A ride through the borderlands tonight, with much music fitting the Utility Fog Charter of music that blurs genre – from indietronica to glitched, mashed soundtrack cues to African electronica, futuristic footwork and more…

LISTEN AGAIN, live life on the edge! Podcast here, stream on demand there.

Dntel – Moonlight [Morr Music/Bandcamp/les albums claus/Bandcamp]
James Figurine – Apologies [Monika Enterprise]
Dntel – Anywhere Anyone feat. Mia Doi Todd [Plug Research/Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
Dntel – Fall In Love [Morr Music/Bandcamp/les albums claus/Bandcamp]
Dntel – I made something [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’s released two Dntel albums, and they’re both wonderful. The second, Away, is just released by Belgian label/gallery les ateliers claus, and out in a couple of weeks from Morr Music. It’s 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 (see tonight’s gorgeous “Fall In Love” from that earlier one) – 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. It’s wonderful of course. We also heard a piece of more straightforward pop from 2006’s Mistake Mistake Mistake Mistake, released under the name James Figurine, and from that 2001 album Life Is Full Of Possibilities we heard the exquisite “Anywhere Anyone” introducing the brilliant LA singer/songwriter Mia Doi Todd.

Wolfgang Mitterer – temp [col legno]
Wolfgang Mitterer – temptation [col legno]
Wolfgang Mitterer – tempo [col legno]
Wolfgang Mitterer – tempt [col legno]
Austrian composer & musician Wolfgang Mitterer writes music for orchestras, operas, and the stage, but is also a composer for the screen. His new album temp tracks is a postmodernist take on the standard practice in filmmaking of using “temp tracks” while editing the work, standing in for the final music. Across 37 tracks, some short cues and some longer, he deconstructs the idea of film music (and presumably some of his own work), into granulated, degraded, glitched samples – and surprisingly often with IDMish flittery beats. There are the hissing ghosts of orchestras, flickers of vocals operatic and international, and even scattered hints of hip-hop on “tempt”. The closest thing I can think of are the glitched easy listening miniatures of Curd Duca. It’s really highly enjoyable & touching, and surprisingly cohesive despite the number of tracks. Highly recommended.

STILL – Nkwaata (feat. Blaq Bandana) [PAN/Bandcamp]
STILL – Rough Rider [PAN/Bandcamp]
STILL feat. Omutaba – Rollacosta (feat. Swordman Kitala) [PAN/Bandcamp]
STILL – Ahlam Wa Ish السماء هي الحد (feat. Winnie Lado) [PAN/Bandcamp]
Milan artist Simone Trabucchi, as well as running the Hundebiss label, started the project STILL in 2017 with an album on PAN featuring a variety of African-Italian vocalists and exploring the connections between Italy, Jamaica and Africa with high-tech dancehall productions. Unfortunately at the time the vocalists weren’t credited, although you can find the credits on Bandcamp now. Far better this time, the new STILL album KIKKOMANDO is in fact credited as a “V/A” release, treated as a mixtape, and all tracks are collaborations. The music isn’t far from the template of labels like Hakuna Kulala, who are co-releasing this album: created in a temporary studio in Kampala, Trabucchi invited many Ugandan musicians and others based in Kampala to work on tracks with him. Among others there’s rap storytelling from Kampala’s Blaq Bandana, there’s the celebrated, lively Swordman Kitala, and two appearances from southern Sudanese singer Winnie Lado, rapping once in English and delivering beautiful spoken word in Arabic. Trabucchi’s varied productions support these vocalists very well, a highly worth release.

Jana Rush – Drivin Me Insane (feat. Nancy Fortune) [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Jana Rush – Frenetic Snare [Objects Limited]
Jana Rush – Mynd Fuc [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
In 2017, Lara Rix-Martin’s Objects Limited released an album from Chicago footwork producer Jana Rush, brilliant productions full of bass energy and the typical skittering drum machines and chopped vocal samples of the genre (even incorporating junglist amen breaks on the last track, “Frenetic Snare”). Rush was involved with the Tek Life crew back in the ’90s, but left music for some time and is widely skilled – paramedic, firefighter, chemical engineer, CT scan technologist! Even more than her previous work, Painful Enlightenment (now released on Rix-Martin’s partner’s Planet µ label) expresses her experiences as a queer woman, and stretches footwork to its very limits. A genre that’s always been aimed at more fleet-footed dancers, footwork here is pushed into all sorts of strange shapes, so that the drums on “Mynd Fuc” are almost more a sonic effect than a beat, clattering around a mournful slow piano fragment; elsewhere the vowels from a sample of a woman saying “Drivin Me Insane” are stretched and repeated over a slower beat in a collaboration with French producer Nancy Fortune. Coming straight from the core of the scene, this should be a landmark for the genre.

MF DOOM – Gazzillion Ear (Thom Yorke Man on Fire Remix) [Lex Records/Bandcamp]
Back in 2010, Lex Records released the Dilla-produced “Gazzillion Ear” as a single from MF DOOM‘s 2009 album Born Like This, with a number of remixes including one from Thom Yorke. Lex are currently celebrating their 20th anniversary, and as part of that they’re unearthing a number of unheard gems from their history (a second Boards of Canada Nextmen remix appeared recently too). So it turns out Thom Yorke submitted two remixes, and the one we heard 11 years ago was the “Monkey Hustle Remix”. Now we get to hear the “Man on Fire” remix, quite radically different from the other, with chaotic noise and a buried groove, very comfortably accompanying the late DOOM’s lyrical flow.

ØNNΔ – ACID CROSSING (Reesepushkin Remix) [Deep Scan]
A few months ago, Sydney’s Deep Scan released a split EP from AIR GOD and the mysterious ØNNΔ, both contributing dirty 4/4 grooves. This coming Friday a remix EP will appear, steering those tracks into broken-beat territory. Vancouver/Sydney artist Reesepushkin here keeps the bass pressure from ØNNΔ‘s original “ACID CROSSING”, but chops the groove and pads, and inserts vocal gasps throughout.

Match Fixer – Rubble 4 [Match Fixer Bandcamp]
Match Fixer – Smile [Match Fixer Bandcamp]
Melbourne’s Andrew Cowie produced a number releases as Angel Eyes some years ago, for labels like Bedroom Suck and Not Not Fun. More recently he’s been Match Fixer, with an EP on Nice Music and a few subsequent releases on his own Bandcamp. 2018’s Rubble explored IDM & drill’n’bass, but new 2-track single Smile floats in an ambient dub space, with a slow pulse and breathy textures over disquieting drones.

Kristen Gallerneaux – Dressing A Skin [Shadow World]
I discovered Detroi-based artist Kristen Gallerneaux on The Leaf Library‘s Object Ten compilation for their Objects Forever label earlier this year. A folklorist, film-maker, writer and musician, Gallerneaux has just released her album Strung Figures through Shadow World – the title refers to a work by Caroline Furness Jayne about Cat’s Cradles and the like – looping string games played on the hands – but also references that strung out feeling of lockdown & pandemic exhaustion. The craft focus also connects to Gallerneaux’s Native family-members, Navajo Nation people who were particularly badly affected by COVID – something which hits home at the moment, as we’re learning of the seemingly inevitable, awful & dangerous lag in providing vaccinations to the Indigenous population of western NSW and the rest of the country. Gallerneaux’s music inhabits a fuzzy, dub-inflected techno world with arcane industrial influences, handmade found-sound samples, disembodied voices and flittering drum machines. An immersive listen.

Dasdreieck – Tearing Paper [Dasdreieck Bandcamp]
Dasdreieck – Timing [Dasdreieck Bandcamp]
Sydney’s Josh O’Connell made generative music as Die Erzeugung and now produces electronica as Dasdreieck. His latest album, Yaspir draws on ’90s IDM. Melodic drum’n’bass track “Tearing Paper” features an unidentified English voice speaking eloquently about depression; it’s a well-chosen speech. And on “Timing” a bass-driven deep house accompanies arpeggiating patterns that wear their Plaid influence on their sleeve. It’s skillfully produced stuff that should appeal to all all fans of this kind of electronica.

JK FLESH vs ECHOLOGIST – Fleshology 0202 B [JK Flesh Bandcamp]
Second volume of murky dub techno by Justin K Broadrick working under his JK Flesh alias with Brendon Moeller aka Echologist. Two tracks are harsher, faster acid techno as of much of the recent JK Flesh stuff, and the other two are much more spaced out dubby numbers like this one.

Eek – Echo Siren, La Return [Anterograde/Bandcamp]
Eek – We’re Fucked [Anterograde/Bandcamp]
The Melbourne-based Hong Kong artist Eek provides much of the incredible artwork for Melbourne’s Anterograde label. Their hallucinatory, lush computer artwork can be seen at their Instagram. For the album Worms Can Talk, the artist sourced huge amounts of audio from YouTube videos, most of which are credited in a massive list on the Bandcamp page. The result, incredibly enough produced & mixed in iMovie, sounds like the outer limits of contemporary industrial techno, albeit mostly without beats – collaged drones and fragmented samples, shuddering surges of bass and all. It’s astonishing and at times overwhelming, an album for the times.

Klara Lewis & Peder Mannerfelt – My Clementine Is Making Paella Tonight [Trilogy Tapes]
Klara Lewis & Peder Mannerfelt – Styrofoam Tone [Trilogy Tapes]
Ahead of a number of stunning releases for Editions Mego, Swedish composer & producer Klara Lewis released an EP in 2014 on Peder Mannerfelt Produktion. Mannerfelt, a mainstay of the Swedish pop and club scenes (and one half of Roll The Dice), was using his personal label to promote the music of a number of female Swedish producers, and Lewis’ musical vision is particularly creative (something she shares with her Dad, Graham Lewis of Wire, who we heard very recently on this show). Now for Trilogy Tapes Lewis & Mannerfelt have teamed up together for a release which is somewhat more abstract than Mannerfelt’s usual fare, and perhaps inserts more humour and chaos into Lewis’ usual work. Warped soundtrack samples, field recordings and drones fizzle and crackle through these 5 tracks – think Fenn O’Berg (RIP Pita!) and you’ll be on the right track. Genius stuff.

Listen again — ~208MB

Everything tonight: choral anarchist punk, indie cello, faux-orchestral, experimental music for dance, ambient, breakbeat, jungle, and other UK bass styles.

LISTEN AGAIN to everything, everything. Stream on demand the FBi way, podcast here.

Crass – G’s Song (Commoners Choir Remix) [Crass Bandcamp]
It’s so good that the ongoing remix 7″ series from the original English anarchist punks Crass continues… 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.

Gareth Skinner – Here U R Where R U [Gareth Skinner Bandcamp]
bZARK – They are the worm [Rubber Records]
Gareth Skinner – zero minus X [Rubber Records/Gareth Skinner Bandcamp]
Gareth Skinner – Yer Pointless Life [Rubber Records/Gareth Skinner Bandcamp]
Gareth Skinner – When It Falls [Gareth Skinner Bandcamp]
Melbourne cellist Gareth Skinner is releasing his new album In Turmoil later this month. It’s his first proper album of songs since 2009’s Looking For Vertical, and that’s cause for celebration in these parts. Skinner’s musical tenure goes back to the mid-’90s, when he & a couple of Uni mates put out a few singles & two albums as bZARK – great indie rock songs with some creative production, and Skinner’s cello riffing up front & centre a lot of the time. They’re fun albums, and Skinner followed up with a couple of solo albums also on Rubber Records – his skills with riffs and basslines on the cello is equalled by his talent for hooky songwriting and cutting lyrics, but he’ll just as easily turn in a beautiful pillow of cello layers. I’m particularly taken with “When It Falls”, in which bowed cello and plucked bassline loop under a melancholy but matter-of-fact song about the coming societal collapse. It’s a crying shame that Gareth’s not better known – check his back catalogue and preorder this gem now!

Tomasz Sroczynski – Diablak [Ici D’ailleurs/Bandcamp]
Polish composer & violinist Tomasz Sroczynski has titled his latest album Symphony Nº2 / Highlander, and it does sound symphonic – but it’s all created by him, with multitudes of samples of his violin and who knows what else. It’s somewhere between classical composition, Eastern European folk music, techno and industrial. It’s a surreal feeling of hearing acoustic instruments but knowing that they couldn’t be performed in this way. Very clever production creating some otherworldly beauty.

Machinefabriek – Music for A Measurable Existence (excerpt) [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp/Bandcamp]
Last year Dutch musician Michel Banabila released a double LP of works for dance that included an extended work for New York choreographer Yin Yue. Now another Dutch musician is releasing works commissioned by Yin Yue – none other than Machinefabriek, and the album Re:Moving (Music for Choreographies by Yin Yue) will be released in September by Phantom Limb‘s Geist im Kino film soundtrack label. It’s unusual for Machinefabriek in having a lot of rhythmic material, including beats – but not unusually, they’re both quite long tracks (about 20 minutes), so we heard the first half or so of the first track. These are complex, through-composed works that flow beautifully; ideal accompaniments for graceful body work.

Laurin Huber – Hostage to History (excerpt) [Hallow Ground/Bandcamp]
Laurin Huber – Nickel [Hallow Ground/Bandcamp]
Swiss producer Laurin Huber released his first solo album under his own name last year on Swiss label Hallow Ground. A collection of four dark works, it sat somewhere between industrial synth ambient and techno, particularly through its use of flittering drum machines on the wonderful “Hostage to History”. Huber’s follow-up, Dog Mountain, maintains a similar disposition, but is much more subdued, with acoustic guitar and field recordings added to the synths. It’s a touching work, inspired by the composer’s meditations on borders.

Tom Hall – Regression of Consciousness [Superpang/Bandcamp]
Tom Hall – Graves for Failed Theories [Superpang/Bandcamp]
Aussie producer Tom Hall is originally from Tasmania, and released some incredible noise albums as AXXONN before turning to more ambient climes under his own name. There’s always been a sense of vastness about his music, of spaciousness and the power of nature. He’s a master sound designer – and indeed he works for Cycling ’74, who make Max/MSP and Jitter. Failed Attempts at Silence finds him on ambient label of the moment Superpang, sees him investigating how to find or produce space inside time. Thus his usual immensity is in-folded here, stretched out over long tracks but seeking something inside the moments.

Stigma – Believe In Me ft. L [Pessimist Productions]
Stigma – No Garden ft. Justin K Broadrick [Pessimist Productions]
As Pessimist, Bristol’s Kristian Jabs makes some of the most minimalist, dark drum’n’bass around – so stripped back it’s basically dub techno, except when it lashes out… His new project Stigma slows the tempo down on the Too Long LP, with various collaborators adding vocals on about half the tracks to create a hard & dark form of trip-hop. DVA Damas‘ Taylor Burch contributes cutting vocals to a longer track, but tonight we heard Lola Thomas-Townsend on “Believe In Me”, and Justin K Broadrick on “No Garden”. The pace and bass put it in the space of Broadrick’s compatriots The Bug and Mick Harris, and at this tempo there’s more room for variation and movement than Pessimist. This might be my favourite material yet from Jabs.

Sully – 5ives [Over/Shadow/Bandcamp]
Nobody has the flittering, dazzling rhythms of jungle down pat like Sully these days. His shift from grime to jungle & drum’n’bass in 2014 was inspired, and if anything he’s only gotten better. His new 12″ 5ives/Sliding comes courtesy of Over/Shadow, whose usual playing field is mid-to-late-’90s style drum’n’bass, but the Moving Shadow connection goes right back to the early days, and Sully here makes the drum breaks not just dance but sing. A masterclass.

LMajor – Can’t Do It [Astrophonica/Bandcamp]
It’s hard to follow Sully in the jungle stakes, but LMajor gives him a run for his money on the first & last tracks of his new 12″ from Astrophonica. This renewed Bandcamp Friday just gone actually brought a stack of new jungle & drum’n’bass releases, but along with Sully this does stand out as an infectious piece of melodic & rhythmic joy.

Leo – latex skies [YOUTH]
Leo – slumped [YOUTH
A member of Manchester collective Manteq in which Iranian refugees work with bass producers, Leo has produced some futuristic grime cuts for MC Tardast (rapping in Farsi) as well as DJing in various bass styles in that northern city. Leo’s second album is released by Manchester’s YOUTH this week, and as typical of that label, it refuses to sit still long enough to pin down the genres or themes – like a mixtape, showcasing this young producer’s skill, whether it’s crazily chopped breaks, instrumental grime or drill, mutated with strange distortions.

FUMU – Skhs Pt.9 [YOUTH]
FUMU – 4 Mika [YOUTH]
FUMU – Extra 10 [YOUTH]
With a few releases on YOUTH under his belt, Michael Steel’s FUMU is a key player on the label and in their segment of the Manchester scene. Different aspects of UK bass, from grime and drill to garage and techno, are distorted and reshaped, like Leo’s album, in mixtape style, with longer tracks broken up with shorter ideas that cut off mid-flow. It gives the sense of something exciting & new that you’re just missing out on (FOMO for FUMU?), suggesting that Manchester (home of course of the SKAM label, Autechre, Boards of Canada, and earlier 808 State et al) still nurtures a cutting-edge club scene.

Listen again — ~208MB

Tonight goes all over – it’s a kind of postpunk krautrock glitch post-jazz drum’n’bass dub deep house deconstructed club deconstructed field recordings thing? Yeah.

Come with me, LISTEN AGAIN. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Elegiac – He Folds [Upp Records/Bandcamp]
Ted Milton, Sam Britton – The Incubating Period [unreleased]
Edvard Graham Lewis – Where’s The Affen? [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
Elegiac – The Swish [Upp Records/Bandcamp]
About 5 years ago I’d been talking to Sam Britton of the great London experimental drum’n’bass duo Icarus (the other half of which is his cousin Ollie Bown, who plays with me in Tangents), and I was quizzing him about the work he’s done with the incredible avant-garde musician Ted Milton. Milton has led the postpunk/jazz group Blurt since the late ’70s, and Britton produced their 2010 album Cut It! (which incidentally has just received a re-release on vinyl – and I’ve yet to track down the original CD edition). Sam told me that not only have he & Milton worked a lot together over the years, but they recorded an album with another legendary postpunk adventurer, Edvard Graham Lewis of Wire – and then Sam kindly sent me the masters! So for 5 years I’ve been sitting on this incredible collaboration, unable to share its mastery – and I just discovered that it’s finally been released. Elegiac (now the name of the group as well as the album) comes out from Lewis’ Upp Records (presumably, as it’s based in Sweden and named after Lewis’ longtime home of Uppsala), and while it’s fair that Milton & Lewis’ names are the ones emphasised, Britton’s juddery, glitchy production hands are all over this music. Of course there’s also plenty of Milton’s Burroughs-like poetry, singing and sax squawks, and Lewis’ heavily-effected guitars and rhythms (also heard on a cut from his pair of albums released on the late lamented Peter Rehberg’s Editions Mego in 2014). It’s a phenomenal album, and timeless enough in these post-everything days that the 5+ year release gap hardly matters (let alone the 5 month gap before I realised it was out!)

HOLY TONGUE – CURSE REMOVING [Valentina Magaletti Bandcamp]
Speaking of postpunk, that seems like a frequent signifier for the versatile drummer Valentina Magaletti‘s music, whether her recent collaborations with Raime as Moin, the already much-missed Tomaga, or the quartet UUUU released by Editions Mego and also featuring Edvard Graham Lewis. In HOLY TONGUE Magaletti works with UK producer Al Wootton, purveyor of dubby club sounds of all persuations, and the second EP from this duo features muscley rhythms and dubbed out textures.

Max Winter – How I Got Rid Of Me [Where To Now? Records]
Max Winter – P.O.S [Where To Now? Records]
UK composer, producer & musician Max Winter‘s debut album One Thousand Lonely Places covers a breadth of styles that can’t be captured by a couple of choices. Along with skittery electronics there are chamber classical arrangements, live jazz drumming and vocals from Winter and collaborator IMOGEN. As you can hear I love the most IDM-ish drum programming, but there are also moments of beautiful peace. Highly recommend that you check the whole thing out.

Downpour – Infinity [Home Assembly Music/Bandcamp]
Downpour – Red Flag [Home Assembly Music/Bandcamp]
Chris Adams has long been a favourite artist of mine, longtime leader of the indie/postrock/indietronic legends Hood. Post-Hood he has occasionally stretched out with brilliant work as Bracken, but Downpour was the project where I first discovered him in the ’90s, making unhinged proto-breakcore & IDM. The project was revived in 2014 for a Bandcamp EP called Do you remember when it was all about the drums?, with a second EP in 2016, both of which have now been re-released on cassette by Home Assembly Music. Do you remember when it was all about the drums? Parts I & II features flowing drum juggling and sub bass swoops for the ages, and comes with a bonus track not on the original EPs, “Red Flag”, which is a reworking of Downpour’s remix of Stewart Anderson‘s political punk band Hard Left from around the same period.

O C O S I – This Year’s Hex [Ohm Resistance/Bandcamp]
O C O S I – Amount [A Matter of Traces]
O C O S I – LOOSE CANNONS [Ohm Resistance/Bandcamp]
Having just released a new album from Mick Harris’s Scorn, Ohm Resistance have also brought to light a similarly heavy dub-hop project from Simon Smerdon and Paul Molyneux called O C O S I. In fact some of O C O S I’s earliest work from 1999 features chopped up recordings of Harris’s live drums, and the general atmos owes a lot to Scorn (although they align themselves with the NYC dub-hip-hop blend, describing themselves as “illbient”). The dark dub basslines and chopped drums are a place I’m always happy to go, so it’s a very nice discovery.

Robag Wruhme – No [Kompakt/Bandcamp]
Robag Wruhme – Quokka Supra [Tulpa Ovi Records/Bandcamp]
Two new tracks from one-time IDM producer (in Beefcake) and longtime techno/deep house producer (as Wighnomy Brothers and Robag Wruhme) Gabor Schablitzki. Schablitzki has just founded his own label, Tulpa Ovi Records, with Robag EP Spoddy Spy as the debut release. There’s no drill’n’bass or overt glitch madness here, but it’s a mix of head-nodding 4/4 and some more broken beats (the humourous press release mentions trip-hop, which is a stretch but not too much). Meanwhile his Speicher 117 EP for techno/ambient institution Kompakt follows last year’s Speicher 115, with last year’s lead track “Yes” contradicted by this year’s “No”, but there’s nothing negative about it, just deep driving techno.

Tennis Pagan – tumi [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
The still mysterious Tennis Pagan (instrumental alias of a Melbourne producer associated with Spirit Level, if that helps) continues his run of EPs after four releases last year. Each release has leaned towards different aspects of the experimental electronic world, and here we have murky house of a sort (hence last year’s all-caps switching to all lower case?)

Myriam Bleau – Stills Upstream [Accidental Records/Bandcamp]
Loula Yorke – YES [Accidental Records/Bandcamp]
Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records has been a home for not only Herbert’s self-sampling glitch, house, jazz & classical permutations, but also other artists, often up-and-coming, working in a similar space. New compilation Antechamber Music explores that space with tracks that run from strings & drones to layered harps, frenetic robot-performed rhythms and more. First up tonight we have Montréal audiovisual artist Myriam Bleau (whose 2019 album Lumens & Profits was released by Where To Now? Records) with arpeggiating synths undercut by ominous held notes. Meanwhile synth maker & audiovisual artist Loula Yorke opens the compilation with cut-up poetry and organ.

Louv – Power [Provenance Records]
Coming next week from Provenance Records, recently relaunched as an artist collective led by Becki Whitton, is a new single from Louise McKnoulty aka Louv. Electronic rhythms underpin a vocal melody, but soon the vocals are caught up in pitch-shifted rhythmic sampling. If the Björk influence wasn’t already clear, the song ends with the repeated refrain “All is full of love” – but this is no cover, and I’m sure the Icelandic goddess would be glad that young female musicians are empowered to go solo in such creative directions. “Power” indeed.

r hunter – V / VI [AR53]
r hunter – Vienna Residue [Genot Centre]
r hunter – IX / X [AR53]
Following last year’s Dead Ambient release on .jpeg Artefacts, Asher Elazary’s r hunter is back with the suitably-titled Chill Beats To Suffer And Die To, released on Melbourne’s AR53 Productions. It’s about equal parts chill-as-in-ambient and chill-as-in-chilling, morphing between unsettling and melancholy as quivering ambient dreamwave rubs up against juddering deconstructed club passages. It’s the kind of thing he’s been exploring since his 2016 release on Nice Music, and can be heard also on his 2019 record rrrrrrafael for Prague’s Genot Centre. It’s pretty remarkable stuff.

Kate Carr – nothing is immobile [Kate Carr Bandcamp]
London-based ex-pat Aussie Kate Carr is one of my favourite artists embedding field recording deep in her practice. Her new album dawn, always new, often superb, inaugurates the return of the everyday is self-released but not on her indispensable label Flaming Pines, with a beautiful-looking custom vinyl edition as well as digital. Commissioned by Forma Arts as they relocated to the Bricklayers Arms roundabout in London, it meditates on that space and how it changed sonically and emotively during pandemic lockdowns as well as Brexit. Tiny rhythms spread through this subtle work, along with soft drones and pure sub-bass tones at times. It’s one to settle into at a quiet time.

Listen again — ~205MB

An opening triggered by a tragic death, a celebration of a 21-year-old album and a 23-year-old track, a number of long, deep tracks on a show that keeps dipping into ambient waters.

LISTEN AGAIN and settle into the unsettling… Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Pita – Untitled 3 [Mego/Bandcamp]
General Magic & Pita – Theme Fridge [Mego/Bandcamp]
This Friday brought terrible, unexpected news that Peter Rehberg had died – of a heart attack, it turns out. Rehberg was co-founder of the Mego label, later relaunched solo as Editions Mego. In the mid to late ’90s his music as Pita, and the associated artists from Austria & beyond, pioneered the sound of glitch – celebrating the sound of broken digital & analogue equipment, grainy granular processing, harsh noise and minimalist crackles… Rehberg was much-loved, an Anglophile Austrian with a hard-to-place accent, endlessly supportive of experimental musicians the world over. He launched a thousand careers, was by all accounts delightful company, took academic sound-art seriously but always with a gleeful sense of humour and the absurd. He’s already deeply missed. Our opening track comes from his second solo album as Pita, Get Out from 1999, looping & reversing a Morricone sample into a kind of blisteringly noisy shoegaze redux… We follow that with the birth of glitch & the birth of Mego, from the Fridge Trax releases with Andi Pieper & Ramon Bauer aka General Magic, the three original founders of Mego.

Ben Bondy – Drip on Nape [West Mineral Ltd/Bandcamp]
Ben Bondy – Meridian [West Mineral Ltd/Bandcamp]
Ben Bondy – Skizz [West Mineral Ltd/Bandcamp]
I discovered Brooklyn designer & sound-artist Ben Bondy in a collaboration with exael last year released by West Mineral Ltd, and after a stack of releases from Bondy last year, that same label now brings us, *ahem*, Glans Intercum. Again it’s some kind of exobiological future documentary soundtrack made of unsettling ambience & club echoes.

LAITR – Raiene [Acroplane]
LAITR – Under Ether [Acroplane]
LAITR – Parsa [Acroplane]
Club echoes also abound on the debut release for Madrid-based Manchester artist LAITR, released on long-lived Irish netlabel Acroplane Recordings. On Sapphire Send, varieties of UK bass collide with choral samples or the kind of glitched-up US rap samples IDM artists favoured in the ’90s, and beats bubble into ambience at times. An impressive debut and I’ll be looking for what comes next.

Bob Holroyd – Steal [Real World X/Bandcamp]
Peter Gabriel’s Real World label recently launched an imprint called Real World X which as far as I can see is meant to be the “cooler” cousin. The latest release is a two-track single from British composer & DJ Bob Holroyd, whose usual beat is world music fusiony chill. But Mangled Pianos is two tracks of quite in-turned music, meditating on the anxiety and monotony of lockdown. The title track layers piano at different speeds, but the undercurrent of nerves is inverted on “Steal”, with a glitchy, jittery techno beat and morphing piano and electronics.

DJ Food – The Crow (dub) [Ninja Tune]
DJ Food – The Rook + Type 3 [Ninja Tune/Bandcamp]
DJ Food – The Crow (original from FunKungFusion) [Ninja Tune]
DJ Food – Skylark [Ninja Tune/Bandcamp]
In 2000, Ninja Tune released the first album for DJ Food as a duo, no longer a collaborative project for Coldcut‘s Matt Black and Jon More at all. Having begun as Black & More’s way of making music outside of a major label contract, feeding directly into the founding of Ninja Tune, it had long benefited from the work of PC (Patrick Carpenter) and Strictly (aka Kevin Foakes). On Kaleidoscope, DJ Food became the project of PC & Strictly, not breaking hugely from the project’s origins with a dubwise approach to instrumental hip-hop’s sample-kleptomania, here reproducing jazz atmospherics in a way that just lets you see where the collaged parts join together. Both Carpenter & Foakes are great musicians too, and the music doesn’t let you work out which bits are performed and which are sampled. After this album, Carpenter left to work for a time with The Cinematic Orchestra and on other projects, and DJ Food has for at least a decade now genuinely been one person. That material’s great, and I love the early beat tapes and collaborative works too, but we’re focusing on the Kaleidoscope period as PC & Strictly got together over the last year to celebrate what’s now 21 years since the album was released with Kaleidoscope Companion – an entire album’s worth of alternate takes and unreleased goodies, along with a quadruple vinyl collection of album & companion. It holds together really well for what’s really an outtakes collection – tracks I would’ve loved to have heard at the time, many even better than the album IMHO. In particular there are two different versions of the beloved track The Crow, which was first heard on the 1998 Ninja Tune compilation FunKungFusion – a head-nodding piece of late-night faux-jazz hip-hop, with sliding double bass, poised samples, and a cathartic synth-strings denoument. On the album “The Crow…” replaces the fake strings with vibraphone, a decision I’ve never understood. Tonight I played the rare “(dub)” version from A Dubplate of Food Vol, 2, and the gorgeous extended Companion track “The Rook + Type 3”, based around the altered harmony of the Crow’s bridge section, and finally played the original 1998 version. The Companion also has a lovely “(Slow)” version which is indeed slowed down, and builds on those synth strings. Finally, “Skylark” is another lost-and-now-found classic of beat juggling and pensive piano from PC.

perila – Fallin Into Space [Smalltown Supersound/Bandcamp]
perila – Enchiz [Smalltown Supersound/Bandcamp]
Multi-talented Russian artist Aleksandra Zakharenko, based like everyone in Berlin, has been noted in the last 2 years for her post-cyberpunk ambient as perila. Her debut album proper How much time it is between you and me? is released by Smalltown Supersound, but shares a lot with her cohorts at West Mineral Ltd (heard earlier tonight) – ambience that is as disquieting as it is calming, with glitches and soft vocals at the edge of hearing, and only occasional fizzling rhythms. A very strange offering, as was to be expected.

Sebastian Field – 55 Cancri A [Provenance Records/Bandcamp]
Canberra’s Sebastian Field moves yet further from his origins as indie singer/songwriter her this first single from his album Sandcandles, coming out from Provenance Records in October. His high, sweet voice is still central, as a textural element looped and mired in delays and tape effects – Benoît Pioulard springs to mind, and I’m not complaining one bit.

Aphir – waste cascader [Provenance Records/Bandcamp]
Speaking of layers of processed vocals! Becki Whitton, who’s just announced the conversion of Provenance Records into an artist collective under her leadership, snuck out the new Aphir Plastichoir album a couple of weeks ago. It’s derived from a series of marathon livestream sessions building vocal improvisations for up to 8 hours at a time, a crazy venture but also crazy productive. Without pre-produced beats or structures, these pieces build up loops of vocals that Whitton processes in realtime, subsiding as she sees fit. “waste cascader” feeds the Becki choir into a pulsating undulation, augmented and modulated over 6½ minutes. Beautiful stuff.

Patrick Kavanagh – The Tidal Path [Patrick Kavanagh Bandcamp]
Finally, the latest album from Sydney experimental music mainstay Patrick Kavanagh is a million miles from the noisy psych rock of Box The Jesuit, his ’80s & ’90s band. On The Tidal Path, Kavanagh bottles down even the quieter parts of his recent instrumental music into a collection of meditations for piano, guitar, vocal effects and lots of electronics. It can be unsettling (a word that’s threaded through many of tonight’s selections), but it’s also quite gorgeous and enveloping. The 16 minute title track ends tonight’s show in blissful darkness.

Listen again — ~204MB