Utility Fog

Future beats, folktronic hybrids, post-everything improv and more…

LISTEN AGAIN because you know it’s good. Stream on demand on the FBi site, podcast here.

Many Seg – wash ur mind [zzaapp records]
Many Seg – i guess [zzaapp records]
Non-binary Melburnian-via-Darwin Serge Balaam releases their debut EP as Many Seg on Kris Keogh‘s ZZAAPP Records, and it’s a helluva opening bout. First track “wash ur mind” has crescendos of drone that seem mostly made up of stretched vocal samples, glitching disturbingly while voices state “I want u to be happy”. The other two tracks are both driven by fast-paced kicks, but “the messages” overlays the stuttery kicks, and eventually harsh snares, with a kind of dub techno dronescape, while “i guess” leans on its repeating bass pulses to evoke a kind of dubstep-footwork hybrid by way of early Autechre. Big tip!

Sunken Foal – Esmeralda [Front End Synthetics]
Sunken Foal – The Verdict [Front End Synthetics]
I realised recently that Dunk Murphy’s music has been with me since the very beginning of Utility Fog in 2003, as he was (and is) a member of Ambulance, the Dublin duo who were released on Planet µ as early as 2002. The first EP and album from Murphy as Sunken Foal were also released on Planet µ, but he and Ambulance had a connection to Dublin label Front End Synthetics since the late ’90s, and of late Murphy’s more ambient releases as Minced Oath as well as the some Sunken Foal have come out through that label. The Ambulance sound was IDM characterised by processed guitar sounds, granular fizz and occasional vocals. With Sunken Foal, Murphy introduced acoustic instruments from the start – the piano and acoustic guitar on Dutch Elm, along with the vocoder vocals, still tingle my spine. Murphy’s talent for unusual, emotive chord progressions and melodies – and acoustic piano too – are present and correct on Reveal in Finder, his ninth official full-length, not to mention layers of cello (samples?) on “The Verdict”. Never not blissful.

Fairie – Ode [Provenance/Bandcamp]
The third and final single from Lucy Li aka Fairie‘s album Nastic Appeal – out next week on Provenance – is, she says, a tribute to the strength of her fellow Asian femmes. The first pop song she wrote, it combines the thumping beats of her previous electronic dance productions with hints of the beloved Kate Bush, channeling all of Li’s rage at the restrictive and harmful structures of patriarchy and whiteness. Powerful stuff.

Carrier – Markers [FELT/Bandcamp]
Guy Brewer, best known for his dark, sometimes industrial, minimal techno as Shifted, unveiled new project Carrier with a cassette on Trilogy Tapes early this year. It clearly has a lineage from Shifted’s techno, but also seems to point back to his brief, early membership in drum’n’bass group Commix (originally a trio, now a solo project). There’s strangely slowed-down techno, frenetic IDM, electro and something electro-drum’n’bass? The subs are pushed, the snares and hi-hats skitter and trill. Accomplished artists changing focus to other genres are often an exciting prospect, and with now three Carrier releases for 2023, I hope to hear more of this from Brewer next year.

R.A.W. – Take Your Soul (6 Ft Deep Mix) [Mictlan]
Raoul Gonzalez is one of LA’s earliest proponents of jungle and UK-style hardcore techno, since the early ’90s, and while 6Blocc is his most common alias these days for jungle, footwork and dubstep mashups and originals, R.A.W. was his first moniker I believe. These tracks aren’t mashups but still, on The Serpent and the Rainbow Remixes the tracks all sample liberally from the Wes Craven movie of that name – exhilirating and sinister junglism, classic-sounding but with modern production values.

Last Life – Tensor (Reeko Remix) [Samurai Records/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based Samurai Records have been pioneering a particular form of drum’n’bass for some years that’s minimal, percussive (it once might have been called “tribal”) and close to techno – not the same stripped-down sound as later-’90s techstep, but just as brutal. The label has started occasional forays into actual 4/4 techno too, so here we have two legends of Italian techno taking apart the also-Italian Last Life, one of the label’s front-runners over the last 5 years or so. Donato Dozzy and Reeko have released their takes on drum’n’bass (or at least 170bpm beats) on the label recently. I also recently loved Reeko’s breakbeat/breakcore offering on R&S Records as Architectural; on his remix here he’s certainly keeping the d’n’b vibe with syncopated kicks and programmed beats melding into sampled breaks. Dark and deadly.

Commodo x Crimewave – redacted [Black Acre/Commodo Bandcamp/Crimewave Bandcamp]
A team-up here of two genre-bending artists on Black Acre Records. Dom Tarasek aka Commodo released a string of great dubstep 12″s on Deep Medi from the early 2010s, but since 2020 he’s found a way to mix postpunk basslines and ’70s cop show styles into the 140bpm throb. Manchester’s Crimewave appeared on the scene only in the last year or two, somehow mixing shoegaze and indie rock with bass music and experimental electronics. Their collaborative track “redacted” sounds like a recent Commodo track with digital fuckery. Great stuff.

Azu Tiwaline – Long Hypnosis [I.O.T/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline – Reptilian Waves [I.O.T/Bandcamp]
French-Tunisian DJ Azu Tiwaline brought her distinctive style of dub-infused techno to the world in 2020 with the incredible double album Draw Me A Silence – Parts I & II released separately and then combined into an album. She also released a couple of EPs on Bristol’s Livity Sound, and it’s notable how well her mixture of Berber/Amazigh rhythms and dub fits with the their dusbtep/techno aesthetic. Like her two-part debut album, The Fifth Dream is released on her own I.O.T Records, and again goes deep with windswept sound design and head-nodding grooves.

UKAEA – La Stessa Croce (Gum Takes Tooth Remix) [The state51 Conspiracy/Bandcamp]
For the last few years I’ve been a subscriber to the online music mag The Quietus, because they publish a lot of highly invaluable music news, feature articles and reviews, and these days publishing online is a highly precarious proposal. While nearly all their content is available for anyone to read for free, being a subscriber comes at a few different levels with a few different bonus things, and if you’re willing to shell out for the top level (which admittedly I got at a discount at one stage), you get a new exclusive release from sympatico artists each month. There’s been music from JK Flesh, Sleaford Mods, Laura Cannell and Lori Goldston, Petbrick, Senyawa, 75 Dollar Bill, Nik Void and Alexander Tucker, Siavash Amini and many more. And to be fair to the creators, much of this music eventually makes it out into the wider world, by and large via The Quietus’ partners in this commissioning project, The state51 Conspiracy.
All of this is to say that I was lucky enough to hear the forthcoming album from UKAEA, Birds Catching Fire In The Sky, way back in March this year, and I’m stoked to be able to point y’all to it now. The first two tracks are available as this double single Habibi / La Stesa Croce, with remixes from Rommek and noise rock/electronic duo Gum Takes Tooth. Circling back to UKAEA themselves, this is the project of Dan Jones and many collaborators. In the past it’s tended to be a kind of industrial techno affair, albeit with wiiiide-ranging inputs, but discovering them here it sounds more like a kind of middle-eastern/eastern-European psych rock band with industrial electronic production? It’s music with plenty of predecessors, but nothing that quite sounds like it, which is high praise. Mixed by Wayne Adams of Petbrick and the Bear Bites Horse studio, enhancing the heaviness. Both remixes lean in to the style here, so I’ve played you Gum Takes Tooth’s viciously chopped club deconstruction.

AMIT – ‘Flow Off’ [AMAR]
AMIT Kamboj has been making drum’n’bass for about 2 decades (maybe more), but for most of that time he’s been a pioneer of the halftime and slow/fast melding of dub & drum’n’bass, and more to the point dubstep sensibilities with drum’n’bass. Earlier this year he dropped two tracks which chatter & skitter along at around 170bpm but thump the bass on the four beats of the bar, creating a menacing hybrid of techno, drum’n’bass and dubstep all together. ‘Flow Off’ is a single track with a halftime feel that would be straight dubstep if it was 30bpm slower, and the pitched-down vocal snippets and horn stabs make it deliciously dark.

Quade – Piles Copse [AD93/Bandcamp]
Quade – Circles [AD93/Bandcamp]
In case there’s any doubt that “genre” just isn’t a thing anymore, here’s UK band Quade, whose first album is out on AD93, a label most known for electronic music on & off the dancefloor. The song structures and some production elements do feel like they come from a post-club POV, but essentially Quade are a hybrid of postpunk, folk and postrock. Their bass player sings in a wonderfully self-effacing way, low in his register, and apart from drums the other two members switch between synths & electronics, tape machine, and violin & guitar. The genre-gregariousness is found also on the technical side: the album was recorded by Jack Ogbourne aka the noirish jazz-pop act Bingo Fury, and it was mixed by Larry McCarthy aka bass/techno bod Bruce – two very different sides of the Bristol music scene. The songs on Nacre are bass-led, introspective, but open out with shoegaze or dub-inflected blooms. I know I’ll be returning to this and being surprised all over again.

Glass House Mountain – Foundation [Glass House Mountain]
Melbourne duo Glass House Mountain started as the rhythm section in a psych-rock band, and while the duo project is their take on electronic music, it’s got a rock backing to it that places it somewhere between postrock, jazz and techno. Some of the tracks on their debut EP Curiosity came out last year, with some awesome videos – particularly recommend Perspective I. The beautiful video for opener Foundation takes us through nightscapes (mostly) of Melbourne. With live drums, lots of synths and guitars, it’s evocative stuff, well-suited to their creative video accompaniments, but it would also go down a treat live.

Saroos feat. Kiki Hitomi – The Sign (サイン) (The Leaf Library Remix) [Alien Transistor/Bandcamp]
Brothers Markus and Micha Acher are core members of German shapeshifting band The Notwist, who started off as hardcore punk, then moved through indie to create some of the most beloved indietronica of the early ’00s. They also run the Alien Transistor label, which showcases various side projects as well as many Japanese artists that they love. Since 2010 one of those side projects has been Saroos, although it’s more like a band in The Notwist’s orbit. Christoph Brandner has been in Village of Savoonga, Lali Puna, Tied & Tickled Trio, Console and others, all projects of the Acher brothers or other Notwist members. Florian Zimmer of Driftmachine has also played with Lali Puna. And Max Punktezahl has frequently been one step away from Notwist side projects, until he actually joined the band a little while ago. I guess this just goes to show that The Notwist have a lovely little incestuous world of multitudinous side projects which range from fully experimental electronic to punk, noise and lots of dubby krautrock vibes. And Saroos very much fits into that – a mostly instrumental affair of indietronica. But on Turtle Roll, released at the beginning of the year, the band enlisted seven singers to augment their instrumentals, ending up with a surprisingly varied collection of odd pop. Now two remixes push things further into the experimental realm, and really, who could be better than London spacerock experimentalists The Leaf Library, who layer and fold Saroos, with the great Kiki Hitomi on vocals, into a morass of pulsing sound.

Clark – Alyosha Lying [Throttle Records]
A month or so ago I discovered that the ever-creative ex-Warp legend Chris Clark is currently living in Australia. Based in Canberra, he has recently created the score for a dance work by his partner Melanie Lane, presented at Phoenix Central Park with members of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Earlier this year Clark released his first vocal album, Sus Dog, which worked surprisingly well as a continuation of his post-idm production style, but with his sensitive vocals leading the songs. It seems like the surprise digital follow-up Cave Dog develops on these themes, taking tangents, perhaps created in a more relaxed manner. Still, there’s an impressive list of guests: Thom Yorke (who “executive produced” Sus Dog) is there, and excellent contemporary violinist Rakhi Singh among others. Indeed, for an album of filler tracks created while he waited to usher Sus Dog into the world, it’s even ended up with an orchestra on a couple of tracks. That’s what you can do when you’re Chris Clark in 2023, and all power to him! Can’t wait for the whole thing next week.

Mesmer – 55°39’09.8″N 12°33’22.4″E [arbitrary/Bandcamp]
Mesmer – Slusen [arbitrary/Bandcamp]
Mads Emil Nielsen is a Danish musician, composer and sound-artist whose work, for me, bridges abstraction and tradition. On his label arbitrary, among other things he’s released graphical scores, beautifully reproduced on prints accompanying the CDs. So it’s quite interesting that improvising trio Mesmer very deliberately chose Nielsen to work on the final mix of their album Terrain Vague, which has now been released on Nielsen’s label. Spanish architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales coined the term “terrain vague” to describe leftover, abandoned spaces that emerge in cities over time, and become sites for the re-emergence of nature within urban space. It’s a concept that clearly inspired Matmos too, whose website has been Vague Terrain for some decades. In any case, Mesmer’s album developed out of field recordings made in these abandoned, not-quite-there spaces around Copenhagen, from which they formulated the structured improvisations that form the basis of the tracks. The group itself is a hybrid, with trumpet, drums and percussion joined by synths and samples and other electronics. The live performances were further deconstructed by the band and then glued together by Nielsen to create a collection that is part free jazz, part glitch, part postrock, a sonic evocation of the vague terrain.

ZÖJ – Hearts of Stone [Parenthèses Records/Bandcamp]
The Belgian label Parenthèses Records was formed originally in Perth, Western Australia, and still retains close connections with this country. From Melbourne, the cross-cultural duo ZÖJ are a great fit for the label, creating liminal music that’s intentionally hard to get a grip on, but is deeply pleasurable. Iranian-born musician Gelareh Pour plays two Persian string instruments, the Kamancheh and the Qheychak Alto, while Brian O’Dwyer’s drumkit winds within and around her melodies. The music can be filmic and evocative, or abstract and contemporary, and at times Gelareh adds impassioned vocals, including lyrics from a number of renowned Persian poets. This is emotive music to lose yourself in.

toechter – Epic Wonder [Morr Music/Bandcamp]
German trio toechter (it means “daughter”) are three women whose main instruments are violin, viola and cello. Along with their voices and electronic treatments, they build songs that seem to exist equally in the classical world, indie rock and the post-club spaces that used to be called chillout rooms. Their second album, Epic Wonder, comes out in February 2024 from venerable German indie/electronic label Morr Music, and from the first single and title track, it will be both epic and wondrous. Who am I to deny them this wording when it’s the pure truth?

Kirk Barley – Courtyard [Odda Recordings/Bandcamp]
I’m very pelased to say I’ve been supporting Kirk Barley‘s delicate, rhythmic music on Utility Fog since his 2019 album Landscapes. Although it’s the debut from “Kirk Barley”, it wasn’t by any means his first release – he’d previously appeared as Bambooman among others, at times making feints towards the dancefloor – but under his own name he consolidated a sound that filtered acoustic guitar, cello and field recordings through an idiosyncratic electronic lens – and often with drums from Matt Davies, with whom he has since frequently collaborated under the name Church Andrews. Here again, for the second release on Thea Hudson-Davies’ Odda Recordings, we have Kirk Barley as Kirk Barley. The music on Marionette comes from modular synths, guitars, and on this track cello upon cello, looping little phrases, undulating in amongst the sound of running water. Unassuming music, but please give it your attention!

Listen again — ~210MB