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

Tonight we’ve got a stack of music from Bandcamp’s Juneteenth Friday special (raising money for NAACP), an array of beat-related experimental electronic music, and a feature on memotone‘s big stash of 2020 music…
Friday the 19th of June is Juneteenth, a most significant day for Black Americans as it commemorates the day on which slavery ended in Texas, the last US state to do so. Like many, this year was the first time I heard of Juneteenth – but worse, it was probably the first year than many non-Black Americans heard of it too. And this year Bandcamp donated all of their profits on Juneteenth to NAACP and promised to do so every Juneteenth moving forward. So quite a bit of tonight’s selections come courtesy of this gesture by Bandcamp and music released in connection with the day.

LISTEN AGAIN for your mortal soul. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Speaker Music – Amerikkka’s Bay (ft. Maia Sanaa) [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Speaker Music – Of Our Spiritual Strivings (ft. Syanide) [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
The album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry by Speaker Music, the alias of theorist and journalist DeForrest Brown, Jr, was surprise-released on Friday in conjunction with Planet µ – his second release on the label. It combines the frenetic rhythms found on his recent Percussive Therapy EP with sampled spoken word about the recent protests, field recordings, jazz samples, noise, and some brilliant guest appearances, along with pointed titles. A particular highlight is the moving poem written & read by 18-year-old artist/actor/singer/dancer (and whatever else she chooses to be) Maia Sanaa on the first track “Amerikkka’s Bay”. I chose to juxtapose this with a track featuring limpid presumably by guest Syanide.

clipping. – Chapter 319 [clipping. Bandcamp]
Also released for Juneteenth is the new single from clipping., which highlights the connections between Trump, white supremacy & police violence against Blacks, while being designed as a catchy, danceable track that can be played through boomboxes at protests. And it sure is! It’s backed with the incredible, devastating “Knees on the Ground”, another track about police brutality which they created in 2014 during the protests in Ferguson, and which was only available on SoundCloud.

700 Bliss – Sixteen [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Loraine James – Microdancing Or Something [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Hyperdub recently put together their second compilation in collaboration with Adult Swim – which is always annoying because for some reason Adult Swim’s musical ventures are geoblocked so Australia has no access. In any case, like last time Hyperdub have now made Stimulus Swim available from the label, and it’s great. Moor Mother and DJ Haram as 700 Bliss contribute a beautiful piece about escaping into the dancefloor, and London’s genius Loraine James creates a bubbly new genre of not-quite-footwork/drill’n’bass on “Microdancing Or Something”.

Vessel – Red Sex (Re-Strung, feat. Rakhi Singh) [qu junctions Bandcamp]
Matana Roberts – Breathe [qu junctions Bandcamp]
English promoter/booking agency Qu Junktions have now put out two compilations on Bandcamp featuring exclusive work from their amazing roster of artists – designed as a way for those artists to make up a small part ofo their lost profits from COVID-19 lockdowns. There’s really some high quality stuff on both comps. Vessel‘s “Red Sex” should be familiar to a lot of people from its original incarnation on his 2014 album Punish, Honey. Here it’s reworked with Rakhi Singh‘s sliding violin alongside the freakish electronics. Seb Gainsborough aka Vessel and Rakhi Singh have teamed up to form new label Palpu, as Tri-Angle has now shut down. Following this we heard from sound-artist & free jazz musician Matana Roberts with a collage of febrile drones, buried hints of turmoil and massed voices.

Rider Shafique / The Bug – Burn [Pressure]
Frequent dubstep/drum’n’bass/grime collaborator Rider Shafique here works with deep bass don The Bug for a masterful new track referencing Black history and current events, with all profits going to Shafique’s charity bringing books by Black authors to Black children.

Pinch – All Man Got (ft. Trim) [Tectonic/Bandcamp]
Pinch – Entangled Particles (ft. Emika) [Tectonic/Bandcamp]
Despite many high profile collaborations – albums with Adrian Sherwood and Shackleton, EPs with many different peeps – it’s been a long time since a solo album from Bristol dubstep original Pinch, and he’s come to the party with a true genre-spanning monster, with house & techno represented along with dubstep & grime (for the latter, see Trim on the poised, minimalist first track tonight) – but also some tantalising bits of almost breakcoreish drum’n’bass in there at times. It’s weird hearing that appear halfway through the almost-trip-hoppy track featuring longtime collaborator Emika, but I’m not complaining! Excellent work.

Torana – Bladesmith [Weaponry]
I can’t tell you much about drum’n’bass crew Torana, except that they seem to be plural, and they’re connected with Seattle-based d’n’b master Homemade Weapons, and have appeared at times on Samurai Music comps. Their latest EP Rust combines contemporary jungle-infused drum’n’bass with halftime, dubstep influences, particularly creative on “Bladesmith”, heard tonight.

E-Saggila – Blue Amps [Northern Electronics/Bandcamp]
BHMF – Mörkertal [Northern Electronics/Bandcamp]
Dream Eater – Flowers of Neptune [Northern Electronics/Bandcamp]
JS Aurelius – Crime is the Highest Form of Sensuality [Northern Electronics/Bandcamp]
Swedish label Northern Electronics released their latest Scandinavian Swords compilation last week, which is spread over a 3xLP and 3x cassette edition, making for a total of 40 tracks over 3 hrs and 22 minutes. Hard to take in, so a week and a bit later, here we are – mostly with selections leaning into the jungle breaks, of which there’s a surprising amount alongside techno, ambient and other genres. So we start with Toronto’s Rita Mikhael aka E-Saggila, with some distorted junglist techno that you love to hear… Then Swedish duo BHMF, previously named Bandhagens Musikförening, with a similar tonic of 4/4 techno with distorted drum’n’bass breaks and glorious rising synth pads. And Dream Eater is apparently Emil Hammarlund of Stockholm’s Struktur Records, giving us ambient textures and anxious, stuttery beats – the only selection tonight from the triple cassette, most of which is on the more ambient side of the label (but clearly not all!). Finally, Ascetic House co-founder JS Aurelius gives us some glitchy bass techno.

Lakker – July [Lakker Bandcamp]
Berlin-resident Dublin duo Lakker – aka Ian McDonnell of Eomac and Dara Smith of Arad – have been UFog favourites for years, with their bassy techno sounds. I’d heard a few of their ravey idmish earlier work on some compilations, but it’s cool to see them collecting some of that stuff as Rave System Demos [2005-2006] on their Bandcamp. The first is early ’90s-style pre-jungle hardcore, while the second, from which this is lifted, is a bit more classic jungle (albeit a bit more breakcore style). Looking forward to the third to drop soon!

ScanOne – Breeze [SEAGRAVE]
Ice_Eyes – Silk01d [SEAGRAVE]
Always great to have a new compilation from SEAGRAVE – it’s been a bit longer since the last one, but Fugitive Pieces is again “compiled by The Fissure Family” and collects some great idm-style breakbeat/bass from artists connected with the label. Present are Etch, Brain Rays + Quiet, SDEM , REQ and many others. Tonight we’ve got electronic breaks from ScanOne, and glitch breaks from Greek duo Ice_Eyes.

Marcus Whale – Lucifer [Marcus Whale Bandcamp]
The third single from Marcus Whale‘s solo album is the title track “Lucifer”. The album, to be released on July 24th, casts Lucifer as queer icon, and promises to combine Marcus’s many talents, as did his previous album – classical background, silky vocals, thought-provoking poetry, heaps of bass and glitched, ravey beats. Can’t come soon enough.

O.G. Jigg & Friends – Harvest (Grime Man Next Door Mix by Iceman Junglist Kru) [Memotone Bandcamp]
memotone – Disembodied [Memotone Bandcamp]
memotone – Waining Bow (excerpt) [Memotone Bandcamp]
memotone – Peaches of Immortality [Diskotopia/Memotone Bandcamp]
HALFNELSON – MIND THE GAP [Memotone Bandcamp]
O.G. Jigg & Friends – May Queen [Memotone Bandcamp]
O.G. Jigg & Friends – May Queen (unperson version) [Memotone Bandcamp]
The multi-talented Will Yates is best known as memotone. A self-taught musician, he’s got roots in post-dubstep bass music, techno & the like, but combines these electronic genre roots with idiomatic piano, cello, live drums and percussion, and a dab hand at the MPC sampler as well, resulting in electro-acoustic music that can float between musique concrète, folktronica, post-classical, jazz, noise and more. The second track tonight, “Disembodied”, comes from his soundtrack to the horror/suspense movie Il Sonnambulo, and it’s followed by the equally creepy and gorgeous scratchy strings & percussion of “Waining Bow” from a recent experimental/ambient album called SUPA LUNA. Then we heard one track from the most “official”, most recent album Invisible Cities, which is somewhat more jazzy and evocative, but does have beats at times. And HALFNELSON is Yates’ alter ego often for more minimal techno, but here he’s sampled ’80s & ’90s skate tapes and created tracks from sequenced samples and live takes on the MPC 1000. Both of these releases only came out in the last month or even couple of weeks, with the others not much earlier even – but this Friday he managed to slip another one out. O.G. Jigg & Friends’ Originals/Remixes is a limited cassette & even more limited t-shirt with a set of English folky jigs, reels and arcane stuff, then remixed by friends from the Bristol scene, including noise/experimental collective Avon Terror Corps of which he’s a member. So at the top we had the rarely very junglist Iceman Junglist Kru with some pitched-down grimey stuff, and at the end we had some gorgeous glitchscapes from unperson. It’s excellent, and all profits will go to the BAME-led Black South West Network, working for racial justice in the south west UK.

Listen again — ~201MB