Utility Fog

Some beautiful experimental song, and hyper beats, but lots of sound-art tonight.

LISTEN AGAIN – you won’t regret it. Stream on demand at the new fbi.radio, podcast here.

Snakeskin – Homecoming [Mais Um/Bandcamp/Ruptured/Bandcamp]
Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal (Snakeskin) – Signs [Ruptured/Bandcamp]
Snakeskin – Waiting [Mais Um/Bandcamp/Ruptured/Bandcamp]
The situation in Lebanon – indeed Beirut – right now is horrifying, as Israel extends its devastation, seemingly unchecked, into the heart of its neighbour. Of course this is by far not the first time Israel has invaded Lebanon, but it does seem like the deadliest, treating towns, neighbourhoods, buildings with the same disregard for civilian lives as they are doing in Gaza. So for Beirut natives Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal, releasing an album right now must be truly disorienting and bittersweet. The two are in fact on tour in Europe right now, but they are also supporting a fundraiser via Tabbal’s Tunefork Studios along with Beirut Synthesizer Centre to help displaced families in Lebanon.
In any case, Snakeskin’s second album They Kept Our Photographs is co-released by the wonderful Beirut/Montréal label Ruptured and the London-based Mais Um. Their debut was one of my favourite albums of 2022, its title now naming the duo. Both albums combine the vocals of Sabra – who is also lead singer of Beirut dreampop/shoegaze band Postcards – with guitars and other instruments performed by both, radically processed and produced by Tabbal. Guitar chords stutter and loop, drums are cut up, while at other times Sabra’s voice floats in uneasily sparse soundscapes. This is deeply emotive music – not surprisingly, as the writing for the album began on October 6th, so it’s been indelibly stained by the genocide in Gaza. Cannot recommend this work highly enough.

Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja [Nuclear Blast/Bandcamp]
Oranssi Pazuzu – Hautatuuli [Nuclear Blast/Bandcamp]
It’s good to finally play this brilliant Finnish heavy metal band on the show. Oranssi Pazuzu started off as ostensibly black metal, but each album has been an evolution, with synths becoming more prevalent early on, psychedelic influences and synth-ambient often taking over altogether. On Muuntautuja the band takes on an even more electronic approach, with sub-bass kicks driving the title track, and a loping trip-hop beat on “Hautatuuli”. The band namecheck Death Grips and Portishead as well as Boredoms, whose heavy punk beginnings morphed into electronic and percussive experimentalism. And yes, you can hear something of the hammering beats of Portishead’s aptly-named “Machine Gun” for sure. I can’t tell you what any of this is about, but as music qua music, love it!

Stick In The Wheel – Steals The Thief [Stick In The Wheel Bandcamp]
From the beginning, the artful yet raw English folk revivalism of Stick In The Wheel refused any singular approaches to folk music’s living nature vs its deep historical roots. Nowhere is that characterised better than the warbling autotune on Nicola Kearey’s voice, accompanied by rich piano accordion, violin and percussion on their much-loved early tune “Follow Them True“. Kearey and partner Ian Carter were responsible for the era-defining “Hater” from dubstep collective Various Production, as well as some eerie and arcane folk missives on Various’s early 7″s (check “Foller“, for instance, sung by Kearey, and its flipside “Home“, sung by Rachel Davies, who was in SITW early on) – so technology and dance music have always been intertwined with the band, but A Thousand Pokes is their most acoustic, back-to-basics album in a while, with pointed commentary on the state of the world right now… So it’s appropriate that the autotune effect makes itself known again here, on the first and last tracks of this album. “Steals The Thief” is a bewitching piece with droning guitars under the folk percussion and gentle guitar jangle, and the way the autotune slightly flattens Kearey’s vocal affect only makes it more touching.

Setting – Night Divers [Cardinals At The Window]
There’s a lot going on in the world. There always is, but we are very much, very solidly in a time of climate crisis, and part of that is a much greater frequency of extreme weather events. One of those hit Western North Carolina (the western bit of the US state of North Carolina, right?), which has been hit with major flooding. We’re very familiar with such stuff in Australia. Anyway, NC musician Libby Rodenbough, David Walker, and music journalist Grayson Haver Currin have compiled a truly gigantic compilation to raise money for local charities – it’s 136 tracks, over 10 hours of music, which really nobody has time to listen to, but you just have to scan through and find artists you know & love, and while you’re there, try out some others – noting that it’s ALL exclusive unreleased recordings. You might be interested in Helado Negro, Animal Collective’s Geologist & D.S., Daniel Bachman, Laraaji, Danny Paul Grody, Lonnie Holley, Jenks Miller of Horseback, Mary Lattimore, Bill Orcutt, Six Organs of Admittance… but there’s so many. Alongside these, I was glad to discover Setting, a trio featuring exploratory folk guitarist/banjo player Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly aka Mind Over Mirrors & drummer Joe Westerlund of Megafaun. This is minimalist, repetitive, kosmische music that blends banjo and harmonium with electronics, tapes, and live drums. Their contribution here is great.

KMRU – MR0 [OFNOT/KMRU Bandcamp]
Nyokabi Kariũki – Item no. ______ [OFNOT/KMRU Bandcamp]
In 2022, Kenyan sound-artist Joseph Kamaru aka KMRU released the album Temporary Stored, which found him in dialogue with audio found in the Sound Archive of Royal Museum of Central Africa, based in Belgium. As well as actual objects (and people) stolen from Africa, Western countries have taken sounds and music and treated them as copyrighted property. So in creating these gorgeous sound works, KMRU has performed a kind of act of “repatriation”. Those tracks are now re-released on a 2LP set by OFNOT, augmented by further reworkings by other African sound-artists. Temporary Stored II is a remarkable, thought-provoking work, and each artist takes a personal approach. Kenyan sound-artist Nyokabi Kariũki emphasises the way the recordings are decontextualised as mere numbered library records, while slowly weaving in haunting synth chords.

Anna Butterss – Seeing You [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
Adelaide-born bass player Anna Butterss has been based in LA for a while now, and is in great demand, not just in jazz – I saw them playing bass with Andrew Bird on his recent tour here. But Butterss is a brilliant jazz player, who recently appeared on International Anthem as part of the jazz/post-whatever supergroup Small Medium Large. So it’s great to see their new solo album Mighty Vertebrate also coming out on International Anthem, a great adventurous label for forward-thinking jazz that can cross over into electronic, krautrock influences and more. The core of Butterss’ compositions here is jazz, but there are pieces based around a drum machine beat, blurred samples, bass as melodic instrument… And Butterss plays both electric and upright bass. There’s plenty here for people who maybe don’t primarily listen to jazz – I highly recommend giving it a go.

TP Dutchkiss – Song for Ugne [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
Spencer Hartling is an engineer and producer based in LA, among other things the co-author with Matt Baldwin of the zine Show Invisibles, or How to Make a Tape Loop. His love of tape loops and effects shines and warbles throughout his forthcoming solo album high functioning, as do glitchy digital effects, and various guests. On second single “Song for Ugne” James Riotto adds a plethora of instruments including keyboards, bass and beats. Equal parts emotional and textural, it bodes well for the rest of the album.

Meemo Comma – The Gift [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
It’s wonderful seeing the progressive growth as an artist of Lara Rix-Martin aka Meemo Comma, having mastered deconstructed and reconstructed rave and IDM over their last few releases, now turning to quasi-soundtrack work with Decimation of I. The album is structured after the philosophical science fiction novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, famously adapted for film by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker. Both works explore a world transformed by alien visitors who are never seen, and the album’s title refers to the “ego-death” experienced by the story’s protagonists. Rix-Martin explores a wide range of influences through the album, with clarinets and flutes providing 20th-century classical touchpoints, while pieces like “The Gift” strongly reference the likes of Vangelis or Tomita, albeit with some rare beats entering in the second half. A concept album thought it may be, Decimation of I would work beautifully as a real soundtrack, and someone needs to take Rix-Martin up on this asap.

Ran Slavin – Dawn Fourteen [Ran Slavin Bandcamp]
Tel Aviv-based Ran Slavin is known for his creative film work as well as experimental audio works that have been released by Crónica among others. Following Oolong: Ambient Works, released by Mille-Plateaux earlier this year, New Dawns takes a different approach to “ambient”, combining instrumentation like upright bass with electronic production techniques and lopsided beats. It’s a surreal evocation of a futuristic alternate reality.

Shinra Knives – Some of Y’all Don’t [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Three tracks of heavy crunching (or not!) electronics from St. Louis artist Shinra Knives – although actually each track hits different. The first is glitched-up snarling drums and bass, interrupted by distorted choirs(?), and the last is pretty ambient new-age synth melodies, but in between is a hip-hop sampling piece of breakcore-dubstep hybrid. So much variation on a three-track EP is to be admired, and YUKU deserves thanks for supporting another creative artist at the intersection of experimentation and the dancefloor.

DJ Die & Addison Groove – Gunsmok£ [Gutterfunk]
Bristol Reprazent! The relatively small UK city of Bristol has played an outsized role in UK soundsystem culture since the ’80s – famously with Massive Attack and Portishead, but before that with Massive Attack precursors The Wild Bunch, and the always underappreciated Smith & Mighty. On the other hand Roni Size and his Reprazent crew were instrumental in the rise of jungle and then drum’n’bass, outside of London itself, and their success earned them the Mercury Prize in 1997, arguably when it still mattered. Roni Size himself was certainly a talented producer, but I’d argue that Krust and DJ Die were the greater beatmakers. Die now helms the GutterFunk label, promoting great bass music from Bristol and beyond. On this new track he joins with a fellow Bristolian of the following generation, Addison Groove, who came up out of the dubstep scene (under the name Headhunter) around 2006 and is no stranger to d’n’b collabs. In fact Die & Addison Groove have worked together since at least 2013, and this one’s a fierce’n’filthy bit of jungle/drum’n’bass.

A.R. Kane – Baby Milk Snatcher (Tim Reaper Jungle remix) [A.R. Kane Bandcamp]
A.R. Kane – Baby Milk Snatcher (Sixty Nine LP version) [A.R. Kane Bandcamp]
East Londoners Rudy Tambala & Alex Ayuli’s A.R. Kane are another of those influential but nearly-forgotten bands. Tambala had also been part of M|A|R|R|S, who had a hit with “Pump Up The Volume” in 1997, mixing scratching and sampling with house. Somehow A.R. Kane wound its way around scrappy noisy guitar stuff that presaged shoegaze by a good few years, as well as sample-based electronic pop, and later more ambient abstract stuff? Arcane indeed. The reformed band have just released Up Home Collected, which extends the proto-shoegaze EP from 1988 with original demos and some new remixes. Slowdive (who’ve released two of their best albums since reforming a few years ago) morph the original harshness into something much more shoegazey, but it’s great hearing jungle’s nicest DJ Tim Reaper spinning some samples from “Baby Milk Scratcher” into a kind of r’n’b-jungle dub. It’s notable that one of the great d’n’b anthems, Boymerang’s The River (VIP) is effectively a remix of A.R. Kane (Boymerang being Graham Sutton of postrock pioneers Bark Psychosis).

Haptic – Proscenium [LINE/Bandcamp]
Chicago experimental trio Haptic have for a couple of decades made a body of deceptively quiet music, which is often anything but: not drone but full of detail, often veering into noise, or hypnotic kraut/postrock, its three or more members using whatever means necessary to make their sounds. Adam Sonderberg, Joseph Clayton Mills and Steven Hess are frequent collaborators outside of Haptic, and Hess is also drummer in the brilliant black metal/drone/noise band Locrian, and also in kraut-glitch ensemble innode (among many others). Their latest appearance (“Haptic recording number sixteen”) is on LINE, the boutique label run by arch-minimalist (and thoughtful curator) Richard Chartier. In contrast with the two 20-ish minute tracks that follow it, “Proscenium” is a brief 3 minutes of drawn-out horns shadowing a barely-audible warbling tape of a piano. The following two tracks, released on Nov 22nd, combine static drones and field recordings dominated by white noise, with thuds and whirrs happening so far in the background you’re hardly sure they’re there.

Harvestman – Herne’s Oak [Neurot/Bandcamp]
Steve Von Till was/is a key member of Neurosis, a pivotal band in post-metal that started as hardcore punk but morphed into an expansive sound drawing from postrock, industrial, hardcore, doom and experimental music of all sorts. The band also had an alter ego called Tribes of Neurot that wasn’t metal at all, allowing them to explore drone, sound-art, glitch, noise and more. Von Till has a solo output of widescreen, psychedelic folk music, but alongside this he has an alter ego, Harvestman, that’s an instrumental project for abstracted psych-folk and much more. In 2024, via Neurosis’s own fantastic label Neurot Recordings, Harvestman has been releasing a Triptych of records, each released on special full moons: the first came out with the Pink Moon on April 23rd, the second on the Buck Moon of July 21st, and the third will turn up on October 17th for the Hunter Moon. The albums use synths, loops, filters, delays, weird percussion and more, as well as guitar – and bass is paramount. On Part One, the legendary Al Cisneros of stoner metal bands Sleep and Om lends his dub weight, and on Part Two Cisneros contributed a dub remix. I recently played the dub from the shortly forthcoming Part Three by The Bug, and here’s a mini-epic of ambient widescreen folk rock. This is a project concerned with ancient history and geological time, exploring humanity’s connection with – and disconnection from – nature on a grand scale.

RUBBISH MUSIC – The Fatberg Which Weighed as Much as Three Elephants [Persistence of Sound/Bandcamp]
Kate Carr (proprietor of Flaming Pines, Aussie living in London) and Iain Chambers (who runs the Persistence of Sound label) came together last year as RUBBISH MUSIC on their first release, Upcycling, released on Kate’s Flaming Pines. Their follow-up, appropriately enough, is this time on Iain’s Persistence of Sound label. Flaming Pines is predominantly concerned with field recordings and site-specific music (although not exclusively), and Persistence of Sound began in 2021 with both field recording work (The London Sound Survey) and musique concrète (a wonderful Beatriz Ferreyra release). The Rubbish Music project works at this intersection: the first album was absolutely concrète music in the sense that all sounds are literally sampled from the rubbish generated by our societies and industries (see this remarkable video of the two performing live). The follow-up, Fatbergs, homes in on one particular product of our Age Of Waste, these “fatbergs” growing in our sewers from discarded wet wipes, nappies, fats and oils, accumulating into monstrous conglomerations that result in blockages and overflows. The music is accordingly lugubrious and at times subtly menacing, without losing sight of the innate humour of the situation: the track titles draw attention to how massive these things are, or how gross they are – slithering, huge and disgusting. Are we hearing dripping, squelching human waste, slithering around our ears? It at least feels enough like it to add another dimension to the project’s social commentary.

BZDB – Dancesing [AD 93/Bandcamp]
AD 93, Nic Tasker’s label previously known as Whities, continues to bring the goods far beyond the leftfield dance music that was their core material. Here’s the first released material from BZDB, a collaboration between London/Marseilles-based poet Belinda Zhawi aka MA.MOYO and multidisciplinary artist Duncan Bellamy, best known as a founding member of jazz/classical/electronic crossover band Portico Quartet. The first single from their elliptically titled album Jump Ship, Sit Lean, Be Still, Stand Tall is “Dancesing”, which demonstrates their “sonic poetry” tag. A minimalist piano ostinato, slow string lines, field recordings and layers of vocal drones underpinn the hypnotic spoken word of Zhawi, only for the strings to burst into strident chords in the song’s last minute.

Passepartout Duo – Viols and Violas, in Mus. [Passepartout Duo Bandcamp]
Itinerant experimentalists Passepartout Duo also bring us strings and piano on the first single from their fourth album Argot. Here the live acoustic instruments emulate the unconventional intervals and rhythmic subdivisions of a generatively-produced synth melody, dancing around each other over some pensive long notes. It’s charmingly unbalancing.

Ava Rasti – I Remember [130701/Bandcamp]
I first heard the work of Tehran-based composer & producer Ava Rasti via her album Ginestra, released last year on Kate Carr’s Flaming Pines label. That work deconstructed the music of the classical “canon” into murky drones, waves of distortion and clouds of glitch. Rasti’s new album The River will be released on Fat Cat’s post-classical/experimental imprint 130701, and like last year’s album was initiated during a residency at Fabrica in Treviso, Italy. The two tracks available so far are less violent in their treatments of classical source material: on “Wound” slow string lines are smudged and overlaid, while on “I Remember”, a muted, reversed piano loop stretches under a sparse piano refrain while glitched, pitch-shifted echoes float around, eventually complicating the harmonies with hints of discords. Rasti very effectively evokes her theme: how memory can be both preserved and hidden in locations, how violence can be obscured and transformed over time. I look forward to hearing the rest of this album.

Listen again — ~201MB

Covering ground from Iranian-American beats to English shoegaze-loop-pop, IDM, nu-skool-jungle, bass-heavy noise and noisy bass music, Middle Eastern-influenced electronic psych rock, the ever-cheeky Aphex Twin’s ambient masterpiece orchestrated, postrock and sound-art. And that’s just a taster!

LISTEN AGAIN for the full flavour profile. Stream on demand @ FBi, podcast here.

Maral – retrofit (feat. YATTA) [PTP/Bandcamp]
Maral – big hands reggaeton [PTP/Bandcamp]
Patience (​ص​ب​ر​) is the new collection from LA-based musician Maral, a varied mix of tracks from throughout her musical life, going back as far as 2013, often referencing her Iranian heritage. I discovered Maral circa her 2020 album Push, but her significance was solidified with her incredible remix of original anarcho-punks Crass the following year – so it’s notable that among the tracks here are her forays into punk, albeit filtered through the beat-making lens. And that’s a Crass sample in the last track, “big hands reggaeton”. Rather than her usual home of Leaving Records, Patience (​ص​ب​ر​) is released on Geng’s ever-relevant activist label PTP, and on our opening track tonight, Maral is joined by another PTP artist, the multi-talented Sierra Leonean-American YATTA, whose multi-layered vocals add an extra aura of disorientation to the proceedings.

Elsa Hewitt – White Mirror [Elsa Hewitt Bandcamp]
British producer Elsa Hewitt inhabits an idiosyncratic space that blurs songwriting with ambient soundscapes, guitars and vocals with electronics. Her new album Dominant Heartstrings, due in January 2025, leans mostly away from “songs”, using the voice and guitars texturally. The first single “Equinox” features a lovely b-side, “Poiselle”, which brings in a more rhythmic elements in the second half. “White Mirror” is the b-side of “Good To U”, the second single, which will be out soon. At its midpoint Hewitt starts cutting the loops rhythmically, and brings in some folktronic beats as well under her warm vocal layers.

Ammonite – When You Don’t (Salamanda Remix) [Ransom Note Records/Bandcamp]
Ammonite – What If I Knew Me (Dot Never Remix) [Ransom Note Records/Bandcamp]
Also from the UK is singer Amy Spencer, whose Ammonite alias produced an excellent album, Blueprints, earlier this year on Ransom Note Records. Spencer samples her voice, repitching it to create uncanny vocal synth pads, and builds almost-songs out of repeated fragments of lyrics. That original album is truly lovely, and it’s now birthed a remix album, Blueprints Revisited. Appearing here are David Holmes, Midori Hirano and Franz Kirmann of Piano Interrupted, as well as the two I played tonight. Korean electronic duo Salamanda (aka Uman Therma and Yetsuby) turn “When You Don’t” in an electro-trip-hop number, while eclectic indie/electronic London band Dot Never take an ambient passage from “What If I Knew Me” and scatter drill’n’bassy beats all over.

Mattr – Dicentra [Mattr Bandcamp]
London-based producer Mattr has been creating smoothly melodic IDM tunes for a while now, and “Dicentra” is another single he’s snuck out on Bandcamp, with skittering jungle-ish beats supported by low pads and twinkling melodies.

Arcologies – Silent Lights [Lightless Recordings]
Finnish drum’n’bass legend Fanu does a lot of mixing for electronic musicians, as well as online training and mentoring. As such, he’s reactivated his Lightless Recordings label to release a compilation of up-and-coming drum’n’bass, jungle and breakbeat artists. Breakbeat Brigade covers plenty of ground, and highlights some great talent. Here we have Chicago drum’n’bass & jungle artist Arcologies with some dark & atmospheric jungle.

Leon Mar – Acellular [Subviral/Bandcamp]
In 1997, one of the greatest drum’n’bass albums was released – the self-titled album from Arcon 2, which took the template of techstep, which was just beginning to take over the drum’n’bass world, but built dazzling complexity into the beats, among swooping basslines and atonal pads. Arcon 2 was the drum’n’bass alias for Leon Mar (real name the inverted Noel Ram), who had worked with Future Sound of London in their studio (FSOL released one 12″ from him under the name Oil). So anyway, at his Subviral Bandcamp you can find the Arcon 2 album and various 12″s remastered, along with some collections of d’n’b/jungle productions – but here we have an entirely new jungle tune, released as “Leon Mar”! “Acellular” is fierce and relentless, just what we needed.

RXM Reality – See All [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
RXM Reality – Sway So Yel [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
RXM Reality – Sammy [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year Mike Meegan released an album as When 2 on Blorpus Editions, featuring deliciously disorienting Carl Stone-influenced glitch-rhythms. Meegan is best known as RXM Reality, and his latest album for Hausu Mountain (which is co-run by Blorpus boss Max Allison) is out now. No. 1 in the World covers the ground RXM Reality has previously paved – breakcore/drill’n’bass beats to the max, feints at metal, references to vaporwave or new age whatever… but more, more MORE! Clocking in at just over an hour, the album’s 24 tracks cover 58-second indie vignettes (“Sway So Yel” played tonight), screamo metal, plenty of breakcore and assorted uncategorizableness. It’s honestly really, really good.

the body – Removal [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
There’s always been a strange synergy between the energy of extreme metal/hardcore punk and breakcore, as well as doom metal and dub; but nobody embodies that better than the body, each of whose albums takes them in another path through the beauty of extremeness, and for the last 10 years, the melding/welding of technology into the core of what they do. The Crying Out of Things, released on November 8th, will be their second album of 2024, with their Orchards of a Futile Heaven collab with Dis Fig released in February this year and garnering them the cover of The Wire just last month. Once again this new album is enriched by the Machines With Magnets wielded by Seth Manchester, and you can hear that in the rolling collapse of “Removal”, where huge crashes, distorted drum machines and descending basslines are what accompany Chip King’s distorted wailing, until eventually some mid-frequency beats come in along with churning industrial noise. Never less than brilliant.

Deaf Squad feat. Flowdan – Collateral Damage [Deaf Squad Bandcamp]
The Bug – ‘Deep in a Mud’ ft Magugu [Relapse Records/Bandcamp]
Deaf Squad x Nah Eeto – Nikushuku [Deaf Squad Bandcamp]
Via The Wire Tapper 66 that came with the current November issue of the magazine, here’s new London duo Deaf Squad, who combine crushing dubstep/dub beats heavily indebted to The Bug with guitar noise and textures claiming Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails as their forerunners. On their debut EP Black And Red they’ve enlised two frequent collaborators with The Bug, Flowdan and Warrior Queen, along with singer/producer Thryn and UK-based Kenyan singer/MC Nah Eeto. These songs take pleasing left-hand turns, so while the Flowdan feature suits his grime creds and many Bug collabs, the second half slides into a kind of shoegazey haze with guitar melody and swathes of enveloping distortion. With Nah Eeto there’s a Tricky-like trip-hop vibe of the dirtiest kind, with post-dubstep beats and jackhammer drum fills. Very fine.

mHz – Copper (Matmos) [Room40/Bandcamp]
New Zealand-based Iranian sound-artist Mo H. Zareei calls himself mHz (milliHertz) – how could you resist with those initials? His debut release was 2019’s Form, formed around pure electronic tones – a set of clicking and shuffling and strobing tracks a la raster-noton and Ryoji Ikeda. Another strand of his work, however, deals in electroacoustic work and the expression of electronic programming through physical media. His new album on Room40, Material Prosody, is based around his sound sculpture called the Material Sequencer, which features an 8-step sequencer that controls a solenoid that whacks itself against a sold block that’s attached to the circuit board. It exists in limited editions with five different materials: aluminium, copper, wood, steel and brass – but for this album an additional concrete edition exists, which was used by mHz to create his piece. The other five materials were handed out to Nicolas Bernier, Loscil, Matmos, Zimoun and Alba Triana, with as wide a range of tracks as you’d expect, from Triana’s literal documentation of simple clicking-on-wood to highly processed numbers. Of course Matmos are old favourites of Utility Fog, and dab hands at using physical objects in their work, so their work with the Copper edition as entertaining as ever.

FOUDRE! – Visions from Zūrūtetsu [NAHAL Recordings/Bandcamp]
The first self-titled album from French postrock/krautrock/psych band Oiseaux-Tempête in 2013 was a revelation. I suspect I found it after the brilliant 2014 remix album, but I was a firm fan from there on. In the interim I discovered many other projects of Frédéric D. Oberland, many of which I’ve played here. One of those is FOUDRE!, a trio of fellow travellers, based around modular & analogue synths, other keyboards, electronic and physical percussion, effects and vocals. Like Oiseaux-Tempête and related groups, the influence of the MENA region is strong in the music. Along with Oberland, the group features Paul Régimbeau aka Mondkopf, who’s been a member of Oisexau-Tempête at times, and Romain Barbot aka the prolific Saåad, who were present on that remix album back when. Voltæ (Chthulucene) might be the most exciting work from these collected artists for some time, driven by percussion and programmed beats, drenched in psychedelic synths and further energised by north-African and Middle Eastern melodies and samples. The full album’s out at the end of the month and I look forward to playing something else from it then.

Aphex Twin – rhubarb orc. 19.53 rev (unreversed) [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Biggest reissue of the week, if not the year, is the deluxe edition of Aphex Twin‘s staggeringly original, iconoclastic lysergic ambient album Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, affectionately known as SAW II since its obsessive analysis in the early days of the internet, released as it was in 1994. At the time the total tracks were just over the length that would fit on 2 CDs, so there were annoying differences between the tracks available on the UK CD and the US CD, differing again on the vinyl. So the Expanded Edition released for the album’s 30th anniversary is welcome in finally bringing the full set to 3CDs and 4LPs, in handsome box sets (I haven’t received mine yet!) The mystique of the music comes from its deliberately lo-fi nature, with synths artfully detuned, beats hovering under hiss and static, each track hovering in hazy repetition until its time is up. Remastered here, there’s some detail and fidelity improvements, without altering the nature of the sound. The story goes that Richard D James had been experimenting with – or at least experiencing – lucid dreaming, and the music here is his attempt to recreate those states. All RDJ/AFX stories need to be taken with a grain of salt, but there’s no doubt that the feel of this music is of altered mental states. Many people – me included – have found themselves waking from weirdly unsettling dreams after this music lulled us to sleep.
Anyway, one of the bonus tracks on the expanded edition is “rhubarb orc. 19.53 rev”. This needs a bit of unpacking: the original releases had no track titles, instead using a set of colour wheels with indistinct photos. One or more people in the IDM mailing lists in ’94 gave the tracks titles based on those little pictures, and Richard obviously ended up taking them as the default names, hence this orchestration of track #3 is “rhubarb”. Internet sleuths believe this was recorded by an orchestra in Poland during a rehearsal, but Rich can’t help his cheeky nature, so the version released is reversed. It’s uncanny and beautiful, but when unreversed (i.e. re-reversed), the way it tracks the original piece is in my opinion even more lovely – despite the rather unfriendly stereo mixing and tape distortion. It’s classic Aphex, however you look at it.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL [Constellation Records/Bandcamp]
From the very start, Godspeed You! Black Emperor (or Godspeed You Black Emperor! as it was originally styled) wore their politics on their sleeves: “The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel”, says the spoken voice at the beginning of “The Dead Flag Blues”. There have also been Jewish references early on – see the cover of the Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada EP. Many members of Godspeed, Silver Mt Zion and related acts are Jewish, including the members of experimental klezmer band Black Ox Orkestar, and they have long expressed their non- or anti-Zionist politics, whether implied or explicitly. Indeed, I recall when I interviewed Efrim in – hard to believe! – 2003, we discussed the difficulty in reconciling our Jewishness with the actions of Israel, and I remain thankful to them; the presence of Jewish voices of dissent has always been important for me in understanding my own identity.
So their latest album was always going to be a response to the last 12 months of grief and horror. “NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD” is particularly cutting, as the ever-increasing number of dead in Gaza now exceeds 40,000 and the invasion of Lebanon carries on with a mounting toll of innocent lives lost and destroyed. As ever, instrumental music can only express what’s already in our hearts, but the shortest track on the album, “BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL”, with its collapsing minor-key string loops is a touching work of mourning.

Ida Duelund – Misi Miamo [Probably available at Initiated Records/Ida Duelund Bandcamp soon]
In 2022 I discovered the Danish duo Lueenas, featuring Ida Duelund on double bass and Maria Jagd on violin. It turns out Duelund had spent some time studying in Melbourne, but is back in Copenhagen now. Her debut solo album Sibo will be out in January on Initiated Records. Duelund sings and plays bowed double basses and picked acoustic guitar, and is joined by Nils Gröndahl’s detuned violins and Liss Wessberg’s trombone, making for a sound that’s by turns murky and precise, lugubriously avant-garde but jazzy. The very lovely “Misi Miamo” is the first single from the album, and while it doesn’t seem to be on the artist or label Bandcamps yet, a freaky video has been released for the song.

Glen Rey. – tomorrow once the rain stops [.jpeg Artefacts/Bandcamp]
Eora’s Mitch J.G. Reynolds, fka Bluetung, releases his second pair of tracks under the Glen Rey. moniker (full stop included) for Naarm-based .jpeg Artefacts. Somewhere between low-key lo-fi indie songs and the more abstract guitar-manipulations of Bluetung, these unassuming pieces hold the promise of more beauty to come.

David Chesworth – Metals [David Chesworth Bandcamp]
Agéd though I am, Naarm/Melbourne musician David Chesworth hails from long before my time, debuting with the electronic experimentation of 50 Synthesizer Greats in 1979, and around the same time founding the idiosyncratic postpunk band Essendon Airport. With a large archive of older works on his Bandcamp, he’s able to slip out occasional new works like the two tracks that make up Sun Rocks and Metals. No information accompanies the release, which contains the 15-minute “Stone Chamber” and the 7-minute “Metals”… Interestingly, I just discovered that when I downloaded it, the tracks were “of rocks” and “of metals”, and the first was only 10 minutes. I’ve re-downloaded and the first track’s ominous drone is extended out and begins with a resonant gong tone as well as more emphasised bass. “Metals” is much busier, with rattles and clangs in amongst the horn-like tones which overlap dissonantly. In fact, electronic horns, flutes, organs and strings evoke modern composition as much as musique concrète or electroacoustic sound-art. What a nice surprise turning up unannounced on Bandcamp Friday!

Rafael Anton Irisarri – Red Moon Tide (ft. KMRU) [Black Knoll Editions/Rafael Anton Irisarri Bandcamp]
The roots of Rafael Anton Irisarri‘s new album Façadisms, due on Nov 8th, came in 2016 as the Trump presidency loomed: a diner in Milan intended to mean “The American Dream” was instead called “Il Mito Americano”, or “The American Myth”. Eight years later, as the façade presented by the American Myth is even closer to collapse, Irisarri here enlists Kenyan sound-artist KMRU to build unsettling drones from the wreckage.

Taylor Deupree – Looming Brittle [Nettwerk/Bandcamp]
With his quietly influential label 12k, with his mastering skills, and most importantly with his own music, Taylor Deupree has been an important name in ambient music and sound-art for the past 2+ decades. He recently signed to Canadian label Nettwerk, who in the ’80s and ’90s were known for industrial and electronic music, but who’ve branched out more broadly since the ’90s. So Deupree’s forthcoming Ash EP will come out through Nettwerk (it’s the second in fact, following last year’s Eev). The first single is gorgeous, full of sonic detail from field recordings, acoustic and electronic instrumentation.

Listen again — ~208MB

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Alan Sparhawk – Heaven [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
Alan Sparhawk – Black Water [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
It’s almost 2 years now since the wonderful vocalist & drummer with Low, Mimi Parker, passed away from ovarian cancer. The core of Low was always Parker and her husband Alan Sparhawk, and the soul of the band was their otherworldly vocal harmonies. However immeasurable her loss was for all of us fans, it was achingly personal for Sparhawk, and naturally his first solo album White Roses, My God is imbued with grief. These songs came out of playing with their kids’ drum machine and synth setup, and Sparhawk made the interest choice of contrasting the couple’s vocal harmonies by harshly processing his voice with vocoder & auto-tune. This can make the songs a little difficult to warm to initially, but the consummate musicianship shines through – especially, I feel, on a track like “Heaven” which does develop into yearnful harmonies. Elsewhere, the beats gain an almost jungle-like denseness – but listen a few times and you’ll tune into the pure emotion.

Moin – Guess It’s Wrecked (feat. Olan Monk) [AD93/Bandcamp]
Here’s the first appearance of UK postpunk/breakbeat/electronic duo Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead aka Raime tonight, here with their trio Moin. Moin finds them officially joined with percussionist Valentina Magaletti, who contributed drums to many of the Raime releases. Previously, Moin has been a kind of ersatz postpunk thing, with jagged, minimalist guitar riffs and taut rhythms embellished with Raime’s characteristic sampled vocal jabs. For the forthcoming album You Never End, they’ve invited singers to guest on about half the tracks, drawing the music further into postpunk “band music”, although Olan Monk‘s singing still finds itself interrupted (or hyped?) by little vocal snatches.

Gazelle Twin – Two Worlds – Keeley Forsyth Mix [Invada Records/Bandcamp]
An unexpected single this week came from Elizabeth Bernholz aka Gazelle Twin, whose 2023 album Black Dog brought a more personal touch to her processed vocals and experimental electronics. The second remix from that album comes from the force of nature known as Keeley Forsyth, whose dramatic vocals and skeletal arrangements transform “Two Worlds” into a mysterious duet.

Nubya Garcia – Triumphance [Concord Jazz/Bandcamp]
Odyssey, the second album from London-based saxophonist Nubya Garcia, is garnering praise from all around, for good reason. The album features brilliant performances from the cream of young British jazz players, along with sumptuous arrangements for strings and collaborations with women from the jazz world (Esperanza Spalding) and soul (Georgia Anne Muldrow). There are joyous, catchy jazz pieces like the incredible piano-led single “The Seer”, but Garcia’s love of reggae also shines through on the last track, “Triumphance”, where the jazz chops fly over low-skanking dub bass and drums.

Ulrich Troyer – Latzfonser Kreuz feat. Mamadou Diabate & Hamidou Koita [4Bit Productions]
On his latest 7″ preceding the Transit Tribe album due later this year, Viennese glitch-dub artist Ulrich Troyer brings us a tune featuring, and co-written by, the legendary Mamadou Diabate on vocals and talking drum, along with Hamidou Koita on vocals and djembe. Both are originally from Burkina Faso and now based in Vienna, teaming up for what the three describe as “dubbed-out Nyahbinghi-style electro-beats”. It’s an inspired combination, showcasing the nimble percussion and sweet vocals of the two guests.

BANKERT – pick’em up eat’em up [BANKERT Bandcamp]
BANKERT – ~osc [BANKERT Bandcamp]
The artist/s behind BANKERT prefer to remain anonymous – in fact, hilariously, if you go to bankert.world and click “Info” and then click “hello, my name is”, you’ll get a different random name for the roles of “Music Producer”, “Web Developer” and “Graphic Artist” each time. Their music is a mixture of idm, glitched bass and deconstructed club across their now seven “ol” releases, so from ol06 we segue’d out of the previous dub tunes with some hip-hop-sampling post-dubstep, and then some more sparse glitchy beats’n’bass from ol07.

Isaka & TRYCE – Slang Overload [SFX/Bandcamp]
The second release in 2024 from Zoë Mc Pherson & Alessandra Leone‘s SFX label comes from Berlin-based Isaka, five years after her last. In keeping with the label’s interdisciplinary approach, this release has a website of its own in which the deconstructed bass music is integrated into a video game-like interface – it might have more features once more tracks are available.

Yally – Payday [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
Powell‘s Diagonal Records is celebrating 10 years of releases with a big 4 x 12″ compilation, but also some bonus bits like this – Yally is Raime‘s alias for more explicitly jungle and bass music – and Raime are also Moin in collaboration with Valentina Magaletti, as heard earlier. Here they’ve contributed a taut piece of minimalist jungle, and because warped vocal samples are their thing, there’s a dramatisation of, they claim, some early email exchanges they had with Powell.

Tim Reaper & Kloke – Wildstyle [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Few could lay claim to being as central to the contemporary jungle revival than Tim Reaper (real name Ed Alloh), whose many collaborations on his Future Retro London and elsewhere have brought together many of the names in new jungle and originals too. Recently he’s had a very fruitful partnership with Naarm/Melbourne-based Kloke, so it’s rather lovely that it’s their duo that brings the first full jungle album to the legendary UK bass label Hyperdub. In Full Effect is full of rinse-outs and rattling subs, breakdowns and perfectly crafted breaks.

Djrum – Codex [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
If Tim Reaper is the patron saint of new jungle (and it’s fair to say that there are a few other contenders), then Felix Manuel aka Djrum is one of the most important names guiding jungle into the future, with an inimitable style that blends dubstep, house, techno and jungle with influences as broad as classical and jazz – but when he gets going, his slicing & dicing of beats is dazzling, as is his ability to somehow keep it focused on the dancefloor as well as the belly, heart and mind. It’s very nice to see him signed to Houndstooth for Meaning’s Edge, his first EP in 5 years, which will be out on November 22nd – with more on its way. This new music gains from his studies in ethnomusicology, specifically adorned on this release with various flutes from the Indian subcontinent, Japan and the Western Classical tradition.

Klara Lewis – Top [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
Around 10 years ago, Klara Lewis emerged as one of the most exciting young creators in the experimental electronic field, with the Msuic EP on fellow Swede Peder Mannerfelt’s label, and the Ett album on the legendary Editions Mego. This sums up her approach perfectly: the playful but uncompromising sonic destruction of Mego and the dancefloor perturbations of Peder Mannerfelt. Since then Lewis has collaborated with Mannerfelt, the great Simon Fisher Turner, Nik Colk Void and others, but tragically Peter Rehberg, Editions Mego’s founder and impish driving force, passed away suddenly in 2021. The artists involved with the label were keen to continue the label’s operations, although initially the aim was to get all the music slated for the label released. Lewis’ new album Thankful may have been in the queue in some form, but has turned out now as a rather touching tribute to the label head and artist. Indeed, there’s a track on there that’s a direct tribute to Rehberg’s infamous & beloved “Track 3” from the Get Out album, an 11 minute track that embodies his spirit, turning an orchestral Ennio Morricone loop into a harsh noise drone track. Elsewhere on the album there’s a sweet ukelele appearance which morphs in the last track into another hypnotic drone-noise etude, but there’s also the cheeky industrial beats on “Top”, a track that’s named for one of Rehberg’s favourite words. Lewis is intimately familiar with the aesthetics of MEGO since its late-’90s inception, and gently guides it into the fast & loose genre-dismissal of her generation with love & affection.

Uniform – Permanent Embrace (Nightmare City Mix) [Sacred Bones Records/Bandcamp]
I’ve played New York band Uniform before courtesy of their two electrifying collaborations with the body (here and here), in which Uniform’s hardcore punk-meets-industrial energy met the body’s black metal/doom expanding into experimental electronic and corrupted pop. Only a couple of months ago Uniform released their cathartic American Standard album, an impassioned howl in which singer Michael Berdan fights the internal and external pressures on his mental health as he suffers from bulimia nervosa. While the album is characterised by harsh vocals, heavy drums and guitars, there’s an electronic undercurrent that carries a lot of emotion too, so it’s pretty amazing to hear the synthwave backgrounds stripped of the industrial elements on Nightmare City. If this is ambient it’s very unsettling, and it’s a dramatic contrast to the album proper, but not just background stems for music nerds. You don’t need to be into industrial metal or punk to appreciate these pieces.

Robert Curgenven – AGEN_SIS [Cloudchamber Recordings/Cloudchamber Bandcamp/Robert Curgenven Bandcamp]
For many years, the work of Robert Curgenven – originally from Sydney, then based in Europe & Ireland – has revolved around two interests: environmental field recordings and the recontextualised, powerful sound of the pipe organ. I’m doing him a disservice here as there’ve been many other elements in his work, including repurposed turntables, guitars feeding back, piano and more. Still, it’s notable that his forthcoming album Agenesis builds on these fundamentals: there are field recordings from the contrasting locations of Katherine, NT and Akihabara, Japan, and there are Irish pipe organ recordings, and there is feedback from a no-input mixing desk, dubplates and acetates. But there’s also the imposing sub bass pressure from location recordings of bass played through a Funktion One soundsystem in Poland. This bass focus displaces Curgenven’s more academic-seeming longform sonic explorations into spaces more attuned to club deconstructions, while also gesturing at his early twin loves of grindcore and 20th century orchestral works. The documentarian nature of his field recording works and his site-specific pipe organ and dubplate recordings is repudiated here: “agenesis” describes a situation in which some element is absent. Thus the early tracks pair throbbing sub bass with discordant drones, while later field recordings flow over and under the bass and discords, only to be replaced with snarling electronics, and all that sturm und drang is felt in its absence in track 6’s organ drones. There’s a wealth of detail across all tracks, and the gradual contrasts draw the listener’s ear to different elements each time you listen.

Mark Templeton – Impossible/Bottle [Faitiche/Bandcamp]
I’ve played Canadian sound-artist Mark Templeton a fair bit over the years, and most recently only in June, when his detourned and decontextualised loops of religious meditation tapes appeared on enmossed. Two Verses marks his first release on Jan Jelinek’s Faitiche, a label that combines meticulous sound-manipulation with playfulness. For this release, Templeton asked Faitiche regular Andrew Pekler to select unreleased material from Templeton’s old hard drives, which were fashioned into bifurcated pieces in AB structure – one loping, looping work sliding into another, often contrasting audio environment. These unusual structures, which somehow emphasis asymmetry despite their dual nature, do capture that Mark Templeton mystery in which fuzzy, unstable tapes are manipulated in the digital realm and vice-versa – an aesthetic clearly in sympathy with Jelinek’s Faitiche. Disarmingly compelling.

Başak Günak – Canon Bee [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Başak Günak – Wings [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Turkish musician and sound-artist Başak Günak is best known for her electronic productions and collaborations under the alias Ah! Kosmos, but here branches out under her own name for the incredible Rewilding album on the impeccably curated Subtext Recordings. This is very much an electroacoustic work in which electronics interact with and manipulate sounds of instruments including the halldorophone, organ, piano and bass clarinet, as well as some vocals and site recordings of installations. In amongst this, Günak works in deconstructed Anatolian folk-song, and personal sounds (whispers and murmurs), developing her theme of (auto-)rewilding in various ways, not always as you’d expect: so the more grounded acoustic performances are set free via electronics, and her own installation work and compositions are transformed too. Music to get lost in.

Colin Riley, Gareth Davis and Rutger Zuydervelt – Of birds with songs of coiled light [Squeaky Kate Music]
Two artists quite familiar to Utility Fog are invited here to interpret a hybrid work by UK composer Colin Riley. Written as part composition and part improvisation, it’s more of a collaboration with the Dutch musicians Gareth Davis on bass clarinet and Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) on electronics. These two are longtime collaborators, so there’s an alchemy to the interactions between the acoustic instrument and the electronics, but it does find itself in a particular avant-garde space via Riley’s compositional input.

Malcolm Pardon – The End [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
The second album from Swedish musician Malcolm Pardon follows on conceptually and musically from his solo debut Hello Death from 2021, where he took inspiration from a health scare to look death in the face and respond with equal parts good humour and seriousness. Pardon was one half of Roll The Dice with Stockholm club/pop maverick Peder Mannerfelt, whose analogue synth-based sound took in acoustic piano refrains with motorik krautrock as much as they feinted towards dub or the outskirts of clubland. Pardon’s music on these two solo albums also brings piano in alongside his synthesizers, approaching “The Abyss” with more peace than foreboding. Just lovely stuff.

Mara – At Every Corner [Pure Space/Bandcamp]
A new full-length from Sydney sound-artist Mara Schwedtfeger is always welcome, and this one comes from the Home Listening series from Pure Space, the usually-club-focused label from ex-FBi DJ Andy Garvey. Mara’s practice brings in recordings from travels – field recordings and found sound, but also recordings of her own performances repurposed for these works. Her viola appears on some tracks, but the title track is based around audio from Seoul and other parts of South Korea, weaving in snippets of conversation, her own voice, traffic and twinkling electronics. The more closely you listen, the more rewarding this album is.

Tom Allum – Tension Expanded / The Break Collection [Tom Allum Bandcamp]
Western Australian sound-artist Tom Allum frequently works with field recordings and recordings of sound in particular spaces. He’s just released a single track, “Tension Expanded / The Break Collection“, which isn’t about drum breaks at all, but rather it’s a piece that’s been created in response to an exhibition from Luke Aleksandrow called The Break Collection: Sounds of the Tropics. The breakage here is ceramics that were broken in the tropical rainforest of far north Queensland. So Allum is still working with the sounds of nature along with the sounds of humanity, and interestingly the ambient track he’s created harkens back to the ambient techno of the early ’90s, even it’s not harnessing sampled drum breaks!

Alex Jasprizza – Throw It In [Alex Jasprizza Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney saxophonist Alex Jasprizza has been trickling tracks out here and there, always engaging music accompanied by the sounds of nature. “Throw It In” is the first single from his forthcoming Waterways, in which his saxophone is embedded in processed field recordings, and lovely prepared piano sneaks in halfway through. Keen to hear what else he has up his sleeve.

Seaworthy & Matt Rösner – Whispered Surfaces [12k/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, Sydney’s Cameron Webb aka Seaworthy and Perth’s Matt Rösner released a 22-minute track for Andrew Khedoori’s Longform Editions called Bundanon. These two expert ambient artists are longtime proponents of combining music and field recordings, and have previously collaborated on an album in 2021. Their follow-up, Deep Valley is again released on Taylor Deupree’s 12k, and like the eponymous track, it was recorded during a residency at Bundanon, the beautiful estate in the Shoalhaven that used to be the home of Arthur Boyd. The landscape that Boyd painted is deeply embedded in the tunes here, where any musical performances can take minutes to enter. In these pieces, the birds, insects, frogs, waterways and foliage are equally important as the guitar, piano and electronics. Truly lovely.

Dialect – Overgrown Song [RVNG Intl./Bandcamp]
Andrew PM Hunt, drummer in the phenomenal & bizarre hypnotic kraut/postrock band Ex-Easter Island Head, has made music as Dialect for at least 10 years, mostly released by RVNG Intl.. His new album Atlas of Green is an electroacoustic delight, reminiscent of the heyday of folktronica, with pitch-shifted acoustic guitars, synth pads and piano in the mix. It’s really reminiscent of certain Four Tet remixes circa 2003-4 and The Books’ first couple of albums, which coming from me is the highest of praise.

Mazza Vision – Monogram (excerpt) [Sub Rosa/Bandcamp]
Claude Pailliot and Gaëtan Collet were both members of Tone Rec, the eccentric experimental electronic/postrock band who released a few albums on the great Brussels-based Sub Rosa label in the 1990s. They then then took a left turn into a kind of electro-clash as DAT Politics, which I never enjoyed as much as Tone Rec, so it’s interesting to find the core pair with a new project called Mazza Vision, which turns back to weird noise-rock-tronica. That combination of glitch, krautrock and drone makes Ohm Spectrum a perfect match for a particular thread of Utility Fog music. Love love.

Listen again — ~205MB

A mixed bag tonight, from experimental indie-jazz to krautrock, post-industrial to electroacoustic, percussive beats to ambient beatscapes, doom dub to d’n’b to noise metal to electroacoustic sound-art to jazz-folk and back to experimental indie.

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Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder [American Dreams Records/Bandcamp]
Wendy Eisenberg – In the Pines [American Dreams Records/Bandcamp]
Starting with the avant-garde songwriting and contemporary jazz of Wendy Eisenberg, a talented and unique guitarist working in the jazz & improv worlds, with solo albums of aleatoric improv and extended techniques a la Derek Bailey, but also songwriterly albums of spiky, lo-fi songs the closest comparison to which I can find is London-based American musician Ashley Paul. Eisenberg’s latest album Viewfinder is released by the impeccable American Dreams Records, and is one of the songwriterly albums, but brings in more musicians so Eisenberg can expand their arrangements with bass, drums, horns, piano and electronics on various tracks – and some of those tracks are very long! The middle pair of tracks are 22 minutes and 12 minutes long, ranging from fully composed to improv sections. The album arose from Eisenberg’s experience with laser eye surgery, the disorientation that comes with seeing the world with new clarity, and the questions that remain about the ways that seeing imposes the see-er’s assumptions upon the visual world. Hence “Viewfinder”, the title track of which appears as a sparse 4-minute work for voice and solo trumpet (“Viewfinder (Intro)”), and then a 4 minutes of grinding distorted guitar interleaved with that avant-garde trumpet, percussion and bass, with Eisenberg’s vocal melodies not quite sitting in key with the rest. But the best is saved for last, after all this chaos… For over two minutes, “In the Pines” begins with the soft, warm plucked double bass of Tyrone Allen II, before falling into a slow waltz-time jazz-blues, with Eisenberg’s two-note guitar chords, and Booker Stardrum’s brushed snare all that accompanies Eisenberg’s heart-pulling vocal melody. And then the second verse adds Andrew Links’ piano, a gorgeous moment that opens the song up while keeping the Andante tempo and the general sparseness. And then on into a completely restrained trombone solo from Zekereyya el-Magharbel. “In the Pines” is one of my songs of the year, and I’ve already listened to it half a dozen times. Pure poise and gentle bittersweetness. “God what a lonely / lonely point of view… Can you be / can you be / can you just be?”

Clark – Head Phone Hospital [Throttle Records]
Clark – Blood [Throttle Records]
Last year’s Sus Dog and Cave Dog from Clark found him singing for the first time. He’s now back with another soundtrack, In Camera, which expands on the cues he wrote for Naqqash Khalid‘s film of the same name. The IDM beats are toned down in favour of electronic arrangements that echo the classical orchestrations of some of his recent work, but it’s nice to hear his voice appearing – not only on the rather lovely cover of “Superstar“, a song originally popularised by The Carpenters, but also across the album, often used texturally like we heard on the two tracks here – reversed and twisted but still emotive in the way only voice can be.

Mazza Vision – Sun Riser [Sub Rosa/Bandcamp]
Claude Pailliot and Gaëtan Collet were both members of Tone Rec, the eccentric experimental electronic/postrock band who released a few albums on the great Brussels-based Sub Rosa label in the 1990s. They then then took a left turn into a kind of electro-clash as DAT Politics, which I never enjoyed as much as Tone Rec, so it’s interesting to find the core pair with a new project called Mazza Vision, which turns back to weird noise-rock-tronica. That combination of glitch, krautrock and drone results in slow burners like the first track here taken from their debut album Ohm Spectrum, the rest of which we’ll get to hear next week.

Lint – What’s wrong with that sentence [Lint Bandcamp]
Lint – Curb Cloud [Lint Bandcamp]
Mitch Jones is a founding member of Sydney industrial/electronic originators Scattered Order, and his wife Dru Jones has been involved either making brilliant art or with noisemaking too since the early ’80s. Despite this, it’s only for the last 5 years or so that the two have released music together in duo form, as Lint. Mitch solo is the little hand of the faithful, and Dru is Skipism. Together they weave the artistic, sample-collage of Dru’s iPad-mediated work with Mitch’s further sample deconstruction and strangely contemporary beats – but I feel like Mirror of your own hopes sees the duo finding its own character more than ever before, something quite freeform, almost sinister at times, but also quite humorous.

Martina Berther – Obertone [Kit Records/Bandcamp]
Martina Berther – Mini Gong [Kit Records/Bandcamp]
Martina Berther x Vic Bang – Arco [Kit Records/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, UK label Kit Records released a very idiosyncratic album from Swiss bass player Martina Berther. Bass Works: As I Venture Into is performed on Fender Jazzbass, but you can hardly hear that on many of the tracks, where the instrument is stretched into drones or compressed into chipmunk riffs, or played as percussion. I discovered this album through an EP of remixes by Argentinian sound-artist Vic Bang, who transposes “Bass Works” into Brass Woks, disassembling and rebuilding Berther’s sounds into two tracks of furious activity that’s as much IDM as it is electroacoustic or musique concrète.

Nídia & Valentina – Nasty [Latency/Bandcamp]
London-based percussion Valentina Magaletti seems to be everywhere these days, doing everything from postpunk dub to indiepop to experimental improv, and now she appears on French experimental label Latency collaborating with Afro-Portuguese dance producer Nídia Sukulbembe. Nídia’s club-tooled kuduro is already all about the rhythm, but here it’s tempered with Magaletti’s own drums as well as melodic percussion like marimba, while Magaletti also contributes melodies on flute and synth. Tom Halstead of the duo Raime, who collaborate with Magaletti as Moin, edited and mixed these contributions into their final shape. Estradas means “roads”, and the cover shows the burnout marks as Nídia and Valentina speed off into the distance, while we follow in their wake.

gi – Weir [world of knots]
Dina Rocaille – Seuvrage [world of knots]
A few weeks ago I played the incredible debut album from Eora/Sydney’s Gigi De Lacy, released on Naarm/Melbourne’s Absorb. But gi has been putting together her own label, and this coming week sees the first compilation from world of knots. Gi herself contributes a piece of her organic, busy IDM, and she’s gathered a troupe of like-minded producers from around the world. Tellingly, the album is “not intended as a collection of songs but as a singular listen”, with ambient pieces and more techno/d’n’b-influenced pieces all sharing a certain aesthetic of organic grime and musical abstraction. I’m not sure this genre has a name yet, but the artists here are at the forefront of it. As well as gi, I played Lyon-based Dina Rocaille‘s skittery beats which emphasis bass and bar-lines a little more than the label boss.

Harvestman – Clouds are Relatives (The Bug – ‘Amtrak Dub Mix’) [Neurot Recordings/Bandcamp]
The Bug – Floored(Point of impact) [Relapse Records/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, Steve Von Till of post-metal heroes Neurosis – who are behind the essential Neurot Recordings – announced a Triptych of albums under his instrumental Harvestman alias. Harvestman is one expression of Von Till’s “rural psychedelia”, mixing folk traditions with the electronics of Neurosis’ alter egos Tribes of Neurot, and making concrete the links between the low-slung, slow-moving genres of doom and dub. Each of the three albums feature a long doom-folk-psych track that’s reprised in a dub version – and who better to provide the third dub than The Bug? Kevin Martin has roots going back decades in metal and punk, having booked some of the earliest Godflesh gigs and then partnered with Justin K Broadrick on a run of groundbreaking albums as Techno Animal. The pair still work together now, and in the wake of Relapse‘s reissues of two ’90s Techno Animal albums, the label has signed The Bug. The first release is Machine, an album-length collection of heavyweight tracks from the five Machine EPs that Martin released on his own Pressure label between late 2023 and earlier this year. These tracks were created to push his massive Pressure soundsystem to its limit (I’ve bathed in its sub bass glory a few years back in London), and I’m glad to see that all five EPs are available in a 2CD set alongside the 12-track vinyl release.

Braille – Dirt Fam (Maude Vôs Rude Remix) [Hotflush Recordings/Bandcamp]
Hotflush Recordings released the full Triple Transit album from Praveen Sharma aka Braille last month, preceded by a string of singles, and the album continues to give, with the first EP of Triple Transit Remixes out now. The album surfs garage and rave sounds and avoids the slower climes of dubstep, so LA experimentalist Maude Vôs dubs out the vocal stabs and dense production of “Dirt Fam” into a kind of dub techno/dubstep hybrid complete with wub-wub bass and sweeping synth clouds.

Mako – Direct Source [Metalheadz/Bandcamp]
One of the most-anticipated drum’n’bass albums of the year comes from Mako, who runs Bristol’s Utopia Music but also has a long connection with Metalheadz. Oeuvre Part 2 does indeed follow Mako’s 2020 album Oeuvre, also released by Metalheadz, and is full of high-energy d’n’b, looking back at the genre’s history while also nodding at more recent hybrids with footwork, other bass musics, and the resurgence of jungle. The constant rhythmic invention of “Direct Source” is jungle at its finest.

KK Null – Ghost Dub Awakening 02 [No Rent/Bandcamp]
Circling back towards metal & noise we join KK Null, whose highly influential band Zeni Geva combined noise rock with elements of prog, metal and hardcore. But Kazuyuki Kishino is just as well known as the extremely prolific KK Null, and has moved between guitar and electronic noisemakers, and has a unique style of dense digital sample destruction. Ghost Dub Awakening, released on Pennsylvania’s No Rent Records, throws breakbeats into his digital blender, resulting in something that sometimes has rhythms you could dance to without breaking too many bones.

The Body – End of Line [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Meanwhile, recent Wire Magazine cover stars The Body have made their own journey from blackened doom metal to something all their own, mixing metal with industrial, dub and just about anything else. The Crying Out of Things which is out in early November on Thrill Jockey, promises more glorious negativity, more mashing up of genres into a industrial metal stew with Chip King’s high-pitched screaming and all-consuming guitars, Lee Buford’s massive drums and various guests, all tied together with the electronics and ultra-saturated production of Seth Manchester. Gird your loins and save the date!

Ghost Phone (uncredited) – DARKNESS FINDS HOME WITH U [Ghost Phone]
It’s not entirely possible to identify the artists on Ghost Phone releases, even though the name is sometimes used for remixes – it’s an anonymous collective as far as I can tell, and GHOST PHONE 008 is named as V/A. It’s four tracks of various types of bass music from Bristol, r’n’b edits taking in weightless 160bpm, Jersey Club and footwork-laced jungle, before finishing up with wispy Bristolian post-dubstep on “DARKNESS FINDS HOME WITH U”.

Elio Martusciello / Ossatura – etèrico [Elio Martusciello Bandcamp]
Elio Martusciello / Ossatura – sottrazione immateriale [Elio Martusciello Bandcamp]
The new album from Italian sound-artist & composer Elio Martusciello, AKOUSMA-MOTHER – subtitled “umbilical cord” – serves as an autobiographical document, channel-jumping through an array of genres from electroacoustic improv to songform, experimental rock to grainy cut-up piano. It’s also a tribute to Martusciello’s late mother, describing the pre-natal world as “amniotic and acousmatic”: the term “acousmatic” was used by Pierre Schaeffer and others to describe music reproduced electronically with the original source obscured. Much of the material on the album is derived from his long-running trio Ossatura, with Luca Venitucci on piano/electric piano and electronics and Fabrizio Spera on drums, and on some tracks the full band is clearly heard, while elsewhere Martusciello obscures the sounds through processing and editing. As much as it’s a conceptual album about the cycle of life and our sensation of the world, there’s beauty here and humour too. Right in the middle of the album, the song “etèrico” appears, and the warm vocals from Martusciello have the demeanor of Tom Zé’s modernised samba, for all that it’s sung in Italian with deconstructed drums and wisps of guitar accompanying it. It’s really charming.

Build Buildings – Scattering Shreds of Wickerwork [laaps/Bandcamp]
Ben Tweel makes electroacoustic music as Build Buildings, processing acoustic instruments and household sounds – on the album Ecotone, released by laaps, he’s using the iPad app Samplr, which allows for processing audio using the iPad’s multitouch screen. The results are glitchy yet smooth, shifting layers of sound that are constantly moving but peaceful. On tonight’s track, “Scattering Shreds of Wickerwork”, the sounds of Tweel’s daughter Mia on clarinet are fed into the sampler.

Adrian Myhr Trio – Begynnelse [Øra Fonogram]
It’s always nice to include some purely acoustic music among the hybrid sounds, and there’s a wealth of this on the first album from Norwegian bassist Adrian Myhr‘s eponymous trio (out shortly on Norway’s Øra Fonogram). After 2 decades playing with ensembles in the Norwegian jazz scene, Myhr leads his trio through a different kind of hybrid music from our earlier electroacoustic works, melding folk with jazz and contemporary classical along with influences from Indian raga and Albanian vocal music. Myhr wields his bass as a melodic instrument as well as holding down basslines, while Rasmus Kjorstad brings his folk music experience on both violin and the Norwegian droned zither called the langeleik, and Jan Martin Gismervik switches between drums, a hanging vibraphone and harmonium. This chamber-folk-jazz is something of a speciality in Norwegian music, beautifully applied here: you can hear tight-knit string harmonies between harmonium, violin and double bass, with melody handed between the instruments, or folk violin sawing over rhythmic bass, or vibraphone chimes resonating over plucked bass and violin… Somewhere in here you can hear comparisons with Norwegian acts on the Hubro label, or Swiss musicians like Andreas Söderström or Tape, or the chamber-folk-jazz of Tin Hat Trio – all of which is to say, this is wonderful stuff worthy of seeking out.

My Brightest Diamond – I Saw a Glimpse [Western Vinyl/Bandcamp]
Shara Nova’s music as My Brightest Diamond has covered a lot of ground in the 18 years since her debut album Bring My Workhorse was released on Sufjan Stevens’ Asthmatic Kitty label. Like Sufjan himself, Nova applies classical rigour to indie rock, draws on electronic music and on her evangelical upbringing, and ends up with an incredibly rich body of work. I’m particularly fond of the album she made with New York contemporary classical ensemble yMusic, All Things Will Unwind. Her new album Fight The Real Terror is out now through Western Vinyl, and is some of her rawest music, forged in emotional times and inspired by the late, great Sinéad O’Connor. Nova’s demo versions of most of these songs ended up forming the basis of the album, with additional orchestrations and enhancements added on top, so it’s held down by grungy guitars, simple and direct. Of course with a musician and songwriter as talented as Shara Nova, a raw directness can be magical, not least on the closing track, which presents as a traditional folk song mourning today in hope for a better tomorrow, and right at the end the declamatory guitar swirls in a fug of distorted drones caught in a delay loop the decays for almost a minute before tailing off.

Listen again — ~204MB