Good evening folks! Second half of my best-of-2009 special!
Check out last week’s playlist for an indication of the stuff I wanted to play but didn’t manage tonight. THERE’S MORE. I am currently working on the big big 2009 rave-on post, so stay chooned for that one in the next couple of weeks (it’s hard work kidz!) and you’ll get a nice comprehensive list of what I thought was great from 2009.
LISTEN AGAIN to tonight’s show via the link at the bottom of the playlist. For best results, listen to last week’s as well :)

HEY. If you want to hear Utility Fog’s take on dance music, tune in to FBi this Friday (New Year’s Day) from 6-8pm when I fill in on Sunsets! Dubstep, drum’n’bass and a few oddities slipped in to keep people on their toes. Should be FUN.

Burning Star Core – Incurable Beauty of the Master’s Demise [Tiny Mix Tapes]
Ben Frost – Killshot [Bedroom Community]
fieldhead – this train is a rainbow [home assembly music]
Quinta – The Finest Riddle [Tartaruga]
Austin Benjamin Trio – Xenosphere (Andrew Pekler remix) [hellosQuare]
Spartak – Sleet/Skid [hellosQuare]
Alister Spence Trio – neon and rain [Rufus Records]
Inch-time – a handful of dust [Static Caravan]
Giardini di Mirò – La vampa (∞ / ∞∞∞) [Unhip]
Years – Are You Unloved? [Arts & Crafts]
Mr. Maps – Your Heels in Sand, Soul in Pursuit (Lights version) [lofly]
epic45 – the future is blinding [make mine music]
Sweet Billy Pilgrim – Kalypso [SamadhiSound]
Grizzly Bear – Southern Point [Warp]
Andrew Bird – Not a Robot, But a Ghost [Fat Possum]
Psuche – Ulfhenden [Two Bright Lakes]
Au – RR vs. D (Versions version) [Aagoo Records]
A Hawk and a Hacksaw – I am not a gambling man [Leaf]
The Books and José Gonzélez – Cello Song [Red Hot/4AD] {lovely Nick Drake cover!}
Akron/Family – Many Ghosts [Dead Oceans/Spunk]
Beth Jeans Houghton & the Hooves of Destiny – Cruel Francis [Static Caravan]
Heather Woods Broderick – From the Ground [Preservation]
Caethua – Day Break [Preservation]
Animal Collective – What Would I Want? Sky [Domino]
Sufjan Stevens – The BQE, Movement III: Linear Tableau with Intersecting Surprise [Asthmatic Kitty]
Sufjan Stevens – The BQE, Movement IV: Traffic Shock [Asthmatic Kitty]
bleeding heart narrative – colours turn colours [Tartaruga Records]
Danny Norbury – All The Stars Are Out Tonight [Lacie’s Records]
dälek – Gutter Tactics [Ipecac]
Collarbones – Weatherman [Internet Archive – free download!]

Listen again — ~ 187MB

Good evening, and welcome to the first of two Utility Fog Best-of-2009 shows! Starting with a couple of tracks which are both awesome, and both so new (to me) that I haven’t even played them before on the show!
LISTEN AGAIN via link at bottom of playlist. For best results, listen to the following week as well!

Ivan Lisyak’s new 3” EP comes courtesy of boutique label CURT, run by up-and-coming Sydney artist Scissor Lock. The artist link takes you to another outstanding EP (free download) by this Blue Mountains musician.
Carlos Giffoni runs the No Fun label out of Brooklyn, NY, and has released reams of awesome noise, drone and experimental stuff. This track represents the first release in his new analog-synth phase, and it’s an awesome blend of sequenced synth lines and squalling noise. I played it at 45 even though I’m fairly sure it’s meant to be 33 – I quite like it like that though!

After this we went into a journey through some of my favourite music of the year. I’m not sure I have to spiel my way through the whole lot, but I’d be willing to play Ben Frost’s By The Throat among the very top albums of the year, if not the top (heck, one needs a bit of room to move).
I should also say that I missed heaps of stuff this week – of course, because I am doing two best-of shows. So tune in next Sunday night for Sweet Billy Pilgrim, fieldhead, Ramona Falls, Grizzly Bear, Andrew Bird, Animal Collective, Tellaro, The Middle East, Silkie, Burning Star Core, Busdriver, Caethua, Heather Woods Broderick, Dragging Pianos, Dirty Projectors, dälek, Shadow Huntaz, Radian, Psuche, Aaron Martin, Part Timer, er… and the list goes on.
I will be publishing my comprehensive Utility Fog 2009 rave on these pages and also at Cyclic Defrost as usual… soon…

Ivan Lisyak – The Contestant 1 [CURT]
Carlos Giffoni – Techno [No Fun]
Ben Frost – Híbakúsja [Bedroom Community]
Eskmo – Agnus Dei [Ancestor Media]
Eskmo – San Francisco (The Rhythm) [Ancestor Media]
Tranqill – Payroll (Paul White’s Clean Dub) [Planet µ]
Paul White – The Uprising Of The Insane [One Handed Music]
Luke Vibert – De-Pimp Act [Planet µ]
Luke Vibert – A Fine Line [soundofspeed]
Lucky Dragons – honeycomb house parts 1-3 [Atelier Ciseaux, now also available on Moamoo]
Here We Go Magic – Fangela [Western Vinyl]
Fire on Fire – Assanine Race [Young God Records]
Lessons in Time – How very good this feeling is [4-4-2 music]
Telafonica – Time and Distance [4-4-2 music]
Sam Price – Auto Hackney [New Weird Australia]
Jeff Burch – Untitled 1 (The Western Hour) [New Weird Australia]
afxjim – Through the Woods [Feral Media]
Balmorhea – March 4, 1831 [Western Vinyl/Longtime Listener]
Balmorhea – November 1, 1832 (Peter Broderick remix) [Western Vinyl/Longtime Listener]
soccer Committee / Machinefabriek – christopher (for suzanne) (by peter broderick) [Machinefabriek]
soccer Committee / Machinefabriek – for I am distant (taylor deupree remix) [Machinefabriek]
lsd march – ai no sakebi [Important Records]
Icarus – Selfautoparent (Ital Tek remix) [Rump]
Jon Hopkins – Vessel [Domino]
Jon Hopkins – The Low Places (Geese Remix) [Domino]
John Callaghan – Phylactery [Warp] {cover of “Tilapia” by Autechre}
Pimmon – Come Join the Choir Invisible! [Preservation]
the declining winter – haunt the upper hallways [home assembly]

Listen again — ~ 191MB

This week Utility Fog joined the world of Facebook, where you can become a fan and suchlike… You can also follow me on Twitter – I haven’t found a reason to create a special UFog Twitter yet, but if people are interested I could. Remember you can always subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed (rss/atom) or the announcement list too.
LISTEN AGAIN link can be found at the bottom of the playlist as usual. Go download!

Starting with the noise/drone of Yellow Swans, from a just-released live album. Beautiful guitar melodies and harmonic progressions buried in there…
Then we had two bands who played similarly enveloping live gigs in Sydney this weekend – Akron/Family and Animal Collective, both bands at the vanguard of freak folk, whatever that may be :)
Winter North Atlantic’s debut album of lovely folktronica inspired the next batch: I first heard of him via Fieldhead, who sent me his remix (played herein) a good year ago… It’s been some time but the album itself was worth the wait, as we hear here. Northerner had an album on the same label as Fieldhead, and all have remixed each other – that’s how they play around there!
Back to Fieldhead, whose own album is one of the albums of the year I daresay, here represented by a remix from the hard-working Machinefabriek.
Thence we segue into another track from Machinefabriek’s collaboration with Melbourne guitarist Tim Catlin, beautifully produced as always.
Montreal’s glitch king Tim Hecker follows, remixing compatriots Bell Orchestre from an excellent recent remix EP. Not too much of their strings/horns/postrock vibe left here, though.
Next up, the wonderful Tim Shiel aka Faux Pas has a new EP out! One new tune, and a bunch of remixes. We hear from Kane Ikin, one half of Perth band Solo Andata, with a beautiful minimal take with great beats. After a detour with the blissed-out hazy pop of Toro Y Moi, we head back to that EP to hear the track Tim sampled for “Silver Line”, from Melbourne alt.country band The Orbweavers – it’s a beauty!
Drawing on the quiet & repetitive sounds of late-period Talk Talk as well as drone and other influences, Zelienople’s new album is beautifully evocative. I played the longest track from it, because I can (what better reason do we need?) and because it’s my favourite.
Speaking of long… Greg Davis has a new album on that other English “Home” label, Home Normal, and it’s two half-hour-ish tracks — but that’s not going to stop me when it’s such wonderful music, so we had all 35 minutes…
Hidden Shoal Recordings is an Australian label that releases music from all around the world, so tonight we are introduced to the excellent ambient and crunchy electronica of Italy’s Elisa Luu. Very fine indeed.
Then from the Bay Area chapter of the world dubstep cartel we have Kush Arora with Sub Swara, and very nicely dubby it is too.
CD player troubles meant that I had to swap the next track out until after two tunes from the incredibly JG Thirlwell, Australian ex-pat and musical chameleon. We had one track from his instrumental Manorexia guise (and I’d like to play more of this in the new year, since I only just got hold of it). Followed this with a tape collage from the early ’80s released under the Foetus name this year.
And it was not inappropriate to jump from there to our last track, the latest signing to Manchester’s legendary SKAM label, Japanese IDM artist Nuearz, fun computer gamey manic stuff.

Dove Yellow Swans – tk3 from Live During War Crimes #3 [Release the Bats]
Akron/Family – Many Ghosts [Dead Oceans/Spunk]
Animal Collective – What Would I Want? Sky [Domino]
Akron/Family – Lumen [Young God]
Winter North Atlantic – The Maid (Fieldhead remix) [direct from Fieldhead]
Winter North Atlantic – Bokor [Boltfish]
Northerner – 1976 [Hibernate]
fieldhead – songs well known (machinefabriek remix) [home assembly music]
Tim Catlin & Machinefabriek – Glisten 2 [Low Point]
Bell Orchestre – Water/Light/Shifts (Tim Hecker remix) [Arts & Crafts]
Faux Pas – Silver Line (Kane Ikin remix) [download from Faux Pas!]
Toro Y Moi – Blessa [Carpark/Mistletone]
The Orbweavers – Diving Bell [via Faux Pas]
Zelienople – Can’t Stop [Type]
Greg Davis – Burlington, Vermont (05/12/09) [Home Normal]
Elisa Luu – The Garden [Hidden Shoal Recordings]
Kush Arora – Constructing the Absence feat. Sub Swara [Record Label Records]
Manorexia – Zithromax Jitters [Ectopic Ents]
Foetus – Industrial Go-Slow [Ectopic Ents]
Nuearz – Non Linear Vibration [SKAM]

Listen again — ~ 172MB

Tonight, still catching up from 4 weeks in the USA – and indeed, so much new music that next week will still be playing catch-up! Then the 20th & 27th of December will be Utility Fog’s best of 2009 shows. I think we’ll have to leave “best of the decade” till after that, because I’m stuffed if I can work out a whole decade right now…
LISTEN AGAIN at the bottom of the post! This week & last week were a lot of fun!
Oops! Fixed the permissions error on that file — you can now download it!

Two members of the Elysian Quartet make up Geese, and their new remix of Jon Hopkins is gorgeous. While it helps that the original track is a stunner, they’ve done some fantastic work here, as they did with their Hot Chip remix earlier this year.
Keeping with the strings a little longer, Le Lendemain give us another track from their lovely new album, with more incredible cello playing from Danny Norbury.
Meanwhile, William Ryan Fritch is one of those ultra-talented multi-instrumentalists who doesn’t have to play strings on every track to prove he can, but his production as The Skyrider Band with Sole on his last couple of albums has added both a live band element and all the crunchy electronic bits you could want. To remind us that Sole also had a remix album out earlier this year, we heard astronautilis’s remix of highlight “a sad day for investors”.
Bleeding Heart Narrative, who gave us one of the best albums of last year, had a very fine follow-up out this year, featuring more songs among the experimentation. He’s now released a remix album which you can download free from Tartaruga (see links below). We heard remixes from Dälek associate Destructo Swarmbots and Tartaruga artist Brassica.
DJ Food is now Strictly Kev solo. He’s released two excellent EPs this year, hopefully in preparation for a new album; it’s what we’d expect from DJ Food, and the quasi-dubstep bass squelches that appear now and then are nice additions.
Two Fingers bring us onto the dancefloor with an rhythm from a very limited Instrumentals album. I’m not sure whether it has come out at all on CD in the UK or Australia, but I found an edition limited to 1000 copies while in the US. Nice!
Kode9‘s legendary Hyperdub label turned 5 this year, and the celebratory 2CD compilation features not only 16 tracks from their history but 16 new tracks showcasing contemporary sound from dubstep, wonky hip-hop and funky house. Cooly G’s track doesn’t sound like house at all to me, with a head-nodding broken rhythm. Darkstar’s ‘Need You” was Pitchfork’s top dubstep track of last year, and finally we heard a track from dubstep stalwart Mala.
Next up, a sideways step into the Krautrocky robot world of L@N, from 1996. I found both their albums in the US, and they’re semi-legendary things in German experimenta electronica.
They were introduced to me on a mixtape sometime in the late ’90s by none other than pimmon, and I also found one of his earlier albums overseas, so we had the beautiful glitchy “hexham scent” from him.
Back, then, to German experimentalism with the wonderful Kammerflimmer Kollektief. From 2003 we hear the crackle of electronics with jazz-and-dub-influenced post-rock. I saw another Kammerflimmer album 2nd-hand somewhere and didn’t get it – OH NOES!
New local demos for the week included some lovely shoegazey electronic stuff from Medalist and something uncategorizable from Sleep In. Telafonica’s new album continues to offer up new pleasures.
I found an old CD of Nice Nice in their hometown of Portland, OR, just in time for a new 7″ to be released on Warp. caural‘s “imaginary quartet remix” from the 2004 release is one of the loveliest things I’ve heard in some time.
One of the best pop albums of the year came from Ramona Falls – which is Brent from Menomena. It sounds a lot like his band, perfectly combining charming songwriting with unusual production, and features many guests from the Portland music scene.
Peter Broderick has spent a lot of time based in Portland. Tonight’s track comes from a soundtrack to a dance/theatre piece for which all music was made from piano and violin, albeit with some processing, as we heard here. Even more processing and sound design went into the collaboration with Machinefabriek. We also heard a beautiful track from Machinefabriek collaborating with Melbourne guitarist Tim Catlin — listen in next week for another track.
Keeping with the glitch/drone, we heard Fennesz from another CD I picked up at one of Portland’s amazing record stores. sur-terre.net (Soundtrack for Variable Fiction) is a soundtrack released on French label Ytterbium featuring exclusive tracks from many European experimental/glitch artists from 2004, including Vladislav Delay, Pita and many others. It’s a hard-to-find release and I’ll be playing something off it next week as well, for sure.
Finished up with two tracks from the twilight sad, whose 7″ came free with their new album when I picked it up in, yes, Portland. The stunning “that summer, at home i had become the invisible boy” takes the template of ’80s mopey British indie (with a wonderful Scottish accent) and pile on noise to surpass My Bloody Valentine. The 7″ b-side is in a similar vein.

Jon Hopkins – The Low Places (Geese Remix) [Domino]
Hot Chip – One Pure Thought (remixed by Geese) [EMI]
Le Lendemain – Fiore [Home Normal]
Sole & The Skyrider Band – Black [Sole One/Fake Four]
sole & the skyrider band – a sad day for investors (astronautilis remix) [black canyon recordings/midheaven]
Bleeding Heart Narrative – The Cartographer (Destructo Swarmbots Remix)[Tartaruga] {free download remix album!}
Bleeding Heart Narrative – A Dialogue (Brassica‘s Dark Side of the Live Aid remix) [Tartaruga] {free download remix album!}
DJ Food & DK – Sentinel (Shadow Guard) [Ninja Tune]
Two Fingers – Broken (Stance) Rhythm [Paper Bag Records]
Cooly G – Weekend Fly [Hyperdub]
Darkstar – Need You [Hyperdub]
Mala – Level Nine [Hyperdub]
L@N – L@N L-8 [a-Musik]
pimmon – hexham scent [(K-RAA-K)³]
Kammerflimmer Kollektief – Neumond inselhin [Staubgold/Temporary Residence]
Medalist – By Land [demo]
Telafonica – Time To Move The Nest [4-4-2 Music]
Sleep In – Sanity [demo]
Nice Nice – Ark Drum [Warp] {free download from Warp!}
nice nice – uh-oh (caural‘s imaginary quartet remix) [audraglint]
Ramona Falls – Russia [Barsuk]
Peter Broderick – the dream [Western Vinyl]
Peter Broderick & Machinefabriek – Rain [Fang Bomb]
Tim Catlin & Machinefabriek – Flutter [Low Point]
Fennesz – The man with the sewing machine [Ytterbium]
the twilight sad – that summer, at home i had become the invisible boy [fat cat]
the twilight sad – In The Blackout [fat cat]

Listen again — ~ 263MB (link fixed!)