We’re halfway through this year, but it feels like it’s been a whole year already. I’m sure time will only compress more as we go on.
Tonight we have a variety of bass-centric music including a fair bit of techno and percussive sounds. It was the fourth Bandcamp Friday (not yet clear whether the last!?) and a small amount tonight comes from that big, now monthly, release day – but more will creep into the next few weeks I suspect!
LISTEN AGAIN… with your head and with your legs! Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here…
Yunzero – I Didn’t Smudge So Easily [Lillerne Tapes]
Hyde – Ox Hill [Nice Music]
Yunzero – Orchard 1 [.jpeg Artefacts]
Yunzero – Mondegreen [Lillerne Tapes]
As Yunzero, Melbourne’s Jim Sellars has released some of the most mind-warping music to come out of Australia in the last few years. Last year’s Ode to Mud on .jpeg Artefacts further blurred and warped the post-everything electronica of 2016’s brilliant Ox Hill released by Nice Music as Hyde – itself a few twists of the Möbius strip along from his earlier beat tapes as Electric Sea Spider. Now he’s gone international, his latest album released by the quietly essential Lillerne Tapes, with the strangely apt title Blurry Ant. It’s more of the same (thankfully) – seemingly ambient interludes morphing into bass-heavy head-nodders built out of off-kilter sliding samples, chopped YouTube discoveries, half-audible raves, but the strange genius is that the dirty, out-of-focus ingredients are diced and plated up so very cleanly.
Azu Tiwaline – Tessiture [Livity Sound/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline – Omok [I.O.T. Records/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline – Red Viper [I.O.T. Records/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline – Tight Wind ft. Cinna Peyghamy [Livity Sound/Bandcamp]
I was so excited to discover the music of Azu Tiwaline this week, via her Magnetic Service EP released by Bristol label Livity Sound. Only a few months ago her two-part album Draw Me A Silence came out through French label I.O.T. Records. Both draw heavily on her Amazigh roots in Saharan Tunisia, as well as her “other” roots as a DJ and producer of techno, dub & hip-hop as Loan. She has an astonishing sense not only of rhythm and techno/dub production, but also of pacing and structure, honed no doubt in years of DJing, and it’s wonderful hearing that applied to these traditional rhythms and sounds (at times flute melodies and field recordings can be heard too). Both double album & EP are essential IMHO – head over to her Bandcamp.
Dominik Eulberg – Siebenschläfer (Robag Wruhme Remix) [!K7/Bandcamp]
Now getting even more blissful with a melodic, pastoral take on Dominik Eulberg‘s nature-loving techno & house, from the one & only Robag Wruhme. I’ve been a fan of Gabor Schablitzki since his idm/acid/drill’n’bass/glitch work in Beefcake, and it took me a while to warm to the 4/4 sounds he made as Wighnomy Brothers and Robag Wruhme, but nowadays I’m a total convert, and I love the head-nodding warmth of the groove here as well as the sharp shocks inserted here and there…
JK Flesh – Dissociation (Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement Extended Remix) [Hospital Productions/Bandcamp]
JK Flesh – Dissociation [Hospital Productions/Bandcamp]
JK Flesh has long been the alias of Justin K Broadrick of Godflesh, Jesu, Techno Animal, Zonal et al for some of his solo work, and in the last few years it’s coalesced as mostly a project for intense industrial techno. One of the original JK Flesh techno releases came out from Dominick Fernow‘s Hospital Productions in 2016, and this new album unearths some more of that early, raw material. Fernow himself took to this particular track in his ambient techno Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement guise, and as you can hear afterwards it hardly resembles the acidic, paranoid original. Great stuff all round.
AURA – Salt [Early Reflex]
Here’s some sludgey techno that understands the dichotomy of the drum’n’bass continuum – slow-moving bass, chittering percussion and acid squelches. Sydney DJ Daniel Curtis’s debut EP as AURA is released by excellent new Italian label Early Reflex this week (their first single-artist release), nodding its head to the influences of dub and industrial on club music. An auspicious beginning.
Askham & S.Tonkin – Idle Pulse [unreleased]
And while we’re on Sydney techno, here’s an unreleased track from the dynamic duo of Askham & S.Tonkin, aka Pip Dolan and Sarah Tonkin of Construct, and previously known as Blank Transit. This is percussive techno that patiently unwinds into a thundering, pulsating morass with dub echoes and gnarly pads in the middle. It starts as it means to go on, and builds more and more as it continues.
Franck Vigroux – Styx [raster-media/Bandcamp]
Franck Vigroux – Rhinocéros [Aesthetical]
Franck Vigroux – Island shores [raster-media/Bandcamp]
In a way it’s surprising that this is French composer Franck Vigroux‘s first work with minimal glitchtronica label raster-media, given how perfectly these electronic tones, rhythmic bass impulses and flittery percussion fit with the label’s aesthetic. Vigroux’s tendency towards growling analogue distortion still comes out at times – sometimes pointing towards industrial rock but equally at his collaboration with the late Mika Vainio. That approach is heard on last year’s Totem, released by another German label Aesthetical, but this new one of a solitary affair – its title Ballades sur lac gelé is a pun on the French word “Balades” – as such it would mean “rambles over a frozen lake”. As well as making electronic music, Vigroux is a guitarist and composer for theatre.
Synalegg – Barricades [Conditional/Bandcamp]
Synalegg – Commuters [Conditional/Bandcamp]
Staying in France, here are a couple of new tracks from Synalegg, who uses every digital processing technique in the book along with complex programming to create his frenetic sounds. Previous releases (see his Bandcamp) have tended to be short sound experiments, so this is where they turn into full-blown tracks, and it’s glitchy idm of the highest order.
Kcin – PERFORM-RAM2.demo [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Taxpayer – Building X (feat. Brayden Condie) [stream on SoundCloud]
Sig Nui Gris – The End of Sig Nu Gris [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
For the fourth Bandcamp Friday, Melbourne’s Spirit Level label released their second Kindred Spirits label compilation, featuring pretty much all of the label’s artists. Tonight we heard UFog regular, Sydney’s Kcin, with typical industrial processed percussion, and something beautiful and floaty from Melbourne’s Erin Hyde aka Sig Nui Gris – hopefully not actually “the end” of.
In between is an impressive debut from Taxpayer, aka Sydney artist Lizzie Nagy, whose art has adorned many gig posters, album covers, minicomics and public spaces. “Building X” is a sludgey piece of dronerocktronica (there, another new genre!) featuring Brayden Condie’s guitar and sampled drums from Brisbane’s Ultra Material.
Listen again — ~206MB
Comments are closed.