the rad Robert Beatty art.

Ghostmemory – Aeroquarium (feat. lunar polygon) [Tabula Rasa Records/Bandcamp]
Ghostmemory – infoSuperhighway [Tabula Rasa Records/Bandcamp]
The hit em comp is released by Tabula Rasa Records, a San Francisco-based “not a record label” who, earlier this year, released an eclectic tribute to rave from Ghostmemory, which I discovered courtesy of… Bleep maybe? From my two selections you may assume Revolution 352 is all about jungle & breakcore, but listen through and you’ll find trance, techno, downtempo and ambient here too. Incredibly well-produced, get amongst it.

clutrrglych – alibaba brainchip implosion [Retrac Recordings/Bandcamp]
Fawn Soto – Fern Gone One Crazy [Retrac Recordings/Bandcamp]
Last week when I played some brilliant new material from Caybee Calabash, I noted that he’s one half of bagel fanclub, and River Everett, the other half, runs the wild & wooly Retrac Recordings label (other than sounding cool, the label’s name is River’s deadname backwards). For the occasion of Retrac’s 5th birthday, they have released RETRAC 5ELEK, a 25-track double vinyl compilation. One LP represents the label’s breakcore inclinations, and the other their “more surreal, dream-like, hypnagogic works”, as the label describes them. Both halves are excellent, and if this kind of relentless music sometimes gets too much, you’ll likely find the next track takes a sharp left turn into something at least a little bit different…
As we find, in this current age, an embarrassment of riches in dancefloor-oriented jungle, the exaggerated speed of breakcore, and its relative disinterest in halftime basslines, can might seem to be missing the point. But its existence right now also suggests that it’s quite content to be its own thing, keeping counsel with variants of noise as well as melodic IDM. Really, this compilation is super fun, and you probably need a bit of that right now.

Daniel O’Toole – Five [Cascade Rumble Records]
Naarm/Melbourne artist Daniel O’Toole works across multiple disciplines, including painting, video art, installations and more. He was previously known as Ears/Captain Earwax. The sound of flowers is a collection of tracks that could be loosely branded as ambient, with soft-focus melodic synths and warbling pads that, at times, collapse in on themselves. What’s fascinating is that this live performance was generated by an instrument O’Toole designed called the “Particle plate”, and once you have the image of riceand pingpong balls dropping on to a metal place, you really can hear the way the physical triggers interact with the music. Check it out in action here. Pretty mind-bending.

Madeleine Cocolas x Vintage Credenza – Rather Cold [4000 Records/Bandcamp]
Jumping up to Meanjin/Brisbane now for another unique idea. Vintage Credenza is John Russell, the man behind the very gregarious 4000 Records. The new project inaugurated with the Drone Prompts I EP finds him reclaiming the idea of the “prompt” from AI’s facsimile of creativity. He provided a selection of fellow Meanjin artists with a specially-chosen drone fragment and asked them to create something from it. The debut EP really goes the gamut, including Tidsguiden’s vocal samples and manic beats, YEARNS’ synth maximalism and Spirit Lights’ drone crescendo, but of course Madeleine Cocolas works her subtle magic on the source, with piano almost drowning in white noise, and other hinted orchestrations all struggling through the snowstorm of drone – “Rather Cold” indeed.

Maja Osojnik & Black Page Orchestra – Doorways #09 (01) [col legno/Mamka Bandcamp]
Maja Osojnik & Maiken Beer – Blende #01 (04) [col legno/Mamka Bandcamp]
It’s interesting to see how typically-“classical” art like musique concrète and acousmatic music is expressed in this age of mass access to electronic production. Some cleaves closely to “composed” music, including the way that the electronics are used; others happily draw from the contemporary sounds of glitch, noise and post-club music, as well as free jazz and other “non-classical” genres.
Here we have excerpts from two works by Vienna-based, Slovenian-born composer Maja Osojnik, who has worked between contemporary and early music, jazz and free improv; sound-art and the experimental rock of Broken.Heart.Collector. This album finds her working with Black Page Orchestra, who specialise in the more unorthodox end of contemporary composed (and improvised) music. Doorways #09 asks the orchestra to enter into a minimalist sound-world, cryptically derived from field recordings inside a forest. From the field recordings, Osojnik constructed a score that instructs the performers what to play, but gives them the scope to decide for how long, and when to change. On top of this performance there’s the electronic editing, which adds a further layer to the questions of performance and mimicry – interpretation of composed instructions, restructured by the composer herself.
In Blende #01, Black Page Orchestra cellist Maiken Beer interprets a piece by Osojnik addressing the duality of “eternal love” and “the inability to receive love”. The cello is joined by samples of voice, recorders and flutes, contributing contrasting tones to the stringed instrument. The electronics are less obvious here… except when they’re not.

Andrea Belfi & Jules Reidy – dessus [Marionette/Bandcamp]
Two brilliant Berlin-based musicians from elsewhere: Jules Reidy is an Australian guitarist who’s been based in Berlin for some time now, and specialises in just-intonation-tuned guitars, giving a sparkling and eerie sound to which Reidy adds effects and increasingly also vocoded vocals. Andrea Belfi, originally from Verona, is a drummer and electronic musician who’s played with the likes of Thom Yorke and Carla Bozulich among many, many others, who released an amazing electro-acoustic solo album through Room40 some 12 years ago (and many more before & after). This is an unexpected dream collaboration between two instinctive, thoughtful composers who are masters of their craft. On the A-side the pair begin refined and reserved, with minimalist patterns on guitar and sparse percussion, slowly getting more complex on the longer piece. On the flip, Reidy’s guitars ring out and are captured by electronics which fling them into higher octaves or scatter them, while Belfi’s drums hold things down more solidly. Experimental though this is, it’s very welcoming music.

civic hall – III (Edit) [Lost Tribe Sound/Bandcamp]
Craig Tattersall is dear to many from his time with Hood and The Remote Viewer, and he’s long been a purveyor of minimalist, disintegrating electronics and electro-acoustics. Euan Millar-Mcmeeken led Scottish indie band The Kays Lavelle in the ’00s up to 2010, and has collaborated with Matthew Collings as Graveyard Tapes among many others, as well as making solo music as Glacis – and he released a stunning album with glitched piano and vocals last year under his own name. So a collaborative work between these two was always going to be special. The two musicians’ imprints are found in differing degrees throughout – on some tracks the piano is lost in a fog of tape degradation, and vocals whisper from another room through static and synths; elsewhere, McMeeken sings melancholy songs with piano front & centre. It’s a touching, elusive work.

Listen again — ~208MB

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