Utility Fog

Over 2hrs, tonight’s Utility Fog seems to cover just about… everything. Appropriate enough for the last “new music” show of the year, with our idiosyncratic best-ofs to come on the last 2 Sundays of 2020. It’s been a horrible year for most people, especially musicians – but it’s been an amazing year for music!

LISTEN AGAIN to the best mix of music before the best of the year… Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Roomful of Teeth, Michael Harrison – II. The Romantic Constellation: Autumn [New Amsterdam/Bandcamp]
The US vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth are the perfect people to be performing this new work by composer Michael Harrison, Just Constellations, so good is their tuning and so beautifully do their voices mesh together that they can carry off the just intonation required. Around the edges of these four beautiful works you can hear the other-worldly, shining intervals of this, to us, slightly strange tuning.

Yannis Kyriakides & Electra – Face V: The Reflection [Unsounds/Bandcamp]
Netherlands-based Greek Cypriot composer & electronic musician Yannis Kyriakides has been a frequent visitor to these playlists, due both to his compositions and for his wonderful duo with guitarist Andy Moor of Dutch anarcho-punks The Ex (with whom he co-runs the brilliant Unsounds label). I somehow didn’t manage to play the latest album from the duo earlier this year, but now we can hear one piece from a new multimedia work from Kyriakides performed by Dutch new music ensemble Electra along with Kyriakides’ electronic processing. Face is concerned with facial & emotion recognition software, and combines computer voice with the unusual instrumentation of violin, recorder, piano, and a soprano singer. All in all, it’s vintage Yannis Kyriakides, thematically and in terms of musical approach, with lovely bending, glitching treatments on the very organic performance.

Prurient – Help If I May Ask [Hospital Productions/Bandcamp]
Kelly Moran – Hymn [Hospital Productions/Bandcamp]
It’s been a seriously interrupted year for touring musicians, and as a consequence, we’ve seen works throughout the year that were meant to be part of touring schedules coming out in other ways. Kelly Moran, composer and prepared piano/keyboard player, was meant to be touring with Dominick Fernow aka noise musician Prurient and veteran Japanese noisemeister Merzbow, and this Prurient/Kelly Moran split release Chain Reaction at Dusk was going to be released for that tour. We get three relatively ambient but quite disquieting works from Prurient (with creepy spoken word and not-so-power electronics), and three varied works from Moran, including this which slides from organ chords into her characteristic sparkling prepared piano.

Jeremy Segal – Four Footprints [Jeremy Segal Bandcamp]
From Perth, sound-artist Jeremy Segal has just released four stereo renderings of environmental sound-works first created for an installation at Callaway Auditorium. Sounds and patterns from nature sputter and buzz around the sound-stage, enhanced & supported by shimmering electronic chords and rhythms at times. Absolutely lovely.

Quasar – Walk [DEEP MEDi/Bandcamp]
Quasar – External Signal Processor [DEEP MEDi/Bandcamp]
The last 12″ of the year from the ever-reliable DEEP MEDi comes from French dubstep artist Quasar – and conveniently for this segue, the title track of the Walk EP is a beautiful piece of beatless, melodic ambient music. Never fear though, the rest is rollicking classic dubstep.

Ash Koosha – YaYa Scat [Ash Koosha Bandcamp]
Ash Koosha – Robot Kareem [Ash Koosha Bandcamp]
Ash Koosha – Nutshell [Ash Koosha Bandcamp]
Ash Koosha – Wall-E [Ash Koosha Bandcamp]
It’s been a big year for Ashkan Kooshanejad aka Ash Koosha. While he’s been working on building artificial creativity, he also started the year with the awesome mixtape BLUUD (from which we heard “Robot Kareem”), released a series of singles, and is ending the year with another mixtape, HALLUCiNATO. This new one is concerned with the idea of computers dreaming, and the wild processed vocals on both “YaYa Scat” and “Wall-E” certainly evoke… something… something quite disturbing all in all, but super glitchy and cool all the same.

Tennis Pagan – IVAN [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Tennis Pagan – DAMP [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
In comparison to the saturated, dense and frantic works of Ash Koosha, the latest EP from Melbourne’s mysterious Tennis Pagan – their fourth for 2020! – is rather peaceful, at least on the very pretty “IVAN”. I think it’s their best since they debuted with the first EP at the start of the year, but all the music has been richly detailed and fun.

The Backfeed Slumber – Wet Stuff For Electric Boys [DataDoor/Bandcamp]
Here’s a flashback to 2004, with a split 7″ just released by Adelaide label DataDoor featuring two tracks from 16 years ago. Nic Datson’s The Backfeed Slumber contributes some murky downtempo breaks; on the flipside is a long-lost track from trip-hop duo Toby1.

Himuro Yoshiteru – I Wanted A New Life [Synaesthesia Media/Bandcamp]
Himuro Yoshiteru – The Chanting To The Void [Synaesthesia Media/Bandcamp]
Zero T – Hostile Environment [Synaesthesia Media/Bandcamp]
The last couple of years have seen journalist Ian Urbina’s project The Outlaw Ocean result in tremendous amounts of music & art inspired by his work bringing to light the astonishing & scary world of the planet’s oceans – from environmental & scientific concerns to the appalling truths of modern-day slavery, alongside piracy and other dangers. A remarkable archive of music, still growing bi-weekly, has been released, drawing from Urbina’s own sound library from his travels, including interviews and field recordings. This week saw the release of a new EP from Japanese idm legend Himuro Yoshiteru, The Sea You Never Know evoking the sorrows of some of the characters in Urbina’s stories through beautiful head-nodding beat tracks. Earlier in the year drum’n’bass don Zero T created three dancefloor-friendly tracks evoking terror and suspense on high waters with the Hostile Environment EP.

KeeZee & Tim Reaper – The Roughneck Sound [Future Retro]
UK jungle & breakcore artist Tim Reaper spreads his music around various different labels, frequently in collaboration with others in the scene. In fact he setup his Future Retro label purely for collaborative works, and has just released volumes 3 & 4 in his Meeting of the Minds series, each with four different collaborations on 12″. “The Roughneck Sound” here is ragga jungle with amen breaks over a 4/4 beat and a reggae feel, created with Brighton-based jungle producer KeeZee.

Moor Mother & billy woods – The Blues Remembers Everything The Country Forgot ft. Wolf Weston (of Saint Mela) [Backwoodz Studioz]
Moor Mother & billy woods – Gang For A Day ft. Franklin James Fisher (of Algiers) [Backwoodz Studioz]
In the middle of the year, Adult Swim released an incredible surprise collaboration between two of the most vital current-day American underground hip-hop artist in their Singles Series – Moor Mother & billy woods. The track melded a loop from Sons of Kemet with the frequent billy woods collaborator Willie Green‘s beats and apocalyptic, furious vocals from the two artists. Moor Mother aka Camae Ayewa has released a series of collaborations this year on her own Bandcamp, as well as incendiary jazz with Irreversible Entanglements. Meanwhile billy woods, after a massive year last year, released one of the rap albums of the year, Shrines, with his pal ELUCID as Armand Hammer. ELUCID appears on this duo album along with many other brilliant guests, like Saint Mela‘s Wolf Weston and Algiers‘ Franklin James Fisher, but really it would be a killer album with just the vocal & lyrical talents of Ayewa and woods. They made the strange choice to release it now as pre-orders for CD & vinyl (and t-shirt combos of course!) and although instant digital downloads come with the purchase, it’s not streaming yet or available anywhere else. So you better get it there because this shit is far beyond.

SENS DEP – New Dawn [Sens Dep Bandcamp]
SENS DEP – The Gate [Sens Dep Bandcamp]
I played new Melbourne group SENS DEP last week on the show, but I’m so enamoured of the album that we got the opening two tracks tonight as well. It’s members of postrock band of legend Laura, ramping up their penchant for walls of sound and for studio fuckery without any limitation. Caz Gannell’s cello, as with Laura, can be heard at times through the fog of distortion, as can the occasional shoegazey vocals, and the riffs and drones are interrupted by studio edits throughout. It’s the work of years, and I’m sure I’ll be listening to whenever things get too bright over summer.

Botanist – Stroma [The Flenser/Bandcamp]
Botanist – Light [The Flenser/Bandcamp]
Speaking of brightness, Botanist, the wonderful, unique, hammered-dulcimer-led black metal band from San Francisco, have dedicated the latest album in their verdant realm to Photosynthesis – to the extent that the songs wax lyrical about biochemical reactions: “Sub organelle stacks / Chloroplast edifice / Like a tower of disks / Of thylakoid daughter cells / Processing the power of the Sun”… It’s all the bombast of metal lyrics, in praise of natural processes. A delight. And in fact, while there’s blast beats and tremolo riffs galore, a lot of the vocals are clean, indie-style. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised, and maybe you’ll learn something too!

Pharaoh Overlord – Arms of the Butcher [Ektro/Rocket Recordings/Bandcamp]
Not content to be the most eclectic, brilliant metal band ever, Finland’s Circle (who themselves draw on krautrock and ambient as well as all forms of metal) years ago formed side project Pharaoh Overlord for psych-rock excursions. For the last 2 albums they’re down to two core members Tomi Leppänen & Jussi Lehtisalo, and like the last, their numerically-titled 6 (their 6th numerically-titled album but not, confusingly, their 6th album) is a purely electronic, melodic affair, highly influenced by the pioneering work of Kraftwerk. Except that they’ve called on the great Aaron Turner to lend his post-metal/hardcore roar to the proceedings. In a year where Turner’s brilliant SUMAC and Old Man Gloom have released sizeable chunks of great music, and SIGE Records, which Turner co-runs with his wife Faith Coloccia, has been relentlessly active, this appearance is the icing on the cake.

Listen again — ~202MB