Variety of sounds tonight, concluding with psych-kraut-postrock, starting with noise-hop, but with heaps of electronics in between, with an emphasis on artists melding classical composition & performance with electronic techniques & sounds.

I missed Oneohtrix Point Never at the Opera House to bring you this, so LISTEN and LISTEN AGAIN damn you. Stream on demand over at FBi, podcast right here (and subscribe in iTunes if you like that kind of thing (the horror!))…

Next week we’ll have a pretty major feature on the music of dälek, the group, along with the various members. Pioneers of “noise hop” or whatever you want to call it (industrial hip-hop?), they married political raps with noise, metal and shoegaze-influenced productions, still with boom-bap beats… The new album doesn’t have original producer Alap Momin aka Oktopus, but retains their original sound and weight.

Originally from the Blue Mountains, Sydney DJ & producer Joel Pearson has released his debut EP as Scatterbrain on his new label Milke Thistle Records, drawing influence from the Australian bush & landscape in which he grew up, as well as from classic hip-hop and new post-dubstep/footwork/r’n’b beats. It’s a hugely impressive debut from a hardworking producer, who should continue to do great things.

British composer/producer Jim Perkins & fellow singer Tom Gaisford have released a single on the excellent UK-based crossover-classical label bigo & twigetti that’s based around the “Kyrie” from English Renaissance composer William Byrd’s Mass for Three Voices. The original by Perkins & Gaisford is an electronic treatment of the work, but tonight we heard Brisvegan ex-pat (now also UK-based) Leah Kardos‘s remix.

As I said last week, William Ryan Fritch‘s music is a quite sui generis mixture of world-inflected classical composition, heavy percussion and, more recently, singing. After a massive string of connected albums & EPs in 2014 and through into early 2015, Fritch has been less active the last year or so, but this album continues where he left off, with epic scope.

Tom Hodge (piano) and Franz Kirmann (electronics) have been working as Piano Interrupted for a few years now. Their glitchy patina of piano, bass, strings and beats is a snug fit for Utility Fog’s central mission of the liminal music inhabiting the foggy boundaries between genres and production techniques. Their latest album has seen them travelling to Senegal to work with local musicians, and while their beautiful playing appears on the album, it’s hard to identify anything West African about the music, which remains a tasteful conversation between jazz, classical and electronic.

Matthew Collings also represents the classical along with the electronic & experimental tonight, even more emphatically than with his previous brilliant works of postrock/indie/noise/electronica. The audiovisual work that he’s been touring for the last year has come out in audio form on Denovali: A Requiem for Edward Snowden may be premature as a requiem, but it explores the implications of the information released by Edward Snowden about surveillance, privacy and security, the losses (of faith, security, privacy) highlighted by Snowden as well as his own personal losses in coming out publically. Musically, electronic processing cracks and disrupts the avant-garde classical compositions performed by Collings and cohorts on clarinet and strings. It’s Collings’ usual modus operandi purified, and a clever approach for a topic in which the digital world intrudes into the “real”. Highly recommended.

An accomplished classical cellist, Oliver Coates is known for some high profile collaborations (often along with the London Contemporary Orchestra) with artists like Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead, Mica Levi & others. I first came across him playing cello with Mira Calix on a stunning Boards of Canada cover for Warp‘s 20th anniversary. Coates’ previous release on Moshi Moshi imprint Prah Recordings saw him mostly performing contemporary compositions (tonight we heard a queasy Chopin-deconstructing work by Larry Goves), but the new one brings him to the fore as an electronic producer & composer. Building beats from samples of his cello, Coates has created a varied album referencing everything from Arthur Russell (of course) via Four Tet, to house, footwork, and indeed classical music. It’s quite an achievement.
I thought it was nice to round out the selection, including covers, collaborations, performances of composed works and his own productions, with a remix. Conveniently, Grasscut‘s new remix album came out just this last week or so, and while I haven’t had a chance to dive into it properly, it was serendipitous to find a remix by “Olly Coates” on there.

Last up tonight is as much as we can fit in of a 20 minute track from one of the new Oren Ambarchi collaborations out right now. This one sees him working with two big figures in Italian experimental, postrock & psych music: Stefano Pilia (perhaps best known as a member of the amazing 3/4HadBeenEliminated) and Massimo Pupillo (probably best known as the bassist in free jazz/math rock/noise band Zu). It’s entirely in keeping with Oren’s output from the last few years – slow burning guitarnoisescapes and driving, head-nodding rhythm section, growing to some kind of freakout. Excellent, of course.

dälek – It Just Is [Profound Lore Records]
Scatterbrain – I Need A… (feat. Kiri Cantle) [Milke Thistle Records]
Scatterbrain – The Great Northern [Milke Thistle Records]
Jim Perkins & Tom Gaisford – Kyrie (Leah Kardos remix) [bigo & twigetti]
William Ryan Fritch – Disregard [Lost Tribe Sound]
Piano Interrupted – Jean Luc Diola [Denovali]
Matthew Collings – Collect It All [Denovali]
Matthew Collings – Vasilia [Facture/Denovali]
Matthew Collings – Rapid Pulses [Denovali]
Oliver Coates – Innocent Love [Prah Recordings]
Mira Calix with Oliver Coates – In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country [Warp]
Leo Abrahams & Oliver Coates – VIII [Slip]
Oliver Coates – The clouds flew round with the clouds (composed by Larry Goves, sampling Chopin’s Nocturne in B Major [Prah Recordings]
Grasscut – Fallswater (Olly Coates Remix) [Lo Recordings]
Oliver Coates – Memorial to Hitchens [Prah Recordings]
Oren Ambarchi, Stefano Pilia & Massimo Pupillo – Shine [Karlrecords]

Listen again — ~194MB

Here we here we go… special on the genius of Aesop Rock tonight, along with some varied tunes from idm to spoken word to pop, electronics and postrock of a sort with classical composition creeping in.

LISTEN AGAIN on the podcast here or stream on demand at FBi.

A new release from Autechre is always an event round these parts, a drop-everything moment, especially since lately they have a habit of surprising us with unexpected downloads well before the physical releases. And this time round it was also a cause for concern (of sorts) as their new release has come as a digital-only set of five EPs (or a five-part album if you prefer), clocking in at over 4 hours – and it was released only 2 and a half days before tonight’s show. I’ve done my best to listen through it all and have found some very tasty highlights in the first run-through. It’s vintage Ae, especially of the last decade and a bit – highly processed sounds, wobbling and jittering, sometimes weirdly squished into part of the EQ spectrum, sometimes gloriously widescreen, and frequently locking into awesome head-nodding grooves.
It’s amusing to have a digital-only release from the duo that wrote “Incomplete without surface noise” on the CD edition of Tri Repetae all those years ago.

Sebastian Gainsbourgh’s been making forward-thinking techno/post-dubstep productions as Vessel and also as part of the Young Echo collective out of Bristol for the last few years. Poet/spoken word artist Chester Giles is also associated with Young Echo and the two have teamed up now for two EPs under the “asda” name – a reference to the British supermarket chain. The words and very uncompromising music summon up a post-cyberpunk continual-consumption urban nightmare. Delicious.

Ian Matthias Bavitz started making hip-hop as Aesop Rock in the mid-’90s and gradually perfected a style of motor-mouthed lyrical prestidigitation using as many words as he could fish out of the dictionary. While he’s collaborated with plenty of the Anticon types, and that other weird-hop motor-mouth Busdriver, it’s probably his work with El-P that indicates his talent for embracing the inherent weirdness of hip-hop without sliding too far into indie “backpack hip-hop” – indeed one of the new tracks we hear tonight features an approving answering machine message from the great Chuck D. Equally, the indie connection is most emphasised in his duo with folk-punk legend Kimya Dawson as The Uncluded. But there’s a real pop appeal to the singles from The Impossible Kid (and indeed the previous couple of albums at least) – flowing beats & scratches, great storytelling. And while his early works are mostly produced by the awesome Blockhead, in the last few albums Aes has really come into his own as an excellent producer in his own right.

UK Garage seems to be making a comeback particularly among Melbourne producers at the moment, and it’s not something I’m going to complain about. Drummer Christopher Port is the latest representative of this production trend, with some nice scratching and pitch-shifted percussion over the bouncy first cut from his Vetement EP, out in July.

Marcus Whale is no stranger to this show, having first appeared as a schoolkid making experimental noise as Scissor Lock, evolving into post-rock and experimental electronic, and then with his r’n’b/vapourwave(?) duo Collarbones and r’n’b/techno of Black Vanilla. His solo stuff combines references to his classical composition training, his love of r’n’b/pop, and even his love of metal. It’s very impressive live, with dual drummers playing complex cross-rhythms and sub-bass paired with beautiful horn arrangements blasting out of the PA…

William Ryan Fritch has worked along with producer SkyRider on a number of Sole‘s albums, but that’s where the underground hip-hop connection ends; his music is a quite sui generis mixture of world-inflected classical composition, heavy percussion and, more recently, singing. After a massive string of connected albums & EPs in 2014 and through into early 2015, Fritch has been less active the last year or so, but this album continues where he left off, with epic scope.

Autechre – latentcall [Warp/Autechre Bleepstore]
Autechre – 13×0 step [Warp/Autechre Bleepstore]
asda (Vessel & Chester Giles) – spud-u-like [FuckPunk]
asda (Vessel & Chester Giles) – Killer of Men [No Corner]
Aesop Rock – Blood Sandwich [Rhymesayers Entertainment]
Aesop Rock – Daylight [Definitive Jux]
Aesop Rock – Bazooka Tooth [Definitive Jux]
Aesop Rock – Fast Cars [Definitive Jux]
Aesop Rock – Fumes [Definitive Jux]
Aesop Rock – Gopher Guts [Rhymesayers Entertainment]
Busdriver feat. Aesop Rock – Superhands’ Mantra (Fuck Us All) [Fake Four, Inc]
The Uncluded – Bats [Rhymesayers Entertainment]
Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman – Environmental Studies [self-released, but via Stones Throw]
Aesop Rock – Lazy Eye (feat. Chuck D) [Rhymesayers Entertainment]
Aesop Rock – Dorks [Rhymesayers Entertainment]
Christopher Port – Bump [Pieater]
Marcus Whale – Vapour [Good Manners Music]
William Ryan Fritch – Entirety [Lost Tribe Sound]

Listen again — ~180MB

Special on the wonderful Evelyn Morris aka Pikelet this evening, among other things.
Evelyn experienced the unimaginable a few days ago, when her entire gear setup was stolen from her locked car in Preston, VIC. You can support her efforts to rebuild at this GoFundMe while it’s still up, or by purchasing music direct from her Bandcamp.

LISTEN AGAIN on the podcast here or stream on demand at FBi.

Really Pikelet needs no introduction on this show. I’ve been playing her since her first album was released in 2007, from inventive songs based around loop pedals to full band extravaganzas to drum machine & sampler experiments and extraordinary piano and voice works. If her brilliant music wasn’t enough, Evelyn is also the initiator and driving force behind the website, label & publisher LISTEN, which was conceived of two years ago (to the day, apparently) in a deep & passionate Facebook thread borne of a frustration with the marginalisation and mistreatment of women (and non-cis-het-white-males) in the Australian music industry. It’s an essential resource for everyone.
Tonight we hear tracks from all Pikelet’s albums but also a few more esoteric works, including a couple of demos from CDR releases, and a loping, looping remix of American intuitive folk artist Diane Cluck.

Susanna Wallumrød has been releasing music under her first name and as Susanna and the Magical Orchestra since 2004, often on the Rune Grammofon label but more recently on her own SusannaSonata. She’s known for her interpretations of other people (including Dolly Parton and AC/DC, and the Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo), and for her very pure, clear voice. She’s approached jazz-inflected pop and folk in the past, but has close connections with the Norwegian experimental and free improv scene, and we heard some pretty heavy sounds on her collaboration with Jenny Hval a couple of years ago, Meshes of Voice. Her new solo album Triangle explores the theme of spirituality, or perhaps a desire for some kind of spirituality from the perspective of an outsider… With 22 tracks, running to over 70 minutes, it probes its theme quite deeply, and mixes piano ballads with cello, violin, tuba, double bass and other instruments, along with distortion & electronic processing. It’s a major work.

About a month ago I played a couple of tracks from the remarkable collaboration between Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Kim Myhr & Jenny Hval. Filigree guitar (and perhaps harp?), wonderfully odd orchestral jazz arrangements and Jenny Hval’s poetic vocals combine into something very unusual, challenging and quite beautiful.

Dublin duo Lakker have been going from strength to strength in the last few years, having started as something of a bedroom IDM project around 2007. Now based in Berlin and signed to the legendary Belgian label R&S Records (with a history that goes back to the early days of ambient techno and rave), they’re at the forefront of the Berlin industrial techno sound, with tough beats and wind-swept synth beauty. Following last year’s album which featured female and choral vocals on more than half the tracks, Struggle & Emerge comes out of a commission from The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s RE:VIVE initiative, asking for a work focused on The Netherlands’ relationship with water, using field recordings and samples of broadcasts.

I’m not sure what to make of the new Andy Stott album just yet. I felt like 2012’s Luxury Problems and the EPs that preceded it were masterpieces of sonic alchemy, and I enjoyed Faith in Strangers‘ step sideways in 2014 into postpunk electric bass combined with his raw jungle experiments with Miles Demdike as Millie & Andrea. But somehow the even rawer sound here, using simple samplers, distorted grime and ’80s electronic pop, doesn’t seem as cohesive and the deliberate lo-fi production values can grate a little. It’s a shame, as there’s still some compelling stuff at the track level, including some lovely as ever contributions from Alison Skidmore on vocals. Hopefully it’ll grow on me!

Pikelet – dear unimaginables [Chapter Music]
Pikelet – Bryson [self-released]
Pikelet – A Bunch [Chapter Music]
Pikelet – Take Off The Face Paint [self-released]
Pikelet – Swooping Buzzards [Chapter Music]
Diane Cluck – “Love Me If You Do” Cluck Cluck remix by Evelyn Morris [Pikelet Bandcamp]
Pikelet – Peephole [Chapter Music]
Pikelet – Darwin Heat [Listen Records]
Pikelet – interface dystopia [Chapter Music]
Susanna – Holy / Sacred [SusannaSonata]
Susanna – This / Phenomena [SusannaSonata]
Jenny Hval & Susanna – Dawn [SusannaSonata]
Susanna – This Place [c/o Wire Magazine]
Susanna – Burning Sea [SusannaSonata]
Susanna – The Fire [SusannaSonata]
Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Kim Myhr & Jenny Hval – Me, You, Me, You [Hubro]
Lakker – Maeslantkering Gating [R&S Records]
Lakker – Coal Bath [Candela Rising]
Lakker – Milch feat. Eileen Carpio [R&S Records]
Lakker – Fierljeppen [R&S Records]
Andy Stott – Waiting For You [Modern Love]
Andy Stott – Selfish [Modern Love]

Listen again — ~187MB

Lots of UFog-stylee sounds this evening, with glitchy postrocktronica, ambient, experimental dancefloor beats, industrial beats, post-industrial collaborative works and experimental Americana…

LISTEN AGAIN because once is not enough… podcast over here, stream on demand over there!

So great to have some new music from Bob Streckfuss aka 0point1. I thought he was originally from the Blue Mountains, outside of Sydney, but he’s certainly now based in Melbourne. His style hasn’t changed much in the last few years – incredibly intricate electronic production, often with manic drill’n’bassy beats or edited drums; in fact, everything glitchily edited, sometimes including his vocals, but as often as not his vocals float over the rest in Sigur Rós style, making for a lovely amalgam of blissful postrock and idm.

The Sounds are Sounds label from Sydney mostly releases different aliases of the work of Jacques Emery, as far as I can see. Which is a good thing, mind you. The latest release as golden window house has him in ambient mode, with varispeed string samples, or slightly unsettling field recordings with sparse, clattering piano and percussive sounds… Well worth your while checking it out.

Melbourne’s Wabz aka Nick Wuksta produces prodigious amounts of music, but his actual releases are a little few and far between (as of now). He did a great jungle-influenced remix of Dylan Michél on Feral Media‘s recent Strain of Origin comp, and his latest EP is a moody, experimental, revisionist take on UK Garage. It’s really one long piece in 5 tracks, so I played the first three as a block tonight. One you shouldn’t miss!

Berlin’s Gainstage put out an EP last year that I really enjoyed but for some reason it never made it on to the show. So tonight we’ll hear tracks from their two releases so far. While it’s quite heavy and noisy, it seems of a piece with some of the other “industrial techno” coming out of Berlin at the moment (e.g. These Hidden Hands, even expat Dubliners Lakker), but the distorted electronic beats are, I believe, augmented with live drums. Alongside these tough, tricky beats are sometimes surges of electronic noise, but also delicate, lonely melodies, reminiscent of similar juxtapositions from two decades earlier from the likes of Seefeel and Mark van Hoen‘s Locust. It feels to me that these guys don’t quite have the nororiety they deserve, next to some of their compatriots in messed up, beautiful electronics.

Italian experimental composer & electronic producer Teho Teardo first teamed up with Blixa Bargeld on a soundtrack in 2010, but they ended up putting out a whole collaborative album in 2013. Clearly I wasn’t the only one to adore its combination of post-industrial experimentalism with Teardo’s soundtrack-influenced strings and the pair’s love of sentimental Italian songwriting. Their second duo album Nerissimo has just come out on Teardo’s Specula Recordings, and it’s just as lovely. I thought I’d go back and play a few of Blixa’s colalborations through the years – mostly more recent ones including the duo with alva noto as anbb and an appearance with avant-garde metal/punk/rock supergroup Book of Knots. But it was also cool to revisit the epic darkwave drum’n’bass remixes by Darkus, an alias of classically-trained composer/producer Mark Rutherford who, as well as working with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Mike Oldfield, was an original member of jungle/drum’n’bass pioneers Metalheadz.

I played some tracks off the new album by René Gonzalez Schelbeck aka Western Skies Motel a few weeks back; it’s a great fit for Lost Tribe Sound, and as their press suggests, surprisingly “American”-sounding for a Danish musician. Schelbeck is adept at fingerstyle guitar, and can produce perfect Americana-styled folk pieces; but he also loves washing things out with droning guitarscapes and field recordings. I was pleased to discover a wealth of earlier work from the last couple of years, available on his own Bandcamp, as well as on the sadly now-defunct Perth label Twice Removed and the excellent Polish experimental/ambient label Preserved Sound.

0point1 – Sleep rebuilds machine [0point1 Bandcamp]
0point1 – Animal magnetism [0point1 Bandcamp]
0point1 – Bedroom universe [0point1 Bandcamp]
golden window house – method actor [Sounds are Sounds]
golden window house – holding on to an object [Sounds are Sounds]
Wabz – NightRider [Solitaire Recordings]
Wabz – Bells Ring Out [Solitaire Recordings]
Wabz – Melrose Park [Solitaire Recordings]
Gainstage – Light Change [Portals Editions]
Gainstage – Sun Burnt Cloud [Portals Editions]
Gainstage – Four Pipes [Portals Editions]
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld – DHX 2 [Specula Records]
Einstrürzende Neubauten – NNNAAAMMM (The Dark Welcome Mix by Darkus) [Mute]
anbb – ret marut handshake [raster-noton]
The Book of Knots – Drosophila Melanogaster (feat. Blixa Bargeld) [Ipecac]
Teho Teardo – Nemmeno Io [Specula Records]
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld – Axolotl [Specula Records]
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld – The Empty Boat [Specula Records]
Western Skies Motel – Myraids [Lost Tribe Sound]
Western Skies Motel – Here and There [Western Skies Motel Bandcamp]
Western Skies Motel – Through the Branches [Preserved Sound]
Western Skies Motel – Black Sea [Twice Removed]

Listen again — ~190MB