Utility Fog

It’s Utility Fog innit. Music. Yeah, music – organised sound.

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Starting with a big compilation (33 tracks!) put together by Josh Nee of legendary New Orleans black/doom metal band Thou to raise money for the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank in the wake of damaging floods in Louisiana in 2016. As well as featuring many of Thou’s fellow travellers in adventurous metal (including UFog faves The Body, SUMAC and Old Man Gloom), the compilation showcases many local Louisiana artists – so tonight we discover the joyful live electronics of A Living Soundtrack and shuddering dronescapes of Proud/Father.

Longtime underground indie musician haddocks’ eyes can’t help but make new music – even when he’s meant to be remastering and packaging his older music for release this year. So we’re gifted with an album of long, mysterious tracks based around drum machine and processed/effected guitar along with other elements like the odd pitched down computer vocals on this track. His music is never less than fascinating, often beautiful.

US label Lost Tribe Sound have a big 2017, and have announced a subscription series to keep up with all their music, with CD and heavyweight vinyl editions as always in sumptuous packaging. As well as plenty of world & classical-influenced sounds from LTS regular William Ryan Fritch there’s some beautiful stuff in the ambient/shoegazey folk vein from guitarist Seabuckthorn (featuring bowed guitars), and some amazing layered cello music from Montreal’s Alder & Ash (based mainly around plucked cello). Really looking forward to full releases from both of these artists.

Experimental, ambient, dubstep and techno-influenced drum’n’bass is now enough of a phenomenon that the Samurai drum’n’bass label started a dedicated sublabel Samurai Horo to release stuff like that a few years ago. It’s a natural fit for the latest releases from Liam Blackburn, who’s half of one of the most exciting electronic acts of the last few years, Akkord. For years he released dubstep, dub and drum’n’bass as Indigo (a highlight is the Storm EP, from which we took a brilliant jungle track tonight), but he’s made a defined switch into more arcane, ambient and tribal sounds as Ancestral Voices. I’d totally missed the fact that he released two EPs last year on Samurai Horo. Both continue the tribal/ambient/new age interests Blackburn made explicit with Ancestral Voices, but also have plenty of clear references to dubstep and drum’n’bass in the productions. Incredibly great.

Sentence is a new duo project from black metal/acid/idm/breakcore producer Surachai and techno/dark ambient producer Drumcell. The industrial techno and dark idm on display on these two tracks suggest it’ll be a very fruitful collaboration indeed.

Emptyset grabbed my attention in 2009 with their self-titled album, which built up techno tracks with mathematical precision from ringing bass and simple, chopped & distorted sine tones. With releases on Subtext Recordings (which they co-run), raster-noton and others, they’ve moved away from dancefloor patterns into a more pure interest in growling, sub-bass noise, projecting their sounds into spaces such as churches and subterranean caves. After a break, their latest album finds them on Thrill Jockey, a label that after practically inventing post-rock, has been releasing some of the most important experimental metal in the last few years. It seems suitable for a group that focus on the noisier aspects of electronic music. A few tracks are more rhythmic than they’ve been of late, and there also seem to be some ringing strings (bass guitar perhaps) producing some of the tones here.

I’m kind of embarrassed I’ve never played Chris Dooks on the show before. I loved his Accretion Disc album from last year and enjoyed his idm-influenced stuff from the late ’90s and early ’00s as Bovine Life. He’s now Dr Chris Dooks, having completed a PhD in his cross-disciplinary field of study, combining philosophy, music and healthcare work to treat both his own chronic fatigue syndrome and other people suffering from various illnesses including depression & anxiety, bi-polar, schizophrenia and more. He’s now focused on the health of his daughter Oona, who has a rare neurological condition that severely limits her abilities – but with help she’s made enormous progress, and he’s looking to raise funds for some equipment which will help her further. The new album AlpenOo sees Dooks enlisting the help of some excellent experimental musicians from around the world, including Machinefabriek and Michel Banabila, who were asked to remix Dooks’ seed track (the “Chris Dooks Stem” I spoke over this evening), at which point Dooks took all their material and wove a beautiful 20 minute track out of them. It’s an interesting concept and produced some lovely results with a surprising variety of sounds, from contemplative piano to glitchy beats.

A Living Soundtrack – Expanding Consolidation [Thrill Jockey Bandcamp]
Proud/Father – La Paz en la Aqua [Thrill Jockey Bandcamp]
haddocks’ eyes – you are no longer beloved [haddocks’ eyes Bandcamp]
Seabuckthorn – The Trail Already In My Mind [Lost Tribe Sound]
Alder & Ash – Seen Through Cedar Smoke [Lost Tribe Sound]
Memotone – Ghosts and Magic Trees (Tape Version) [Bastakiya Tapes]
Memotone – Docklands [Bastakiya Tapes]
Ancestral Voices – Jadian Sun [Samurai Horo/Samurai Bandcamp]
Indigo – Spirit Of The Winds (feat Versa) [Samurai Music/Samurai Bandcamp]
Ancestral Voices – burialground [Samurai Horo/Samurai Bandcamp]
Ancestral Voices – Priests of MU [Samurai Horo/Samurai Bandcamp]
Sentence – Azimuth [Surachai Bandcamp/Drumcell Bandcamp]
Emptyset – sight [Thrill Jockey]
Emptyset – Gate 3 [Caravan Recordings]
Emptyset – retrieve [Thrill Jockey]
Emptyset – ground [Thrill Jockey]
Chris Dooks – Alpenglühn (Michel Banabila Stem) [Chris Dooks Bandcamp]
Chris Dooks – Alpenglühn (Chris Dooks Stem) (excerpt under talking) [Chris Dooks Bandcamp]
bovine life – ether works part 2 (feat. samples from Third Eye Foundation) [BiP_HOp]
Chris Dooks – Night Time Hats [Chris Dooks Bandcamp]

Listen again — ~190MB