Utility Fog

Sunday, 21st of July, 2024

Tonight, from experimental electronic pop to free improv, live beats and programmed beats, modern classical and avant-garde, from all over the world.

LISTEN AGAIN and open up to a world of music. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

ROMÆO - Worlds [ROMÆO Bandcamp]
Starting with art-pop from here in Eora/Sydney, from young artist ROMÆO, who combines electronic experimentalism with a fine ear for pop songwriting. Her new song "Worlds" laments a world in which every person is isolated from every other - an acknowledges that her own world is not the whole world. The song moves from indie guitars to electronic pop replete with saxophone, and climaxes with hammering kick drums.

Snakeskin - Sunburst [Mais Um/Bandcamp]
Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal's first release together (titled Snakeskin) was released on Beirut/Montréal label Ruptured in 2022. It was a clear highlight of the year for me, continuing from the shoegaze/dreampop of Sabra's previous band Postcards, but with more electronic and experimental production from Tabbal. For their second album, they've adopted that album title as their name, and They Kept Our Photographs will be released on UK-based global music label Mais Um. The first single "Sunburst" is on the noiser end of shoegaze and I very much dig.

Bizhiki - Unbound [Jagjaguwar/Bandcamp]
Bizhiki - Gigawaabamin (Come Through) (feat. Justin Vernon) [Jagjaguwar/Bandcamp]
Moving to the US with Bizhiki, a new trio featuring Joe Rainey, whose album and 7" single made with Andrew Broder blew many minds in 2022. Here Rainey teams up with another powwow singer from the Ojibwe people, Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, the duo working with indiefolk musician S. Carey (Sean Carey), longtime member of Justin Vernon's Bon Iver and solo artist in his own right. The gentleness of that association tempers the sound compared to the forthright experimentalism of Rainey's work with Broder, although there are still beats and noise in there. Rainey and Bizhikiins Jennings both sing in the open-throated powwow style and play hand drums, which are often electronically processed (both drums and voices!) along with other electronics and instrumentation. There are also environmental and field recordings and even punk in the mix. This should be on many best-of lists.

Another Dancer - Overfriendly Dogs [Bruit Direct/Aguirre Records/Bandcamp]
Here's some scrappy DIY-indie from Belgian band Another Dancer, blithely throwing in influences from postpunk, '80s electro-pop, '90s indie and who knows what else. They claim to be outdated, but in fact this kind of joyful hodge-podge suits the current era to a tee. "Overfriendly Dogs" is the chaotic first single from their debut album I Try To Be Another Dancer.

Buffalo Daughter - ET (Densha) - AMBIENT KYOTO Mix [Anniversary Group/Bandcamp]
The world is incredibly fortunate that Buffalo Daughter not only exist at all, but are still making creative music 30 years after their inception. In the way of the best Japanese bands, they've always combined pop with heavy rock with electronica and hip-hop, and so they continue. Out this week is a set of two extended & warped mixes made for the AMBIENT KYOTO installation/exhibition thingy in 2023. The original tracks are on their 2021 album We Are The Times, and neither remix is ambient at all - rather they're deconstructed, in a modern take on the original 12" mix, adding unexpected elements. Basically, just so great.

Thom Yorke - The Big City [XL Recordings/Bandcamp]
You might have heard of Thom Yorke, lead singer of the very popular but very experimental Radiohead and of course more recently The Smile. Thom is embarking on a solo tour soon, and will play two shows in the Sydney Opera House Forecourt, but I'm very sorry if you're just hearing about it now, as they're both sold out. Anyway, out this month was the Confidenza OST, soundtracking the Italian thriller Confidenza aka Trust, directed by Daniele Luchetti. Yorke's music is as dramatic and dynamic as a soundtrack requires, with orchestrations by Hugh Brunt and a jazz ensemble including his Smile bandmate Tom Skinner. I chose a long track tonight that's got lovely glitchy samples & loops of Thom's voice among the orchestrations.

Opius - Empty feat. LUMENAATE [Inperspective Records/Bandcamp]
Vinnie Smith aka Opius is a longtime proponent of drumfunk, making often-jazz-influenced drum'n'bass out of intricately edited jazz breaks. Here we've got a storming track of plaintive string pads, those insane beats and the poetry of LUMENAATE.

X-Altera - Run [Bopside]
In the last few years, Tadd Mullinix, best known by his hip-hop project Dabrye, has started releasing jungle/drum'n'bass (with excursions into Detroit techno) as X-Altera. This is a return to these styles really, first heard in his collabs with Soundmurderer as SK-1 making ragga jungle in the early '00s. The Groundswell EP unleashes ravey, jungley tunes (oh yeah and one techno piece) that fit really well in the current milieu.

Tigran Hamasyan - The kingdom [naïve]
Tigran Hamasyan - Only the one who brought the Bird can make it sing [naïve]
I only discovered this weekend that there's a new album coming from Armenian jazz piano virtuoso Tigran Hamasyan. Previous albums showcased not just his playing, but his beautiful, complex compositions that draw a lot from the scale patterns and harmonies of Armenian folk music. Hamasyan has also worked with Serj Tankian of the Armenian-American nu metal band System of a Down - and at times the complex jazz time signatures on his releases can veer into math rock. In any case, after many albums released on Nonesuch, Hamasyan has joined eclectic French imprint naïve for his forthcoming album The Bird of a Thousand Voices, which is in fact a multimedia project reworking an old Armenian legend (Hazaran Blbul) into a stage play, films, installations, the album and also an online video game featuring music from the album and the stunning artwork of Khoren Matevosyan. Over 24 tracks, the album covers a lot of ground (I'm lucky to have a preview), and I played two of the singles so far: the hyperkinetic track "The kingdom" that echoes the jungle influence on video game soundtracks, and the latest, "Only the one who brought the Bird can make it sing", with live drumming, bewitching vocal melodies, and math rock excursions. No doubt I'll play more when it's released in late September.

Spectral Gates - hulk park [forthcoming on Spectral Gates Bandcamp]
Spectral Gates - loops_6b_ext_23 [forthcoming on Spectral Gates Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney duo Spectral Gates play a live take on electronic music, with post/math-rock elements. Steve Allison plays furious drum patterns and Daniel Arena plays guitar as well as synths and electronic processing from both. As you can hear from these preview tracks, it's euphoric electronic rock that flows nicely from Tigran Hamasyan's fusions. New album warning is out this coming week, and is being launched at Lazy Thinking, a small bar/record store/performance space on New Canterbury Rd.

Laurent Pernice, Jacques Barbéri, Dominique Beven - le silence la nuit [Psychofon/Bandcamp]
Laurent Pernice, Jacques Barbéri, Dominique Beven - les petits canards [Psychofon/Bandcamp]
Nine Tales of the Winds is a fascinating album that extends work that Laurent Pernice and Dominique Beven have done before. Pernice, coming out of the French industrial scene in the late 1980s, is mainly responsible for electronics, with live processing as well as looped samples and rhythms underpinning a lot of the music - and he also contributes accordion and bullroarer. Beven plays wind instruments from all over the world: Sardinian laudennas, East Asian hulusi, French cromorne, the Lao khaen... and on this album they're joined by French writer Jacques Barbéri, who adds the Tibetan rhadong, a "genetically modified saxophone" which is left unexplained(!) and clarinet. With all these instruments, the album nevertheless resists any hints of bland or appropriative "world music" or exotica. Rather it sounds like some kind of ancient ritual compositions, aided by ancient alien technology. Although Dead Can Dance provide something of a precursor, the closest contemporary comparison I can think of is the work of two fellow Frenchmen, François Robin & Mathias Delplanque, on their 2022 album L'ombre de la bête. Mysterious liminal music is Utility Fog's bread & butter, and this album is a feast.

KK Null x Joel Gilardini - chthonic ephemerals [GIVE/TAKE/Bandcamp]
KK Null x Joel Gilardini - adrifting [GIVE/TAKE/Bandcamp]
Japanese musician Kazuyuki Kishino has been a key part of the noise/industrial and experimental electronic music world since the 1980s, with legendary hardcore band Zeni Geva, Absolut Null Punkt, and under the name KK Null. He's also a constant collaborator with other musicians, whether famous experimentalists like John Zorn, Fred Frith, Jim O'Rourke, Mick Harris of Scorn, James Plotkin and others, or lesser-known Japanese and international musicians. Psychic Drones 3 is his third collaboration with Zurich-based guitarist and sound designer Joel Gilardini. These albums tone down the maximalist tendencies of Kishino, limiting the harsh noise and glitch-rhythms, without retreating to the spectral ambient of, say, Aurora with Plotkin. There are grinding, churning and pulsating drones, crackles of distortion and glitch, digital detritus. It's rich, lush, and only sometimes noisy listening, highly recommended.

Moose Terrific - Cast Iron Curtains [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Montréal-based duo Moose Terrific are made up of the prolific, influential Egyptian-Canadian Sam Shalabi (of Shalabi Effect, Land of Kush, Dwarfs of East Agouza with Maurice Louca and others) and Tamara Filyavich. Their second album after 2018's The Drinks, Nude Beginnings is released by the part-Montréal-based Lebanese label Ruptured Records, and features both musicians on miscellaneous electronics, blending in, as they say, "Ukrainian, Jewish, Arabic and Canadian musical elements, as per the artists' cultural backgrounds, life and musical experiences". All this said, these are mostly low-key electronic vignettes, emphasising fun and hopefulness over rage and sorrow.

Ulrich Troyer - BRENNERAUTOBAHN feat. Taka Noda [4bit Productions/Bandcamp]
Ulrich Troyer - MOMENTS I [4bit Productions/Bandcamp]
I first came across Ulrich Troyer via a little 3" CD he released through Mego back in 2000 (an expanded edition came out in 2020). His music continues to reflect the glitchy, granular, digital soundworld of that label in its earlier years, but with a love of dub also coming through. This year he's released a series of 7"s, starting with the sparse glitched guitar sounds of MOMENTS. The third 7" is AUTOSTRADA DEL BRENNERO, also the second single from his forthcoming Transit Tribe album. The A side is the Italian Autostrada Del Brennero (an important international trucking route), with a melody from dub flautist Diggory Kenrick, and on the flip, we cross the border into Austria where it becomes the Brennerautobahn, with the very dub-appropriate melodica from Taka Noda aka Mystica Tribe.

Associated Sine Tone Services - 000900 [Flag Day Recordings/Bandcamp]
Associated Sine Tone Services - 000200 [Flag Day Recordings/Bandcamp]
Montréal sound-artist Jeremy Young awoke from a dream one night in which he was on a darkened stage with Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek and fellow Montréaler Nicolas Bernier, all dressed in lab coats, performing with sine wave oscillators. He immediately prepared a set of oscillator loops and sent it to the other two, who were game to turn this dream into reality. Despite the name Associated Sine Tone Services, and the library music-esque cover art, the music is neither academic nor anodyne, the three participants preferring to lean into melody and even rhythm at times. The sine wave oscillators are particularly effective when detuned, so there are some gorgeously woozy and eerie passages. There's a strange beauty here, from three sensitive sculptors of sound.

Dialect - Late Fragment [RVNG Intl./Bandcamp]
Andrew PM Hunt, drummer in the phenomenal & bizarre hypnotic kraut/postrock band Ex-Easter Island Head, has made music as Dialect for at least 10 years, mostly released by RVNG Intl.. The first morsel from his new album Atlas of Green (out on Sept 20th) is an electroacoustic delight, reminiscent of the heyday of folktronica, with pitch-shifted acoustic guitars, synth pads and piano in the mix. Keen to hear the rest!

Frances Cameron - Dreamer's Waltz [Frances Cameron Bandcamp/other links]
Hailing from Tasmania, Frances Cameron is a classically-trained pianist with her take on the modern/post-/neo-classical style. She's releasing tracks from her forthcoming Piano for Dreamers album one-by-one. "Dreamer's Waltz" starts simply, with a right-hand melody in a major key, but a little way in, the harmonisations take unexpected turns. It's quite touching.

Marmalsana - Transiro I [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Finally, we have a second release from Ruptured Records this week, from a new trio calling themselves Marmalsana. German drummer Burkhard Beins has been part of Polwechsel for 20 years, and among others has worked with our own Chris Abrahams. Joining him are Lebanese photographer and musician Tony Elieh on acoustic bass guitar and the great Egyptian multi-instrumentalist & producer Maurice Louca on microtonal acoustic guitar! All three are based in Berlin, and have chosen for this collaboration to work only with acoustic instruments. Their self-titled album is two cassette sides of free improv and extended instrumental techniques, although Beins is instrumental in Berlin's Echtzeitmusik ("real-time music") movement that seeks to differentiate a newer generation of musicians' work from prior imaginings of improvised music, free jazz, new music etc. In Marmalsana the other two musicians' Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds - and choice of instrumentation - produce a singularly idiomatic music worth attending to.

Listen again — ~207MB

Sunday, 14th of July, 2024

Layers of abstraction, mutations of punk, warpings of beats, rebuilings of improv, détournements of ambient...

LISTEN AGAIN and mutate... Stream on demand via FBi Radio, podcast here.

Chris Corsano - I Don't Have Missions [Drag City/Bandcamp]
Since the early '00s, American drummer Chris Corsano has been a key member of the free improv world, bleeding over into areas of noise, avant-rock and contemporary jazz. He's been part of countless lineups, in particular with saxophonist Paul Flaherty, and at times with the great C Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core. His solo albums are few & far between, so this one spurred interest. It's burdened with the title The Key (Became the Important Thing [and Then Just Faded Away​]​), which is in itself an indicator of something, if only you can unravel what - although it reminds me of the even more cumbersome poetry-titles that Keiji Haino gives his works. And this is very much in the psych-rock vein. Incendiary drumming of all sorts, along with chugging and soloing guitars and bass, and the resonating polyrhythms of his string drum. All in all, Corsano makes a proper racket, and it's properly transcendent.

Show Me The Body - It Burns [Corpus/Bandcamp]
With their 2017 mixtape Corpus I, New York hardcore punks Show Me The Body showed early on that they were interested in mixing up the hardcore genre with whatever else fits their vision of community, direct action and solidarity, including appearances from the likes of Eartheater, Moor Mother, Dreamcrusher and many more, veering into hip-hop, industrial, noise and experimental electronica. Frontman Julian Pratt generally uses banjo rather than guitar as the lead instrument, bassist Harlan Steed picks up baritone guitar, and in new single "It Burns" there's a throbbing bass synth underpinning the action. It's hard to avoid callbacks to '90s style metal & punk crossover, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If Corpus II is anywhere near as good as its predecessor, I'll be very happy!

GUTTR - Stress [May be at his Bandcamp at some point?]
I was sent this nice piece of glitchy grime recently and it was meant to be out now, but I can't find a trace of it online, so... exclusive? Really nice late-night murky bass music from the Bristol area.

Von D - Arcane 17 [Deep Medi Musik]
More forthcoming bass, here from French dubstep maestro Von D. The THL EP is three slices of dubstep mostly using triplets - 6/8 dubstep. At 140BPM it's not swung as such but the triplets drive things really nicely and give a bit of ambiguity about how to divide up the bars.

Cocktail Party Effect - So Disco (feat. Mo Van Zandt) [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Cocktail Party Effect - Reset [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based South Londoner Charlie Baldwin, who releases music as Cocktail Party Effect, isn't fond of blurbing his own music, and fair enough - often beats are just nice beats, and Baldwin's background in sound design makes for lush listening. His second release on YUKU for 2024 is Gulper Eel Ballons, a 10-track album taking in ambient sound-design and all forms of bass music from dubstep & grime to techno & almost-d'n'b, integrating the complexity & weirdness of IDM. There are a couple of vocal tracks too, although Mo Van Zandt's voice is mostly part of the textures no "So Disco". Super stuff whatever words describe it.

Sote - AFRCNRNGSSPXCASPIAN [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
Sote - ADTVESSPXLUT [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
Surely by now Ata "Sote" Ebtekar needs no introduction. Since the early '00s he has made uncompromising, complex electronic music, starting with 2002's stunning Electric Deaf EP on Warp Records. I bring this up because his latest release, Sound System Persepolis (his second on Powell's Diagonal Records) references hardcore techno in its rather twisted ways. Ebtekar said goodbye almost immediately to the breakcore/junglism of his very first few EPs. He's really pioneered the integration of electronics with Persian classical and Iranian instrumentation, and he's developed some amazing methods for sound processing in the meantime. But Sound System Persepolis, despite referencing the ancient Persian city, doesn't feature any West/Central Asian instrumentation, and as far as I can tell it uses Western tuning. The rhythmic programming recalls the untethered approaches of Mark Fell and Rian Treanor, Vladislav Delay and perhaps even Russell Haswell, but with Sote's distinctive sliding tones. It's a kind of return to the Hardcore Sounds From Tehran mixtape but with everything Ata's learned about audio alchemy in the meantime. Insane and brilliant.

Dom & Roland - Stormy Waters [Individual]
Dominic Angas aka Dom & Roland (Roland is the sampler of course) has been one of my favourite drum'n'bass artists since the '90s, but I've always thought of him as primarily d'n'b - techstep beats, done with incredible finesse and accompanied by brilliant synth lines, sound design and basslines. So it's a nice surprise to find the beats on his new Stormfront EP (initiating his own Individual label) brings flittering, careening beat programming in between the 2-step hits. All four tracks here are gold.

ASC - waveform 12 [waveforms/Bandcamp]
Kloke - waveform 9 [waveforms/Bandcamp]
waveforms is the label setup last year by ASC (beloved drum'n'bass & grey area techno producer who returned to jungle a couple of years ago) and Presha, boss of the groundbreaking Samurai label, releasing 10"s focused on early jungle-style production. So here from the latest pair of releases we have a typical epic tune from ASC and technically brilliant stuff as always from Naarm/Melbourne-based Kloke.

Doc Sleep - Lemon Zest [Dark Entries/Bandcamp]
DJ and producer Melissa Marisuten aka Doc Sleep is co-founder of experimental techno & ambient label Jacktone Records, and she's also one half of Beats Unlimited. Her own music spans house & electro as well as IDM and more broadly ambient stuff. "Lemon Zest" is an infectious piece of electro-techno with a wicked syncopated bassline.

Tawdry Otter - Foreign Assets [Adrien75 Bandcamp]
By now we've heard Adrien75's IDM-focused Tawdry Otter a fair bit on this show. Adrien used to be part of the group of the IDM collective Carpet Bomb (mainly 3 people in various combinations) doing complex break-mashing and programming that I was obsessed with in the late '90s. For a while now the Adrien75 moniker has been more for ambient guitar stuff I think, hence Tawdry Otter, which conversely has often been made on the mobile software Koala Sampler. Not sure if that's the case here, but there are some truly funky electro & breakbeat vibes on the latest release, Streamline.

SML - Rubber Tree Dance [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
SML - Switchboard Operations [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
International Anthem feels like the ideal label to release this album by LA-based quintet SML/Small Medium Large. The five musicians are jazz-trained, busy members of multiple music scenes, and their self-titled(-ish) album began with a live performance at the now-sadly-defunct LA venue ETA. The recordings of those improvisations (just stereo mind you, not multi-tracked) were then edited, chopped up, restructured a la Makaya McCraven - or indeed Teo Maceo's work on Miles Davis' In A Silent Way, always a reference for this kind of studio deconstruction. The band features Australian bassist Anna Butterss (long based in LA, and performing not only in countless jazz ensembles but also on tour with the likes of Andrew Bird), along with similarly-connected cross-genre musicians, and the music veers from jazz to Afrobeat, psych to experimental electronic, Jon Hassell-style harmonising effects and more. You don't need to be any kind of jazz-head to appreciate the joyful invention here.

Lia Kohl - Car Alarm, Turn Signal (feat. Ka Baird) [Moon Glyph/Bandcamp]
Chicago cellist and sound-artist Lia Kohl has built up a gorgeous catalogue of odd, inquisitive and considered sound works over a very short period of time, with releases on Skeletons' Shinkoyo, Longform Editions and American Dreams. Her new album Normal Sounds is coming at the end of August from the adventurous Portland (Oregon) tape/vinyl label Moon Glyph, and the album title is a nice description of Kohl's practice (as are the track titles). As well as field recordings and the sounds of "normal" human activity, Kohl likes to incorporate the randomness of a radio scrolling through frequencies and settling on whatever happens to be on the airwaves. And of course there's her cello, which along with electronics can slip into the mix and transform everything. On this first single, Kohl has also invited Ka Baird to add layered flute and little keyboard drones, adding an avant-garde new-age sensibility. Without noticing, we're left with slowly-more-sparse cello plucks and slow layered bowing and then... the sound of a pedestrian crossing brings us back to the "normal sounds" (with some faint found-sound saxophone soloing from someone's car radio). Just so good.

Stranded Horse - Le feu qui nous rend las [Heartists for Palestine]
Mayssa Jallad & Fadi Tabbal - Ad-Douar [Heartists for Palestine]
Fadi Tabbal - (keep thumping) [Fadi Tabbal Bandcamp]
Back in the early 2000s, French musician Yann Tambour started releasing music under the name Encre - music tailor-made for Utility Fog with its postrock & indie-chanson tendencies mixed with digital editing. Most of that music is still available from French label Clapping Music, but then around 2007 Tambour's focus changed (back) to guitar-based indie/chanson/folk under the name Thee, Stranded Horse, and then just Stranded Horse. And thus he has continued, with Stranded Horse the band frequently featuring Malian kora player Ballaké Sissoko and more recently Boubacar Cissokho. I'd lost track, but listening back, the last couple of Stranded Horse albums are fantastic. So it was really nice to hear a piece of heartfelt folk music from Tambour on a new compilation, Counting the strips of light, the second put together by the Paris-based Heartists for Palestine. The beneficiary for both of their compilations is Palestinian Medical Relief Society, and the musical focus is mostly indie singer-songwriter but with some interesting/inspiring inclusions - John Parish, who has worked consistently with PJ Harvey and others; Kate Stables of This Is The Kit doing a lovely Ben Folds cover; Adrian Crowley; and Aidan Baker of Nadja with Frédéric D. Oberland of Oiseaux Tempête and Saåad; and more! Lebanese singer Mayssa Jallad, who put out one of the best albums of last year, works again with Fadi Tabbal (co-founder with Ziad Nawfal of Ruptured Records) on an incredible piece of experimental song. It turns out their piece is a Frankensteinian creation in which Jallad added vocals to a piece of Tabbal's from his recent album I recognize you from my sketches. Jallad's lyric (the title means "Vertigo" in Arabic) follows a woman suffering from loss and displacement, inspired by the work of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and photojournalist Belal Khaled in Gaza recently. Meanwhile, Tabbal's album happens to be a lovely, made of processed guitars, synths and tape, so I played a track from the album proper too.

Ola Szmidt - Making My Own Dice [Ola Szmidt Bandcamp]
I discovered UK-based musician Ola Szmidt through her EP3, released on Accidental Records a couple of years ago. Lately she's been putting up single tracks here and there, and "Making My Own Dice" is a great example of her craft - melodic vocals looped and chopped up, and, eventually, glitchy programmed beats. Healing music for trying times.

Andrea De Witt - APR 5 [Undogmatisch/Bandcamp]
Andrea De Witt - PIANOCHROM 2M [Undogmatisch/Bandcamp]
Italian musician Andrea De Witt has been in & around various music scenes for decades, in rock bands, techno acts and experimental electronic projects. But his new self-titled album for the excellently-named Berlin label Undogmatisch is in fact his debut album. It's a great collection of glitchy sound-edits, stumbling beats, rumbling bass and shimmering textures. I've always been partial to glitched-up piano, so the two PIANOCHROM tracks are highlights, but the seemingly anonymous track titles belie an album of real humanity inside its minimalist soundworks.

Dahk-Kloud - Through The Night Quiet [Streaming in various places e.g. here]
Eora/Sydney-based musician Dahk-Kloud makes music aptly described by the title of his debut album Piano Tapes & Synthesiser. For a debut release it's impressive: late-night music with restrained piano and modular synths, with the magic of tape processing warping and bending inside and around the compositions. The album will be launched at Annandale Creative Arts Centre on Friday the 9th of August, for those in the area - tix here.

Matthew Bourne - the mirror and its fragments [Leaf/Bandcamp]
Following his second album of minimalist electro-acoustic work with Nightports earlier this year, English pianist & composer Matthew Bourne is back with a very solo album, this is not for you. (full stop included). These are quiet, expressive compositions for piano, on some tracks joined by his own cello playing - even more minimalist. This album demands listening in a place of calm & quiet, and if you make the space for it, you'll find yourself deeply moved.

Listen again — ~200MB

Sunday, 7th of July, 2024

Dark acoustic and electronic sonics, big beats and no beats, glitched folk...

LISTEN AGAIN and win at life! Stream on demand via FBi, podcast here.

Coppé - Ajisai (Nikakoi Remix) [Mango + Sweetrice Records/Bit-Phalanx Music]
Japanese singer Coppé's been around longer than many. And since the 1990s she's been collaborating with creative electronic artists, from the IDM world and club, while never veering too far from her jazz roots. Last year she released a proper jazz album, no electronics, called *(Un-)tweaked with a jazz quartet of piano/keys, bass, drums and guitar... but that title does rather imply something, right? So here comes *( -)tweaked, in which these loungey jazz songs are thrown back to some of her favourite electronic producers to glitch and chop. To come are mixes from the likes of Atom™, Plaid, Luke Vibert and more, but here's one from a very frequent collaborator of Coppé's, Georginan IDM/glitch maestro Nikakoi. It's lovely and granulated, with clicks'n'cuts but the song itself intact. Can't wait for the rest.

Romeo Moon - Dream Seed [Romeo Moon Bandcamp]
About 5 years ago, Naarm/Melbourne musician Kevin Orr released an EP under his Romeo Moon alias called It Unfolds, a beautiful amalgam of Radiohead, krautrock and Talk Talk-style postrock. With a catalogue going back 5 years earlier, it's taken that amount of time for his next release to start sneaking out. "Dream Seed" is as lovely as the previous work, a gentle song of low drones, acoustic guitar refrains and a repeated lyric that all slowly grows and then fades away. Stay tuned for more...

Laurence Pike - Introit [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
By now, Eora/Sydney drummer Laurence Pike has three solo albums under his belt along with various EPs, and of course renowned work with Triosk, Pivot/PVT and Szun Waves... His previous albums have mixed his impeccable jazz-trained drumming with live-triggered samples in his own unique way, but The Undreamt-of Centre, coming in September, opens a new chapter for Pike, augmenting his drums, electronics & keyboards with lush arrangements for the Sydney Philharmonia Choir's VOX choir (made up of 18-30 year olds). The choir, in a sense, came first here: Pike had had the idea of writing a requiem for drums, electronics and choir some time ago, and then sadly witnessed his father-in-law decline and pass away during the lockdowns. Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice became the final piece of the puzzle. Listening to this first piece from the album, Pike has been very successful in merging these different forms, and from what I've heard of the rest of the album, it's moving and innovative.

MMMD - Taxonomia [Antifrost/Bandcamp]
I guess first impressions leave a mark. The earliest releases from Greek band MMMD, now sometimes styled MMMΔ and at that point known as Mohammad, were massive, tectonic drone works with double bass, cello and electronic oscillators. Double bassist Coti K is no longer a member but remains connected, while the core of Nikos Veliotos and Ilios continue with ice-blasted sub-bass music that mixes synthcore with arcane chants. It's still some kind of mix of Eastern European folk and classical with deep drone, but sounding like the scene in a sci-fi horror movie when the crew enter a gigantic malevolent alien structure.

Assyouti - Kraken Sight [PAYNOMINDTOUS/Bandcamp]
The Egyptian electronic scene is bustling with inventiveness, and Assyouti is one of its more recent proponents - his first EP came out a couple of years ago, although he's been DJing for at least 5 years. He's now based in Berlin (who isn't?) and his new EP comes from Turin-based experimental electronic label PAYNOMINDTOUS. The Kraken Sight EP is a distorted, industrial take on bass, techno and, on the title track, something like breakcore.

GILA - Electrified Tea Garden [Lex/Bandcamp]
GILA - Infinite 5AM Youtube [Lex/Bandcamp]
Almost 4 years since his last full-length, Denver-based GILA returns with Domain Expansion. By and large it's in the same space as his earlier work - bass-heavy beats with strictly controlled breakbeats leaving plenty of white space, and space for head-nodding. While GILA's bass roots are probably more in southern US hip-hop & trap, there are clear nods to UK bass too, including LTJ Bukem-styled d'n'b.

DJ FLP - Portal [DJ FLP Bandcamp]
A fair way east and a bit north of Denver we find Ann Arbor, Michigan-based DJ FLP, mixing jungle in with footwork as is his wont. "Portal" is pay what you want and it's a very fine, classy sampler of his craft.

Xylitol - Jelena [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Xylitol - Miha [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Xylitol - Empty Vessel [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
One of the best decisions of Planet µ recently (and they're one of my favourite record labels) was the signing of Catherine Backhouse aka Xylitol, who's been around the UK experimental electronic scene for well nigh a couple of decades, making minimal house, synth-pop, ambient, who knows what else. She DJs under the name DJ Bunnyhausen, and is something of an expert on Eastern European pop and electronica. For Anemones we find Xylitol deep in IDM mode, with plenty of jungle/drill'n'bass workouts (from under 2 minutes to almost 10!) as well as slower breakbeat-driven melodic tunes in the vein of label boss Mike Paradinas/µ-Ziq. Uniformly excellent.

Giraffe - ATOM V [Stoffe/Bandcamp]
Hamburg trio Giraffe have previously released two albums on Meakusma, Juni and Shine and Dark, which combine guitars and acoustic drums with synths and electronics, in a very organic-seeming way. Their new album ATOMS, out on Hamburg label Stoffe, was initially confusing for being a lot more electronic than I expected - it's almost more like a raster-noton release than what I thought would be more like, say, Tomaga. This is partly because their percussionist/drummer Charly Schöppner here worked with drum machines alongside frame drums and acoustic drumkit, while the guitar hums and crackles and drones along with the keyboards. Still, the earlier releases were also part of a German/Austrian tradition that goes from krautrock's electronics and pulses through to the crackly postrock of Radian, Innode, Kammerflimmer Kollektief and the like. Tragically, Schöppner passed away in 2020, before the album was completed, but his rhythms are absolutely central to the tracks here.

ZULI - The Horn [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
ZULI - Myth -- [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
ZULI - Plateau ft. Abdullah Miniawy [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Now resident in Berlin, the brilliant Egyptian beatmaker and electronic producer ZULI has released his first album on Berlin-based (originally Bristol) Subtext Recordings. Lambda takes ZULI the furthest away from the dancefloor than ever, with few beats through its 13 tracks - but the sound design is still drawing from bass music and "deconstructed club" as much as industrial and ambient. The album had a long gestation, conceived in Cairo in 2020, and completed in Berlin in July 2023. I'm fairly sure that his live sets in Australia earlier this year would have included music from this. There's also a lot of mutated pop - including contributions from MICHAELBRAILEY and Coby Sey, but also processed and destroyed vocals of unknown origins - granular effects are used throughout. And one of the most touching pieces features another Europe-based Egyptian musical master, Abdullah Miniawy. A stunner of an album through & through.

Nika Son - Trinsar Gobble [V I S]]
Nika Son - It's just a cucumber [V I S]]
Back in Hamburg now, we join Nika Breithaupt under her Nika Son alias with ASLOPE, her new album released on V I S, the label connected to Hamburg's legendary Golden Pudel club. Breithaupt's music is an out-of-time collage of musique concrète elements, found-sound spoken word, tape manipulation and synth work, with just enough post-industrial beats to feel like an outsider take on techno. Somehow from lo-fi sound sources, Breithaupt builds impeccable sound-design: vocal snippets pop up at perfectly dramatic moments, and synths warble diminished chords. Tune in to these little sonic journeys and scenes that immediately evoke creepy situations, darkened abandoned buildings or murky underwater happenings.

Brique - Giraf [Umlaut Records/Bandcamp]
Brique - Tu Devrais [Umlaut Records/Bandcamp]
The Dutch anarcho-punk band The Ex has had a weighty impact on the European music scene over its 4½ decades, with countless members moving through the band and on to other influential acts around improv, jazz, rock and punk, and probably more. Luc Ex (Luke Klaasen) played bass with The Ex from 1983 till 2002, through most of their influential period, going from punk deep into improv, up to the beginning of a new phase collaborating with Ethiopian jazz greats. Here we find Luc playing acoustic bass guitar in a band that's equal parts acoustic punk, free improv and chamber jazz. Singer Bianca Iannuzzi sings, speak-sings a la sprechstimme and shouts in English, French, Italian and German. Luc Ex and drummer Francesco Pastacaldi bring a rhythmic drive which easily switches from postpunk to jazz, while Eve Risser's piano can accompany Iannuzzi in classical melodicism or jazz cabaret, or clang with internal preparations. This is highly expressive, highly energetic music that transcends time and genre.

BirdWorld - Coroico [Dugnad Records/Bandcamp]
I discovered BirdWorld through a compilation from The Wire in 2018, and was grabbed by the combination of Gregor Riddell's cello and electronics with Adam Teixeira's drums and percussion. Their music shows a different path for the melding of acoustic & digital, not quite The Books or folktronica, nor classical musique concrète. Their second album Nurture is on its way from Norway's Dugnad Records, with "Coroico" as the first single, which grows from field recordings into a rhythmic piece for plucked cello and drumkit, while Riddell also adds splashes of piano. While we wait, do yourself a favour and check out their debut album UNDA.

Neil Luck - Oxford Girl [Accidental Records]
Neil Luck - For the Mother _ Cherry Tree Carol [Accidental Records]
On Eden Box, British composer Neil Luck takes a different path again - or many - in deconstructing acoustic folk traditions. Every track on the album seems to do something else from the last, so the album opens with a guitar playing a folky melody, while drawn-out glitched vocals join, gradually slowing the whole thing down. But then we have cavernous percussion and spoken word over a field recording of a walk through a forest. And then we're thrown into the razor-sharp kazoo sound of leaf blowing (not the obnoxious suburban activity, albeit still rather obnoxious). Then we have tribal drumming of sorts, cut-up field recordings, cut-up voices with... a snoring sheep? And then we're back to a gorgeous folk piece - a strummed string instrument and falsetto vocals, which takes a turn into slowed-down speech and pump organ(?) drones. The mystery of the sound sources is the point, and the joy of the listen. The album finishes with sampled organic sounds sequenced into rhythms a la Art of Noise, and like that pioneering group at their best, Luck is adept at pulling pathos from sonic deconstruction.

Kaboom Karavan - Parafiks [Miasmah/Bandcamp]
Kaboom Karavan - Kobo [Miasmah/Bandcamp]
Kaboom Karavan - How to put valium in a madman’s drink? [Miasmah/Bandcamp]
The gaps between Bram Bosteels' Kaboom Karavan album tend to be so large that each one is a joyous rediscovery. Fiasko! is the latest, released as always on Erik Skodvin's singular Miasmah label, and like the other music at this end of tonight's show, they deconstruct acoustic (folk) music in their own unique fashion. Along with co-conspirators Bart Maris (brass), Raphaël De Cock (Eastern European string instruments, uillean pipes, voice) and Stefaan Smagghe (violin and sarangi), Bosteels evokes alternative-world folk traditions, and crumbled jazz a la Tom Waits. Like his earlier albums, electronics are subtly there in the way the music is arranged and mixed, and while there's nothing as sparse and creepy as "Kobo", which I played from the 2011 album Barra Barra, it still suits Miasmah's avant-garde acoustic doom catalogue to a tee.

Concrete Cedars - The Mostly Indoors [Concrete Cedars Bandcamp]
Finishing with the patient abstraction of Kansas noise/drone/country(?) group Concrete Cedars. I discovered them via Kansas musician Chance Dibben, one third of the band, whose solo music as SELVEDGE I played earlier in the year. Dibben uses synths and noisemakers, and Bradley McKellip builds further on the abstract sound with a no-input mixing desk - but McKellip also contributes processed guitar, and drummer Til Willis adds the eerie sounds of a water harp. As much postrock as ambient noise, this is highly evocative music in a style all its own.

Listen again — ~203MB