Utility Fog

Sunday, 11th of November, 2012

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We started with a pretty magical new EP from Canberra's Reuben Ingall, combining a kind of lackadaisical-yet-impassioned grungey indie songwriting with uncompromising digital processing. These are his best songs yet, and for all the seemingly-haphazard song structures, it's also his tightest and more assured production. Highly recommended.

Peter Broderick is such a sweetie. Yeah. You may find some of his efforts a little fey, a little self-conscious, and maybe you'd be right, but he's so sincere and earnest, and importantly, he's such a deeply talented musician and songwriter that it all works for me. These Walls Of Mine is his second album for 2012, this one mostly home-recorded, some featuring crowd-sourced lyrics or thematic material. And I have the limited edition version with a lovely hand-stitched booklet of lyrics and photos plus some bonus download tracks, one of which we heard tonight. I couldn't resist playing a couple of highlights from his earlier album, with the kind of ridiculous title http://www.itstartshear.com/.

Keeping it post-classical-crossover, Balmorhea have a new album out which is their most upbeat and postrock-crossover (well, you know) yet. I actually wanted to play a lot of it. Still with the violins and piano and acoustic guitar, but also drums and rock-out bits and synths and vocal chants... really pretty rapturous music.

It's been a while since we heard heaps of Eskmo on the show – back in 2009 or so I was playing the shit out of his EPs, whether heavy classical chant-laden dubstep or bouncing rhythmically complex wonky beats. He then released an album on Ninja Tune that seemed to tone down all the interesting stuff, so it's particularly great to have this new EP which brings the bounce back, melodic and bass-heavy, at various different BPMs. Very fine.

Which brings us firmly to the dancefloor... Or does it? ASC is a drum'n'bass artist (and label-owner) of some renown, but takes his productions into idm and techno-inspired realms with odd time signatures (for instance we heard 3/4 tonight) and strangely, wonderfully cut-down beat structures. It's somehow still clearly d'n'b. Meanwhile, on one of his recent mini-albums for PAN, Lee Gamble revisits his d'n'b fandom of the mid-'90s with a set of tracks that celebrate the interstitial material – ambient drop-out, vocals sighs, bass drops; everything except the beats – although kindly on the 2nd-last track he allows a breakbeat to drop, so it's not all unreleased tension. In fact it's a kind of blissful work more akin to glitchy minimal techno, but it's certainly got a sense of the hardcore and drum'n'bass euphoria.

Speaking of hardcore, The Future Sound Of London produced some of the classic tracks of early hardcore and rave before moving into ambient territories. It's terrifying that they're now on to their 7th From The Archives album, and there's no sign of the quality flagging. I might be nostalgic, and I was an obsessive fan back in the mid-'90s, but it seems to me this stuff is totally living up to the best of their material from the halcyon days, and works pretty well in the current context.

Finally, something very special. It's been known for a long time that the legendary Coil's Nine Inch Nails remix sessions with Danny Hyde yielded many more tracks than saw the light of day, and some intrepid fans sought out Hyde to see whether the "lost remixes" could be heard, and he apparently was willing to pass them on (story recounted here). So while you won't find Uncoiled available to buy officially, a bit of an internet search will turn them up, and they're perhaps not totally illegal. I played a section of one of the astounding remixes of "the downward spiral" that you can find on further down the spiral, plus a completely different one that's among the recently uncovered ones.

Reuben Ingall - to lose [Reuben Ingall Bandcamp] {pay what you like}
Reuben Ingall - moon [Reuben Ingall Bandcamp] {pay what you like}
Peter Broderick - When I Blank I Blank [Erased Tapes]
Peter Broderick - Asleep [Erased Tapes]
Peter Broderick - A Simple Sunday Song [Erased Tapes]
Peter Broderick - Everything I Know [Erased Tapes]
Balmorhea - Pyrakantha [Western Vinyl]
Andrew Bird - Beyond The Valley Of The Three White Horses [Mom & Pop Music]
Balmorhea - Dived [Western Vinyl]
Eskmo - 1996 [Ancestor]
Eskmo - Let Them Sing [Planet µ]
Eskmo - Oh in This World of Dread, Carry On [Ancestor]
ASC - Open Source [Samurai Music]
ASC - Stay True [Samurai Music]
ASC - Scanners [Samurai Music]
Lee Gamble - Razors / 3,4 Synthetics [PAN]
Lee Gamble - Dollis Hill / Rufige [PAN]
The Future Sound Of London - Abandoned Housing Blocks of Prypiat [FSOL Digital]
nine inch nails - the downward spiral (the bottom) (coil and danny hyde) (excerpt) [Nothing/Interscope]
nine inch nails - the downward spiral (a gilded sickness by coil and danny hyde) [not released, but search the torrents]

Listen again — ~ 103MB

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