Dark dubby techno / dubstep / grime / drill tonight, but also jittery idm and classical electronic fusion.
LISTEN AGAIN with FBi on the stream-on-demands, or podcast here, for pure pleasure.
Blackhaine – Prayer (ft. Iceboy Violet & Blood Orange) [Fixed Abode/Bandcamp]
Blackhaine – Armour Freestyle [Fixed Abode/Bandcamp]
So here’s the new EP from Lancashire’s Blackhaine, the rapper, choreographer & dancer who named himself in part after the incendiary French movie La Haine (Hate). With cohort Rainy Miller and also Croww on this EP underlining and entwining his anguished howls and poetry with industrial menace, Blackhaine (aka Tom Heyes) gives visceral voice to the depressing realities of working class life in post-Brexit England. Armour II careens between intense industrial throbs and no-less intense quietude, with guests Iceboy Violet & Blood Orange adding additional points of view on “Prayer”.
Azu Tiwaline – Deep Theko [I.O.T/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline x Cinna Peyghamy – Lowww [I.O.T/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline & Al Wootton – Light Transmission [Livity Sound/Bandcamp]
French DJ & producer Azu Tiwaline is expert at dub-techno and uk bass storytelling, with sounds from her Saharan Tunisian roots combining to create something unique. On her solo EP for Livity Sound in 2020, she collaborated also with French-Iranian percussionist Cinna Peyghamy, who appears here also on Vesta, her new EP on her own I.O.T Records. Deep dub textures and beats. Earlier this year Azu Tiwaline collaborated with Al Wootton for a follow-up on Livity Sound, dub/bass beats both syncopated and 4/4…
Holy Tongue – River Cannot Wash it Away [Amidah Records/Valentina Magaletti Bandcamp]
Holy Tongue – Spirit Mask [Amidah Records/Valentina Magaletti Bandcamp]
Meanwhile, there’s a third EP from Holy Tongue, Al Wootton‘s continuing duo with Valentina Magaletti. As with their previous two releases, this is stripped-down live dub, with Magaletti’s muscular drum kit and Wootton’s electric basslines and plenty of dub delays throughout.
Low End Activist ft. Emz – Get Get [Sneaker Social Club]
Low End Activist – Parity [Sneaker Social Club]
Jamie Russell is a very busy man of many aliases. Not only does he run co-run Hypercolour Records, he also helms the incredible Sneaker Social Club, and although it’s difficult to unravel it all, he is also the man behind Low End Activist, sometimes also aka Patrick Conway, one half of Trinity Carbon, and somewhere in there he runs a bunch of other labels too. Across all of this, Russell covers just about every electronic genre, and Low End Activist is there for everything on the ‘ardcore continuum, from jungle through to grimey dubstep and all that wotnot. There are a bunch of great grime MCs on his new album Hostile Utopia, including a heavy hitter from Killa P, but it seems to me that “Get Get”, featuring Emz, is a real hit.
Slikback – GEOMETRY [Slikback Bandcamp]
Nairobi’s Slikback won’t stop either. Every month at least, there’s a few new tracks on his Bandcamp, very internet dance music, rhythmic stuff of all sorts and also hi-tech ambient biz. Always rad.
JK Flesh – Human/Nature [KR3 Records/Bandcamp]
The don Justin K Broadrick, of Godflesh, Jesu and a billion other incarnations, has been churning out acerbic, bracing techno under his JK Flesh for some years now. The latest is Veneer of Tolerance for Italy’s KR3 Records, with the usual 4/4 beats of at various tempos dark textures and dark outlook.
tsx – squidge feat. Sue Tompkins [generate and test/Bandcamp]
tsx – know you don’t [generate and test/Bandcamp]
Oswald Berthold is a member of the legendary Farmers Manual, who started their glitching, generative techno/idm/breakbeat work in the mid-’90s, pioneered net labels and webcasts before they were a thing, and are now releasing idiosyncratic idm & related music on their generate and test label through Bandcamp. Solo, Berthold has been releasing glitchy beats under the name tsx (it stands for different things depending where you look), at times with collaborators like English performance artists Sue Tompkins and the mysterious psygod. It’s all good and worth checking out.
Bienoise – FFF THIS MEANING TODAY [Mille Plateaux]
Bienoise – LAC – Silence Half Speed [Mille Plateaux]
Piedmontese musician Alberto Ricca is Bienoise. He’s studied electronic music, and now teaches it too, and his album THIS MEANING TODAY has a typically elusive philosophical concept as per Mille Plateaux‘ usual tendencies. As well as intense stuttery barrages, there’s a rather beautiful Autechrian ambient piece.
Luis & Lis Dalton – timmy chalamet [AD 93/Bandcamp]
Luis – or anyone said it [AD 93/Bandcamp]
New York house master DJ Python revives little-used alias Luis for an EP of delightful Boards of Canada-style idm for AD 93 titled 053 (Schwyn). The most BoC-like is named for the equally pretty Timmy Chalamet, and is a collaboration with UK’s Lis Dalton.
Florent Ghys – Quatre Fromages [Cantaloupe/Bandcamp]
Florent Ghys – Météos [Cantaloupe/Bandcamp]
Florent Ghys – Véranda [Cantaloupe/Bandcamp]
French musician Florent Ghys is a composer, double bassist, electronic musician and video artist. He’s a longtime Bang on a Can collaborator, so it’s no surprise to find his latest album released on the New York collective’s Cantaloupe label. It’s two albums, Ritournelles released on CD and the accompanying digital Mosaïques (tracks from both will appear on a special vinyl edition later in the year). The former album focuses on double bass and other instruments, but they’re often sampled and edited into complex tapestries, while the latter is more electronic, with Ghys’ penchant for sampled speech coming to the fore, but there’s also plenty of double bass on that album too. They’re cut from the same cloth, and are well taken together. Fans of The Books will love what they find here – a wonderful revelation.
Flora Wong – Heroes (Movements I II) [Corella Recordings/Bandcamp]
Fans of The Books will also appreciate the work of Brisbane’s MJ O’Neill, performed by Brisvegan violinist Flora Wong on her solo album of recent Australian compositions, Geburtstag, released on new label Corella Recordings run out of the University of Queensland School of Music. All the works are very creative and somewhat transgressive, performed with gusto by Wong, and “Heroes” juxtaposes Wong’s looped violin with samples from school climate strikers arguing passionately for a future they’re being denied.
Frances Shelley – For Now We See Darkly (Drexler Rework) [Drexler Bandcamp]
Finishing with a lovely piece of neo-classical piano meeting with electronics when London-based ex-Sydney composer Drexler reworks a track by UK composer & pianist Frances Shelley. It’s a nice follow-up to Drexler’s debut album and accompanying remixes from 2020.
Listen again — ~206MB
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