Monthly Archives: November 2019

Playlist 24.11.19

This was going to be mostly electronic beats tonight, but of course there’s no purity when it comes to Utility Fog playlists…

LISTEN AGAIN and get with it… stream on demand at FBi, podcast here.

Ecker & Meulyzer – Growth [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Stray Dogs – Phaeton [Kvitnu/Bandcamp]
Ecker & Meulyzer – Commons [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
I leapt on the new album from Belgian cellist Koenraad Ecker & percussionist Frederik Meulyzer because I love Ecker’s work with duos Lumisokea and Stray Dogs, and Subtext Recordings is a very reliable outlet for bass music, abstract sound & electro-acoustic work. And then as I researched Meulyzer I realised that Ecker & Meulyzer ARE Stray Dogs. Not a million miles from Ecker’s work with Andrea Taeggi in Lumisokea, Stray Dogs showcases a mix of percussion-driven industrial techno and acoustic/processed acoustic sounds. Under their own surnames, their music leans a little more on Ecker’s cello and sound design – made even more stunning as this album was recorded in Norway at the very remote Svalbard Global Seed Vault, one of a number of seed banks around the world keeping seeds for a wide variety of essential crops to be used in the event of a global ecological calamity. In these times of climate crisis, it’s vital stuff, and I’m all for instrumental music that engages with subject matter like this – making this important space come alive with resonance.

Kcin – Already Dissolving [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Nicholas Meredith put out his debut EP under his backwards alias Kcin in 2017 – a massive-sounding beauty of overdriven electronics and live percussion. He’s continuing to hone his craft, and the second part of his Sleepless and Hopelessness EP(s) has just come out from Melbourne label Spirit Level. An expert mix of electronic programming, live-triggered electronics and live percussion.

Thrax – THISFLESH [Empirical Intrigue]
With one previous EP, Sydney’s Thrax remain quite mysterious, but they’ve come to the still new Sydney label Empirical Intrigue for their new release Lament Lost, which suits the label’s exploration of synthesised sounds. Despite an aura of power electronics & noise, there are surprisingly melodic turns, along with some freakily pitch-mangled vocal samples.

Ptwiggs – Worth It [Opal Tapes]
Ptwiggs – The Town of Death [Opal Tapes]
Two tracks from Sydney’s Phoebe Twiggs (who’s also been co-running the Eternal label & events in recent times), released for the first time on the much loved UK label Opal Tapes. It’s interesting because Twiggs’ music is if anything ultra-digital, showing that Opal Tapes cares not for the purity of tape-saturated electronics. The EP showcases Twiggs’ characteristic industrial, complex beats and electronic melodies alongside a raft of auto-tuned vocals. Impressive as always from a young artist with a keen sense of style and a love of darkness.

Moor Mother – The Myth Hold Weight [Don Giovanni Records/Bandcamp]
Moor Mother – Time Float [Don Giovanni Records/Bandcamp]
Zonal – In A Cage ft. Moor Mother [Relapse/Bandcamp]
Moor Mother – Cold Case (feat. Emel Mathlouthi) [Don Giovanni Records/Bandcamp]
Moor Mother – Black Flight (feat. Saul Williams) [Don Giovanni Records/Bandcamp]
Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother has been appearing all over the place lately, including cameos with NYC hardcore band Show Me The Body and Eartheater. Already this year her gruff voice and incisive lyrics graced the entire first side of the new album from Zonal, the reincarnation of Justin K Broadrick & Kevin Martin‘s Techno Animal. Her new album Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes is a masterpiece of noise, beauty, poetry and politics. Unlike 2016’s entirely self-produced Fetish Bones, an onslaught of power electronics, weird beats and afro-futurist raps from which we took the uncharacteristically soothing “Time Float”, this new album is crammed full of collaborations, including various producers including King Britt, and various guest vocalists including Tunisian star Emel Mathlouthi and cerebral, experimental rap god Saul Williams. Moor Mother’s own art transcends even these great collaborators though – she is a unique and powerful force in contemporary art.

Scorn – Talk Whiff (feat. Jason Williamson) [Ohm Resistance]
Scorn – Mugwump Tea Room [Ohm Resistance]
Mick Harris has a long history in heavy instrumental dub. Originally a drummer, Harris featured in one of the earliest lineups of Napalm Death (alongside the aforementioned JK Broadrick) and invented blast beats. By the early ’90s he’d split off with Nic Bullen to form the experimental duo Scorn, and within a couple of albums they’d mostly sawn off the vocals and moved into heavy instrumental dub & electronics. Bullen left not long after, and Harris continued Scorn for many years, alongside drum’n’bass experiments as Quoit and dubwise techno as Fret. After the last Scorn album in 2011, Harris announced that the project was no more – so it’s rather exciting to have a new album of these bass-heavy, dark concoctions. Also a delight to hear Sleaford Mods‘ Jason Williamson doing his thing, a Northerner rapping over a Birmingham legend’s beats.

Loefah – Ginnocchio [Loefah Productions Bandcamp]
Wonderfully dirty slab of dubstep from one of the great pioneers, Loefah, second emanation from his own Bandcamp.

Lee Gamble – Tyre [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Lee Gamble – Shards [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Continuing the car focus of his Flush Real Pharynx EP series for Hyperdub following In A Paraventral Scale from earlier this year, we have a couple of manic tracks from Lee Gamble. This is supposedly the second phase of semioblitz, where the constant stimulus of contemporary life has clearly gone into overdrive. Gamble is an expert deconstructor of rave & contemporary electronic music forms, which also comes out in his impeccable curation of the UIQ label. Looking forward to the third part in this EP series, coming next year.

Dean Blunt – Darcus [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Ikonika – Primer [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Speaking of Hyperdub, Kode9‘s label is celebrating its 15th birthday with a compilation, just like they did at 5 & 10. This time it’s released in conjunction with Adult Swim, a compilation called HyperSwim featuring most of their recent acts (including an exclusive from Burial). Tonight, and adorably creepy number from the unpredictable Dean Blunt and a great head-nodding piece of techno from Sara Abdel-Hamid aka Ikonika.

Elmono – Cooper’s Dream [Tectonic Recordings/Bandcamp]
Elmono – Endorfiend [Tectonic Recordings/Bandcamp]
With a couple of releases under his belt from Cold Recordings, Cardiff-based producer Elmono moves here to another Bristol label, (post-)dubstep legends Tectonic Recordings, for four tracks of rolling breakbeats, kind of drum’n’bass slowed down to techno tempo (with a nice swung feel too).

Andy Odysee – Like Jazz [Odysee Recordings/Bandcamp]
An original player in the ’90s jungle scene, composer & producer Andy Baddaley joined Tilla Kemal aka Mirage to run the Odysee Recordings label, releasing important early 12″s from Photek and Source Direct among others. They’ve lately been releasing remastered digital versions of old releases on their Bandcamp, but here’s a new EP from Andy Odysee, with a dark classic-sounding techstep A-side backed with a skittery jazzy number and a third bonus track.

Listen again — ~198MB

Playlist 17.11.19

Spooky sounds starting this evening for a night of evocative experimental music.

LISTEN AGAIN to catch the bits you missed… stream on demand at FBi, podcast here.

Casey Bebenek – Your reflection echoes through the corridors (excerpt) [Casey Bebenek Bandcamp]
Casey Bebenek – You are no longer of this world (excerpt) [Casey Bebenek Bandcamp]
Melbourne composer, multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer Adam Casey’s main musical outlet for some years was the band The Boy Who Spoke Clouds. Their delayed last album was released earlier this year, but in the meantime he moved his focus to a duo with drummer Julia Bebenek, with whom he has been creating one engrossing, beautiful longform piece a month all year. I’m sad that I’ve only just caught up with this material – most tracks are too long to play even on my show, but I would have been excerpting them earlier I’m sure! Double bass features extensively (often mournfully bowed), but so does piano, guitar, hurdy gurdy… sonic beds are created from slow loops or field recordings, and percussion rolls around the sound stage. There’s a pervasive sense of melancholy, but also of peace. You should definitely spend a few hours with these pieces.

Ryan Lott – inversion myth [Ryan Lott Bandcamp]
Ryan Lott – breathing cycle [Ryan Lott Bandcamp]
Ryan Lott – jittering cry [Ryan Lott Bandcamp]
Ryan Lott – tether shift [Ryan Lott Bandcamp]
In 2008 alt-hip-hop label Anticon released a rather incredible debut album of neoclassical indietronica from Son Lux. At the time it was a solo outlet for the song-based material of composer Ryan Lott. Over time it’s become a full-blown band in its own right, and meanwhile Lott has composed works for dance, theatre and film (as well as classical music for music’s sake) under his own name. Recently, he released a series of 4 EPs (with more to come!) grouped as learning structures, all works originally commissioned for contemporary dance – including works going back before that first Son Lux album was released. With strings, piano, lots of electronic processing and some percussion, it’s a real pleasure to listen and return to.

Matthew Collings – Blackwater [Denovali/Bandcamp]
Matthew Collings – Vasilia [Denovali/Bandcamp]
Matthew Collings – S Wave [Denovali/Bandcamp]
Scottish composer Matthew Collings released a number of indie/electronic/ambient albums under the name Sketches for Albinos, but with Splintered Instruments in 2013 turned to composition which, like Ryan Lott, melds fizzling, rumbling electronics with classical instruments (as we hear tonight, he hadn’t entirely abandoned vocals for that first solo album). He’s also half of the experimental indie duo Graveyard Tapes with Euan McMeeken and has released a couple of amazing albums with Dag Rosenqvist. Following 2016’s Requiem for Edward Snowden, an audiovisual work with strings and electronics which focused on surveillance society, new album Uzonia grapples with with post-Trump, post-Brexit age of ascendant fascism and tries to imagine something utopian.

Inga-Lill Farstad – Smalsoldogg [eilean records/Bandcamp]
As the great French label eilean records nears the end of its self-prescribed 100 releases, the consistency of quality isn’t letting up one bit. Norwegian artist Inga-Lill Farstad had a duo called Children and corpse playing in the streets, and has also worked on a number of releases from Benjamin Finger, but appears here solo for the first time. The sounds here have a strange mix of innocence and disquiet, and with subtle manipulations to instruments, field recordings and vocals but also beautiful, patient chord progressions.

Mamiffer – All That is Beautiful [SIGE Records/Bandcamp]
Mamiffer – River of Light [SIGE Records/Bandcamp]
Faith Coloccia recently released her second solo album under the name Mára, an outlet for ambient piano and vocals, and tape experiments. It’s a joy to also have a new album, The Brilliant Tabernacle, from her longstanding band Mamiffer, for some time now formed around her and her husband, ISIS/SUMAC/Old Man Gloom maestro Aaron Turner. Here Coloccia’s lovely songs and piano are buttressed by full arrangements including Turner’s guitar, drums from the great Jon Mueller, additional vocals from Zen Mother’s Monica Khot (who has released music on Coloccia & Turner’s SIGE Records as Nordra), Veronica Dye’s flute and string arrangements from Eyvind Kang. From an excellent catalogue, it’s probably Mamiffer’s best work yet, like her recent Mára work an exploration and celebration of becoming a mother for the first time – and there really is something life-affirming going on here. Turn it up loud, put it on repeat.

Aaron Turner – Attar Datura [SIGE Records/Bandcamp]
At almost the same time, Coloccia’s husband Aaron Turner has put out his first release under his own name (previous solo work was as House of Low Culture). It’s based around the distorted abstractions of his guitar, but on the third track the abrasiveness lets up for a piece of sustained bass tones and tape-manipulated trumpet samples – at least initially.

Liturgy – EXACO I [Liturgy]
Liturgy – Vitriol [Thrill Jockey/Liturgy Bandcamp]
Liturgy – VIRGINITY [Liturgy]
Liturgy – EXACO II [Liturgy]
And now the metal leanings of the last two acts gives way to a real black metal band – or are they? Hunter Hunt-Hendrix has an uneasy relationship with black metal, and has stretched the medium (and the friendship potentially) over Liturgy’s albums. Released digitally this week, H.A.Q.Q. simultaneously returns to some more black metal-style vocalisations and also takes Liturgy as far away from metal as it’s ever been, with glitchy piano & classical-sounding interludes and very weirdly shaped songs (he loves the glitch, and I’m down with that!) As this show isn’t naturally geared towards metal, I’ve selected some less-representative tracks along with a reminder of the previous opus, the extraordinary The Ark Work.

Ben Carey – Peaks [Hospital Hill]
Sydney musician Ben Carey is an accomplished saxophonist as well as technological interfaces, and has recently become fascinated with modular synthesis. His new release Antimatter on Hospital Hill documents some of his modular work, sometimes quite abstract, sometimes full of burbling synths, odd harmonies and dischords and quasi-rhythms. This first track slowly growsc rather satisfyingly into a sputtering mass of sound.

Listen again — ~193MB

Playlist 10.11.19

Dancefloor mutations of various sorts tonight, veering away into other territories near the end…

LISTEN AGAIN because you can, and you know you want to! Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here…

Katie Gately – Bracer [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
Even before her debut album Color came out in 2016, Katie Gately was a singular artist making waves with a couple of singles and remixes. Having come to music indirectly, she approached the creation of her music with scientific curiosity and precision, building incredibly catchy pieces from infectious rhythms, creative field recordings and layers of her vocals. Then, as she was preparing her second album, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and understandably her whole perspective changed. The second abum is coming out in Feb 2020, and this first single “Bracer” was apparently her mother’s favourite. It’s got her signatures in spades – a driving rhythm throughout the ups and downs of its 10 and a half minutes, and the strength of musicality to sustain a cohesive song for that length – shades of Kate Bush, perhaps. For all its strangeness, it’s less abstract and more of a “real song” than anything she’s done before. Bring on Feb 14th!

Hiro Kone – Akoluthic Phase [Dais Records/Hiro Kone Bandcamp]
Hiro Kone – Truth That Silence Alone [Dais Records/Hiro Kone Bandcamp]
Hiro Kone – A Desire, Nameless [Dais Records/Hiro Kone Bandcamp]
For her third album, and second for Dais Records, Hiro Kone aka NYC’s Nicky Mao addresses the techno-fascism of the current age through the lens of “absence”. Instrumental music shackled to big concepts is always a bit of a stretch, but you can feel it working with music this evocative, drawing on the last few decades of post-cyberpunk art & music. Superb sound design and detailed beat programming that doesn’t succumb to the current “deconstructed club music” obsession of the current age.

20syl – Ongoing Thing (feat. Oddisee) (Sig Nu Gris Fixation) [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Sig Nu Gris & Cassius Select – Herd Fixation [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Melbourne’s Erin Hyde aka Sig Nu Gris spent October progressively releasing her EP of Fixations – radical edits of songs that she “fixates” on to a perhaps obsessive extent. I played one a few weeks ago, but really wanted to revisit them, and this more beat-heavy show is the right time. Her take on French club producer 20syl‘s hit with Oddisee is a completely discombobulated version of the original – a slow/fast monster; meanwhile her take on ex-Sydney maestro Cassius Select‘s classic “Herd” is deceptively faithful, but it’s completely reconfigured by an added melodic hook and subtle changes to the (still very recognizable) beat.

Leif – Igam-Ogam [Livity Sound/Bandcamp]
Livity Sound draws from Bristol’s soundsystem culture but focuses more on techno & house than dub, although many of its artists stem from the outcropping of dubstep in that fine city. Leif fits nicely into that sound, with a track that takes James Blake’s post-dubstep floating jazz chords into percussive deep house. It’s lovely.

Andy Stott – Ballroom [Modern Love]
Andy Stott – Versi [Modern Love]
Surprise new double EP, It Should Be Us, from Andy Stott, returning to dancefloor productions after his most recent releases progressed into more postpunk and computer-free sounds. For some reason here the aesthetic is “64k mp3s downloaded from SoulSeek in 2001” – I’m not sure why all the beats are aliased fizzles, but nevertheless it’s Andy Stott, so there’s beautiful pads and basslines. The highlight is of course the “bonus” track not available on vinyl, “Versi”, a head-nodding 4/4 shuffle.

Rrose – Mine [Eaux]
Sutekh – Fire Weather [Orthlorn Musork/Sutekh Bandcamp]
Rrose – Open Cell [Eaux]
For years, Californian musician Seth Horvitz made intelligent, challenging techno & experimental electronic music as Sutekh. For some years now he has explored slippery techno, club music and ambient textures under the pandrogynous pseudonym Rrose (taken from Marcel Duchamp’s female-identified alter-ego Rrose Sélavy). There’s a continuity with their earlier work (witness the collision of 4/4 beats, field recordings and electric piano on the 2002 track I played), but the Rrose work does stand alone. The album Hymn To Moisture – the first full album as Rrose! – does indeed feel fluid, submerged, sodden. It’s a beauty.

Shit & Shine – WHO ARE YOU? [OOH-Sounds/Bandcamp]
Shit & Shine – 57YOUYOI-DRINKIN [OOH-Sounds/Bandcamp]
Texas maverick (now based in the UK) of the noise and doom scenes Shit & Shine has for the last few years been producing perverted variants of electronic & dance genres, with some brilliant disco edits last year now followed with the strange minimal techno-disco on Italian label OOH-Sounds called NO NO NO NO. The title track features an incredibly frustrating phone support conversation that may or may not be a prank call, and weirdly twisted & processed vocal samples follow throughout. It’s edging on creepy, but not quite as balls-out as his earlier work.

Tears|Ov – A Hopeless Place [The Tapeworm/Bandcamp]
Tears|Ov – Trapdoor Ant [The Tapeworm/Bandcamp]
An LP release on Touch-affiliated cassette label The Tapeworm (recently turned 10) here comes from UK trio Tears|Ov, made up of poet and experimental musician Lori E Allen, cellist Katie Spafford and artist & multi-instrumentalist Deborah Wale. There’s a kind of postpunk industrial feel to this freeform music. The music may originate from improvisations, but it’s precisely constructed and mixed into weird, angular, uncompromising quasi-songs.

Del Lumanta – Preparations I [Room40/Bandcamp]
Del Lumanta – Preparations III [Room40/Bandcamp]
This new release from Sydney’s Del Lumanta, released on Room40‘s cassette series A Guide To Saints, documents Del’s initial experiments with modular synthesis, showing once again what a talented artist they are. These thought-provoking and creative works are a response to being asked to perform at the Art Gallery of NSW for Sydney Festival earlier this year – both a response to the space and also to the artist’s disquiet with the idea of institutions like this. Highly recommended.

Listen again — ~203MB

Playlist 03.11.19

It’s a rainy night if you’re in Sydney, and we’ve got some rainy night tunes for you.

Sadly, the stream on demand facility broke down last week, so there’s no listen back for this one :(

The Leaf Library – In Doors And Out Through Windows [where it’s at is where you are/The Leaf Library Bandcamp]
The Leaf Library – Hollow Tone [where it’s at is where you are/The Leaf Library Bandcamp]
The Leaf Library – Bright Seas [where it’s at is where you are/The Leaf Library Bandcamp]
This six-piece from North London have been combining gorgeous songwriting with postrock and experimental tendencies for some time – closest comparisons I can think of are Broadcast and Stereolab. I discovered The Leaf Library via an excellent remix album a few years ago featuring a few Hood-related acts and other Utility Fog-friendly folks like Isnaj Dui. This new album, The World Is A Bell, is the first collection of new songs from the band as a whole in a while, and it’s a winner. Great songs that don’t mind going 2-3 times as long as typical radio would prefer, with krautrocky motoricism and delightful melodies. Surprising episodes of found sounds, odd arrangements… everything a Utility Fog curator could wish for.
Pre-order copies of the album came with a limited CD called Bell Tones with extended abstractions of the album material. I played a little looping piece of backwards sounds.

The Bad Plus – Love is the Answer [Edition Records]
US jazz piano trio The Bad Plus made their name doing perfectly skewed interpretations of unexpected songs – Nirvana, the Pixies, and a beloved version of Aphex Twin’s classic “Flim”. A couple of years ago founding pianist Ethan Iverson left (he’d gotten in some hot water for some pretty shitty comments about women in jazz music, which may or may not be related), but bass player / frequent songwriter Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King have continued on, enlisting another brilliant jazz pianist to join them – Orrin Evans. Evans is a less showy player than Iverson, but settles into the Bad Plus sound with ease. Tonight’s choice from Activate Infinity, the second album of the new lineup, is a classic Reid Anderson tune – a beautiful cyclic motif on piano & bass with a slow build and release.

Grischa Lichtenberger – 0319 09 eins c4 (32 cents) [raster/Bandcamp]
Grischa Lichtenberger – 0319 02 saturn 2f (saturn) [raster/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based electronic musician Grischa Lichtenberger usually very much embodies the raster-noton (and now raster) sound – clicky, tight & taut electronic rhythms and high-tech sound design. For his new album this approach is married with some much looser source material, from saxophonist Phillip Gropper‘s ensemble PHILM. Lichtenberger’s glitchy, stuttery, granular approach to audio is the order of the day, but the jazz origins of the material are frequently audible – shuffling drum kit, piano & sax melodies surfacing or even leading on some tracks, while elsewhere soundscapes are built from fragments of acoustic sounds.

memotone – The Brownie of the Black Haggs [memotone Bandcamp]
memotone – Mary Burnet [memotone Bandcamp]
I’ve been following the work of William Yates aka memotone on this show since around 2012. At the time he was making on-point post-dubstep and folktronic beats, but strangely with a kind of contemporary classical side. Yates is an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, as can often be seen on his Instagram (and elsewhere) and creates all his music with hardware – whether it’s distorted hip-hop beats, electric piano, complex drum patterns, arcane folk reels, or distorted bass synth throbbing like on the first track tonight. Both tracks come from a cassette release called FOUR TALES which is inspired by four, er, tales by 19th century author James Hogg. So our starting point musically is anything but pastoral, but there is a strain of folk weirdness going through these tunes.

John Roberts – Mental Model No. 1 [Brunette Editions]
The particular strain of deep house favoured by New York musician John Roberts has often leaned towards acoustic sounds, such as the limpid piano featuring on Glass Eights. On his new album Can Thought Exist Without The Body, beats are entirely left behind for absorbing sound design, with close-mic’d piano, humming tones and some exquisite violin glissandi among the sounds. It’s quite something.

Jim Perkins – Pools [bigo & twigetti/Bandcamp]
Jim Perkins – Fragment [bigo & twigetti/Bandcamp]
Jim Perkins – A Ritual for Saying Goodbye [bigo & twigetti/Bandcamp]
Even more classical sounding is the new album from British composer Jim Perkins, who runs the bigo & twigetti label that focuses on modern classical & electronic music. His penchant for glitchy edits comes out in a few spots (check the sweet ending to the title track) but there’s precious little in terms of electronic (or other) beats that he’s featured in the past – he’s leaning in to the classical & ambient stylings on this one. It’s lovely stuff.

Leah Kardos – Bird Rib [bigo & twigetti/Bandcamp]
Jameson Nathan Jones – Continuum [bigo & twigetti/Bandcamp]
Inventive compilations have always been part of what bigo & twigetti like to do, and their latest, Scale, invites 17 artists to respond to the title – whether using musical scales or the idea of “scale” (loud vs soft, solo vs orchestral, small vs large etc). Ex-pat Brisvegan Leah Kardos, now well established in London as an academic, composer & sound engineer, contributes a track from a new series of pieces which respond to old material of hers played through through a tape machine backwards. You can’t hear the original, but it’s an interesting jumping off point – more info here (and very glad to hear there’s an EP coming next year!) Mississippi composer Jameson Nathan Jones starts the compilation off with some windswept synths hovering and puslating through a slow crescendo and decrescendo. There’s a lot going on in the details here. I strongly recommend checking out the whole compilation.

Joanna John & Burkhard Stangl – november air [Interstellar Records]
Joanna John & Burkhard Stangl – birds cannot enter the poem [Interstellar Records]
Beautiful sound-art from Norway-based Polish multi-media artist Joanna John & veteran Austrian experimental musician Burkhard Stangl. Stangl’s guitar playing grounds this music in a rootsy comfort zone, but around it we have field recordings, noisy granular processing, and other estranging effects. It’s electro-acoustic music at its finest.

She Spread Sorrow – She Didn’t Care [The Helen Scarsdale Agency]
Alice Kemp – A Gold Blade To The Back Of The Head [The Helen Scarsdale Agency]
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project – Not Intended As [The Helen Scarsdale Agency]
Himukalt – Cruel By Most Estimations [The Helen Scarsdale Agency]
Originally due out on October 25th, the massive new boxset from The Helen Scarsdale Agency seems to be delayed – so hopefully it’s OK that I’m “previewing” a few tracks. Titled On Corrosion, it’s 10 cassette albums housed in a beautiful wooden box, featuring artists from around the world leaning towards: “post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, and existential vacancy”. Some of the cassettes are made up of two long tracks – so for instance I couldn’t feature Richard Chartier’s pinkcourtesyphone tonight. But others are more traditional EPs or mini-albums split into tracks. Italian artist Alice Kundalini aka She Spread Sorrow starts things off with a morose, processional piece from her cassette Orchid Seeds. Next, we have British experimental musician Alice Kemp and one of her 9 Dreams In Erotic Mourning – a ticking pulse and throbbing electronics. US collective Fossil Aerosol Mining Project have been around for decades, mining (yes) the collective refuse of late 20th century America – thus the woozy VHS samples, an anti-nostalgic hauntology. And finally, some wonderfully confronting / enveloping power electronics & industrial noise from Nevada-based Ester Kärkkäinen aka Himukalt, recalling Puce Mary or the halcyon days of Prurient.