Utility Fog

Monday, 26th of July, 2010

Evening! It's late-start-'Fog! It's also not-very-organised-'Fog, but some really interesting sounds, whether Nick Zammuto’s pre-Books electronic music, or Oval’s re-invention with tiny audio vignettes.
LISTEN AGAIN via the link at the bottom.

I played Salem last week via These New Puritans’s amazing mix for FACT Mag, and this week have a so-heavy-it's-distorted slab of slo-mo hip-hop, plus a similarly slo-mo reworking of These New Puritans themselves. You can just about hear the original track if you stick it on straight after...

Here We Go Magic put on a great performance directly before Utility Fog, and "Only Pieces", from their (at the time, just Luke Temple's) previous album. There were a gratifying number of HWGM fans in the audience, along with the massed Grizzly Bear fans, who were rewarded with a long set of which I caught less than half (see how dedicated I am?)
Meanwhile, PVT have put together a nice remix of the single(ish) from the new HWGM album — yet another download from Stereogum for this week!

I'm pretty sure Zeal’s debut album will be a stayer. Indietronica from Melbourne, nicely shambolic, with some great tunes.

Like last week, we had a new track from part timer’s forthcoming album, plus a brilliant remix from the now-available remix disc which you can buy direct from him.

The L-O-A-F Explorers' Club continues to turn up some excellent stuff. From the July EP we have Düsseldorf natives Hauschka & Stefan Schneider collaborating on a track that sounds more like the latter's Mapstation than Volker Bertelmann's prepared piano and strings as Hauschka. This month there's also a lovely piece by Nils Frahm which I'm holding off on because I should have a couple of other releases of his in the mail for next week's show!

Again tonight I wanted to play something from Chris Abrahams’s wonderful new album, and I played a track which actually Room40 made available on a compilation a while ago - it's a fitting, beautiful end to the new album; and I wanted to play another little bit of The Necks for context (gotta love "context"), so we had a short and evocative piece from their soundtrack to Rowan Woods' harrowing 1998 movie The Boys.

In between those two tracks, I played two very interesting little pieces by Markus Popp aka Oval, who's no longer slashing up CDs and glitching his way through semi-aleatoric ambience, but instead is using live instrumentation in unusual fashions. Both these tracks are available for free, as is quite a bit of tonight's music - see the playlist below for links.

Sydney's This Is How It All Begins makes another appearance tonight. It's hard to excerpt this album, which likes silences in the middle of tracks, and climaxes many minutes in, but it's highly rewarding listening.

Nick Zammuto of The Books is blogging their new album track by track over at their tumblr, and on Saturday he wrote a fascinating post on what's in many ways one of my least favourite tracks on the album, A Cold Freezin' Night. It shares with a fair proportion of the album (and moreso than their previous releases) a dependence on gimmicky joke samples, which don't take long (for me at least) to become annoying rather than enjoyable or clever.
Nevertheless, it's impeccably constructed, and what's particularly interesting in the post is Nick's discussion of how he created the rhythm track — and subsequently his discussion of drill'n'bass's influence on The Books' art. Since I first met Nick online in the late '90s on the (perhaps infamous) idm-list (immortalised in the artwork for Warp's second Artificial Intelligence compilation in 1994), it was particularly nice to see him acknowledging this. I played a couple of old Zammuto tracks that he may or may not be embarrassed to see unearthed — one of them extremely obscure and having the dubious distinction of being a remix of sorts of none other than myself, as one link in a chain of remixes.
Nick also released, a couple of years prior to the first Books album, and extraordinary 3CDR set of abstract guitar-based rhythmic music, of which I played one track tonight.

English experimental artist Chris Cook has been sending me his music for yonks - long before I even had a regular radio show. Originally based in Brighton, he was very active in the improv scene there, as well as with the Wrong Music bunch. As Same Actor, he uses sitar and dulcimer along with electronic manipulation, while Hot Roddy tends to be more along the zany electronic lines. His 4-track EP of sitar-based Kraftwerk covers is out now (see below) and I'm awaiting info on when and where the excellent Hot Roddy EP (also a free download) is coming out. The latters "Best Before 1997" is a perhaps sardonic reference to its drill'n'bass style.

Speaking of drill'n'bass, Himuro’s "Tonoma Shock", from 1998, is one of my favourites of the genre - insane drum programming, classic bassline, drops and crescendos. He's still making music, and predictably his latest EP is dubstep and wonky-influenced, and pretty nice — oh, and free!

Not free, but pretty cheap, is Autechre’s latest album, released as an EP. I've played it a fair bit already, and you can now read my review over at Cyclic Defrost. The track I played is, seriously, almost wonky hip-hop. Cute, eh!

Salem - King Night [Merok Records] {download courtesy Stereogum}
These New Puritans - Hologram (Salem remix) [Angular/Domino] {download courtesy Stereogum}
Here We Go Magic - Only Pieces [Western Vinyl]
Here We Go Magic - Collector (PVT remix) [Secretly Canadian] {free download from Stereogum}
Zeal - They All Say [self-released]
part timer - in your hand [lost tribe sound]
part timer - the runner (feat. heidi elva) (jazzy jones is nano remix) [self-released, click here for purchasing options]
Hauschka & Stefan Schneider - Common Exposure [L-O-A-F Explorers' Club]
The Necks - The Boys II [Fish of Milk]
Oval - Salajingle [Thrill Jockey] {free download from Thrill Jockey, via FACT Mag!}
Oval - Haste [Thrill Jockey] {free download from FACT!}
Chris Abrahams - Leiden [Room40]
This Is How It All Begins - Within [self-released, get from Bandcamp!]
The Books - A Cold Freezin' Night [Temporary Residence/Spunk]
Zammuto - fairly aggressive salsa [Very hard-to-find track from the idm-list's remix helix in 2000. As it happens, this is a remix of my Raven track "I carpet bombed the old school"]
Zammuto - Full Martyr Status [No Type]
Zammuto - theme [Apartment B]
Same Actor - Computer Love [wombnet] {free download! Yes - Kraftwerk covers!}
Hot Roddy - Best Before 1997 [forthcoming free download EP]
Himuro - Tonoma Shock [Worm Interface]
Himuro - Pay For What [Bedroom Research] {free download!}
Autechre - rew(1) [Warp]

Listen again — ~ 146MB

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