Tonight we have a whole slew of music influenced by… well, sampling, mostly… the original Blade Runner and its incredible soundtrack by Vangelis. Later, drum’n’bass & weirdtronica abounds.

LISTEN AGAIN, before these moments are lost in time… futuristic stream on demand from FBi & podcast right here…

Pop Will Eat Itself – Wake Up! Time To Die… [RCA/Cherry Red Records]
Pop Will Eat Itself – Live In Splendour: Died In Chaos (under talking) [RCA/Cherry Red Records]
The Poppies were one of those bands that just inevitably would be influenced by Blade Runner. If nothing else, they were influenced by vast amounts of pop culture, comics to sci-fi to sport. But also, they were such a cyborg band, combining their love of scraggly punk riffage with hip-hop and techno. They slathered everything in samples, and thus we have the eponymous words from the replicant Leon in the first track tonight. The second offering uses the gorgeous high-pitched statement of one of Vangelis‘ main themes (I think it actually appears near the very beginning of the movie) to bookend the track.

Vangelis – Tears In Rain [EastWest]
As well as featuring one of the most iconic bits of dialogue from the movie, in which the brutal lead replicant Roy Batty asserts his unique personhood in the last few minutes of his artificially-short life, this is a lovely example of the restrained beauty of Vangelis’ work on this soundtrack. He makes a lot of use of pitch bends and glissandi, apart from simply creating rich & varied sounds.

Vangelis – Rachel’s Song [EastWest]
This track, featuring the bewitching wordless vocals of Mary Hopkin, has been sampled countless times since its release. I recently heard a trance tune which I couldn’t track down which used the same segment as the following track:

The Future Sound of London – My Kingdom (Part 4) [Virgin]
Like PWEI, it’s no surprise that The Future Sound of London would draw from Blade Runner. Their psychedelic aesthetic oozes cyberpunk, and while the originating works of cyberpunk fiction probably came out a couple of years earlier, it was really the rain-swept, Tokyo-inflected Los Angeles of Blade Runner, with its ubiquitous advertising, hard-nosed film noir attitude and lived-in, aged futuristic technology, that defined cyberpunk forevermore. FSOL were so excited by where technology could take them that they fancied themselves archaeologists of the future, and they couldn’t help but be informed by works like Blade Runner. They integrated the Mary Hopkin/Vangelis sample beautifully into the various versions of this track, and I selected this one in particular because not only is the vocal very prominent, but it’s about as close as FSOL got to drum’n’bass…

Dillinja – The Angels Fell [Metalheadz]
A hybrid genre descended equally from the hardcore techno of rave, the syncopations of dancehall and breaks of hip-hop: jungle and its descendant drum’n’bass were strongly dependent on sampling technology, and its producers were keen from the beginning to draw out the cyborg aspects of making music this way. Both Terminator and Blade Runner figured strongly in this music, and here we find jungle original Dillinja sampling both a snippet of Roy Batty’s dialogue (“Fiery the angels fell…”) and basing his entire melody on a progressively pitch-shifted sample from the next little bit from the soundtrack…

Vangelis – Blade Runner Blues [EastWest]
Here’s Vangelis emoting his heart out with some synth sax and plenty of use of that mod wheel. Dillinja samples a two note phrase from earlyish in this track, and shifts it up and down a third to create the melody repeating under his chopped-up breaks.

Trace & Nico – Replicant [Idiosyncratic Records]
This track – played off YouTube – is highly sought after and highly limited, only released on a white label a few years after its creation, likely because of its hefty sampling from Blade Runner. Throughout are fragments of dialogue, primarily Deckard instructing his computer(?) to zoom in on a photograph – you know the bit.

Vangelis – Main Titles [EastWest]
That sample from the movie appears right here in the “Main Titles” that open the original official soundtrack (released on CD in 1994 – this is the source of all the Vangelis music I’m playing tonight). It then moves on to some of the important musical themes from the movie, including some lovely pitch slides, and those rising and falling chords…

Company Flow – Info Kill II [Rawkus Records]
I can’t find the specific section of soundtrack sampled here, but those falling chords are definitely there. It’s iconic – you couldn’t mistake them for anything else. Company Flow is of course the hip-hop crew from the mid-’90s where El-P grew up, and again it’s no big surprise that Blade Runner figures in his influences and turns up in one of his earliest mature productions. It’s very substantially used throughout, and augmented nicely with a funky bassline and beats.

Zomby – Tears in the Rain [WERKDISCS]
When infamous dubstep/uk garage producer Zomby put together his first full-length album he called it Where Were U in ’92 – a direct tribute to early ’90s rave, hardcore and jungle. He knows his shit, so of course he’s going to end up sampling from Blade Runner (even if he misquotes it in the title here). It’s a nice completion of the circle to end our Blade Runner tribute for tonight.

So Blade Runner 2049, you ask? Well, without spoiling anything, it’s very beautiful, the soundtrack is a workable tribute to Vangelis by Hans Zimmer, the plot, what there is of it, is an interesting and pretty satisfying extension of the original… and it has some nice appearances from original cast members. In keeping with the original, it’s indulgently slow-paced – even I felt it could have shaved off 15-25 minutes pretty easily – but I didn’t actually feel impatient. Equally in keeping with the Hollywood of 3 decades ago (and now), it has some fairly icky sexual politics, and restricts its POC characters to hackneyed small-time-crim roles (and a couple of other minor characters), which is a huge shame. It’s sumptuously beautiful in any case.

Forest Drive West – Persistence of Memory, Pt. 3 [Hidden Hawaii]
Sticking with drum’n’bass for a bit though, here’s a young artist with little info available on him. Forest Drive West may be based in Bristol, given he’s got a couple of releases on Livity Sound, giving him instant bass-techno cred. But last year he also dropped a great bit of jungle revivialism on Rupture, the Jungle Crack EP, and thus on the flipside of two fantastic dub-techno tracks, we have this piece of 5/4 drum’n’bass, really just switching up the tempo from from the dubby sounds on the A side, and adding some amen breaks.

Ziúr – Cipher [Objects Ltd/Planet µ]
Ziúr – Human Life Is Not A Commodity [Objects Ltd/Planet µ]
Ziúr – Bud Dallas [Objects Ltd]
Ziúr – Fractals [Objects Ltd/Planet µ]
Lara Rix-Martin, part of Planet µ boss Mike Paradinas, recently formed the Objects Ltd label to promote the work of female & non-gender-binary electronic producers, and has wasted no time in bringing some brilliant artists to greater prominence. Based in Berlin, Ziúr has released a number of pretty club-ready EPs, as well as running the Boo-Hoo club night that again focuses on non-cis-male artists. Her prior work is excellent (including a more straighforward dance-oriented EP on Deeform on Objects Ltd last year), but it’s wonderful to hear artists branch out in album form, and here were have glitchy-freaky ambient tracks like opener “Human Life Is Not A Commodity”, and many tracks in which the beats are so broken down that no dancefloor would tolerate them. There are also sampled riffs, intense hardstyle & footwork-influenced excursions, and even some emotive r’n’b slipping through. Top notch all the way.

Brainwaltzera – yamaha Hills [edit] [Film]
Brainwaltzera – 10_muddy_puddle Trot [Film]
Brainwaltzera – 0Swald trace [-/+2] [Analogical Force]
Brainwaltzera – Δlate Hither [ma8ema8mati7s a∫✂ nap version] [Film]
Here’s a mysterious European producer making pitch-perfect mid-’90s idm & “braindance”… Brainwaltzera was tipped by Aphex Twin on SoundCloud at some point last year and since then rumours have abounded about his identity, but if there’s one thing I’m sure of from listening to his stuff, it’s that it’s not Aphex. There are some lovely wobbly synth melodies redolent of Boards of Canada, and definitely some high class beat fuckery of the sort that Aphex, Squarepusher and µ-Ziq were wont to do back in the day, both high-speed drill’n’bass and head-noddy hip-hop beats. It’s melodic, electronic, and heaps of fun, although the production and/or mastering leaves things a little hollow sounding. In any case, for lovers of idm this is absolutely unmissable.

Herva – Smania [Planet µ]
Herva – Slam The Laptop [Delsin]
Herva – Bien [Planet µ]
I’ve been meaning to play this for a while, and this very electronic show is the perfect slot for it. African-Italian producer Herve Atsè Corti (I mis-spoke this as African-Spanish on the show, confused I think by the Spanish label releasing one of Brainwaltzera’s EPs above) brings an utterly bent take to dance music, whether house or broken beat genres, glitching up the sounds in ever-inventive ways. As well as two tracks from a new(ish) Planet µ EP, I played a fantastic bit of glitch-house with an infectious bassline from the 2014 album Instant Broadcast on Dutch label Delsin.

VVV x Holly – 09H1L7 [Hush Hush]
And finally, another EP I should’ve played months ago, out on Seattle label Hush Hush. Iranian-American producer VVV aka Shawhin Izaddost is often ambient in a vaporwavey fashion, often influenced by 2step & other genres; Miguel Oliveira aka Holly is a Portuguese trap producer. This collaboration is a stellar mix of slightly burnished rave influences, old and new. Highly recommended.

Listen again — ~198MB

Lovely, weird electronics from all over tonight…

LISTEN AGAIN for the pure joy of it. FBi provides delicious streaming on demand for everyone everywhere; podcast also available here.

Four Tet – LA Trance [self-released]
Four Tet – Scientists [self-released]
A new album from Kieran Hebden (frankly, pretty much a new tweet) is always big news these days, and the new Four Tet already has people blissing out around the world. I know I’m never going to get another Rounds (one of the most influential albums on the beginnings of this very show), and this one really is absolutely lovely.
One of the interesting things about the album is hearing the ’90s electronica, ambient and rave influences. Particularly on the track “Scientists” I have intense feelings of déjà vu whenever I listen to it – I know it’s not ripped from someone else, but that bassline, and the way it interacts with the breakbeats and delicate synth pads has strong feelings of something (or some things) I know very well. A couple of suggestions appear below…

Autechre – Pule [Warp]
The way the bassline in “Scientists” pushes out a harmonic an octave-and-a-fifth above was one of those things that generated very strong feelings for me. Eventually I found that sound – a percussive attack but a very pure sound with that same overtone – in this beautiful Autechre track from 20 years ago. In this case, there’s no hip-hop beat going along with it, although there are floaty synth pads.

µ-Ziq – Brace Yourself Jason [Planet µ]
While the Planet µ boss is best known nowadays for having his finger on the pulse of underground dance music, from dubstep to footwork, he’s one of the biggest influences on bedroom electronica, a peer of Autechre, Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert et al. From the same year as the Autechre above (1997 was an amazing year, trust me), this track again sounds nothing like “Scientists”, at least superficially, but it has a bouncing bassline, skittering hi-hats and those characteristic mournful synth pads.

Ciptagelar – Sera Ponggokan (Gail Priest Industrialisation) [hitek lotek]
Ciptagelar – Jasmine Guffond‘s Ciptagelar Remixture [hitek lotek]
Sydney experimental musician, advanced mathematician and event creator Dan MacKinlay has for some time been travelling to remote locations in Asia creating collaborative installations and dance parties… He’s now bringing it to another level with this collaboration with the people of a tiny kingdom in West Java called Ciptagelar. The link there goes to a YouTube video which is part documentary and part video album, and their music has now been remixed by a cadre of Sydney experimental electronic musicians. An excellent cross-cultural project.

dälek – Nothing Stays Permanent [Ipecac]
dälek – The Song Of Immigrants [Ipecac]
It was so great last year to discover that pioneering noise-hop troupe dälek had re-formed. It turns out that producer Oktopus aka Alap Momin is no longer involved, but with longtime collaborator Destructo Swarmbots stepping in, there’s a definite continuity in sound as much as with the political, conscious rapping of Will Brooks. Last year’s album came out on the very progressive Canadian metal label Profound Lore, but Endangered Philosophies finds them back on Mike Patton’s Ipecac label.

Ben Frost – Entropy In Blue [Mute/Bedroom Community]
Ben Frost – Minesweeper II [The Orchard]
Ben Frost – Eurydice’s Heel [Mute/Bedroom Community]
Longterm Iceland resident Ben Frost (we’ll still call him an Aussie though for the purposes of this broadcast) has not one but two albums out this week – fairly coincidentally mind you. His new album proper, his first straight studio album since 2014, is The Centre Cannot Hold, clearly somewhat influence by the political events of the last year or two, and was recorded with the legendary Steve Albini, although I’m not sure how we can hear that among the windswept synths, surging distortion & bass. It’s pretty conceptual – you can hear musical themes wandering through the different tracks, so it holds together nicely as a single work. The other album is a soundtrack to a teen slasher flick (set in the ’90s no less) called Super Dark Times, and it’s suitably dark, with some of the growliness dialled back – but it does raise the question of where we can hear the Albini influence on the new studio album.

Antwood – The New Industry [Planet µ]
Tristan Douglas – Way of the Coral [Tristan Douglas Bandcamp]
Tristan Douglas – Mystic Olympics [Tristan Douglas Bandcamp]
Margaret Antwood – Power Confessions [B.YRSLF DIVISION]
Antwood – Uncanny Valley [Planet µ]
Tristan Douglas – Replicon [Tristan Douglas Bandcamp]
Antwood – Human [Planet µ]
British Columbia-resident microbiologist Tristan Douglas came to the music world’s attention with a couple of footwork/grime/techno releases as Margaret Antwood a couple of years ago – in particular he came to the attention of the aforementioned Mike Paradinas of the Planet µ label. Thankfully he dropped the “Margaret” from his name, losing both the pad pun and the inadvisable gender appropriation, and he’s released two brilliant albums of genre-mashing experimental electronica for the label, exploring the topics of artificial intelligence and computer consciousness (on last year’s Virtuous.scr) and our own relationship with technology and ubiquitous communication/advertising (on the recent Sponsored Content). It’s fair to say that these themes ooze into each other across both these albums and also the more recent album on his Bandcamp. So the muffled computer voice on “Uncanny Valley” begins to sing on “Replicon” from a recent Bandcamp release (although admittedly Bandcamp declares it to be released on Janary 1, 2037, so who knows?), and on “Human” from his new album a malfunctioning cyborg sings a pop song. Beautifully disturbing stuff.

STILL – Bubbling Ambessa [Afrikan Messiah Riddim] [PAN]
STILL – Rough Rider [PAN]
STILL – Nazenèt [Wasp Riddim] [PAN]
The previous music of Simone Trabucchi (boss of Italian noise/experimental label Hundebiss), mostly released as Dracula Lewis, was a challenging melding of folk, rock and noise, but for his new album on PAN he’s giving us his idiosyncratic take on dancehall, very digital, working with a bunch of fantastic Afro-Italian vocalists (my research suggests they are Devon Miles, Keidino, Taiywo, Freweini, Elinor and Germay – they are not credited on the digital release or press release). In any case, it’s an exciting mélange of sounds, minimalist and focused. Highly recommended.

Listen again — ~194MB

Beautiful drones, industrial beats, glitchy bliss…

LISTEN AGAIN because you – like we – love music. And music loves you. FBi has the stream on demand love, and you can podcast here too.

Helena Espvall – För Leucothea [Tandem Tapes]
It’s wonderful to have some new solo works from Swedish-American cellist & multi-instrumentalist Helena Espvall, known for playing with psych folk band Espers, but for her many many collaborative works (and scattered solo material) she tends to be found working in the noise/drone/improv spectrum… And so it is with the tracks on this split cassette, absolutely stunning sound works made with cello and guitar (I believe).

Gabriel Saloman – What Belongs To the Line [Shelter Press]
Gabriel Saloman – What Belongs To Love [Shelter Press]
GMS aka Gabriel Saloman was one half of the beloved noise band Yellow Swans. This is from the third in a series of EPs entitled Movement Building, also now collected as a 2CD album by Shelter Press (and available separately as a 12?), all somewhat based around rhythmic drive, from subconscious bass downbeats to all-out percussive battering. Around this he weaves a beautiful spectrum of drones and twangs. Absolutely stunning.

The Seaport & The Airport – Two Trick Pony [Perfect Hair]
A New Zealander now living in Sydney, Oscar Wuts shows his junglist roots on this perfectly composed piece of breakbeat nostalgia. So glad people are making these sounds now – and locally! There’s a second album coming from The Seaport & The Airport, with breakbeats fast & slow, and you can still find his previous one if you like the sounds.

AnD – Resisting Authority [Electric Deluxe]
AnD – Narcissism [Electric Deluxe]
Two slabs of ultra-heavy noise’n’beats from UK duo AnD, first segueing out of The Seaport & The Airport with drum’n’bass nihilism, then something at a more dubstep tempo. There’s techno & various other sounds on this album, but it’s all wrapped up in swathes of noise and it’s all overdriven to the max. As the album title Social Decay suggests, it’s the sound of our industrial cyberpunk present.

JASSS – To Eat With Dirty Hands [iDEAL Recordings]
JASSS – Every Single Fish In The Sea [iDEAL Recordings]
Silvia Jiménez Alvarez is a ridiculously talented young artist working at the crossover between sound-art, industrial and techno. The music on her debut album Weightless flits easily between the dancefloor and then mindwarp, mostly aiming to freak you out wherever it finds you. Overlapping spoken Spanish words are subsumed by thudding bass and disquieting synths. Equally the disturbing English spoken words in our second take from the album tonight, with echoing processed sound – but it builds into a Teutonic industrial banger with strident chords and a pulsating bassline. Hugely impressive debut.

Köhn – Brügge [(K-RAA-K)³]
Köhn – Karohte [(K-RAA-K)³]
Köhn – öhnöch [(K-RAA-K)³]
de Portables – Telephone [(K-RAA-K)³]
Köhn – wabbit regghae [(K-RAA-K)³]
Köhn – remembering the flash back [Western Vinyl]
Köhn en de Portables – 120 km/µ ? 120bpm [(K-RAA-K)³]
Köhn – Goodbye, Pluto [(K-RAA-K)³]
Köhn – Wisch [(K-RAA-K)³]
And so we arrive at the big feature for tonight – the word of Jürgen de Blonde, mostly known as Köhn. In Belgium & Europe he is perhaps equally known for being part of the long-lived oft-pranksterish postrock/indie rock band de Portables, from whom we hear a couple of cuts as well tonight (in particular the first one has a solid The For Carnation feel, maybe crossed with The Notwist).
He’s got a new album out on the Flemish (north Belgian) label (K-RAA-K)³, an influential experimental label that he’s been associated with for over 20 years. For mine, his early albums are just as much classic documents of glitch and electronic experimentalism as the early albums of Fennesz, Farmers Manual et al (coming only a few years after the very early Mego releases) – in fact, I was first introduced to his music via the beloved Aussie glitch/drone producer pimmon (also known as beloved Aussie radio & now podcast hero Paul Gough), and I faithfully collected his albums back in the day. Somewhere in the last 10 years or so he shifted mostly to kosmische drones and pulses, but this new album ties all his strands back together nicely, looping back on the earlier glitches and no-input sonic processing along with krautrocky and postrocky excursions.

Listen again — ~204MB

Quite a show tonight, full of mostly Australian music! Except when it’s not. Mostly electronic music, except the bits which aren’t.

LISTEN AGAIN and then buy all the good shit, m’kay? Stream on demand via FBi, podcast here.

Pop Will Eat Itself – Harry Dean Stanton [RCA/Cherry Red Records]
I guess this is partially a silly excuse to play one of my favourite bands of the deep (’90s) past, but anyway the Poppies defined a particular mixture of grease-punk riffs and sampling culture (hip-hop and techno) from the last ’80s into the mid ’90s. I have no idea what this song (written by co-frontman and now much-awarded soundtrack composer Clint Mansell) has to do with Harry Dean Stanton, but the beloved actor whose name graces this track passed away this week. It’s hard to believe he was 91 years old, and hard also to believe that this track is a quarter of a century old itself!

common holly – if after all [Solitaire Recordings]
common holly – the desert [Solitaire Recordings]
Although Solitaire Recordings are based in Melbourne (we’ve heard quite a bit of indietronic loveliness from the label on this show), new signing common holly aka Brigitte Naggar is based in Montréal. It’s primarily delicate indiefolk, but there’s an exploratory nature to the recordings, with clattery sampled percussion and other sounds across a number of tracks, which makes it perfect for this show – even if the songs weren’t as delightful as they very much are.

Danielle de Picciotto & Werkstatt – Desert Fruit (Perera Elsewhere Remix) [Monika Enterprise]
AGF & Werkstatt – Ninjaness [Monika Enterprise]
Lucrecia Dalt & Werkstatt – Blindholes (Borusiade Remix) [Monika Enterprise]
Earlier this year Gudrun Gut’s label Monika convened a Werkstatt (German for workshop) in a country property outside of Berlin with a generations-crossing group of female electronic producers from around the world. A double LP and CD set was released a few months ago with a substantial array of collaborative works, and now what appears to be the first in a set of remix EPs has been released (this one subtitled “Berlin / Los Angeles”). Not all of the remix artists featured are female, but the two I’ve selected tonight do also happen to be. First up, the boundary-pushing Perera Elsewhere from the UK radically reworks one of the highlights from the compilation from Berlin-based American multimedia artist Danielle de Picciotto (for the last 5 years a member of postpunk legends Crime & the City Solutiom), and later Miruna Boruzescu aka Romanian producer Borusiade turns in a dark techno take on Lucrecia Dalt‘s short contribution. In between, one of the original contributions, choppy electronica from the one and only AGF.

Ducks! – Into The Sea (feat. Nate Goldentone) [Ducks! Bandcamp]
Ducks! – Dear You [Ducks! Bandcamp]
Aussies Lani Bagley and Craig Schuftan are, like our previous project, based in Berlin. Their Ducks! project is joyfully hard to pigeonhole, with a funky psychedelic, electronic pop background but just as easily able to fall into head-nodding instrumental territory. Fun stuff.

palence – scarp [The Playground]
London-based electronic artist Savanh Phaophanit aka palence claims influence in equal amounts from postrock & slowcore artists like Low, and idm & electronic artists like Aphex Twin. Whatever the provenance, palence’s music here is beautifully melodic alongside the skittering trap hi-hats. An artist to investigate.

Kcin – ISOL [Hospital Hill/Kcin Bandcamp]
Acharné – Innocence and Suburbia (Kcin Remix) [Seppüku]
Kcin – New England [Hospital Hill/Kcin Bandcamp]
Sydney’s Nicholas Meredith has been making music for a decade or so, trained as a jazz drummer, but his Kcin project finds him in deliciously dark electronic vein, with an industrial weight to the bass and beats, synth pads verging into distortion, plenty of atmosphere and also controlled chaos. Really super great anyway. In the middle there we heard Nick’s remix of another Aussie long resident in Berlin (not any more mind you!), Deepchild, under his lovely ambient electronica alias Acharné.

phile – Found in Blood [Deep Seeded Records]
We heard Sydney duo of phile, producers Hannah Lockwood and Gareth Psaltis, a few weeks ago on this show. Their debut self-titled EP came out on Deep Seeded Records, and it’s a really interesting mix of industrial techno and some hardcore punk/metal influences – and hear that postpunk bassline in this track!

ptwiggs – Hypno Game [ptwiggs Bandcamp]
Another Sydney artist, Phoebe Twigg’s debut vinyl EP is also coming out on Deep Seeded Records soon (click link for pre-orders) but in the meantime here’s a frenetic drum’n’bass-influenced track from earlier this year.

IljusWifmo – Dog Fight [IljusWifmo Bandcamp]
IljusWifmo – Frenetic [Clubwerks]
I’ve been awaiting some new material from Sydney duo IljusWifmo since I heard their track “Scatter” on a TEEF compilation last year. Expert bass-heavy beats for progressive dancefloors.

F ingers – You’re Confused [Blackest Ever Black]
F ingers – Escaping Into The Bushes [Blackest Ever Black]
F ingers – Awkwardly Blissing Out [Blackest Ever Black]
Melbourne trio F ingers have released their second album now on on-point London label Blackest Ever Black. It follows on from a highly successful solo debut from Carla dal Forno, but it’s great to hear her teaming up again with Bum Creek alumni Sam Karmel and Tarquin Manek (the latter of whom has released some bizarre, freewheeling solo stuff himself on the label). Don’t bother trying to pin it down – the vocals are mixed low if they’re there, tracks seem formless and random, the playing seems inept, except… not. It’s not random, and it’s strangely beguiling, even while it’s also strangely spooky. Whatever, these three know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it very, very well.

Listen again — ~204MB