Utility Fog

Sunday, 25th of April, 2010

Evening all! Beautiful music to start tonight...
LISTEN AGAIN via the link at the bottom!

Chris Weisman appears again with a delightful ditty about "bicycle operator and co". Near the end he refers to the BOAC in the Beatles' "Back In The USSR", which that eminence gris of Drum Media, Ross Clelland, pointed out to me stands for "British Overseas Airways Corporation". I prefer Weisman's acronym.

More also from Sam Amidon, including a track from his earlier album All Is Well — more highly authentic American folk.

Matthew Herbert’s new album is as conceptual as ever. One One indicates that he has reduced his sphere of sample-sources to nothing but... himself! He plays and sings and produces and edits everything here, and his unsteady vocals lend a special quality to the familiar melodic cadences which are usually sung by one of his female accomplices. Lovely stuff.

B. Dolan’s album continues to impress. Heavy tricky beats and great vocal delivery.

I played Underlapper’s excellent remix of Parades a couple of weeks ago and it gets another spin tonight because the Parades album proper is now out. Jonathan Boulet & co take their drums into album drum'n'bass territory, with postrock aesthetics and great pop hooks. Underlapper just ramp it up to the Nth degree with a last third heading into full-on breakcore glitch territory...

...after which there is no choice but to play some new 65daysofstatic. I've been supporting these guys since their very first EP, and it's great to see their latest album getting an Australian release. Maybe now we'll get to see them live, finally. From their Weak4 EP we have a very electronic piece, kind of glitchy drum'n'bass, and then a really beautiful number from the album We Were Exploding Anyway, just out this very week. I'll play some more next week, along with a few exciting bits from their past — including something with young Robert Smith of a band called The Cure, who 65dos supported on tour last year (or... 2008-2009?)

Following this, we were joined by the estimable Shoeb Ahmad from Canberra, who popped in for a chat and a chance to play some favourite music of his. Shoeb's work with Spartak and solo, and his label hellosQuare Recordings, have provided much listening fodder for Utility Fog over the years, so it was great to hear these selections, and also some of the connections that brought them forth.
That's how we go from German postrockers to rococo rot to Blur to Massive Attack (connected by Krautrocky grooves) and later the alt.country experimentation of Califone and the gorgeous classicism of Hauschka. Listen to the re-play below for much discussion.

The "triple play" after Massive Attack is an interesting beast. Cold Cave is one of those bands combining the post-punk disco/electro-pop thing (I tried to get "goth" in there but wasn't sure where to put them hyphen) with a bit of the noise biz, and with both Dominick Fernow of Prurient (and Hospital Productions) and the fabulous Sarah Lipstate (Noveller) involved, at least live, it's got to be interesting.
The collaborative tracks came from a cassette on Hospital Productions that's surprisingly ambient (and lovely), and in between, the legendary Arthur Baker takes on one of Cold Cave’s tracks...

Continuing in the noise-meets-ambient sphere, we have some newness on boutique label Monstera Deliciosa, run by Grant Hunter of UFog faves Crab Smasher.
Reunion Sacred Ibis is a solo act from Melbourne, and both "pana-wave" tracks are thrilling bits of broken-down distorted electronics.
Sydney's Edwin Montgomery should be familiar to UFog listeners, and his latest album's title says it all: Please Be Quiet and Play Your Guitar, Vol. 1 sends his guitar through various pedals to produce quiet listening music.

Meanwhile, Gail Priest has some new tracks up on Bandcamp for only a few dollars. Disquieting vocal, acoustic and electronic sounds and one of the big recommendations of the week.

A couple more tracks courtesy of Shoeb, including a bit of processed field recordings from Bangladesh, and then we're back to Sydney with Vorad Fils, aka John Hassell from Seekae. Anyone familiar with his trio's music will know what to expect, but this album certainly delivers — despite being written & recorded in only a few weeks. Glitched-up hip-hop beats, verging on the wonky side, with synths and (acoustic) piano processed to buggery.

Did we say "wonky"? One of the centres of the west-coast US's wonky hip-hop/dubstep/thingy sound is Alpha Pup Records, whose latest release comes from Take. The album has really grown on me, but I'd been scratching my head for a week or more over the synth sample in this particular track...
After confirming that it wasn't any of the classic idm folks I thought it was, I suddenly had the epiphany that it was much closer to home - a wonky producer from across the Atlantic. No wonder it had been so familiar — Paul White’s Clean Dub of Tranqill’s Payroll had been one of my favourite songs of last year! This led me to track down the original, which is none other than Greek synth legend Vangelis, he of the Blade Runner soundtrack. The track "Spiral" comes from years earlier - 1977 - starting with these synth squiggles and then moving into a sequenced line of the sort we'd hear in the work of Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never these days.
It's amusing to hear that not one, not two, but three artists have sampled this same squiggly line within about a year - the third being that manufacturer of drum'n'bass anthems Sub Focus, who takes not just the wobbly/warbly beginning but also the pomp and bluster of the big organ lines to introduce his hard-hittin' beats. All very silly but fun enough.

Chris Weisman - b.o.a.c. [autumn records]
Sam Amidon - Little Johnny Brown [Bedroom Community]
Sam Amidon - How Come That Blood [Bedroom Community]
Matthew Herbert - Porto [Accidental Records]
B. Dolan - Earthmovers [Strange Famous]
Parades - Invaders (review) [dot dash]
Parades - Hunters (Underlapper remix) [Direct from the 'lappies, but available on iTunes (eek!)]
65daysofstatic - Goodbye, 2007 [Hassle Records]
65daysofstatic - Debutante [Hassle Records]
Spartak - Tweezer [Low Point] {available locally through hellosQuare. Cheap! Awesome!}
to rococo rot - working against time [Domino]
Blur - Music is My Radar [Parlophone]
Massive Attack - Babel (feat. Martina Topley-Bird) [EMI]
Cold Cave / Prurient - Injured In Sleep [Hospital Productions]
Cold Cave - Life Magazine (Arthur Baker's Not Going Back Remix) [Matador] {Download from Stereogum}
Cold Cave / Prurient - Stars Explode [Hospital Productions]
Reunion Sacred Ibis - pana-wave 1 [Monstera Deliciosa]
Edwin Montgomery - Tuesday, 3:30pm [Monstera Deliciosa]
Reunion Sacred Ibis - pana-wave 2 [Monstera Deliciosa]
Gail Priest - Stranglers [get via Bandcamp!]
Califone - Evidence [Dead Oceans]
Hauschka - Rode Null [Fat Cat]
Shoeb Ahmad - Blossoms part 8 [hellosQuare]
Vorad Fils - Lioness [Feral Media]
Take - Crystallia [Alpha Pup]
Vangelis - Spiral [RCA]
Tranqill - Payroll (Paul White’s Clean Dub) [Planet µ]
Sub Focus - Let The Story Begin [Ram Records]

Listen again — ~ 175MB

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