Long and short, tonight’s tracks take us from Canadian punk genius through a post-dubstep lens, to something like anti-hop, to analogue synth ambience and dark ambience, to beautiful post-classical sound-art with a post-dubstep/r’n’b bent. HOWZAT!
LISTEN AGAIN via FBi’s on-demand streaming, or the podcast/link at the bottom of the playlist.

Starting with my favourite punk band, NoMeansNo – so awesome to be able to play them on the show without having to make excuses. Earlier this year they put out a tour 12″ with four remixes on it, including fellow Canadian and NoMeansNo fan Deadbeat. The standout for me is Shackleton, surprisingly since I usually find his music too oppressive. I do keep wanting this track to break out into some kind of mad drum’n’bass workout, but hey – it’s Shackleton. It’s a brilliant earlyish NoMeansNo tune brilliantly reimagined.

Last year Death Grips, er, exploded onto the scene with some psychedelic videos and the Exmilitary “mixtape” (really their debut album), all as free downloads. It’s the kind of intensely tough, heavy electronics that characterised early grime, with electronic bass & scribbly sounds plus Zach Hill‘s drums being practically the only thing underlying the relentless rap/spoken word of MC Ride. Epic Records signed them for what was going to be 2 albums this year, but after they finished NO LOVE DEEP WEB they discovered that it wasn’t going to come out till next year. Pissed off (not sure if this was the only reason), they decided to release it FOR FREE themselves, from their SoundCloud and direct from their website (WARNING: uncensored erect male member if you follow the link inside). It’s miles better than The Money Store, the album Epic did release earlier this year.

The electronic backing of these Death Grips tracks slides nicely into something a lot old-sounding, but also just released: Chris Madak aka Bee Mask is one of those young noise-affiliated artists doing awesome stuff with longform ambient sonic sculptures of analogue synths. There’s a huge debt to prog and krautrock, of course, in this music, and it’s kind of weird that after the most overblown of the prog sounds became demonized by punk as the great evil of the previous generation, it’s where the current noise set have gravitated. Politics(?) aside, it’s excellent music, so enjoy it.

Also on Brisbane’s ROOM40, ambient of a darker, more oppressive sort comes from pinkcourtesyphone aka Richard Chartier. An sound artist of some renown, Chartier also runs the Line label, and in a nice exchange, just put out a new release from ROOM40’s Lawrence English (which we’ll hear from in a couple of weeks…) Under his pinkcourtesyphone alias he’s able to expand into somewhat less minimal, abstruse zones, with spooky sampled vocals and cavernous reverb on the occasional beats. Very fine indeed.

When AXXONN started it was a duo of Tom Hall with Ian Rogers of No Anchor, and it was an outlet for awesome noise/drone. For the last album and this new one, though, it’s reverted to being Tom (mostly) solo, with the noise roots channeled through a electro-pop (albeit without vocals and pretty challenging for the mainstream) sensibility. It’s interesting to compare these sounds with Tom’s stellar solo (under his own name) album from last year: it’s a similar aesthetic, but the album’s more sparkly and definitely more ambient. The new AXXONN album Beyond Light is out in a couple of weeks.

And the rest of tonight’s show was taken up by the amazing sounds of UK’s William Yates aka Memotone. A multi-instrumentalist, he sits nicely in the post-dubstep/r’n’b axis of artists like James Blake, Downliners Sekt and compatriots on the Black Acre label, but mixed in with the beats and bass is scintillating sound-art and post-classical composition: piano, strings, clattering percussion and plenty of space.
We’ll see whether my obsession wanes, but I played a good cross-section of excellent stuff tonight, including a number of free downloads you can grab now (see his music page). The digital-only Hands EP and the new album I Sleep. At Waking are deep and varied and will surely be among the top releases of the year. Dig it.

NoMeansNo – Dark Ages (Shackleton‘s My Goal’s Beyond remix) [self-released]
Death Grips – No Love [self-released]
Death Grips – Guillotine [self-released]
Death Grips – Artificial death in the west [self-released]
Bee Mask – Vaporware [ROOM40]
pinkcourtesyphone – sans motif [ROOM40]
AXXONN – Sky’s One Kite [Sonoptik]
Tom Hall – Chased By Demons Through Vacant Lands [Complicated Dance Steps]
AXXONN – Outback Wonderland [Sonoptik]
Memotone – Onset / Stalker [Black Acre]
Memotone – Sleep it Off [A Future Without]
Memotone – Lost Hours [Black Acre]
Memotone – Sleeping With The Insects [Bad Panda] {free download!}
Memotone – Nightshift [Raised By Records]
Memotone – Dark Under The Eyes [Boiler Room SoundCloud] {free download!}
Memotone – Sad Sack [free from Memotone website]
Memotone – Don’t Come Looking [A Future Without]
Memotone – Down Illusion [Black Acre]

Listen again — ~ 106MB

Space beats, dubstep-meets-’80s-pop, intricate drum’n’bass, improvtronica, field recordings meet ambient, post-classical meets noise, we’ve got it all tonight!
LISTEN AGAIN via the usual methods: stream online, download below or podcast.

Collarbones‘ long-awaited second album was FBi’s album of the week last week, and deservedly so. It’s even more influenced by their love of r’n’b, and perhaps not as much is typical UFog fare, but they still love constructing their music out of unusual chunks of sound (tiny vocal samples etc). “Soul Hologram” is more along the glitchy lines of their earlier work, while “Teenage Dream” is perhaps as close as they’ll get to a dubstep beat, which takes us nicely into the next selections…

Mala‘s one of the undisputed kings of dubstep, since the beginning, and has made and released some of the most iconoclastic tunes of the genre, solo, as part of DMZ and with his Deep Medi label. Initially, Gilles Peterson’s idea of having Mala collaborate with Cuban musicians seemed a bit odd – Mala’s roots are Jamaican, and his music is dark, heavy, slow-moving in ways that I couldn’t imagine gelling with Cuban music’s rhythms and jazzy sensuality. But he’s made it work, especially on some of the highlight tracks – mostly, I think, by making classic dubstep rather than trying to warp his sound. It’s beautiful when the Cuban piano chords, percussion or bass sneak through here and there, but it’s certainly more “Mala” than “Cuba”.

Young Scottish producer Rudi Zygadlo is certainly not a dubstep traditionalist. On his first album and this new one he hangs his ’80s(?) pop vocals, odd quasi-classical string arrangements and post-Zappa jazz off a post-dubstep framework… it’s unlike anything anyone else is doing. It’s on that borderline between totes naff and pretty cool, but heck, I enjoy it :)

Great to hear another excellent song with Martina Topley Bird on Clark‘s new EP. For all that it’s been described as the dancefloor cousin of the album Iradelphic, to me it doesn’t sound that different. He can be a lot more techno than this – but I prefer him in this mode anyway. The last track, which I also played, seems like classic ’90s ambient idm, of the like that µ-Ziq used to make. Keep the faith, Christopher!

Awesome that Finnish d’n’b/breaks maestro Fanu has just setup a Bandcamp for himself. We get to grab his earliest 12″s for a steal, plus there’s a whole free album’s worth of unreleased tracks! But peeps, if you’re partaking of the free shit, consider buying something too m’kay? Fanu’s a master at intricate break choppery at all tempos, but he doesn’t skimp on melody, bass and all the rest. And he has one or two very fine female vocal collaborators too. Not to be missed.

Speaking of d’n’b technicians, you probably couldn’t be unaware of my obsession with Icarus, and both members have any number of side projects going on. Sam Britton releases solo records as Isambard Khroustalov (nope, no idea why), but here with Fiium Shaarrk he’s collaborating with Rudi Fischerlehner on drums and Maurizio Ravalico on percussion, so it’s pretty free improv (like a lot of his stuff), but also pretty rhythmic. I’ll be playing some more from this soon for sure.

Sydney’s Kate Carr‘s doing amazing work with her Flaming Pines label and I have two new releases to spin tonight, both (as usual) mixing field recordings and more “musical” elements. First up is a split between Kate Carr herself, with natural sounds brushing up against electric guitar, and the always-amazing Gail Priest mixing vocals in with her electronics – reminiscent of Motion Sickness of Time Travel (or is it the other way round?)

Also on Flaming Pines is young Perth artist Michael Terren, who dragged an upright piano into a field in his childhood farm, and the sounds of birds and cows coexist with his minimalist piano pieces without (potentially) the need for any fancy mixing. And it’s beautiful music, which helps!

And another split release follows, from two contemporary noise/not-noise artists who are willing to bury true beauty beneath squalling distortion or awesomely ugly digital edits. Rene Hell comes on all neo-classical on his side, with screetching noise over pensive piano, somewhat reminiscent of Burning Star Core. Oneohtrix Point Never, meanwhile, comes on all early Fennesz, with glitching micro-samples.

We finish with not a split release but a collaboration between Edinburgh-based sound artist Matthew Collings & Sweden’s Dag Rosenqvist (no longer Jasper TX), with beautiful acoustic sounds, drones and heavy noise, on an essential 3″ CD from Hibernate.

Collarbones – Missing [Two Bright Lakes]
Collarbones – Soul Hologram [Two Bright Lakes]
Collarbones – Teenage Dream [Two Bright Lakes]
Mala – Curfew [Brownswood Recordings]
Mala – Changuito [Brownswood Recordings]
Rudi Zygadlo – Russian Dolls [Planet µ]
Rudi Zygadlo – Catharine [Planet µ]
Rudi Zygadlo – Black Rhino [Planet µ]
Clark – Secret Slow Show (feat. Martina Topley Bird) [Warp]
Clark – Dove In Flames [Warp]
Fanu – Next To The Divine One I Awake [Lightless/Fanu Bandcamp]
Fanu – Going Home [Fanu Bandcamp] {free release!}
Fanu – Controversial [Fanu Bandcamp] {free release!}
Fanu – Salem (with Gigi) [Lightless/Fanu Bandcamp]
Fiium Shaarrk – We Advance Covered [Not Applicable]
Kate Carr – an inky night [Flaming Pines/Metal Bitch Recordings]
Gail Priest – randolph’s dream [Flaming Pines/Metal Bitch Recordings]
Michael Terren – Cureakling [Flaming Pines]
Michael Terren – These Ones [Flaming Pines]
Rene Hell – Meta Concrete [NNA Tapes]
Oneohtrix Point Never – The Letter [NNA Tapes]
Matthew Collings & Dag Rosenqvist – Wonderland Part One [Hibernate]
Matthew Collings & Dag Rosenqvist – Precipice [Hibernate]

Listen again — ~ 179MB

Huge amount of stuff came in this week, of which I managed to play perhaps 2/3. Which is fine, because more great stuff next week!
Huge special on Talk Talk, mind you, took up much of the second half — due to the release this week of the 2CD tribute compilation Spirit of Talk Talk.
LISTEN AGAIN as usual… stream online at FBi, subscribe to podcast, download below.

Opening track tonight comes courtesy of the lovely string duo Geese, who sent me their remix of trip-hoppy collective Rude Audio. Geese remixes are always pretty much amazing, and this is no exception — bouncing bows and driving rhythms, most excellent. No idea what the original sounds like, mind you :)

And then we dive into a pile of awesome tunes from Californian solo artist yyu. His new album’s on the tape (and Bandcamp) label Beer on the Rug, but he has a bunch of stuff also on his own Bandcamp, and it’s the kind of bewildering music I love, never settling on one particular genre, with strummy indiefolk tunes being interrupted by glitching edits in the middle, beats that would suit the Tri-Angle label and minimal glitchscapes. All with excellent musicianship and songwriting charmingly hidden by ramshackle production. Love it.

From Brisbane, the rather unsettling ambience and spoken samples of Guatemala seemed to flow on nicely. Reminiscent of the most mysterious of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol II, it’s one of the two first releases on new Brisbane label Duskdarter, off to an excellent start.

Skipping now down to Melbourne, we join Children of the Wave for their second album. It pretty much carries on from where 2008’s Carapace left off, which is awesome: odd song structures with ambient interludes (or prefaces), quasi-beats here and there, genuine songs floating out of weird world samples, and some very fine guest musicians. One of the Aussie album highlights of the year so far.

And then, because I’ve been a fan since the start, we had one track from the new Grizzly Bear album. It’s certainly their most pop, one could say MOR, album yet, but still pretty great, and this song in particular has an ending that’s just straight out of the Talk Talk songbook, as everything drops down to the basics, with muffled loping percussion, clarinet, piano and muted screeching strings. And the last 20 seconds are just gorgeous.

And thus we come to Talk Talk. A lot of people have problems with cover albums and remix albums. They feel they’re superfluous, don’t add anything to the originals, are just a lazy maybe? I’m not sure to be honest. But to deride covers is to deny music’s millenia-long history. Any classical musician spends the majority of their time playing & interpreting other people’s music, and most folk, jazz and world music involves the same.
That said, the last 2 1/2 Talk Talk albums are some of the most exquisitely poised, perfectly conceived and executed music ever recorded. There, I said it. Well, they are. So what can an artist covering these tunes hope to add? I suppose what this double CD set achieves, undoubtedly, is the status of a tribute. All the artists are extremely respectful of the music, and many turn in deeply honest, emotion-laden takes on some wonderful songs. Some of the entirely straight renditions like Lone Wolf‘s “Wealth” and S. Carey‘s “I Believe In You” are lovely to hear even if they can’t be expected to surpass the originals, just because of this. Frequent collaborators Nils Frahm & Peter Broderick join with Goldfrapp/Coldplay string arranger and guitarist Davide Rossi for a version of one of my favourites, “It’s Getting Late In The Evening”, setting the synths (I think) of the instrumental as close-scored strings, but losing some of the edge of the original.
On the other hand, some stretch and bend the originals into something new, so Matthias Vogt Trio set “April 5th” as instrumental jazz piano quintet, with upright bass and piano taking turns with the melody. It’s occasionally too pleasant, but a beautifully executed idea. And Depeche Mode’s Alan Wilder, who helped curate the compilation, appears twice as Recoil. I played his take on “Inheritance”, featuring spoken words from Linton Kwesi Johnson and sung vocals from Paul Marshall of Lone Wolf, in a kind of Mezzanine-era Massive Attack interpretation. It shouldn’t work, but it really does.
A lot of the majesty of Talk Talk, which influenced so many bands that came later, is the uncanny restraint in these works. The least successful covers are lacking in this regard, or lack the jagged edge of the improv aspects found particularly on Laughing Stock and Mark Hollis’ self-titled solo album. I played a few of the originals, too, just because, including the lo-fi rough & ready indie romanticism of Heligoland, the solo project of producer Tim Friese-Greene, who was so integral in their latter-day sound.

Rude Audio – Wise Blood (Geese remix) [direct from Geese]
yyu – when you said that [Beer on the Rug]
yyu – moo.1 [yyu Bandcamp]
yyu – SHOVELKITENOW [yyu Bandcamp]
yyu – BREAKFASTSANDWICH [yyu Bandcamp]
yyu – yyyy [Beer on the Rug]
Guatemala – A Dying Girl’s Message [Duskdarter]
Guatemala – Parapet [Duskdarter]
Children of the Wave – Far Away Choirs [Sensory Projects]
Children of the Wave – Kora [Sensory Projects]
Children of the Wave – Dip Your Toe Into The Water [unreleased?]
Children of the Wave – Start Stop [Sensory Projects]
Grizzly Bear – What’s Wrong? [Warp]
Matthias Vogt Trio – April 5th [Fierce Panda]
Nils Frahm/Peter Broderick/Davide Rossi – It’s Getting Late In The Evening [Fierce Panda]
Talk Talk – The Rainbow [Parlophone]
Mark Hollis – The colour of spring [Polydor]
Recoil (feat. Linton Kwesi Johnson & Paul Marshall) – Inheritance [Fierce Panda]
Do Make Say Think – New Grass [Fierce Panda]
Talk Talk – Ascension Day [Parlophone]
Heligoland – Creosote & Tar [Calcium Chloride]

Listen again — ~ 102MB

We’ve got post-classical, drone, even some prog-metal later on…
LISTEN AGAIN as per usual – link’s at bottom, it’s in the podcast, and of course you can stream on demand from FBi.

It’s great to have something new from Edwin Montgomery to play you. His cinematic (that word comes up a lot with his work), post-rocky sounds have graced the show a lot in the past, but it’s been a little while, and he’s back with an EP of honest-to-goodness songs! It’s somewhat misleadingly called 4 Songs, given it has 6 tracks, but 4 of them are songs. Ought to get more widespread airplay!

We preview a couple more tracks from the awesome new duo from Adam Trainer and Matt Rösner aka Pablo Dali, Gilded. Beautiful acoustic and electronic music which is too minimalist to postrock or indie, but too much going on for drone. They’ll be in Sydney in a bit over a month – I’ll let you know!

Also a reprise from last week, Edinburgh trio Hiva Oa bring us more gorgeous acoustic/experimental sounds, from layered cello to strummed indiefolk with an electronic edge. I like the way it doesn’t try and fit into any trends — it’s just very varied, very idiosyncratic stuff. And beautiful.

And before our big special for the night, a bunch of tunes from the wonderful Fieldhead, late of Leeds (er, Leeds area before someone corrects me), once upon a time a member of The Declining Winter, more recently living in Canada. His new album continues the grainy textures and precise beats of the his first, with perhaps more emphasis on the acoustic elements. Highly recommended.

And now the majority of the second hour of the show is dedicated to the music of the wondrous Tin Hat (Trio) and their violinist/vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, one of musical heroes. I first heard them at a venue in Manhattan’s East Village called Tonic, which was closely associated with the Tzadik label, although Tin Hat are west coast representatives. Mark Orton’s guitar skips around tango rhythms while Carla Kihlstedt’s violin and Rob Burger’s accordion entwine in gorgeous old-worlde harmonies. But there’s a clue in the hidden track, where Mike Patton guests in semi-disguise, and not longer after we find Carla appearing on the last Mr Bungle album. Still, despite their connections with experimental and improvised music, Tin Hat, as a trio and later augmented, always emphasise the very approachable, melodic, tender side of their music, incorporating Americana, jazz, klezmer and classical traditions in a playful way.

Their new album, the first in a good few years, is a tribute to the poetry of e.e. cummings, one of my favourite poets (speaking, admittedly, as not much of a connoisseur of poetry). I can’t really speak for whether these are sensitive settings of the words; the one poem I’m very familiar with (“anyone lived in a pretty how town“) didn’t really sound like that in my head, but also seems to fit very well with what they’ve done. To me it’s a wonderful opportunity to hear a whole new album of Tin Hat’s fabulous music, benefiting from the Ben Goldberg‘s heavy contra alto clarinet, while Goldber’s clarinet, the violin and new member Rob Reich’s accordion weave familiarly delicious harmonies elsewhere.
And Kihlstedt is as accomplished a singer as she is a violinist and arranger. I wanted to play HEAPS of her stuff too but time and sense intervened, so we just had a few: one solo track and one from her trio 2 Foot Yard (named after the first album with a similar lineup), exemplifying incredible chamber arrangements with a punk spirit, twisty harmonic shifts and of course brilliant musicianship; and one track from the legendary Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, featuring Kihlstedt and her partner Matthias Bossi alongside Dan Rathbun and Nils Frykdahl in a bizarre amalgam of prog, metal, classical and… who knows what else; and finally a track from Kihlstedt & Bossi’s latest project, Rabbit Rabbit Radio, a monthly subscription service delivering one new track, plus video, images and words from the two plus regular collaborators. A treasure trove of awesome.

After all this, I managed to slip in one track from the lovely Memory Drawings, some pretty folk/post-classical from a free Bandcamp EP.

And then we close with something pretty bizarre and cool: Machinedrum lovely a track from the end of a Boards of Canada live bootleg so much, he decided to recreate it, piece by piece — beats, synths, samples and all. His “edit” features elements from the original (including the crowd cheering at the end), but sounds very much like Machinedrum, but whether it’s an authentic rendition of BoC or not, it’s a bloody good track.

Edwin Montgomery – The Abyss [available from Bandcamp]
Edwin Montgomery – Sunday Night [available from Bandcamp]
Gilded – Tyne [Hidden Shoal]
Gilded – Expand/Contract [Hidden Shoal]
Hiva Oa – Seadog [mini50records]
Hiva Oa – These Hands [mini50records]
Fieldhead – a correction [Gizeh Records]
Fieldhead – this train is a rainbow [Home Assembly Music]
Fieldhead – he’d found the sea [Home Assembly Music]
Fieldhead – northern canada [Gizeh Records]
tin hat – the enormous room [New Amsterdam Records]
tin hat – unchanging [New Amsterdam Records]
tin hat trio – fire of ada [Angel Records]
Tin Hat Trio – Helium [Angel Records]
Tin Hat Trio – Nickel Mountain [Ropeadope]
Carla Kihlstedt – Rooting for the Shy Librarian [Tzadik]
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum – Formicary [Polymorph Recording]
2 Foot Yard – Borrowed Arms [Yard Work – self-released] {try CD Baby}
Rabbit Rabbit Radio – The Curious One [Rabbit Rabbit Radio, now available from Bandcamp]
tin hat – little i [New Amsterdam Records]
Memory Drawings – High Sea Light [free from Bandcamp]
Boards of Canada – Untitled (Machinedrum edit) [available from SoundCloud]

Listen again — ~ 101MB