Utility Fog

On the hottest 1st of October ever recorded here in Eora/Sydney, a whole gamut of stuff for you tonight on Utility Fog.

LISTEN AGAIN and feel the gamut. Stream on demand as offered by FBi Radio, or podcast here.

Lord of the Isles & Ellen Renton – A Discovery [AD93/Bandcamp]
Lord of the Isles & Ellen Renton – My Noise Is Nothing [AD93/Bandcamp]
Starting with something unexpectedly beautiful from two Scottish artists. Ellen Renton is a poet, theatre-maker and performer from Edinburgh, who wrote these poems in 2020 during the pandemic. This is not her first collaboration with Scottish electronic musician Lord of the Isles aka Neil McDonald – she appeared on one side of McDonald’s last EP for AD93, back when it was called Whities. Renton’s words are thought-provoking, but her delivery is absolutely delicious – English spoken with a gentle Scottish accent is a delight. And the gentle music from McDonald, which builds into lovely IDMish beats on most tracks, is a joy.

Hidden Orchestra – Little Buddy Move [Lone Figures Bandcamp]
Hidden Orchestra – Reverse Learning [Lone Figures Bandcamp]
Although Joe Acheson released a lovely soundtrack to the video game Creaks in 2020, and a bonus album of remixes and live versions last year, it’s been 6 years since the last Hidden Orchestra album proper, Dawn Chorus. To Dream is to Forget is a welcome return, again embodying Acheson’s aim of reimagining electronic music acoustically. So the skillful drumming of Tim Lane and Jamie Graham melds funk breakbeats and jazz skitteriness into complex, propulsive patterns, while many other Hidden Orchestra regulars including Poppy Ackroyd provide strings, horns and those characteristic bass clarinet runs. Add in the plethora of instruments performed by Acheson, plus his composition and arrangement skills, and you get another album’s worth of warm pleasures. It may be nothing new after 13 years, but those of us who enjoy these sounds will always come back for more.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Elseware [Warp/Bandcamp]
Oneohtrix Point Never – World Outside [Warp/Bandcamp]
Oneohtrix Point Never – Nightmare Paint [Warp/Bandcamp]
On the other hand, Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never/OPN has rarely rested for long, having begun his career making highly abstract analogue synth works that found him a place in the noise scene alongside other synthmeisters like Emeralds, then absorbing the glitch and cut-up aesthetics that made him a perfect fit for Editions Mego, founding Software, his subsidiary label of Mexican Summer, and then settling with Warp ten years ago(!) The son of Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States, much of his early aesthetic was derived from his father’s collection of old synth records and the like. Somewhere in there he also invented vaporwave with a bunch of YouTube videos – maybe start here, check the whole channel. So unsurprisingly over the last decade his Warp albums, EPs and sundry other releases have combined ’90s and early oughts-style digital choppery, crunchy IDM beats, hints of breakcore and synth nerdery with plunderphonic sampling of everything from hardcore to ’80s videotapes. It’s surprising-but-not-surprising to hear new album Again starting with some rather avant-garde orchestral strings, gradually messily layered and adapted into something a little more filmic. Those strings permeate the whole album, appearing in the backing of many of the more electronic tracks. Lopatin sings, invites Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu to sing on a couple of tracks, and also uses/misuses the talents of the likes of Jim O’Rourke, Lee Ranaldo and genius engineer Randall Dunn. What it adds up to is, well, another OPN album? The last few do kind of run into each other in my head, and they’re all good, but not as distinctive as the ravenous early-to-mid years of his career. Nothing to complain about, it’s cool y’know.

dgoHn & Badun – Not Just A Best [Love Love Records/dgoHn Bandcamp/Badun Bandcamp]
I first heard of Danish producer Badun aka Oliver Duckert via a split release between Badun and Icarus back in 2011. Badun makes a kind of wonky electronic jazz that’s somewhat adjacent to the post-drum’n’bass electro-acoustics of Icarus, so it’s not all that strange to find Duckert collaborating with English drumfunk/jungle master dgoHn on new EP Talk to the Planets, released on Love Love Records. The syncopated drum patters created by dgoHn don’t need much coaxing to fit in with jazzy keys and more psych-ish passages, so if that sounds like your jam, you’re in luck.

NIQH – Planet Market [Plasma Sources/Bandcamp]
Ben Broughton tells us that his artist name NIQH is to be pronounced “NEE-KEEH”, so OK. His Familiar Rift EP released on Plasma Sources comes as a CD as well as digital – I’m impressed (although postage to Australia is impressively insane at €25, no blame to the label tho!) More than jungle or dubstep, the sounds here are influenced by UK garage – it’s lightfooted, but still loving the breakbeats and with some lovely sound design.

Cloaking Device – The Deepening (2023 Rework) [Odysee Recordings/Bandcamp]
Andy Baddaley has been going by Andy Odysee for recent jungle-fuelled drum’n’bass releases since reinstating the Odysee Recordings label that’s co-run by Tilla Kemal (aka Mirage) – a label that was home to some early Source Direct 12″s and Photek alias Phaze 1 too. Under the “Broken Circuitry” series he’s now bringing back some productions from the mid-’00s released on his Circuit Breaker label under the name Cloaking Device. It’s cyberpunk/noir drum’n’bass of a piece with Photek & Source Direct, with the tunes remastered and reworked with a nice mix of different breaks and synth pads.

MOOKI6 x B4MBA – ANKHNOWLEDGE [Jokkoo Collective]
There’s a jungle influence to the tunes on the Proto Nexus EP from two members of the Jokkoo Collective, a group of Barcelona-based African producers. MOOKI6 & B4MBA were inspired by their travels around Kenya to combine dancehall & jungle and hard dance with the riddims and environments found in their travels. The hyperspeed second half of “ANKHNOWLEDGE” is particularly insane, top stuff.

Fiesta Soundsystem – Jabbaphlex [Fiesta Soundsystem]
After releases on a myriad excellent labels, Fiesta Soundsystem has released their latest EP Jabbaphlex on their own Bandcamp. Spurred on by a conversation with Osc Kins (proprietor of Shubzin) to make the most monstrous breaks possible, Fiesta turned to a variety of most excellent monsters, including Lewis Carroll’s splendid Jabberwocky. On “Jabbaphlex” an old reading of the poem (maybe by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson himself?) creepily surfaces through the haze of distorted, timestretched breaks, which clatter in an almost breakcore fashion, or perhaps a braindance fashion given the Rephlex reference. It’s well worth checking out Fiesta Soundsystem’s back catalogue – on their Bandcamp and elsewhere – for inventive drum’n’bass, IDM and occasional house & techno.

Debby Friday – La Posesyon [Debby Friday Bandcamp]
Debby Friday – Good Luck [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
Debby Friday – let u in (with Darcy Baylis) [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
The first track in this batch from US polymath Debby Friday is an almost instrumental from 2018’s Terror: A Mix-Tape, proving that she can chop jungle breaks with the best of them. But she plunders hip-hop, r’n’b and pop, often with a penchant for industrial-level distortion and plenty of bass, and is a talented rapper & singer too. I’m not sure why I mised her album Good Luck earlier this year, as it’s first class, but just this week standalone track “let u in” appeared, a co-pro with Darcy Baylis recorded while she was on tour in Naarm/Melbourne earlier this year. Again with the jungle influences, this one eschews the industrial heaviness to the extent that it could be a PinkPantheress song – no shade! It’s lovely.

Armand Hammer – Total Recall [Fat Possum Records/Bandcamp]
Armand Hammer – Empire Blvd (feat. Junglepussy & Curly Castro) [Fat Possum Records/Bandcamp]
Around 5 years ago, Armand Hammer released their Paraffin album on various labels on cassette, vinyl and CD, and it brought them the highest level of acclaim they’d yet seen. This was further cemented by billy woods’ incredible Hiding Places with Kenny Segal the following year. So by now woods’ Backwoodz Studioz is known as a vital home to NYC underground hip-hop, and he and Elucid have the recognition they’ve deserved for a good decade. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips finds them on Fat Possum Records as part of the label’s growth from a Mississippi blues focus into other genres, but they’re no less adventurous or incisive in their commentary on the state of the USA. The album’s title itself refers to the signs that turn up in economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods where those not fortunate enough to have health insurance purchase unused diabetic test strips necessary for them to manage their diabetes.
Following Haram, which was entirely produced by The Alchemist, woods and Elucid bring their tremendous intelligence and experience to a suite of tracks produced by many of their usual collaborators like Segal and Willie Green, and JPEGMAFIA on a number of tracks. Meanwhile a jazz ensemble headed up by Shabaka Hutchings brings some additional cohesion to the proceedings, but this has never been lacking on Armand Hammer albums, as the duo bring poetically-chosen spoken word samples and other aural oddities into play. As I mentioned when discussing woods in my 20th anniversary special, hip-hop has always been an experimental genre, but woods and Elucid consistently make super leftfield shit just work perfectly. What could be more perfect than the Sun Ra call-and-response referenced in “Total Recall”?

JOBS – List the Creator Twice Part 1 [Ramp Local/Bandcamp]
JOBS – Allure [Ramp Local/Bandcamp]
Here’s another form of experimentalism harnessed to pop – or at least postpunk. The members of JOBS are active in the jazz & experimental scenes in New York – I’m particularly a fan of violist and singer Jessica Pavone – and with JOBS they’ve created a selection of arty songs that elude easy categorisation. Sure, there’s the contemporary references to postpunk, but there’s also experimental electronic beats, processed drums and that lovely mixture of live drumkit and electronic beats… and then there’s jazz fusion and kraut-noise. All members contribute vocals, and their androgynous nature makes it hard to know who’s who. I can tell this one is going to be getting plenty of repeat listens over the next few months.

PLF – Fast Looped Paradise [Ventil/Bandcamp]
It’s worth noting that Welsh noise-vocalist Elvin Brandhi’s given name is Freya Edmondes in order to understand the trio PLF, whose other members are two mainstays of Viennese experimental music, Peter Kutin and Lukas König – so yeah, with that in mind, PLF is their three first initials, and all their track names are weeeeeird variants of those three initial letters. At least “Fast Looped Paradise” makes some sense, while ParziFoooooooooooL is… a Wagner reference? No matter, much like kœnig’s album 1 Above Minus Underground from earlier this year, there are song-resembling structures with mad messed-up beats and messed-up sounds, hints at hip-hop, mutant techno, and Elvin Brandhi’s arresting voice.

squncr – …drowned out… I [Elli Records/Bandcamp]
Releases on French-Italian label Elli Records are always interesting, whether on an improv tip or electronic, or somewhere in between. New EP …drowned out… from French academic and musician François Larini aka squncr takes a post-colonial approach to its sound-art, with glitchy minimalist electronics enveloping shimmering choral music, which is taken (with permission) from recordings of the “Messe des Savanes”, a Catholic mass arranged by the Abbé Robert Wedraogho and performed by an all-African choir in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. It was the first of a number of “world music” Masses, often composed or arranged by white men for performance by African musicians, a perpetuation of colonialist thinking and cultural violence which Larini seeks to overturn or deconstruct. Whether this theoretical goal is successful is not for me to say, but this is beautiful music to contemplate cultural and religious imperialism.

ABADIR – Agios O Theos [SVBKVLT]
ABADIR – Mois de Marie [SVBKVLT]
Here’s a very different take, moving from West Africa to the very north-east of the continent. Rami ABADIR grew up in Heliopolis, now a suburn of Cairo but once one of Egypt’s major cities in itself, and the Greek derivation of its name (“City of the Sun”) gives a clue to its multifarious significance. So as a kid, little Rami was taken around various different churches for masses and holidays, taking in Coptic, Syriac, Maronite, Greek Orthodox and Catholic traditions of choral music. From this personal history, Abadir has synthesized his own fictional futuristic hymnal tradition, melded also with the sounds of his previous adaptations of worldwide club styles through African rhythm. So beautiful choral harmonies rise up and intertwine with sub bass swoops and percussive beats. It could be spiritual or it could be the pleasurable come-down from last night’s clubbing. Perfect either way really.

underworld – denver luna (a capella) [Smith Hyde Productions/lnk.to thingy/Watch on YouTube]
For me, Underworld‘s second toughest in the infants, even moreso than its predecessor dubnobasswithmyheadman, was a religious experience in the mid-’90s. Just about perfect expressions of what rave and club could achieve, trance-inducing evolving techno sneaking emotion in through the back door. I haven’t followed everything they’ve done since beaucoup fish, but it’s always nice to run into them again, and hoo-boy denver luna (a capella) is a heady reminder of Karl Hyde’s vocal delivery and lyrical obtuseness, with a frankly gorgeous vocoded “choral” accompaniment. Not that nobody’s done that before (*ahem* Pink Floyd, 1987), but I’m only saying that to point out that this track is great because of the song and arrangement rather than purely from the effect.

Happy Axe – Injuries [Provenance/Bandcamp]
I got a liddle sneak preview of this new song from Emma Kelly aka Happy Axe earlier this week, the first taster from a new album which Becki Whitton suggested will be half songs, half ambient. It feels like “Injuries” fulfils that promise all by itself, starting with soft vocals and abstract violin accompaniment before blossoming into a full song with beats partially made up from violin-percussion. The Tiger Dream is out later this month, and I’m looking forward to the rest.

Listen again — ~206MB