Utility Fog

Sunday, 20th of September, 2015

Two specials take up the whole show tonight - Justin K Broadrick's JK Flesh and the wonderful Low.

LISTEN AGAIN because you owe it to yourself. Stream on demand anytime, podcast anytime.

Justin K Broadrick is one of my musical heroes. From his early days in as a very young man in Napalm Death, he's gone on to influence many metal and noise bands with his seminal industrial metal band Godflesh, followed by his shoegaze metal(?) band Jesu, as well as free jazz/metal hybrids God, electronic/hip-hop/dub monster Techno Animal with Kevin Martin of The Bug (etc), and more recently a completely electronic shoegaze act that sprung out of the more electronic aspects of Jesu, Pale Sketcher (not to mention the pitch-perfect drum'n'bass of Tech Level 2, and countless collaborations with metal, noise and electronic musicians). He's been called "JK Flesh" by Kevin Martin for a long time, and before Godflesh reformed, he'd been wanting to explore the heavier sounds again with a more electronic bent - so JK Flesh became a real thing.
Rather than attempt to somehow cover all of JK Broadrick's musical history, I'm taking the opportunity of his new album Nothing Is Free (release, er, for free on Bandcamp) to recap the JK Flesh repertoire - focusing on some Japanese CD exclusive versions (now available digitally like many of the countless versions JK likes to produce). The distorted dub/hip-hop and junglist influences of this project are close to my heart.

Another band very close to my heart is Duluth, Minnesota's slowcore monarchs Low. What can you even say about Low? One of the most important & beloved indie bands of the last 2 decades, with their roots in the "slowcore" sound that they pretty much founded - a melancholy, stripped-down indie music - they introduced distorted guitars, electronic sounds and textural noise elements into their music quite early on. This musical adventurousness often underscored quite emotionally unsettling themes, although there's usually enough peaceful beauty in there to counteract the intensity. Admittedly I'm tending to focus on the unsettling tonight! In keeping with Utility Fog's interest in genre-crossing and experimental sounds, we have some remix/collaboration work as well - although I wasn't able to fit Alan Sparhawk's Retribution Gospel Choir side project, a more straight rock band whose third release is made of two 20-minute psych rock jam monsters.

JK Flesh - Peace in Pieces [JK Flesh Bandcamp]
JK Flesh - Knuckledragger Version [3by3/Daymare]
JK Flesh - JK Flesh Merges Prurient 1 [Hydra Head/Daymare]
Violetshaped - cX310 (JK Flesh Reshape) [Violet Poison]
JK Flesh - They Own You [JK Flesh Bandcamp]
Low - Gentle [Sub Pop]
Low - Landslide [Sub Pop]
Low - Fear [Vernon Yard]
Low - Do You Know How To Waltz? [Vernon Yard]
Low - down (porter ricks remix) (excerpt) [Vernon Yard]
Low & Spring Hell Jack - Way Behind [Tugboat Records]
Low - Shots & Ladders [Kranky]
Low - Pissing [Sub Pop]
Low - Belarus [Sub Pop]
Low - I Started A Joke [Touch & Go Records] {wow, it's a Bee Gees cover!}
Low - Just Make It Stop [Sub Pop]
Low - No Comprende [Sub Pop]

Listen again — ~58MB

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