IDM and electronic sounds abound tonight!
LISTEN AGAIN – you’ll work it out eventually! Stream on demand via FBi, podcast over here.
Arikon – City Cum Temple [Portals Editions]
Gainstage – Sediment Two [Portals Editions]
Arikon – The Prophet’s Blood Is Boiling [Portals Editions]
Arik Hayut is half of the industrial doom-techno duo Gainstage, with two releases on Berlin label Portals Editions. Given the heavy bass and overdriven sound of that band, the “drum and drone” of his solo work as Arikon doesn’t come as a big surprise – but it just happens to be some of the best work to come out of this label and the associated Berlin scene of late. The Prophet’s Blood Is Boiling references on the one hand the social decay and excess of late-stage capitalism, and on the other hand various monsters found in both the Hebrew bible and Jewish apocrypha. It’s dirty and distorted, but full of engaging basslines and rhythms. Very highly recommended.
Tim Koch – Bloom (feat. Beth Keough) [CPU Records]
Thug – rhino song [Aural Industries/Tim Koch Bandcamp]
FourPlay String Quartet – Meshugganah (Methugganah remix by Tim Koch) [FourPlay String Quartet Bandcamp]
Machine Drum – Machine Drum (Tim Koch‘s Thousand Times Over Mix) [Merck]
Tim Koch – Ecittal [U-Cover]
Tim Koch – Techune [U-Cover]
Tim Koch – Truth Sinks In [Merck/Tim Koch Bandcamp]
10:32 – Blue Little [Ghostly]
Tim Koch – Miller Lowlife [CPU Records]
Adelaide’s Tim Koch is one of Australia’s best-established idm artists, with his first release (under the name Thug) dating back to 1999. Already at that time it was clear that he was a producer of great musical talent who also knew his way around synth patches and drum machines. He found international acclaim with releases on celebrated electronic labels like deFocus (weighted more towards electro/techno), Merck (definitely core idm!) and U-Cover (more ambient leanings), as well as *ahem* remixing my band FourPlay String Quartet back in the day (turning in no less than three very different versions of the same tune!) His most recent full release was an EP under the name “10:32” exploring some more (electro-)acoustic leanings for the legendary Ghostly label – and that was in 2009. The last album “proper”, as Tim Koch, was the last release for the beloved Merck label, in 2006 – so it’s been a while between drinks and it’s lovely to hear a big collection (17 tracks) released by Sheffield’s Central Processing Unit – initial copies on Tim’s preferred format of MiniDisc.
µ-Ziq – Lexicon (ft. Kazumi) [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
µ-Ziq – scaling [Hut Records/Astralwerks]
µ-Ziq – Bassbins [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Mike Paradinas has been slowly unearthing unreleased gems from his massive archive over the last few years. In the ’90s his habit was to record vast amounts of music, almost daily, and so there’s a lot of stuff contemporaneous to many favourite releases that has never seen the light of day. Just released now is Challenge Me Foolish, collecting music from the same period as the Royal Astronomy album, his follow-up to the still incredible Lunatic Harness, expanding on the drill’n’bass and faux-classical elements of that release. Many of these tracks feature Japanese vocalist Kazumi, who contributed to a number of releases by Paradinas and other contemporaries. I remember Mike launched Royal Astronomy in London with a string quartet, which he says was at the behest of the label and was a total disaster – but nevertheless I’ve always found his quasi-classical synth string pieces delightful and moving.
Autechre – four of seven [Warp/AE_STORE]
Autechre – six of eight (midst) [Warp/AE_STORE]
Last time Autechre dropped new music, in 2016, they decided to entirely free themselves from the constraints of physical releases, and gave us over 4 hours of music (all at once) over the 5 Elseq EPs. This time round there are exactly 8 hours of music, but at least they’re spreading them out in 2 hour blocks over the four weeks of their NTS Radio residency. Each NTS Session is available for download after it airs, as basically a full album – there are separate tracks, albeit many clocking in at 15 minutes or more. They’ll all be collected into massive box sets too – 8xCD or 12xLP. At this stage we can say it’s typical Autechre stuff – hard to get into and then utterly immersive and brilliant. The long tracks evolve in fascinating ways; the shorter ones explore distinct sonic terrain. Sometimes the sound is expansive, bass-heavy, at other times the duo’s penchant for squashed, unyielding mid-range timbres takes over. But as always the beauty’s in the details, the buried melodies and often in the way things unfold over the luxuriously long times they allow themselves.
Listen again — ~197MB
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