A lot of moody music tonight, some different types of “jazz”, music from Norway, Japan, the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Canada and of course Australia.

LISTEN AGAIN, it’s a mood. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

ØKSE – Amager feat. billy woods [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
ØKSE – Amar Økse [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
Starting tonight with a record that literally came out today. It’s odd to find essentially a free jazz record on billy woods‘ great underground hip-hop label Backwoodz Studioz, but here you have it. ØKSE are a Norwegian-American quartet, as far as I can see, featuring the great Norwegian saxophonist Mette Rasmussen and Norwegian bassist Petter Eldh whose Koma Saxo we heard earlier this year. Eldh plays synths and sampler as well as holding down some wicked bass, and Haitian composer, percussionist & turntablist Val Jeanty adds scratches and other sounds (she’s credited as “sound chemist”), while NYC-based Setter Harris pounds out live free-jazz breakbeats. So it’s pretty out-there stuff already, and the rhythm section is heavy and nimble. On their self-titled debut record, half the album (four tracks) has guest appearances from NYC hip-hop vocalists, including both billy woods and his Armand Hammer other half ELUCID. The word “alchemical” may be overplayed in music writing, but there’s definitely some kind of magical transmutation going on here – from this afternoon’s listen this is shaping up to be a 2024 highlight already!

Coppé – My Funny Valentine (Sonny-Boy Anderson & GIZAT Rework)* [Mango + Sweetrice Records/Bit-Phalanx Music]
Coppé – Fever [Mango + Sweetrice Records/Bit-Phalanx Music]
Coppé – Cry Me A River (DJ Kensei Remix) [Mango + Sweetrice Records/Bit-Phalanx Music]
A few weeks ago I previewed the new album from Japanese chanteuse and experimental electronic pop veteran Coppé, someone who’s worked with the likes of Plaid, Atom™, Terminal11, Georgia’s Nikakoi and many others. Aside from IDM & experimental electronica, she is well-versed in jazz and classical music, and in 2022 decided to do a “pure jazz” album – albeit still with an interesting sound. *​(​Un​-​)​tweaked featured mostly covers of jazz standards, with one or two originals, and of course the “un-” implies *( -​)​tweaked, which is now here in the form of a remix album. It’s all great, with some admirably radical reworkings. Having selected the first track, I then went searching and discovered that Sonny-Boy Anderson is none other than the son of The Designers Republic™ founder Ian Anderson, whose cartoonish, typeface-obsessed designs defined Warp Records, Pop Will Eat Itself and more from the beginning of the ’90s. Sonny’s drum’n’bassy rework of Coppé’s “My Funny Valentine” cover is a collaboration with young UK artist GIZAT. And then we have a brilliant deconstruction of her “Cry Me A River” by DJ Kensei.

MAREWREW – Etukuma Kara (M.RUX Remix) [Pingipung Records/Bandcamp]
Staying in Japan, but heading north, we find MAREWREW, an a capella quartet of women keeping alive the musical tradition of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido and other northern islands of Japan. The Ainu’s culture has long been suppressed, and the “Ukouk” singing here is incredible: repetitive canon structures (rounds) in which the singers move the reptitions slightly out of phase – live! MAREWREW’s original album Ukouk. Round Singing Voices of the Ainu 2012-2024 was released earlier this year by Pingipung Records, and I plan to dive in soon, but in keeping with the musicians’ desire to keep this tradition alive, the label have commissioned a series of remix EPs. From Ukouk Remixes Pt. 1, today we heard the lovely melodic techno of Berlin’s M.RUX.

WaqWaq Kingdom – Hado [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp]
To me, WaqWaq Kingdom‘s new album is their best yet. The duo of Kiki Hitomi (who’s worked with The Bug in early King Midas Sound, Goh Nakada aka Gorgonn in Dokkebi Q and many others) and Shigeru Ishihara (aka DJ Scotch Egg aka Scotch Rolex, who has indeed also worked with Goh Nakada) are both known for heavy bass projects, but with WaqWaq Kingdom they’ve brought an unhinged psychedelic approach to reggae influences along with Japanese traditional musical styles and dance styles from all over. On Mind Onsen, there’s a slight reduction in manicness (slight!) and a re-affirmation of BASS, especially on the second track, “Hado”.

b0t23 + inoperative system – Simplo (Roel Funcken Remix) [From Roel’s Bandcamp subscription/original here]
I subscribe to the Bandcamp of Roel Funcken, which includes the music he & his brother Don made as Funckarma. Since the late ’90s they flew the flag of IDM high, incorporating dubstep and bass music and ever-increasing technological advances. Roel’s output has slowed of late, but every month we still get something exclusive – there’s a huge amount in the archive! This month is a remix of US artist b0t23 + Spain’s inoperative system, a track from their recent Reticle EP reworked in Funcken’s trademark glitchy, low-slung funk.

samwho – St Elmo’s Fire [Intercept Records/Bandcamp]
Staying in the Netherlands, young Rotterdam artist samwho has made a name for himself DJing in his hometown (a place with a long fabled history in techno and rave music). His new EP is Gaea’s Good Grace for Dutch label Intercept Records, two tracks of energetic percussive bass techno.

Modern Norman – The Frogs [Suitably Bizarre]
MastaGlow – We Wanna Roll [Suitably Bizarre]
Louis Hubris Nooz – Dunrobin Stobie [Suitably Bizarre]
Last week I played the first track I could find of “hit em”, the genre that sprung up out of a dream Drew Daniel related on Twitter a mere two weeks ago: it’s in 5/4 time at 212bpm with super crunched out sounds. Drew is one half of highly-beloved experimental electronic duo Matmos with his partner M.C. Schmidt, who played a hilarious, memorable and beautiful hour and a quarter show at Phoenix Central Park on Friday night. Sorry if you missed it. Also on Friday, Drew woke up to the bizarre fever-dream of not just some partial joke tracks on Twitter, but a whole compilation of hit em. Disposable Heroes of Hit Em was conceived by Adrien 75, who in a bizarre coincidence I met in 1999 at a Matmos gig in NYC shortly after he had a hand in one of my favourite IDM compilations ever. Adrien asked a few friends including Adelaide’s Tim Koch and NZ’s Michael Upton (the three have a project together called Takamu), and along with a couple of other friends they put the compilation together in a few days. It’s a lot of fun, only occasionally acceding to the breakcore/jungle temptation found elsewhere, while also covering melodic IDM, skittery ambient and frenetic Dave Brubeck sampling (I mean, of course). Tonight’s three tracks are from Adrien, Michael and Tim in that order, FWIW.

Mattr – Amaranthus [Mattr Bandcamp]
Out now also is a single new track from Birmingham IDM producer Mattr. Amaranthus follows the album Pheno released a few months ago, and it’s his lovely twinkly ambient-melodic synth work with a clattering drill’n’bass beat. Joyous.

Meat Beat Manifesto – Into The Sun Pts 1&2 [Yellow Machines]
Jack Dangers’ Meat Beat Manifesto was there at the beginning of jungle, arguably presaging UK hardcore and jungle with the 1990 breakbeat masterpiece “Radio Babylon“. “Into The Sun Pts 1&2” is Meat Beat Manifesto’s side of a split 12″ on London label Yellow Machines, who appropriately focus on hybrids of IDM, hardcore and jungle, and that’s very much what we get here, flitting through various styles of breakbeat accompanied by NASA samples I think. It’s a corker, if not quite as intense as MBM’s recent collaboration with Merzbow, Extinct.

Boris Hauf – hw26 om [Shameless Records/Bandcamp]
The one track I played tonight can only show a portion of what’s in store on German musician Boris Hauf‘s album CLARK3 – from the edges tongues grow. It’s the third in his CLARK series, the previous two of which came out on vinyl & digital and focused more on minimal techno and ambient sounds. The third continues Hauf’s meditations on humanity’s current state – digitally divided, heading towards climate collapse – and looks to a “futuristic interstellar co-existence”. The music here varies from glitchy post-industrial ambient to technoid experimentation and faster-paced IDM. Oh, and “CLARK3 is produced AI free”.

o’summer vacation – 宿痾(Shuku-a) [Alien Transistor/Bandcamp]
Although courtesy of The Notwist‘s Alien Transistor label, our next selection veers into noise punk with Japanese trio o’summer vacation. The riff-heavy sound is produced only with bass, drums and voice, the bass screaming and heavy with effects, and vocalist Ami slathering herself in delays. Brilliant.

Stick In The Wheel – A Thousand Pokes [From Here Records/Bandcamp]
Somehow segueing perfectly out of o’summer vacation are Stick In The Wheel, English folk duo of Nicola Kearey & Ian Carter who in the last more than a decade have revived raw, acoustic traditional folk (with various cohorts) and simultaneously taken folk into strange electronic climes (Ian Carter was a founding member of dubstep iconoclasts Various Production, and makes music solo as EAN). But you can also find them making distorted punk-folk like on the title track for their forthcoming album A Thousand Pokes, which takes a satirical look at the current age from their unique standpoint.

Clark – Green Breaking [Throttle Records/Bandcamp]
Also forthcoming is Chris Clark‘s expanded soundtrack to Naqqash Khalid‘s award-winning film In Camera – which incidentally I can’t wait to see. Clark’s abilities as a classical composer of great sensitivity are combined with his electronic production – seemingly on everything he does – so this comes highly anticipated.

The Smile – Don’t Get Me Started [XL Records/streaming links]
Thom Yorke & Jonny Greenwood’s “not-Radiohead” project The Smile, with jazz drummer Tom Skinner, already put an album out this year, but now they’re back with a moody electronic single, great enough on its own but further augmented by the trippy (as usual) music video created by Aphex Twin collaborator Weirdcore.

Robag Wruhme – CDV feat. Bruno Pronsato (Remix-Edit) [Kompakt/Bandcamp]
In the late ’90s and early ’00s, Gabor Schablitzki was one half, with Volker Kahl, of one of my favourite IDM groups, Beefcake. Their material is mostly out of print but you can hear their three albums on YouTube here, here and here – drill’n’bass and acid madness, post-Aphex melodies, glitchy processing and all. Then in the early part of the new millennium Schablitski started to find success as a techno DJ with Wighnomy Brothers and making remixes and original music both under that name and as Robag Wruhme. I was really not attuned to tech house or 4/4 techno at the time, so it wasn’t until years later that I realised the brilliance of this new phase… Now Robag Wruhme is a favourite, and he’s still a bit of a larrikin – weird things always happen somewhere in his tracks, but there’s also a lot of heart and melody. This track features Berlin-based Bruno Pronsato aka Steven Ford, purveyor of microhouse, minimal techno and also rather experimental sounds at times – in fact I think it’s Robag’s “Remix-Edit” of a live set of Pronsato at Club Der Visionäre .

Severin Black & Owen Pratt – I (Vulcanised Types) [Archaic Vaults]
Here’s some visceral industrial-noise with a direct connection to the physical world. Severin Black runs the Archaic Vaults label, whose releases are usually mastered by France-based sound-artist Owen Pratt. After an excellent untitled cassette a few years ago, their debut album is simply titled Duet. Many of the tracks are derived from field recordings and feedback – self-propelling “duets” such as one between bass amp feedback and an open snare drum, for instance. “I (Vulcanised Types)” may or may not feature hardened rubber, but it’s one on which the drones are set back a little, driven by primitive industrial rhythms. This is richly grimy music.

Lawrence English – ShellType [Room40/Bandcamp]
For his forthcoming EP ShellType, Room40 boss Lawrence English has been thinking about the blurring of our selves as we become dependent on, and augmented by, technology. This blurring is found in the four tracks too, where field recordings and human-created sounds are conflated into sculpted drone, whether the gamelan hiding somewhere in the winds on all four tracks or the drawn-out voices reverberating through the title track, while sub-bass looms like distant foghorns and mysterious sounds crackle at the edge of hearing. This is one to listen loud on your stereo late at night, or lying on the floor with headphones on: 25 minutes of immersion.

Erik K Skodvin – A dark escape [Miasmah Recordings/Bandcamp]
Erik K Skodvin – Prayer [Miasmah Recordings/Bandcamp]
Miasmah Recordings is the remarkable label created by Berlin-based Norwegian musician Erik K Skodvin, a home to certain types of dark experimental music that often fit the moniker “acoustic doom”. Skodvin is a cellist, guitarist and producer (often releasing music as Svarte Greiner), and is extremely adept at creating engrossing, troubling atmospheres from very minimal sources. The new digital EP Afterwar is music made for the docu-fiction film of the same name by Danish director Birgitte Stærmose, shot over 15 years to document the lives of four survivors of the Kosovo war. Skodvin’s music is moody and moving.

Mark Hjorthoy – A Heart Full Of Hollow Wounds [Unexplained Sounds Group]
Italian musician Raffaele Pezzella curates the Unexplained Sounds Group, a group of record labels covering industrial and experimental music from all over the world. One of their great achievements is the “Anthology of Experimental Music From…” series, which has covered experimental music from regions like Latin America and the Balkans as well as specific compilations from Iran, Lebanon, China, Indonesia, Finland and beyond. The latest is Anthology of Experimental Music from Canada, featuring mostly artists I’ve never heard of. Tonight we have one of the less abrasive offerings, a beautiful piece of pulsating synths, Fender Rhodes (I’m guessing), crackles and tape hiss from Vancouver-based Mark Hjorthoy.

Gregory Paul Mineeff – Advancement [whitelabelrecs/Bandcamp]
Wollongong composer Gregory Paul Mineeff‘s latest album is a slight departure from his usual ambient/post-classical piano & synths. Released on English label whitelabelrecs, the album adds quiet, minimal drum machines and nostalgic electric guitar throughout. A lovely closer for tonight.

Listen again — ~210MB

Thanks to Giulio for filling in last week while I was away – excellent selections, and even some text about everything that was played 🤗
Tonight, we’ve got all the genres: hardcore punk, classical hyper-pop, nu-spiritual jazz, nu-folktronica, shoegazetronica, singer-sound-artist, feral ruralcore, computer music poetry, glitchnaturebeat, footwork-cumbia, experimental electronic, jungle, hit ’em, grime, minimal electronic, arcane dub, postrocktronica, free-improv-tronica, bass-vox-improv, and neo-post-classical.

LISTEN AGAIN and degenrify yourself! Stream on demand via FBi Radio, podcast here.

Show Me The Body – Shelter [CORPUS]
Not long after NYC hardcore punk trio Show Me The Body released their debut album Body War – itself a creative expansion of contemporary hardcore – they dropped their original Corpus I mixtape, which saw them hooking up with diverse artists from underground hip-hop and experimental electronica, with the likes of Moor Mother, Eartheater, Denzel Curry, Dreamcrusher and more. That was 2017, and there’ve been a couple of albums since then, and a world tour or two – and an excellent remix EP mind you – but they’re finally getting back to CORPUS with Corpus II EP I (the existence of which implies at least EP II). The credits are missing on Bandcamp (you can see them on the cover image though), but a bunch of rappers do feature. That said, the melted loops and raw power of “Shelter” are a winner for me.

Darian Donovan Thomas – Flirting [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp]
Darian Donovan Thomas – Flirting – Coda [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp]
Out now on New York-based classical crossover label New Amsterdam Records is an album from composer, violinist, producer and multimedia artist Darian Donovan Thomas. Among many credits, he’s found playing violin on Arooj Aftab‘s breakthrough album Vulture Prince. I believe A Room With Many Doors: Night is his debut solo album proper, mostly performed, sung and produced by himself. “Flirting” stands out as a piece of hyperpop with hyper beats and post-PC Music melody (and some cute phrasing) that glitches and dissolves into its Coda, where Phong Tran (also responsible for the album art) contributes sampling and abstraction with various software & hardware, while Thomas plays looped & pitch-shifted violins along with vocals and bells.

Sharada Shashidhar – Soft Echoes [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
LA-based singer, composer & producer Sharada Shashidhar released her debut EP Rahu on Leaving Records in 2020, in which jazz and r’n’b were treated through hip-hop and electronic production techniques. Four years later, she’s gearing up to release her debut album Soft Echoes, which sees Shashidhar take on the role of band leader, with an ensemble featuring LA-based Australian bassist Anna Butterss and other accomplished young players (saxophonist Devin Daniels has also released a couple of excellent beat tapes on Leaving Records as Kara-Do). Shashidhar’s compositions meld vocal techniques from Indian classical music with evocative and catchy spiritual jazz – and electronic production techniques. I for one can’t wait to hear the rest of the album.

Andrew Tuttle & Michael Chapman – Wholly Unrelated To Four Seasons [Basin Rock/Bandcamp]
British guitarist and singer-songwriter Michael Chapman worked across many genres up until he passed away in 2021 aged 80. His latter-day following was confirmed in the Tompkins Square-issued compilation Oh Michael, Look What You’ve Done: Friends Play Michael Chapman, featuring Lucinda Williams, Meg Baird and Thurston Moore among others. One Australian fan was Brisbane’s Andrew Tuttle, who’s made a career around electronically-mediated banjo and acoustic guitar-picking soundscapes. By luck, Chapman’s partner Andru had been enjoying Tuttle’s album on Basin Rock, Fleeting Adventure, in the years after Chapman’s passing, and so Andrew Tuttle has had the privilege of expanding on and reworking the unfinished final instrumental recordings of Chapman. The album Another Tide, Another Fish is out through Basin Rock at the end of the month and features the original recordings on a second disc. Andrew’s post-production has created something quite enchanting on the first single, “Wholly Unrelated To Four Seasons”, in which guitar tones are stretched and layered in a dreamy, underwater fashion.

Seefeel – Sky Hooks [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Back in 2010 & 2011, shoegaze/electronic pioneers Seefeel released a new EP & album after some 14 years’s absence. Now the core of Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock have put together a new album (albeit only 6 tracks), with the familiar sampled & looped vocals of Peacock pulsing through through dubwise electronics. They’ve always had a temporally displaced sound – constructed entirely through digital technology but somehow analogue, even organic sounding. It’s a pleasure to have something new, and we’ll hear the rest of Everything Squared later this month.

Simon Fisher Turner – The “Special Relationship” [Mute/Bandcamp]
Simon Fisher Turner – Purr [Mute/Bandcamp]
Simon Fisher Turner – She Lowers Her Arms [Mute/Bandcamp]
So finally the actual new album from Simon Fisher Turner is out. SFT has been many things in his career, from child actor and young pop idol to composer and sound-artist who’s worked with Derek Jarman and created some of the most alluring and boundary-pushing audio work in the last few decades. Instability of the Signal is a quietly alluring album, sprinkled with his humour and frequently pulling the heartstrings. It’s deconstructed pop, constructed from four “S”es: “Slivers” of samples from David Padbury’s Salford Electronics, “Strings” from the Elysian Collective (previously the Elysian Quartet), found “Sounds” and field recordings, and “Singing” primarily from SFT himself. Fisher Turner also incorporates ideas from filmmakers Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatic, and words from Harold Pinter, whose “Special Relationship” we heard tonight. It’s tied together with subtle gestures like the eerie drone that starts The “Special Relationship” and reasserts itself at the close of the following track “Purr”. The “Slivers” sometimes develop into rhythmic figures, the “Strings” often insert themselves with fragmented romantic chord patterns. It’s a gentle & unassuming tour-de-force of the sort that an accomplished, adventurous artist of 5 decades can create.

Udder J Russell – After Midsomer [Udder J Russell Bandcamp]
Johnny Russell aka Ronny Juzzle aka Then Dof, Other J Russell, Udder J Russell and more, was once upon a long ago one half of folktronic duo Clickits with John McCaffrey aka Part Timer. I’ve followed his work as best I could, and lately those Udder/Other aliases have been highly active on Bandcamp. For someone who doesn’t care to promote his work in any way, he’s putting quite a bit of work into some very creative music, not least the analog festival for rabbits EP, where we find ourselves at an organic dream-rave with wonky found-percussion, caveman feedback and balooning bass tones. It seems unfair that Johny Part Timer & I are the only people who’ve bought it as yet. Go on.

John Wall and Alex Rodgers – Herd Vectiv [John Wall Bandcamp]
British composer John Wall is an important figure in electronic music despite being self-trained. His work since the mid-’90s (when he was already in his 40s) has involved painstaking organisation of tiny samples into strange, disarming narratives. Since 1997’s Fractur he has pioneered a glitch aesthetic that incorporates his recordings of British improv musicians, avant-garde composers, heavy metal and pop, albeit rarely recognizable. Since 2006, Wall has been creating collaborative works with British spoken word artist Alex Rodgers, whose acerbic poetry and equally-acerbic delivery seem at first glance contradictory to the austerity of pure sound-art. But Wall’s compositions are both meticulous and full of energy – even anger – that’s expressed even in these abstract sound-structures that rarely coalesce into anything resembling beats and barlines. This is seemingly all present in their latest missive, “Herd Vectiv“, with clattering bodies of sound tumbling and syncopating in ways that suggest songwriting structures, and when Rodgers’ voice does appear, it’s vocoded and autotuned into some kind of song(?) – this is the Brechtian alienation that claire rousay employs too, invoking pathos from abstraction. Another contradiction – in effect flipping all of Wall’s divorced, un/anti-music into a kind of pop; or at least anti-pop.

Moss Kissing – 35mg to 75mg to 150mg [Colectivo Casa Amarela/Bandcamp]
Moss Kissing – Dont make plans [Colectivo Casa Amarela/Bandcamp]
Zackary Enright-Wells’ latest album Between Summer & Now (a fragmented diary of depression) also draws pathos from abstracted forms, here referencing club music from ambient un-structures, scuffed field recordings, granulated piano refrains, anti-song. It’s the kind of deeply engrossing, quietly revolutionary stuff that the Portuguese Colectivo Casa Amarela have been sneaking out for some years. Really, don’t miss this!

Joaquín Cornejo – Cuica [YUKU]
This track from Ecuadorian producer Joaquín Cornejo actually came out a year or so ago on YUKU, but it’s available right now, for free, as part of YUKU’s 4th Birthdizzle Compapoodle. These big label anniversary compilations only stay up for about a month, so grab it now for a great primer on one of the best experimental electronic labels around at the moment.

E-Saggila – Every Voice At Once [Northern Electronics/Bandcamp]
Rita Mikhael, Iraq-born producer & DJ based on Toronto, released her latest album Gamma Tag, earlier this year on Northern Electronics. I’m not sure why I only just got onto it, but probably because there’s a CD (yay) and it must’ve taken a while to find it in stock? THAT’S MY EXCUSE! Mikhael’s usual tendencies are here – industrial & noise undertones but on a firm footing of bass, techno and IDM, seriously great.

Comatone – Start Synthy (2008) [Feral Media]
Another month, another entry in the unreleased hard-drive-plundering C-TONE20 EP series from Comatone, aka Blue Mountains-based Greg Seiler. On EP4, it’s more acid squiggles and breakbeats galore, from across the 20+ years being covered. It’s streaming on Spotify and elsewhere… Really ought to be downloadable but for now it’s just a streamfest!

Kloke – Lost Technology [Unknown To The Unknown/Bandcamp]
Last week the venerable UK label Hyperdub, run by Kode9 and home to forward-thinking bass music of all sorts, announced their first ever jungle album, and it’s a co-production from two of the current jungle crop’s greatest: the UK’s most enthusiastic jungle proponent Tim Reaper and the Naarm/Melbourne-based Kloke. There’s a single out now, but in the meantime Kloke also released a whole album of sparkling space-jungle on Unknown To The Unknown, The Cosmik Connection Lost Tape. “Lost Technology” mixes intense beat-mashing with dreamy synth pads, and incidentally uses one of the same breaks that Reaper & Kloke use on In Full Effect‘s first single, “Alienation“. Brilliant stuff.

Alex Reed – Hit ‘Em Dreamgrl (Remastered) [Alex Reed Bandcamp]
On Monday – yes, still less than a week ago! – the one & only Drew Daniel aka The Soft Pink Truth, one half of Matmos, sent out this tweet:

had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called “hit em” that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds thank you dream girl

— DREW DANIEL (@DDDrewDaniel) July 29, 2024

Within hours the tweet had gone viral and people were making “hit em” tracks. One of the first I saw was by Alex Reed – an academic like Drew, and usually making postpunk, post-industrial and, well, other stuff. But his “Hit ‘Em Dreamgrl” – pushed out within a day but since remastered, remixed & b-sided – is as close to what I’d have imagined the genre to sound like, i.e. breakcore in 5/4. Hilarious and yet strangely compelling?

Kruz Leone – Ready & Live (Deft Remix) [Ninja Tune Production Music/Stream here]
A hefty piece of grime from Kruz Leone here gets remixed by London bass/dusbtep/jungle producer Deft, which is intriguingly released via Ninja Tune Production Music, a large library run by Ninja Tune of music specially selected for synch – that is, for licensing for film, TV, advertising etc. I wouldn’t immediately think of a hard-hitting grime/d’n’b hybrid like this being ideal for synch, but now I can hear it hitting in a hard transition in some urban TV action drama…

Tutu Ta – Could Be Monk [Tutu Ta Bandcamp]
London producer Lorenzo Geary has a few releases under his belt as Tutu Ta, all with a dub bent, but bent dub that ventures into homegrown techno or postpunk, with pitch-shifted vocals stumbling out of the mix, and a sense of indistinct druidic ritual around the whole thing.

Alva Noto – HYbr:ID Sync Inter [Noton]
A sharp slam of the brakes and we’re in a very different bass-land, the pristine electronics of Carsten Nicolai’s Alva Noto giving us the third of his HYbr:ID series of somewhat more beat-oriented albums. Sub bass plays an important role, and crisp, glitchy beats with synth tones as cold as the desert at night. Nicolai’s music is as purely electronic as it comes, but the beautiful CD package (a standard that was set early in the Raster-Noton/Alva Noto timeline) comes with gorgeously laid-out full-page diagrams describing each track – worth the slightly higher price of admission.

Memory Drawings – Some Vague Sense Of Belonging (Epic45 Remix) [sound in silence/Memory Drawings Bandcamp]
I’ve mentioned Memory Drawings a fair bit before, the trans-Atlantic, dulcimer-led postrock band that I’ve had the honour of contributing cello to for some years now. I played a track from the latest album Deathbed Requests when the album came out back in June, but I now have possession of the beautiful double-CD edition from Greek label sound in silence, sporting a second disc of remixes and tied up in a fabric envelope. Each Memory Drawings album has come with bonus remixes & reworks, and an excellent lineup of colleagues is found here (see the list on their Bandcamp). It’s pretty nice to hear my cello recontextualised in the hands of Northern English rural indietronica mob Epic45.

Kai Angermann, Frauke Berg, Axel Ganz, Anja Lautermann – HFM02 03 [Trestle Records/Bandcamp]
Ross Downes & co’s Trestle Records has been host to a number of interesting series since their inception, including the One Day Band sessions bringing musicians from around the world together for a day in a studio, and then during lockdown the From Isolation series of online collaborations. Their latest venture is a series called HFM, from Haus Für Musiker, a creative space just outside of Düsseldorf. The label took up residence for a week and convened sessions with local musicians. For the second EP, we have percussionist Kai Angermann (also on electronics), electro-acoustic musician Frauke Berg, electronic musician Axel Ganz and multi-instrumentalist Anja Lautermann, playing cello, flute and who knows what else. There are propulsive krautrocky numbers, drones and glitching sound-art, and fragmented spoken word at times – interesting listening and a good introduction to some Düsseldorf musicians!

Theodora Laird & Caius Williams – Dummy [Cherche Encore/Bandcamp]
Versatile singer Theodora Laird (who you may have heard as feeo on Loraine James’ breakthrough 2019 album For You and I) and experimental bassist Caius Williams got together after seeing each other play and talking to the same mutual friend – Williams asked whether Laird needed a bassist, and Laird asked whether Williams had a boyfriend! Which is very sweet and they are partners as well as a duo. Their debut together, Crosspiece, is released on Cherche Encore and showcases Williams on both resonant double bass and shuddering Fender bass guitar, and Laird channeling jazz, classical, trip-hop and singer-songwriterly vocal styles. Both musicians have incredible technique and also process their sounds liberally, but while this is improvisatory and experimental music it’s also enormously touching. Couldn’t recommend highly enough.

Alex Zethson – Terrella [Thanatosis/Bandcamp]
Also enormously touching is a new single track from Stockholm’s Alex Zethson on his Thanatosis label. Zethson is comfortable in jazz, noise, contemporary classical, postrock and more, and “Terrella” is a sweet little piano piece with a light-footed melody in the left hand and pulsing chords in the right. Soft and expressive.

Listen again — ~205MB

Tonight, from experimental electronic pop to free improv, live beats and programmed beats, modern classical and avant-garde, from all over the world.

LISTEN AGAIN and open up to a world of music. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

ROMÆO – Worlds [ROMÆO Bandcamp]
Starting with art-pop from here in Eora/Sydney, from young artist ROMÆO, who combines electronic experimentalism with a fine ear for pop songwriting. Her new song “Worlds” laments a world in which every person is isolated from every other – an acknowledges that her own world is not the whole world. The song moves from indie guitars to electronic pop replete with saxophone, and climaxes with hammering kick drums.

Snakeskin – Sunburst [Mais Um/Bandcamp]
Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal‘s first release together (titled Snakeskin) was released on Beirut/Montréal label Ruptured in 2022. It was a clear highlight of the year for me, continuing from the shoegaze/dreampop of Sabra’s previous band Postcards, but with more electronic and experimental production from Tabbal. For their second album, they’ve adopted that album title as their name, and They Kept Our Photographs will be released on UK-based global music label Mais Um. The first single “Sunburst” is on the noiser end of shoegaze and I very much dig.

Bizhiki – Unbound [Jagjaguwar/Bandcamp]
Bizhiki – Gigawaabamin (Come Through) (feat. Justin Vernon) [Jagjaguwar/Bandcamp]
Moving to the US with Bizhiki, a new trio featuring Joe Rainey, whose album and 7″ single made with Andrew Broder blew many minds in 2022. Here Rainey teams up with another powwow singer from the Ojibwe people, Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, the duo working with indiefolk musician S. Carey (Sean Carey), longtime member of Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver and solo artist in his own right. The gentleness of that association tempers the sound compared to the forthright experimentalism of Rainey’s work with Broder, although there are still beats and noise in there. Rainey and Bizhikiins Jennings both sing in the open-throated powwow style and play hand drums, which are often electronically processed (both drums and voices!) along with other electronics and instrumentation. There are also environmental and field recordings and even punk in the mix. This should be on many best-of lists.

Another Dancer – Overfriendly Dogs [Bruit Direct/Aguirre Records/Bandcamp]
Here’s some scrappy DIY-indie from Belgian band Another Dancer, blithely throwing in influences from postpunk, ’80s electro-pop, ’90s indie and who knows what else. They claim to be outdated, but in fact this kind of joyful hodge-podge suits the current era to a tee. “Overfriendly Dogs” is the chaotic first single from their debut album I Try To Be Another Dancer.

Buffalo Daughter – ET (Densha) – AMBIENT KYOTO Mix [Anniversary Group/Bandcamp]
The world is incredibly fortunate that Buffalo Daughter not only exist at all, but are still making creative music 30 years after their inception. In the way of the best Japanese bands, they’ve always combined pop with heavy rock with electronica and hip-hop, and so they continue. Out this week is a set of two extended & warped mixes made for the AMBIENT KYOTO installation/exhibition thingy in 2023. The original tracks are on their 2021 album We Are The Times, and neither remix is ambient at all – rather they’re deconstructed, in a modern take on the original 12″ mix, adding unexpected elements. Basically, just so great.

Thom Yorke – The Big City [XL Recordings/Bandcamp]
You might have heard of Thom Yorke, lead singer of the very popular but very experimental Radiohead and of course more recently The Smile. Thom is embarking on a solo tour soon, and will play two shows in the Sydney Opera House Forecourt, but I’m very sorry if you’re just hearing about it now, as they’re both sold out. Anyway, out this month was the Confidenza OST, soundtracking the Italian thriller Confidenza aka Trust, directed by Daniele Luchetti. Yorke’s music is as dramatic and dynamic as a soundtrack requires, with orchestrations by Hugh Brunt and a jazz ensemble including his Smile bandmate Tom Skinner. I chose a long track tonight that’s got lovely glitchy samples & loops of Thom’s voice among the orchestrations.

Opius – Empty feat. LUMENAATE [Inperspective Records/Bandcamp]
Vinnie Smith aka Opius is a longtime proponent of drumfunk, making often-jazz-influenced drum’n’bass out of intricately edited jazz breaks. Here we’ve got a storming track of plaintive string pads, those insane beats and the poetry of LUMENAATE.

X-Altera – Run [Bopside]
In the last few years, Tadd Mullinix, best known by his hip-hop project Dabrye, has started releasing jungle/drum’n’bass (with excursions into Detroit techno) as X-Altera. This is a return to these styles really, first heard in his collabs with Soundmurderer as SK-1 making ragga jungle in the early ’00s. The Groundswell EP unleashes ravey, jungley tunes (oh yeah and one techno piece) that fit really well in the current milieu.

Tigran Hamasyan – The kingdom [naïve]
Tigran Hamasyan – Only the one who brought the Bird can make it sing [naïve]
I only discovered this weekend that there’s a new album coming from Armenian jazz piano virtuoso Tigran Hamasyan. Previous albums showcased not just his playing, but his beautiful, complex compositions that draw a lot from the scale patterns and harmonies of Armenian folk music. Hamasyan has also worked with Serj Tankian of the Armenian-American nu metal band System of a Down – and at times the complex jazz time signatures on his releases can veer into math rock. In any case, after many albums released on Nonesuch, Hamasyan has joined eclectic French imprint naïve for his forthcoming album The Bird of a Thousand Voices, which is in fact a multimedia project reworking an old Armenian legend (Hazaran Blbul) into a stage play, films, installations, the album and also an online video game featuring music from the album and the stunning artwork of Khoren Matevosyan. Over 24 tracks, the album covers a lot of ground (I’m lucky to have a preview), and I played two of the singles so far: the hyperkinetic track “The kingdom” that echoes the jungle influence on video game soundtracks, and the latest, “Only the one who brought the Bird can make it sing”, with live drumming, bewitching vocal melodies, and math rock excursions. No doubt I’ll play more when it’s released in late September.

Spectral Gates – hulk park [forthcoming on Spectral Gates Bandcamp]
Spectral Gates – loops_6b_ext_23 [forthcoming on Spectral Gates Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney duo Spectral Gates play a live take on electronic music, with post/math-rock elements. Steve Allison plays furious drum patterns and Daniel Arena plays guitar as well as synths and electronic processing from both. As you can hear from these preview tracks, it’s euphoric electronic rock that flows nicely from Tigran Hamasyan’s fusions. New album warning is out this coming week, and is being launched at Lazy Thinking, a small bar/record store/performance space on New Canterbury Rd.

Laurent Pernice, Jacques Barbéri, Dominique Beven – le silence la nuit [Psychofon/Bandcamp]
Laurent Pernice, Jacques Barbéri, Dominique Beven – les petits canards [Psychofon/Bandcamp]
Nine Tales of the Winds is a fascinating album that extends work that Laurent Pernice and Dominique Beven have done before. Pernice, coming out of the French industrial scene in the late 1980s, is mainly responsible for electronics, with live processing as well as looped samples and rhythms underpinning a lot of the music – and he also contributes accordion and bullroarer. Beven plays wind instruments from all over the world: Sardinian laudennas, East Asian hulusi, French cromorne, the Lao khaen… and on this album they’re joined by French writer Jacques Barbéri, who adds the Tibetan rhadong, a “genetically modified saxophone” which is left unexplained(!) and clarinet. With all these instruments, the album nevertheless resists any hints of bland or appropriative “world music” or exotica. Rather it sounds like some kind of ancient ritual compositions, aided by ancient alien technology. Although Dead Can Dance provide something of a precursor, the closest contemporary comparison I can think of is the work of two fellow Frenchmen, François Robin & Mathias Delplanque, on their 2022 album L’ombre de la bête. Mysterious liminal music is Utility Fog’s bread & butter, and this album is a feast.

KK Null x Joel Gilardini – chthonic ephemerals [GIVE/TAKE/Bandcamp]
KK Null x Joel Gilardini – adrifting [GIVE/TAKE/Bandcamp]
Japanese musician Kazuyuki Kishino has been a key part of the noise/industrial and experimental electronic music world since the 1980s, with legendary hardcore band Zeni Geva, Absolut Null Punkt, and under the name KK Null. He’s also a constant collaborator with other musicians, whether famous experimentalists like John Zorn, Fred Frith, Jim O’Rourke, Mick Harris of Scorn, James Plotkin and others, or lesser-known Japanese and international musicians. Psychic Drones 3 is his third collaboration with Zurich-based guitarist and sound designer Joel Gilardini. These albums tone down the maximalist tendencies of Kishino, limiting the harsh noise and glitch-rhythms, without retreating to the spectral ambient of, say, Aurora with Plotkin. There are grinding, churning and pulsating drones, crackles of distortion and glitch, digital detritus. It’s rich, lush, and only sometimes noisy listening, highly recommended.

Moose Terrific – Cast Iron Curtains [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Montréal-based duo Moose Terrific are made up of the prolific, influential Egyptian-Canadian Sam Shalabi (of Shalabi Effect, Land of Kush, Dwarfs of East Agouza with Maurice Louca and others) and Tamara Filyavich. Their second album after 2018’s The Drinks, Nude Beginnings is released by the part-Montréal-based Lebanese label Ruptured Records, and features both musicians on miscellaneous electronics, blending in, as they say, “Ukrainian, Jewish, Arabic and Canadian musical elements, as per the artists’ cultural backgrounds, life and musical experiences”. All this said, these are mostly low-key electronic vignettes, emphasising fun and hopefulness over rage and sorrow.

Ulrich Troyer – BRENNERAUTOBAHN feat. Taka Noda [4bit Productions/Bandcamp]
Ulrich Troyer – MOMENTS I [4bit Productions/Bandcamp]
I first came across Ulrich Troyer via a little 3″ CD he released through Mego back in 2000 (an expanded edition came out in 2020). His music continues to reflect the glitchy, granular, digital soundworld of that label in its earlier years, but with a love of dub also coming through. This year he’s released a series of 7″s, starting with the sparse glitched guitar sounds of MOMENTS. The third 7″ is AUTOSTRADA DEL BRENNERO, also the second single from his forthcoming Transit Tribe album. The A side is the Italian Autostrada Del Brennero (an important international trucking route), with a melody from dub flautist Diggory Kenrick, and on the flip, we cross the border into Austria where it becomes the Brennerautobahn, with the very dub-appropriate melodica from Taka Noda aka Mystica Tribe.

Associated Sine Tone Services – 000900 [Flag Day Recordings/Bandcamp]
Associated Sine Tone Services – 000200 [Flag Day Recordings/Bandcamp]
Montréal sound-artist Jeremy Young awoke from a dream one night in which he was on a darkened stage with Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek and fellow Montréaler Nicolas Bernier, all dressed in lab coats, performing with sine wave oscillators. He immediately prepared a set of oscillator loops and sent it to the other two, who were game to turn this dream into reality. Despite the name Associated Sine Tone Services, and the library music-esque cover art, the music is neither academic nor anodyne, the three participants preferring to lean into melody and even rhythm at times. The sine wave oscillators are particularly effective when detuned, so there are some gorgeously woozy and eerie passages. There’s a strange beauty here, from three sensitive sculptors of sound.

Dialect – Late Fragment [RVNG Intl./Bandcamp]
Andrew PM Hunt, drummer in the phenomenal & bizarre hypnotic kraut/postrock band Ex-Easter Island Head, has made music as Dialect for at least 10 years, mostly released by RVNG Intl.. The first morsel from his new album Atlas of Green (out on Sept 20th) is an electroacoustic delight, reminiscent of the heyday of folktronica, with pitch-shifted acoustic guitars, synth pads and piano in the mix. Keen to hear the rest!

Frances Cameron – Dreamer’s Waltz [Frances Cameron Bandcamp/other links]
Hailing from Tasmania, Frances Cameron is a classically-trained pianist with her take on the modern/post-/neo-classical style. She’s releasing tracks from her forthcoming Piano for Dreamers album one-by-one. “Dreamer’s Waltz” starts simply, with a right-hand melody in a major key, but a little way in, the harmonisations take unexpected turns. It’s quite touching.

Marmalsana – Transiro I [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Finally, we have a second release from Ruptured Records this week, from a new trio calling themselves Marmalsana. German drummer Burkhard Beins has been part of Polwechsel for 20 years, and among others has worked with our own Chris Abrahams. Joining him are Lebanese photographer and musician Tony Elieh on acoustic bass guitar and the great Egyptian multi-instrumentalist & producer Maurice Louca on microtonal acoustic guitar! All three are based in Berlin, and have chosen for this collaboration to work only with acoustic instruments. Their self-titled album is two cassette sides of free improv and extended instrumental techniques, although Beins is instrumental in Berlin’s Echtzeitmusik (“real-time music”) movement that seeks to differentiate a newer generation of musicians’ work from prior imaginings of improvised music, free jazz, new music etc. In Marmalsana the other two musicians’ Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds – and choice of instrumentation – produce a singularly idiomatic music worth attending to.

Listen again — ~207MB

Layers of abstraction, mutations of punk, warpings of beats, rebuilings of improv, détournements of ambient…

LISTEN AGAIN and mutate… Stream on demand via FBi Radio, podcast here.

Chris Corsano – I Don’t Have Missions [Drag City/Bandcamp]
Since the early ’00s, American drummer Chris Corsano has been a key member of the free improv world, bleeding over into areas of noise, avant-rock and contemporary jazz. He’s been part of countless lineups, in particular with saxophonist Paul Flaherty, and at times with the great C Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core. His solo albums are few & far between, so this one spurred interest. It’s burdened with the title The Key (Became the Important Thing [and Then Just Faded Away​]​), which is in itself an indicator of something, if only you can unravel what – although it reminds me of the even more cumbersome poetry-titles that Keiji Haino gives his works. And this is very much in the psych-rock vein. Incendiary drumming of all sorts, along with chugging and soloing guitars and bass, and the resonating polyrhythms of his string drum. All in all, Corsano makes a proper racket, and it’s properly transcendent.

Show Me The Body – It Burns [Corpus/Bandcamp]
With their 2017 mixtape Corpus I, New York hardcore punks Show Me The Body showed early on that they were interested in mixing up the hardcore genre with whatever else fits their vision of community, direct action and solidarity, including appearances from the likes of Eartheater, Moor Mother, Dreamcrusher and many more, veering into hip-hop, industrial, noise and experimental electronica. Frontman Julian Pratt generally uses banjo rather than guitar as the lead instrument, bassist Harlan Steed picks up baritone guitar, and in new single “It Burns” there’s a throbbing bass synth underpinning the action. It’s hard to avoid callbacks to ’90s style metal & punk crossover, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If Corpus II is anywhere near as good as its predecessor, I’ll be very happy!

GUTTR – Stress [May be at his Bandcamp at some point?]
I was sent this nice piece of glitchy grime recently and it was meant to be out now, but I can’t find a trace of it online, so… exclusive? Really nice late-night murky bass music from the Bristol area.

Von D – Arcane 17 [Deep Medi Musik]
More forthcoming bass, here from French dubstep maestro Von D. The THL EP is three slices of dubstep mostly using triplets – 6/8 dubstep. At 140BPM it’s not swung as such but the triplets drive things really nicely and give a bit of ambiguity about how to divide up the bars.

Cocktail Party Effect – So Disco (feat. Mo Van Zandt) [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Cocktail Party Effect – Reset [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based South Londoner Charlie Baldwin, who releases music as Cocktail Party Effect, isn’t fond of blurbing his own music, and fair enough – often beats are just nice beats, and Baldwin’s background in sound design makes for lush listening. His second release on YUKU for 2024 is Gulper Eel Ballons, a 10-track album taking in ambient sound-design and all forms of bass music from dubstep & grime to techno & almost-d’n’b, integrating the complexity & weirdness of IDM. There are a couple of vocal tracks too, although Mo Van Zandt‘s voice is mostly part of the textures no “So Disco”. Super stuff whatever words describe it.

Sote – AFRCNRNGSSPXCASPIAN [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
Sote – ADTVESSPXLUT [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
Surely by now Ata “Sote” Ebtekar needs no introduction. Since the early ’00s he has made uncompromising, complex electronic music, starting with 2002’s stunning Electric Deaf EP on Warp Records. I bring this up because his latest release, Sound System Persepolis (his second on Powell’s Diagonal Records) references hardcore techno in its rather twisted ways. Ebtekar said goodbye almost immediately to the breakcore/junglism of his very first few EPs. He’s really pioneered the integration of electronics with Persian classical and Iranian instrumentation, and he’s developed some amazing methods for sound processing in the meantime. But Sound System Persepolis, despite referencing the ancient Persian city, doesn’t feature any West/Central Asian instrumentation, and as far as I can tell it uses Western tuning. The rhythmic programming recalls the untethered approaches of Mark Fell and Rian Treanor, Vladislav Delay and perhaps even Russell Haswell, but with Sote’s distinctive sliding tones. It’s a kind of return to the Hardcore Sounds From Tehran mixtape but with everything Ata’s learned about audio alchemy in the meantime. Insane and brilliant.

Dom & Roland – Stormy Waters [Individual]
Dominic Angas aka Dom & Roland (Roland is the sampler of course) has been one of my favourite drum’n’bass artists since the ’90s, but I’ve always thought of him as primarily d’n’b – techstep beats, done with incredible finesse and accompanied by brilliant synth lines, sound design and basslines. So it’s a nice surprise to find the beats on his new Stormfront EP (initiating his own Individual label) brings flittering, careening beat programming in between the 2-step hits. All four tracks here are gold.

ASC – waveform 12 [waveforms/Bandcamp]
Kloke – waveform 9 [waveforms/Bandcamp]
waveforms is the label setup last year by ASC (beloved drum’n’bass & grey area techno producer who returned to jungle a couple of years ago) and Presha, boss of the groundbreaking Samurai label, releasing 10″s focused on early jungle-style production. So here from the latest pair of releases we have a typical epic tune from ASC and technically brilliant stuff as always from Naarm/Melbourne-based Kloke.

Doc Sleep – Lemon Zest [Dark Entries/Bandcamp]
DJ and producer Melissa Marisuten aka Doc Sleep is co-founder of experimental techno & ambient label Jacktone Records, and she’s also one half of Beats Unlimited. Her own music spans house & electro as well as IDM and more broadly ambient stuff. “Lemon Zest” is an infectious piece of electro-techno with a wicked syncopated bassline.

Tawdry Otter – Foreign Assets [Adrien75 Bandcamp]
By now we’ve heard Adrien75‘s IDM-focused Tawdry Otter a fair bit on this show. Adrien used to be part of the group of the IDM collective Carpet Bomb (mainly 3 people in various combinations) doing complex break-mashing and programming that I was obsessed with in the late ’90s. For a while now the Adrien75 moniker has been more for ambient guitar stuff I think, hence Tawdry Otter, which conversely has often been made on the mobile software Koala Sampler. Not sure if that’s the case here, but there are some truly funky electro & breakbeat vibes on the latest release, Streamline.

SML – Rubber Tree Dance [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
SML – Switchboard Operations [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
International Anthem feels like the ideal label to release this album by LA-based quintet SML/Small Medium Large. The five musicians are jazz-trained, busy members of multiple music scenes, and their self-titled(-ish) album began with a live performance at the now-sadly-defunct LA venue ETA. The recordings of those improvisations (just stereo mind you, not multi-tracked) were then edited, chopped up, restructured a la Makaya McCraven – or indeed Teo Maceo’s work on Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, always a reference for this kind of studio deconstruction. The band features Australian bassist Anna Butterss (long based in LA, and performing not only in countless jazz ensembles but also on tour with the likes of Andrew Bird), along with similarly-connected cross-genre musicians, and the music veers from jazz to Afrobeat, psych to experimental electronic, Jon Hassell-style harmonising effects and more. You don’t need to be any kind of jazz-head to appreciate the joyful invention here.

Lia Kohl – Car Alarm, Turn Signal (feat. Ka Baird) [Moon Glyph/Bandcamp]
Chicago cellist and sound-artist Lia Kohl has built up a gorgeous catalogue of odd, inquisitive and considered sound works over a very short period of time, with releases on Skeletons’ Shinkoyo, Longform Editions and American Dreams. Her new album Normal Sounds is coming at the end of August from the adventurous Portland (Oregon) tape/vinyl label Moon Glyph, and the album title is a nice description of Kohl’s practice (as are the track titles). As well as field recordings and the sounds of “normal” human activity, Kohl likes to incorporate the randomness of a radio scrolling through frequencies and settling on whatever happens to be on the airwaves. And of course there’s her cello, which along with electronics can slip into the mix and transform everything. On this first single, Kohl has also invited Ka Baird to add layered flute and little keyboard drones, adding an avant-garde new-age sensibility. Without noticing, we’re left with slowly-more-sparse cello plucks and slow layered bowing and then… the sound of a pedestrian crossing brings us back to the “normal sounds” (with some faint found-sound saxophone soloing from someone’s car radio). Just so good.

Stranded Horse – Le feu qui nous rend las [Heartists for Palestine]
Mayssa Jallad & Fadi Tabbal – Ad-Douar [Heartists for Palestine]
Fadi Tabbal – (keep thumping) [Fadi Tabbal Bandcamp]
Back in the early 2000s, French musician Yann Tambour started releasing music under the name Encre – music tailor-made for Utility Fog with its postrock & indie-chanson tendencies mixed with digital editing. Most of that music is still available from French label Clapping Music, but then around 2007 Tambour’s focus changed (back) to guitar-based indie/chanson/folk under the name Thee, Stranded Horse, and then just Stranded Horse. And thus he has continued, with Stranded Horse the band frequently featuring Malian kora player Ballaké Sissoko and more recently Boubacar Cissokho. I’d lost track, but listening back, the last couple of Stranded Horse albums are fantastic. So it was really nice to hear a piece of heartfelt folk music from Tambour on a new compilation, Counting the strips of light, the second put together by the Paris-based Heartists for Palestine. The beneficiary for both of their compilations is Palestinian Medical Relief Society, and the musical focus is mostly indie singer-songwriter but with some interesting/inspiring inclusions – John Parish, who has worked consistently with PJ Harvey and others; Kate Stables of This Is The Kit doing a lovely Ben Folds cover; Adrian Crowley; and Aidan Baker of Nadja with Frédéric D. Oberland of Oiseaux Tempête and Saåad; and more! Lebanese singer Mayssa Jallad, who put out one of the best albums of last year, works again with Fadi Tabbal (co-founder with Ziad Nawfal of Ruptured Records) on an incredible piece of experimental song. It turns out their piece is a Frankensteinian creation in which Jallad added vocals to a piece of Tabbal’s from his recent album I recognize you from my sketches. Jallad’s lyric (the title means “Vertigo” in Arabic) follows a woman suffering from loss and displacement, inspired by the work of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and photojournalist Belal Khaled in Gaza recently. Meanwhile, Tabbal’s album happens to be a lovely, made of processed guitars, synths and tape, so I played a track from the album proper too.

Ola Szmidt – Making My Own Dice [Ola Szmidt Bandcamp]
I discovered UK-based musician Ola Szmidt through her EP3, released on Accidental Records a couple of years ago. Lately she’s been putting up single tracks here and there, and “Making My Own Dice” is a great example of her craft – melodic vocals looped and chopped up, and, eventually, glitchy programmed beats. Healing music for trying times.

Andrea De Witt – APR 5 [Undogmatisch/Bandcamp]
Andrea De Witt – PIANOCHROM 2M [Undogmatisch/Bandcamp]
Italian musician Andrea De Witt has been in & around various music scenes for decades, in rock bands, techno acts and experimental electronic projects. But his new self-titled album for the excellently-named Berlin label Undogmatisch is in fact his debut album. It’s a great collection of glitchy sound-edits, stumbling beats, rumbling bass and shimmering textures. I’ve always been partial to glitched-up piano, so the two PIANOCHROM tracks are highlights, but the seemingly anonymous track titles belie an album of real humanity inside its minimalist soundworks.

Dahk-Kloud – Through The Night Quiet [Streaming in various places e.g. here]
Eora/Sydney-based musician Dahk-Kloud makes music aptly described by the title of his debut album Piano Tapes & Synthesiser. For a debut release it’s impressive: late-night music with restrained piano and modular synths, with the magic of tape processing warping and bending inside and around the compositions. The album will be launched at Annandale Creative Arts Centre on Friday the 9th of August, for those in the area – tix here.

Matthew Bourne – the mirror and its fragments [Leaf/Bandcamp]
Following his second album of minimalist electro-acoustic work with Nightports earlier this year, English pianist & composer Matthew Bourne is back with a very solo album, this is not for you. (full stop included). These are quiet, expressive compositions for piano, on some tracks joined by his own cello playing – even more minimalist. This album demands listening in a place of calm & quiet, and if you make the space for it, you’ll find yourself deeply moved.

Listen again — ~200MB