It’s FBi’s supporter drive all this week, so head along to fbiradio.com and sign up for a small monthly fee to help run this station! I have a selection of tunes running from jungle breaks and experimental electronics through granular and additive synthesis to folk and experimental classical of a sort…
LISTEN AGAIN because that’s what FBi’s about. Stream it on demand or podcast it over mailhere.
Djrum – Tournesol [R&S Records/Bandcamp]
Insane gear in pure Djrum style, techno with drips of amen breaks until the last third of the track where it just effortlessly slips into junglist breakage and rolling bassline – plus acid freakout synths. Bit of everything, all working perfectly.
Laptop Destroyer – Tell Dem [ZZAAPP]
Kris Keogh has recently been putting out delightful processed harp recordings under his own name, and has also released weird mixed-up indie/indietronica, but for years he was producing very odd idm and electronica as Blastcorp. He’s now doing electronic music under Laptop Destroyer, and created this fun ragga jungle track on a Pocket Operator PO-33 toy sampler. It’s super cool and also available on a lathe-cut 7″ made in Newcastle, with an equally cool track on the flipside.
GOOOOOSE – Plasma Sunrise [SVBKVLT]
GOOOOOSE – Lab White [SVBKVLT]
I was lucky enough to get to see Shanghai electronic artist GOOOOOSE at Soft Centre yesterday, and I’m kicking myself that I hadn’t already gotten hold of this excellent album on Chinese electronic label SVBKVLT. He and his partner 33, who played a great techno set later in the day, are alumni of the Chinese electro-rock band Duck Fight Goose. The mashed jungle breaks, reconfigured in new ways on a few tracks here are really exciting, but the gentle jazzy piano chords and the more ambient passages are great too. As a bonus the album finishes with a few remixes, including the one & only Iranian electronic master Sote (interviewed last week on the show), who did a superb hardcore set at Soft Centre too.
Hyde – Nine Ways To Imitate A Monsoon [Nice Music]
Yunzero – Orchard 1 [.jpeg Artefacts]
Recently I featured some of Jim Sellars’ music as Yunzero, released by the great little Melbourne label .jpeg Artefacts. Very warped electronica, with deep basslines, fidgety beats, and woozy ambient passages, it’s music for our time.
Proc Fiskal – Pico [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Edinburgh’s Joe Powers has been releasing grime/bass/drum’n’bass/idm-influenced productions for a little while now, always coming at a strange tangent from what you’d expect of any specific genre. His new EP is a genre-defying collection of tunes made for the club he ran for a little while called Shleekit Doss, and contains this bouncy number which juggles jungle beats in a lovely melodic fashion.
Carl Stone – Han Yan [Unseen Worlds]
Nice thing about ordering physical music online is that sometimes labels send it early – so despite coming from the US, I’ve got both the new Carl Stone album and the preceding EP on CD already! Nevertheless the track I’m playing is already available if you order it from Bandcamp… Strangely starting as if it’s a bit of jungle, with sped up drums, but it’s really Stone’s longstanding technique of granular synthesis, chopping up a sample or set of related samples into small fragments and shuffling through them, often rhythmically, allowing strange beats and rearranged melodies to surface. He’s been at this for decades – performing with a “home computer” on stage in the 1980s. He’s an absolute master, and these two releases are superb.
Isomov – Origin, Emergence and The One [DECISIONS]
Isomov – Ensemble [DECISIONS]
New York musician and mathematician Isomov names themself after science fiction author Isaac Asimov, with an EP here on Aussie electronic label DECISIONS. It’s a kind of futuristic epic of highly evolved artificial intelligences, with sampled vocals from Kathryn LeBlanc on a couple of tracks adding a kind of soundtrack-like classical aspect to the proceedings. In truly science-fictional form, the album is also available as a one-of-a-kind WiFi-enabled holographic sculpture…
Floating Spectrum – The early green outburst [Temporary Residence/Bandcamp]
Floating Spectrum – Inner island [Temporary Residence/Bandcamp]
Taiwan-born artist Mei-Fang Liau, now based in Berlin, is Floating Spectrum. Her debut album comes out on the legendary Temporary Residence label this coming week, and explores the cycles of nature through a suite of homemade music software alongside samples of household objects. You can actually download the fractal-inspired synthesiser Polyphylla for yourself. It’s beautiful and sometimes unsettling ambient music, a really great achievement for a debut release.
Sebastian Field – Unravel (Shoeb Ahmad Remix) [Provenance/Bandcamp]
Following his lovely ambient-indie album Picture Stone, Canberra’s Sebastian Field now releases a short album of remixes from some great Australian artists – many of them with roots in Canberra. Shoeb Ahmad (who also appeared at Soft Centre this weekend) is a central player in Canberra’s experimental music scene, and has previously released Field on her hellosQuare label. Here she takes Field’s Björk cover and chops it into tiny pieces, elongating some syllables while creating pulsating rhythms from others. Other contributions from Kris Keogh (featured earlier), Tilman Robinson, Reuben Ingall, Aphir and Arrom are all well worth checking out.
The Crooked Fiddle Band – Twilight to Darkness (excerpt) [Crooked Fiddle Bandcamp]
Sydney act The Crooked Fiddle Band are an acoustic steamroller of a group… A folk band with a great love of gypsy and klezmer styles, but frequently letting fly with riffage befitting of a metal band, with epic prog-metal-like tracks (we heard about half of one tonight), also capable of writing incredibly catchy songs. Their new album Another Subtle Atom Bomb is a howl of anger and fear and hope at the climate catastrophe we find ourselves in. It’s been a long wait but it’s a hugely worthy successor to their last epic, Moving Pieces of the Sea.
Listen again — ~202MB