Tonight’s mostly electronic show ranges from electronic pop to noise to experimental hip-hop and dancefloor mutations around jungle, techno and dubstep.
LISTEN AGAIN via stream on demand at FBi’s website or podcast over here.
Sydney’s Anklepants is perhaps the most perverted electronic music act of the current age due to his disturbing (awesome) prosthetic penis face masks. He’s also a brilliant musician (and has been featured on this show for a lot longer than Ankepants existed, through his previous idm & breakcore acts). When touring the US recently he teamed up with Colorado artist Mr. Bill for a rather lush cover of the ’70s prog rock band Gentle Giant.
Canberra’s noisy indiepunk band Agency featured on last week’s show, and they launched their album in Sydney last week. One of the supports was Evan Dorrian, who’s one half of Spartak with Agency member Shoeb Ahmad, and tonight we hear his unsettling Agency remix – like his new solo material, it plays with constantly shifting tempos to wrongfoot the listener. Meanwhile Canberran duo P A R K S continue to impress with their experimental electronics.
Featuring members of Making, Tanned Christ and Mannheim Rocket among others, Extreme Misanthropy Crew are shortly releasing their second cassette of relentless negativity through industrial noise, recorded live in the Blue Mountains. Fantastic, unmissable. If a bit scary (sorry kids!)
With a far more ascetic take on “noise”, we follow up last week’s final track from Brisbane’s Ross Manning with another cut from his new album, featuring hand-made noise-generating contraptions.
Keeping it experimental, but a bit of a left turn and we end up in LA with arch-alt.hop master Busdriver, whose new album Thumbs dropped this week with the usual excellent west-coast production and collaborators galore, starting with Hemlock Ernst, the rap alias of Samuel T. Herring, frontman of synthpoppers Future Islands, and followed by the genius Daveed Diggs of Clipping. – experimental rap worlds colliding…
Finally we have a live collaboration with Oakland-based experimental artist Caural, nicely segueing into the junglist part of the evening…
Akkord‘s two members both made drum’n’bass as well as dubstep, 2step and so on in their solo incarnations, but as Akkord they’ve perfected a polished hybrid of techno, jungle and post-dubstep forms to become one of the most exciting electronic producers of the last few years.
Meanwhile, house & techno producer Paul Woolford has pulled off some of the most pitch-perfect junglist revivalism of the last years under his Special Request alias. It’s great to have a new album from him, if a little more on the rave tip. Segueing from Akkord with his great mind-meld of a remix, we then heard the amazing rolling breaks of his Lana Del Rey refix, and the bouncing grime-meets-jungle of his Wiley remix from earlier this year.
On Pinch’s Tectonic label, post-dubstep/techno artist Ipman opens his album with a piece of slowed-down heavy-as-fuck junglism too. The rest of the album isn’t quite in the same vein, but this is the real deal.
And finally we come to the dubstep/techno/jungle mélange of Addison Groove aka Headhunter. His earlier productions as Headhunter were forward-thinking dubstep with a techno impetus and plenty of syncopated rhythms (see that bouncy Tempa track from 2008). The change to Addison Groove only really focused more on the dancefloor, and by the time last year’s album came out, he’d imbibed a serious quantity of drum’n’bass & jungle with collaborations with Sam Binga & the legendary DJ Die – as well as juke, techno and house. The junglist elements are present in his new productions just released as Headhunter, but it’s definitely back to the dubstep bassweight. Fantastic sounds whichever name he chooses to use.
Mr. Bill & Anklepants – Proclamation (cover of Gentle Giant) [SoundCloud (free download while it lasts)]
Agency – Safe Haven (Evan Dorrian remix) [hellosQuare Recordings]
Agency – This Could Be A Goer (P A R K S remix) [hellosQuare Recordings]
Extreme Misanthropy Crew – Revelation 1A (excerpt) [3BS Records]
Ross Manning – led vert [Room 40]
Busdriver – Ministry of the Torture Couch (prod. by Elos feat. Hemlock Ernst) [Busdriver Bandcamp]
Busdriver – Surrounded By Millionaires feat. Daveed Diggs, prod. JNTHN STN [Busdriver Bandcamp]
Busdriver – NY 03 LIVE w/ Caural [Busdriver Bandcamp]
Akkord – Megalith [Houndstooth]
Akkord – Destruction (Special Request VIP) [Houndstooth]
Lana Del Rey – Ride (Special Request remix) [Houndstooth]
Wiley – From The Outside (Special Request VIP) [Ninja Tune]
Special Request – Tractor Beam [XL Recordings]
Ipman – Regicide [Tectonic]
Headhunter – Stand Alone [Trusik Recordings]
Headhunter – Prototype [Tempa]
Addison Groove – Phantom [Tectonic]
Addison Groove & Sam Binga – Thr3id [50 Weapons]
Listen again — ~183MB