Utility Fog

Sunday, 15th of May, 2011

Hey! Currently it's FBi's supporter drive - we're offering All You Can Eat, with listen-on-demand coming in the middle of the year, very exciting! But we need your financial help as always to keep the station running! So please sign up as a supporter at the FBi website.

Also, I recently did a DJ mix for Micronations, which you can read about and download from over here. 35-minute beat-mixed selection of Cuban son, glitch-hop, dubstep, sax mutilation, punk, jazz, wonky and more. Just the usual.

Quite an electronic UFog for tonight!
LISTEN AGAIN via the link at the bottom (see sidebar for podcast feed).

We started with a few (mostly) electronic tracks, fairly subdued tracks featuring piano.
Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto have been collaborating for a number of albums now. The latest is just out now, and the first track we took from it is a cover (of sorts) of Brian Eno's "By This River". Sweet.
Robag Wruhme is an artist we featured a little later on in the show, so more about him later, but this piece of loveliness is the last track on his new album, Thora Vukk, with murmering vocals and then a sortof massed choir, delightfully shabby-sounding over the impeccable minimal house/ambient.
And a quiet track also from Kattoo, his partner in the much-missed Beefcake (of whom more later too).

From Peter Broderick we have the first track of the night from an amazing, unmissable compilation from Japan's flau, another benefit for the tsunami & earthquake-ravaged country. 31 songs for japan is highly recommended, and you'll be hearing more from it next week as well. I'm guessing this is a piano version of a track from his forthcoming album - in any case it's gorgeous, as the banter with his dog at the end is ultra-sweet.

The second Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto track is deeper, with both the piano and the electronics having more presence.

From Wire Magazine, this month subscribers get the latest download compilation, Below The Radar Vol 6, with the usual selection of unusual musics from round the world. AGF is hardly a new discovery for most of the Wire crowd, but it's always great to hear something new from her, with semi-nonsense lyrics intoned over glitchy electronics.

Very slightly less nonsense poetry comes from the collaboration between Anne-James Chaton & The Ex's Andy Moor. A very disturbing tribute of sorts to Lady Di.

Back to Japan, while I was there in Feb/March I got to meet the lovely Yasuhiko Fukuzono, aka aus, who runs the flau label. Before heading back into that awesome compilation, we heard two tracks from his history, both from 2006 — one of these albums I only picked up this week. He loves his sparkly folktronic textures, but he's also a dab hand at complex beats.

Two more from 31 songs for japan. Upward Arrows is the latest moniker for Melbourne's Part Timer, in which he turns piano recordings into wondrous drone textures. It's excellent seeing this very talented fellow develop further.
And from Chicago, Colorlist is a saxophone and percussion duo exemplary of their hometown's jazz/postrock crossover. The second half of this track is just beautiful.

And now, big special number 1 of the night: Robag Wruhme has a new album out. I was an enormous fan of Gabor Schablitzki's duo Beefcake (with Volker Kahl) from their inception in 1998. Their albums seemed to go all over the place, from classic idm and drill'n'bass to semi-ambient cheesy Euro-tronica, with healthy doses of glitch through it all. We heard a few tracks from the first couple of albums.
After 2004 they stopped making music together, and for quite some time I ignored his new project as I knew it was essentially minimal house.
Certainly most of the music Schablitzki makes with Wighnomy Brothers is a more 4/4 club-oriented affair than I'm generally interested in, but the production is impeccable, and there's a lot of electro and broken beat sounds in there too.
The first Robag Wruhme album contains a fair bit of idm-style beats too — it's a very fine album. And from 2007, The Lost Archives 1998-2007 has a couple of examples of drill'n'bass and lots of fun stuff.
Meanwhile, Volker Kahl kept the Beefcake flag flying with Kattoo, which can tend towards the ambient side of things, but also keeps up the experimental beats and glitches.
But the new Robag Wruhme is a subtle production, 4/4 but muted beats, piano, some soft singing, and beautiful string pads here and there. Very lovely.

Coincidentally, the next artist we feature has a new album out on Hymen, who released much of Beefcake's output. Karsten Pflum is a Danish electronic artist who's been around since 2003, and I played a lovely melodic track from his album on Worm Interface (which even in 2003 was very much a part-time label). FIrst off, though, we heard a Middle-Eastern sounding dubstep tune from his 2010 EP on Ad Noiseam.
I played a number of tracks from both of his last two albums — last year's Slaphead Faun and 2011's No Noia My Love. Both exhibit highly impressive production and programming skills with enough musicality to make them a cut above. Recommended listening for crazy beats.

Slew52 is another Danish producer, a friend of Karsten Pflum's and also released on Hymen. His debut(!) album is a double CD, the first disc featuring dubstep, wonky and drum'n'bass tracks, and the second ambient tracks. I only had a chance to play one piece — intricate beats over a dubstep template; very nice.

Hugely excited that this Thursday at the FBi Social, my favourite Canberrans Spartak are debuting their new pop/indietronica quartet Savages for Sydney audiences. The two tracks we heard show how awesome this is going to be - Hood-influenced guitar and electronic-based glitchy indie songs. Can't wait!

And finally, I really wanted to also feature Jason Forrest's new album on the show, but there's only so much you can fit into three hours! So we'll have more next week, but the closing track is a lovely soft number mainly made of piano. Uncharacteristically delicate and affecting.

Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto - by this river [raster-noton]
Robag Wruhme - Ende [Pampa]
Kattoo - l--l-ll- ll-ll- l- l--l-l l--l-ll ll-- l--ll-ll l- ll- l--l- [Kattoo]
Peter Broderick - One Story (piano version) [flau] {from the stellar 31 songs for japan benefit album}
Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto - reverso [raster-noton]
AGF - The Wires Are Fragile [via The Wire]
Anne-James Chaton & Andy Moor - Princess in a Mercedes Class S 280 [Unsounds] {via dj /rupture}
aus - It's Tomorrow Already [Music Related]
aus - Moraine [Preco]
Upward Arrows - (no title) [flau] {from the stellar 31 songs for japan benefit album}
Colorlist - Resolve [flau] {from the stellar 31 songs for japan benefit album}
Robag Wruhme - Hugendubel [Kompakt]
Robag Wruhme & Wighnomy Brothers - Spekk-Drumm [Kompakt]
Beefcake - digilog [Hymen]
Beefcake - 5:09 [Hymen]
Beefcake - 4:37 [Hymen]
Robag Wruhme - Bakkenvesper [Kompakt]
Kattoo - Place2 [Hymen]
Robag Wruhme - Pnom Gobal [Pampa]
Karsten Pflum - Nemo Loon Part V [Ad Noiseam]
Karsten Pflum - The hand [Hymen]
Karsten Pflum - Te [Worm Interface]
Karsten Pflum - jazzkroge III [Mindwaves Music]
Karsten Pflum - Muntermacher [Hymen]
Slew52 - Lolest [Hymen]
Savages - Catch/Control [unreleased]
Savages - Wildflowers [unreleased]
Jason Forrest - Isolation, Too [Staatsakt]

Listen again — ~ 216MB

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