Playlist 28.06.15

Gidday! Nice mixture of stuff, lots of electronic sounds tonight but not exclusively!

LISTEN AGAIN for the sheer pleasure of it all. Podcast here, stream on demand over there.

Starting with the wonderful new Jenny Hval album, couple more tracks after a bit of a special on this extraordinary artist last week.

Second cab off the rank is a new Perth postrock group called Original Past Life, featuring Adam Trainer of Gilded, Radarmaker (whose Warwick Hall joins him here) et al. Looking forward to the whole album!

I played a couple of new Björk remixes last week, and part two of the Vulnicura remixes is out this week. The one that stood out is from the guy whose mixing magic is all over the album – and co-production on a couple of tracks too – The Haxan Cloak. It’s heavy too!

It’s been great seeing Sydney trio Black Vanilla getting a bit of international attention on the music blogs of late – FACT Mag featured this new single, and it is as they say rather ominous – everything they do is pretty dark, and pretty dank lol. The production is never not top-notch, heavy but sparse grooves, couldn’t-give-a-fuck vocals.

Melbourne’s I’lls are a pretty different proposion – dancefloor-oriented indietronica. Their first couple of EPs were much more on the “indie” side, although very electronically-mediated. More recently they’ve slid over to the other side, very 2step/uk garage-sounding production, with modular synthesis to the fore in the live setting, but still with the indie-inflected vocals and songwriting. Whole new EP coming soon.

Back to Sydney, Bushranger is a new project from Sydney’s Eli Murray aka Gentleforce. Released on Australian label Built Environment, it bridges field recordings and ambient techno in interesting ways – a really great listen, as is everything Eli does.

Next up, a fascinating collaboration between Italian sound artist, spoken word artist & singer Alessandro Bosetti & Sydney’s own pianist Chris Abrahams. Piano meanders around fidgety, glitchy ambient textures, or shadows spoken texts, while sung vocals often haunt the background. It’s beautiful, immersive stuff, highly recommended.

Back in 1995, as legend has it, there was a malfunctioning (or at least noisy) fridge in an Austrian house and inspired the duo of General Magic along with Pita to sample and process it into a bunch of ambient & techno tracks – and thus was the legendary glitch label Mego born. These early releases actually don’t have a lot of the granular processing, micro-sampling and clicks & cuts that would characterise the sound, but they’re still part of that continuum – and it’s exciting that Editions Mego (as they are now, run by Pita’s Peter Rehberg) have re-released a collection of all the original tracks, on vinyl and digital.

Michel Banabila‘s latest EP sees him returning to rhythmic sampled vocals, with a pan-world music feel. In some ways it could be a throwback to the ’90s ethnomusicology of Deep Forest or something – or even Jean-Michel Jarre’s strange, groundbreaking Zoolook, but it has enough of a contemporary sheen to set it apart, particularly with the glitchy vocal interruptions. Calming dubby grooves and lovely disembodied vocals make for great travelling music (even if you’re sitting on your sofa travelling in your head).

Frequent Banabila collaborator Machinefabriek is the first artist to appear off Hibernate RecordsDayalu / for Nepal, which raised an impressive amount of money in its pre-order phase for the Nepal disaster. It’s a 2CD set full of beautiful ambient, drone and electronic sounds, highly recommended for its music let alone the worth cause. Machinefabriek contributed a number of 1-minute pieces, scattered throughout. We also heard some gorgeous glitchy piano from Caught In The Wake Forever, ambient electronica from idm legend Arovane, and some ambient piano-and-drums from Mute Forest feat. Matthew Herron.

Next up, the processed guitar and tenor/baritone ukulele(!) of Kevin Hufnagel, best known as a prog/metal guitarist in bands like Dysrhythmia and for his much more folky, sometimes almost classical ukulele & guitar-based solo works. His new album Kleines Biest is a bit of a change of direction, still featuring those instruments, but consistently chopped and processed in his computer to create new forms – from contemplative ambient work to more frenetic cut-ups and layers of distorted riffs at points. Cool stuff.

Finally, a new collaboration from Sontag Shogun‘s Jeremy Young and celebrated cellist & multi-instrumentalist drone-folk artist Aaron Martin. Released on Chihei Hatekayama‘s White Paddy Mountain, it’s a gorgeous set of tape-looped piano, cello and drones.

Jenny Hval – That Battle Is Over / White Underground [Sacred Bones Records]
Original Past Life – Times of Ceylon [Original Past Life Bandcamp]
Björk – mouth mantra (the haxan cloak remix) [One Little Indian]
Black Vanilla – Slug [Black Vanilla SoundCloud]
I’lls – Keep [Solitaire Recordings]
Bushranger – Dry Creek Bed [Built Environment]
Bushranger – The Billabong Speaks [Built Environment]
Alessandro Bosetti & Chris Abrahams – La Nourriture [Unsounds]
Alessandro Bosetti & Chris Abrahams – Eye [Unsounds]
General Magic & Pita – Theme Fridge [Mego]
General Magic & Pita – Dope Fridge [Mego]
General Magic & Pita – Shuffle Fridge [Mego]
Michel Banabila – Tortoise [Banabila Bandcamp]
Michel Banabila – Field Trip [Banabila Bandcamp]
Machinefabriek – Minuut 5 [Hibernate]
Caught In The Wake Forever – Station Middle [Hibernate]
Machinefabriek – Minuut 8 [Hibernate]
Arovane – Flueplay for Nepal [Hibernate]
Mute Forest feat. Matthew Herron – Amid River Sounds [Hibernate]
Kevin Hufnagel – Súton [Kevin Hufnagel Bandcamp]
Kevin Hufnagel – Rain Visions [Kevin Hufnagel Bandcamp]
Kevin Hufnagel – Shallow Beds [Kevin Hufnagel Bandcamp]
Jeremy Young & Aaron Martin – A Pulse Passes From Hand To Hand III [White Paddy Mountain]

Listen again — ~106MB

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