It’s that time of year again… And as usual it’s extremely difficult to fit all my notable selections into two 2hr shows, so take it as read that this is just some of the best.
There’s certainly been some stunning music this year – it perhaps wasn’t the bonanza year that 2020 turned out (surprisingly) to be, but another good’un for sure.
This week and next will complement each other thematically, so tonight we have songs, words etc, and some post-classical and sound-art near the end. Next week we’ll have beats as well as some more sound-art & experimental stuff.

So LISTEN AGAIN on the FBi website‘s stream on demand, or podcast here.

Low – White Horses [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
Low – I Can Wait [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
It was almost worrying imagining how Low could follow up their almost-perfect 2018 album Double Negative, which took the already intense excursions into digital production techniques from 2015’s Ones and Sixes and turned up the distortion, sidechaining and general glitchiness to 11 for a mournful ode to America under Trump. But HEY WHAT, like the last two produced by BJ Burton, manages to draw yet more inspiration and emotion from these techniques – see the segue from opener “White Horses” into “I Can Wait”, in which the repeating delay ending the first track gradually changes tempo and diffuses into the backing for the second, with the crunching, shattering sounds of both accompanying angelic harmonised melodies. The digital production aside, wrong-footing juxtapositions like these have long been the modus operandi of husband & wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, often joined by a bass player but now just the two with Burton on the sound deck. There’s nothing quite like them, and much though I adore the sonic experimentation, in the end it comes back to the songs, and the gorgeous vocal harmonies.

Crass – G’s Song (Commoners Choir Remix) [Crass Bandcamp]
It’s been so good that the ongoing remix 7″ series from the original English anarchist punks Crass has continued through 2021… All profits go to UK domestic violence charity Refuge, and the political power of the original songs (currently all from their debut album The Feeding of the 5000), is retained – including this, the eponymous song for the collective’s artist Gee Vaucher. This stunning version adds 5 minutes to the original 36 second punk jab, courtesy of the collected voices of the Commoners Choir, pulled together by none other than Boff Whalley of those other anarcho-punks (yep!) Chumbawumba.

Springtime – The Island [Joyful Noise Recordings/Bandcamp]
This debut eponymous album from Springtime is what happens when Gareth Liddiard of Drones/Tropical Fuck Storm gets together with Chris Abrahams of The Necks and Jim White of The Dirty Three. Of course Abrahams and White are masterful collaborators, and Abrahams’ piano and organ on here, along with White’s idiosyncratic drums, perfectly join with the raucous guitar and anguished vocal cords of Liddiard. It’s an ensemble that feels like it’s always existed, somehow, in the Platonic musical plane. Liddiard here returns to his typical storytelling vein, although the lyrics to a couple of the tracks come from his Irish uncle, Ian Duhig. Mostly, it’s the sound of three consummate musicians playing together in a room, although there are subtle effects like the vocal delays and pitch-shifting on “Jeanie” which just add to the listening thrill.

Marissa Paternoster – White Dove [Don Giovanni Records/Bandcamp]
This stunning single from Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females comes from the album Peace Meter, much of which was co-created with Andy Gibbs from the phenomenal adventurous metal band THOU, with contributions also from cellist Kate Wakefield from the Cincinnati-based band Lung. It’s a lovely album altogether, but this is one of my songs of the year.

Buffalo_Daughter – Global Warming Kills Us All [Buffalo Daughter Bandcamp]
SuGar Yoshinaga, Yumiko Ohno and MoOoG Yamamoto, sometimes with another member, sometimes a live drummer, have been Buffalo Daughter since the early ’90s. They had an association with the Beastie Boys for a while, and were released on their Grand Royal label alongside other indie acts like Luscious Jackson, and had some major label releases too, but I haven’t heard from them for ages. So it was rather nice when Boris mentioned this new album on their own Bandcamp feed. It has many of the hallmarks of the ’90s crossover of Japanese and Chicago postrock & indie, including the lovely Brazilian pop feels of “Jazz”, featuring vocals from Caetano Veloso collaborator Ricardo Dias Gomes – and perhaps even more than in the ’90s, all this is minced up with electronic production techniques. I don’t know what it sounds like without 20 years of context, but this crossover stuff (so beloved of UFog) seems pretty current to me – suitably for an album called We Are The Times.

Herbert – Might As Well Be Magical (feat. Allie Armstrong) [Accidental Records/Bandcamp]
Sometimes trilogies can take a long time to manifest. Back in 1998, Matthew Herbert released the first of his “domestic house” albums, going just by his surname. Around The House was co-written with his then partner, Dani Siciliano, and featured jazz & r’n’b-informed deep house pop songs. Then in 2001 his masterpiece Bodily Functions was released, again mostly featuring Siciliano. And it’s taken 2 decades and a lockdown to bring us Musca. Named for Musca domestica, the common housefly, it’s got typical downbeat deep house and electronic tunes, with that jazz/r’n’b feel, and the vocalists are all relatively new or unknown artists, none of whom Herbert had met in person or worked with previously. The singers do a wonderful job, and the tracks are moody and blissful; despite being music for the home/music for the heads, it’s got that head-nodding pulse, and spots of euphoria here and there, courtesy of Herbert’s strong musicality, and his band’s and singers’ great musicianship. Joy.

Dntel – Fall In Love [Morr Music/Bandcamp/les albums claus/Bandcamp]
Dntel – Moonlight [Morr Music/Bandcamp/les albums claus/Bandcamp]
The music of Jimmy Tamborello, particularly as Dntel, is without doubt one of the instigators of what I wanted Utility Fog to be when it started. Electronic at its core, influenced by IDM as well as electronic pop, Dntel became a vehicle for something transcendent on the 2001 album Life Is Full Of Possibilities, when Tamborello brought in singers & other musicians from the indie music scene, creating hazy, granulated floating soundscapes and deconstructed songs among the glitched beats. Tamborello’s an inveterate fan himself – presenting Dying Songs on LA’s dublab – and that comes out in his approach to music, I think. This year he released two Dntel albums, and they’re both wonderful. The second, Away, is his paean to pop, while March’s The Seas Trees See showcased his more introspective, experimental & quiet side. Both albums, though, feature vocals, always highly processed – and on Away it’s notable that although the soft-voiced vocals sound female, they are all sung by Tamborello, using auto-tune and other techniques to create a cyborg idoru version of himself.

Stick In The Wheel – The Cuckoo [Stick In The Wheel Bandcamp]
London’s Stick In The Wheel are a collective with a close interest in English folk, and have released albums of revived, traditional song from across centuries. But as I’ve said as I’ve played them over the last few years, they also have a close connection to English club music, through Ian Carter aka EAN, who was a key member of dubstep pioneers Various Production. Stick In The Wheel is now primarily Carter and Nicola Kearey, who I believe was involved in Various at times too. In between their main albums, the band have traditionally (ha!) put out “mixtape” albums, the latest of which is Tonebeds for Poetry. These still sound like English folk songs (except for some interstitial instrumentals), but with sequenced synths (at one point closely echoing the Stranger Things theme) and oft-vocoded vocals.

Happy Axe – Growing In The Ground [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Maybe It’ll Be Beautiful is the name of the 2021 album from Emma Kelly’s Happy Axe – and yup, it sure is! No surprise there, as her previous, Dream Punching, was too: her looped violin, vocals and adept electronics are a winning combination, especially as she has a talent for blissful songwriting and clever sonic manipulations.

Laura Cannell & Kate Ellis – We Took Short Journeys [Brawl Records]
More strings for a while now, starting with the yearlong monthly series from cellist Kate Ellis and brilliant English folk musician Laura Cannell, who has recorded a number of stunning albums with overbowed violin, vocals and wind instruments in churches and other spaces in the UK. The monthly releases allow for a gradual exploration of what two string players can do, and while they gradually also introduced other collaborators (one or two a month) with poems, songs, field recordings and additional instruments, this track from May features Cannell reading a touching poem over their string drones.

Rakhi Singh – For Giri (Nüss) [Bedroom Community/Bandcamp]
Welsh/Indian violinist Rakhi Singh straddles not only the heritage of her background, but also the English cities of London and Manchester. She is Music Director of contemporary ensemble Manchester Collective, who record for Bedroom Community, but her name jumped out at me immediately due to a collaboration last year with Bristol’s Seb Gainsborough aka Vessel, reworking his bendy, twisted “Red Sex” with virtuoso violin and keeping the rattling rhythms. But even this excellent pedigree didn’t prepare me for the brilliance of the three-track Quarry EP released by Bedroom Community. Singh’s violin is indeed virtuosic, but she is happy to take multi-tracked trills and short phrases and chop them into industrial rhythms, or take time with strung-out violin and vocal drones, with exquisite avant-garde harmonisation. Don’t let this one slip you by.

Mabe Fratti – Hacia el Vacío [Unheard of Hope/Bandcamp]
It was wonderful to discover Mexico-based Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti last year. Her Pies sobra la tierra showcased beautiful, creative songs accompanied live with cello and electronics, and there’s more of that to be found on her new album Será que ahora podremos entendernos (“Now we will be able to understand each other”). The album contemplates the idea of communication, and of how often people make understanding more difficult. As always, not only is her use of cello and synths creative and unique, she just writes beautiful vocal melodies as well.

The Bug – Vexed (feat. Moor Mother) [Ninja Tune/Bandcamp]
Moor Mother – Mangrove (feat. elucid & Antonia Gabriela) [ANTI-/Bandcamp]
Divide and Dissolve – Mental Gymnastics (Moor Mother Remix) [Invada/Bandcamp]
Camae Ayewa has been busy these last couple of years with multitudinous projects, from free jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements (who have another album coming soon) to the punkish Moor Jewelry to her side with JK Broadrick & Kevin Martin’s Zonal, and the phenomenal BRASS with billy woods a year ago. But 2019 was the last solo album proper from Moor Mother. Powered by beats from Olof Melander, the Swiss producer with whom Ayewa released the album Anthologia 01 last year, Black Encyclopedia of the Air is consequently somewhat lighter than much of that other work (with only a couple of days to start ingesting it) – but no less powerful. Guests include elucid (billy woods’ bandmate in Armand Hammer), Pink Siifu, and many others.
2021 also saw a new album from The Bug, the third in a trilogy that began with 2008’s London Zoo. Having worked with Martin on that Zonal album mentioned above, it’s not surprising to find Moor Mother appearing here, with a fierce track in that dubby style only The Bug can do.
And finally, a local connection, with Ayewa contributing to a series of remixes of indigenous doom duo Divide and Dissolve, whose stunning Gas Lit album came out in January. Moor Mother adds her apocalyptic spoken word over the emotive saxophone & guitars of Takiaya Reed (Black & Tsalagi [Cherokee]) and drums of Sylvie Nehill (Māori) – welcome to the dangerzone!

Malaria! – I Will Be Your Only One (Lucrecia Dalt Mix) [Moabit/Monika Enterprise/Bandcamp]
Three important bands (all beginning with M) from the German underground were celebrated on the M_SESSIONS collection, courtesy of Gudrun Gut‘s Monika Enterprise. Matador, Mania D. and Malaria! all featured Gut, two featured Beate Bartel, two featured Bettina Köster and two featured Manon Duursma; all were all-female acts, working in post-punk, industrial and a particularly German strain of synth-pop. There’s a direct link between this seminal music, Gut’s deep involvement in the Berlin music scene, and the work she does with Monika Enterprise, including the “Werkstatt” she convenes with multiple generations of female electronic & experimental artists. Many of the Werkstatt artists appear on the first disc of M_Sessions, the new collection which unearths, celebrates and recontextualises this music. Along with a disc of “Rare Originals”, with demos, live versions and non-album tracks all remastered, the first disc sees these works remixed and recreated by artists like Midori Hirano, AGF, Natalie Beridze, Sonae, Gut and Bartel, and featured tonight Lucrecia Dalt – who joins us again on the next track…

Aaron Dilloway & Lucrecia Dalt – Yodeling Slits [Hanson Records/Bandcamp]
On the face of it, a collaboration between Aaron Dilloway & Lucrecia Dalt is rather unexpected. Dilloway is a venerable member of the US noise scene, master of pedal-based sound manipulation, garbled vocal grotesquery, tape manipulation & harsh noise, while Dalt moved from adventurous singer-songwriting to exquisitely controlled minimalist modular synth-and-Ableton sound-art. Yet the pair felt an instant rapport when performing on the same lineups on various tours, and on Lucy & Aaron Dalt’s soft vocals and sonic alchemy fit perfectly with the clatter and hum of Dilloway’s noises. Like Dalt’s recent albums for RVNG Intl, unorthodox, slippery-yet-catchy songs slide one into another, never quite in focus enough to be latched onto, yet compulsively re-listenable. From solo artists it’s brilliant enough, as a duo it’s something remarkable. Let this not be the last from Lucy & Aaron!

nobuka – The people (w/ Machinefabriek) [Esc.rec/Bandcamp]
From Dutch label Esc.rec here’s a gem of an album from Michel van Collenburg as nobuka (he’s from the Netherlands despite the vaguely Japanese-sounding name). Reiko contemplates the feeling of living in pre-apocalyptic times (see more at the dedicated micro-site), with field recordings and electronics combining with strings & acoustic found-sounds for a mostly-instrumental narrative of tension and real beauty. It’s not minimalist, and not overly polite, and it also mostly avoids the surging sub-bass intensity of a lot of current-day experimental ambient. Nobuka also collaborated with two Dutch artists close to this show, Michel Banabila and Machinefabriek, should that tempt you to look further. I hope you do, because this is a very fine album indeed.

soccer Committee – Hazy [Morc Records/Morc Bandcamp/soccer Committee Bandcamp]
I first discovered the Dutch musician Mariska Baars through her work with Rutger Zuydervelt Machinefabriek – drawn from 2008 is a masterclass in heart-stopping slowcore, glistening songwriting coupled with expert sound art, and the following year’s redrawn collected magical reworkings from the cream of the crop from the time. Meanwhile, Baars and Zuydervelt formed an array of minimalist ensembles such as Piipstjilling, FEAN and many others – and in 2019 the pair released the 30-minute single track eau, a drifting sea of processed voice and electronics. But Baars’ very low-key songwriting and performances really shine on their own, so it’s an unexpected pleasure to have this solo album, Tell from the grass, a mere 14 years after her only other solo release!

Malcolm Pardon – Beneath The Surface [The New Black/Bandcamp]
Stockholm duo Roll The Dice released a steady stream of electronic music since their debut self-titled album came out through experimental label Digitalis Recordings in 2010. Peder Mannerfelt is well-known for his gregarious club music under his own name, his involvement with Fever Ray, and for releasing fellow Swiss electronic artists on his Peder Mannerfelt Produktion. But the other half, Malcolm Pardon, has stayed more in the background, making music for film & TV, so his debut solo album is a very welcome occurrence. Hello Death doesn’t take its title too seriously – it’s more about the acceptance of the inevitability of death than anything more maudlin, with peaceful, enveloping piano and analogue synths echoing his work with Roll The Dice.

Clark – Lambent Rag [Deutsche Grammophon/Clark Store/Bandcamp]
I remember 20 years ago when Chris Clark was a precocious young IDM producer with his first records on Warp… He seemed to have a good command of the emotive backbone under the flashy beat programming, in keeping with the previous generation like Aphex Twin, µ-Ziq, Boards of Canada et al. A few years later, the Body Riddle album was the first step into something that felt truly new – organic-feeling crunchy beats and sounds, clearly still electronica, clearly referencing rave tropes, but also postrock, jazz and a lot more. Since then he’s careened easily between dancefloor and campfire and everywhere in between, and somewhere in the last 5 years added soundtrack work as a new string to his bow – replete with piano and orchestra. So I assumed that this new album, Playground In A Lake, released by eminent classical institution Deutsche Grammophon, was another soundtrack – but it’s something different. Starting with the solo cello of Oliver Coates, featuring muted piano, orchestral passages, choral and solo classical voices, it doesn’t throw out the electronics – with Ben Frost-like surging bass, processed vocals and occasional rhythm programming. And it’s a narrative of sorts – a tale of lost youth and innocence, with the submerged children’s playground standing in for our loss of innocence as a species in the face of accelerating climate change. Weighty subject matter, and the music matches it with darkness and gentle sadness, give or take the sweet hopefulness of “Lambent Rag”. All in all an excellent entry into Clark’s oeuvre.

Yann Tiersen – Ar Maner Kozh [Mute Records/Bandcamp]
It’s unfair that to a lot of the world, Yann Tiersen is synonymous with the twinkly prettiness of his soundtrack to the sweet French film Amelie. He’s known and loved in France (and Europe and to those who know the world over) also for indie rock, chanson and postrock, but he does do that post-classical piano thing really well, as evidenced by new album Kerber, part of a more ambient turn of late. It’s a very intimate album, and the glitchy electronics that envelop the piano and other instruments at times are welcome. There are jazzy drums in “Poull Bojer”, but mostly the album focuses on piano, hints of strings, and these electronic effects. It’s often quite lovely but simple quasi-classical fare, but at times the French sentimental melancholy surfaces, as with “Ar Maner Kozh”. Inspired by living on the remote island of Ushant, off the north-west tip of France (hence the strangely-spelled track titles), the album soundtracks a film that you can watch online now.

Leider – Human Error [Beacon Sound]
The debut album from Berlin-based quartet Leider, A Fog Like Liars Loving, is the music & words of Rishin Singh, who studied music in Sydney and went through the improv & sound-art scene here before moving overseas. The music itself – minimalist, slow-moving, unsettling with its hints at microtonality – reflects the ensemble’s unconventional makeup, with Singh on trombone, Derek Shirley on cello & percussion, Annie Gårlid on viola and Stine Sterne on flute. The two women also provide vocals, sung in an understated, unemotive manner, somehow making the songs even more touching. Singh’s lyrics are allusive and cutting, even when quoting Charles Dickens. It’s unusual and gratifying to find music so, well, unusual. I’ve found it gripping – and the Human Error Remixes are very well-chosen too – check them out for Iran’s Tegh (on a roll with remixes lately) inserting rumbling sub-bass and shattered beats into the glacial sound-world.

Listen again — ~198MB

Nearing the end of 2021… and so this will be the last “new music” UFog of the year, with the following 2 weeks being Best of 2021, and Boxing Day a well-earned week off.
Tonight we have a beautiful mix of folk, indietronica, IDM, drum’n’bass, noise and acoustic drone…]

LISTEN AGAIN to complete the collection! FBi will let you stream on demand, or find the podcast here.

Leyla McCalla – Fort Dimanche [Anti-/Bandcamp]
It’s only been 2 years since the last album by Leyla McCalla, but it’s great to have her back, and in bluegrass-tinged Haitian folk mode to boot. McCalla is a brilliant cellist (and multi-instrumentalist) and singer who draws on her Haitian heritage, singing in both French-derived Haitian Creole and English, as well as the rich musical heritage of New Orleans. This song, her first released on the Anti- label, is about the political prison Fort Dimanche run by the oppressive Duvalier regime, including excerpts from an interview on the groundbreaking Radio Haiti, with a political prisoner about the torture he was subjected to in the prison.

Hymie’s Basement – Phantom Throb [Lex Records/Bandcamp]
Hymie’s Basement – 21st Century Pop Song [Lex Records/Bandcamp]
It’s been nearly two decades since Andrew Broder (aka Fog) and Yoni Wolf (aka or of Why?) teamed up for a beloved album of alt.hop/indietronica as Hymie’s Basement. That particular combination of nasal Jewish slacker pop and switched-on hip-hop-influenced production was never repeated, but both have stayed in similar circles, and it seems that finally it’s time for something new. Broder’s production of late has been outta sight, and Wolf hasn’t lost his acerbic sense of nonsense, so I sure do hope that “Phantom Throb” isn’t just a one-off!

Nosdam + Rayon – Desert [Morr Music/Bandcamp]
Nosdam + Rayon – Colours / Heavy Load [Morr Music/Bandcamp]
The indietronica-alt.hop connection was strong in the early ’90s when Anticon was big, and The Notwist were finding success outside of Germany with their emotional blend of IDM and indie. Notwist members collaborated with Anticon’s Themselves as 13&God, but the most idiosyncratic producer to come out of the Anticon stable must surely be David Madson aka Odd Nosdam, purveyor of “drum and space”… Acher and Madson have been pals for ages, but I’m pretty sure this new EP, From Nowhere To North, is the first music they’ve actually created together. The sweetness of Acher’s indie songwriting is offset by the washed-out production and wicked drums from Nosdam, along with nice glitchy interlocutary snippets, and then there’s the epic “Heavy Load” of the 10-minute last track… glorious.

SKY H1 – Freefall [AD93/Bandcamp]
SKY H1 – Elysian Heights [AD93/Bandcamp]
Belgian producer SKY H1 dedicates her debut album Azure to her mother. It sits well in the AD93 catalogue, with influences from ’90s ambient and techno, and UK bass styles including drum’n’bass. Tonight we heard one track evoking classic techno through an IDM/ambient glass, and some blissful drum’n’bass vibes.

Yaporigami – Non-Acid Classic #1 [The Collection Artaud/Bandcamp]
Yaporigami – Sun | Moon [The Collection Artaud/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based producer Yu Miyashita has released an impressive selection on his The Collection Artaud label this year, with music under his own name and as Yaporigami, as well as other like-minded artists. Earlier this year Yaporigami gave us IDMMXXI-L, and now comes its partner IDMMXXI-R. Both have their fair share of dextrously-mashed breaks and acid/non-acid melodies titled humourously, often referencing 20th-century modern art. We heard a track from each tonight.

Harmony – Photing [Deep Jungle]
Kid Lib – Living In The Zone [Deep Jungle]
Lee Bogush aka DJ Harmony doesn’t stop. His Deep Jungle has been cranking out 12″s for each Bandcamp Friday all year, with classic jungle sounds, frequently represented by tracks from himself. Bogush has been around the jungle scene scene early in the ’90s, and his tracks have that heritage with the benefit of modern-day technology. Meanwhile, Sheffield’s Kid Lib has made a home on the label lately, and “Living In The Zone” has a great darkside feel…

RQ – 12 Strikes [Samurai Music/Bandcamp]
Roho – Anemia [Samurai Music/Bandcamp]
Berlin’s Samurai Music is home to a particular strain of bass-heavy, minimal, tribal drum’n’bass that often skirts the edges of grey area techno – although they’re not averse to firing off raging amen breaks when the mood takes them. For December’s Bandcamp Friday they’ve released Outliers: 4, the fourth of their Bandcamp-only lockdown compilations collecting dubplates and other tracks from Samurai artists which haven’t made it on to releases. Tonight we heard a couple of tracks that don’t entirely cleave to the template of thumping syncopated bass and dark-as-fuck minimalist textures: New Zealand’s RQ gives us stormy weather and buried trumpet with an amen heavy beat, while Russia’s Roho is a bit closer to the current Samurai sound but also drops syncopated amens into his cyberpunk car chase.

TMUX – Wasteland [False Industries/Bandcamp]
TMUX – Hand Disinfection (Shackleton Remix) [False Industries/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based producer Yair Etziony was part of the drum’n’bass scene in Israel in the ’90s, but makes IDM-leaning ambient music usually these days. During lockdown he found an outlet in new project TMUX, looking back at the drum’n’bass days, albeit often at slower tempos and with a melodic spirit. The debut TMUX album State of Exception was released last year, and just ahead of the follow-up Stars, which follows a similar path, he also released Altered State, with various bass-oriented artists contributing, including Christoph de Babalon and Appleblim among others. The latter’s old Skull Disco partner Shackleton contributed a lovely dub-techno reworking which we heard tonight.

My Disco – Folterkammer [Heavy Machinery Records/Bandcamp]
My Disco – The Shore [Heavy Machinery Records/Bandcamp]
Melbourne’s My Disco spent a decade and a half of their life making taut, rhythmic postpunk/math rock, including a set of albums on Temporary Residence, Ltd. But in 2019 they took a sharp left turn into bleak ambient industrial, with sparse percussion and dark synthetic textures. Now their follow-up Alter Schwede (a weird German exclamation, literally “old Swede”) dives deeper into this new sound, with clanging percussion, FM synthesis and heavy bass, and occasional freakish vocal emanations. When rhythm does appear, it’s alienating, as with the jackhammer of “Folterkammer”. It’s a brilliantly disorienting album.

Atsuko Hatano & Midori Hirano – Nocturnal Awakening [Alien Transistor/Bandcamp]
Cycling back to Markus Acher who we heard earlier, Alien Transistor is the label he runs with his brother Micha. Here we have two utterly unique Japanese artists working together; Midori Hirano is on a roll at the moment with her warped piano works, and Atsuko Hatano similarly treats her viola with all sorts of effects. The exchanges of recordings that went into creating this album produced what the artists describe as a Water Ladder, and the music does at times have a strange submerged feel. In amongst field recordings and drones, the piano interjects periodically, while the viola is at times blurred out of standard tunings. On this piece the viola takes on the role of staccato accents while the piano eventually tries to find peaceful repose.

Gilded – Alden [Fluid Audio/Facture Bandcamp]
Gilded – Cluttered Room [Hidden Shoal/Bandcamp]
Gilded – Bells Cutting [Fluid Audio/Facture Bandcamp]
The 2012 album Terrane by Perth duo Gilded is one I hold close to my heart. The peaceful electroacoustic sounds centre on piano and guitar, with skittery percussion from a cut-down kit point at the postrock of Radian or indeed late Talk Talk. It’s the work of Matt Rösner (who’s released music on 12k, Room40, hellosQuare and elsewhere) and Adam Trainer (who played in the great indie/postrock band Radarmaker, released solo music on hellosQuare and has a long association with community radio), and it always seemed like the album was a one-off. So it was particularly great to hear from both members earlier this year that this second album was coming. Mostly recorded closely following the original album, it got caught in a series of life changes and took its sweet time to get it together. The piano is gone, replaced by synthesizers alongside the guitar, field recordings, and those flittering hi-hats. There’s a strong sense of place, the marshlands and evaporated salt lake around Rösner’s hometown of Myalup, and it’s just gorgeous. There’s promise of more to come from the reunited duo, and they’d better hold to their promise…

Listen again — ~198MB

Heavy dub beats and bass techno gives way to percussive skitterscapes, guitarscapes, free jazz and… gothic metal? – only to land at string-folk and post-classical recontextualisations. It’s Utility Fog.

LISTEN AGAIN because it’s all in here. All of it. Well, most. Stream on demand @ FBi, podcast here.

SIMM – Civil War (featuring Flowdan) [Ohm Resistance]
Equations of Eternity – Kurukulla [Wordsound]
SIMM – Hope Spectre [Ohm Resistance]
SIMM – Gqom Squbulo (featuring Phelimuncasi) [Ohm Resistance]
The industrial dub sounds of Eraldo Bernocchi go back to the ’90s, alongside dark ambient and sound-art work and film soundtrack recordings. An inveterate collaborator, Bernocchi worked extensively with Mick Harris of Scorn, including also their project with Bill Laswell as Equations of Eternity. SIMM has been one of his main aliases for the dub beats, and it’s easy to hear the cross-pollination of his mate Mick Harris, whose mid-’90s Scorn work prefigures dubstep a decade before it coalesced in the East/South London scene. Bernocchi’s new SIMM album Too Late To Dream, for the great Ohm Resistance (also responsible for some years for Scorn’s recent output), finds him treading similar ground to The Bug or Harris, with dubstep & grime-adjacent bass music (often menacing, sometimes peaceful), and MCs on about half the tracks. Grime master Flowdan appears on a number of tracks here, and there’s also a brilliant collaboration with South African gqom legends Phelimuncasi.

Vacuum – Resonate [Heavy Machinery Records/Bandcamp/It Records/Bandcamp]
Vacuum – Resonate Deadverse (Dälek Remix) [Heavy Machinery Records/Bandcamp/It Records/Bandcamp]
Naarm/Melbourne duo Jenny Branagan and Andrea Blake have played in post-punk and synth-punk bands for some time, and their Vacuum duo dates back to 2013; but their self-titled album is to be their first real release, coming out now in February 2022. A couple of singles are out to tide you over, but I’m giving a sneak peak of a minimalist highlight, like Suicide with drop bass, the deeply disquieting “Resonate”. The album comes with a set of excellent remixes, including Dublin’s Lakker and locals Ela Stiles and Sow Discord, but “Resonate” has been given the Deadverse treatment but industrial hip-hop legends Dälek, which naturally I couldn’t resist.

NERVE – MIRRORWISE [Nerve Bandcamp]
Also out of Naarm/Melbourne is NERVE, who continues releasing live fragments on his Bandcamp with industrial-leaning syncopated drum machine techno that sites somewhere to left of drum’n’bass.

Hodge & Simo Cell – Medusa [Livity Sound]
Two alumni of Bristol’s Livity Sound appear together on the label: Bristol’s Hodge (most recently seen on Houndstooth) and Paris’s Simo Cell. As is their wont, this EP traverses different tempos and styles while staying true to bass and syncopated beats. Club music as it should be.

Blawan – Blika [XL Recordings/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based UK mainstay Blawan takes a break from his usual 4/4 fare with more bass-oriented syncopation here for XL Recordings, on the excellently-titled Woke Up Right-Handed. A restless beat and a distorted vocal that seeps into the subs make the opening track an instant freakish classic.

Construction – Nervous (Katerina‘s Tension Remix) [forthcoming]
Construction – Nervous [Construction Bandcamp]
Seattle based Nadya Peek and Marko Ahtisaari make dancefloor-adjacent postpunk or post-rock under the name Construction. Last year they released the EP We’re Great Thanks For Asking, and now they’re preparing a remix 12″, on which Finnish-Bulgarian producer Katerina simultaneously moves their track “Nervous” closer towards the dancefloor and also into a sort of psychedelic pop space.

Eli Keszler – Years of This [LuckyMe/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, New York avant-garde percussionist Eli Keszler released his album Icons on Glasgow’s LuckyMe – probably his most approachable album yet. Now just in time for Christmas the album gets extended as Icons+ with two bonus digital tracks and a scented candle edition (as you do!) The extra tracks are worth it – Keszler’s hyperactive drill’n’bass-influenced live drumming and electronics never fails to dazzle.

Ingar Zach/Michele Rabbia – Typology [SOFA/Bandcamp]
Ingar Zach/Michele Rabbia – Proprioception [SOFA/Bandcamp]
Following Keszler, a pair of brilliant percussionist bring their second collaboration to Norway’s SOFA Music. Musique pour deux corps (Music for two bodies) finds Norway’s Ingar Zach and Italy’s Michele Rabbia both on the same setup of percussion and electronics, with a beguiling and disorienting mix of programmed electronics and drones with beautifully-recorded acoustic percussion.

Leo Abrahams – Spiral Trem [figureight/Bandcamp]
Leo Abrahams – Alternations [figureight/Bandcamp]
Speaking of disorienting & beguiling, here’s the full new album from Leo Abrahams on Shahzad Ismaily’s figureight label. On Scene Memory II, the in-demand guitarist bends his instrument into Fennesz-like glitchscapes, and loops noises and crackles into abstract quasi-rhythmic figures. No two tracks sound the same, but the same creative spirit runs through the whole work; highly recommended.

Irreversible Entanglements – Keys to Creation [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
Chicago label International Anthem has their finger on the pulse. They released the debut album from free jazz/rap/poetry ensemble Irreversible Entanglements last year, and if anything the band have surpassed that now with Open The Gates. Sure, it’s free jazz, but as heard on this track there’s wonderful cyclical drumming and bass underpinning postpunk synths as well as trumpet & sax, and of course the evocative, incisive spoken words of Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother. Astonishing.

Converge & Chelsea Wolfe – Blood Dawn [Epitaph/Bandcamp]
Converge & Chelsea Wolfe – Coil [Epitaph/Bandcamp]
Speaking of worlds colliding, here we find powerhouse musicians drawing something new from each other. Hardcore punk legends Converge could hardly be more influential, with revered producer Kurt Ballou as their guitarist, vocalist Jacob Bannon also responsible for their iconic artwork, and bassist Nate Newton also playing in the untouchable Old Man Gloom. Not only are they joined on this album by gothic rock/folk/doom maestro Chelsea Wolfe and her creative partner Ben Chisholm, but Steve Brodsky is also on hand (too many projects to mention, now including Old Man Gloom). And yes, there’s a fair share of growly metal vocals, but also passionate clean singing from all, and a spread of styles from across all contributors. Bloodmoon: I (which implies the future existence of Bloodmoon: II) is a behemoth of an album.

Marissa Paternoster – Waste [Don Giovanni Records/Bandcamp]
Marissa Paternoster – Promise [Don Giovanni Records/Bandcamp]
A couple of weeks ago I played the gorgeous single “White Dove” from Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females. There’s a metal connection here, as much of the album was created in collaboration with Andy Gibbs from the great New Orleans metal band THOU, but the album veers in different directions, featuring throughout the cello & backing vocals from Kate Wakefield of Cincinnati avant-rock duo Lung. While I still think “White Dove” is one of the songs of the year, the folk-rock harmonised bliss is found on a number of other tracks, such as those featured tonight.

Laura Cannell, Kate Ellis & Adrian Hart – Through Frost & Thunder [Brawl Records]
It’s getting late in the year, so we’re up to the second-last in the phenomenal series These Feral Lands – A Year Documented in Sound and Art from British violinist Laura Cannell & cellist Kate Ellis. As with the last few months, for November they’re joined by a collaborator, this time violinist and producer Adrian Hart who lends additional classical technique and folk knowledge to the two core string players, while on some tracks Cannell adds her pure vocals. Each month these Sounds have been an absolute joy.

Gabriel Prokofiev + OpenSoundOrchestra – Sad Colours I [Melodiya]
Gabriel Prokofiev + OpenSoundOrchestra – Isolation [Melodiya]
We finish tonight by bringing the strings back around to the UK bass/experimental electronic we started with, courtesy of English composer Gabriel Prokofiev. Prokofiev (who is indeed descended from the great Russian “neoclassical” composer Sergei Prokofiev) travelled to Russia to work on new & recent compositions with the adventurous contemporary ensemble OpenSoundOrchestra. From those recordings he then deconstructed and reconstructed his own work in the manner of his earliest releases on the Nonclassical label, his String Quartet No.1 and No.2, which invited contemporary dubstep & techno artist to remix the works using only sound from the string quartet themselves. So here we have jittery cuts and slices, repurposing the orchestral sounds into a trip through grime, house and other dance genres. It’s released on the revived Melodiya label, once the legendary music label of the Soviet state. Postmodern music for postmodern times.

Listen again — ~208MB

Some old friends tonight, and some new talents. Underground hip-hop, experimental electronic pop?, deconstructed dancefloors of various types, and even some acousmatic music that got lost and found a nightclub in the woods…

LISTEN AGAIN… just to be sure. FBi’s got the streams on demands, podcast is here.

Aesop Rock x Blockhead – That Is Not A Wizard [Rhymesayers/Bandcamp]
Aesop Rock – fast cars [Def Jux]
Aesop Rock – Fumes [Def Jux]
Aesop Rock x Blockhead – Difficult [Rhymesayers/Bandcamp
We’ve gotten used to Aesop Rock producing his own beats over the last few albums. He’s a master beat-maker, almost as much as he is a wordsmith (and indeed an artist!), recently producing an entire EP for his buddy Homeboy Sandman – but many of Aes’s greatest tunes from his early days through to his 2012 return were produced by his close college friend Blockhead. So when Aes was finding creativity hard, in lockdown, following the tragic death of a close friend, he turned to Blockhead to provide some beats for him to write rhymes to. And these two do just gel so well – they seem to understand each other’s creativity instinctively – so enough tunes flowed that they ended up with a full album, with the utterly Aesop Rock title Garbology. With Aes’s usual self-deprecating observations and metaphor-laden vocabularianism, it’s deeply enjoyable, like putting on an old jacket and finding it fits better than it ever did. Both artists are better at their game than ever – but that’s not to say that the back catalogue isn’t absolutely genius, as we saw with tunes from 2005 & 2007…

Arad – Gravedad Nos Dobla [Voitax/Bandcamp]
Arad – Inti [Bedouin Records/Bandcamp]
Arad – Squidger [Voitax/Bandcamp]
Arad – Dream House [Voitax/Bandcamp]
Dara Smith is one half of the Berlin-based Irish electronic duo Lakker along with Ian McDonnell aka Eomac. McDonnell’s solo productions are deservedly well-known, but I’m always up for some new tunes from Arad, especially since the brilliant EP The Glimpse that came out in 2018 from Bedouin Records. Vocoder vocals and unexpected harmonies accompany IDM-inflected techno & breakbeats, and these tendencies have continued on his releases last year & just now on Berlin label Voitax. This year’s Augmented Fantasy also features a couple of excellent female vocalists on two tracks, but I’ve played two which again rely on the vocoded & processed voice of Smith himself, along with his usual beatmaking talents.

Moon Sign Gemini – Tomato Town [Moon Sign Gemini Bandcamp]
Moon Sign Gemini – Adelaide to Gawler [Moon Sign Gemini Bandcamp]
The second EP of the year from Dylan Cooper’s Moon Sign Gemini is full of South Australian references, EP title included. As well as playing in hardcore punk bands like Raccoon City and Melchior, Cooper makes electronic music influenced by UK & US bass music and laden with unexpected samples, and he has a real talent for this stuff.

Klahrk – E-merge Stgy (coproduced with Zoë Mc Pherson) [SFX/Bandcamp]
Klahrk – NuNegative [SFX/Bandcamp]
I guess when you’re named Ben Clarke, going by Klahrk is one way of differentiating yourself from the famous (Chris) Clark. Klahrk, who also runs the Ware Collective, makes deconstructed bass music, often in collaboration, and his new album for Berlin label SFX features various dense coproductions, including one with SFX boss Zoë Mc Pherson. There’s a thread of jungle and breakcore through this album, but plenty of other genres are visited as well along the glitchy, unpredictable path.

Patrick Conway – Evident Wear [ESP Institute/Bandcamp]
Patrick Conway – A Long Way To Walk For Bad News [ESP Institute/Bandcamp]
It’s not immediately obvious that Patrick Conway, whose Cellular Housekeeping album from LA-based ESP Institute follows two EPs for the label, records under any other names, but he’s best known on Utility Fog as Low End Activist, recording politically-on-point releases for Seagrave and Sneaker Social Club. Conway manages to cover a lot of ground, taking in electro, deep house, and all sorts of techno (often all on the one release), and running the Black Orpheus label, but Low End Activist focuses on bass and breakbeats, and his earlier 2021 EP Engineers Origins featured some brilliant ’90s-style jungle & drum’n’bass, so it’s great to hear that emphasis also on Cellular Housekeeping. Like the earlier EP, there are tracks on this album showing that Conway knows the origins well enough to evoke those production styles – not just the beats and basslines – beautifully, while still departing and disassembling in fine contemporary style. There are elements of some kind of mysterious ’80s industrial ambient storytelling here also, weaved into the haunted rave dancefloors.

MSC – Home 2 God [First Terrace Records/Bandcamp]
Manslaughter 777 – ARC [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
MSC – Tek [First Terrace Records/Bandcamp]
Brothers Isaac and Zachary Jones have formed many bands over the past decade and a half, starting with hardcore punk acts like GIANT and then Braveyoung, which gradually morphed into the postrock-informed sounds of their later period, with orchestral influences as well as tape manipulation alongside the hardcore and doom metal trappings. As Braveyoung they collaborated with ever-morphing beauty/noise proponents the body, and Zachary Jones is a longtime touring member of that band too. Braveyoung eventually was disbanded and replaced by their equally-uncategorizable soundsystem identity MSC, and alongside their incredible second collab with the body from last year called I Don’t Ever Want To Be Alone – and Zach’s duo with Lee Buford of the body released at the start of this year under the name Manslaughter 777 – they have been exploring the power of junglist breaks and dub bass, still emphasising the catharsis of noise and the emotiveness of classical music-referencing samples and drones. It’s no surprise that their new album What You Say Of Power is baffling and inspiring.

Jannah Quill – 2020 [SUMAC]
Naarm (Melbourne) based multi-disciplinary artist Jannah Quill has been a name to look out for for some time in the Sydney & Melbourne music scenes, so it’s a bit of a surprise that her new self-titled EP is her first full solo release. In installations & performances, Quill has a reputation for unique experimental work involving hardware & software sound, which result in five evolving club-adjacent tracks on this EP. It’s great to finally have a recording from this singular Australian artist.

Louis Dufort – Into the Forest My wounded arms wide open [empreintes DIGITALes]
Montréal composer Louis Dufort has been a force in acousmatic music since the 1990s. It’s fascinating to hear the way the more recent electronic music of “the academy” ingests and de-contextualises the electronic music of the dancefloor in its own way. Into the Forest collects works from Dufort from the last five years inspired by walks in the mountains and forests of Canada, and renders the experience of nature – its pleasures, comforts, and horrors and majesty – through highly artificial means, recalling (in its own way) the bass-heavy distorted electronics of Vladislav Delay’s recent Rakka duology. On this particular 10-minute track, fast-paced glitchy stereophonic electronic beats compete with digitized field recordings and synth pads; elsewhere sub-bass drops accentuate static-filled landscapes. I can only imagine how experiencing these works in surround sound in large soundsystems would inspire the kind of awe they are themselves inspired by.

Helm – Para [Dais Records/Bandcamp]
Helm – Moskito [Dais Records/Bandcamp]
Luke Younger aka Helm, owner of the ALTER, channels his noise and industrial roots on his latest album, Axis. But despite the primitive noisemaking techniques, this music is clearly informed by the more recent directions he’s taken, including the string arrangements on 2019’s Chemical Flowers. There’s drama and detail in these monumental tracks; it’s a worth successor to that fantastic 2019 album.

Olivia Block – En Echelon [Room40/Bandcamp]
Olivia Block – Great Northern, 34428 [Room40/Bandcamp]
And we finish tonight with two tracks from one of a slew of albums released late in the yeare by Brisbane’s Room40. Chicago composer Olivia Block is best known for longform works combining notated composition with improvisation, live instrumentation with analogue & digital synthesised sound, and thoughtful use of field recordings. This new album, not her first for Room40, certainly places icy field recordings inside organ and lovely Mellotron recordings, but it’s also notable in that the pieces are mostly around 5-6 minutes long – convenient for me to play on radio for a change! There’s much beauty and drama in these pieces which evoke a kind of imaginary sci-fi movie – and there’s a surprising amount of rhythm in the electronics too. If you’d like an easy way in to this important musician’s oeuvre, Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea is a great place to start.

Listen again — ~215MB