Mysterious dark music and bursts of light tonight. It’s not a post-classical or folktronic or electro-acoustic or techno or idm playlist here – but it’s a bit of all of that.

LISTEN AGAIN to unearth the mysteries… Stream on demand over @ FBi is messed up because I made a mistake – but you can go ahead and podcast it here in fullllll.

Kaboom Karavan – Kaban [Miasmah/Bandcamp]
Kaboom Karavan – Kobo [Miasmah/Bandcamp]
Kaboom Karavan – KipKap [Miasmah/Bandcamp]
Kaboom Karavan – Silk Skin Armor [Miasmah/Bandcamp]
It’s been more than 6 years since Bram Bosteels’ last album as Kaboom Karavan – so I was quite surprised to see this appear on my radar. I discovered him sometime between the previous two albums, both of which generate a sense of unease and fascination through the use of ancient instruments, home-made instruments, disembodied voices and electronics, orchestrated in a weirdly out-of-time musical vernacular. It’s part circus music, part olde-world folk – and tbh the tag I use most with the great Miasmah suits it best: acoustic doom. In the time since his last album, Bosteels lost his father to a rare disease, and that shocking event pushed him to complete this music. Disjointed and weirdly alienated as it is, this music seems perfect for these strange times.

Michel Banabila – Humans and Nonhumans [Tapu Records Bandcamp]
From Belgium to the Netherlands, and another artist who’s merging “world” music with electronics, as he has for some decades now. Michel Banabila recently put together a wonderful compilation called To Yemen With Love as a fundraiser for on-the-ground charities working in war-torn Yemen – including Arabic, European and international artists working in traditional genres as well as electronic & ambient. I contributed a piece of lightly processed cello in fact. Following that massive effort, Michel has released a short EP of material recorded in a new setup – in the park outside his house. These tracks feature the sounds of nature in amongst ambient loops, alien wind instruments, and dubby rhythms.

Sabina Covarrubias – We are alive / I am loved [Elli Records/Bandcamp]
Sabina Covarrubias – Rhythmic instincts / I kissed my land / Nature rituals [Elli Records/Bandcamp]
During COVID-19 lockdown, Emanuele Battisti’s Elli Records has produced 16 varied releases in quick turnaround for their “In the room” series. I’ll be playing another later in the show, but here we have two excerpts for a remarkable piece of organic-sounding electro-acoustic work from Paris-based Mexican sound artist Sabina Covarrubias. After bachelor studies in Mexico, she completed a Masters in Paris in computer-assisted composition and ethnomusicology, and is now an associated researcher at CICM (Centre d’Informatique et Création Musicale). This work, entitled Fertility, combines many of her interests at once, using electro-acoustic technices such as spectral processing and spatialization alongside sounds and structures from ambient techno, as well as borrowing from Senegalese compositional traditions. I love the sound-world she has created, the very natural, bubbling way that it progresses, and particularly the way the processed vocals coexist with the percussion and other instrumentation.

Hidden Valley Logging Company – Northern Plub Blossom [Lillerne Tapes]
M. Sage – minno to taste [Lillerne Tapes]
We were just talking a couple of weeks about how great Lillerne Tapes are, the Chicago label that just released the new album from Melbourne-based sonic genius Yunzero. And now they’ve come out with a massive 38 track Fundraiser Compilation, benefiting two local Chicago organisations: Black-led LGBTQ centre Brave Space Alliance and community-based food suppliers Urban Growers Collective. Yunzero appears here, along with the label boss at his previous label .jpeg Artefacts, Other Joe. We’ll be hearing more from .jpeg Artefacts shortly, but here’s a couple of other tracks from the comp, starting with a favourite discovery from last year, Vancouver-based Cameron Everatt’s Hidden Valley Logging Company. Droney pads give way to minimalist jittery beats, in keeping the mystery-laden feel of tonight’s show. And then keeping with the theme of nature meeting electronica, we’ve got chirping birds and beats from Chicago’s own M. Sage.

Cypha – Sequence 1 [forthcoming on .jpeg Artefacts]
OBA – Side A (excerpt) [forthcoming on .jpeg Artefacts]
Other Joe – New Years Kiss [forthcoming on .jpeg Artefacts]
As mentioned, Other Joe, who runs boutique Melbourne label .jpeg Artefacts, has a lovely track appearing on Lillerne Tapes’ comp. Joe got in touch recently to send me some forthcoming sounds from his excellent label, and he’s given me his blessing to play you some previews. First is a super-impressive debut of idm-leaning bassy breakbeat from Cypha, a young artist who doesn’t even have a web presence yet. Next, some ambient jazz drum’n’bass from Jordan Obarzanek aka OBA, previously released on .jpeg Artefacts and also Phinery. and finally, some gorgeous glitchy piano and found sounds from Other Joe himself.

Annika Moses – Amazing blissful moment (fearful receiver) [Tura Adapts 2020 Commissioning]
With live performances on hold for the foreseeable future, essential Perth-based contemporary music organisation Tura have turned to commissioning new works through their Tura Adapts program. This piece is from emerging sound-artist Annika Moses, who I’ve featured before probably in her guises as Nika Mo or great statue. This work will appear on Bandcamp in a bit, but for now you can experience it at the Tura site. Here matter-of-fact poetry meets contemporary composition and sound-art – all keen interests of Moses. I’m very glad to be able to play it for you tonight.

Emra Grid – A Platform [Opal Tapes]
Continuing with the spoken word theme, albeit here sampling an external work, is mysterious Berlin-based artist Emra Grid (who seems from their web presence to be Sean Pineiro). Their more ambient inclinations give way on this EP to bass-heavy industrial techno influences, on this track enhanced by sections from a reading of Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips”, a poem about lying in a hospital room recovering from an operation. It’s evocative and disquieting – the whole EP is recommended, including Swiss artist Martina Lussi‘s remix of this track, which uses additional excerpts from the poem.

Wauwatosa – Bright Star (Kcin Remix) [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Transnational collaboration of a sort here, with that inescapable bloke Kcin on remix duties for Norwegian experimental pop duo Wauwatosa. Kcin takes their usually quite pretty sounds into his brooding industrial electronic sound-world, going all drum’n’bass on us in fact, but as the track progresses, trumpet and twinkly synths bring joy from the chaos.

Wytchings – Viet Drift [Lazy Thinking/Bandcamp]
Continuing with the somewhat industrial sounds, here’s some incredible new work from new Sydney artist Jenny Trinh aka Wytchings. Her debut release was a quite ambient work of underwater electronics, but here things are a lot tougher, for want of a better word. “Viet Drift” is from forthcoming EP Oculus, which sees her exorcising the trauma of having been racially assaulted as a teenager. It’s intense and brilliant work.

Moor Mother & billy woods – Furies [Adult Swim Singles 2020]
Moor Mother & Yatta – WE [Moor Mother Bandcamp]
Moor Mother & Yatta – 27 [Moor Mother Bandcamp]
Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother has been on a roll throughout lockdown, releasing many different collaborative and solo works on her Bandcamp. One of those appears tonight, but before that, an absolute dream team duo of Moor Mother with billy woods – obviously one half of Armand Hammer and also responsible for two of my favourite releases last year. The two are perfectly matched on the apocalyptically dark “Furies”, release through the ongoing Adult Swim Singles series. And then, Moor Mother teams up with Sierra Leonean-American artist Yatta, whose work takes in hip-hop, jazz, folk, and experimental art of all sorts. She’s had two releases on Purple Tape Pedigree, and as with all great collaborations you can clearly hear both artists in the insane concoctions put together on this mini-album DIAL UP. Check it out.

Ben Peers – Variation One [Elli Records/Bandcamp]
Ben Peers – Variation Eight [Elli Records/Bandcamp]
OK, so back to Elli Records‘ 16-release “In the room” series that has recently finished up – here’s UK algorithmic musician Ben Peers with Eight Variations – specifically the first and last. It’s the kind of stuff that happily burbles along in the background, but it’s got plenty enough darkness and edge to hold the attention in the foreground too, as each iteration varies aspects of the melodic and rhythmic elements.

Taraamoon – زَهازْ (Zahāz) [Low-Zi Records Bandcamp]
Just last week I played the first released track from Taraamoon, the Farsi-based electronic pop project from Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo of 9T Antiope. This beautiful song was already on their SoundCloud, and now it’s available from Bandcamp too. Again I cannot tell you much about the song, but it’s exquisite.

Listen again — ~198MB

TONIGHT we have some indie/pop/folkshoegaze epics and miniatures, some stunning contemporary musique concrète and sound-art, and some leftfield post-classical as well.

LISTEN AGAIN, immerse yourself! Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Sufjan Stevens – My Rajneesh [Asthmatic Kitty/Bandcamp]
It’s pretty exciting to have a new Sufjan Stevens album “proper” coming soon. Since Carrie & Lowell 5 years ago, there’ve been singles, remixes & reworkings, and collaborations such as the recent one with his stepdad Lowell Brams – but here’s another typical dense, through-composed, philosophical/historical/political genre-bending work from the master. The single “America” is an epic, but here on the b-side we have another long one, not appearing on the album, about an Indian guru who came to America, formed a cult and tried to build a utopian city in Oregon – and it all came apart, resulting ultimately in the largest bioterrorism attack on US soil. So Sufjan writes a song about it which of course is sweet and melancholy and bombastic, indie and folk and electronic and everything. Ah Sufjan *weeps*

Taraamoon – شیزان (Shezān) [Low-Zi Records Bandcamp]
Here’s a new project from Paris-based Iranian musicians Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo, best known to listeners of this show as 9T Antiope. The noise & abstractions of that group are mostly switched out here for experimental electronic pop, with Sara Shamloo singing in Persian rather than the English that features in most of 9T Antiope’s work. I can’t tell you much about the subject matter of these songs, but the music is absolutely beautiful – this one’s from earlier this year, but their SoundCloud also features a new song.

Molly Joyce – Who Are You [New Amsterdam/Bandcamp]
Molly Joyce – Breaking And Entering [New Amsterdam/Bandcamp]
Two tracks from the debut album by Molly Joyce, who has an impaired left hand due to a childhood car accident, and has found the ideal instrument for her body in the vintage Magnus toy electric organ. These instruments, like some accordions, have chord buttons on the left and a full keyboard for her right hand, and with these – along with various electronics and her voice – she creates gorgeous widescreen songs which themselves explore the experience of disability. The songs are absolutely transporting, due to the combination of the sounds of the organ, the production techniques, and the fantastic composition.

Jesu – never there for you [JK Broadrick self-released/Bandcamp]
Last week on the show we heard from JK Broadrick‘s industrial techno incarnation JK Flesh. This week it’s the turn of the beloved Jesu, his shoegaze metal and increasingly electronic shoegaze band/alias. Broadrick of course has an incredibly broad history, from being involved at the start of Napalm Death, to inventing industrial metal with Godflesh, to his world-dub-hip-hop with Kevin Martin as Techno Animal (and now Zonal). It’s wonderful to have Jesu back though – always blissful with just enough edge to it, on this non-album track combining looped vocals, shoegaze guitars and a drum’n’bass-influenced beat. Bring on the full album!

Ai Aso – I’ll do it my way [Ideologic Organ]
Ai Aso – Gone [Ideologic Organ]
Electrifying, simple, powerful acid folk from the wonderful Ai Aso, who has long been a collaborator with the likes of Boris (who appear on a couple of ambient tracks here) and Stephen O’Malley (whose imprint Ideologic Organ released this album). This music is in the vein of Eddie Marcon, Tenniscoats etc, of deceptively simple Japanese electric folk, with beauifully direct songs and strange things going on around the edges (the angularly discordant solo in the latter part of the first song for instance). Incredible.

Boris – Interlude [Boris Bandcamp]
I think the new Boris album took some people by surprise, since they have decided – for now at least – to release it only digitally. NO is vintage Boris – noise metal, psych, catchy songs, crazy solos, downtuned doomy slow riffs. It’s awesome, but it ends with 3 minutes of beautiful shoegazey guitar loops and whispers of Wata’s vocals, which seemed the perfect segue from Ai Aso.

Bérangère Maximin – The Broken Shoe [Karl Records/Bandcamp]
Bérangère Maximin – Knitting in the Air (feat. Christian Fennesz, guitar) [Sub Rosa]
Bérangère Maximin – Elpis [Atlas Réalisastions/Bandcamp]
Bérangère Maximin – Walking Barefoot, Imaginary Quintet [Karl Records/Bandcamp]
A few works now from the ever-surprising, brilliant musician Bérangère Maximin. Her new album comes out from Berlin label Karl Records, following released on labels as diverse as Tzadik, Sub Rosa, Crammed Discs and Craig Leon’s Atlas Réalisastions. I still think of Maximin as a musique concrète composer and sound-artist, and those elements are still present on this new album – field recordings from around city parks and abandoned buildings recorded throughout Europe feature here, manipulated in various ways, alongside all sorts of electronic elements. There are even drum machines and sequenced synthesizers, allbeit treated in unusual fashions – but then, her 2012 album No one is an island featured various guitarists (Christian Fennesz appeared tonight) and even leaned into song-forms with Bérangère’s vocals at times – like many of the artists featured tonight, she is not one to be pinned down. I strongly recommend connecting with this album and whatever you can find of her back catalogue.

Marina Rosenfeld – One [softl, re-released Room40/Bandcamp]
Marina Rosenfeld – Four (Fever) [softl, re-released Room40/Bandcamp]
Lawrence English & Room40 are doing god’s work here by releasing two out-of-print albums from the great Marina Rosenfeld. I’m very fond in particular of Joy of Fear, which I have the original limited CD of. Now you can hear this masterpiece of sound-art & composition, based around Rosenfeld’s extensive collection of acetates – one-off records of the sort dance producers cut for DJing, here often featuring Rosenfeld’s piano and cello, or that of collaborators such as Okkyung Lee. Lee’s cello and Rosenfeld’s piano appear alongside crackling, manipulated vinyl, in works of beautiful aural sorcery. Not to be missed.

Leah Kardos – Retracing Your Lines [bigo & twigetti/Bandcamp]
Luke Wyland – Hand Gestures [bigo & twigetti/Bandcamp]
English post-classical label bigo & twigetti have put together many creative compilations in the past. With Perceptions they are again progressively releasing a project, a few tracks at a time. It’s all about the piano – played straight, or processed with delays or granular synthesis, composed or improvised. I gave you a special sneak preview of one track tonight, from longtime UFog fave, London-based ex-pat Aussie Leah Kardos – arpeggios and scale patterns that might be associated with piano practice are slowly layered with delays and low organ, and made more baroque with higher, faster patterns as the track rises to a sparkling climax. Meanwhile, American multi-instrumentalist Luke Wyland, whose freak-folk band AU was a favourite round these parts years ago, here revists territory from his LWW project for Leaf, with playfully improvised piano gestures subtly manipulated in post-production.

Drexler – Ivory Tape [Rhodium Publishing/Bandcamp]
Drexler – Ashes [Rhodium Publishing/Bandcamp]
I’ve been talking with now London-based Sydney-born musician Adrian Leung for a while, and I’m super pleased that his debut album as Drexler is now coming out later this week. It draws on his background as a classically-trained pianist and violinist, but equally on his Hong Kong Chinese heritage and times spent in Japan. Tracks on Handles remind me of the joyful mélange of post-classical, postrock and electronica from many Japanese artists, as well as the Rachels’ mixture of classical & postrock, and many contemporary post-classical artists. It’s a great achievement, worth your time.

Julia Kent, Seb Rochford and David Coulter – From Isolation 6 01 [Trestle Records/Bandcamp]
Cecilia Forssberg, James Hammond & Keir Vine – From Isolation 9 01 [Trestle Records/Bandcamp]
It’s been a minute since we checked in with Trestle Records‘ From Isolation series, and I need to remind you that they’re still releasing awesome one-off collaborations like these! So let’s finish with two remotely-created collabs. From From Isolation 6 we’ve got New York cellist frequently appearing in UFog playlists Julia Kent, with Scottish musician Seb Rochford of Polar Bear and more recently Pulled By Magnets, and British composer David Coulter. As you’d expect, woody cello, jazzy postrocky beats, lovely textures.
And finally, from the recent From Isolation 9 we have classically-trained singer & drone musician Cecilia Forssberg‘s gorgeous vocals & electronics with the guitar & bass from 33-33 co-founder James Hammond and the synth & electronics of Portico Quartet‘s & Keir Vine.

Listen again — ~198MB

We’re halfway through this year, but it feels like it’s been a whole year already. I’m sure time will only compress more as we go on.
Tonight we have a variety of bass-centric music including a fair bit of techno and percussive sounds. It was the fourth Bandcamp Friday (not yet clear whether the last!?) and a small amount tonight comes from that big, now monthly, release day – but more will creep into the next few weeks I suspect!

LISTEN AGAIN… with your head and with your legs! Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here…

Yunzero – I Didn’t Smudge So Easily [Lillerne Tapes]
Hyde – Ox Hill [Nice Music]
Yunzero – Orchard 1 [.jpeg Artefacts]
Yunzero – Mondegreen [Lillerne Tapes]
As Yunzero, Melbourne’s Jim Sellars has released some of the most mind-warping music to come out of Australia in the last few years. Last year’s Ode to Mud on .jpeg Artefacts further blurred and warped the post-everything electronica of 2016’s brilliant Ox Hill released by Nice Music as Hyde – itself a few twists of the Möbius strip along from his earlier beat tapes as Electric Sea Spider. Now he’s gone international, his latest album released by the quietly essential Lillerne Tapes, with the strangely apt title Blurry Ant. It’s more of the same (thankfully) – seemingly ambient interludes morphing into bass-heavy head-nodders built out of off-kilter sliding samples, chopped YouTube discoveries, half-audible raves, but the strange genius is that the dirty, out-of-focus ingredients are diced and plated up so very cleanly.

Azu Tiwaline – Tessiture [Livity Sound/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline – Omok [I.O.T. Records/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline – Red Viper [I.O.T. Records/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline – Tight Wind ft. Cinna Peyghamy [Livity Sound/Bandcamp]
I was so excited to discover the music of Azu Tiwaline this week, via her Magnetic Service EP released by Bristol label Livity Sound. Only a few months ago her two-part album Draw Me A Silence came out through French label I.O.T. Records. Both draw heavily on her Amazigh roots in Saharan Tunisia, as well as her “other” roots as a DJ and producer of techno, dub & hip-hop as Loan. She has an astonishing sense not only of rhythm and techno/dub production, but also of pacing and structure, honed no doubt in years of DJing, and it’s wonderful hearing that applied to these traditional rhythms and sounds (at times flute melodies and field recordings can be heard too). Both double album & EP are essential IMHO – head over to her Bandcamp.

Dominik Eulberg – Siebenschläfer (Robag Wruhme Remix) [!K7/Bandcamp]
Now getting even more blissful with a melodic, pastoral take on Dominik Eulberg‘s nature-loving techno & house, from the one & only Robag Wruhme. I’ve been a fan of Gabor Schablitzki since his idm/acid/drill’n’bass/glitch work in Beefcake, and it took me a while to warm to the 4/4 sounds he made as Wighnomy Brothers and Robag Wruhme, but nowadays I’m a total convert, and I love the head-nodding warmth of the groove here as well as the sharp shocks inserted here and there…

JK Flesh – Dissociation (Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement Extended Remix) [Hospital Productions/Bandcamp]
JK Flesh – Dissociation [Hospital Productions/Bandcamp]
JK Flesh has long been the alias of Justin K Broadrick of Godflesh, Jesu, Techno Animal, Zonal et al for some of his solo work, and in the last few years it’s coalesced as mostly a project for intense industrial techno. One of the original JK Flesh techno releases came out from Dominick Fernow‘s Hospital Productions in 2016, and this new album unearths some more of that early, raw material. Fernow himself took to this particular track in his ambient techno Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement guise, and as you can hear afterwards it hardly resembles the acidic, paranoid original. Great stuff all round.

AURA – Salt [Early Reflex]
Here’s some sludgey techno that understands the dichotomy of the drum’n’bass continuum – slow-moving bass, chittering percussion and acid squelches. Sydney DJ Daniel Curtis’s debut EP as AURA is released by excellent new Italian label Early Reflex this week (their first single-artist release), nodding its head to the influences of dub and industrial on club music. An auspicious beginning.

Askham & S.Tonkin – Idle Pulse [unreleased]
And while we’re on Sydney techno, here’s an unreleased track from the dynamic duo of Askham & S.Tonkin, aka Pip Dolan and Sarah Tonkin of Construct, and previously known as Blank Transit. This is percussive techno that patiently unwinds into a thundering, pulsating morass with dub echoes and gnarly pads in the middle. It starts as it means to go on, and builds more and more as it continues.

Franck Vigroux – Styx [raster-media/Bandcamp]
Franck Vigroux – Rhinocéros [Aesthetical]
Franck Vigroux – Island shores [raster-media/Bandcamp]
In a way it’s surprising that this is French composer Franck Vigroux‘s first work with minimal glitchtronica label raster-media, given how perfectly these electronic tones, rhythmic bass impulses and flittery percussion fit with the label’s aesthetic. Vigroux’s tendency towards growling analogue distortion still comes out at times – sometimes pointing towards industrial rock but equally at his collaboration with the late Mika Vainio. That approach is heard on last year’s Totem, released by another German label Aesthetical, but this new one of a solitary affair – its title Ballades sur lac gelé is a pun on the French word “Balades” – as such it would mean “rambles over a frozen lake”. As well as making electronic music, Vigroux is a guitarist and composer for theatre.

Synalegg – Barricades [Conditional/Bandcamp]
Synalegg – Commuters [Conditional/Bandcamp]
Staying in France, here are a couple of new tracks from Synalegg, who uses every digital processing technique in the book along with complex programming to create his frenetic sounds. Previous releases (see his Bandcamp) have tended to be short sound experiments, so this is where they turn into full-blown tracks, and it’s glitchy idm of the highest order.

Kcin – PERFORM-RAM2.demo [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Taxpayer – Building X (feat. Brayden Condie) [stream on SoundCloud]
Sig Nui Gris – The End of Sig Nu Gris [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
For the fourth Bandcamp Friday, Melbourne’s Spirit Level label released their second Kindred Spirits label compilation, featuring pretty much all of the label’s artists. Tonight we heard UFog regular, Sydney’s Kcin, with typical industrial processed percussion, and something beautiful and floaty from Melbourne’s Erin Hyde aka Sig Nui Gris – hopefully not actually “the end” of.

In between is an impressive debut from Taxpayer, aka Sydney artist Lizzie Nagy, whose art has adorned many gig posters, album covers, minicomics and public spaces. “Building X” is a sludgey piece of dronerocktronica (there, another new genre!) featuring Brayden Condie’s guitar and sampled drums from Brisbane’s Ultra Material.

Listen again — ~206MB

Tonight’s show has everything from avant-garde jazz to sound-art to folktronica to Iranian-Canadian noise…

LISTEN AGAIN, genre be damned! Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here…

zeitkratzer & Mariam Wallentin – Strange Fruit [zeitkratzer Bandcamp]
Ornette Coleman – Lonely Woman [Atlantic Records]
zeitkratzer & Mariam Wallentin – Cry Me A River [zeitkratzer Bandcamp]
Starting with some extraordinary avant-garde jazz. Swedish singer Mariam Wallentin appears frequently with free jazz superpower Fire! Orchestra, and is the natural choice for pan-European contemporary/avant-garde ensemble zeitkratzer when they decide to go jazz. As well as performing & recording 20th & 21st-century composition, zeitkratzer have taken on unexpected cover versions before – including two albums of Kraftwerk, an acoustic take on noisemeisters Whitehouse, a version of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and much more. Here with Wallentin, they show that they are absolutely comfortable with the jazz idiom – its expressiveness as well as its more far-out tendencies, and Wallentin is of course comfortable with anything they can throw at her – including heart-rending versions of Abel Meeropol’s 1930s protest song about lynchings, and Arthur Hamilton’s archetype of break-up songs.
Still, it’s quite a flex to name your album The Shape of Jazz to Come and not reference Ornette Coleman at all (acknowledging that it’s a title that’s been adopted & adapted frequently through the years). Coleman’s earth-shaking album of that name, and his subsequent career, created more than anyone else the free jazz which is performed by these musicians – so I played the stunning “Lonely Woman”, in the original recording with Don Cherry on cornet, Charlie Haden on bass and Bill Hicks on drums.

Ways + Simon Toldam – Fame [Brodie West Bandcamp]
Ways + Simon Toldam – Passion [Brodie West Bandcamp]
More music here which dare I say blends contemporary composition with jazz – Toronto duo Ways is saxophonist/composer Brodie West and Evan Cartwright on drums, whose near-magical duo instincts are joined on Fortune by Danish pianist Simon Toldam for an album of incredibly restrained works. The two tracks titled “Fame” play with empty space (at times filled with gorgeously held piano chords) and perfectly synchronised flutters which render the saxophone percussive, while “Passion” is all the better for holding its passion in check, with a fragmented saxophone melody and slow-moving partial discords on piano.

Roman Rofalski – Alpha [Nonclassical/Bandcamp]
Roman Rofalski – Sea [Nonclassical/Bandcamp]
Berlin pianist Roman Rofalski has a background in jazz, like our first feature artists tonight, but on Loophole, his wonderful new album for Nonclassical, a collaboration with the Stockhausen Foundation has allowed him to bring his love of ’90s techno and avant-garde electronic music to his instrument. These deconstructions of the piano are cavernous and luxurious, embedding us deep within the physicality of the instrument, with subtle preparations letting strings ring and buzz while delays and edits create rhythms and discontinuities. On the second track tonight “free jazz” drums also creep into the edits. Of course all these techniques are nothing new, exactly – it’s the execution that makes this so special – and special it is.

Alex White – Cheekbone Against Window Of Car [Room40/Bandcamp]
Alex White – Bicycle Rear Wheel Lateral Movement [Room40/Bandcamp]
Sydney musician Alex White has been an innovative proponent of modular synthesis and generative music for years. Mostly we’d expect to hear harsh noises or artificial timbres from him, so this new project Transductions is quite a surprise, “performed” as it is on a Diskclavier, that wondrous mixture of piano, player piano, and MIDI instrument. White used his knowledge & experience in modular synthesis to create simple-seeming patches which, butterfly effect-like, feed back on themselves in strange & unpredictable ways – and these patches are used to output MIDI signals which produce the Diskclavier performances here. The titles refer to the physicality of the instruments solenoids translating his electronic signals into sound – so the kinetic energy of a car, train or bicycle producing vibrations which are then translated into other movements and thence into sound.

Tim Koch – Leaving Michester [Tim Koch Bandcamp]
Tim Koch – Tusk [Tim Koch Bandcamp]
On a theme of artists challenging themselves to make music in news ways, Adelaide’s IDM maestro Tim Koch here leaves behind the crunchy programmed beats and synth melodies – and indeed timeline-based musical arranging – for an album of mostly acoustic guitar undergoing live granular synthesis. The album’s title, Scordatura, refers to the tuning of an instrument’s strings in an unconventional manner, and recontextualisation is very much the name of the game here. It’s simultaneously nostalgic for late-’90s/early-’00s IDM-goes-folktronica-goes-drone era, and also excitingly new, hearing Tim’s very musically-perceptive take on these techniques. Really impressive.

Kirk Barley – The Night [Health/Bandcamp]
Kirk Barley – Cradle [33-33/Bandcamp]
Kirk Barley – Courtyard [Health/Bandcamp]
Yorkshire musician Kirk Barley has previous released folktronic techno & ambient sounds as Bambooman, and last year we heard him under his own name on a lovely exploratory album for 33-33. He’s back, this time on Health, for an EP of Miniatures in a similar vein – exquisite little works of edits of acoustic guitar, field recordings I believe, some drums from Matt Davies, and even cello on one track. There’s a full length album coming, and I’m hanging out for it.

David Chesworth – Permian Forest [David Chesworth Bandcamp]
Here’s something I’ve been meaning to play for a while, from legendary Aussie electronic musician David Chesworth. Chesworth came to fame with his 1979 album 50 Synthesizer Greats, the sound of a very young musician exploring the possibilities of electronic music, and around the same time his post-punk electronic group Essendon Airport. Chesworth has been involved with avant-garde music, contemporary composition and weird pop for decades, and co-produced the amazing Bec Plexus album I featured a few weeks ago – so here we have something relatively new, from a couple of years ago, reminiscent of dubby ’90s ambient techno, a slow-moving monster of a tune.

Saint Abdullah – Philosopher Kings [Purple Tape Pedigree]
Saint Abdullah – Vivid Persian Dreams [Boomarm Nation/Bandcamp]
Saint Abdullah – Mechanical Flirtations (feat. Sabha Sizdahkhani) [True Aether Bandcamp]
Saint Abdullah – Movin’ out of Harlem (feat. ARP 220) [Purple Tape Pedigree]
Finally tonight, featuring a few tracks from the Canadian-Iranian duo Saint Abdullah, made up of brothers Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh. Their music represents a kind of collision and fusion of “Western” and “Eastern” – from their experience of being Iranian/Middle Eastern yet having a Western upbringing, and from the assumptions and pressures placed by the world around them. So their music draws on Persian music (including the wonderful santour playing by Sabha Sizdahkhani on last year’s “Mechanical Flirtations”), and features sampled Shia Muslim orations and field recordings from Tehran, as well as guest spots from free jazz musicians, and sets it frequently in swampy dub and looping techno. It’s unavoidably political music, incorporating journalistic reportage and interviews into its sound world as well, resulting in sounds driven by anger, grief and passion. Yet this musical fusion is inevitably creating something integrated, something that purely in its existence spurns the idea of a dualist Othering, whether Orientalism or racist Islamophobia. Their latest album, on the ever-radical PTP, sends all profits to the New York Immigration Coalition, and when you purchase it you’ll also get a free PDF of Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing. But buy their other stuff while you’re at it, as they’re doing something vital and brilliant.

Listen again — ~195MB