New music extravaganza on the show tonight! So excited by how this year’s turning out.

LISTEN AGAIN because music is timeless. Podcast here, stream on demand at FBi.

It’s been a big year for Kane Ikin, with already a solo album on a well-regarded UK label, and an EP on a French techno label. Now his duo Solo Andata, formed in Perth but now I believe based in Melbourne, have released a surprise new album after some years’ silence. They started out with their debut on beloved Chicago postrock/jazz/electronic label Hefty Records 10 years ago, and have stayed in the international spotlight since. Their music is pure gentleness, with guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings and very subtle electronic touches.

Sar Friedman releases her debut as Medicine Voice on Provenance, the new label run by Stuart Buchanan of New Weird Australia and Wood & Wire. Although there are high-profile collaborators on here (Oren Ambarchi, Joe Talia & James Rushford), Friedman’s is a singular vision, and this track in particular is predominantly her piano and vocals, with some nicely disturbing drones underneath.

I often talk about Canberra-based Reuben Ingall as one of my favourite Australian artists. I guess he walks that line that Utility Fog loves so much where live instrumentation washes up against electronic processing – using Max/MSP patches and pedals, he samples and glitches his voice and guitar along with non-musical objects, and switches easily between emotive indie guitar dirges and complex programmed electronics. His new release comes from a new cassette label Tandem Tapes run by ex-Underlapper Morgan McKellar, now based in Jakarta, Indonesia. The label pairs Indonesian experimental artists (who I will get to in a future show) with overseas artists, mostly from McKellar’s Australian connections for now.
Ingall’s side is from the second Tandem Tapes release. The debut cassette features a side from Melbourne experimental electronic artist Pare Ohm, jittery beats with a jazzy inflection.

Back to Provenance, and back to Canberra whence the duo Spartak originate. Drummer Evan Dorrian is now based in Sydney, but guitarist Shoeb Ahmad is still in Canberra; both also contribute electronics of all sorts and vocals, and will be joined by a female vocalist on most of their new album, due in July, which I’m 100% pumped for. This track comes from Marks of Provenance I, given away with all purchases of the first (few?) Provenance releases, and it’s an alternate version of a track from their new album.

Also from Marks of Provenance I is Melbourne electronic pop artist KAIA, extending tonight’s theme of glitched vocals. And Sydney’s Simo Soo gets remixed into quite dark territory by Vivian Huynh aka Lovely Head.

Our final Australian track for tonight takes us to Brisbane with Feet Teeth, a trio who combine electronics with live instrumentation, all improvised live. Their new release, Gout sees them collaborating with various Australian improvisers & experimental artists like Andrew Tuttle, Erik Griswold and Duskdarter‘s Kahl Monticone. This piece starts off as pure electronic drone but soon we hear the trumpet and drums surfacing out of the mix.

So finally we move overseas to Great Britain, with a band whose albums have a strong sense of place – their first was a folky, indie, symphonic, electronic ode to the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland; their new one examines and celebrates a small English town called Skelmersdale. Orkney is home to singer Erland Cooper of Erland & the Carnival, while multi-instrumentalist Simon Tong (ex member of The Verve and Gorillaz, also playing in Cooper’s band) hails from Skelmersdale, so presumably their next album will take them to third member Hannah Peel‘s Ireland. The folk musics of their various countries heavily informs their songwriting, as does an indie rock sensibility and a certain homespun electronic undercurrent (drum machine beats etc).

As I listened to their new album I noticed something very familiar – a bassline that drives the wonderful single “Bay of Skaill” from their first album. It appears as a bassline on the single “Signs”, but also as on plucked strings and a vocal refrain on “Pennylands” and elsewhere on the album too. It’s a nice unifying feature and a callback to a popular song from their first release, but it was familiar quite aside from this, and it took a couple of listens before I managed to make the necessary mental connections – was it Boards of Canada? Autechre? Not quite right… Suddenly I knew exactly who it was. I would be surprised if it’s a deliberate lifting, in fact I’d be surprised if The Magnetic North know the track at all, but it’s almost exactly the bassline from a gorgeous idm track by the legendary Darrel Fitton aka Bola, from his Mauver EP. A bizarre and unexpected connection.

This electronic sidestep connects us handily to the work of Klara Lewis, whose second album on Editions Mego came out a few weeks ago. Lewis hails from Sweden, so it was not until reading an interview recently that I made the connection that she is the daughter of Edvard Graham Lewis of English post-punk experimentalists Wire. Her father has also released music on the Mego label, and while some of her sensibilities are similar, it’s not necessary to draw comparisons or bring expectations to her own music. She’s adept at the sort of sonic fusions and deconstructions long favoured by Mego, with chopped up sounds, gaseous ambient tracts, spooky sampled voices and the like, but she’s also willing to drop in muffled techno beats here and there. In the same year as her Mego debut she put out a 12″ on Peder Mannerfelt Produktion (and it was nice to read Mannerfelt in the new edition of The Wire talking about wanting to break down what he sees as extreme segregation in Swedish society, and releasing a number of female Swedish electronic artists is part of that). There’s no doubt that new releases from Lewis will be highly anticipated round these parts.

Finally, another recent Editions Mego release is from the label boss himself, Peter Rehberg aka Pita. Rehberg is one of the originals in the glitch/noise scene that came out of Austria centred around the label that was originally called Mego. The Rehberg & Bauer releases with Ramon Bauer formed the catalyst for the pair to start the label, and Rehberg has also collaborated fruitfully with Christian Fennesz and Jim O’Rourke as FennO’Berg. Solo, the Pita work was always quite confrontingly noisy, although his work under his real name for contemporary dance artists is less tinittus-inducing. His new album Get In situates itself in a series of Pita releases (Get Out, Get Down, Get Off), and has passages of quite harsh abstract noise, but on the whole is queasy and ambient. I couldn’t resist playing an epic and gorgeous untitled piece from 1999’s Get Out, a shoegazey, faux-orchestral, distorted onslaught.

Solo Andata – Left [12k]
Solo Andata – Separate Lovers [12k]
Medicine Voice – the roman / crossing the fourth threshold [Provenance]
Reuben Ingall – Tomorrow [Tandem Tapes]
Reuben Ingall – Superfood [Tandem Tapes]
Pare Ohm – Com Glut [Tandem Tapes]
Pare Ohm – Three in One Hundred [Tandem Tapes]
Spartak – Black Eye Trace [Provenance]
KAIA – iii [Provenance]
Simo Soo – Dancer In The Dark (Lovely Head Remix) [Provenance]
Feet Teeth – six minutes and twelve seconds [Feet Teeth Bandcamp]
The Magnetic North – Signs [Full Time Hobby]
The Magnetic North – Bay of Skaill [Full Time Hobby]
The Magnetic North – Pennylands [Full Time Hobby]
Bola – Vespers [Skam]
Klara Lewis – Twist [Editions Mego]
Klara Lewis – c a t t [Editions Mego]
Klara Lewis – Msuic I [Peder Mannerfelt Produktion]
Klara Lewis – Beaming [Editions Mego]
Klara Lewis – Us [Editions Mego]
Pita – 9U2016 [Editions Mego]
Pita – Untitled 3 from Get Out [Editions Mego]

Listen again — ~194MB

Industrial hip-hop & industrial techno are the main features tonight… back after an unintended gap due to the east coast storms & flooding!

LISTEN AGAIN, listen anytime, listening is good. Podcast here, stream on demand at FBi.

It was a huge pleasure to discover that FBi have decided to make Marcus Whale‘s debut album (under his own name) Inland Sea album of the week this week. Not just because it’s nice when my taste overlaps with the station’s highest level of official endorsement, but also because Marcus has been an important part of this show for a long time, and indeed this show played a role in his own musical story, playing his experimental tracks as Scissor Lock back when he was still at school. His bands Collarbones and Black Vanilla draw from r’n’b/pop as well as post-dubstep, uk garage and experimental electronic forms, but he’s also got a background in postrock, noise & metal as well as training in classical performance & composition. And all of this emerges in some form or other on this new album, with avant-garde horn and string arrangements, skittering hi-hats, occasional glitchy edits, and massive, complex drums. Live they’re performed by dual drummers – usually Ivan Lisyak along with Russell Fitzgibbon of Fishing. Lyrically the album explores the dark undercurrents of Australia’s history, whether it’s a tribute to a gay bushranger or laments for our horrific treatment of indigenous Australians and particular Aboriginal women. It’s Australian album of the year for me.

Perth artist Kane Ikin (now based in Melbourne I believe?) was the subject of a feature on this show a few weeks ago, and is back with another new EP, Basalt Crush. It follows Modern Pressure with a similar style of gritty techno and post-industrial ambient electronics. Ikin’s turn to the outer reaches of the dancefloor, and the attention he’s receiving internationally of late, is extremely welcome.

Had I not been stranded outside of Sydney last Sunday, we would’ve had an even more substantial special on the amazing industrial hip-hop/noise/shoegaze/etc collective dälek. Fronted by MC Dälek aka Will Brooks, for most of its history alongside producer Alap Momin aka The Oktopus, dälek pioneered a noise-hop sound which was at once absolutely in touch with hip-hop history going back to Public Enemy and earlier, and absolutely iconoclastic in the way it drew from noise, shoegaze, psych rock, metal and more – indeed the band was generally released on metal-affiliated labels, and appeared on stage with metal-related bands. Brooks’ raps are politically charged, and gain depth from the moody, harsh and beautiful productions (for particular beauty see the 2 minute outro on the 10-minute title track to 2007’s Abandoned Language). We also heard one of their remixes (of Swiss indietronic band Velma, released under the umbrella of Deadverse, the collective revolving around the various members & collaborators of dälek). In 2009 or 2010 dälek quietly broke up, with Brooks completing a doctorate and Momin moving to Berlin to work on solo production. Brooks has released a substantial amount of solo material as iconAclass, with an impressive handle on beatmaking as well as his rapping; meanwhile, among other projects Momin was involved with a hip-hop supergroup called Numbers Not Names. Released & conceived by French label Ici d’ailleurs, it also features Chris Cole of Manyfingers and various incarnations of Third Eye Foundation on drums. Brooks reformed dälek last year as he felt he had more to say with its particular voice. Momin didn’t want to be involved but was happy for it to go ahead, and dälek alumni Destructo Swarmbots and DJ rEk, along with Brooks, have produced a bunch of tracks that easily live up to the name.

Lately in industrial hip-hop we’ve had Death Grips and even more excitingly to me, clipping. Serendipitously, just as I was putting together this dälek special together, clipping. (full stop included) released a stack of new stuff on their Bandcamp, including the full stems from their brilliant 2014 album CLPPNG, and a remix album full of weird & experimental artists. Producers William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes have connections to the noise, experimental electronic & breakcore scenes – Snipes was one half of Captain Ahab, which explains the presence of Aussie breakcore larrikin Toecutter, and also breakcore luminary Xanopticon. Also of note in the Bandcamp update is a 24hr “remix” of the album track “Dream”. Extreme timestretching and other techniques make for an insane piece of art, which one day I would love to attempt to experience in full (give or take some sleeping hours!)

Final artist for tonight is one of the true geniuses, Justin K Broadrick, grindcore and industrial metal pioneer, shoegaze metal pioneer, who’s also in his long history produced experimental ambient guitar music, minimalist electronics, drum’n’bass, breakcore, electronic shoegaze & idm… and no doubt more. As JK Flesh he’s explored various electronic genres – dubstep, instrumental hip-hop, drum’n’bass and now techno – with a heaviness inherited from metal. Distorted bass, distorted beats, occasional post-hardcore howls, make for a primal sound that’s high-tech but lo-fi and strangely timeless. This is made clear listening back to the Techno Animal cut I played from 1997 – he & The Bug‘s Kevin Martin have been in this game longer than most. Again, I wish I’d had a chance for a more comprehensive overview of JK Flesh & related music but I’m glad I slipped this Techno Animal reminder in at least :)

Marcus Whale – Is He That Man [Good Manners Music]
Marcus Whale – Arcadia [Good Manners Music]
Kane Ikin – Street Flare [Latency Recordings]
Kane Ikin – Grid [Latency Recordings]
dälek – Shattered [Profound Lore]
dälek – Spiritual Healing [Ipecac]
dälek – Abandoned Language [Ipecac]
Velma – Rouge (Deadverse Remix) [Hydra Head Records]
Numbers Not Names – Numbers Not Names [Ici d’ailleurs]
iconAclass – Crushed [Deadverse Recordings Bandcamp]
dälek – 6dB [Profound Lore]
clipping. – body & blood [Sub Pop]
clipping. – ends (xanopticon remix) [clipping. Bandcamp]
JK Flesh – trinity [Electic Deluxe]
Techno Animal – demonoid [City Slang]
JK Flesh – Hide & Seek [JK Flesh Bandcamp]

Listen again — ~199MB

Variety of sounds tonight, concluding with psych-kraut-postrock, starting with noise-hop, but with heaps of electronics in between, with an emphasis on artists melding classical composition & performance with electronic techniques & sounds.

I missed Oneohtrix Point Never at the Opera House to bring you this, so LISTEN and LISTEN AGAIN damn you. Stream on demand over at FBi, podcast right here (and subscribe in iTunes if you like that kind of thing (the horror!))…

Next week we’ll have a pretty major feature on the music of dälek, the group, along with the various members. Pioneers of “noise hop” or whatever you want to call it (industrial hip-hop?), they married political raps with noise, metal and shoegaze-influenced productions, still with boom-bap beats… The new album doesn’t have original producer Alap Momin aka Oktopus, but retains their original sound and weight.

Originally from the Blue Mountains, Sydney DJ & producer Joel Pearson has released his debut EP as Scatterbrain on his new label Milke Thistle Records, drawing influence from the Australian bush & landscape in which he grew up, as well as from classic hip-hop and new post-dubstep/footwork/r’n’b beats. It’s a hugely impressive debut from a hardworking producer, who should continue to do great things.

British composer/producer Jim Perkins & fellow singer Tom Gaisford have released a single on the excellent UK-based crossover-classical label bigo & twigetti that’s based around the “Kyrie” from English Renaissance composer William Byrd’s Mass for Three Voices. The original by Perkins & Gaisford is an electronic treatment of the work, but tonight we heard Brisvegan ex-pat (now also UK-based) Leah Kardos‘s remix.

As I said last week, William Ryan Fritch‘s music is a quite sui generis mixture of world-inflected classical composition, heavy percussion and, more recently, singing. After a massive string of connected albums & EPs in 2014 and through into early 2015, Fritch has been less active the last year or so, but this album continues where he left off, with epic scope.

Tom Hodge (piano) and Franz Kirmann (electronics) have been working as Piano Interrupted for a few years now. Their glitchy patina of piano, bass, strings and beats is a snug fit for Utility Fog’s central mission of the liminal music inhabiting the foggy boundaries between genres and production techniques. Their latest album has seen them travelling to Senegal to work with local musicians, and while their beautiful playing appears on the album, it’s hard to identify anything West African about the music, which remains a tasteful conversation between jazz, classical and electronic.

Matthew Collings also represents the classical along with the electronic & experimental tonight, even more emphatically than with his previous brilliant works of postrock/indie/noise/electronica. The audiovisual work that he’s been touring for the last year has come out in audio form on Denovali: A Requiem for Edward Snowden may be premature as a requiem, but it explores the implications of the information released by Edward Snowden about surveillance, privacy and security, the losses (of faith, security, privacy) highlighted by Snowden as well as his own personal losses in coming out publically. Musically, electronic processing cracks and disrupts the avant-garde classical compositions performed by Collings and cohorts on clarinet and strings. It’s Collings’ usual modus operandi purified, and a clever approach for a topic in which the digital world intrudes into the “real”. Highly recommended.

An accomplished classical cellist, Oliver Coates is known for some high profile collaborations (often along with the London Contemporary Orchestra) with artists like Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead, Mica Levi & others. I first came across him playing cello with Mira Calix on a stunning Boards of Canada cover for Warp‘s 20th anniversary. Coates’ previous release on Moshi Moshi imprint Prah Recordings saw him mostly performing contemporary compositions (tonight we heard a queasy Chopin-deconstructing work by Larry Goves), but the new one brings him to the fore as an electronic producer & composer. Building beats from samples of his cello, Coates has created a varied album referencing everything from Arthur Russell (of course) via Four Tet, to house, footwork, and indeed classical music. It’s quite an achievement.
I thought it was nice to round out the selection, including covers, collaborations, performances of composed works and his own productions, with a remix. Conveniently, Grasscut‘s new remix album came out just this last week or so, and while I haven’t had a chance to dive into it properly, it was serendipitous to find a remix by “Olly Coates” on there.

Last up tonight is as much as we can fit in of a 20 minute track from one of the new Oren Ambarchi collaborations out right now. This one sees him working with two big figures in Italian experimental, postrock & psych music: Stefano Pilia (perhaps best known as a member of the amazing 3/4HadBeenEliminated) and Massimo Pupillo (probably best known as the bassist in free jazz/math rock/noise band Zu). It’s entirely in keeping with Oren’s output from the last few years – slow burning guitarnoisescapes and driving, head-nodding rhythm section, growing to some kind of freakout. Excellent, of course.

dälek – It Just Is [Profound Lore Records]
Scatterbrain – I Need A… (feat. Kiri Cantle) [Milke Thistle Records]
Scatterbrain – The Great Northern [Milke Thistle Records]
Jim Perkins & Tom Gaisford – Kyrie (Leah Kardos remix) [bigo & twigetti]
William Ryan Fritch – Disregard [Lost Tribe Sound]
Piano Interrupted – Jean Luc Diola [Denovali]
Matthew Collings – Collect It All [Denovali]
Matthew Collings – Vasilia [Facture/Denovali]
Matthew Collings – Rapid Pulses [Denovali]
Oliver Coates – Innocent Love [Prah Recordings]
Mira Calix with Oliver Coates – In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country [Warp]
Leo Abrahams & Oliver Coates – VIII [Slip]
Oliver Coates – The clouds flew round with the clouds (composed by Larry Goves, sampling Chopin’s Nocturne in B Major [Prah Recordings]
Grasscut – Fallswater (Olly Coates Remix) [Lo Recordings]
Oliver Coates – Memorial to Hitchens [Prah Recordings]
Oren Ambarchi, Stefano Pilia & Massimo Pupillo – Shine [Karlrecords]

Listen again — ~194MB

Here we here we go… special on the genius of Aesop Rock tonight, along with some varied tunes from idm to spoken word to pop, electronics and postrock of a sort with classical composition creeping in.

LISTEN AGAIN on the podcast here or stream on demand at FBi.

A new release from Autechre is always an event round these parts, a drop-everything moment, especially since lately they have a habit of surprising us with unexpected downloads well before the physical releases. And this time round it was also a cause for concern (of sorts) as their new release has come as a digital-only set of five EPs (or a five-part album if you prefer), clocking in at over 4 hours – and it was released only 2 and a half days before tonight’s show. I’ve done my best to listen through it all and have found some very tasty highlights in the first run-through. It’s vintage Ae, especially of the last decade and a bit – highly processed sounds, wobbling and jittering, sometimes weirdly squished into part of the EQ spectrum, sometimes gloriously widescreen, and frequently locking into awesome head-nodding grooves.
It’s amusing to have a digital-only release from the duo that wrote “Incomplete without surface noise” on the CD edition of Tri Repetae all those years ago.

Sebastian Gainsbourgh’s been making forward-thinking techno/post-dubstep productions as Vessel and also as part of the Young Echo collective out of Bristol for the last few years. Poet/spoken word artist Chester Giles is also associated with Young Echo and the two have teamed up now for two EPs under the “asda” name – a reference to the British supermarket chain. The words and very uncompromising music summon up a post-cyberpunk continual-consumption urban nightmare. Delicious.

Ian Matthias Bavitz started making hip-hop as Aesop Rock in the mid-’90s and gradually perfected a style of motor-mouthed lyrical prestidigitation using as many words as he could fish out of the dictionary. While he’s collaborated with plenty of the Anticon types, and that other weird-hop motor-mouth Busdriver, it’s probably his work with El-P that indicates his talent for embracing the inherent weirdness of hip-hop without sliding too far into indie “backpack hip-hop” – indeed one of the new tracks we hear tonight features an approving answering machine message from the great Chuck D. Equally, the indie connection is most emphasised in his duo with folk-punk legend Kimya Dawson as The Uncluded. But there’s a real pop appeal to the singles from The Impossible Kid (and indeed the previous couple of albums at least) – flowing beats & scratches, great storytelling. And while his early works are mostly produced by the awesome Blockhead, in the last few albums Aes has really come into his own as an excellent producer in his own right.

UK Garage seems to be making a comeback particularly among Melbourne producers at the moment, and it’s not something I’m going to complain about. Drummer Christopher Port is the latest representative of this production trend, with some nice scratching and pitch-shifted percussion over the bouncy first cut from his Vetement EP, out in July.

Marcus Whale is no stranger to this show, having first appeared as a schoolkid making experimental noise as Scissor Lock, evolving into post-rock and experimental electronic, and then with his r’n’b/vapourwave(?) duo Collarbones and r’n’b/techno of Black Vanilla. His solo stuff combines references to his classical composition training, his love of r’n’b/pop, and even his love of metal. It’s very impressive live, with dual drummers playing complex cross-rhythms and sub-bass paired with beautiful horn arrangements blasting out of the PA…

William Ryan Fritch has worked along with producer SkyRider on a number of Sole‘s albums, but that’s where the underground hip-hop connection ends; his music is a quite sui generis mixture of world-inflected classical composition, heavy percussion and, more recently, singing. After a massive string of connected albums & EPs in 2014 and through into early 2015, Fritch has been less active the last year or so, but this album continues where he left off, with epic scope.

Autechre – latentcall [Warp/Autechre Bleepstore]
Autechre – 13×0 step [Warp/Autechre Bleepstore]
asda (Vessel & Chester Giles) – spud-u-like [FuckPunk]
asda (Vessel & Chester Giles) – Killer of Men [No Corner]
Aesop Rock – Blood Sandwich [Rhymesayers Entertainment]
Aesop Rock – Daylight [Definitive Jux]
Aesop Rock – Bazooka Tooth [Definitive Jux]
Aesop Rock – Fast Cars [Definitive Jux]
Aesop Rock – Fumes [Definitive Jux]
Aesop Rock – Gopher Guts [Rhymesayers Entertainment]
Busdriver feat. Aesop Rock – Superhands’ Mantra (Fuck Us All) [Fake Four, Inc]
The Uncluded – Bats [Rhymesayers Entertainment]
Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman – Environmental Studies [self-released, but via Stones Throw]
Aesop Rock – Lazy Eye (feat. Chuck D) [Rhymesayers Entertainment]
Aesop Rock – Dorks [Rhymesayers Entertainment]
Christopher Port – Bump [Pieater]
Marcus Whale – Vapour [Good Manners Music]
William Ryan Fritch – Entirety [Lost Tribe Sound]

Listen again — ~180MB