Good evening. Black Lives Matter. People still don’t seem to get it – especially those involved in policing.
Black American music is literally in the origins of all the music I play on this show, of all the pop music we listen to… Tonight we’ve got hip-hop, Ugandan percussion, and international dance music based around sampled and re-sampled breaks and techno originals. Sending out love to all.

LISTEN AGAIN, keep listening again until you get it! Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Armand Hammer – Slewfoot [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
Armand Hammer – Pommelhorse ft. Curly Castro [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
Last year billy woods, founder of Backwoodz Studioz, put out two of the best hip-hop albums of the year – Hidden Places with Kenny Segal in particular was top of my list. The year before, his duo Armand Hammer with ELUCID released one of the most bewildering and brilliant albums of that year, Paraffin, so their follow-up this year had a lot riding on it. And Shrines by and large pulls it off. The lyrics as usual are rapidfire, dense and reference-laden, frequently apposite to the current situation, which after all is just drawing attention to the reality of life for Black Americans that white people have the privilege of staying oblivious to (much like in Australia). Musically it’s as strange and unexpected as ever – highlighting the fact that hip-hop has always been experimental music.

Nihiloxica – 190819 [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
Nihiloxica – 170819 [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
Nihiloxica – Choir Chops [Nyege Nyege Tapes]
Nihiloxica – Dubugwanjuba [Nyege Nyege Tapes]
Nihiloxica – Salongo [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
Bugandan electro-percussion group Nihiloxica formed in 2017 when the Ugandan percussion group Nilotika Cultural Ensemble fused their music with the warped synth playing of pq and the hybrid live/electronic drumkit of Spooky-J. They released two amazing EPs of dark, raw music on Kampala-based Nyege Nyege Tapes, and now have signed to legendary Belgian label Crammed Discs for their debut album Kaloli. It’s both the same and different – in some ways more polished, a little less edgy, but allowing more freedom for experimental skits and the beautiful flute & synth piece “170819” among others. Whatever, it’s great that this creative, brilliant band will get more followers through this wider release, and can hopefully tour widely once things open up again…

Tennis Pagan – GALAXIES A MESS [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Tennis Pagan – Dirge [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Tennis Pagan – [unlisted] [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Melbourne’s Tennis Pagan continues to be resolutely anonymous – we know he’s a pagan who’s into tennis… actually we don’t even know that at all. His second EP for Spirit Level continues to harken back to woozy ’90s idm, drill’n’bass & downtempo, with a current-era edge to it. It was also delightful how the fluttering synths and percussive backing of the first track conveniently flowed out of Nihiloxica.

MoMA Ready – The Other Side [MoMA Ready Bandcamp]
MoMA Ready – An Exorcism [MoMA Ready Bandcamp]
Gallery S/MoMA Ready – The Subtle Sound of Dying [MoMA Ready Bandcamp]
New York producer Wyatt D. Stevens embodies New York’s gregarious club traditions with his MoMA Ready project and the similarly art world-focused “Gallery S”, as well as his label HAUS of ALTR. The music ranges across techno, house, breakbeat etc, with a pervasive love of jungle in there too. It’s bizarrely hard to pin down in a wonderfully queer way – while “The Other Side” is pure junglist rave, the rest of the EP of that title is everything else; last year’s A Demon / An Exorcism is a little more consistent, with effectively three variants of the one beat-juggling track. This year’s Gallery S is co-credited to Stevens’ alternate project of the same name, an arty exploration of dance music of all forms, even though I’m of course focusing on the jungle & breakbeat energy. Brilliant stuff.

ASC – Moment of Truth [Samurai Music/ASC Bandcamp]
James Clements’ ASC started off as a drum’n’bass project, but after helping pioneer the autonomic sound in the 2010s, he’s strayed further into techno & ambient climes – so it’s wonderful to hear new EP An Exact Science, courtesy of Samurai Music, who encouraged him to unearth some old breakbeats and create four storming tracks of junglist beat science.

Luke Vibert presents Amen Andrews – Bass Kick [Hypercolour]
Amen Andrews – Fast & Bulbous [Rephlex]
Luke Vibert presents Amen Andrews – Ready Again [Hypercolour]
Of all the “drill’n’bass” producers of the mid-’90s – Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, µ-Ziq et al – even though I believe they all genuinely loved jungle & drum’n’bass, I always felt Luke Vibert pulled it off the best with his Plug alias. Best known for his dubby hip-hop sounds as Wagon Christ, and for his effortless melodic acid techno & funk (often under his own name), Vibert returned to jungle in the early 2000s as Amen Andrews (indicating that Plug could only be created on the long-gone old-school sampling technology). From the very first Amen Andrews EP I’ve played a cute track that samples Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, Captain Beefheart and of course The Winstons. This year Vibert’s putting out three breakbeat-focused albums through Hypercolour, and the first sees a welcome full-album return of Amen Andrews. Relentlessly fun stuff.

Nahash – Changement de Régime [Svbkvlt]
Nahash – The Horns feat. Osheyack [Svbkvlt]
Montreal producer Raphaël Valensi is Nahash, producing bass & jungle-riffing deconstructed club music with a strong political undercurrent, especially on the new album Flowers of the Revolution for Shanghai’s Svbkvlt – he lived for some years in Shanghai, and the new album features Shanghai-based Osheyack on one track (as well as a set of remixes including our own DJ Plead). Nahash delves deep into Western & Evangelical Christian interference with countries the world over – installing right-wing dictators, bringing a neo-liberalism that, as he says, they “could do very well without it”. And the harsh industrial bass and amen breaks are rad…

Arad – Barometric Shuffle [VOITAX/Bandcamp]
Arad – Inti [Bedouin Records]
Arad – Vortex [VOITAX/Bandcamp]
Dara Smith’s duo Lakker with Ian McDonnell aka Eomac have been favourites on this show since their IDM days, and their take on bass techno – very much informed by their move from Dublin to Berlin years ago – is very close to this show’s heart. I was very much taken with Arad‘s 2018 EP on Bedouin Records, The Glimpse, which melded autotuned & vocoded vocals with syncopated machine funk. His new EP Radiance Haze on Berlin label VOITAX leans back towards techno but still features his voice and of course that broken-beat funk.

Liminal Drifter – Connected [Hidden Shoal/Liminal Drifter Bandcamp]
Liminal Drifter – A Love Song for Ghosts [Hidden Shoal/Liminal Drifter Bandcamp]
Liminal Drifter – Choir on Mars [Hidden Shoal/Liminal Drifter Bandcamp]
Dr Simon Order is the UK-born, Perth-based musician behind Liminal Drifter, with 5 years and 4 albums of melodic, blissful electronica under his belt. Connected continues the theme started on Troubled Mystic in 2015 – touchpoints would be Plaid, Boards of Canada, The Orb’s ambient techno and the downtempo instrumental hip-hop of the ’90s, although there’s something recognizably his own about Order’s basslines and melodies. It’s a delight to have him back.

Listen again — ~207MB

Another week of protest, and another week also featuring Bandcamp Friday again – and this week many independent artists and labels have been passing on their earnings, including Bandcamp’s largesse in waiving their fees – to organisations related to the Black Lives Matter movement, to bail funds in the US, and to Aboriginal justice organisations in Australia. As usual while I’ve bought lots, I haven’t had enough time to take it all in, so most of this is stuff that’s already been released or was coming out anyway.

LISTEN AGAIN because you can. Stream on demand from FBi Radio, podcast here.

Rrawun Maymuru w/ Nick Wales – Nyapillilingu; Spirit Lady [stream on SoundCloud – available on iTunes and possibly elsewhere]
Starting with an extraordinary collaboration between Yolngu songman Rrawun Maymuru and Sydney composer/electronic musician Nick Wales. This work sets a Songline from the Mangalili clan on Rrawun’s paternal side with electronic production and orchestral arrangements. The spirit lady Nyapillilngu [pronounced Na-pil-lil-new] provides safe passage between the Earth and Milky Way. It’s a beautiful work, created for Sydney Dance Company’s Ocho.

Run The Jewels – Out Of Sight (Ft. 2 Chainz) [Run The Jewels]
Run The Jewels – Early (feat. BOOTS) [Run The Jewels]
Run The Jewels – Goonies Vs. ET [Run The Jewels]
Finally, four years after RTJ3, the fourth album from Killer Mike & EL-P’s Run The Jewels came out this week. Slated for Friday, they decided to drop it early, because everybody needed a bit of good news maybe! It hits just as hard as previously – EL-P’s production is impulsively danceable, and still hints a little at the industrial & experimental influences his work has often borne. And while Killer Mike’s always been politically outspoken & eloquent, this is probably the most explicitly anti-racist and political, being their first created during the Trump presidency. I’m playing two highlights from my first couple of listens – I particularly love the chopped vocal “oh” that accentuates the downbeats in the breakdowns. In between, probably my favourite RTJ tune “Early” comes from their second album, and is both a brilliant production and a moving piece about police brutality.
As usual the new album is a pay-what-you-want download ahead of its physical release, with all profits going to the Mass Defense Program that provides legal aid to political activists, protesters and movements for social change.

zeroh – The Fade [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
zeroh – YOP [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
zeroh – MDNmoves [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
zeroh – Rites of Passage [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
zeroh – Metacine [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
The debut album proper from LA rapper/producer zeroh, BLQLYTE (“blacklight”) dropped on Leaving Records a few weeks ago. It features contributions from Busdriver under the guise of his FR/BLK/PR (“free black press”) project, and that’s probably how I heard about it, although it’s gotten some well deserved press lately anyway. The production is psychedelic, disorienting and brilliant, covering a bewildering amount of ground – especially when you go back to his re-released five-volume 0 EMISSIONS project from 2016. He’s Edwin Liddie Jr, and he’s released music as Blaqbird and was associated with LA’s Low End Theory as an MC for many years – but he was never really foregrounded. This album should do something about that, even though he smudges and obfuscates everything throughout. It’s pretty amazing.

C Trip A – Draco [Translation Loss/Bandcamp]
End Christian – Karaoke_So [Corpse Flower Records]
The Brazilian Gentleman – Fog Variation [Lazy Thinking/Bandcamp]
The Brazilian Gentleman – You’re Boring [Lazy Thinking/Bandcamp]
C Trip A – Wave Lord [Translation Loss/Bandcamp]
And now for a series of releases gathered around Christian McKenna (aka Christian Alexander, of psych/post-metal band Hex Inverter and before that post-hardcore band Empty Flowers) and Alap Momin, best known as Oktopus from noise-hop pioneers dälek.
There’s not much metal involved with any of these projects, truth be told. New duo C Trip A is a murky hip-hop collaboration with rapper Anthony Adams, with help from Momin and multi-instrumentalist Colin Marston among others. Their debut Ozzy Nights is out later this month but is available now digitally on Bandcamp. Meanwhile, almost at the same time the second album from McKenna, Momin et al’s The Brazilian Gentleman has dropped, co-released by Sydney’s own Lazy Thinking. L & L is a tribute to, and featuring members of, the late-period shoegaze band All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors – and among the experimental electronics and auto-tuned vocals there are some jangly guitars! It’s all very weird stuff that I find fascinating and addictive.

Ash Koosha – Nutshell [Ash Koosha Bandcamp]
While London-based Iranian artist Ash Koosha continues to explore the possibilities of the virtual artist, he’s also putting out random tracks & mixes all the time. This one is described as “2020inanutshell” on Bandcamp, and even though it’s only a couple of weeks old, it already seems very premature to try and summarise this year anytime before it’s over! But it’s as intense and furious as you’d expect.

Hadi Bastani – interference [Flaming Pines]
Hadi Bastani – ecbatan (excerpt) [Flaming Pines]
Also an Iranian ex-pat, Hadi Bastani is a sound-artist and anthropologist at the Queen’s University Belfast. Bastani deals in synthesised electronic sounds, field recordings, voices and “recycled sounds” sourced both in Tehran and more recently in Belfast. It’s music that has seen him forge connections with musicians in his homeland through his research, having found his way to Belfast as a refugee over 10 years ago. Bastani expertly creates a fine balance here between the austerity of pure electronics and the warmth of human creation.

Kcin – Freedom Capital Exchange [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Kcin – New England [Hospital Hill/Bandcamp]
Kcin – Well it’s their Fault for Bringing their Kids Into a Battle [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Nick Meredith’s Kcin is a frequent visitor to these playlists – well, he has insisted on releasing a plethora of music these last few months! Here’s something new and solo, and it’s apparently not the debut album proper. Bushmaster is instead billed as a mixtape – an interlinked album-length collection of his typical processed live percussion, overdriven synths and, here, a collection of intercepted military transmissions. At a time when heavily militarised policing around the world is coming under increased scrutiny (in some circles at least), these sampled communications can be quite chilling – e.g. “Well it’s their Fault for Bringing their Kids Into a Battle”. There’s some furiously high-speed rhythms in here too – it’s a highly individual Australian take on industrial electronics, just how we like it.

Machinefabriek & Anne Bakker – Voorwaarts [Where To Now? Records/Machinefabriek Bandcamp/Anne Bakker Bandcamp]
Anne Bakker – Stars in her Eyes [Anne Bakker Bandcamp]
Machinefabriek & Anne Bakker – Sirene [Where To Now? Records/Machinefabriek Bandcamp/Anne Bakker Bandcamp]
Rutger Zuydervelt returns with yet another Machinefabriek album for 2020, here working with longtime collaborator Anne Bakker on violin, viola & vocals. Bakker’s improvisations form the building material for a series of electro-acoustic works, some pulsingly rhythmic & eerie, some abstract, some opulent. It’s some of their best work. Bakker is a very versatile musician, playing with folk groups, with neoclassical pianist/singer Agnes Obel, Iron Maiden’s Blaze Bayley and others. I only recently discovered her solo album Vox/Viola which showcases her unadorned playing & singing with wonderful folk-inspired songs.

Mabe Fratti – Aire (with Gibrana Cervantes) [Tin Angel Records]
We only just heard from Mexico-based Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti a few weeks ago, and now she has a new song coming out next week. A piece originally created by Fratti when she first arrived in Mexico, it would be a harrowing dirge with Fratti’s sawing cello and Gibrana Cervantes‘s violin, but for the sorrowful, high vocals which elevate it to another place.

Sumn Conduit – TRACK (excerpt) [Sumn Conduit Bandcamp]
Finishing with an excerpt from the debut release from Sydney duo Sumn Conduit, formed by Indigenous Australian vocal improviser Sonya Holowell and Sydney composer, saxophonist and modular synthesist Ben Carey. TRACK is a nearly-hour-long recorded live at Carriageworks late last year. It demonstrates their impressive ability to merge extended vocal techniques with synthesised drones & noises. It’s a sustained tour de force, from which I’ve played an excerpt that tries to showcase both musicians’ virtuoso technique and their merging together as an ensemble.

Listen again — ~202MB

Given the events of the last few days, I kinda wish my whole show was like the first two songs, but I’m glad that Drew Daniel has provided something so brilliant and timely anyway. We have plenty of weird, heavy and twisted songs tonight alongside some weird sound-art old & new, and some wonderful minimal techno.
If you’re in Australia and want to do something, you could donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, although at this point there are protests in cities all around America and people are being arrested who need help making bail – especially at a time when going to jail means high risk of COVID-19 infection. So there are other organisations like the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund are also helpful.
That said, in Australia we must not forget that we have police forces around the country that consistently target brown people over white people. Single Aboriginal women are incarcerated at horrific rates in Western Australia because they can’t pay fines – donate to help Sisters Inside Inc. There’ve been at least 400 Aboriginal deaths in custody, zero convictions. David Dungay‘s last words were “I can’t breathe”. This stuff is sickeningly familiar.

LISTEN AGAIN for the usual emotional and cerebral sustenance… Stream on demand @ FBi, podcast here.

The Soft Pink Truth – Fuck Nazi Sympathy (Aus-Rotten cover) [The Soft Pink Truth Bandcamp]
The Soft Pink Truth – Protest and Survive (Discharge cover) (feat. Angel Deradoorian) [The Soft Pink Truth Bandcamp]
A few weeks ago I played some excerpts from what I consider to be one of the greatest albums of the year, The Soft Pink Truth‘s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? (the link, by the way, goes to the 2-track mixed version which is different from the multi-track digital version and flows much better). Drew Daniel of Matmos is The Soft Pink Truth, and he used that album to express love and peace at at time of great anguish, anxiety and anger for the world, and particularly America. Now, just in time for the discord in America to rise once again in the face of racist, violent police and a white nationalist, kleptocratic President, Drew has released a companion album to SWGOSSTGMI?, which is much more in the format of the usual Soft Pink Truth catalogue. Am I Free To Go? sees him covering a selection of crust-punk anarcho-protest songs in various electronic stylings, breakcore, glitch techno etc, with appropriately gutteral vocals alongside some clean singing. On the last track, the anarchy gives way to the beautiful voice of Angel Deradoorian, serving as a segue into Shall We Go On Sinning…, on which she sings as well. Masterful & timely.
The album is pay what you can and profits go to the International Anti-fascist Defence Fund.

Kcin & Brendan Clark – Short bow [Focused Silence]
Kcin & Brendan Clark – An economy of ghosts [Focused Silence]
We’ve heard Nick Meredith’s Kcin on this show a lot with his overdriven electronics and live percussion. After a collaboration on Trestle Records recently he’s here again working with another Sydney muso, bassist Brendan Clark of Lisathe, Broken Mountain etc for an album on UK label Focused Silence of targeted noise, drones & crushed beats. The sound of machines & buzzing amplifiers abounds, and it’s a shock (in a good way) when Clark’s slow-bowed double bass makes an entry at some points.

Party Dozen – Auto Loser [GRUPO]
Party Dozen – Dead Friends [GRUPO]
More Sydney noise now, from the long-awaited (truly!) second album from Party Dozen. It’s everyone’s drummer & producer Jonathan Boulet and saxophonist Kirsty Tickle (also singer/songwriter as Exhibitionist). Once again the full-frontal assault of noisemaking machines and sax is the main focus, but with plenty of other electronics and varied sounds in the mix. Two ridiculously talented musicians, and let’s hope our R-thingy value is low enough by November to see them perform together again around the country…

Mrs. Piss – Nobody Wants To Party With Us [Sargent House/Bandcamp]
Mrs. Piss – Knelt [Sargent House/Bandcamp]
Oathbreaker – Ease Me (Chelsea Wolfe Remix) [Deathwish Inc/Bandcamp]
On tour together, Chelsea Wolfe and drummer Jess Gowrie started new project Mrs. Piss under which they’ve now released possibly the heaviest stuff they’ve done – their love of industrial metal really comes through, but of course it’s also superbly melodic and full of heartfelt emotion. The equally melodic and unusual Belgian hardcore/indie/experimental band Oathbreaker have just released new single Ease Me featuring 4 “interpretations”, including JK Broadrick in Jesu mode, James Kelly’s Wife and also Chelsea Wolfe, who mixes up heavy guitars and fragile piano & electronics in fine form.

Fuse Box City – Shine On [Weeping Prophet Records]
New London band Fuse Box City are here with their second single, anticipating debut album Shipwreckers, released on July 31st. Rachel Kenedy’s blissful shoegazey vocals give way to spoken word, electronic beats and glitches. It’s the kind of rock/electronic fusion that could’ve happened in the early ’90s, and it’s interesting (and welcome!) to hear it now. Looking forward to the album.

Dolphins of Venice – Dark Ivor [DataDoor/Bandcamp]
Here’s another of Adelaide IDM maestro Tim Koch‘s new collaborations, this one with the excellent US IDM/ambient producer Adrien75. Dolphins of Venice insist on writing all their titles in extreme emoji, but the album title is Insect Spread. The music is full of glitchy beats, buried vocals, and blissful shoegazey textures.

Bec Plexus – mirror image [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp]
Bec Plexus – think out loud [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp]
Amsterdam-based singer Bec Plexus released her new album Sticklip in collaboration with New York neoclassical label New Amsterdam Records a couple of months ago. A lot of the tracks (including the second one tonight) are produced with Melbourne composer/post-punk synth legend David Chesworth, and most tracks find her working with various other composer/lyricists – the first tonight is from Pascal Le Boeuf, the second by Molly Joyce. There’s a general air of sarcastic remove to these tracks, but also a viciously talented musicianship. This is not music for the faint-hearted, and one should expect the unexpected.

Marion Cousin & Kaumwald – La loba parda [Les Disques du Festival Permanent]
Marion Cousin & Gaspar Claus – Ametleret abundós [Les Disques du Festival Permanent]
Marion Cousin & Kaumwald – Las bodas de Inesilla y el Brillante [Les Disques du Festival Permanent]
The first album by French singer Marion Cousin to explore the Iberian Peninsula was made with cellist Gaspar Claus in 2016 and explored work songs from Minorca and Majorca. For her second in this open-ended series, she moves to a remote region of Spain called Estremadura, and works with experimental electronic duo Kaumwald, made up of Clément Vercelletto and Ernest Bergez aka Sourdure. The result, on both albums, is an extraordinary, hypnotic take on folk musics, freely updated and extemporised.

Marion Cousin – Confinuum #10 ‘Agustina y Gloria’ [Murailles Music/Bandcamp]
Jean-Brice Godet ft Achille – Confinuum #18 [Murailles Music/Bandcamp]
One more track from Marion Cousin, here solo on a compilation from self-described iconoclastic French label Murailles Music, whose Confinuum asks artists to take over one from another in a series of tracks, which turned out to be beautiful and challenging in turn. Experimental artist Jean-Brice Godet‘s contribution appears a lot further down the line, with tape manipulation and queasy piano.

Beatriz Ferreyra – Echos [ROOM40/Bandcamp]
Beatriz Ferreyra – Deux dents dehors [Persistence of Sound]
Bernard Parmegiani – Dedans-dehors (part 1) [Ina-GRM]
Active since the 1960s, Argentine composer Beatriz Ferreyra is still making music now, and has (luckily for us) just had a couple of new releases of her works come out. A couple of months back, ROOM40 put out a 12″ called Echos+ which collected the incredible 1978 work “Echos” heard tonight alongside another vocal-derived work from 1987 and one using percussion sounds from 2007. “Echos” chops and inter-layers the voice of her niece, who tragically died in a car crash, and forms a gorgeous and joyful tribute. And now, perhaps coincidentally, new musique concrète-focused UK label Persistence of Sound has released Huellas entreveradas (“Interspersed footsteps”) with works as recent as 2018. “Deux dents dehors” from 2007 is a punning tribute (literally meaning “two teeth outdoors”) to her colleague, the great Bernard Parmegiani, written for his birthday. The piece referenced, Dedans-dehors, actually translates as “inside-outside” of course, and it’s lovely to be able to play the first part: composed in 1977, it’s extraordinarily contemporary-sounding electronic work.

Panasonic – Zoviet France Remix [Sähkö]
An incredbile find here; Finnish label Sähkö were apparently sent remixes of the great Pan Sonic by :zoviet*france: (as it’s usually styled) and Muslimgauze in 1996 (so long ago that they were still called Panasonic!) and for some reason they were set aside and never released. Which is insane because they’re fantastic. Like, so so good. I tried to play as much as I could tonight of the blissful 13-minute take by :zoviet*france:, with a pulsing techno beat and fluttering waves of choral sounds. No idea what the source is, but this is ambient techno of a less dark & industrial nature than I’d expect from :zoviet*france:, but I’m not an expert on their music (I should probably correct this sometime soon!) The other two tracks are vintage Muslimgauze, as is to be expected.

Listen again — ~198MB

A few exciting new releases out this week, starting with a surprise new album from someone who’s been featured on this show since almost the beginning…

LISTEN AGAIN, as though your very life depends on it. Podcast here, stream on demand from FBi.

Owen Pallett – Paragon Of Order [Domino/Bandcamp]
Owen Pallett – Fire-Mare [Domino/Bandcamp]
Before FBi & this show started broadcasting full time, I contacted the German label Tomlab because I knew they were releasing The Books‘ second album and it was pitch-perfect for this show I was starting up. A year and a bit later, the label released the debut album from “Final Fantasy”, a Canadian violinist making extraordinary songs with looping and some studio trickery, so it seemed, and thus began my decades-long devotion to all things Owen Pallett. That first album Has A Good Home and the second as Final Fantasy, He Poos Clouds were recently re-released in remastered form by longtime label Domino, so it’s not a massive surprise that this long-awaited new one has just droppped, but still – long-awaited it is, finished a few years ago and finally seeing the light of day. The music is as beautiful, subtle and sly as ever, and notable is the presence of the London Contemporary Orchestra, performing gorgeous strings which frequently evoke an underlying creepiness through bitonality. The first single, “A Bloody Morning” (not played tonight), is also adorned with an incredible video, featuring dancers of all backgrounds filmed in Toronto during lockdown. While you’re on YouTube, you can then search for Owen (and “Final Fantasy“) performing live with loop pedals – not just his own songs but myriad covers from over the years.

John Callaghan – Let the path grow over [Antigen Records/Bandcamp] {video}
John Callaghan – Phylactery (based on “Tilapia” by Autechre) [Warp] {video}
John Callaghan – Just Be [Touched Music]
John Callaghan – Ghost moments [Antigen Records/Bandcamp]
Here’s another one I’ve been waiting for for AGES. English musician John Callaghan came into my radar in 2009 when his remake of Autechre‘s “Tilapia” appeared on one of Warp‘s 20th anniversary compilations. Callaghan has inhabited a strange zone for even longer than that – comfortable in the idm scene, making melodic electronica, yet almost always vocally-based, with eccentric lyrics and usually silly and brilliant videos. That strange dualism of electronica & songwriting sits alongside this other dualism of the beautiful & moving against the very English sense of the irreverent and ridiculous. I’m so pleased that this album has finally come out, with a few tracks familiar from videos & compilations, and plenty of new ones.

Marcus Whale – What Worth? [New Weird Australia/Bandcamp]
A couple of singles have come out recently from Marcus Whale in preparation for a new album, Lucifer, coming later this year. I’m guessing this one is part of that suite – dark electronics and his instantly recognizable vocals.

Night Dives – Mirror [Eternal]
New from Ptwiggs & Grasps_‘s label Eternal is a collection of dark electronics – some booming post-club beats and some ambient – from Melbourne artist Night Dives. The murky, disturbing CGI artwork (see Bandcamp) kind of perfectly captures the aesthetic going on here…

Grischa Lichtenberger – snt 2cx [Raster/Bandcamp]
Grischa Lichtenberger – re derec [Raster/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based artist Grischa Lichtenberger‘s last album was a deconstruction/reconstruction of a jazz band into glitchy electronica. This album, KAMILHAN; il y a péril en la demeure, is the end of a 5-part cycle of quite abstract works that began with LA DEMEURE, il ya péril en la demeure, and in some ways it’s the most accessible, being based around songs of a sort – albeit computer generated vocals singing cut-up material in an incomprehensible language. Deliciously strange music for strange times.

Accelera Deck – Salamander [Accelera Deck Bandcamp]
Accelera Deck – pulling through [Blackbean and Placenta/Accelera Deck Bandcamp]
Accelera Deck – halo 1 [Morr Music/Accelera Deck Bandcamp]
Accelera Deck – Tumult [Accelera Deck Bandcamp]
Accelera Deck – Smile (Dub It) [Accelera Deck Bandcamp]
Chris Jeely started making idm & ambient music in the mid-’90s inspired by classic Warp and shoegaze type stuff. From the late ’90s onwards, huge amounts of material came out under the name Accelera Deck, on various labels from his native US and also across the pond in the UK and Germany and the like. He also ran a bunch of labels including the pioneering Pitchcadet for idm & glitchy electronica, and then Scarcelight for the glitchscapes and hazy shoegaze-ambient he started making himself from the mid-’00s – a lot of lovely beatless stuff now comes out under the name Llarks. As you can see from his Discogs page, there were also myriad aliases, so his process now of uploading his back catalogue to Bandcamp is uncovering/recovering a massive amount of material. In 2017, after years of shoegazey sounds and glitchy processing before that, Accelera Deck returned with an EP of (rather messed-up) beats called Tumult, and now is making available a kind of new-old release he’s called Perfect Nostalgia Beach Rave. Here he imagines himself DJing his own material at some imaginary night-time beach rave, made up of old tapes of already lo-fi material, recorded on drum machines & sequenced synth – so that particular aesthetic of squished, tumbling beats and sweetly meandering melodies does indeed create a strange nostalgia for folks like me. Lovely to have this reminder of one of those streams of “deconstructed club music” – a kind of parallel-world vaporwave from days gone by!

group A – Inhuman Ecstasy [Mannequin Records]
group A – Circulation [Mecanica Records/Bandcamp/Bandcamp]
group A – Almost, Almost [Mannequin Records]
I was lucky to see the German-Japanese duo group A perform a live set at Dark Mofo in Hobart in 2018. For half an hour or more, Tommi Tokyo and Sayaka Botanic produced one long work from drum machines, noise-making electronics, violin and vocals, with delays and beats all set at the same tempo. It was incredible. Their new album anOther is the soundtrack to a dance work created with Dana Gingras and Sonya Stefan originally for Agora de la danse in Montréal in 2018, and it was performed in Launceston in 2019 for Mona Foma – I’m sad I didn’t get to see it. The music is incredible as usual, head-nodding industrial-tinged techno, and the work is inspired by Isabelle Adjani’s viscerally disturbing and cathartic subway scene in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (explaining the unhinged laughter in the first track I played).

Listen again — ~196MB