Utility Fog

Sunday, 17th of August, 2014

Back from my long jaunt overseas, playing some really cool gigs and holidaying in Europe... and buying truckloads of CDs. I seem to have hurt my hand from carrying so many heavy suitcases & bags. That must be it, yes.

Tonight we have the wondrous & mysterious (but gradually also more pop) Grumbling Fur aka Daniel O'Sullivan and Alexander Tucker, with a new album via online music mag and now label The Quietus Phonographic Corporation... So, a bit of a retrospective on their work.

Then we have some tunes from brilliant Scottish composer/producer Matthew Collings, whose UFog favourite from last year has been reissued by Denovali along with a new album cementing his avant-garde classical meets electronic post-rock production.

We then move into even more of a contemporary classical composition world with Polish producer Jacaszek & his compatriots Kwartludium, a classical ensemble consisting of violin, clarniet, percussion and piano. Their album on Touch mixes crackly electronics and field recordings with flickers of acoustic instruments and clarinet drones (the latter of which recalls similar instrumentation from Matthew Collings).

In keeping with the "classical" theme, where better to go than the Red Hot + Bach compilation from a month or two ago? We have the one and only Paul de Jong, once cellist in The Books, with a piece featuring Mia Doi Todd and based on Bach's first Prelude in C from The Well-Tempered Clavier, made particularly famous via Charles Gounod's adaptation as "Ave Maria" - the vocal melody is Gounod's. We hear that vocal performed by opera star Pia Ercole in the version by, er, King Britt Presents Fhloston Paradigm, known on his new stuff for Hyperdub just as Fhloston Paradigm. Although it is on his album, I took the next track from the Hyperdub 10.2 compilation, the label's second 10th birthday comp, this one focused on "pop" music, all with vocals, and the collaborator here is Rachel Claudio, taking it into a very subdued trip-hop kind of territory. Very nice.

Less subdued (although not always!) are Killing Sound, members of Bristol bass/techno/etc collective Young echo, who put out an amazing 12" (only) of post-dubstep sounds on Blackest Ever Black earlier this year and have followed it up with a storming one-sided techstep drum'n'bass reworking of one of those tracks. Vinyl-only makes this boy sad though :(

Nearly finishing up, electro-acoustic drum'n'bass duo Icarus released a new track while I was away, inaugurating London-based ex-pat Aussie label Mystery Plays' "Singles Club". Many other awesome artists are involved and I'll be playing some over the coming weeks.

But I couldn't go out without playing one short track from the debut album from Blue Mountains chap 0point1, kindly released by the ever-awesome Feral Media. Ever questing between genres of glitch, drill'n'bass, expansive post-rock and who knows what else, 0point1's sound flows very nicely from Icarus and finishes up just a little bit over into poor Alexander Tullett's brilliant Close To The Edge.

As usual, please LISTEN AGAIN — you got yer link right in this post, yer podcast subscription or glorious streaming on demand at FBi.

Grumbling Fur - Neil Megson Fanclub [The Quietus Phonographic Corporation]
Grumbling Fur - Secrets of the Earth [The Quietus Phonographic Corporation]
Grumbling Fur - Green Garden Fur / Sommaren Är Här / Orb Of The Woods [Aurora Borealis]
Grumbling Fur - Huthering Whites [Latitudes]
Grumbling Fur - Eyoreseye [Thrill Jockey]
Grumbling Fur - Materials Recording the Fibres of Time [The Quietus Phonographic Corporation]
Grumbling Fur - Pluriforms [The Quietus Phonographic Corporation]
Matthew Collings - Stills / Everything You Love Will End Up On The Breeze [Denovali]
Matthew Collings - Paris Is Burning [Denovali reissue originally on Fluid Audio]
Matthew Collings - Toms [Denovali]
Jacaszek & Kwartludium - A book of lake (Roselière) [Touch]
Jacaszek & Kwartludium - Anthem (La forêt) [Touch]
Paul de Jong - Number Man (feat. Mia Doi Todd) [Red Hot] {based on the well-known 1st Prelude in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier by JS Bach as adaped by Charles Gounod}
King Britt Presents Fhloston Paradigm - Ave Maria feat. Pia Ercole [Red Hot] {also based on that Gounod adaption}
Fhloston Paradigm - Never Defeated, feat Rachel Claudio [Hyperdub]
Killing Sound - Thousand Hands [Blackest Ever Black]
Killing Sound - $ixxx Harmonie$ Version [Blackest Ever Black]
Icarus - Collectable Woodland Creatures Armed With Heavy Weaponry [Mystery Plays]
0point1 - Eggborn [Feral Media]

Listen again — ~107MB

Comments are closed.