Indiepop, indiefolk, pipe organ drone/noise, idm & techno, postrock… we’ve got it all!
Next Sunday night I’ll be heading back from Canberra so I’ll tune in to hear Heli Newton filling in. And a couple of weeks later I’m off touring in the UK so Heli gets another 2 Sundays. But for now I’ll see you all on Sunday the 24th of May.

LISTEN AGAIN FOR THE FIRST OR MORETH TIME. It’s east. Podcast here, stream there.

Brian Campeau‘s been making his own music & producing others’ around Sydney for a good decade now since leaving Canada for frankly warmer climes. He’s maybe best known round here for playing with Elana Stone’s band and recording her music, but he’s also seen behind the live mixing at various venues, and produces a wide range of styles for different people. His music doesn’t usually convey the metal and other weird shit he loves so much, but for someone with such a pretty voice he goes in some pretty leftfield directions at the drop of a hat. Like, say, fellow Canadian Benoît Pioulard he’ll drop drone tracks in between pieces of indiepop, and he’s wont to slam in digital edits and clicky beats under acoustic guitars and strings…
His first album came out in 2006 as a double CD – two completely different versions of the same album, with songs radically reworked between the two. Since then there’s only been one more album and a few scattered singles, so the newie is very welcome!

Dublin’s Lakker have been making electronic music in one form or another since at least 2007. Now resident in Berlin they’re making impeccably-produced techno for Belgium’s legendary R&S Records. They’ve tapped into the recent fertile vein of mixing noise & industrial elements in with the electronic beats, and switching between breakbeats, drum machines and techno thump… In fact, you can hear the noise influence way back in their 2007 debut album (still available from their Bandcamp!), and the idm & ambient influences track right through their sound as well. The Berlin influence seems to kick in around 2012 or 2013, as the production gets simultaneously wider and tighter. Nowadays they seem wholly in control of their sound, whether incorporating vocals (indeed a whole choir on one track), field recordings, piano or just heaps of bass. Bass is good. Bass is a winner. Lakker. You want it.
Oh, and the new album is called Tundra and it is indeed appropriately frosty and windswept. It’s a beauty.

British trio Fiium Shaarrk are one part Icarus (the non-Sydney-based half Sam Britton) and two parts percussion/drums, and thus channel the Icarus-style post-drum’n’bass stylings through jazz-trained live beats and improv along with electro-acoustic sound processing. There’s a world/jazz feel in there along with basslines which could be electro-funk or could be inherited from Britton’s junglist past.

In 2008, when it came to summing up the year on Utility Fog I chose a few top albums, and among them was the debut album from at the time solo artist Bleeding Heart Narrative. It was predominantly the work of cellist, multi-instrumentalist & producer Oliver Barrett, but soon BHN became a band, stretching the noise/soundscape/postrock stylings of the debut album into something more like indie songwriting. Eventually Bleeding Heart Narrative broke up and Petrels became the main output of Barrett (aside from various squalling, challenging cello-mangling EPs), again maybe initially a solo project, but expanding into all kinds of psych/kraut/postrock. The new album is a kind of concept album although I’m not sure of the concept, with long interrelated songs and a massive three-part composition at the end which climaxes at the start of part three and then goes on for another 9 minutes of motorik riffing and chanting. Pretty wonderful.

The great thing about being from Australia is that you’re always an ex-pat, even if it’s been over a decade since you lived here. So John Chantler is still an ex-pat Aussie, originally from Brisbane, even though he’s spent a lot of time in Japan, then lived in the London for the best part of a decade, had a big hand in experimental music hub Cafe OTO and for a time running the UK wing of ROOM40. Now relocated with his wife to Stockholm, Sweden, a comfortable home for electronic music, and he took with him a bunch of recordings of the pipe organ from London’s St John-at-Hackney church. He processed these sounds at the Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm and is now releasing the finished product on CD and vinyl (and digital) via his newly-established label 1703 Skivbolaget. The album’s out in August so I’ll have another opportunity to play these massive and detailed sounds again.

Brian Campeau – Interlude B [Art As Catharsis]
Brian Campeau – How We Knew [Art As Catharsis]
Brian Campeau – mtl / montreal (version 1) [self-released debut album two faces]
Brian Campeau – like a girl (version 2) [self-released debut album two faces]
Brian Campeau – reinventing myself (single version) [self-released]
Brian Campeau – then came the sun [self-released]
Brian Campeau – Cutting Ties (single version) [Brian Campeau Bandcamp]
Brian Campeau – So Long, Angela [Art As Catharsis]
Lakker – Echtrae feat. Eileen Carpio) [R&S Records]
Lakker – Milch feat. Eileen Carpio) [R&S Records]
Lakker – Julystep [Acroplane/Alphabetset]
Lakker – PanShelac [Lazybird/Lakker Bandcamp]
Lakker – fmsnw [Lakker Bandcamp]
Lakker – Static & Amp [Blueprint]
Lakker – Coal Bath [Candela Rising]
These Hidden Hands – Ivy (Lakker remix) [Hidden Hundred]
Lakker – Pylon [R&S Records]
Fiium Shaarrk – Fear Of Mapping [Not Applicable]
Fiium Shaarrk – Krypton Tunning [On The Corner]
Petrels – L. Caution part three [Denovali]
John Chantler – The Long Shadow of Decline pt II [1703 Skivbolaget]

Listen again — ~111MB

Switching from last week’s strings to mostly electronics tonight!

LISTEN AGAIN and relive the then and the now! The podcast is here, the stream is there.

Melbourne’s molten wing has just released a follow-up to his stunning debut we seek a new beginning from last year, with four tracks of frosty electronics that would be at home on a ’90s idm release but equally don’t seem dated at all. When the first EP came out, the web presence was almost totally anonymous – an entirely mysterious artist & release which just arrived with no fanfare. But it was too good to be a debut release, and it turns out that Molten Wing is an alias for a Melbourne artist, originally from the UK, who releases folky indiepop as Muckle Pup.
Regardless, this is highest quality home listening electronica and you should listen to it as you go to sleep.

The Crooked Fiddle Band manage an impressive feat and feature not just on the string special but also tonight’s electronic follow-up. Both last week’s and this week’s tracks are self-remixes, taking the songs into more beat-driven and even electronic territories.

Grime legend Wiley has a new album out on Ninja Tune(!) and they’ve put out a couple of limited remixes in the lead up. This week’s is a pretty amazing junglist take by Paul Woolford’s Special Request alias.

Machinedrum was one of the artists responsible for taking Chicago footwork into new territories, mixing it up with idm, dubstep and drum’n’bass. He’s just released a tribute to the late DJ Rashad, probably the single artist most responsible for bringing footwork to the rest of the world. All proceeds go to Rashad’s family and estate, so it’s worth dropping some pounds sterling on. We also heard a beautiful tech-steppy remix of Machinedrum by dBridge, one of the artists who’s rejuvinated drum’n’bass in recent years, and who runs the excellent Exit Records.

The latest EP on Exit Records is something pretty special. A hugely impressive debut EP from new drum’n’bass artist Fixate, referencing rave and various subgenres of drum’n’bass all in the bouncy title track, and darker territories elsewhere. It’s certainly dancefloor-friendly, but reminds me as much of idm and drill’n’bass as mainstream drum’n’bass.

Speaking of “drill’n’bass”, nobody embodied that somewhat derisory moniker better in the ’90s than Squarepusher. From earliest releases on the Spymania label to his debut album on Rephlex and then his longtime home on Warp, he was the name on everybody’s lips when they talked about insanely complex beat juggling and sweet melodies. People also complained that the bedroom drill’n’bass heads had forgotten about the “bass” bit in drum’n’bass and it’s true that they fixated more on the crazy beats than the half-time dub-influenced sub-bass. The accusation was that they’d never heard drum’n’bass in the clubs with the massive bassbins, but I suspect they knew what they were doing – Squarepusher himself, after all, was and is a mean funk bass player and would pull out his bass guitar to noodle jazz fusion basslines along with the insane drum programming.
For me it was probably the jazz fusion that was the undoing of my love affair with the ‘pusher. Not so much the initial lo-fi jazz detour of Music Is Rotted One Note, but the unfocused fusion/prog/everything of a succession of albums in the 2000s left me not caring very much. Even the remote-controlled Japanese robots of recent years were still playing… jazz fusion.
The new album is certainly back to more pure electronics and has plenty of beat madness – but it suffers a bit from the same thing recent Amon Tobin has, which is a seeming desire to be as tough and up-front with the sound as possible. Maybe inspired by the EDM of recent years? Or just current norms in digital production. It’s a shame, but it’s still quite enjoyable.

We finish with a long piece of live improv from ambiq, featuring Sun Electric‘s Max Loderbauer on the Buchla 200e modular synth along with Samuel Rohrer on drums & electronics and Claudio Puntin on clarinet, percussion & electronics. It’s actually rather tonal and organic-sounding, not as out there as a lot of modular synth stuff – or indeed live improv stuff. This track takes its time to get going, but ends up with some nice deep grooves going on.

molten wing – solstice [molten wing Bandcamp]
molten wing – no unwinding this [molten wing Bandcamp]
molten wing – watching waiting [molten wing Bandcamp]
molten wing – four zero zero zero zero [molten wing Bandcamp]
The Crooked Fiddle Band – Vanishing Shapes (Intense Suspense Density Remix) [unreleased self-remix, stream on SoundCloud]
Wiley – From The Outside (Special Request VIP) [Ninja Tune]
Machinedrum – The $$$ [Machinedrum Bandcamp]
Machinedrum – Rise N Fall (dBridge‘s Fall N Rise Remix) [Ninja Tune]
Fixate – Throwback Therapy [Exit Records]
Fixate – Alive [Exit Records]
Squarepusher – Baltang Ort [Warp]
Squarepusher – Theme From Ernest Borgnine [Rephlex]
Squarepusher – Port Rhombus [Warp]
Squarepusher – massif (stay strong) [Warp]
Squarepusher – Anirog D9 [Warp]
Squarepusher – My Red Hot Car [Warp]
Squarepusher – Exjag Nives [Warp]
ambiq – toxic underground [arjunamusic]

Listen again — ~109MB

Stringy, but not tough. Cello there. This is your Utility Fog for the week. Not the first time I’ve done a strings feature, but it’s always fun and this week we have an impressive range from experimental electronics, laptop folk through dubby ambient, doom and postrock…

LISTEN AGAIN, LISTEN EARLY, LISTEN OFTEN. Seriously, this is good stuff. Podcast it here, stream it there.

Starting in Sydney. Last year Nick Wales sent me some unreleased material which I was very excited to play on the show as it combined his classical composition skills and viola with excellent electronic production. Nick’s been making music for a couple of decades now, including with his once-string-quartet-now-postrock-band CODA, and he’s collaborated with many people in that time. He’s also spent a lot of time composing music for theatre & dance productions, and recently he & Sarah Blasko put together a work for Sydney Dance Company called Emergence which will be released in the month or so. Although both tracks tonight feature vocals, only one is really a “song”, but musically compelling they certainly are.

The Crooked Fiddle Band are a fascinating hybrid of stringy folk musics (gypsy, celtic, Australian) with postrock – and after commissioning some interesting remixes from other folks, they’ve also tried their hand at it themselves. Their SoundCloud features a couple of self-remixes, including tonight’s remix of album highlight “Puncture”, and a beat-centric almost drum’n’bassy take on “Vanishing Shapes” which I’ll play on another night for sure. Catch them Saturday May 2nd at Hermann’s Bar along with the very stringy Hinterlandt Ensemble and the Czech folktronica duo DVA.

Paul de Jong has long been one of my favourite cellists in the liminal world of folktronica/laptop experimentalism, and he may have been one of yours without your knowing, as he was the cellist in the beloved duo The Books. The many touching, disturbing and thought-provoking found sounds & found spoken samples in their music could as easily have come from him as Nick Zammuto too, and this wonderful new album demonstrates that the creative production techniques of his old band have well and truly rubbed off on him too. I can’t stress how great this new album is, and if you loved the folk-meets-electronic-meets-postrock side of The Books, you should rush to find it.

Cécile Schott aka Colleen definitely fits into our string theme, and indeed our cello theme, even though for the first few albums of her career she made acoustic-sounding music out of either pure samples or music boxes… But she has a background in cello, and eventually began introducing the viola da gamba (a member of an older string family, still played in some Baroque music, with a particualr breathy tone) along with acoustic guitar and woodwind into the sound – and on the last couple of albums, vocals have appeared. The new album on Thrill Jockey introduces some surprising dub elements into the mix, although her earliest releases show her interest in splicing samples in interesting ways.

Alison Chesley aka Helen Money featured on the show a few weeks back with a new EP/mini-album collaboration with the one & only Jarboe of Swans etc.
Helen Money is her “doom cello” alias, and it’s amazing that I hadn’t come across her before. So tonight we have tracks from all three solo albums as well as the Jarboe collaboration. Cello through every pedal a metal guitarist would have in their arsenal as well as played straight (albeit played hard). Chesley has collaborated with many heavy bands over the years including MONO, and her latest solo album features drumming by Jason Roeder of Neurosis and Sleep. So yeah, quite the pedigree.

Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld‘s duo album on Constellation brought with it high expectations, all well fulfilled here. Colin Stetson gets in here despite not being a string player because of Neufeld’s gorgeous violin playing. I first came across Stetson’s unique saxophonic vision when he jumped up on stage with My Brightest Diamond at the Laurie Anderson co-curated Vivid Festival in 2010. His circular breathing, multiphonic, percussive sax playing was like none other. Sarah Neufeld plays violin in The Arcade Fire and postrockers Bell Orchestre. Solo she, like Stetson, focuses almost solely on her instrument, using double stops and other techniques, sounding at times folky, at times ambient or referencing her rock background.
Their sound together has the heaviness and darkness of Stetson’s music with some of the folk elements of Neufeld’s, melodic elements from both including wordless vocals, violin noise solos… it’s pretty damn great!

Nick Wales & Sarah Blasko – Pain Is A Number [Create/Control]
Nick Wales & Sarah Blasko – Belongil [Create/Control]
The Crooked Fiddle Band – Puncture (Melancholy mix) [unreleased self-remix, stream on SoundCloud]
Paul de Jong – Debt Free [Temporary Residence]
the books – the lemon of pink [Tomlab/Temporary Residence]
The Books – Smack My Bishop [Temporary Residence]
The Books – Foreign Country and Western [Temporary Residence]
Paul de Jong – Number Man (feat. Mia Doi Todd) [Red Hot] {based on the well-known 1st Prelude in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier by JS Bach as adaped by Charles Gounod}
Paul de Jong – Baxter @73 [Temporary Residence]
Colleen – Captain Of None [Thrill Jockey]
Colleen – everyone alive wants answers [Leaf]
Colleen – blue sands [Leaf]
Colleen – The Weighing of the Heart [Second Language]
Colleen – Holding Horses [Thrill Jockey]
Helen Money – Radio Recorders [Profound Lore]
Helen Money – Jackson [Cellobird Records]
Helen Money – Waterwalk [Table of the Elements]
Helen Money & Jarboe – For My Father [Aurora Borealis]
Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld – With the Dark Hug of Time [Constellation]
Colin Stetson – Fear of the unknown and the blazing sun feat. Laurie Anderson & Shara Worden [Constellation]
Sarah Neufeld – You Are The Field [Constellation]
Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld – The Rest of Us [Constellation]

Listen again — ~105MB

OK, so yesterday was Record Store Day. It’s a silly thing really. Record stores are awesome – in fact they’re just about my favourite thing in the entire world, along with book & comic stores – but RSD just makes their lives very difficult for one day of the year while making money for big labels with mostly dumb reissues. Of course there are some special releases which are awesome and just need to come out on CD as well, c’mon. Here’s a great in-depth article on how RSD affects smaller stores…

LISTEN AGAIN because your ears need a workout, podcast over here, stream on demand over there!

From a special touring/RSD-related 7″ single, we start with a gorgeous Sufjan Stevens track, folky electric piano-based like much of the new album, but with much more electronic production.

Then some tracks from Robotic Empire‘s new Nirvana tribute compilation – it’s Nevermind covers from awesome metal & noisy artists, to match last year’s In Utero one. So many tempting treats, including a nice heavy (but faithful) cover from Torche and a big excitable one from the wonderful Cave In. Tonight, though, we start with contemporary shoegaze band Nothing, who draw from My Bloody Valentine and Jesu, but have also recently covered Low, and take the quietest song from the album and tone it down another notch with piano and feedback.
From last year, Thou take on “Milk It” with a surprising amount of clean vocals among the black metal screaming. As with a lot of their music, it’s strangely moving – see later for more!
And back to Nevermind, the reliable Boris twist “Lithium” into something their own, keeping the structure but making it heavier and more strung out. It’s kind of stunning.

The covers continue with inveterate po-mo prankster Drew Daniel of Matmos, aka The Soft Pink Truth. Over 10 years ago, his second album featured house covers of anarcho-punk songs, but on 2014’s Why Do The Heathen Rage? he takes on classic black metal. Rather than the disco/house music I was expecting, this stuff sounds more like the idm/electronica Daniel grew up with in Matmos, albeit with some tracks featuring a contemporary r’n’b spin, some suggesting rave or even vaguely Alec Empire style digital hardcore/junglisms. It’s all good fun despite (or because of?) the intended queer deconstruction of a music that has played host to some very ugly politics in its history.

Greg Fox takes us on a little detour away from “black metal”, although as drummer in Brooklyn’s Liturgy he’s indelibly part of the scene, for better or worse… But as a solo artist he’s put out a couple of releases using tuned percussion and mallet instruments along with electronics to create some beautiful sparkling textures. As well as some amusing chopped-up metal riffs in there…

So, Liturgy are an interesting prospect. Frontman Hunter Hunt Hendrix attracted a lot of vitriol a few year ago by barracking for “transcendental black metal” in a florid manifesto which is offensive as much for being heavy on Lacanian bullshit terminology as it is for implying that black metal lacks the features of transcendence and adventurousness Hendrix was asking for. In any case, he & Liturgy have become figures of variously suspicion, scorn or at least controversy in the metal world.
Nevertheless, at their best they do create inspiring and exciting music which may transcend black metal only by leaving the genre behind, but whether it’s doom/sludge riffs they’re playing, chants and half-spoken singing, or the familiar blast beats of black metal, there’s a lot that’s great in their music.

We heard New Orleans doom/black metal group Thou earlier covering Nirvana. With deconstructionist black metallers The Body they released a mini-album and EP last year, collected together by Thrill Jockey in the USA and Daymare in Japan. Much of the music is a haze of intense guitar noise and typical black metal screetching. But there are moments of expansive sound work and even some more natural vocals in there. No question, you need to be in the right frame of mind to listen to very much of this stuff, but moments like the ones I chose tonight are everything that metal should be and more.

Now a swift 90° turnaround into neoclassical postrock courtesy of Brisbane’s Nonsemble, self-described as an “indie chamber ensemble”. Although they play other contemporary music live, they’re centred around the compositions of Chris Perren, who we heard featured on the show a few weeks back with his folktronic/electronic solo music and his postrock band Mr Maps. Postrock and math rock are very audible in his compositions, along with clear influences from minimalist and other contemporary composers.
Both their albums feature long compositions broken into (still quite long) movements. Perren’s compositional vision and arrangements remain clear, but the performances (and to some extent the compositions) seem more assured on the new album, due out from English classical crossover label bigo & twigetti soon. It’s lushly produced, accurately & emotively played stuff which should gain them some more traction in this sphere of post-classical, genrefluid music which is quite bustling overseas, particularly in Europe. More power to them!

Sufjan Stevens – Exploding Whale [Asthmatic Kitty]
Nothing – Something In The Way [Robotic Empire]
Thou – Milk It [Robotic Empire]
Boris – Lithium [Robotic Empire]
The Soft Pink Truth – Maniac (originally by Hellhammer) [Thrill Jockey]
The Soft Pink Truth – Ready To Fuck (originally by Sarcófago, feat. Jenn Wasner & M.C. Schmidt) [Thrill Jockey]
Greg Fox – Homoplasmates [Rail Cables]
Greg Fox – Adversary [Rail Cables]
Greg Fox – Lamb [Rail Cables]
Liturgy – Father Vorizen [Thrill Jockey/Daymare]
Liturgy – (untitled bonus for Japan from Aesthethica, also I think available on a split LP with Oval) [Thrill Jockey/Daymare]
Liturgy – Veins Of God [Thrill Jockey/Daymare]
Liturgy – Vitriol (The Soft Pink Truth remix) [Thrill Jockey/Daymare]
The Body & Thou – He Returns to the Place of His Iniquity [Thrill Jockey/Daymare]
The Body & Thou – Lurking Fear [Thrill Jockey/Daymare]
Nonsemble – Practical Mechanics Movement I – The Great Awakening [Nonsemble Bandcamp]
Nonsemble – Practical Mechanics Movement II (MeekSounds Remix) [bigo & twigetti]
Nonsemble – Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke (Movement II) [bigo & twigetti]

Listen again — ~106MB