Utility Fog

It’s been a hell week for many of us. This isn’t the place to talk about it really, but let’s just acknowledge the pain that so many are feeling, and get on with doing good where we can.

LISTEN AGAIN if you have the mental wherewithall – it’s good for your soul. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Mary Ocher – Love Is Not A Place (feat Your Government) [Underground Institute/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based Russian-Jewish musician Mary Ocher incorporates activism into her art, to the extent that her forthcoming album Approaching Singularity: Music for the End of Time comes with a substantial (and great) essay about politics, philosophy and art (if I dare sum it up with such broad strokes). She writes movingly about how she holds two passports – Russian and Israeli – both of which she is ashamed of, as Russia invades Ukraine and Israel pummels Gaza to dust. Of course, nothing’s simple, but the simple fact that nothing justifies killing civilians anywhere, much less children, should hardly be controversial. As it happens I’m not playing her latest single, “Zone (A Tale of a Mourning Mother)”, which mourns children killed in war, because I love this track so much. “Love Is Not A Place”, featuring her old band Your Government, was released earlier in 2023 as a fundraiser for Kyiv charity repair.together, and is a bit of an experimental electronic pop anthem.

Olivia Louvel – We Are One Land [Cat Werk Imprint]
Born in France but long based in Britain, Olivia Louvel has made conceptual art-pop since the mid-’00s, but I feel like her music has erred more on the sound-art side for some time. Her latest project doggerLANDscape, is based around Doggerland, the evocatively-named landmass that once connected Britain to continental Europe before the last Ice Age. It’s a powerful concept in the age of Brexit, clearly expressed in the first track to be released, “We Are One Land”. There is a video work accompanying this, documenting Louvel’s location-specific research and comprising this track and one more. The imagery of coastlines and occasional ghostly human figures is beautifully evocative, but the audio works beautifully by itself too – narrative spoken word, treated vocals, floating drones. I look forward to hearing more.

Jay Glass Dubs – Goodbye Forbidden Hell (feat. Richard Youngs) [Jay Glass Dubs Bandcamp]
Jay Glass Dubs – Wild Terrier (feat. Christina Vantzou) [Jay Glass Dubs Bandcamp]
I usually think of the music of Dimitris Papadatos aka Jay Glass Dubs as dub techno and minimal dub, but that’s only a slice of what he does. A great entry-point is his new album You Would Love Me Now, which ventures into trip-hop via the dub roots that always lay in the genre. But Jay Glass Dubs has also always been an avant-garde project, so there are some pretty interesting guests here. Richard Youngs‘ verse, entering in the last 3rd of “Goodbye Forbidden Hell”, is a real beauty, while I’m guessing sound-artist and composer Christina Vantzou is heard speaking in “Wild Terrier”, but perhaps she also contributed some of the sounds?

Vanishing Twin – Lotus Eater [Fire Records/Bandcamp]
Vanishing Twin – Afternoon X [Fire Records/Bandcamp]
Dub plays a part in the sound of Vanishing Twin too, alongside krautrock and Broadcast-style sunny experimental pop. The band began as a five-piece, but have whittled themselves down to three for this album, with Brussels-born Cathy Lucas joined by the brilliant drummer/percussionist Valentina Magaletti, and Susumu Mukai aka Zongamin on bass. That said, the bandmembers aren’t credited to specific roles, with synths and samples throughout (and both former members also appear as guests). Vanishing Twin’s music does that Broadcast/Stereolab thing of sounding vintage while employing contemporary technology – and like both those bands, the songs are lovely and the grooves strong.

Pynuka – Tá N’agua [Translation Loss Records/Bandcamp]
If you didn’t know, you’d be unlikely to pick up that Justin K Broadrick is one third of Pynuka. Well, that’s not entirely true; once you know, there are distinct Jesu vibes to some of the songs (e.g. “Shampoo”). It’s eclectic stuff, as with most of the music Christian McKenna‘s been involved with for some time. His Translation Loss Records still focuses mostly on metal, but there’s also stuff like his hip-hop project C Trip A with Anthony Adams, and now Pynuka, where McKenna and Broadrick join Anda Szilagyi in an eclectic selection of electronic pop. Szilagyi’s background is in soul, funk and Brazillian music – she’s played trumpet with the likes of Antibalas and Sharon Jones – but Pynuka ends up sounding different from any of its constituent artists, not grindcore or metal or industrial, not jazz or funk, but something nonetheless musically rich and also catchy. Unexpected!

Arthur Clees – Stay [Macro/Bandcamp]
Arthur Clees – I’ll Hold You [Macro/Bandcamp]
Stefan Goldmann‘s take on techno has grown steadily stranger over the years, as well as branching out into dark ambient and other weirdnesses – but with Macro, the label he founded with DJ Finn Johannsen, techno is also only one part of the proceedings. So here we have Luxembourg vibraphonist, drummer, pianist, and vocalist Arthur Clees with a solo album of great restraint. If I told you it was a cross between Dntel’s indietronica circa Life Is Full Of Possibilities, Herbert’s always jazz-inflected glitch-pop, and James Blake’s soulful song-shadows, you might get the idea? I think it lives up to those comparisons too. These are fragmented song-shapes, with cut-up voice and instruments, beats that drop in halfway through songs, and an air of wistfulness. It’s quite beautiful.

Popular Music – Bad Actors [Popular Music Bandcamp]
OK so I’ve played two singles from Popular Music‘s new album Minor Works of Popular Music, and now it’s finally out. I love these works – self-referential and determinedly pop-culture-referential (and only sometimes minor) as they are. They’re cabaret songs with the emo edge that Zac Pennington brought to Parenthetical Girls, orchestrated by Popular Music’s other half Prudence Rees-Lee with performances from OpensoundOrchestra, Jherek Bischoff, Deerhoof‘s Greg Saunier and more… And yet, even at their most dramatic, these songs are redolent of Leonard Cohen’s Casio keyboard era – no shade, that’s high praise! The duo moved from LA to Rees-Lee’s hometown of Melbourne, where they’ll be launching the album at Carlton’s John Curtin Hotel on October 26th. Would love to see them come up to Sydney, but where? Ah, Sydney…

Glasser – Vine [One Little Independent/Bandcamp]
Ten years after her last album, Cameron Mesirow has brought Glasser back with crux, as experimental and pop as ever. It’s no surprise it’s released on One Little Independent, as it has quite a Björk feel at times – although it also reminds me of Braids or Chairlift too. Her singing’s very strong here, and the pop hooks are decorated with acoustic instruments as well as synths, and IDM beats that clatter and tumble. If this is pop music, sign me up.

Toumba – Daboor [Toumba Bandcamp]
The UK-based Medical Aid for Palestinians is an organisation I’ve seen reliably mentioned for helping Palestinians in Gaza. Jordanian producer Toumba makes beats that fit with UK bass and club forms, but with a lot of input from Levantine music – rhythms and scales and instrumentation. He’s released For Palestine, a collection of dubs and unreleased material, to raise funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians, and the tunes are well up to the standards of his official releases.

Pugilist & Tamen – Extract [RuptureLDN]
Perfect liquid junglism from Pugilist & Tamen, from NZ & UK respectively but now based in Naarm/Melbourne. Pugilist’s roots in dubstep inform the bass weight here, and footwork and techno bubble under the chattering rhythms.

Aroma Nice – Made Your Bed [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Czech label YUKU is really at the forefront of mutated bass/jungle/IDM/techno sounds, from all round the world. Aroma Nice, from the north-west of England, brings some lovely nostalgic jungle/d’n’b with undertones of jazzy downtempo and IDM circa mid-1990s.

Architectural – Clothed In Light [R&S Records/Bandcamp]
Spain’s Architectural is not a name you’d usually associate with jungle or breakcore, with a background in beautifully immersive minimal techno, but for his second EP on R&S Records the 4/4 beats are spattered with amen breaks in an almost breakcore fashion.

alva noto – HYbr:ID Ectopia Field 1 [Noton]
For minimal electronics, we might as well go to the king himself, alva noto, whose HYbr:ID Vol.2 teases out intricate spikes of sound with mirrorshade-smooth pads hovering over distilled dub bassweight. A masterclass in how to do the purest of pure digital electronica.

Ümlaut – The great twin leitmotifs [esc.rec/Bandcamp]
Ümlaut – This immense motionless pause [esc.rec/Bandcamp]
The work of Jeff Düngfelder aka Ümlaut also uses tiny spikes of digital sound, but melds them with cleverly-edited field recordings to build impressionist sound-paintings. On “This immense motionless pause” the tiny sounds sweep up and down in pitch like some alien natural phenomenon. Like a nature documentary soundtrack for an alternate reality, this music contains all the busyness and peace of life going about its business.

Kamran Sadeghi – Day One Part Two [LINE/Bandcamp]
But lo, we still have more jittery shards of sound! Here we hear Kamran Sadeghi working with Nam June Paik’s Wobbulator – which is not, in fact, a wobbulator, but rather a cathode ray tube setup to paint beautiful visualisations from audio inputs. Sadeghi used two vintage synths to create the sounds to feed into the CRT Wobbulator: a Doepfer A-100 modular system, and a Korg MS-20. Sadeghi’s experiments, recorded over 5 days, use a deliberately constrained sound palette, creating a kind of primitive version of alva noto’s clicks’n’pads. It’s raster-noton if performed by a malfunctioning fridge. It’s great.

Nickolas Mohanna – Mixed Numbers [Run/Off Editions/Bandcamp]
Nickolas Mohanna – Light Sleeper [Run/Off Editions/Bandcamp]
I was introduced to the work of NY-based composer Nickolas Mohanna through two labels of Sydney’s Andrew Khedoori. A couple of albums came out on Preservation, and more recently the 22-minute track Throwing the Chain came out on Longform Editions. Mohanna’s new album Double Pendulum extends outward from a graphic score Mohanna created as part of his interdisciplinary artistic practice, and a selection of quite different pieces merge into and out of each other through the album’s 5 tracks and 32 minutes. There are deconstructed orchestral strings, flittering cymbals and krautrock guitars, unidentifiable percussion. It feels like Mohanna has converged on a similar space to some of Oren Ambarchi’s recent work, where very arcane experimental music is coalesced into a highly digestible form of psych-rock. Some of the joy of the album comes from the slow segues, as one texture, genre, composition melds into another. New perspectives are found in the sounds we’ve just been listening to, and those we’re about to find emerging out of the last. A highly rewarding listen in full.

Islaja – Featherless [Other Power]
Islaja – Urvogel [Other Power]
Having concentrated more on songforms for her last couple of albums, Finnish musician Merja Kokkonen aka Islaja has now created a stunning work of composition and sound-art. Angel Tape, released by new Helsinki label Other Power, stems from the vibrant imaginings of childhood experiences: in this case, listening to a much-redubbed recording of church music that her mother played her, which she thought of as the “angel tape”. So Islaja, whose early connection with the legendary Finnish label Fonal has already linked her to dusty, distorted rememberings of folk-music-that-never-was, here uses voice, acoustic instruments and electronics to (re-)imagine a music of an unknowable angel-world, beautiful but slightly disquieting, not quite of this reality. It is, to continue the religious iconography, quite a revelation.

Amby Downs – Ngunmal (excerpt) [Room40/Bandcamp]
Tahlia Palmer is a Murri/European artist who works in multiple media, and the two substantial works on her upcoming Room40 album Ngunmal exist as filmworks that will be downloadable with the purchase of the album. Purely as audio documents, they are extraordinarily evocative and painterly, juxtaposing and blending visceral sounds that seem to come from industrial machinery, people or animals breathing, the amplified movement of a fence recorded by Room40’s Lawrence English, and the ponderous respiration of the land itself. Unlike some other adapted field recordings, Amby Downs’ pieces don’t capitulate to conventional expectations of musical composition, keeping the sound sources’ complex tonal profiles. It’s no wonder Palmer credits herself as “sounds collected and put together by”. But if these works resist being labelled “music”, they’re nevertheless products of great artistry.

Johannes Malfatti – And At That Moment [LINE/Bandcamp]
Johannes Malfatti – Someone Pointed [LINE/Bandcamp]
The second album released on Richard Chartier‘s LINE Imprint this week (next to the aforementioned Kamran Sadeghi) is an album of subtle, unassuming etudes for church organs from Johannes Malfatti. A composer, multi-instrumentalist and experimental musician, Malfatti has been part of Olivier Alary‘s varying project Ensemble, which started as glitchy IDM, and captivated me with chanson-postrock on Excerpts back in 2011. More significantly, Alary & Malfatti released the exquisite u,i in 2020, an album that captures the yearning of distance with buried vocals, string arrangements and smudged electronics. Somehow that aesthetic is reproduced in this collection of organ works, In the glow of distant fires, recorded as part of Malfatti’s creation of a soundtrack to a film about the Berlin churches where they’re housed, churches created in the ’50s and ’60s as memorials to the horrors of war and the Holocaust. In this background, Malfatti coaxes from these organs a music of whispers, minor gestures, exhalations that capture the idiosyncracies of the instruments in question. Alongside Rishin Singh & Martin Sturm’s mewl infans these pieces show the expressive range of these strange mechanical instruments.

Claire Deak – In Defiance of Time [Lost Tribe Sound/Bandcamp]
Melbourne composer Claire Deak tends to operate in the background, whether writing arrangements for friends’ bands, or composing for film, TV and stage. In 2020, however, we were treated to a wonderful album, the old capital, that Claire created with her partner Tony Dupé, himself a producer building incredible arrangements and treatments for indie and postrock musicians. That album was picked up by Ryan Keane at Lost Tribe Sound, and their connection has blossomed further with, finally, some solo work from Claire Deak. Sotto Voce is a solo album that emerged from Deak’s investigation of two female baroque composers, Francesca Caccini (1587-c.1645) and Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677). So many female composers have been erased or buried, so Deak has gathered what traces remain into diaphenous scores, like an acoustic, classical version of vaporwave’s nostalgic vision of 1980s media. Deak plays a large selection of instruments and is joined by Tony Dupé on various stringed instruments, as well as three other musicians, who perform compositions that blend and smudge, as if a sheaf of musical scores was dropped in the rain. These performances are then further treated, soft drones added, and in the case of tonight’s choice, snippets of tape are looped and embedded in reverb. “Sotto voce”, an instruction typically for playing as soft as possible, literally means “under the breath”, and these touching tributes to women’s work from bygone eras are whispered to us by a woman more used to being behind the scenes.

Listen again — ~200MB

Heartrending songs from around the world, glitchy processed traditional instruments, breakcore, and more tonight!

LISTEN AGAIN, even if you missed it the first time around. Stream on demand via FBi, or podcast from here.

Sufjan Stevens – Goodbye Evergreen [Asthmatic Kitty/Bandcamp]
It was possible, when one first heard Sufjan Stevens‘s new album Javelin, to think it was a touching album about a break-up – although Sufjan’s lyrics have always been open to interpretation. But by the time we reached the weekend in Australia, Sufjan had posted his heartbreaking dedication of the album to his long-term partner Evans Richardson, who tragically passed away in April at only 43 (mourned by Nico Muhly at the time). For Sufjan to lose his life partner the same year as coming down with Guillain-Barré syndrome is doubly devastating. And for him to reveal the relationship (widely known but kept remarkably, respectfully quiet by all those in their circle) in this way is a humbling act for us, his fans, to whom he owed nothing about his personal life. It’s a beautiful gut-punch of an album.

June McDoom – Emerald River Dance [Temporary Residence Ltd/Bandcamp]
Last year Temporary Residence Ltd did us the wonderful service of bringing to light the music of Jamaican-American singer-songwriter June McDoom, who brings her love of classic folk together with her love of reggae and soul, and the particular sound produced by particular analogue equipment. And yes, the sound of June McDoom’s songs is classic, warm and welcoming – but her songwriting, performance and arrangements are just as special. Her second EP With Strings has just been announced, with the first track being a cover of cult singer-songwriter Judee Sill. Sill found minor success in her lifetime, but is one of those musicians who is much celebrated among later generations of musicians (she died in 1979 after long struggles with addiction). The 2009 compilation Crayon Angel featured a raft of cover versions, including gorgeous interpretations by Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy) and Daniel Rossen. With her version of “Emerald River Dance” (the original of which, like the Rossen-covered “Waterfall”, only exists in demo form) she easily matches those old favourites of mine, with gorgeous strings and harp accompanying McDoom’s fingerpicked guitar and soft vocals.

Honeydrip – System feat. Shanique Marie [Banoffee Pies/Bandcamp]
Psychotropical is the new album from Bajan-Canadian DJ & producer Honeydrip aka Tianan McLaughlan. McLaughlan is a music promoter as well as DJ, and looks to her Caribbean roots here, dub and dancehall-infused bass music featuring reggae artist King Shadrock on a few tracks, and Equinoxx member Shanique Marie on the excellent “System”.

Iury Lech – Here Comes Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes [Muscut/Bandcamp/Mida/Bandcamp]
Maarja Nuut – Flamingo Pop [Muscut/Bandcamp/Mida/Bandcamp]
Ukrainian label Muscut and Estonian label Mida have teamed up to release new compilation Volia x Rahu, with one side only Ukrainian artists, and the other almost all Estonian. The label profits from the compilation go to Liviyj Bereh, an organising helping Ukrainians affected by the war. Ukrainian electronic producer Iury Lech contributes a minimalist head-nodder named “Here Comes Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes” – the Latin means “war of all against all”. And from Estonia, I played the wonderful Maarja Nuut, eschewing her violin and voice in favour of modular synths, in keeping with her last album, Hinged.

Bisweed – Boa (feat. Joshua Stephenz) [Bisweed Bandcamp]
And next we segue right into more Estonian electronic music, with a new track from dubstep producer Bisweed, featuring a nimble bassline from fellow Estonian Joshua Stephenz.

exmantera – MACHINE [PAYNOMINDTOUS/Bandcamp]
exmantera – EXPOS [PAYNOMINDTOUS/Bandcamp]
From the Finnish underground comes exmantera with their new album LETHALITY released on the excellent Turin label PAYNOMINDTOUS (whose last release came from Sydney’s/FBi’s own Obelisk, presenter of Mithril on FBi directly after Utility Fog). The music here is a kind of industrial bass music, dubstep/grime with distortion turned up, or the beats and other sounds mutated into post-cyberpunk nightmares. Music of the futuristic present.

ITSUFO – TECKFO140 [ITSUFO Bandcamp]
Here’s San Francisco’s longtime purveyor of jungle love UFO, with a bit of a dubstep/jungle hybrid – it’s literally got “140” in its title, the BPM of dubstep. It’s full of nimbly jumping breakbeats and makes them work at this slower-than-usual tempo.

Hoavi – Phase 10 [Gost Zvuk]
Earlier this year, Russian producer Hoavi created a very unusual remix for DEEP LEARNING‘s Evergreen Remixed – accelerated rhythms with seemingly no centre to them. These tumbling, fast-paced percussive rhythms continue in his new mini-album Phases, with tracks that cover different tempos but with the same woozily disoriented feeling throughout. It’s the kind of music you need to listen closely to in order to understand, but it actually works its magic when heard in the background too.

Tawdry Otter – More Sauce [Adrien75 Bandcamp]
Adrien Capozzi has made music as Adrien 75 for ages (like, decades), and before that was part of a bunch of mix’n’match aliases making incredible breakbeat-driven IDM with a couple of mates under the umbrella of the Carpet Bomb label. These days Adrien75 is mostly engaged in fairly ambient guitar-manipulation stuff, so the IDM tends to come out under the Tawdry Otter alias (cute). This weekend he made the rather bonkers decision to release three new albums on his Bandcamp. All three are almost entirely made in an app called Koala Sampler on an Android phone. I can’t imagine doing complex things like this on a touchphone, but hey, people write blog posts, articles, books on the things, so that’s just me. Anyway, I particularly love the first of the three, named Extinction Event Pre-Game Show, a title that maybe cuts a little close to the bone, but hey, this pre-game show sounds great so let’s sit back & take it all in! There are lots of lovely shifting breakbeats and melodies, and an array of bizarre samples that suggest that working in the constrained environment of the phone is a useful catalyst for engaging creativity.

JSPHYNX – King Cobra (JSPHYNX Remix) [Sekito/Bandcamp]
Here’s something interesting and great. London jazz musician Johnny Woodham is JSPHYNX, but his band is also JSPHYNX (I think?), including keyboardist Alfa Mist aka Alfa Sekitoleko, who runs the Sekito label. Sekitoleko is an accomplished jazz pianist but also loves his beats, and both he and Woodham have remixed tracks from the band’s Reflex album released earlier this year. Both originals feature live breakbeats, and both remixes ratchet up the jungle inflections, with the jazz arrangements twisted into old-school sounding looped samples and loops. JSPHYNX’s own remix in particular is a complex beat workout on the level of early Squarepusher or Amon Tobin. Rad.

Fanu – Some Old Type Shit [Fanu Bandcamp]
Back to Finland, where Janne Hatula aka Fanu has been making legendary jungle & d’n’b tracks for decades – really since the early days. He appeared on Metalheadz for I think the second time earlier this year, he’s remixed the masters, and by the way he’s a skilful mixing and mastering engineer as well, and provides quality production tuition online. As he suggests, releasing an album in this day and age – particularly in the dance music world – is either a bold or foolhardy move, but I for one appreciate it. Classy Coffee Cuts covers a lot of breakbeat ground, mostly tried-and-true d’n’b and old-school jungle, but it also ventures into breakbeat at slower tempos, if not quite down in the hip-hop basements of his FatGyver incarnation. It’s Fanu, it’s excellent, dig.

Noneless – A Vow of Silence [☯ anybody universe ☯]
Noneless – Neurocannibal [☯ anybody universe ☯]
The North Sydney/Kuringgai artist now known as Noneless previously released some pretty crazy breakcorey hybrid music as elfaether, but has returned to music production a couple of years later with their amazing new album A Vow of Silence. It has the well deserved cachet of being released on ☯ anybody universe ☯, the label run by Japanese IDM/breakcore latter-day legend Laxenanchaos. On this album their classical violin training and love of erhu is married with breakcore splatterbeats, joyous distortion and a bit of Zen Buddhism. Lovers of World’s End Girlfriend or Kashiwa Daisuke, not to mention Venetian Snares, will gobble this up. Compulsory listening.

Christoph de Babalon – Pechvogel [Vaagner/Bandcamp]
Now to one of the breakcore originators, Christoph de Babalon, whose 1997 album If you’re into it, I’m out of it for DHR is the stuff of legend. He never really stopped, but after a gap between 2000 and 2008, releases have appeared with some frequency. The three Haunting Past of Christoph de Babalon albums on his Bandcamp collect heaps of dark drum’n’bass, dark ambient and breakcore stuff, and there’s IDM aplenty too. The latest album, Vale, is released on Berlin label Vaagner, a label known for industrial and industrial beats, and for ambient for all sorts. The dark ambient aspects blur even into a kind of gothic neoclassical music at times, but breakbeats of all tempos have by no means been abandoned.

Aho Ssan – Cold Summer Part I (feat. Blackhaine) [Other People/Bandcamp]
Aho Ssan – Away (feat. Exzald S & Valentina Magaletti) [Other People/Bandcamp]
When I previewed the stunning new album Rhizomes from Aho Ssan back in August, we heard the track featuring both clipping. & Polish cellist Resina. The Paris-based West African producer, Désiré Niamké to his family & friends, has gathered an incredible cast of collaborators for the album, released on Nicolas Jaar’s Other People. The physical format is a further collaboration, with illustrator Kim Grano exploring Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome” through abstract shapes which respond to the music. The book also makes available bonus tracks and a sample pack from the artist – if only postage to Australia didn’t basically double the price! Check the full album for the rest of the awesome collaborators, but tonight we had a near-perfect collaboration with the poet laureat of northern English bleakness, Blackhaine, and another phenomenal piece with Exzald S (fka Fawkes, aka Sarah Foulquiere) and ubiquitous percussive genius Valentina Magaletti.

Yara Asmar – to die in the country [Hive Mind Records/Bandcamp]
Yara Asmar – objects lost in drawers (found again at the most inconvenient times) [Hive Mind Records/Bandcamp]
The artistry of Beirut’s Yara Asmar doesn’t end with synth waltzes and accordion laments, beautifully descriptive though this album title is. She creates delightful video art on Instagram that’s somehow lo-fi and modernist at the same time, and beautiful, strange puppetry. All is tied together with whimsy and delicateness, with her own music accompanying the performances and videos. It’s a very different take on the YouTube-archaeology of vaporwave, all her own, and these synth walzes and accordion laments feel like they come from somewhere outside of time.

Safa – Grounds [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Safa – Supersummer [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
The last album from Mhamad Safa, also hailing from Beirut, was 2022’s Ibtihalat, a collection of crushed beats and sound design perfect for Lee Gamble’s UIQ label. Now on the ever-reliable Lebanese label Ruptured Records comes Hometown (Original Score), created for a video installation by the Dutch collective Metahaven, which depicts a fictional, liminal city, filmed in both Kyiv and Beirut. So you’d expect the music to lean more on the sound-art side, which it does, but still with convulsing percussive electronics, noise and chopped samples. Highly effective even stripped of the visuals.

Youmna Saba – Akaleel أكاليل [Touch/Bandcamp]
And finally, venerable UK sound-art label Touch brings us our third Lebanese artist tonight, with a remarkable new work from Beirut’s Youmna Saba, now based in Paris. Saba is an accomplished oud player, found on many other artists’ releases (such as Oiseaux-Tempête). On Wishah و​ِ​ش​ا​ح her oud’s sound is technologically extended, to amplify every string squeak and body tap, and further integrated with sympathetic electronics. The works range from abstract processed sound to delicate oud fingerpicking, and most tracks patiently reach a place where Saba brings in her emotive vocals. It’s an immersive, moving listening experience.

Listen again — ~208MB

On the hottest 1st of October ever recorded here in Eora/Sydney, a whole gamut of stuff for you tonight on Utility Fog.

LISTEN AGAIN and feel the gamut. Stream on demand as offered by FBi Radio, or podcast here.

Lord of the Isles & Ellen Renton – A Discovery [AD93/Bandcamp]
Lord of the Isles & Ellen Renton – My Noise Is Nothing [AD93/Bandcamp]
Starting with something unexpectedly beautiful from two Scottish artists. Ellen Renton is a poet, theatre-maker and performer from Edinburgh, who wrote these poems in 2020 during the pandemic. This is not her first collaboration with Scottish electronic musician Lord of the Isles aka Neil McDonald – she appeared on one side of McDonald’s last EP for AD93, back when it was called Whities. Renton’s words are thought-provoking, but her delivery is absolutely delicious – English spoken with a gentle Scottish accent is a delight. And the gentle music from McDonald, which builds into lovely IDMish beats on most tracks, is a joy.

Hidden Orchestra – Little Buddy Move [Lone Figures Bandcamp]
Hidden Orchestra – Reverse Learning [Lone Figures Bandcamp]
Although Joe Acheson released a lovely soundtrack to the video game Creaks in 2020, and a bonus album of remixes and live versions last year, it’s been 6 years since the last Hidden Orchestra album proper, Dawn Chorus. To Dream is to Forget is a welcome return, again embodying Acheson’s aim of reimagining electronic music acoustically. So the skillful drumming of Tim Lane and Jamie Graham melds funk breakbeats and jazz skitteriness into complex, propulsive patterns, while many other Hidden Orchestra regulars including Poppy Ackroyd provide strings, horns and those characteristic bass clarinet runs. Add in the plethora of instruments performed by Acheson, plus his composition and arrangement skills, and you get another album’s worth of warm pleasures. It may be nothing new after 13 years, but those of us who enjoy these sounds will always come back for more.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Elseware [Warp/Bandcamp]
Oneohtrix Point Never – World Outside [Warp/Bandcamp]
Oneohtrix Point Never – Nightmare Paint [Warp/Bandcamp]
On the other hand, Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never/OPN has rarely rested for long, having begun his career making highly abstract analogue synth works that found him a place in the noise scene alongside other synthmeisters like Emeralds, then absorbing the glitch and cut-up aesthetics that made him a perfect fit for Editions Mego, founding Software, his subsidiary label of Mexican Summer, and then settling with Warp ten years ago(!) The son of Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States, much of his early aesthetic was derived from his father’s collection of old synth records and the like. Somewhere in there he also invented vaporwave with a bunch of YouTube videos – maybe start here, check the whole channel. So unsurprisingly over the last decade his Warp albums, EPs and sundry other releases have combined ’90s and early oughts-style digital choppery, crunchy IDM beats, hints of breakcore and synth nerdery with plunderphonic sampling of everything from hardcore to ’80s videotapes. It’s surprising-but-not-surprising to hear new album Again starting with some rather avant-garde orchestral strings, gradually messily layered and adapted into something a little more filmic. Those strings permeate the whole album, appearing in the backing of many of the more electronic tracks. Lopatin sings, invites Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu to sing on a couple of tracks, and also uses/misuses the talents of the likes of Jim O’Rourke, Lee Ranaldo and genius engineer Randall Dunn. What it adds up to is, well, another OPN album? The last few do kind of run into each other in my head, and they’re all good, but not as distinctive as the ravenous early-to-mid years of his career. Nothing to complain about, it’s cool y’know.

dgoHn & Badun – Not Just A Best [Love Love Records/dgoHn Bandcamp/Badun Bandcamp]
I first heard of Danish producer Badun aka Oliver Duckert via a split release between Badun and Icarus back in 2011. Badun makes a kind of wonky electronic jazz that’s somewhat adjacent to the post-drum’n’bass electro-acoustics of Icarus, so it’s not all that strange to find Duckert collaborating with English drumfunk/jungle master dgoHn on new EP Talk to the Planets, released on Love Love Records. The syncopated drum patters created by dgoHn don’t need much coaxing to fit in with jazzy keys and more psych-ish passages, so if that sounds like your jam, you’re in luck.

NIQH – Planet Market [Plasma Sources/Bandcamp]
Ben Broughton tells us that his artist name NIQH is to be pronounced “NEE-KEEH”, so OK. His Familiar Rift EP released on Plasma Sources comes as a CD as well as digital – I’m impressed (although postage to Australia is impressively insane at €25, no blame to the label tho!) More than jungle or dubstep, the sounds here are influenced by UK garage – it’s lightfooted, but still loving the breakbeats and with some lovely sound design.

Cloaking Device – The Deepening (2023 Rework) [Odysee Recordings/Bandcamp]
Andy Baddaley has been going by Andy Odysee for recent jungle-fuelled drum’n’bass releases since reinstating the Odysee Recordings label that’s co-run by Tilla Kemal (aka Mirage) – a label that was home to some early Source Direct 12″s and Photek alias Phaze 1 too. Under the “Broken Circuitry” series he’s now bringing back some productions from the mid-’00s released on his Circuit Breaker label under the name Cloaking Device. It’s cyberpunk/noir drum’n’bass of a piece with Photek & Source Direct, with the tunes remastered and reworked with a nice mix of different breaks and synth pads.

MOOKI6 x B4MBA – ANKHNOWLEDGE [Jokkoo Collective]
There’s a jungle influence to the tunes on the Proto Nexus EP from two members of the Jokkoo Collective, a group of Barcelona-based African producers. MOOKI6 & B4MBA were inspired by their travels around Kenya to combine dancehall & jungle and hard dance with the riddims and environments found in their travels. The hyperspeed second half of “ANKHNOWLEDGE” is particularly insane, top stuff.

Fiesta Soundsystem – Jabbaphlex [Fiesta Soundsystem]
After releases on a myriad excellent labels, Fiesta Soundsystem has released their latest EP Jabbaphlex on their own Bandcamp. Spurred on by a conversation with Osc Kins (proprietor of Shubzin) to make the most monstrous breaks possible, Fiesta turned to a variety of most excellent monsters, including Lewis Carroll’s splendid Jabberwocky. On “Jabbaphlex” an old reading of the poem (maybe by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson himself?) creepily surfaces through the haze of distorted, timestretched breaks, which clatter in an almost breakcore fashion, or perhaps a braindance fashion given the Rephlex reference. It’s well worth checking out Fiesta Soundsystem’s back catalogue – on their Bandcamp and elsewhere – for inventive drum’n’bass, IDM and occasional house & techno.

Debby Friday – La Posesyon [Debby Friday Bandcamp]
Debby Friday – Good Luck [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
Debby Friday – let u in (with Darcy Baylis) [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
The first track in this batch from US polymath Debby Friday is an almost instrumental from 2018’s Terror: A Mix-Tape, proving that she can chop jungle breaks with the best of them. But she plunders hip-hop, r’n’b and pop, often with a penchant for industrial-level distortion and plenty of bass, and is a talented rapper & singer too. I’m not sure why I mised her album Good Luck earlier this year, as it’s first class, but just this week standalone track “let u in” appeared, a co-pro with Darcy Baylis recorded while she was on tour in Naarm/Melbourne earlier this year. Again with the jungle influences, this one eschews the industrial heaviness to the extent that it could be a PinkPantheress song – no shade! It’s lovely.

Armand Hammer – Total Recall [Fat Possum Records/Bandcamp]
Armand Hammer – Empire Blvd (feat. Junglepussy & Curly Castro) [Fat Possum Records/Bandcamp]
Around 5 years ago, Armand Hammer released their Paraffin album on various labels on cassette, vinyl and CD, and it brought them the highest level of acclaim they’d yet seen. This was further cemented by billy woods’ incredible Hiding Places with Kenny Segal the following year. So by now woods’ Backwoodz Studioz is known as a vital home to NYC underground hip-hop, and he and Elucid have the recognition they’ve deserved for a good decade. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips finds them on Fat Possum Records as part of the label’s growth from a Mississippi blues focus into other genres, but they’re no less adventurous or incisive in their commentary on the state of the USA. The album’s title itself refers to the signs that turn up in economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods where those not fortunate enough to have health insurance purchase unused diabetic test strips necessary for them to manage their diabetes.
Following Haram, which was entirely produced by The Alchemist, woods and Elucid bring their tremendous intelligence and experience to a suite of tracks produced by many of their usual collaborators like Segal and Willie Green, and JPEGMAFIA on a number of tracks. Meanwhile a jazz ensemble headed up by Shabaka Hutchings brings some additional cohesion to the proceedings, but this has never been lacking on Armand Hammer albums, as the duo bring poetically-chosen spoken word samples and other aural oddities into play. As I mentioned when discussing woods in my 20th anniversary special, hip-hop has always been an experimental genre, but woods and Elucid consistently make super leftfield shit just work perfectly. What could be more perfect than the Sun Ra call-and-response referenced in “Total Recall”?

JOBS – List the Creator Twice Part 1 [Ramp Local/Bandcamp]
JOBS – Allure [Ramp Local/Bandcamp]
Here’s another form of experimentalism harnessed to pop – or at least postpunk. The members of JOBS are active in the jazz & experimental scenes in New York – I’m particularly a fan of violist and singer Jessica Pavone – and with JOBS they’ve created a selection of arty songs that elude easy categorisation. Sure, there’s the contemporary references to postpunk, but there’s also experimental electronic beats, processed drums and that lovely mixture of live drumkit and electronic beats… and then there’s jazz fusion and kraut-noise. All members contribute vocals, and their androgynous nature makes it hard to know who’s who. I can tell this one is going to be getting plenty of repeat listens over the next few months.

PLF – Fast Looped Paradise [Ventil/Bandcamp]
It’s worth noting that Welsh noise-vocalist Elvin Brandhi’s given name is Freya Edmondes in order to understand the trio PLF, whose other members are two mainstays of Viennese experimental music, Peter Kutin and Lukas König – so yeah, with that in mind, PLF is their three first initials, and all their track names are weeeeeird variants of those three initial letters. At least “Fast Looped Paradise” makes some sense, while ParziFoooooooooooL is… a Wagner reference? No matter, much like kœnig’s album 1 Above Minus Underground from earlier this year, there are song-resembling structures with mad messed-up beats and messed-up sounds, hints at hip-hop, mutant techno, and Elvin Brandhi’s arresting voice.

squncr – …drowned out… I [Elli Records/Bandcamp]
Releases on French-Italian label Elli Records are always interesting, whether on an improv tip or electronic, or somewhere in between. New EP …drowned out… from French academic and musician François Larini aka squncr takes a post-colonial approach to its sound-art, with glitchy minimalist electronics enveloping shimmering choral music, which is taken (with permission) from recordings of the “Messe des Savanes”, a Catholic mass arranged by the Abbé Robert Wedraogho and performed by an all-African choir in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. It was the first of a number of “world music” Masses, often composed or arranged by white men for performance by African musicians, a perpetuation of colonialist thinking and cultural violence which Larini seeks to overturn or deconstruct. Whether this theoretical goal is successful is not for me to say, but this is beautiful music to contemplate cultural and religious imperialism.

ABADIR – Agios O Theos [SVBKVLT]
ABADIR – Mois de Marie [SVBKVLT]
Here’s a very different take, moving from West Africa to the very north-east of the continent. Rami ABADIR grew up in Heliopolis, now a suburn of Cairo but once one of Egypt’s major cities in itself, and the Greek derivation of its name (“City of the Sun”) gives a clue to its multifarious significance. So as a kid, little Rami was taken around various different churches for masses and holidays, taking in Coptic, Syriac, Maronite, Greek Orthodox and Catholic traditions of choral music. From this personal history, Abadir has synthesized his own fictional futuristic hymnal tradition, melded also with the sounds of his previous adaptations of worldwide club styles through African rhythm. So beautiful choral harmonies rise up and intertwine with sub bass swoops and percussive beats. It could be spiritual or it could be the pleasurable come-down from last night’s clubbing. Perfect either way really.

underworld – denver luna (a capella) [Smith Hyde Productions/lnk.to thingy/Watch on YouTube]
For me, Underworld‘s second toughest in the infants, even moreso than its predecessor dubnobasswithmyheadman, was a religious experience in the mid-’90s. Just about perfect expressions of what rave and club could achieve, trance-inducing evolving techno sneaking emotion in through the back door. I haven’t followed everything they’ve done since beaucoup fish, but it’s always nice to run into them again, and hoo-boy denver luna (a capella) is a heady reminder of Karl Hyde’s vocal delivery and lyrical obtuseness, with a frankly gorgeous vocoded “choral” accompaniment. Not that nobody’s done that before (*ahem* Pink Floyd, 1987), but I’m only saying that to point out that this track is great because of the song and arrangement rather than purely from the effect.

Happy Axe – Injuries [Provenance/Bandcamp]
I got a liddle sneak preview of this new song from Emma Kelly aka Happy Axe earlier this week, the first taster from a new album which Becki Whitton suggested will be half songs, half ambient. It feels like “Injuries” fulfils that promise all by itself, starting with soft vocals and abstract violin accompaniment before blossoming into a full song with beats partially made up from violin-percussion. The Tiger Dream is out later this month, and I’m looking forward to the rest.

Listen again — ~206MB

Music both popular and unpopular tonight. There’s not enough unpopular music on the radio, but this is an imbalance that Utility Fog has always attempted to correct.

LISTEN AGAIN and experience transcendence (again). Podcast right here, stream on demand on the FBi website.

Popular Music – Sad Songs [Popular Music Bandcamp]
Back in August, I played the first single from Popular Music, the new duo of Zac Pennington from Parenthetical Girls with Australian cellist & composer Prudence Rees-Lee. Having spent many years in the LA area, they are based in Naarm/Melbourne now – if you’re lucky enough to live there, you can see them launch their new album on October 26th. Because they’re already so search engine-unfriendly, they’ve called the album Minor Works, and while they are perhaps mainly in minor keys, these songs should not be downplayed. These are theatrical pop songs with arch humour, pop references galore, and an air of melancholy. Lovely.

ZÖJ – Hangman [Parenthèses/Bandcamp]
Another duo based in Naarm/Melbourne are Iranian born kamancheh player & singer Gelareh Pour, and drummer Brian O’Dwyer, working together as ZÖJ. Their album FIL O FENJOON is coming out in November through Belgian/West Australian label Parenthèses, but this single, featuring Pour’s emotive, impassioned playing and singing, was released especially to commemorate the anniversary last Saturday of the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini. It was her murder at the hands of the Iranian regime’s morality police that sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

Eartheater – Heels over Head [Chemical X/Mad Decent/Bandcamp]
Eartheater – Face in the Moon [Chemical X/Mad Decent/Bandcamp]
The last album proper from Alexandra Drewchin aka Eartheater was 2020’s Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, in which electronic beats were by and large abandoned in favour of classical orchestrations and acoustic instrumentation. For Powders, her first released through Chemical X/Mad Decent, Drewchin is melding those acoustic folk influences with glitchy beats’n’bass and some of the current trip-hop zeitgeist, for a collection that may have the most pop appeal of anything she’s done – not that she’s any less barmy and uncompromising than before, with heels over head and wearing whatever she damn well pleases. Oh – and there’s a cover of System of a Down’s “Chop Suey” which is great, although it just made me want to listen to the original again.

HAAi – ZiGGY (DJ-Kicks) [!K7 Records/Bandcamp]
Teneil Throssell, originally from Karratha, WA, has been DJing as HAAi since 2016, with her profile only rising ever since then. She’s been invited to do a mix for the prestigious DJ Kicks series on German electronic mainstays !K7 Records, and as is traditional, contributes an exclusive original. Hints of breakbeats give way to a big ravey 4/4 techno piece, melodic and uplifting.

Richie Culver – Alive in the Living Room (Pessimist Remix) [Drowned By Locals/Bandcamp]
Here’s some techno that’s frankly not intended to be uplifting. We last heard from Richie Culver round here back in April with an album of remixes of his 2022 album I was born by the sea. The original album featured Culver’s spoken storytelling with avant-garde electronics, taken to the max by the remix artists. Culver’s new album proper is a rather imposing near-half-hour piece called Alive in the lving room, released by the ever-excellent Jordanian label Drowned By Locals, a relentless piece of throbbing, evolving 4/4 beats that evokes the unsettling experience of sleep paralysis. There’s an accompanying poem by Culver, contained in a leather hardcover hymnbook (very limited edition!), but the piece itself is intentionally lacking vocals. However, on the remixes, the vocals surface in two very different settings. bod [包家巷] bathes their piece in shuddering, glitching layers of distorted fug, while Pessimist crafts his characteristic d’n’b-inflected dark techno.

Rutger Zuydervelt – Part 4 – Point of No Return [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Among other delights, the Objects & Sounds label’s Seasonal Diary III: Curious Enchantment compilation offered up a piece from Rutger Zuydervelt, better known as Machinefabriek, that was credited as a “Kaleiding Outtake”. It’s an offcut from the music he composed for a performance titled Kaleiding by Lily&Janick, who combine dance and acrobatics in their work. There’s a lot of movement in Zuydervelt’s pieces, whether through chiming pitched percussion, more sinister bass surges, or lovely interlocking motorik grooves. There’s an organic, acoustic feel to the sounds, whether digitally modelled or sampled, that convey a warm humanity even when programmed into complex patterns. One of the most enjoyable Machinefabriek works of late.

Loraine James – Prelude of Tired of Me [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Loraine James – Gentle Confrontation [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
As I said last week, this is Loraine James‘ third album for Hyperdub, although there’ve been a couple of other things in between. Gentle Confrontation is a lovely name, and James’ love of IDM is all over the album, as well as r’n’b & pop, bass music and more. Although there are many great guest vocalists featured too, it’s always particularly nice hearing her own gentle voice on a few tracks too. This does feel like her best work yet, but that’s a big thing to say given how brilliant even her pre-Hyberdub material was!

Soda Plains – Meet Me at Escados [Yegorka/Bandcamp]
Hong Kong musician Soda Plains, based now in Berlin after some time in London, here releases a single track on Berlin label Yegorka. It’s experimental bass music along the lines of his Living With Elvis EP from last year, also very fun stuff.

Pl4net Dust – Bunny Hat [[re]sources]
Paris producer Pl4net Dust seems to comfortably switch between dance genres, but on the Freefall EP for the Paris bass label [re]sources, we get two tracks of fantastically syncopated jungle. I’d love to hear more of this.

Mukqs – Truck-Kun [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
Mukqs – Etheric Double [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
Max Allison named his musical self Mukqs, which explains a lot. It’s his name but spelled like the fabled Aphex Twin album, and Allison’s music is a continuation of the off-kilter humour and dense programming of the first generation IDM producers of yore. Stonewasher is released on Hausu Mountain, the label Allison runs with Doug Kaplan (the pair were also 2/3 of Good Willsmith with Natalie Chami aka TALsounds). The Hausu Mountain aesthetic is one of pixellated post-computer game imagery and bizarre juxtaposition – and so it is with the music of Mukqs: relentlessly chopped, scrambled and pitch-shifted samples, information overload overloaded. Somehow it all lands just on this side of coherent – or maybe that’s just me.

Brutter – Dance un-dance [Brutter Bandcamp]
Brutter – Twin Outta [Brutter Bandcamp]
Christian and Fredrik Wallumrød come from a very prominent family in Norwegian jazz & experimental music. Their sister Susanna, best known by her first name, is an influential and loved avant-garde singer-songwriter, and they are also cousins of pianist David Wallumrød. I’ve heard plenty of Christian’s music on labels like Hubro, and Fredrik as part of the phenomenal Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. Anyway, none of this really prepares one for Brutter (unsurprisingly the Norwegian word for “brother”). Here both brothers play drum machines and various electronics, alongside live drums, loving the glitch and with industrial and dub influences to the fore. It’s awesome, and it’s not a million miles away from the next artists…

Radian – Stak [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Radian – Jet [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Radian – Cold Suns [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Austrian experimental trio Radian have been around even longer than Utility Fog, maintaining a remarkable consistency across 2½ decades. Martins Brandlmayr and Siewert, on drums and guitars respectively, both also contribute electronics, and both are known for their connections with the Viennese glitch and experimental scenes (Siewert a long time ago replaced Stefan Németh, also central to that musical world). They’re joined by John Norman on bass, so the band technically has a guitar/bass/drums lineup, and it’s no surprise that they’ve been connected with Chicago’s Thrill Jockey for much of their existence. They play a European form of Chicago-style postrock, with jazzy, muscular drumming next to glitchy rhythmic cut-ups, guitars coexisting with sweeping machine drones, real instrumental performances underpinning electronic abstraction. New album Distorted Rooms – coming 7 years after their last – leans towards their more abstract side, but snaps you back into focus with surprising guitar riffing or krautrocky acoustic drums. It’s always a pleasure to be reminded how quietly influential this long-lived group have been (on me at least!)

Zoltan Fecso – Feast Terrain [Oxtail Recordings/Bandcamp]
Bringing the glitches home, Naarm/Melbourne experimental ambient musician Zoltan Fecso has a new album out on Oxtail Recordings. Other Air is a little different from the earlier works I’ve heard of Zoltan’s, often built from ingenious real-time sampling & manipulation of guitar sounds. Here we have field recordings, synths and chittering textures inspired by a month-long stay on Yuin Land in southern New South Wales. This is beautiful stuff, made for deep listening on headphones.

Emily Wittbrodt – Interlude [Ana Ott/Bandcamp]
Emily Wittbrodt – Foolish [Ana Ott/Bandcamp]
Via glitchy textures we segue into the genre-repudiating music of Emily Wittbrodt, from her new album Make You Stay, released by the equally unpigeonholeable label Ana Ott. The album is a cycle of eight pieces, alternating between “recitatives” and “arias”, adapting these baroque & early classical forms for a contemporary band. Wittbrodt plays freely with the forms – the recitatives are songs, each sung by a different member of the four-piece band, while the arias are in fact instrumentals, distilling and reinterpreting some aspect of the preceding song. The band itself is just as unconventional, with Wittbrodt on cello, Annie Bloch on chest organ and electric organ, Jan Philipp on drums and Wolfgang Pérez on electric guitar and electronics. Thus we have music that shifts between quite classical sounding arrangements, indiepop songs, burbling, glitching electronics and free jazz. It’s charmingly strange and strangely engaging music.

Bob Holroyd – February [Bob Holroyd Bandcamp]
English producer & composer Bob Holroyd happily spans genres and styles too. He’s probably best known for the rave-era polyrhythmic anthem African Drug, which appeared in various influential DJ mixes including Coldcut’s Journey By DJ and was much later remixed into blissful percussive/ambient techno by Four Tet, and even later again by himself. In 2021 Holroyd released a series of two-track singles through Real World X, including the uneasily layered Mangled Pianos. “February” is a standalone track originally called “Machine Lullaby”, which neatly describes the combination of pensive piano chords and processed samples.

Hessien – We Are Fond Of Them [sound in silence]
Our last track moves yet further into ambience, with textured field recordings underlying chiming guitar loops. This is Hessien, the duo of UK artist Tim Martin aka Maps & Diagrams and Queenbeyan musician Charles Sage aka y0t0, also co-founder of guitar-noise project The Rothko Chapel. Hessien combines looped jangles of guitar with electronic processing, which might sound like Fennesz or countless others, but really doesn’t. These pieces spool out slowly and patiently and catch you unawares, evoking landscapes you can get lost in.

Listen again — ~207MB