IDM and electronic sounds abound tonight!

LISTEN AGAIN – you’ll work it out eventually! Stream on demand via FBi, podcast over here.

Arikon – City Cum Temple [Portals Editions]
Gainstage – Sediment Two [Portals Editions]
Arikon – The Prophet’s Blood Is Boiling [Portals Editions]
Arik Hayut is half of the industrial doom-techno duo Gainstage, with two releases on Berlin label Portals Editions. Given the heavy bass and overdriven sound of that band, the “drum and drone” of his solo work as Arikon doesn’t come as a big surprise – but it just happens to be some of the best work to come out of this label and the associated Berlin scene of late. The Prophet’s Blood Is Boiling references on the one hand the social decay and excess of late-stage capitalism, and on the other hand various monsters found in both the Hebrew bible and Jewish apocrypha. It’s dirty and distorted, but full of engaging basslines and rhythms. Very highly recommended.

Tim Koch – Bloom (feat. Beth Keough) [CPU Records]
Thug – rhino song [Aural Industries/Tim Koch Bandcamp]
FourPlay String Quartet – Meshugganah (Methugganah remix by Tim Koch) [FourPlay String Quartet Bandcamp]
Machine Drum – Machine Drum (Tim Koch‘s Thousand Times Over Mix) [Merck]
Tim Koch – Ecittal [U-Cover]
Tim Koch – Techune [U-Cover]
Tim Koch – Truth Sinks In [Merck/Tim Koch Bandcamp]
10:32 – Blue Little [Ghostly]
Tim Koch – Miller Lowlife [CPU Records]
Adelaide’s Tim Koch is one of Australia’s best-established idm artists, with his first release (under the name Thug) dating back to 1999. Already at that time it was clear that he was a producer of great musical talent who also knew his way around synth patches and drum machines. He found international acclaim with releases on celebrated electronic labels like deFocus (weighted more towards electro/techno), Merck (definitely core idm!) and U-Cover (more ambient leanings), as well as *ahem* remixing my band FourPlay String Quartet back in the day (turning in no less than three very different versions of the same tune!) His most recent full release was an EP under the name “10:32” exploring some more (electro-)acoustic leanings for the legendary Ghostly label – and that was in 2009. The last album “proper”, as Tim Koch, was the last release for the beloved Merck label, in 2006 – so it’s been a while between drinks and it’s lovely to hear a big collection (17 tracks) released by Sheffield’s Central Processing Unit – initial copies on Tim’s preferred format of MiniDisc.

µ-Ziq – Lexicon (ft. Kazumi) [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
µ-Ziq – scaling [Hut Records/Astralwerks]
µ-Ziq – Bassbins [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Mike Paradinas has been slowly unearthing unreleased gems from his massive archive over the last few years. In the ’90s his habit was to record vast amounts of music, almost daily, and so there’s a lot of stuff contemporaneous to many favourite releases that has never seen the light of day. Just released now is Challenge Me Foolish, collecting music from the same period as the Royal Astronomy album, his follow-up to the still incredible Lunatic Harness, expanding on the drill’n’bass and faux-classical elements of that release. Many of these tracks feature Japanese vocalist Kazumi, who contributed to a number of releases by Paradinas and other contemporaries. I remember Mike launched Royal Astronomy in London with a string quartet, which he says was at the behest of the label and was a total disaster – but nevertheless I’ve always found his quasi-classical synth string pieces delightful and moving.

Autechre – four of seven [Warp/AE_STORE]
Autechre – six of eight (midst) [Warp/AE_STORE]
Last time Autechre dropped new music, in 2016, they decided to entirely free themselves from the constraints of physical releases, and gave us over 4 hours of music (all at once) over the 5 Elseq EPs. This time round there are exactly 8 hours of music, but at least they’re spreading them out in 2 hour blocks over the four weeks of their NTS Radio residency. Each NTS Session is available for download after it airs, as basically a full album – there are separate tracks, albeit many clocking in at 15 minutes or more. They’ll all be collected into massive box sets too – 8xCD or 12xLP. At this stage we can say it’s typical Autechre stuff – hard to get into and then utterly immersive and brilliant. The long tracks evolve in fascinating ways; the shorter ones explore distinct sonic terrain. Sometimes the sound is expansive, bass-heavy, at other times the duo’s penchant for squashed, unyielding mid-range timbres takes over. But as always the beauty’s in the details, the buried melodies and often in the way things unfold over the luxuriously long times they allow themselves.

Listen again — ~197MB

Big show with sad news and exciting news…
And BIG THANKS to Krishtie Mofazzal for enthusiastically filling in for me last week!

LISTEN AGAIN for all them feels… Stream on demand from FBi alwayyys, or podcast over here…

Tunng – Flatland [Full Time Hobby/Tunng Bandcamp]
The duo of Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders as Tunng took my breath away in mid 2004 when I heard their first single, released originally by Static Caravan. Arcane English folk channeled through glitchy electronic production, it was everything Utility Fog was initially conceived to be about, and they became a staple on the show for some years. A few years in, Sam Genders left to pursue some indie & folky directions of his own, and to me the band somewhat lost its way, with grating generic singalong folk songs… (of course your mileage may vary!) So it’s with great pleasure that I learned that the original duo have gotten back together, with this single auguring a full album, and what a delightful song it is too. Can’t wait for more.

Flame 1 – Shrine [Pressure]
Epic teamup of Kevin Martin aka The Bug and Burial, creating basically just what you’d expect – rainswept dark post-dubstep music. It’s a very low-key two-tracker, but really lovely and a nice first entry for The Bug’s new Pressure label.

Zozobra – The Vast Expanse [Hydra Head]
Old Man Gloom – Close Your Eyes, Roll Back In Your Head [Tortuga Recordings]
Old Man Gloom – Girth And Greed [Tortuga Recordings]
Old Man Gloom – Sonic Dust [Tortuga Recordings]
Cave In – The World Is In The Way [Hydra Head]
In the first in two pieces of tragic news that hit the music world last week (and we’ve had more this week although not so much in the Utility Fog realm…), Caleb Scofield passed away in a car accident at the age of 39. Best known probably as the bass player in Cave In, who started off as hardcore/metalcore but moved into alternative rock waters, and in a way came back again… Most significantly to me, Caleb was the bass player in the immense, inventive supergroup Old Man Gloom, featuring Scofield alongside ISIS‘s Aaron Turner, Converge‘s Nate Newton and the cheeky Mexican drummer Santos Montano. Montano also played with Scofield in his heavy, rifftastic bass-led solo act Zozobra (named for the same Mexican figure that inspired Old Man Gloom).
Scofield leaves a young family. A YouCaring fundraiser was setup which far surpassed its $1,000 goal within hours, and has now raised over $100,000.

Alias – Divine Disappointment [Anticon]
Anticon – We Ain’t Fessin’ [Anticon]
Alias – Watching Water [Anticon]
Alias – Unseen Sights (feat. Markus Acher) [Anticon]
Sole – Every Single One Of Us [Anticon]
Sage Francis – Product Placement [Epitaph]
Alias – M.G. Jack [Anticon]
B. Dolan – Fifty Ways To Bleed Your Customer [Strange Famous Records]
Alias – Gold cLOUDDEAD Skiez [Anticon]
A few days after the death of Caleb Scofield, last Sunday for me, the news hit that Brendon Whitney aka Alias had passed away of a heart attack. It’s been a while since we had significant work from Whitney – a solo album came out on Anticon in 2014, and he’s had an important hand in plenty of (alternative) hip-hop releases but more in the background. But his impact on a lot of UFog favourites through the years can’t be overstated. From B. Dolan‘s incredible 2010 album Fallen House, Sunken City that could not exist without Alias’s hard-hitting beats, to many of Sage Francis‘s important albums including the 2005 turning point A Healthy Distrust, and early work by the likes of Sole and others, and back to his own rap work in the early days, some of which we sampled from early Anticon compilations… And of course there’s that collaboration with Markus Acher of The Notwist, a plodding piece of sad-hop that I’ve loved for a decade and a half. We finish with a track from Alias’s last solo album, from 2014, which incorporated trap & bass elements, and in amongst it a rather nice tribute to Odd Nosdam‘s production…
Brendon Whitney also left a young family behind. There’s a GofundMe setup to support them, and I recommend dropping some cash if you can afford to.

Fake – Lo Res [SUMAC]
BLACK VANILLA – SMACKS [SoundCloud]
Cassius Select – Joy Mile [Unknown To The Unknown]
BV – Huh [Black Vanilla Bandcamp]
Fake – blame! [Fake Bandcamp] {under talking}
Cassius Select – Essence [Accidental Jnr]
BV – Hounds Out [BV Bandcamp]
Fake – Living Hard [SUMAC]
We learned in the last week or two that Lavurn Lee, long fixture of Sydney’s music scene, is returning to his original home of Toronto. As a result, the beloved BV – his trio with Marcus Whale and Jared Beeler – are going on long-term hiatus. Beeler has also moved to Melbourne, and it’s him along with a couple of other Sydney ex-pats in Melbourne who’ve setup the SUMAC label that just released Lee’s new self-titled album for his minimalist grime/trap/r’n’b project Fake. Lavurn originally came to notoriety in Sydney via his r’n’b vocal looping & electronics as Guerre, but apart from the legendary BV who trickle out pure gems every couple of years, he’s received international acclaim for his techno/bass productions as Cassius Select. There’s a hefty grime influence on his sounds – not just the rawness of the bass & electronics, but also in some of the cadences of his rapping (although no doubt Southern hip-hop has a more substantial presence). BV has always approached the dancefloor as a dark, post-cyberpunk battlefield, and Cassius Select tends to look to the darker ends of the dance spectrum too. With Fake, Lavurn is breaking down hip-hop into its most fucked-up & experimental formats too, processing his vocals, samples and beats as much as possible, and keeping the bass heavy. Mad props.

Listen again — ~204MB

Singular interpretations of pop & songwriting tonight, taking in folk, disco, krautrock, industrial & more, as well as some glitchy and leftfield electronic music of various types.

LISTEN AGAIN and maybe you’ll get it? Who knows. Stream on demand, it’s the FBi way, or podcast here.

Lost Girls – Drive [Smalltown Supersound/Lost Girls Bandcamp]
Some years ago, not long after Jenny Hval released her first solo album after the wonderful Rockettothesky albums, she put out a duo album as Nude on Sand with fellow Norwegian musician Håvard Volden. Now she’s teamed up with Volden again (he also plays in her solo band), this time as Lost Girls. The Nude on Sand arrangements were intentionally sparse and fairly acoustic, but the two long tracks making up Lost Girls’ debut EP are slow-burning crescendos – “Drive” builds from simple programmed drums, drones & spoken word into a big, head-nodding piece of space rock meets slow disco. Beautiful.

Björk – Arisen My Senses (Kelly Lee Owen Remix) [One Little Indian]
Lost Girls’ labelmate on Smalltown Supersound, Kelly Lee Owen (who featured Jenny Hval on her debut album), is one of the first batch of artists remixing Björk from her Utopia album. The inspired choices – the others are hot young techno/idm artist Lanark Artefax and footwork iconoclast Jlin – turn in very nice efforts, but it’s the slow nod and chopping up & layering of the vocals in this track that drew me in. Also inspired is the introduction of the harp and its slow fade-out in the outro.

Sunna – Hero Slave [Sunna Bandcamp]
A couple of weeks ago we heard a track from young Icelandic musician Sunna featured on the latest Wire Tapper compilation from The Wire. On her debut single as there, the vocals are layered & pitch-shifted, with a nice bass-heavy, shuffling beat and a very catch melody. Need more…

Ptwiggs & Grasps_ – ETERNAL [ETERNAL]
Asio Otus & GYUR – druidism [ETERNAL]
Sydney electronic producers Phoebe Twiggs & Grasps_ put together ETERNAL last year, launched with a club event in Sydney featuring people like Marcus Whale (appearing on this compilation as marcus (not singing)) and others – but their debut compilation as a label, ETERNAL 001 (released unconventionally on SoundCloud with full WAV downloads of all tracks) features artists from all over the world. It spans heavy industrial techno, bass music, ambient and vaporwave, and it’s very good.

Seth Graham – Binary Tapioca [Orange Milk Records]
Seth Graham – Whisper Slap [Orange Milk Records]
Orange Milk co-founder Seth Graham has released his new album Gasp via that label, Noumenal Loom and his own Bandcamp, and it’s a corker – a bizarre facsimile of modern classical music, made up of micro-samples perfectly reconstructed.

Hanz – Psychic Dog [Tri-Angle Records]
Hanz – Dues (Version 2) [Hanz Bandcamp]
Hanz – Plasty [Tri-Angle Records]
Hanz – Clutched [Tri-Angle Records]
Exactly a month ago, we heard Hanz aka Brandon Juhans’ first EP of 2018, Plasty I. He’s just released Plasty II, which is slightly less manic than the first (see quasi-title track “Plasty” played tonight for that sped-up hip-hop-tronica). Equally dense, the new EP tends to keep things at hip-hop tempo, and still very strange – check out the binaural beats on “Clutched” for instance. From 2017, “Dues (Version 2)” walks a similar weird-hop path.

Lana Del Rabies – Submberged [Deathbomb Arc]
Lana Del Rabies – Weren’t u Asking For it [Lana Del Rabies Bandcamp]
Nicole Dollanganger – Chapel (Regret remix by Lana Del Rabies) [Lana Del Rabies Bandcamp]
Lana Del Rabies – The Empty Mantra [Deathbomb Arc]
Phoenix artist Sam An records under the unholy moniker of Lana Del Rabies, variously described as extreme noise (which it is sometimes), industrial and darkwave. She’s released by the excellent Californian label Deathbomb Arc (linked with metal, noise & hip-hop artists like Clipping.), who’ve just put out her new album, Shadow World, which really ought to blow up any minute. A heavy artistic statement with songs buried under distortion, loops and beats, it’s her strongest work yet – and that’s saying something. From 2016 we took a couple of tracks from a release capturing demos from 2014 & 2015, which she describes as a pretty dark time. The excellently titled Starving Escape Artist EP also features her remix of Canadian darkwave/shoegaze/indie artist Nicole Dollanganger (who I heard last year collaborating with hardcore monsters Full of Hell). Get with it.

Allenheimer – Hazenmaschine [Unfiled]
Allenheimer – Megas [Unfiled]
Like Sunna above, I discovered Icelandic producer Atli Bollason’s Allenheimer project via the latest Wire Tapper compilation, which featured the first track here, a lovely piece of slow-growing ambient which crescendos into a disturbing digital glitch. Granular micro-sampling is all over this EP, with chopped samples of Icelandic pop songs and field recordings brushing shoulders with electronic beats. A really nice debut.

Richard Youngs – Nebulosity [O Genesis]
Richard Youngs – Bewilderment [O Genesis]
Richard Youngs – Once It Was Autumn [Jagjaguwar]
Richard Youngs – I Am The Weather [Jagjaguwar]
Richard Youngs – Oh Reality [Sonic Oyster Records]
Richard Youngs – where are you going to get your luck from? feat. Sorley Youngs [Glass Redux]
Richard Youngs – In Another Fog [O Genesis]
It’s somewhat strange to find Richard Youngs being released on the label run by Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, but Belief is one of his most “pop” albums in a while – for rather weird values of pop. Apparently he built it up out of skeleton structures of (other people’s) pop songs made on drum machines, but they’re imbued with his very English oddness, as well as his very English talent for transcendently beautiful songwriting. Frequent visitor to UFog playlists Daniel O’Sullivan, himself an explorer of English musical weirdness, introduced Youngs’ music to Tim Burgess and so here we are. Youngs is equally known for his very experimental music, often in collaboration with like-minded artists. I’ve been a fan for some years, and it’s nice to revisit some of his more song-oriented material in tonight’s special. From the stellar series of albums released by Jagjaguwar we dipped into The Naïve Shaman and Autumn Response, and then we heard from another almost-pop album, Beyond the Valley of Ultra-Hits. And from 2016’s the rest is scenery we heard an amazing piece of arcane folk-jazz-rock featuring the wise-before-his-time vocals of Youngs’ son Sorley.

Listen again — ~200MB

Tonight we’ve got some pretty cool glitchy sounds and crunchy beats, and we’re also having a chat with renowned Sydney drummer Laurence Pike, who’s got an album out soon and a launch this coming Saturday!

LISTEN AGAIN for good chatter and great tunes – stream on demand via FBi and podcast right here.

Reuben Ingall – Floriade [hellosQuare]
Reuben Ingall – Free Field [hellosQuare]
It’s always a pleasure to receive new music from Canberran audio wizard Reuben Ingall here at Utility Fog Towers. Reuben is one of those producers whose sounds I love to puzzle out – how is he doing that? Especially live, you can see the way his talents as a guitarist interact with his smarts at programming his Max/MSP patches – and whatever else he uses to process his sounds. We’ve heard him create drone epics from the sound of a pie being microwaved, and we’ve heard him chop up his voice, piano, ukulele, other instruments and found sounds – but this new album Threads sees him focusing mainly on his guitar. As usual, he’s able to draw out a hefty amount of emotive force from the instrument and the soundscapes he weaves around it. It’s wonderful stuff.

Laurence Pike – Distant Early Warning [Leaf]
…interview with Laurence Pike…
Szun Waves – At Sacred Walls [Szun Waves Bandcamp]
Laurence Pike – Clouds And Wires [Leaf]
Really nice to talk to Laurence Pike, one of Sydney’s top drummers in many different genres and contexts, on the release of his (surprisingly!) first solo album Distant Early Warning, coming out on Friday the 31st of March through The Leaf Label. You may know Laurence as the drummer in fabled Sydney bands PVT and Triosk, or many other collaborations & appearances including an album by Flanger, and albums from Sarah Blasko and Jack Ladder. So it’s really nice hearing this stuff, recorded live in the studio in one single session – all glitchy & murky samples & loops trigger live along with the drum kit performance. He’s launching the album this Saturday, March 24th, at the lovely Golden Age Cinema in Surry Hills.

Arad – Slua Washed [Bedouin Records]
Arad – Inti [Bedouin Records]
We’ve heard a lot from Ian McDonnell aka Eomac on this show lately, but as a fan of his duo Lakker for years now I’ve been interested in what’s happening with the other half, Dara Smith. So here we have the long-awaited new EP from Arad, The Glimpse. It’s stunning, really – ghostly autotuned vocals accompanied by various takes on bass techno, or crunching, sparse percussion and synth pads. Beautiful but also by and large dancefloor-tuned. So highly recommended.

Mark Van Hoen – Thru [Mark Van Hoen Bandcamp]
Seefeel – time to find me (come inside) [Astralwerks]
Locust – Penetration [R&S Records]
Scala – Naked [Touch]
Mark Van Hoen – Another Light Casts its Will [Touch]
Mark Van Hoen – Closer Than We All Thought [Apollo]
Mark Van Hoen – Don’t Look Back [Editions Mego]
Locust – Do Not Fear [Editions Mego]
Mark Van Hoen – Only [Mark Van Hoen Bandcamp]
A new album from Mark Van Hoen dropped with very little fanfare on his Bandcamp earlier this week. Its title, Voices, encapsulates something that’s been very important throughout his work with many different bands through his career – that is, vocals. He’d been making electronic music at home since his very young years in the early ’80s, but began releasing music in the early ’90s, as an early member & producer of shoegaze-meets-IDM band Seefeel, and with solo work as Locust. Sarah Peacock, singer with Seefeel, turned up on many of the classic Locust tracks – including the crunching, overdriven hip-hop of “Penetration” here, from the amazing Truth Is Born Of Arguments album. Peacock was also a member of Scala, the electronic-meets-shoegaze-meets-indie band that put out a few albums in a concentrated period of time in the mid-’90s. Throughout his solo work as well as collaborations with people like Neil Halstead of Slowdive, vocals or chopped vocal samples have been very prominent alongside the weeping synth pads and expertly programmed beats. When he returned to his roots of granulated electronics & beats with a couple of albums on Editions Mego in 2012-2013, the vocal snippets were again very much to the fore – so to the fans, this new album’s title immediately rings true, and its contents are just what we expect and crave. A truly important artist of the last 2 1/2 decades.

Listen again — ~203MB