Back from Tokyo, China and Hong Kong bearing much musical fruit! Thanks to Heli Newton for his excellent fill-in shows the last three weeks.

LISTEN AGAIN through the usual channels – the stream on demand on the FBi website is a better audio experience, but the podcast here may be more convenient.

While in Beijing I visited a few pretty cool boutique record stores – it’s kind of extraordinary that these still exist. In Shanghai, perhaps because it’s actually more cosmopolitan and westernised, there’s more interest in vinyl (and still only one or two stores!) and pretty much nowhere I found where you could get even local artists on CD. Even so, basically all international music on CD was imported, and basically all the Chinese music was explicitly only for the Chinese market, which compounds with the obvious language barrier (even being able to type Chinese characters into search engines is essentially impossible for non-Chinese speakers, not to mention the fact that Google is blocked in China if you don’t have a VPN or international SIM card!) to make it almost impossible to find out about Chinese music outside of China.
These days a number of Chinese artists have Bandcamps as well as presences on Douban or other local Chinese social networks/websites – and some are on Facebook despite Facebook being blocked too.
Nevertheless, I only found out about our first artist Dou Wei (窦唯) (who we have a substantial special on, as he’s kind of important and also amazing) because I heard his latest album being played in both of the first record stores I stepped into. And it’s fantastic – a mix of ambient electronics, downtempo beats, and a clear postpunk/postrock sensibility, along with whispered / spoken / sung vocals. All performed by him. The people in the stores were also impressed by the fact that more recently Dou Wei has been incorporating Chinese traditional instruments into his music – I guess there’s not a lot of adventurous, contemporary music that does this. The interesting thing about travelling in China is that all of your cultural barometers and compasses are off – it’s very hard to tell what’s traditional, “authentic” (there’s literally no concept of such a thing, it feels like), or transgressive and inventive, what’s individualistic and sui generis or part of some cultural trend or imposed by the government. And sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s bullshit being peddled to you by people or authorities too, it has to be said!
Anyway. Dou Wei has been around for yonks and warrants his own Wikipedia page in English, so you can read about his background in the hard rock (like, hair rock) band Black Panther in the 1980s, after which he drew on influences from postpunk bands like The Cure and so on, and in the mid-’90s became interested in the early postrock sound of Bark Psychosis, as found in his collaborations with E Band. He’s also famous for having been married to the Chinese diva Faye Wong, for whom he produced a number of albums. In the last decade or two he’s been more interested in experimental, less-structured music and in improvisation, incorporating electronics, and even more recently the acoustic sounds of traditional Chinese instruments into his music. And he’s collaborated quite a bit with Chinese electronic music pioneers FM3 (famous for the Buddha Machine).

A while ago (a year? longer?), Evelyn Morris of Pikelet was responsible for starting some fantastic and illuminating discussions on Facebook around gender in the music industry – the omnipresent male privilege, the often appalling treatment of women as artists, DJs, sound engineers or punters, the suppression of female voices from conversations about music, the inequalities that continue to exist, all of which continues despite everyone being convinced that they’re oh-so-reasonable and modern and conscious. Out of this came a project/organisation called Listen focused on provoking further conversations around women’s and LGBTQIA+ experiences in the Australian music industry, through publications, events and recently an excellent musical compilation, the first release from Listen Records. I thought it was appropriate to play the Pikelet track from the compilation, one of her wonderful lo-fi pieces of improvised piano music.

Sydney artist Astrid Zeman has a track on the Listen compilation, and is releasing her debut EP this Friday night (Nov 13th) at the Glebe Justice Centre (previously known as Cafe Church). I’ll also be there playing looped cello in my raven guise, but Astrid’s beautiful music should be drawcard enough. She uses loop pedals to create her songs with vocals along with guitar, trombone and keyboards, but frequently the pieces are entirely looped vocals. There’s an abstract drone kind of piece on the EP, with some freaky overtone singing, and also some lovely layered songwriting.

Alon Ilsar’s trio The Sticks, with keyboardist Daniel Pliner and bass player Josh Ahearn, is named after Alon’s incredible gestural instrument The AirSticks. It’s been over a decade in the making, fruits of his long-held desire to extend his percussion technique into triggering samples and live effects. Among Alon’s various bands over the years was UFog fave Gauche, an indie/jazz/electronic group featuring opera singer Jane Seymour, Julian Curwin of The Tango Saloon and Luke Dubber of Hermitude. The Sticks make live electronica, and do it beautifully, so even without seeing the crazy gestural interface of the AirSticks themselves, it’s just very cool music.

Melbourne artist Robin Fox is at least as well known for his amazing audiovisual work with laser lights in shows for the Chunky Move dance company as for his music. In audio, he’s collaborated with Oren Ambarchi and Atom™ recently, among others, but it’s been a while since a solo release so it’s extra-nice to see it appearing on the legendary Editions Mego. And it’s very suited to the label too – despite their expanding into other areas of noise and experimental music of late, this is just great glitchy electronics (the digital bonus tracks move into slightly more regular beat territory).

It’s been a long time since the last album from Stephanie Böhm and The Notwist‘s Micha Acher aka Ms. John Soda. With the new album it’s like they never went away. It’s classic German indietronica, drawing on indie rock, idm, dub and krautrock. The Notwist’s album of last year was a huge return to form, and this too is a solid album through and through.

Dou Wei (窦唯) – 弥疑第二 [self-released(?) album 天真君公 (Tiān zhēn jūn gōng)]
Dou Wei – How the Empty Language Gives Knowledge (语虚何以言知) [Shanghai Audiovisual Company (上海音像公司)]
Dou Wei & FM3 – 赶路 (Hurry On The Road) [Shanghai Audiovisual Company (上海音像公司)]
Dou Wei & FM3 – 九吾 [Lona Records]
Dou Wei – 和无题 (He Wu Ti) [FM3 Productions Ltd]
Dou Wei – 殃金咒 (Yang Jin Mantra) (excerpts) [self-released(?)]
Dou Wei & 不一样 (Indefinite) – track 1 from 束河乐记 (Shuhe music note) [self-released(?)]
Dou Wei – 寻常第三 [self-released(?) album 天真君公 (Tiān zhēn jūn gōng)]
FM3 – Ting Shuo 听说 [self-released, available from FM3 Bandcamp]
Pikelet – Darwin Heat [Listen Records]
Astrid Zeman – Imagination [Astrid Zeman Bandcamp]
The Sticks – Receive Your Host [The Sticks Bandcamp]
Foley (aka Alon Ilsar of The Sticks) – willow [from self-released 2005 EP ideophone]
The Sticks – Sidestep [The Sticks Bandcamp]
Robin Fox – Through Sky [Editions Mego]
Ms. John Soda – Millions [Morr Music]
Ms. John Soda – no. one [Morr Music]
Ms. John Soda – The Light [Morr Music]

Listen again — ~105MB

A big list of great music tonight, covering a broad range of genres across the globe of music.
Tonight’s my last show for a few weeks – I’m off to Tokyo, China and Hong Kong and back on Sunday the 8th of Nov. In the meantime you’ll be in the extremely capable hands of Heli Newton, so tune in regardless!

LISTEN AGAIN for the first time (the choice is yours) here or stream on demand on the FBi website.

Lebanese musician Radwan Moumneh has now released two albums for Constellation as Jerusalem In My Heart. Beautiful Arabic singing and playing merges seemlessly with electronic processing and juddering, pulsing keyboards, to stunning effect. The title “A Granular Buzuk” from the new album gives you a bit of an idea what to expect, but there’s also tracks of just pure noise washing over bouzouk lines, and vocal lines gorgeously sung through harmoniser effects, etc. Can’t recommend strongly enough.

Tom Smith appeared on the show last week with the lead track from his new Thomas William EP Annum Contra. Tonight we take an even more club-ready track from that EP, and we also find out where the glitches from the glitch-hop went: they’re all over the beautiful album he’s released as T.Morimoto, a more-or-less beatless affair of grainy soundscapes and murky samples.

It’s been almost 10 years since the last album proper from the wonderful Berlin-resident UK producer Adam Butler aka Vert. From Squarepusher-style drill’n’bass origins he’s moved on to glitchy clunky experimental electronics and experimental jazz – including an amazing remix of an entire jazz festival, and even that came out 7 years ago. But his last solo album in 2006 introduced his spoken/sung vocals over vaudevillian ragtime piano – along with the glitchy electronics & beats. His brilliant newie, out in early November, follows on with more real songs, introducing lush string arrangements and by no beans skimping on the electronics. And Butler is a very fine songwriter too.

Speaking of brilliant songwriter-producers, Kevin Martin is something of an all-rounder, and his bass-heavy, whether as The Bug or in his various collaborations. Now his wonderful, low key atmospheric collaboration King Midas Sound (featuring Trinidadian poet Roger Robinson and Japanese singer Kiki Hitomi on vocals) has teamed up with ambient guitar/glitchmeister Fennesz for their most washed-out album yet. Fennesz has for some years sounded repetetive and uninspired to me, but to his credit, Kevin Martin’s brought out the best in him for some years, with queasy textures lapping up against Martin’s basslines and very backgrounded beats. It’s interesting to hear the instrumentals too – sometimes a little meatier than the vocals versions, although both are beautiful singers and Robinson in particular is a touching lyricist.

This week sees the release of the final set of remixes from Björk‘s extraordinary album vulnicura. Probably the best have already come out (especially Katie Gately‘s intoxicating layered-vocal procession also heard tonight), but Warp’s sonic mulcher patten turns “stonemilker” inside out and grime producer Bloom turns in two heavy cuts.

One half of stellar electronic duo Akkord, Synkro has released music from drum’n’bass to dubstep to uk garage to techno, but his latest solo releases have been for R&S Records‘ ambient subdivision Apollo. In fact there are plenty of incredibly tastily-produced beats on here, but the ambient textures do dominate.

It’s impossible to understate the fondness with which I hold the music of Luke Vibert – from the blunted hip-hop of Wagon Christ to the perfect drill’n’bass of Plug to countless other pseudonyms making the most melodic bouncy acid available or disco or who knows what else. For Planet µ he tends to just release under his own name, and there’s usually one or two drill’n’bass tracks among the acid and head-nodding hip-hop. His basslines are tight and funky, his beats crisp and the vocal samples constantly amusing. His sample library is insanely extensive but his music’s far more than just clever collage. One of the best.

Himuro Yoshiteru‘s been making idm beats for yonks now, and never fails to be fun and melodic too. It’s nice to find a drill’n’bass track among the hip-hop and breaks on this latest EP. He’s made some of my favourite drill’n’bass stuff over the years.

Brisbane trio Feet Teeth combine jazz & postrock improv with experimental electronics in an inimitable way. They released a mini-album on hellosQuare along with some remixes in 2013, and they’ve just put out an EP (albeit long!) showcasing their insane, freewheeling live sets.

Finishing up with a lovely twinkly piece from Japanese duo yuco, contributing to the latest geography-specific location-music series from Sydney’s Flaming Pines label. Yuco’s piece is about the island of Shikinejima in southern Japan.

Jerusalem In My Heart – Al Affaq, Lau Mat, Lau Lau Lau Lau Lau Lau (The Hypocrite, If He Dies, If If If If If If) [Constellation]
Jerusalem In My Heart – Yudaghdegh El-ra3ey Walal-Ghanam (He Titilates the Shepherd, but not the Sheep…) [Constellation]
Suuns and Jerusalem In My Heart – Leyla [Secretly Canadian]
Jerusalem In My Heart – A Granular Buzuk [Constellation]
T.Morimoto – 3x (bonus) [Illuminated Paths]
Thomas William – Busss w/ Lamtech9 [Plastic World]
Vert – And I Know [Shitkatapult]
Vert – A Little Learning [Shitkatapult]
King Midas Sound & Fennesz – On My Mind [Ninja Tune]
King Midas Sound & Fennesz – Melt (Instrumental) [Ninja Tune]
King Midas Sound & Fennesz – Loving or Leaving [Ninja Tune]
Björk – stonemilker (patten rework) [One Little Indian]
Björk – family (katie gately remix) [One Little Indian]
Björk – mouth mantra (the haxan cloak remix) [One Little Indian]
Björk – black lake (bloom remix) [One Little Indian]
Synkro – Let Me Go [Apollo]
Synkro – Body Close (feat. Francesca Bergami) [Apollo]
Luke Vibert – Hey Go [Planet µ]
Luke Vibert – Don’t Fuck Around [Planet µ]
Himuro Yoshiteru – Takhos [King Deluxe]
Feet Teeth – nineteen minutes and ten seconds (excerpt) [Feet Teeth Bandcamp]
Feet Teeth – Normandy [hellosQuare]
yuco – marine [Flaming Pines]

Listen again — ~108MB

Here we are… October… time for revolution. Well, maybe later this month, heck.
Quite a range of sounds tonight, from hip-hop to jungle to house esoteric electronics and electro-acoustics, gorgeous drones and shoegazey indiefolk.

LISTEN AGAIN on your public holiday if you’re in NSW or your first day of work elsewhere! Podcast here, stream on demand there.

Starting with Sydney underground music stalwart Tom Smith aka Thomas William, who’s been twisting hip-hop into new forms since his early recordings as Cleptoclectics in 2007. It’s always great to have something new from him – leaning less on the ethnic samples and glitches this time round.

There’s no drum’n’bass producer I’ve been more excited by in the last few years than Sam Binga, one of those involved in bringing jungle back into currency, combining it with grime and Chicago footwork alongside the “slow-fast” movement. Bouncy stop/start beats, basslines front and centre, and MCs all over the place, with a dub/dancehall feel never far away. Great stuff. His new album is almost 100% collaborations, with only one track credited just to him – although the various digital bonuses include a few instrumental versions, along with some deep drum’n’bass remixes and some more grimey ones.

Chicagoan sound engineer Casey Rice has worked extensively with the likes of Tortoise while living in that city, but has been based in Melbourne for some time, with Australians benefiting from his mixing and mastering expertise. His productions as Designer have always been few and far between, but it’s cool to discover that the latest release will be a collaborative 12″ with Four Tet on his TEXT label. Tonight’s selection is the b-side, direct from Mr Rice himself.

Sydney artist Corin Ileto put out her debut solo EP Deluge last year to some acclaim. On that release, acoustic piano appeared alongside ambient electronics, but her new album Wave Systems sees her concentrating more on strange sound structures from analogue keyboards. There’s not much to compare it, even though there are the occasional beats you can nod your head to. Recommended listening.

We accidentally heard the first Kyle Bruckmann track ahead of Corin due to outrageous playlist mismanagement, but now for the rest… Based in Oakland, California (we’d think of it as a suburb of San Francisco really but it’s part of the Bay Area hey), he plays oboe and other reeds, often in that area of composed jazz meeting free jazz, but the releases I know him for, on the Entr’acte label, see him bringing his reeds into the world of strange, malfunctioning electronics. Not really malfunctioning but certainly deliberately warped, given the title of the first of these releases was Technological Music Vol. 1 – or, Regarding the Misuse of Tools and the Rigorous Application of Capriciously Derived Organizational Principles… The new one takes itself just as seriously/tongue-in-cheek, as Technological Music Vol. 2 – or, Regarding, in Addition to Concerns Previously Explicated, Matters of Process, Artifice, and Verisimilitude, and they are also available as a double album from the label.

Jason Corder’s been making music as offthesky for a good 10 years now out of somewhere in the middle of the USA… He came to my attention via a group called Color Cassette who put out a release on the beloved Moteer label, making a lovely kind of folktronica, while offthesky has generally been a more ambient affair, sometimes with clicky beats, and Juxta Phona has been his outlet for the somewhat more idm-influenced beats. He has two major releases this year, the stunning solo album the serpent phase on UK label Hibernate, and an equally commanding album with Polish ambient/post-classical artist and serial collaborator Bartosz Dziadosz aka Pleq.

Post-classical piano buddies Ólafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm have made a couple of previous EPs & singles together, and with this latest one comes an announcement that the material will be collected on a double album along with some new stuff. It’s nice stuff, the Juno synth beloved of Nils, occasional dub techno thud and occasional clicky non-beats.

And finally, some tracks I’ve been meaning to play for a while, from a split 12″ on Rural Colours which sold out almost instantaneously and is now available from the two artists’ Bandcamps. Isnaj Dui is English flautist Katie English, who’s played with many drone, folk, postrock (of sorts) and electronic artists – but on this release she’s focusing on her other instrument, the cello. The track I’ve chosen is a burbling stew of layered electric cello and never fails to thrill my ears.
On the flipside is the lovely Richard Adams of The Declining Winter. Since Hood broke up for reals (*sob*), he’s been holding the fort with a regular schedule of indie music, and his album of earlier this year was the best rendering of his sound yet. On this EP he goes for an acoustic shoegazey sound reminiscent of Benoît Pioulard, perhaps, although Richard’s songwriting is very distinctive.
Check out both sides digitally!

Thomas William – Tuition (feat. Kid Kairo & Chun Yin) [Plastic World]
Sam Binga – Wasted Days (feat. Warrior Queen) [Critical Music]
Addison Groove & Sam Binga – Thr3id [50 Weapons]
Sam Binga – Freezy [Modulations]
Sam Binga – Steppin ft. Redders (Foreign Concept mix) [Critical Music]
Sam Binga & Om Unit – Reclaim [Critical Music]
Four Tet + Designer – Dark [TEXT]
Kyle Bruckmann – Music for Dancing [Entr’acte]
Corin – Empress [Speaker Footage]
Corin – Morning [Corin Bandcamp]
Corin – Images II (Moon Holiday Remix) [Corin Bandcamp]
Corin – Hydrate [Speaker Footage]
Kyle Bruckmann – Four Investigations Of A Dubious Premise I [Entr’acte]
Kyle Bruckmann – Four Investigations Of A Dubious Premise III [Entr’acte]
Kyle Bruckmann – Irreproducible Result A2 [Entr’acte]
offthesky – well worn sting [Hibernate]
offthesky & pleq – wands upon a thousand fields [Infraction]
Ólafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm – Wide Open [Erased Tapes]
Isnaj Dui – Radial Field [Rural Colours/Isnaj Dui Bandcamp]
The Declining Winter – Lost In Huge Light [Rural Colours/The Declining Winter Bandcamp]

Listen again — ~105MB

It’s FBi‘s supporter drive! That time of the year when we ask the people who love what we do to help us – financially – to pay our bills, and so on!

LISTEN AGAIN while you subscribe – stream on demand at FBi’s website, or podcast it here.

Melbourne postpunk trio F ingers start things off with a release on the ultra-hip Blackest Ever Black (shit, I said “hip”, how old am I?) Pretty great to have Oz representing on this label which is home to a great array of UK & US noise, techno, industrial, punkish, and experimental electronic stuffs. Featuring Carla dal Forno plus Bum Creek’s Sam Karmel and Tarquin Manek (also ex-Pikelet).

Moscow’s Alexey Devyanin releases music under a number of pseudonyms, but for a long time I only knew him as Gultskra Artikler, under which he made a number of albums of collagey acoustic doom of sorts – quite dark, woozy folk stuff along the lines of Miasmah labelmates Kaboom Karavan or Kreng. But then I discovered that Devyanin is also Pixelord – in which (to my ears) he explores kitsch of a different variety, with the computer gamey vaporwave the YouTube generation makes of late. It feels to me like his latest project as Gultskra, appropriate released as a cassette by Umor Rex, brings the experimental electronic tendencies of Gultskra Artikler and the more pop dance side of Pixelord a little closer – sampling, mulching up and spitting out the sounds he’s been listening to of late. It’s incredible stuff.

Strangely Gultskra’s acoustic collage (and less strangely the electronic sounds) remind me a lot of the pre-eminent ambient techno collage artists The Future Sound of London, who have just released their 8th archive album, this time not “From The Archives” but Archived 8 – perhaps to denote the fact that there’s a lot of rather new material to be found here.

Persian-American artist Aria Rostami has been releasing experimental electronic music from San Francisco for a few years (I was introduced to him because Ollie Bown contributed a remix to a release in 2011). Inhabiting that comfortable/uncomfortable zone between conceptual, glitchy experimental music and idm/house beatmaking, he does a fine job in covering both. For his latest release, he explores the idea of orientalism – of the “othering” of the East – through field recordings sent to him from Tehran, Kerman and even Taipei. And as well as electronics and processed field recordings, there’s an array of middle eastern and western live instrumentation in there, from violin and piano to the Turkish tar.

So this new Julia Holter album has been getting crazy accolades from all round. And well deserved… we’re talking about a highly accomplished artist still at a young age. This album feels like a fairly straightforwardly pop thing, albeit more of a Kate Bush style pop than Katie Perry (lol). While in the past, her albums have lyrically been based around Greek myth, French literature and American film, here there’s no high-concept theme as such, although still much poetry to be found. Musically it’s a lovely continuation from her past arrangements, fleshed out a little more with a larger ensemble of strings, woodwind (including some quite ’80s sax), and jazzy drums along with her piano and breathy vocals. Is it the 5 stars, 10/10 album some critics are hailing it with? Well, it’s as good as the older albums and that makes it superlative already. That’s enough – you know you need it.

F ingers – Tantrum Time [Blackest Ever Black]
F ingers – Mum’s Caress After Trip [Blackest Ever Black]
Gultskra Artikler – D [Umor Rex]
Gultskra Artikler – Fizik Dyadya Kolya [Lampse]
Gultskra Artikler – Berezka [Miasmah]
Gultskra Artikler – kartoshka [Miasmah]
Gultskra Artikler – e [Cluster]
Pixelord – I Don’t Need This [Infinite Machine]
Gultskra Artikler – Destroy [Umor Rex]
The Future Sound of London – Blue Green [FSOL Digital]
The Future Sound of London – Troxós [FSOL Digital]
Aria Rostami – Delta [Aria Rostami Bandcamp]
Aria Rostami – Midori [Audiobulb]
Aria Rostami – Denizens [Crash Symbols]
Aria Rostami – Vietnamoses [Aria Rostami Bandcamp]
Julia Holter – Vasquez [Domino]
Julia Holter – Tragedy Finale [Leaving Records/Domino]
Julia Holter – Marienbad [RVNG Intl./Domino]
Julia Holter – World [Domino]
Julia Holter – How Long? [Domino]

Listen again — ~106MB