Industrial techno, glitchscapes and other oddities tonight…

LISTEN AGAIN to the best sounds to nod your head to… Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Goth-Trad – Bloody Dice [Daymare Recordings]
JK Flesh – Empty Victory [Daymare Recordings]
JK Flesh – Circus of Illusions [Avalanche Recordings]
Klaska – Lithium Voodoo [Avalanche Recordings]
Two split EPs featuring JK Flesh to start the show. Justin K Broadrick has spread himself across countless genres since he was part of the original lineup of Napalm Death in the 1980s and helped initiate the short sharp shocks of grindcore. With Godflesh he took grindcore and metal into the mechanised wastelands of industrial music, and along with Kevin Martin (aka The Bug), he released some much-prized ambient/experimental/dub/beats as Techno Animal (and also Ice, and various other aliases). After Godflesh split, his main outlet for songwriting was Jesu’s doomy shoegaze metal, but he’s continued electronic production in various guises, and JK Flesh has of late been a powerhouse of industrial techno at various tempos. His split on legendary Japanese label Daymare Recordings, Knights of the Black Table, is described as “slow-motion industrial dub techno”, and both he and the great Japanese dubstep/electronic artist Goth-Trad deliver in spades. Meanwhile on his own Avalanche Recordings, the Halved EP has much faster, squelchier sounds from Broadrick, while on the (notional) flipside post-metaller Kevin Laska brings three tracks of smoother head-nodders, with a curious and compelling triplet feel…

The Pulse Projects – Nonfunction 02 [Opal Tapes]
Some much more minimal broken techno here from Dutch producer Albert van Abbe on the ever-reliable Opal Tapes, with a little dubby nod to the bass & kick, skittering hi-hats and heavily tweaked dub delays. It’s subtle and delicious.

joni void – lov-ender (with ylangylang) [Constellation]
joni void – observer (natalie’s song) (feat. Natalie Reid) [Constellation]
joni void – deep impression / im depression [Constellation]
Canadian producer Jean Cousin has just released his second album for Constellation as Joni Void, Mise en Abyme. Like his previous, Selfless, there are vocal contributions from a multitude of (mostly female) friends, and lots of glitchy, hazey samples and mostly semi-buried beats. But his layered vocals appear on one or two tracks this time, and also his own words on the last selection, spoken through a text-to-speech system, rather disquietingly in an Australian accent.

Fennesz – Rainfall [Touch]
Fennesz – Instrument 3 [Mego/Touch]
Fennesz – traxdata [Mego]
Fennesz – We Trigger the Sun [Touch]
In the mid-to-late ’90s, no label was more synonymous with glitch and electronic experimentalism than Australian label Mego (which relaunched as Editions Mego in 2006), and one of the most talented purveyors of this sound was Christian Fennesz. To some extent this is because Fennesz was less uncompromising with the noise and chaos than contemporaries like Pita (Peter Rehberg, who runs Editions Mego), Hecker or even Farmers Manual, but his earlier works were at the time rather groundbreaking and ear-opening. He gained deserved fame with the Endless Summer album, which invoked the Beach Boys through a haze of static and drone. In the last 10 years or so, it’s felt to me like Fennesz started repeating himself, with lacklustre overly-pleasant collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and a whole lot of stuff that seemed to repeat the same four strummed guitar chords through the same patches. So I’m very glad that his new album Agora, recorded on a limited setup in a small room on his house, mixed on headphones, brings back some kind of edge to his sound – still with beautiful processed guitar, but with a low-end pulse running through a lot of the release, and a certain roughness. Maybe it’s just me, but anyway it’s rather wonderful. To remind us, I played a track from his first EP and from his first album, glitching electronics and dubby bass.

JWPaton – Waiting To Cross [Histamine Tapes]
JWPaton – Everything’s Okay [Histamine Tapes]
Sydney experimental artist JWPaton recently relocated from the city to the Blue Mountains, and his new album Skychief, released on US label Histamine Tapes, reflects these two settings, with noisy drone tracks based on processed field recordings giving way to ambient dub pieces. On “Everything’s Okay” a choir is sampled and harmonised to create something both noisy and uplifting.

Sensaround – varispeed [hellosQuare]
The first new track from a new release from cross-continental trio Sensaround, which features Canberran guitarist & electronic musician Shoeb Ahmad, Sydney pianist Alister Spence and Scottish saxophonist Raymond MacDonald. All three artists here are producing quite unusual sounds for their instruments, with little of a pulse or even a tonal centre – it’s soundscapey stuff from three accomplished sculptors of sound. The album drops soon.

Romeo Moon – Let Love In [Hotel Motel]
We recently heard a lovely instrumental track from Melbourne’s Kevin Orr, and the new EP from Romeo Moon is released soon. There’s a bit of a Radiohead feel to this, and it has a delightfully/disturbingly lopsided beat that adds an extra beat and a half every 4 bars I think. There’s an expansive feel to the whole EP, which combines electronic & live instruments, and treats its songs in many ways like instrumentals.

Lisathe – Pagan Poetry [Art As Catharsis]
Sydney trio Lisathe have undertaken on their debut album to cover a series of Icelandic composers & musicians – so in guitar/bass/drums format they’re playing people like Jóhann Jóhannsson and, here, Björk. It’s initially jolting to hear this classic of glitch-pop on these instruments, with Björk’s high voice replaced by the baritone of the guitar, but it somehow works, and makes me keen to hear the takes on even more radically different artists.

The Future Sound Of London – Artificial Placement of Emotion [FSOL Digital]
For the second year in a row psychedelic ambient techno/rave veterans The Future Sound Of London are doing their FSOL Calendar for the year – no physical calendar, but a new track released each month in mp3 format. This archival (but relatively recent) track is a nice skittery piece of drill’n’bass-ish electronica. The duo have a seemingly endless archive of mostly excellent music. They’ve sustained a cyberpunk aesthetic and a habit of fictionalised self-mythologising for decades now, and it seems they’ll never stop. I’m not complaining.

Listen again — ~197MB

Inventive indiepop, sample mangling, field recordings, post-classical / acoustic doom and more tonight…

LISTEN AGAIN before the world turns to dust… Demand that stream from FBi! Or podcast here.

Pikelet – Exchange Rate [Babyrace Records]
Pikelet – Wealthy / Worthy [Babyrace Records]
For many years, Melbourne artist Evelyn Ida Morris released inspiring, creative music as Pikelet – often solo with various instruments and loop pedal(s), sometimes as a full band. Evelyn also played drums in heavy bands like True Radical Miracle, and Pikelet was partly a way of expressing a kind of (simplified) femininity. Morris’ own identity, however, was much less clear-cut, and I believe that they came to the conclusion in the last few years that they must come out as non-binary. This means that the person they created to be Pikelet can be retired. As Evelyn says in the liner notes of this album: “Goodbye, Pikelet, I will be myself from now on.”
So it’s a kind of bittersweet goodbye – “Pikelet” has touched so many people in the music scene, myself included. But Evelyn Ida Morris already created two wonderful albums last year, and no doubt whatever they continue to produce will be beautiful, challenging and inspiring.

whisker floater – ip_address_Mix_Edit 1_v2 [Æscape Sounds]
whisker floater – still_no_zinc6_cropped_mix2 [Æscape Sounds]
Two members of the Sydney experimental scene since the 1980s join together here with sounds initially created in iPad apps and then transferred to DAWs for further chopping & processing… Dru Jones and Shane Fahey are both part of the reincarnated Scattered Order, but Jones’s involvement goes back to the 1980s, at which time Fahey was involved with the similarly iconoclastic Makers of the Dead Travel Fast. Their work with electronics and sampled sounds goes back further than most can boast, and like various members of that scene they continue to work with technology to create layered sounds, with nods to dance culture in twisted ways.

Alexandra Spence – bodies in place [Room40]
Alexandra Spence – bodyscan [Room40]
On her own bio, Alexandra Spence writes that “she holds the pseudo-scientific belief that electricity might actually be magic”. Well, it’s true at least in the sense that her utterly magical sound-art is created through electricity. She uses sounds from everyday objects, field recordings, spoken (and often whispered) words, and sometimes musical instruments and her own sung vocals, to create fascinating and gripping works, and it’s so great to hear them collected on a full album – Waking, She Heard The Fluttering, released by the estimable Room40. Can’t recommend highly enough.

Deaf Center – A Scent [Sonic Pieces]
Deaf Center – Red Glow [Sonic Pieces]
Deaf Center – Dial [Type Records]
Deaf Center – Stone beacon [Type Records]
Deaf Center – New Beginning (Tidal Darkness) [Type Records]
Deaf Center – Gathering [Sonic Pieces]
Norwegian musicians Erik K Skodvin and Otto A Totland have been legendary names in ambient and electronica since their debut EP on Type Records in 2004 (from which we heard “Dial” tonight) – initially a lovely form of melodic electronica and ambient. By even their first album the following year, they were leaning more heavily into the acoustic aspects of their work – Skodvin is a cellist, Totland a pianist. What could be a precursor to the post-classical piano-and-electronics of recent times instead swerved into far darker, spookier territories – particularly in Skodvin’s own work under his own name and as Svarte Greiner – and by their last album (2011’s Owl Splinters) their music was haunted and chilling as much as it was beautiful. With only a single 12″ record since then as a duo, this album is a welcome return, following closely from the format of Owl Splinters.

Saffronkeira – Without Keeping Memory Of It [Denovali]
Saffronkeira – A Pattern Didn’t Exist [Denovali]
The latest album from Sardinian artist Eugenio Caria as Saffronkeira segues quite nicely out of Deaf Center – the first track being minimalist solo piano with some lovely subtle, scratchy violin lines. The second takes whisps of electronics and gradually builds a minimal techno beat of sorts under it. This album creeps up on you – listening in the background you’ll find yourself turning back to it frequently to remind yourself what you’re listening to – a good sign!

Max Cooper – Hope (Roly Porter remix) [Mesh]
Max Cooper – Rule 110 (Synkro remix) [Mesh]
Max Cooper – Lovesong (Brecon remix) [Mesh]
It’s always interesting hearing what Max Cooper‘s been up to – he’s one of those artist who takes his interest in experimental electronic music, ambient and post-classical into dancefloor-friendly areas. But he’s also got great taste in his contemporaries, as shown in recent DJ mixes, and that flows over into the artists he’s chosen for One Hundred Billion Sparks Remixed, re-envisioning the music from his latest album. Dubstep pioneer-turned-power-ambient maestro Roly Porter builds something glacially blissful with swooping bottom-end movement, while Synkro takes things into his particular kind of technoid drum’n’bass. Finally, some nice chopped live drums and electronics from new duo Brecon, who are signed to Cooper’s own Mesh label.

Oedura – Prologue [Empirical Intrigue]
Finally tonight, the first release on a new Sydney label called Empirical Intrigue. Oedura is a Sydney artist who I believe runs the label, and this piece mixes some evocative analogue synth stuff with multilingual vocal samples. Would like to hear more.

Listen again — ~188MB

Electronic pop, industrial techno and non-techno, experimental electronica and freeform sampling, edgy post-classical and cutting-edge jazz tonight…

LISTEN AGAIN and again, because you can! Stream on demand via FBi, podcast here.

Ducks! – Swerve (feat. Rachel Maio) [Ducks! Bandcamp]
Ex-pat Aussies now based in Berlin, Ducks! started releasing lovely quirky indie pop with an electronic bent a couple of years ago (under this name) and this new single is a welcome addition to their discography, with a sweet melody and some great cello from another Berlin-based Australia, Rachel Maio.

Lakker – A Juggling Of Numbers [R&S Records/Lakker Bandcamp]
Lakker – Dropped Shoulders [R&S Records/Lakker Bandcamp]
Lakker – Body From The Water [R&S Records/Lakker Bandcamp]
After a series of solo releases from Ian McDonnell last year as Eomac, as well as some collaborations on his Eotrax label, and an excellent EP from Dara Smith as Arad, it’s great to have them back together as Lakker, again on legendary Belgian dance label R&S Records. This album doesn’t quite reach the dancefloor, but doesn’t perhaps go quite as experimental as some of their releases either. The vocals that both introduced in their recent solo work appear here, lending some tracks an ’80s industrial/pop feel.

Dis Fig – Alive [Purple Tape Pedigree]
Dis Fig – Watering [Purple Tape Pedigree]
Dis Fig – U Said U Were [Purple Tape Pedigree]
Jazz-trained vocalist Felicia Chen makes full use of her vocal training as Dis Fig, but her solo art draws from industrial, techno, noise and further outer reaches for a quite intense experience on Purge, her debut album from Purple Tape Pedigree. The arrangements feature flute, trumpet and trombone, along with plenty of creepy and heavy electronics. At times her voice is distorted & processed, increasing the intensity of what are already passionate & emotional performances. A really impressive debut.

Rian Treanor – ATAXIA B2 [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Rian Treanor – ATAXIA C2 [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
After releases on Death of Rave and Warp sublabel Arcola, Rian Treanor now drops his debut album on the one and only Planet µ, and appropriately for the label’s more recent focus, it’s quite footstep-influenced. Treanor’s experimental techno chops may have been learned in the cradle, as he’s the son of Mark Fell, glitch/click-techno don and one half Snd. In any case, Treanor sneaks some nice melody into his twitchy machine beats.

Sote – Artificial Neutrality [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
Aka Ebtekar has been on the must-listen list since his first release as Sote on Warp back in 2002, an explosive double-header of breakcore techno. He’s more recently been exploring both the history of Iranian electronic music and new techniques in processing and interacting with traditional Persian instruments and music. Thus on this very electronic-sounding piece he’s joined by Arash Bolouri on the santour and Pouya Damadi on the tar, both using extended techniques and further manipulated by Ebtekar. I can’t wait to hear the rest of this album!

Matmos – The Crying Pill [Thrill Jockey]
Matmos – Plastic Anniversary [Thrill Jockey]
Matmos – Collapse Of The Fourth Kingdom [Thrill Jockey]
Martin C Schmidt and Drew Daniel have been together for 25 years, and they’re celebrating their anniversary with an album that samples from every sort of plastic they could find. They’re past masters at this kind of thing – not just making music from unusual samples (that’s for sure!) but also for creating entire albums from arch concepts and somehow making it work. Live, they populate the stage with weird & wonderful objects that they sample in front of the audience and build abstracted versions of their tracks from. In recording, they can afford to finesse everything carefully, and employ a great deal of musicality to create catchy ditties (of a sort). On this release they seem to harken a bit back to the frenetic, skittery (and very idiosyncratic) idm of their earliest couple of CDs, albeit with much higher production values!

Carl Stone – Xé May [Unseen Worlds/Bandcamp]
On his new album Baroo, US musician Carl Stone, who’s been called the “King of Sampling”, recreates his time-slicing technique of stretching and rearranging musical works through microsampling in a modern way using Max/MSP. Actually the track I played tonight uses an Elektron Octatrack sampler, but all these pieces show Stone enjoying the flexibility of new technologies in extending techniques he’s been developing since the 1980s – he first performed with a computer onstage in 1986. Having heard the two archival compilations released by Unseen Worlds last year, I’ve been seeking out as much of Stone’s back catalogue as I can find, and I’ll give you a listen in a future show.

Giraffe – On the shore [Meakusma]
Giraffe – The night is dark [Meakusma]
Hamburg trio Giraffe sit in a strange land somewhere between jazz, postrock and avant-garde experimentalism, not unlike certain other unusual travellers from Germany & Austria such as Kammerflimmer Kollektief, Radian et al. It’s rhythmic yet rarely quite settles into a groove, it features familiar instruments but they don’t quite follow the roles you’d expect. Whatever it is, I love listening to it.

Aries Mond – Cut Off [IIKKI]
Aries Mond – Cracks [IIKKI]
Aries Mond – Ink [IIKKI]
Boris Billier has been recently creating a beautiful and unusual take on “post-classical” ambient piano genre as Aries Mond – eschewing pretty, sub-classical melodies and the “subtle electronics” that I dread to read about in press releases, he uses electronics in a more uncompromising manner and his piano in a very subtle way, playful with sound and just melodic enough. On this new album, sounds crackle forth at odd spots in tracks, muted piano clicks and sputters in reverse, and field recordings of (sometimes indistinct) voices intermingle with the music. It’s really gorgeous.

Daniel Carter, Tobias Wilner, Djibril Toure, Federico Ughi – Nostrand Avenue [577 Records/Bandcamp]
I discovered this teaming up of great NYC musicians through the latest issue of The Wire Tapper cover CD with The Wire, which featured an excerpt from another track off the album New York United. Combining brilliant jazz musicians Daniel Carter and Federico Ughi with electronic soundtrack musician Tobias Wilner and versatile bassist Djibril Toure (who’s played with The Wu-Tang Clan), it’s an album of jazzscapes, grooves and experimentation. This particular quartet may be new, but they’ve played together in various sub-groupings before, and that shows in an album that matches the avant-garde aspects with remarkable cohesion. I decided to play as much of this long track as I could, because I love the way it develops its themes as it cycles through upbeat sections and lulls. We left it about 10 minutes into its 17 minutes. I highly recommend checking out the whole album.

Listen again — ~193MB

A cinematic vibe across a lot of tonight’s sounds, whether it’s krautrock/shoegaze, psychedelia, acoustic doom or who knows what else…

LISTEN AGAIN and fly to the stars and back… FBi does the stream on demand, podcast here.

Romeo Moon – It All Goes [Hotel Motel]
Melbourne musician Kevin Orr has released a couple of things before as Romeo Moon, but this is the first track in a couple of years. While he’s a songwriter, this is a beautiful instrumental work, a slow burning meld of shoegaze and krautrock with a loping beat and shimmering drones.

LaBrecque / Barakat – Planet R-101 [Karlrecords]
Paul LaBrecque is best known as a member of long-lived psychedelic group Sunburned Hand of the Man, while German-Palestinian musician Ghazi Barakat is known as Pharaoh Chromium as well as various rock groups such as The Golden Showers. This duo release sees them creating two quite contrasting sides – side A is psych rock freakout, while tonight’s side B achieves that feeling of static movement – things changing slowly but keeping in the same space for over 11 minutes until the delays and reverbs become more intense and then a Middle Eastern melody enters – and even then it takes a couple more minutes before it really takes off! Quite a trip indeed.

Elsen Price – Assemble: The Spirit Controlled [ABC Music]
Sydney double bassist Elsen Price is equally at home playing complex contemporary music scores, improvising jazz, playing with Middle Eastern ensembles, and creating solo double bass works live with looping pedal. On his solo album Descent of the Free he lets loose with every kind of double bass technique, conjuring beautiful high melodies, a tremolo choir of basses, plucked basslines, percussive slaps and more.

Deaf Center – Red Glow [Sonic Pieces via The Wire]
Cellist & drone/sound-artist Erik K Skodvin and pianist Otto A Totland have worked together as Deaf Center for a decade and a half. Their music started off a little more electronic and ambient, but gradually moved towards the spooky acoustic doom of Skodvin’s solo work. To say I’m looking forward to their new album would be an understatement! I was even willing to pay vinyl prices for the limited CD edition – Sonic Pieces releases are always gorgeously packaged, but you pay for it…

Good Moon Deer – Aloner [ via The Wire]
Brussels-based Icelandic musician Guðmundur Úlfarsson basdardises his own name as Good Moon Deer, under which he releases lovely glitchy electro-acoustic stuff. This track slowly builds the chopped vocals and synths until the drum edits and bass drops take over. More soon please!

Machinefabriek – sidder [Nomad Exquisite]
Machinefabriek – zinder (feat vocals from Rie Mitsutake and Alden Penner) [Nomad Exquisite]
Rutger Zuydervelt is taking his music (as Machinefabriek and under his own name) into continually unexpected new vistas all the time. Here, for a short EP on Chicago label Nomad Exquisite he’s created off-beat rhythm-and-bass, with synth pads and noises, all of which wouldn’t be out of place on an updated idm release, say, or a well-hyped Boomkat-approved hot young thing. Excellent as always.

Lee Gamble – BMW Shuanghuan X5 [Hyperdub]
Lee Gamble – In The Wreck Room [Hyperdub]
I’m not sure why I didn’t end up playing this in February, but better late than never! Lee Gamble can never be predicted, except that he’s going to be cutting edge and conceptual, yet linked to the dancefloor all the same. Here we have one track which is a kind of concrète ode to an extravagant Chinese knock-off car, and then a track that’s half ambient pads, half cool finger clicking bass and half jittery drill’n’bass breaks – and it exists in the folds of higher dimensions where you can have three halves.

Laurence Pike – Drum Chant [Leaf]
After a long break from solo work, Laurence Pike put out an album last year of placid percussion and live-triggered samples. Another new album is coming soon, and this first single is somewhat more frenetic in its percussion, again combining live drums with samples and electronics.

DJ Plead – Salt and Pepper [Nervous Horizon]
Now based in Melbourne, Jared Beeler continues his solo work as DJ Plead where he left off with last year’s Get In Circle – Lebanese percussion meets bass music. Except this time he’s released by London label Nervous Horizon and getting repped all over the place. His productions for BV were always first class too.

Aidan Baker, Faith Coloccia, Jon Mueller – Harmony In Distance [Gizeh/Bandcamp]
Barnett + Faith Coloccia – Bachelor’s Grove [SIGE Records]
Barnett + Faith Coloccia – Switch [Blackest Ever Black]
Barnett + Faith Coloccia – AM Horizon [Blackest Ever Black]
Barnett + Faith Coloccia – Fountain of Youth [SIGE Records]
It’s going to be a big year for Faith Coloccia, with a new solo release as Måra in the works, and a new release from her long-running duo with Oakeater‘s Alex Barnett – and coming in late April, a trio release with prolific guitar mangler Aidan Baker and brilliant, versatile percussionist Jon Mueller. On the latter release, Coloccia layered vocals through tape machines to create a beautiful wordless addition to the glitched & processed guitars and primitive percussion. It’s a beautiful album, released on LP & digital through Gizeh in late April – tonight’s track is an exclusive for now.
The Barnett + Coloccia duo has been producing precessional, arcane electronic works since 2013’s Retrieval, only occasionally including Coloccia’s angelic vocals, focusing rather on dark synthetic textures which could feel at home on an ’80s industrial/gothic release a lot of the time. 2015’s Weld continued, again with subtle melodies, abstract noise and sometimes drum machine beats. The latest, VLF, is released on SIGE Records, the label Coloccia runs with husband Aaron Turner. All three releases are evocative works that I return to quite often.

haddocks’ eyes – fury and disgust [haddocks’ eyes Bandcamp]
The musical emanations from Aussie artist Benjow aka haddocks’ eyes come at irregular intervals and vary from indie songwriting to folk guitar picking to electronic processing – anything really. This track is typically outsiderish – highly processed vocals and dirgelike guitar and drum machine. Benjow is capable of creating gorgeous, emotive songs, but even when he’s in alienation mode I find his stuff highly compelling.

Listen again — ~206MB