Utility Fog

Sunday, 14th of November, 2010

Inch-time interview tonight, and lots of amazing musics from around the world. The Inch-time interview is available as a separate download here ~ 40.9MB.
LISTEN AGAIN via the link at the bottom, like always.

Our friends at New Weird Australia have a new free download comp out. This time it's The Sound Of Young Canberra, compiled by Shoeb of hellosQuare and Tim of Dream Damage, and has a nice range of stuff from experimental through to jangly pop.
Shoeb's duo Spartak with Evan Dorrian is one of the most exciting groups around at the moment if I may say, and this song is proof if you need it - indie vocals, jazzy post-rock drums, jangly guitars, plenty of electronic. Yeah it helps that it's got such a big Hood influence :)
Bum Creek are an even weirder creature, three Canberrans now based in Melbourne (one of them plays with Pikelet), but I was surprised that this was in essence more like a song (a freaky song) and less noisy and random than I'd expected.

Nice to have a new EP or mini-album from 65daysofstatic, hot on the heels of their album We Were Exploding Anyway. The Heavy Sky EP is heavy on their post-rock technoisms, but has some particularly nice touches at the end, with a brief bit of their good ol' drum'n'bass madness, and then a track combining grainy, glitchy guitarscapes with some nice rock beats, and a long outro. Very fine indeed.

We're still on the case with the amazing Digitalis label (more next week!), and here we have purveyor of weird experimental Americana, Scott Tuma. He's actually really hard to pin down — ambient field recording-esque pieces segue into delicate bells and then almost country blues guitar, but then we have epic drone pieces as well. It's beautiful, and UFog loves and artist you can't pin down.

Next up we had in the end quite an epic special on Adelaide folktronic/electronic artist Inch-time, who dropped by a couple of weeks ago in the two days he had in Sydney on the way from a wedding back to his current adopted home of London. Interspersed in the interview (which you can download above) were a whole lof of his tunes from across his career, which is one I've been following since his very first release. A few excellent remixes from his recent album also appear in there, as discussed on previous shows.

I've been waiting all week to play you the next couple of songs - Shearwater’s electronic/post-rock improv album! All instrumental tracks, combining their customary beauty with some more loose and adventurous arrangements. Definitely worth a garner, and as it's on Bandcamp, you can stream it in its entirety right there, and buy for only USD$10.

And, as I am wont to do, I just had to play one track from an album I rediscovered this week - tracking it down on the internets, having had it in the family's record collection back in 1996. That year, Japanese legend, composer, electronic music pioneer and inveterate collaborator Ryuichi Sakamoto put out an album named after the year, rendering his soundtracks and other music in wonderful piano trio arrangements. One of the other tracks has a brilliantly wild cello solo that I might just have to play some other night for you.

This brought us nicely into a rather wonderful cello album by Paris-based American Zach Miskin, aided by his friends from The Books, Clogs/The National and elsewhere. I'm definitely going to play more next week, as these tracks garnered a good reaction from listeners. Great cello playing, typical Books production on the first track, and lovely compositions. I was perhaps slightly disappointed that Miskin isn't writing his own stuff, but he's being far more adventurous than your typical classical cellist (this isn't a put-down — your typical professional classical cellist is able to marry technical proficiency with exquisite musical expression, and highly worthy of your respect, youngster!) and probably has a sizeable hand in the arrangements.
We also heard a beautiful Clogs song from earlier this year, featuring (I believe) Padma on vocals.

Next, we head to the scary and thrilling climes of Portland, Maine, with the wierdest & wonderfullest folk/Americana/postrock/weirdass Cerberus Shoal, whose latest album An Ongoing DING is a holdover from a number of years back, finally seeing the light of day courtesy of a Japanese label called iscollagecollective. The CD can be mailordered from the label (as I did), or you can get a download via CD Baby. It's a pretty good intro to the band, in fact, in which their amazing folksy vocal harmonies and arrangements (more recently in follow-up groups Fire on Fire and Big Blood) with strangely-intoned spoken word passages over abstract electronic bleeps, and extended prog-punk freakouts. Odd in just the right way.

Meredith Godreau, aka Gregory & the Hawk, has a couple of albums under her belt now, produced by Adam Pierce of Mice Parade. She's got a bit of the Joanna Newsoms to her (not just because she plays the harp, but also in her vocal inflexions); but she has a distinctive voice and some great songs are buoyed by excellent arrangements.

We are brought from this songwriter territory into dark electronica, dubstep and breaks via the opening sequence of tracks from Cursor Miner’s new album. Over four tracks we span some dark guitar-pop, wobbly world-beats, heavy dubstep and breaks. It recalls Tim Exile a bit in its electronic songwriting, although Cursor Miner is an even more gregarious genre-hopper.
Heavy ain't heavy, however, next to the basslines and sampled vocals of Matta, brought to us by Germany's afficionados of the dark & heavy, Ad Noiseam.

Starkey has a new EP out, complete with an array of excellent remixes. His latest collaboration with vocalist Anneka is remixed a few times, and fellow Planet µ artist Rudi Zygadlo here turns in a very pretty reworking, complete with classical piano.

Second-last is Dam Mantle, who like Zygadlo hails from Glasgow, but makes wonky beats of a rather LA persuasion (with his own twist). Indeed he turned in an excellent remix for LA's Gonjasufi earlier this year. The album samples from some MIDIfied classical music, and chops and screws everything in the contemporary fashion. I'm really warming to it, after initially not hearing quite what I was expecting.

And finally, we have the first outing from the forthcoming debut album from Sydney's Ghoul. With Ivan Vižintin's distinctive vocals, and glitchy wonky beats, this is killer, and suggests that their new album will be one of a suite of brilliant new Sydney releases for the start of next year, alongside Seekae and (well, one half of) Collarbones.

Spartak - Nightshift (Version) [New Weird Australia] {free download from The Sound Of Young Canberra comp on Bandcamp!}
Bum Creek - Bollywood [New Weird Australia] {free download from The Sound Of Young Canberra comp on Bandcamp!}
65daysofstatic - Beats Like A Helix [Hassle Records]
65daysofstatic - Guitar Cascades [Hassle Records]
Scott Tuma - Free Dirt [Digitalis]
Inch-time - red in green [self-released; re-released by Static Caravan]
...interview with Inch-time. Excerpts from the tracks "Kyoto (autumn leaves)", "Icicles and Snowflakes" and pimmon’s "Silver Needle", all on Static Caravan...
Inch-time - No Need To Sign Your Name [Static Caravan]
...interview with Inch-time. Excerpts from "Thought Objects (Part II)", "Auroroa in Dub", "Suspensions", all on Static Caravan...
Inch-time - Videograms [Static Caravan]
...last part of interview with Inch-time. Excerpts from "Two Courtesans (Old Growth in Asia Mix)", "Of Times Past (Icarus Wow and Flutter Mix)"...
Inch-time - X-Ray Eyes (Spartak’s Sly Eye Version) [Mystery Plays Records]
Shearwater - Shearwater is Enron (1) / Shearwater is Enron (2) [self-released through Shearwater Bandcamp!]
Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (piano trio version from 1996 [Milan]
Zach Miskin - But I Grabbed a Branch (feat. Nick Zammuto from The Books) [Naïve]
Zach Miskin - Long Winter (feat. Bryce Dessner and Padma Newsome of Clogs/The National) [Naïve]
Clogs - Red Seas [Brassland]
Cerberus Shoal - Me No No Show You There [iscollagecollective]
Cerberus Shoal - I've nothing left [iscollagecollective]
Gregory & the Hawk - Stone Wall Stone Fence [Fat Cat]
Gregory & the Hawk - Landscapes [Fat Cat]
Cursor Miner - Reject [Uncharted Audio]
Cursor Miner - The Golem of Bognor Regis [Uncharted Audio]
Cursor Miner - The Man With the Transparent Face [Uncharted Audio]
Cursor Miner - Mad Cow (Intensively Farmed Version) [Uncharted Audio]
Matta - Mass [Ad Noiseam]
Starkey - Paradise (feat. Anneka) (Rudi Zygadlo remix) [Civil Music]
Dam Mantle - Broken Slumber [Growing Records]
Ghoul - 3Mark [Speak N Spell] {download free from Inertia!}

Listen again — ~ 173MB

One Response to “Playlist 14.11.10”

1. Utility Fog | Mystery Plays Records Says:
   November 15th, 2010 at 9:23 pm

   [...] Listen again here Leave a comment Tags: inch-time / inchtime / interview / utility fog [...]