Utility Fog

UuuuuutilitilitilitilityFfffffffogggggg!

As we were preparing the text for this week’s episode, the news came of the death from ovarian cancer of Mimi Parker from Low. She’d been sick all year but this was nevertheless absolutely heartbreaking and I spent Monday listening to nothing but Low. An angelic voice and a beautiful person. RIP.

LISTEN AGAIN to Sunday’s show, because there’s so much to listen to! Music is good! Stream on demand the FBi way, podcast here.

The Leaf Library – Agnes In The Square [Where It’s At Is Where You Are/The Leaf Library Bandcamp]
The Leaf Library – Badminton House [Where It’s At Is Where You Are/The Leaf Library Bandcamp]
I’ve been following London’s ever-versatile drone-pop/space-rock band The Leaf Library for some years. They have a talent for melodic indiepop hooks and krautrock grooves, but are just as happy making minimalist sound-art pieces, being remixed and remixing others, or taking those kraut-pop grooves into stratospheric 20-minute hypno-jams. Our opening track tonight originally came from a Second Language comp and displays their pop prowess, while the second comes from a 2012 Olympic-themed compilation from their current label Where It’s At Is Where You Are, and seems to model its beats on hits of badminton racquets.

Lueenas – In The Search feat. Emma Acs [Barkhausen Recordings/Bandcamp]
Lueenas – Gaia [Barkhausen Recordings/Bandcamp]
A few weeks ago I played two preview tracks from this incredible self-titled album from Danish duo Lueenas. Here are two more. They are Ida Duelund on double bass, drum machine, Moog bass and “pedals”, and Maria Jagd on violin and pedals. The string instruments are the core, but some of the best material comes when the violin is screeching through distortion and the double bass is producing thundering drones. That said, tonight’s selections are both on the more subdued side, including a gorgeous piece of almost-jazz featuring a touching vocal from Emma Acs (whose current band is Evil House Party). Through the album there are filmic violin swells, drones, thudding rhythms from the instruments’ bodies, and groaning noise drones as well as beautiful pizzicato lines and delicate string interactions. Very special stuff.

Pleasure – BE SAFE (YOU CAN GET NALOXONE IN NSW WITHOUT PRESCRIPTION FROM ANY PHARMACY) 191012 [Disasters By Choice/Bandcamp]
Pleasure – HARDLY 210203 [Disasters By Choice/Bandcamp]
Sydney’s Pleasure are a trio of drums and synths and occasionally other instruments, all talented multi-instrumentalists. They’re led by Adam Connelly, with Hugh Deacon and the ever-busy Jonathan Boulet (look! He has a Wikipedia page!) Their music is always improvised, but unlike their great album from last year that was all recorded in Saint Albans, Chop Wood, Carry Water collects bits from the last 3 years or so. It’s motorik at times, a bit postpunk, it’s primitive but sophisticated (yup) and also just plain fun.

CS + Kreme – Would You Like A Vampire (feat. Bridget St. John) [The Trilogy Tapes/Bandcamp]
CS + Kreme – Pink Mist [The Trilogy Tapes/Bandcamp]
The work of Conrad Standish and Sam Karmel as CS + Kreme seems representative of a certain segment of the Melbourne experimental music scene, with Karmel’s history in bands like Bum Creek, while Standish (brother of HTRK’s Jonnine) has inhabited the indie rock sphere for a couple of decades. The CS + Kreme duo has seemed to relish a kind of shapelessness, from smooth lo-fi electro-pop on their early EPs through to gradually more jagged edges and post-punk/dub aesthetics from the much-loved Snoopy LP a couple of years ago. Now comes Orange, an even greater departure into post-punk experimentalism, with bubbling drum machine patterns, disembodied vocal samples, a little spooky cocktail jazz piano (maybe that’s a stretch) and a side-long drone, distortion & drum machine opus with help from James Rushford on various keyboard instruments. For my money, this is by far their best effort and a 2022 essential.

Deepchild – Songs You’ll Never Hear [A Strangely Isolated Place/Bandcamp]
Deepchild – Now It Is Me Being Breathed The Veil Breaks [A Strangely Isolated Place/Bandcamp]
Sydney prodigal son Deepchild was a regular on 2ser and FBi for many years who started making beats around the same I did in the late ’90s, and was comfortably ensconsed in the Berlin club scene, playing at the likes of Berghain for years. He released his stunning Fathersong on Mille Plateaux earlier this year, and its follow-up Mycological Patterns is now out on ambient/idm blog-turned-label A Strangely Isolated Place. It’s a one-two punch of ambient techno bliss from an artist of great depth who found immense success among a small cadre of music-makers and connoisseurs but struggled to break out in the way he deserved. Some of the half-forgotten club and pop sounds filtered through grainy delays and drones from Fathersong are echoed here (on both of tonight’s selections), but this fungal-themed album also harnesses Holly Herndon’s Holly+ voice model on two tracks, and sneaks into beatless techno territory on some more uplifting compositions. Wonderful stuff.

Christophe Bailleau & Friends – The Dream Card [Optical Sound/Bandcamp]
Christophe Bailleau & Friends – Mère Nature [Optical Sound/Bandcamp]
French label Optical Sound specialises in French sound-art from cross-disciplinary artists, although from further away, Simon Fisher Turner, Robin Guthrie and others have turned up there on occasion. On new album Shooting Stars Can Last, Belgian “free musician” Christophe Bailleau decided to bring some community to lockdown life by inviting friends to provide field recordings, electronic programming, instrumental soundscapes and the like for this hybrid album. The result is a work that rejects easy classification, at times offering up glitchily-edited folktronica, at times post-classical pastiche, at times gothic chanson-dub. Whatever it is, it’s compelling listening, and a little window into the francophone sound-art scene.

Loom & Thread – Causal Ambiguity [Macro/Bandcamp]
Loom & Thread – O**ne* [Macro/Bandcamp]
Leipzig/Berlin band Loom & Thread aim to turn the traditional jazz piano trio inside-out, much like pianist Tom Schneider’s other band KUF do to dance-pop. Tobi Fröhlich on double bass and Daniel Klein on drums are immaculate jazz players, and Schneider is a brilliant jazz pianist, but his nimble playing is also fed back into the trio improvisations by way of his sampler: sped up, stuttered into static clouds of notes, shifted in time. We’re told this happens in real-time but if so, he’s masterfully controlling the sampler simultaneously with his keyboard gymnastics… I feel like there are digital re-edits of the jazz improvs, but in any case this is a brilliant and unique take on post-jazz, with moments of true beauty and dazzling sections of both instrumental prowess and technological creativity.

Tim Reaper – Elephant Workshops [Future Retro]
UK junglist and collaborator extraordinaire Tim Reaper often uses his own labels as a platform to cross-promote jungle & drum’n’bass producers around the world in team-ups, but here he’s finally dropping a solo EP on his Future Retro label. Submerged Into Darkness really is some of the hardest and darkest stuff I’ve heard from him in a while, but then we get “Elephant Workshops”, with a notably delicate & pretty piano intro and fleet-footed beats with sub-bass support and melancholy melodicism. Among his best tunes.

Hooverian Blur – Kill Chain [Sneaker Social Club]
On his second Sneaker Social Club EP of the year, UK rave obscurantist Hooverian Blur starts in jungle tekno territory before accelerating into syncopated jungle break-juggling.

Godwin. – Switchin Sidewayz Ft Outsider YP [Godwin. Bandcamp]
Strange Boy – Bronson (Godwin. Rmx Ft. JME) [Godwin. Bandcamp]
Hailing from Ireland, Godwin. is a producer known mostly for smooth r’n’b and hip-hop beats that have graced various rappers & singers from Ireland and beyond. In March he released his solo instrumental album The Beginning, but he’s keen to show his versatility and the appropriately-titled Unexpected is a excursion mostly into jungle & drum’n’bass, accompanied by various MCs both sampled and collaborative. Fellow Irishman Outsider YP joins him on “Switchin Sidewayz”, and also included is a junglist re-cut of a recent single from Limerick rapper Strange Boy, with added vox grabbed from grime original JME. On the EP this segues straight into some pitch-perfect ragga jungle. At 20 years old, Godwin. is on an upward trajectory.

Vaal – 4th Generation Smart Phone [Bedouin Records/Bandcamp]
Vaal – Song Zero [Bedouin Records/Bandcamp]
Eliot Sumner has been producing electronic music as Vaal for around a decade, but only started releasing it relatively recently. They are also known as a singer & songwriter under their own name, both for punk/post-punk and electro-pop, as well as an actor – and if you recognize the surname, that’s because they are indeed the child of Gordon Sumner, better known as Sting, with actress Trudie Styler. The name Vaal was taken as a way of being anonymous, and even though “Eliot Sumner” is connected with this album, the family connection goes unnoted. And while I have to admit that the Police and Sting’s early solo music were among the first rock & pop I became a fan of as a schoolkid, there’s near-zero connection with this particular music at all – it’s just really fucking good. Unlike Nosferatu, their 2019 album that was much more along techno lines, this album incorporates breakbeats galore, from drum’n’bass and drill’n’bass (see “4th Generation Smart Phone”) to more trip-hop like stylings, along with noisy but cinematic guitars and electronics. It’s really very Bedouin Records, which is always a drawcard.

Lårry – CMmL_CoE3 [BleeD]
Berlin-based Lårry has released EPs previously on labels like Super Hexagon and Awkwardly Social. His new mini-album out from revived London techno label BleeD, titled Over The Why, showcases leftfield techno at a broad range of tempos, with IDM and bass influences. Maybe it’s because I love me some bass, or maybe it’s just because this is really well-done, but this seems to me great stuff to enjoy on headphones, in the car or to slip into a DJ set. Follow the BleeD Bandcamp as it’s not up for pre-order, but it’s out on Nov 18th.

Gantz – spineless [Gantz Bandcamp]
Turkish dubstep & experimental electronic producer Gantz has been on a Bandcamp rampage all year – actually much longer – and if you’re much of a UFog listener you will be have been reminded of this fact quite frequently. He’s just ported across his EPs originally released on V.I.V.E.K’s Innamind Recordings, including the excellent Pusher Acid, but there’s a small difference there: the original opening track “Axxon N” (which is great btw) has been replaced with the sparse and creepy “spineless”, which you may be able to identify as sampling The Weeknd’s huge choon “Earned It“. Yikes!

JK Flesh – Cruiser [Pressure]
JK Flesh – Crawler [Pressure]
If you know me at all, you know that Justin K Broadrick is one of my heroes. He’s voraciously creative in many spheres, from foundational grindcore/metal with Napalm Death, even more foundational industrial metal with Godflesh, wondrous shoegaze metal as Jesu, and meanwhile the ambient/dub/techno/hip-hop of Techno Animal and Ice with Kevin Martin aka The Bug (recently reformed as Zonal) and his other electronic work including a series of drum’n’bass 12″s as Tech Level 2 (also recently revived!) – not to mention the drone/noise of Final and countless other projects. Earlier this year he released an incredible IDM album under his Pale Sketcher moniker, and meanwhile the JK Flesh alias, initially a kind of mutant dubstep thing, has been an outlet for harsh and dirty industrial techno, often veering into surprisingly high tempos, but for the superb new Sewer Bait album for Kevin Martin’s own Pressure label the tempo slows right down to super scuzzy, pummelling but somehow, dare I say… comforting? Put this on in a dark room with a bunch of like-minded folk and joyfully wallow in the negative vibes.

Listen again — ~206MB

Tonight we go from dancehall and percussive beats through IDM and jungle to postpunk, glitch, postrock, neo-classical and folk.

LISTEN AGAIN – somebody has to! Podcast here, stream on demand from FBi.

Lady Lykez – Woza (Feat. Toya Delazy) [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Lady Lykez – Bully Dem [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
The entire Woza EP from Lady Lykez is produced by Scratchclart aka Scratcha DVA – it’s their second EP together, and it’s a perfect pairing. The north Londoner grew up as a battling MC, but here she leans heavily into the dancehall connections of UK hip-hop and dance music, as well as the South African ampiano influences that Scratcha has been championing for some time. The SA connection is cemented with an appearance on the title track from London-based Zulu princess (true!) Toya Delazy. The beats are infectious, the rhymes cutting and frequently hilarious. It’s fun and sharp.

DJ Plead – Louca [Livity Sound/Bandcamp]
Sydney’s Jared Beeler aka DJ Plead returns to the great Bristol label Livity Sound with another selection of beats that combine global dance styles with the percussion patterns and melodies of his Lebanese background. Beeler cut his teeth making cutting-edge beats for beloved Sydney trio BV/Black Vanilla before going it alone, and has moved from strength to strength. Bringing traditional rhythms into the electronic dance realm is a popular and exciting development at the moment, but there’s an argument to be made that DJ Plead was at the vanguard, and he continues to elegantly forge his own path.

Molotof – Omara [Rakete]
Down and across from Lebanon now we head to Cairo, with a short album by Molotof on the young Egyptian label Rakete. Molotof takes off from the Egyptian urban style of mahraganat, but the beats owe more to techno, with local percussion rhythms weaving in as well. This is a different strain of Egyptian electronic music from the stuff I’ve featured previously – ZULI, Abadir, 3Phaz et al. Let’s not forget the psych rock and free jazz bubbling along as well – the Egyptian music scene is thriving.

SCALPING – Flashforward (Squid Remix) [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
I almost missed this when it appeared in my Bandcamp feed. I’ve really enjoyed the electronic rock of SCALPING on Houndstooth, and actually I’ve also liked the jagged postpunk of fellow Bristolians Squid (one of those rock bands you’re surprised to find on Warp), but I couldn’t figure what a remix from them would be like. It turns out, very good! There’s a ravey aspect which is more in common with SCALPING than Squid, and the remix goes in a few directions over its almost 6 minutes.

Ryterski – Rimworld [Pointless Geometry]
Polish composer Rafał Ryterski studied classical composition, but is equally influenced by glitch & idm – and on Gaymers’ Cheatsheet there’s no small amount of hyperpop in there too. The hyperpop genre itself blends idm & glitch with frenetic computer game soundtracks (which in turn are influenced by jungle and rave), and many of its proponents emphasise queer identity, so Ryerski’s identification as a gaymer fits well into this aesthetic. I’m particularly interested in how this material fits into the strains of reconstructed jungle that are bubbling around at the moment – so this is also a nice segue into the new two tracks.

µ-Ziq – Iggy’s Song [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
µ-Ziq – Green Chaos [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
I may have gotten overexcited about this one – the Hello EP from Mike Paradinas aka µ-Ziq is out this coming Friday, so here’s a couple of previews. To my ears it’s got some of the best material from his yearlong revival of the melodic, experimental tribute to jungle that was his 1997 album Lunatic Harness, re-released as a double album with many contemporary tracks in the middle of the year. Meanwhile we’ve had the Goodbye EP earlier in the year, the Magic Pony Ride album alongside the Lunatic Harness reissue, and now the series is completed with Hello. Mike was in Australia at the start of September, playing Infinity Worm in Canberra and a club show in Melbourne, and I remember the rather irritating child’s scream running through one track! That’s “Iggy’s Song”, with a pitch-shifted sample of Mike’s son, and on record it’s a lot less irritating! In general there’s a darker quality to the tracks on this EP, but Mike’s irrepressible melodic sense still shines through, and it’s got some of the most tricksy yet danceable beats. Yes! Hello!! Yes!!!

Lakker – Dredger [Lakker Bandcamp]
All year Dublin-via-Berlin duo Lakker have been releasing a rave-influenced EP a month on their Bandcamp. October, of course, brings LKRTRX010, which may be the best so far. Jungle and jungle tekno vibes here, killer rhythms and deep synth pads, just how we like it in UFog Towers.

ASC – Hindsight [Auxillary]
Sometime during the pandemic, acclaimed US producer James Clements returned to jungle & drum’n’bass with a vengeance. The ASC name has been associated with grey area techno & ambient for some time, but before that it was autonomic drum’n’bass, and now he’s churning out dark jungle and d’n’b at such a rate that this month there are two simultaneously released 4-track EPs: Quantum State is this one, and the other is A Storm In Space. Definite sci-fi vibes on both, from blissful rolling breaks to complex chop-ups, lots of sub-rattling bass and warm, saturated pads. Delicious.

Moin – Melon [AD93/Bandcamp]
Moin – Foot Wrong [AD93/Bandcamp]
Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews’s Raime have been a favourite of mine and many others since their earliest releases over 10 years ago. Since the start they’ve been equally influenced by the propulsive breakbeats of jungle & UK hardcore on the one hand, and the angular basslines & riffs of postpunk on the other. Also characteristic of Raime’s tracks is the finely chopped vocal sample – often just a single phoneme, crying out on a syncopated accent, adding to the tautness of their funk as well as the disqueting aura. The brilliant drummer Valentina Magaletti has often been a silent partner on Raime releases, and for the last two albums in their side-project Moin, Magaletti is a full-time third member. Both Paste and last year’s Moot! find them extending the root tendencies of Raime, but with far more emphasis on live guitar and bass – drawing postpunk into hardcore territory – and those disquieting vocal chops are now extended into full phrases, usually American-accented, divorced from context but often more than a little sinister. Scary? Scary good.

Zacharias Szumer x Raung Jagat Synthetic – Soleiman, Jule (Atavistic Jam Module) [New Weird Australia/Bandcamp]
Zacharias Szumer x Raung Jagat Synthetic – Thena, Idrus, Hilga (Afterlife) [New Weird Australia/Bandcamp]
Last year Indonesian musician Rully Shabara, singer in Senyawa and many other projects, released an album of Synthetic Vocabulary – a collection of AI-generated (whatever that means) voices. Naarm/Melbourne musician and writer Zacharias Szumer liked these sounds so much that he decided to remix them into equally uncanny electronic songs. The named voices are credited on each track, sometimes “singing” together, pitch-bent into melodies by Szumer, who accompanies them with glitchy beats. It’s a bizarre cousin of Vocaloid or the Laurie Anderson cut-ups on Jean-Michel Jarre’s Zoolook, but really it’s its own thing.

Oiseaux-Tempête – Black Elephant [Sub Rosa/Nahal/Bandcamp]
Oiseaux-Tempête – Nu.e.s Sous La Comète [Sub Rosa/Nahal/Bandcamp]
When I first discovered Oiseaux-Tempête, around 2014, it was in the context of their first album being remixed by folks like Machinefabriek, Scanner, Do Make Say Think and others. Core members are guitarist Frédéric D. Oberland, bassist Stéphane Pigneul and Paul Régimbeau aka Mondkopf, but not only do all three play a multitude of other instruments and sound-makers, they are regularly joined by musicians from around the world such that their postrock/psych rock/kraut/kosmische sensibilities are augmented by North African and Middle Eastern musicians, among others. On many recent albums they’ve been joined on a few tracks by the wonderful singer G.W.Sok, for decades the frontman of Dutch anarcho-punks The Ex, and he’s here on the nearly-12-minute “A Man Alone (In A One Man Poem)” – and that’s not even the album’s longest track! Leave that to the 20-minute “The Crying Eye — I Forget”, which features the brilliant Radwan Ghazi Moumneh aka Jerusalem In My Heart. Tonight, however, we have neither of them (partly for reasons of space!) – but we do hear from Ben Shemie of Suuns on the first track – another Montréaler like Moumneh. Jessica Moss cements the Montréal postrock connection, appearing on one track too, and that takes us conveniently to the next album…

set fire to flames – there is no dance in frequency and balance [Alien8/130701/Bandcamp]
set fire to flames – two tears in a bucket [Alien8/130701/Bandcamp]
Back in 2001, in the earlyish years of the Montréal postrock bloom, a bunch of musicians from many of the bands in the scene got together to record a sprawling album under the name set fire to flames. The album was so good that the Fat Cat folks were inspired to start a sister label, 130701, to release it (it came out through the legendary experimental label Alien8 in Canada). As 130701 tell it, the vinyl pressing sold out almost straight away and has been out of print ever since, so 21 years later they have remastered and re-released it on vinyl. It has a familiar dreamy, collagey quality to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and A Silver Mt Zion, but take a look at the member list at the bottom of this page to see their provenance – Esmerine, Hiss Tracts, Hanged Up, Sackville, Exhaust, Fly Pan Am and more are represented. After a slow-growing, then explosive post/krautrock number, we then heard a fragile piece of string magic from Becky Foon, Geneviève Heistek and Sophie Trudeau which takes us into the next few tracks.

Nonsemble – Pelagornis [Nonsemble Bandcamp]
So here’s Chris Perren‘s neo-classical-cum-postrock group Nonsemble, with their album Archaeopteryx, each track celebrating a different prehistoric bird. The Pelagornis was a sea bird with a 6 metre wingspan, and it’s represented with perhaps the most peaceful track, in which the strings creep in before becoming rhythmic, underscored by Perren’s electronics, which never overwhelm the acoustic instruments. For this project, Nonsemble is primarily a string quartet plus electronics, although there are live drums and piano on the title track. These tracks are lovely in themselves, but it’s worth also noting the two singles, which come with remixes from Madeleine Cocolas on Argenativis and MJ O’Neill on Phorusrhacos.

Jacaszek, Romke Kleefstra, Jan Kleefstra – Leafst Sjoch Ik Nei Beammen [Moving Furniture Records/Bandcamp]
For some reason this collaboration is not one I’d expected. Polish composer / producer Michał Jacaszek is known for his classical-tinged electronic music and for collaborations with contemporary classical ensembles; Dutch brothers Romke & Jan Kleefstra are guitarist and poet/vocalist and collaborate on mysterious, minimalist music with folks like Rutger Machinefabriek Zuydervelt in projects like Piiptsjilling. Yet the artists meld together like they were always meant to be – stirring drones from Romke, string arrangements and buried beats from Jacaszek and poetry in Frisian – a language only found in the northern region of the Netherlands called Friesland – from Jan. The IT DEEL project finds the Kleefstras partnering with Frisian cultural organisation Popfabryk, making works about environmental decline and damage to nature – in this case, the damage to the beautiful ancient forests of Friesland, in particular Oranjewoud. But few people in the world can understand Frisian, and as with the other works from the Kleefstra Bros, the music and atmosphere is more than enough regardless.

Pattern Recognition Machines – The Garden of the Tuilleries [New Weird Australia/Bandcamp]
So here’s the second release this week from the resurrected New Weird Australia New Editions – Stuart Buchanan is not only compiling excellent compilations for NWA, but also releasing artist editions like Zacharias Szumer’s above and this one. Pattern Recognition Machines started as a duo of drummer Sam Price and electronics from Vijay Thillaimuthu, but for this new album they are joined by veteran experimental musician Robert Vincs on “woodwind” (lots of sax but evidently other instruments) and Chloë Sobek on violone (a relative of the double bass) and electronics. There are dirty grooves and wailing noise on this release, but I really liked the scrabbling non-music/music of this particular track.

Yair Elazar Glotman – A Mirror [SA Recordings/Bandcamp]
Yair Elazar Glotman – A Path [SA Recordings/Bandcamp]
When I first discovered Berlin-based musician Yair Elazar Glotman via his wonderful submerged techno as KETEV. But Glotman’s sonorous double bass playing and his skills as a sound-artist have been the focus of his solo career, and on top of this he spent some years working closely with the great Jóhann Jóhannsson in his soundtrack work before the composer’s untimely death. New album Speculative Memories finds Glotman in introspective mode, with the music spinning out from memories of his childhood in the Galilee, into more abstract evocations of scents, sounds and sights. Jóhannsson’s influence is found in the beautiful vocal contributions from Sara Fors, while Glotman on double bass is also joined by trombone, bowed guitar, violin and viola. It is in some ways a modern classical album, but Glotman inserts field recordings and sound-art techniques into the analogue recordings, with tape manipulation credited to Glotman’s alias Mephisto Wunderbar. It’s an enveloping, at times almost heartbreaking work to sink into.

June McDoom – Babe, You Light Me Up [Temporary Residence/Bandcamp]
In July I was blown away by the first released track “The City” from new Temporary Residence signing June McDoom. So it’s a joy to have her debut, self-titled EP now available. It’s a shame “The City” isn’t on here, but the five new tracks take a similar approach. McDoom plays all instruments and sings the soft vocals. She draws from her Jamaican heritage as well as her love of classic folk artists, classic r’n’b and reggae – I can’t help thinking of early-to-mid period Grizzly Bear. There’s a hazy analogue sheen to these songs, with instruments all melding together so that you hardly notice the beats in the mix even as you’re nodding your head. McDoom has a keen ear for melody and harmony, making these the most gently catchy songs you’re likely to hear this year.

Listen again — ~206MB

Strange ambiences, with strange songs and strange settings, and some strange beats tonight.
Thanks once again to Marcus Whale for kindly filling in for me last week when I was too busy!

LISTEN AGAIN before the gibbering aliens eat your brainwaves. It’s too late for me, but your can save yourself! Podcast here, stream on demand from FBi!

Brian Eno – who gives a thought [Opal/UMC]
Brian Eno – garden of stars [Opal/UMC]
It’s strangely surprising that foreverandevernomore is the first Brian Eno album of songs in a long time. “It’s not an ambient album!” claim all the stories, but… it kind of is? There are no beats, there are beautiful glacial keyboards. Eno is hardly known only for his pioneering ambient music (and for coining the term). Alongside producing huge bands across many musical eras, he has a rich heritage of songwriting himself, and no surprise, there are some beautifully moving songs here – appropriately for the subject matter, which is a kind of elegy for the world that might have been. Yes, Eno continues to urge humanity to do better – on climate change, on sociopolitics – but the muted, wistful tone here is not exactly a call to arms. It’s also not an entirely solo album as I expected – yes, there are Eno children singing on a couple of tracks, but also a number of his other well-known collaborators, including his brother Roger Eno, the excellent experimental guitarist & producer Leo Abrahams, and good ol’ Jon Hopkins, who in fact composed one of the loveliest tracks on the album, sung by experimental folk singer Clodagh Simonds. Of the two songs I chose tonight, “who gives a thought” only features Abrahams, adding soft drones to Eno’s ode to the dispossessed – it struck me as something like Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry, or David Sylvian or even Scott Walker, but Eno’s voice is not as rich as any of those. On “garden of stars”, as with a number of tunes, Eno applies digital effects to his voice (software designer Peter Chilvers is also here, playing keyboards), as well as inviting Roger Eno’s daughter Cecily to sing (and Roger plays accordion). It’s an immensely affecting album.

Jane Sheldon – Put my eyes out: I can see you [Jane Sheldon Bandcamp]
Jane Sheldon – In the deep nights I dig for you [Jane Sheldon Bandcamp]
Australian soprano Jane Sheldon may be best known to Utility Fog and indeed FBi listeners as the singer in the brilliant early 2000s genre-crushing ensemble Gauche, but like many of the band’s members, she has forged a phenomenal career, hers in contemporary vocal music. Her incredible new solo album I am a tree, I am a mouth draws its lyrics from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in his Book of Hours, a collection of pantheistic odes to God. Sheldon’s compositions call for two voices (both sung by her) that harmonise and separate over the eerie, enveloping sound of gong resonances, distended, re-pitched and edited into dronescapes. At times crackling, glitchy textures bubble to the surface – the technology used to produce these pieces is integral to the final works, even though Sheldon’s settings of the German lyrics, her compositions and her exquisite vocal technique recall classical & romantic Lieder. You won’t hear any other music quite like this anywhere else, and you shouldn’t miss this!

SURACHAI | FYOHNA – But You Remember [BL_K Noise]
It can be hard to keep up with what Surachai Sutthisasanakul is going to sound like on each release, having buzzed and hammered between IDM, grindcore/doom metal, breakcore, noise and ambient over many releases in the last decade and a bit. Lately there have been a number of experimental, dark ambient-ish albums produced on modular gear. That gear is no doubt behind the new Violet EP, but this collaboration with singer Fyohna is a lovely, if short, collection of dark electronic pop songs. There’s a bit of trip-hop in there, as is the style these days, tied up with Surachai’s great talent for sound design and Fyohna’s silky vocals.

Lucrecia Dalt – Dicen [RVNG Intl/Bandcamp]
Lucrecia Dalt – Enviada [RVNG Intl/Bandcamp]
Now, this. THIS is album of the year right here. One of the albums of the year, for sure. I’ve followed Lucrecia Dalt through her early hazy, increasingly experimental indie works (including a gorgeous early collaboration with Canberra’s Spartak – find her as Lucrecia Perez on “Second-Half Clouded” here), then to her extraordinary genre-free electronic experiments, where her voice was used as just one more instrument or sound-source… and recently her brilliant, disturbing soundtrack work, as well as her inspired duo with Aaron Dilloway, Lucy & Aaron. Here she comes full circle – having been based in Europe for many years now (first Barcelona, then Berlin), Dalt originally comes from Colombia, and thus her return to song also finds her returning to South & Central American rhythms, harmonies, basslines and melodies. The lyrics, co-written with Miguel Prado, are in Spanish, and if you’re not paying attention you may think it’s a traditional latin band (and indeed it is, beautifully orchestrated) – until you hear the edits, détournements, smudges, the processed sounds melding with the real. It’s a beautiful headfuck, emphasis on beautiful. Unmissable.

Mabe Fratti – Desde el cielo [Unheard Of Hope/Bandcamp]
Mabe Fratti – Cuestión de tiempo [Unheard Of Hope/Bandcamp]
Not far from Colombia, north along the Isthmus of Panama, is Guatemala, where Mabe Fratti hails from. Based for some time now in Mexico City, Fratti has created her own form of experimental song from her raw cello playing, often filtered through multiple effects, along with arrays of electronics and her delicate voice – her ear for melody is remarkable, with melodic lines rising up over scratchy riffs and drones. Although this album is deliberately sparser in orchestration than her last few releases, her usual collaborative process remains, with guitar, percussion and many other sounds contributed by fellow travellers in Mexico and also Rotterdam. Nevertheless, this is a creative vision that could come from noone other than Fratti, and I’m proud that she’s a fellow cellist!

Marina Hasselberg – Só [Redshift Records/Bandcamp]
Marina Hasselberg – At A Distance [Redshift Records/Bandcamp]
Speaking of cello… Vancouver-based cellist Marina Hasselberg is classically trained, both in her native Portugal and in Canada, but on her album Red she takes a small handful of classical compositions into experimental lands, with scratchy, breathy playing and unusual drones surrounding even the ancient works. These are joined by a number of free improvisations, some augmented by guitar, drums and other instruments (if subtly). The end result is an album that travels far in terms of genres – and indeed date of composition – but retains an impressively consistent sound. Even the contemporary compositions are corralled into the album’s schema: the beautiful solo cello composition “At A Distance” by Martin Reisle here has its melodies and repeating rhythmic ostinati overlaid with improvised guitar from Aram Bajakian.

Felicity Mangan – Dolphin Tricks [Warm Winters, Ltd./Bandcamp]
Nobody else is making music quite like that of Felicity Mangan, Berlin-based Australian sound artist. Her music’s foundation is flora & fauna – many of her releases feature raw field recordings of the wondrous sounds of nature. But among her recent releases are works which take nature’s creativity and notch it up a few levels. Insectile rhythms become electronic beats, flows of water are reversed, cut up and overlaid in unnatural patterns, and the “pedosphere” (the upper layer of the Earth’s crust) is mined (pun intended) for sound. Wet On Wet was originally to be released by Russian label Klammklang, but Putin’s lunacy caused the label to indefinitely stop operations, so Warm Winters, Ltd. stepped in to release it. While the album’s main focus is on soil and its inhabitants, we also have the repurposed polyrhythms of dolphin sounds on tonight’s selection.

Maral – Walk and A Talk [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
Maral – Hold My Hand, Go For a Walk [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
Both of LA-based Iranian-American artist Maral Mahmoudi’s albums on Leaving Records sound on one level like typical fleet-footed beat records. Maral loves head-nodding breakbeats and loves mixing them up with riffs (the first track of hers I discovered was a brilliant remix of anarcho-punks Crass). But Maral has studied the setar, and the traditional Persian instrument features in her music along with voracious samplings of Iranian popular music of yore and Persian classical music. Yes, Ground Groove is grounded in groove (I am embarrassed to write this, but not enough to not write it), but it contains multitudes. Dude. Get into it.

Persher – Calf [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Arthur Cayzer (Pariah) & Jamie Roberts (Blawan) are Bristolian bass & techno stalwarts who gathered together as Persher to produce a very Thrill Jockey record indeed. Man With The Magic Soap is not techno, nor is it dubstep, although it has some low-slung basslines and reveals electronically-produced beats at times. But the closest comparison is surely the heaviest parts of Petbrick‘s metal/hardcore/electronic compound. At 26 minutes over 7 tracks, it’s short & sharp, and unlikely to find itself on the same dancefloors as the artists’ usual fare, but I’m willing to give it a go (hire me, I’m a DJ!)

Marco Zenker – Resistance [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
Marco Zenker – Intuition Dub [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
Oooh and here’s a real one. Marco Zenker is one of the Zenkers wot run the excellent Munich label Ilian Tape. And his new solo album Channel Balance is a beautifully realised example of most of what the label does oh so well – dub aesthetics cutting through genres from lugubrious ambient through breakbeat-loving techno up to (on the second half) jungle and drum’n’bass. The brothers came to techno and 4/4 electronics via a love of hip-hop and Jamaican styles, and somehow that really shows too. But it’s the consistency of quality production and emotional depth across the ostensible genre changes through this album that make it such a highlight. Not to be missed.

Rasmus Hedlund – Chords Galore [Ljudverket]
Finnish producer Rasmus Hedlund recently became a father, and his new album commemorates that in its title, Far, which is Finnish for Father. The music itself cycles around dub techno patterns. Each track is relatively long – around the 8 minute mark – and pleasantly carries the listener with head-nodding 4/4 beats and, as this track tells us, “Chords Galore”.

clipping. and Aho Ssan – Looking Like Meat (Aho Ssan Remix) [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
The last of clipping.‘s RMXNG 2 12″s is out now – that’s four EPs each with 7 tracks, totally over 2 hours of music reworking tracks from their last two albums of “horrorcore” rap. As with the last 3 EPs, the last one features an impressive lineup, including Kenyan electronic hero Slikback, ex-DHR veteran experimentalist Patric Catani and frequent clipping. collaborator Christopher Fleeger as Cooling Prongs. A highlight is the rework by French-Ghanayan ambient/glitch maestro Aho Ssan, which manages to preserve the energy of Daveed Diggs’ performance without any beats to speak of. Also notable is the opening track, from our very next artist!

Carl Stone – Omar [We Jazz]
Yes, glitch/cut-up originator Carl Stone also contributes a remix on the latest clipping. remix EP. But also released this week is We Jazz Reworks Vol. 2, which is the second time the Finnish We Jazz label has opened up its catalogue to a single artist to remix at will. We’re not told who the original artists are here, and there are some quite interesting excerpts, including some apparent jazz settings of classical compositions. Stone juxtaposes different performances in surprising and sometimes deliberately jarring ways. He shuffles and re-arranges in his usual manner – everything gridded up, juddering along in seemingly controlled chaos, and as of his more recent work, the rhythms sections still hang together while solo parts are shredded. And yet, it’s still clearly jazz, ripped apart though it may be.

RUBBISH MUSIC – Trash and Treasure (excerpt) [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
Kate Carr (proprietor of Flaming Pines) and Iain Chambers (who runs the Persistence of Sound label) come together here for the first – but not last – time as RUBBISH MUSIC, a project which describes itself in its name. Upcycling is their album, with one track each by the individual members and one together (which we’ve excerpted tonight), all working on the idea of, well, “upcycling” objects, taking discarded refuse from consumer society and using it for art. You can see a beautifully-shot video of the two performing via State51 and Nonclassical here.

Jonathan Higgins – 01 [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
Jonathan Higgins – sckt [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
Kate Carr’s Flaming Pines is a rich source of experimental music, mostly derived from differeing approaches harnessing field recordings and found sound. But along with a general interest in ambient music, Carr also has a love of glitch, and two recent releases celebrate that in style. First, we have British composer Jonathan Higgins, whose Good thanks, you? uses glitch to express inner turmoil and anxiety. This feels close to my heart – the anodyne reply “Good thanks, you?” is all too common when asked “How are you?” or even (*shudder*) “RUOK?” The clicks & cuts on Higgins’ album are produced from custom-modified CD players – a kind of mirror image of the CD desecration performed by artists like Oval in the ’90s.

Kamran Arashnia – Black Screen of Death [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
Kamran Arashnia – Guru Meditation [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
The other glitch release from Flaming Pines, released pretty much simultaneously, comes from Iranian composer Kamran Arashnia. Drawing on a quote from Augustine of Hippo, Arashnia treats the glitch not so much as a malfunction, but as a treasured mistake. In this, Arashnia is returning to the origins of digital glitch music in the mid-to-late ’90s works of the Mego founders alongside fellow Europeans like Pole, who all celebrated the glitch as the serendipitous hardware or software mistake that brings a patina of beautiful randomness to the ostensibly perfect digital realm. Of course, rock music itself is founded in the overdriven circuits that bring glorious distortion, and Arashnia revels in the distortions, clipping and chaos of his collected mistakes.

Sebastian Field – All Tomorrows [Provenance Records/Bandcamp]
Sebastian Field – Somnambulist [Provenance Records/Bandcamp]
While Canberra’s Sebastian Field doesn’t express the sonic aesthetic of his Prescients EP in quite the same terms as the previous two artists, the pieces here are also experienced through a patina of distortions – here, like last year’s beautiful Sandcandles album to which he considers this a “prequel”, Field is taking old tapes of his from 20+ years ago and looping, chopping and obscuring their origins through a fog of effects. Rather than sharp glitches and raw edits, the artistic principle here is one of smudging, of continuous modulation rather than disjunction, even though there are rhythmic cut-ups to be found inside the haze. This EP and its sister album both contain detail worthy of close appreciation.

SPILL – Residue [Corvo Records/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based Magda Mayas and Australian, often Berlin-based Tony Buck have partnered as the duo SPILL for over a decade. Mayas’ piano playing is intuitive and virtuosic, much like Buck’s drumming, and both are experienced collaborators – Buck has played with luminaries across jazz, noise, punk and more, and may be best known to listeners as the drummer in The Necks. Much of SPILL’s work is quite challenging, in the vein of free improv, but tucked away at the end of Mycelium, their latest album, is the beautiful, sparse piece we end with tonight, performed with great sensitivity by these two accomplished musicians.

Listen again — ~210MB

Warped, theory-laden hip-hop, industrial sounds a’plenty, electronic pop, jungle and dubstep, glitched folk from black-metal, African ragga and IDM tonight.

LISTEN AGAIN and your head will explode (in a good way). Podcast here, stream on demand @ FBi.

MSRMNT – Substance is Subject [MSRMNT Bandcamp]
MSRMNT – Fantasy [MSRMNT Bandcamp]
Starting tonight with something unique. You could call this industrial hip-hop, but we can’t ignore that the lyrics are drawing on some pretty high-concept theory, from Hegelian dialectics to Marxist politics to Lacanian psychoanalysis. This is all done, mind you, with sardonic humour, with entertaining spoken word samples, and Australian-accented rapping alongside noisy, ramshackle beats made from hardware and homemade found-sound samples. The closest thing I can think of is Curse ov Dialect, but MSRMNT comes in on a different tangent of his own. It’s a pseudonym of a member of a well-loved Aussie indie rock band, but that’s all I’m sayin’.

Terrificus – Tylex’s Decadent Sitcom [self-released]
Shaggy and Tyler are Terrificus, making industrial garage, as they call it, out of Eora/Sydney. It’s insane in the best way, especially when they take to the stage, but during lockdown Tyler took it upon himself to learn production in his garage. Both members have been active in the Sydney scene for a while – you can find Shaggy around Utopia Records, and both are part of Face Command as well as MC Filth Wizard. The more aliases the better, the more insanity the better!

Penny – Crucial [Thanatosis/Bandcamp]
“Crucial” is the debut single of Stockholm-based Penny Elvira Loftéen, once a child actress, who co-produced this song with fellow Swede Anton Toorell with extra synth from busy experimental musician Alex Zethson, who also runs the Thanatosis label. The glitchy vocals and throbbing bass express the idea of “crucial” words from someone to bring a person back from a paralysing state of anxiety.

Aphir – Pomegranate Tree [Provenance Records/Bandcamp]
Aphir – Equinox [Provenance Records/Bandcamp]
The new album from Becki Whitton’s Aphir is more long-awaited than it may seem. Although Whitton released a collection of improvised, processed vocals last year called Plastichoir, and the wonderful album Republic of Paradise in 2020, the latter album actually replaced the original release of Pomegranate Tree, which Whitton considered at the time not to reflect the strange feeling of that early pandemic time. The album has thus spent three years being overhauled and has benefited for Whitton’s epic vocal experimentation which resulted in Plastichoir, as well as her ever-growing experience mixing and mastering work of her musician colleagues. Whitton draws from the choral masses of 17th century composer William Byrd, a connection between her current songwriting and the church experiences of her youth. The album is about her eventual loss of faith, the resulting disconnection from the community around her Christian church – and the continued need for connection and community.

Jessica O’Donoghue – Awakening [Art As Catharsis/Bandcamp]
Jessica O’Donoghue – Good Grief [Art As Catharsis/Bandcamp]
We follow immediately with another powerful album from an Australian woman, Jessica O’Donoghue. The classically-trained O’Donoghue combines moving folk songs, drones, electronic beats, string arrangements and transcendent vocals to tell stories of female resilience, from the legendary to the very personal. The album captures her unique talents, with help from the brilliant creative (and family) partnership of Alyx Dennison and David Trumpmanis.

Liturgy – संसार [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Hunter Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix has often been a controversial figure in black metal, with her band Liturgy not just straying from whatever “real black metal” should be, but often doing so in a structured way that Hunt-Hendrix theorised and proselytised about in essays. At this point, nobody expects a Liturgy album to be anything except whatever complex vision Hunt-Hendrix has, often influenced by her theological studies, and musically drawing from classical composition, folk, and glitchy production techniques. Liturgy have just announced double album 93696 to be released in March 2023 – quite a long wait! In the meantime, the 15-minute title track has been released on a new EP As the Blood of God Bursts the Veins of Time, split into three continuous tracks but also accompanied by the highly contrasting “संसार” (“world” in Hindi), in which acoustic guitar and kind-of clean vocals meet stuttering digital edits.

Senyawa, Lawrence English, Aviva Endean, Peter Knight, Helen Svoboda, Joe Talia – Perjamuan (The Supper) [Room40/Bandcamp]
Collaborative work is the bread & butter, the soul of what Indonesian metal duo Senyawa do. Wukir Suryadi constantly creates bizarre instruments to make industrial noises with, while Rully Shabara has a highly powerful, instantly recognizable voice in any context. Last year, with the pandemic doggedly refusing to go away, Room40‘s Lawrence English, in Brisbane, was discussing the regional effects of the pandemic with Melbourne sound-artist & trumpeter Peter Knight. They reached out to Rully and Wukir and started exchanging recordings. Along with various other Australian-based musicians – clarinettist Aviva Endean (also on harmonic flute), double bassist Helen Svoboda (also contributing vocals), and drummer Joe Talia – they made music via a kind of deconstructed improvisation. Knight also manipulated sounds on a Revox tape machine, and English played organ as well as corralling the sounds into completed pieces. What results is an often dark and foreboding work, but also quite moving; different from whatever a “normal” Senyawa recording might be, and different from the individual work of any of the artists.

clipping. and Speaker Music – Say the Name [_] Something Underneath (Speaker Music – Longsuffering Remix) [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
clipping. and Stazma – Say The Name (Stazma‘s Driller Bees Remix) [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
And clipping.‘s REMXNG onslaught continues, with 2.3 out of four parts released this week. DeForrest Brown, Jr’s Speaker Music chops up Daveed Diggs’ voice because this is clearly irresistable, along with his scattershot drum machine beats. And French breakcore producer Stazma aka The Junglechrist aka Repeater Eater brings not just jungle breaks but guitar riffs to the table with his version of the much-remixed “Say The Name”.

Djinn – Tempest [RuptureLDN/Bandcamp]
Appropriately enough for a tour of the solar system, London drum’n’bass label Rupture‘s “Planets” series has taken a while to get to the big gas giants, but this week both Saturn and Jupiter are covered. Each 12″ is a mini-compilation, with some artists taking more directly to the planetary theme than others. Manchester’s Djinn references the storm that powers Jupiter’s Great Red Spot with her absolutely storming track “Tempest”.

Alan Johnson – Stillness [Sneaker Social Club]
Tom Neilan and Gareth Kirby adopted the very normcore name “Alan Johnson” to release bass-heavy music sporadically over the last 9 or 10 years. Their latest EP Stillness comes courtesy of Sneaker Social Club, sitting somewhere around dubstep-land, and the title track makes use of the legendary Poem by Count Ossie from 1972, while muscular beats drop in & out across its 5 minutes.

Hippoflip – Assif [FKOF/Bandcamp]
French producer Hippoflip turns in only his second release via FKOF (Fat Kid On Fire), a digital EP that leans nicely on the “dub” aspect of dubstep.

Commodo – Widebody [Mysterious Trax]
Commodo – cclarity [Mysterious Trax]
After the brilliant Deft 1s for Black Acre earlier this year, Commodo inaugurates his new Mysterious Trax imprint with an EP that follows suit with a collection of tracks that owe clear allegiance to his dubstep/grime roots, but are built from postpunk bass guitar riffs and weird jazz-inflected stabs. For the last few years Commodo has been following a path all his own, taking UK bass into strange noir TV soundtrack lands – you’re missing out if you’re not following.

Second. – Rasuba [TemeT Music/Bandcamp]
More French bass music next, from Simo Cell‘s TemeT Music. The Rasuba EP is the first solo work from Victor Paud as Second., better known as one half of techno duo Society of Silence. Much like the label boss, Second. is not tethered to any particular tempo or genre except for bass and infectious rhythm. There’s a bit of IDM in there and some ambient textures along with syncopated beats, all very fun.

SLIKBACK X SWORDMAN – 22GAZA [Slikback Bandcamp]
The latest drop from Kenya’s Slikback on his Bandcamp finds him joining with Ugandan dancehall-influenced master rapper Swordman Kitala, showing how versatile Slikback is – always an experimental edge, but always with hard-hitting rhythms, comfortably supporting Swordman here, who himself works comfortably with pretty experimental beats much of the time.

Clark – Re-Scar Kiln [Warp/Bandcamp]
Clark – Herzog [Warp/Bandcamp]
There was a time when Clark was a youngster playing in the venerable Warp stable – when he joined as Chris Clark around 2001 with some early albums that showed bright talent combining Aphex-style quasi-classical piano and, well, Aphex-style melodic IDM. But in 2006 Clark came out with the extraordinary Body Riddle, certainly still IDM but with incredibly organic, physical-feeling drums and chiming melodies that seemed like electronic music come to life. Around that time, there were a series of surrounding releases, including 3″ CDs, EPs and download tracks, and some of that material is now compiled on 05-10, along with some unreleased contemporaneous material – also released with the remastered original album as Body Double. “Re-Scar Kiln” comes from the 3″ Throttle Furniture, the point at which Clark lost the “Chris” and became mononymic. There’s some great stuff among the extra material, although none of it quite reaches the genius of Body Riddle.

Tim Koch – Nocturne [CPU Records]
Tim Koch – Vowelstwo [CPU Records]
Adelaide’s own Tim Koch has been on the IDM tip since before young Chris Clark – his excellent Isolated Rhythm Chock came out in 1999. Out on Sheffield’s Central Processing Unit in a couple of weeks is his latest IDM release – as meanwhile he’s stretched into granular ambient, electronic shoegaze, glitched folktronica and more. On Volplaning the melodies are sweet and the beats are crunchy, and all is well in the world.

Listen again — ~204MB