Utility Fog

Sunday, 10th of May, 2015

Indiepop, indiefolk, pipe organ drone/noise, idm & techno, postrock... we've got it all!
Next Sunday night I'll be heading back from Canberra so I'll tune in to hear Heli Newton filling in. And a couple of weeks later I'm off touring in the UK so Heli gets another 2 Sundays. But for now I'll see you all on Sunday the 24th of May.

LISTEN AGAIN FOR THE FIRST OR MORETH TIME. It's east. Podcast here, stream there.

Brian Campeau's been making his own music & producing others' around Sydney for a good decade now since leaving Canada for frankly warmer climes. He's maybe best known round here for playing with Elana Stone's band and recording her music, but he's also seen behind the live mixing at various venues, and produces a wide range of styles for different people. His music doesn't usually convey the metal and other weird shit he loves so much, but for someone with such a pretty voice he goes in some pretty leftfield directions at the drop of a hat. Like, say, fellow Canadian Benoît Pioulard he'll drop drone tracks in between pieces of indiepop, and he's wont to slam in digital edits and clicky beats under acoustic guitars and strings...
His first album came out in 2006 as a double CD - two completely different versions of the same album, with songs radically reworked between the two. Since then there's only been one more album and a few scattered singles, so the newie is very welcome!

Dublin's Lakker have been making electronic music in one form or another since at least 2007. Now resident in Berlin they're making impeccably-produced techno for Belgium's legendary R&S Records. They've tapped into the recent fertile vein of mixing noise & industrial elements in with the electronic beats, and switching between breakbeats, drum machines and techno thump... In fact, you can hear the noise influence way back in their 2007 debut album (still available from their Bandcamp!), and the idm & ambient influences track right through their sound as well. The Berlin influence seems to kick in around 2012 or 2013, as the production gets simultaneously wider and tighter. Nowadays they seem wholly in control of their sound, whether incorporating vocals (indeed a whole choir on one track), field recordings, piano or just heaps of bass. Bass is good. Bass is a winner. Lakker. You want it.
Oh, and the new album is called Tundra and it is indeed appropriately frosty and windswept. It's a beauty.

British trio Fiium Shaarrk are one part Icarus (the non-Sydney-based half Sam Britton) and two parts percussion/drums, and thus channel the Icarus-style post-drum'n'bass stylings through jazz-trained live beats and improv along with electro-acoustic sound processing. There's a world/jazz feel in there along with basslines which could be electro-funk or could be inherited from Britton's junglist past.

In 2008, when it came to summing up the year on Utility Fog I chose a few top albums, and among them was the debut album from at the time solo artist Bleeding Heart Narrative. It was predominantly the work of cellist, multi-instrumentalist & producer Oliver Barrett, but soon BHN became a band, stretching the noise/soundscape/postrock stylings of the debut album into something more like indie songwriting. Eventually Bleeding Heart Narrative broke up and Petrels became the main output of Barrett (aside from various squalling, challenging cello-mangling EPs), again maybe initially a solo project, but expanding into all kinds of psych/kraut/postrock. The new album is a kind of concept album although I'm not sure of the concept, with long interrelated songs and a massive three-part composition at the end which climaxes at the start of part three and then goes on for another 9 minutes of motorik riffing and chanting. Pretty wonderful.

The great thing about being from Australia is that you're always an ex-pat, even if it's been over a decade since you lived here. So John Chantler is still an ex-pat Aussie, originally from Brisbane, even though he's spent a lot of time in Japan, then lived in the London for the best part of a decade, had a big hand in experimental music hub Cafe OTO and for a time running the UK wing of ROOM40. Now relocated with his wife to Stockholm, Sweden, a comfortable home for electronic music, and he took with him a bunch of recordings of the pipe organ from London's St John-at-Hackney church. He processed these sounds at the Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm and is now releasing the finished product on CD and vinyl (and digital) via his newly-established label 1703 Skivbolaget. The album's out in August so I'll have another opportunity to play these massive and detailed sounds again.

Brian Campeau - Interlude B [Art As Catharsis]
Brian Campeau - How We Knew [Art As Catharsis]
Brian Campeau - mtl / montreal (version 1) [self-released debut album two faces]
Brian Campeau - like a girl (version 2) [self-released debut album two faces]
Brian Campeau - reinventing myself (single version) [self-released]
Brian Campeau - then came the sun [self-released]
Brian Campeau - Cutting Ties (single version) [Brian Campeau Bandcamp]
Brian Campeau - So Long, Angela [Art As Catharsis]
Lakker - Echtrae feat. Eileen Carpio) [R&S Records]
Lakker - Milch feat. Eileen Carpio) [R&S Records]
Lakker - Julystep [Acroplane/Alphabetset]
Lakker - PanShelac [Lazybird/Lakker Bandcamp]
Lakker - fmsnw [Lakker Bandcamp]
Lakker - Static & Amp [Blueprint]
Lakker - Coal Bath [Candela Rising]
These Hidden Hands - Ivy (Lakker remix) [Hidden Hundred]
Lakker - Pylon [R&S Records]
Fiium Shaarrk - Fear Of Mapping [Not Applicable]
Fiium Shaarrk - Krypton Tunning [On The Corner]
Petrels - L. Caution part three [Denovali]
John Chantler - The Long Shadow of Decline pt II [1703 Skivbolaget]

Listen again — ~111MB

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