Utility Fog

IDM, glitch, postrock and folktronica – all the core Utility Fog genres tonight!

LISTEN AGAIN at the FBi website for stream-on-demanding, or here for podcasting.

µ-Ziq – Midwinter Log [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
µ-Ziq – Brace Yourself Jason [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
µ-Ziq – Kubba [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
So here it is – no, not that, the other one. The (wonderful) new µ-Ziq album Magic Pony Ride, released a few weeks ago, is a tribute to the jungle and hardcore sounds that Mike was deeply invested in when he produced the music for his dearly beloved Lunatic Harness album and accompanying EPs in 1997. Now that album is re-released with all the EP tracks and a few other rarities, in 2CD and quadruple(!) vinyl form. Following the drum’n’bass experiments of Urmer Bile Trax Vol 1 & 2, Lunatic Harness finds all the melodic invention, faux-classical synths and super-crunchy beats of µ-Ziq’s earliest work combined with thrilling jungle-inspired cut-up beats. There are clear links to Aphex Twin & Squarepusher’s adaptation of jungle, but the character of Paradinas’ composing and production is like noone else really. It’s a delight to have this celebrated 25 years later, and vinyl lovers will be happy with the multiple-disc set.

ltfll – lY11 [irsh]
Yaseen – Siteh ft Dakn [irsh]
Ismael – Faster [irsh]
Egyptian DJ Rama and Egyptian electronic producer/genius ZULI started irsh in 2020, as a way of getting together with friends and sharing sessions on YouTube. The pandemic quickly killed off the in-person get-togethers, and the project became a label, releasing the brilliant compilation did you mean: irish in September of that year, with many experimental electronic artists from Egypt featured. Now comes the second compilation, again amusingly referencing Google’s suggested misspelling, and this time featuring some of the same higher-profile artists along with new and lesser-known Egyptian producers. There’s a range from ambient sounds with MENA influence to a lot of jungle-inspired tracks, and more. Alexandrian George Farid aka ltfll gives us the junglist beats of “lY11”, Cairo’s Yaseen Akram collaborates with Palestinian Dakn combining rap with halftime jungle beats, and also from Cairo, Ismael Hosny’s “Faster” also has junglist beats at its core.

Cocktail Party Effect – C_A_T_C_R [Sneaker Social Club]
A Londoner based in Berlin, Cocktail Party Effect always mixes up the UK bass sounds, with dubstep, garage, techno and drum’n’bass influences all present. From his new EP for Sneaker Social Club I’ve chosen, yep, the most jungle-inspired of the tracks.

Maya Q – beno (soft) [All Centre]
But speaking of UK garage, here’s a lovely melodic piece reminiscent of Four Tet’s garage period from Maya Q. Her track appears on a split 12″ with Endless Mow released on the excellent forward-thinking London label All Centre.

Grids/Units/Planes – Follow The City’s Lights [False Peak Records/Bandcamp]
Grids/Units/Planes – Harp Particle Pursuit [False Peak Records/Bandcamp]
I first discovered Grids/Units/Planes last year remixing the countrytronic A Country Practice. Brisvegan Andrew Foley has a number of projects, including circuit-bent YEARNS with Joel from A Country Practice, and the shoegazetronica of Make A Montage. As G/U/P it’s the most IDMish, beat-oriented stuff, albeit still with pretty shoegazey textures – very nice.

Wrecked Lightship – Found Beast [Dead Bison]
Wrecked Lightship – Radial Geometry [Dead Bison]
Some deep aquatic sounds from Wrecked Lightship, the duo of Adam Winchester from experimental bass project Dot Product and Laurie Osborne aka Appleblim. Both artists’ background in mutated dubstep is here in the dubby atmos and bass frequencies, but it’s all very submerged and often rather abstract.

Deepchild – Mystery Not Yet Become [Mille Plateaux/Bandcamp]
Deepchild – Final Breath [Mille Plateaux/Bandcamp]
Deepchild – Now It Is Me Being Breathed (unreleased bonus track) [Mille Plateaux/Bandcamp]
Surely album of the week here from Sydney legend Rick Bull aka Deepchild, who’s had his own shows on FBi and 2ser in the past, and spent many years in Berlin DJing at Berghain and the like and solidifying his techno credentials. This is not techno really though. Released on the also legendary now-revived ’90s label Mille Plateaux, it has nods to the classic minimal techno of Basic Channel and the glitch of early Mego and of course Mille Plateaux itself – moreso than the current hyperglitch and other trends MP is following. The gorgeous Fathersong finds Deepchild simultaneously waxing nostalgic for a closed-down club scene and dealing with the heartache of watching from afar as his father passes away in aged care – one of the great injustices of the pandemic lockdowns. The result is deeply moving, from ambient recollections of chorales to half-heard distant techno.

Tegh & Adel Poursamadi – Ijaad ایجاد [Injazero Records/Bandcamp]
Tegh & Adel Poursamadi – Mornaal مرنال [Injazero Records/Bandcamp]
Istanbul/London label Injazero Records releases the first in a new series from Tehran’s Tegh working with acoustic instrumentalists. On Ima ایما fellow Iranian violinist Adel Poursamadi draws from Persian classical music as well as drone, arranged by Tegh along with his signature rumbling bass and stretched, glitched electronic processing. It’s powerful stuff – that we’re promised a whole series of this is something to be excited about.

Michel Banabila – Sounds From An Unforgettable Place 2 [Michel Banabila Bandcamp]
There’s no doubt that the late Jon Hassell‘s “fourth world” ambient is a big influence on the experimental analogue/digital electronic world music of Dutch musician Michel Banabila. Hassell passed away in June last year, and the digital EP Sounds From An Unforgettable Place is Banabila’s touching tribute to Hassell.

Rok Zalokar – McBeing [Nature Scene Records/Bandcamp/via Wire Mag]
One of the tracks from Tegh & Poursamadi’s album is featured on the latest Wire Tapper cover CD from UK experimental music institution The Wire, and from that same CD is a track by Slovenian pianist Rok Zalokar. Zalokar’s gregarious approach to genre (a jazz-trained composer also playing in a noise/hip-hop duo) is evident here in this sampled & programmed organised chaos.

Party Dozen – Risky Behaviour [GRUPO/Temporary Residence/Bandcamp]
Party Dozen – Earthly Times [GRUPO/Temporary Residence/Bandcamp]
Sydney’s Party Dozen are finally poised to take over the world, with features in all sorts of international press thanks to their new album The Real Work being released internationally via Temporary Residence (*ahem* also the label of my band Tangents). As usual there’s sampled riffage and tough drums from Jonathan Boulet and wailing saxophone and occasional vocals-through-sax from Kirsty Tickle (and a prominent if brief cameo from Nick Cave on one track). There are also a couple of slightly less hard rockin’ tracks there: “Earthly Times” sports a sinister Birthday Party-like bassline, post-punk drums and snake-charming sinuous sax, with free jazz outbursts (The Thing and Fire! come to mind), while album closer “Risky Behaviour” brings sumptuous Wurlitzer-style organ along with the rhythm section to support Tickle’s impassioned saxophone – recreating the funksploitation sampled by trip-hoppers back in the day.

Mice Parade – Finding Faces [Mice Parade Bandcamp]
Mice Parade – Milton Road (Blizzard Version) [Mice Parade Bandcamp]
Once regular UFog faves, Mice Parade haven’t released a new album since 2013. They represent a kind of alternate path for postrock, which in the late ’90s got bogged down in Mogwai/Explosions in the Sky/MONO-style tremolo melodies and loud/soft/loud rock theatrics for decades hence, while the jazz inflections, live/electronic beats and fusions of the likes of Tortoise and yes, Mice Parade, were mostly sidelined. Adam Pierce started Mice Parade as an entirely solo affair (it’s an anagram of his name after all), a side-project from the marimba & vibraphone-led Dylan Group, also released on Pierce’s Bubble Core label, which mixed slacker-indie with electronic and postrock. Mice Parade turned into a full band with members of June of 44 and múm among others, and a keen interest in mixing world music influences into the indie, postrock and electronic stew. The music on lapapọ was developed in the intervening years since Mice Parade’s last album and tour, with many historic members contributing, and it lay completed for a year or two while the pandemic (of course) interrupted plans for a regrouped world tour. It comes now with a limited vinyl edition and is finally available digitally on Bandcamp as well. It does have everything that we loved about Mice Parade in the first place, a nice nostalgic reminder of a different musical path.

Akusmi – Divine Moments of Truth [Tonal Union/Bandcamp]
That said, there are elements of the Mice Parade / Tortoise approach to postrock in ’00s folktronica and electronic-meets-jazz of folk like our own Triosk. Here London-based French composer Pascal Bideau aka Akusmi mixes classical minimalism with jazz, electronic and Indonesian gamelan, producing a new take on folktronica, with saxophone, trombone, drums, acoustic guitars and gamelan percussion pulsing and phasing rhythmically in ways that elude identification of what’s performed live and what’s arranged electronically. At its best it’s exhilarating.

Listen again — ~204MB

Experimental song, experimental folk, experimental beats, sound-art.
Thanks to the legend Marcus Whale for stepping in at the last minute last Sunday when I fell ill with Covid and was entirely unable to do the show. Feeling better now thanks (but will the fatigue ever go away?)

LISTENING AGAIN may improve your symptoms. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Shearwater – Xenarthran [Polyborus/Bandcamp]
Shearwater – Everyone You Touch [Polyborus/Bandcamp]
I first fell in love with Shearwater circa their very first album, where Jonathan Meiburg started making folky postrock with Will Sheff as a side project from Okkervil River. The influence of late-period Talk Talk has always lain heavily over their music (including bird & tree motifs on their early album artwork), but there’s a characteristic Shearwater sound, partly purely from Meiburg’s soulful vocals and his melodic/harmonic tendencies, and partly from the subtleties of the arrangements, the skittery jazzy percussion and postrocky dynamics. The last Shearwater album came out in 2016, just in time for Donald Trump to take power in the US. Six years later, Trump’s gone and there was some sense of hope (much of which has been sapped now with the realisation of the intentions of the Republicans’ Supreme Court), and that ambivalent sense of, well, something, is what led to The Great Awakening, which is a return of sorts to the original sound – with particularly phenomenal string arrangements adorning many of the tracks. It’s a special one, this.

Ashley Paul – Escape [Orange Milk Records/Bandcamp]
Ashley Paul – Not Myself [Orange Milk Records/Bandcamp]
Following a couple of stunning albums on Slip, the wonderful London-based American musician Ashley Paul returns to Orange Milk Records with the same trio as her 2020 album Ray – Yoni Silver on bass clarinet & viola, Otto Wilberg on double bass, and Ashley Paul herself on sax, clarinet, percussion and vocals. This is another set of sparkling yet subtle songs, obliquely touching.

Hatis Noit – Jomon [Erased Tapes/Bandcamp]
Hatis Noit – chuchr ideins ouy [Virgin Babylon Records/Bandcamp]
Singular Japanese singer Hatis Noit releases her first album on Erased Tapes with Aura. It’s one of those weird signings that makes total sense when you hear the final product – I knew Hatis Noit for her very Japanese, glitchy productions like the bizarre track I played second, from the mighty Virgin Babylon Records, with her multi-tracked choral constructions chopped up in fine fashion. For this new album, her voice is the only instrument, very much layered up but not edited in any obvious way. Operatic and choral sounding techniques abound, but so do full-throated approaches from Bulgarian folk styles, and extended techniques. The original recordings from Japan were taken to London during lockdown, where Erased Tapes’ Robert Raths suggested re-amping them in a church, giving the multi-tracked recordings a physical, live feel.

Cameron Deyell, Laurence Pike – Greta [Endless Recordings/Bandcamp]
Cameron Deyell, Laurence Pike – Calling [Endless Recordings/Bandcamp]
Two jazz-trained, broadly exploratory Australian musicians team up here for Isola, an album of shimmering soundscapes and skittering rhythms. Guitarist Cameron Deyell plays with many jazz masters, but also with pop stars. Laurence Pike is of course known for his complex drumming with PVT and Triosk, and here his playing draws from the drum’n’bass-via-jazz of his earlier work and also the percussion and live samples of his more recent solo efforts.

François Robin & Mathias Delplanque – Perdu [Parenthèses Records/Bandcamp]
L’Ombre de la Bête (“Shadow of the Beast”) finds François Robin pitting his chosen instrument the veueze (a French bagpipe), along with doudouk, mizmar and violin, against the electro-acoustics of Mathias Delplanque. The result isn’t so much folktronica as a natural music from a parallel reality, with krautrock grooves, drones and plucked ostinati combining in whirling motion.

Nanook Of The North – Heide III [Denovali/Bandcamp]
Nanook Of The North – Heide VII [Denovali/Bandcamp]
Nanook Of The North – Pingajoq [Denovali/Bandcamp]
The debut self-titled album from Polish duo Nanook Of The North was a revelation at the time – combining the talents of DJ/producer Piotr Kaliński, who records club-adjacent music as Hatti Vatti, with classical musician Stefan Wesołowski, a collaborator with another electronic/post-classical Polish artist, Michał Jacaszek. The first album has a very northern European feel, with ambient depth and bassy beats. For follow-up Heide, again released on Denovali, the duo emphasize their classical side, with very few beats and with help from mezzo-soprano Margarita Slepakova on many tracks. It’s very cinematic and rather avant-garde.

Prequel Tapes – Alone [VEYL/Bandcamp]
Prequel Tapes – I Hate You [VEYL/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based Prequel Tapes has been responsible for some nostalgia-fuelled ambient and techno, driven initially by unearthed VHS & DAT tapes from his youth. On his latest album The Golden Cage, Marco Freivogel includes his own voice for the first time, albeit mostly through vocoder effects, and this is a guide to the approach – ’80s electronic pop meets rave aesthetics through a contemporary glaze. It’s energetic and works well as a pop/dancefloor crossover.

The Fear Ratio – Death Switch (feat. King Kashmere) [Tresor/Bandcamp]
The Fear Ratio – STMS [Tresor/Bandcamp]
IDM duo The Fear Ratio are made up of UK techno producers James Ruskin and Mark Broom, so it’s a little bit less bizarre to find their latest effort released by legendary Berlin techno club Tresor. Nevertheless, this is typical little melodies, crunchy syncopated beats and basslines found in IDM since the ’90s, albeit with some vocal guests on a few tracks such as UK rapper King Kashmere – a reminder of their recent EP from Seagrave under the Deadhand alias. UK bass genres like grime certainly feature here too, but it’s mainly glitchy beats as per Gescom et al, and very fine too.

Sig Nu Gris – Amphibia Blip Eladril [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Sig Nu Gris – Space Alen 100 [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Melbourne’s Erin Hyde aka Sig Nu Gris became essential listening as soon as Spirit Level released her first earliest singles, including the edits she calls “Fixations“. Her debut album Threshold finds her trying to express the inexpressible about surviving Melbourne’s endless lockdowns with very little to do except make music. So the dancefloor is there, mashed up with IDM and experimental sound techniques, along with ambient sound design and a strange psychedelia. It’s undeniably fun though, and brilliantly produced.

Esc – Lumberjack’s Groove [Straight Up Breakbeat/Bandcamp]
Finland’s a surprising home to a highly dedicated drum’n’bass & jungle scene, and Straight Up Breakbeat has become a great outlet for that talent. Here’s Esc with some dark jungle-tinged d’n’b from Summer of ’96, the “extended EP and mixtape” version of the label’s Midsummer Murdas EP. As well as Esc’s track there’s another bonus track and a two-sided DJ mix from label head Dizzy available on cassette and digital.

Wordcolour – Babble [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
Wordcolour – Crescent [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
Young UK artist Wordcolour wrote music for TV & film before releasing his sound design-oriented club tunes, starting with the incredible Tell Me Something for Lapsus in 2020. The producer is highly adept at UK club forms of all sorts – Djrum‘s presence as remixer on the recent Bluster single is a good indicator – and so we get jungle-influenced tunes, hints of dubstep and deep house, and always IDM, but also crystalline ambient passages with distinct classical and jazz influences and crazy glitch interjections a la Japanese figures like Kashiwa Daisuke. Spoken word throughout adds to the pleasant sense of mystery and gives additional depth to a thought-provoking album, one I can see myself returning to a lot this year.

part timer – loose leaf [part timer Bandcamp]
part timer – freeway [part timer Bandcamp]
It feels silly to still be banging on about the “return” of John McCaffrey to making music as part timer, given this recent phase started about 3 years ago in 2019. But every new drop brings much joy, and self-released new album Interiority Complex is a magnificent synthesis of the sensitive, poised post-classical piano & string arrangements he’s produced of late with the glitchy, head-noddy beats and samples of his early folktronica, which featured nearly every week on Utility Fog for years, back when. If you haven’t gotten behind the new part timer phase then shame on you, but for $10 AUD on Bandcamp, Interiority Complex is the perfect place to start.

Machinefabriek with Anne Bakker – Speling [Machinefabriek Bandcamp/Anne Bakker Bandcamp]
Machinefabriek with Anne Bakker – Folklore [Machinefabriek Bandcamp/Anne Bakker Bandcamp]
Dutch violist Anne Bakker has collaborated with Rutger Machinefabriek Zuydervelt for some years now – the earliest work I can find is from 2007, with Greg Haines included. Wisps is their third duo album together, based around a selection of violin, viola and vocal improvisations Bakker recorded and passed on to Zuydervelt. The short tracks range from folky sounding strings to rather abstract sound works, all quite bewitching. Oh, and listen out for the Don Cherry samples on a couple of tracks!

Alexandra Spence – Air Pockets [Room40/Bandcamp]
Alexandra Spence – Wind [Room40/Bandcamp]
Finishing with some quietly stunning sound-art from Sydney’s Alexandra Spence. Her latest album for Room40 is Blue waves, Green waves, an exploration of bodies of/and water, and particularly the Pacific Ocean. As usual with Spence’s work, concrete sounds produced from specific objects merge with musical elements and at times spoken word. The glooping, sliding “Air Pockets” are a particular highlight.

Listen again — ~203MB

Dark dubby techno / dubstep / grime / drill tonight, but also jittery idm and classical electronic fusion.

LISTEN AGAIN with FBi on the stream-on-demands, or podcast here, for pure pleasure.

Blackhaine – Prayer (ft. Iceboy Violet & Blood Orange) [Fixed Abode/Bandcamp]
Blackhaine – Armour Freestyle [Fixed Abode/Bandcamp]
So here’s the new EP from Lancashire’s Blackhaine, the rapper, choreographer & dancer who named himself in part after the incendiary French movie La Haine (Hate). With cohort Rainy Miller and also Croww on this EP underlining and entwining his anguished howls and poetry with industrial menace, Blackhaine (aka Tom Heyes) gives visceral voice to the depressing realities of working class life in post-Brexit England. Armour II careens between intense industrial throbs and no-less intense quietude, with guests Iceboy Violet & Blood Orange adding additional points of view on “Prayer”.

Azu Tiwaline – Deep Theko [I.O.T/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline x Cinna Peyghamy – Lowww [I.O.T/Bandcamp]
Azu Tiwaline & Al Wootton – Light Transmission [Livity Sound/Bandcamp]
French DJ & producer Azu Tiwaline is expert at dub-techno and uk bass storytelling, with sounds from her Saharan Tunisian roots combining to create something unique. On her solo EP for Livity Sound in 2020, she collaborated also with French-Iranian percussionist Cinna Peyghamy, who appears here also on Vesta, her new EP on her own I.O.T Records. Deep dub textures and beats. Earlier this year Azu Tiwaline collaborated with Al Wootton for a follow-up on Livity Sound, dub/bass beats both syncopated and 4/4…

Holy Tongue – River Cannot Wash it Away [Amidah Records/Valentina Magaletti Bandcamp]
Holy Tongue – Spirit Mask [Amidah Records/Valentina Magaletti Bandcamp]
Meanwhile, there’s a third EP from Holy Tongue, Al Wootton‘s continuing duo with Valentina Magaletti. As with their previous two releases, this is stripped-down live dub, with Magaletti’s muscular drum kit and Wootton’s electric basslines and plenty of dub delays throughout.

Low End Activist ft. Emz – Get Get [Sneaker Social Club]
Low End Activist – Parity [Sneaker Social Club]
Jamie Russell is a very busy man of many aliases. Not only does he run co-run Hypercolour Records, he also helms the incredible Sneaker Social Club, and although it’s difficult to unravel it all, he is also the man behind Low End Activist, sometimes also aka Patrick Conway, one half of Trinity Carbon, and somewhere in there he runs a bunch of other labels too. Across all of this, Russell covers just about every electronic genre, and Low End Activist is there for everything on the ‘ardcore continuum, from jungle through to grimey dubstep and all that wotnot. There are a bunch of great grime MCs on his new album Hostile Utopia, including a heavy hitter from Killa P, but it seems to me that “Get Get”, featuring Emz, is a real hit.

Slikback – GEOMETRY [Slikback Bandcamp]
Nairobi’s Slikback won’t stop either. Every month at least, there’s a few new tracks on his Bandcamp, very internet dance music, rhythmic stuff of all sorts and also hi-tech ambient biz. Always rad.

JK Flesh – Human/Nature [KR3 Records/Bandcamp]
The don Justin K Broadrick, of Godflesh, Jesu and a billion other incarnations, has been churning out acerbic, bracing techno under his JK Flesh for some years now. The latest is Veneer of Tolerance for Italy’s KR3 Records, with the usual 4/4 beats of at various tempos dark textures and dark outlook.

tsx – squidge feat. Sue Tompkins [generate and test/Bandcamp]
tsx – know you don’t [generate and test/Bandcamp]
Oswald Berthold is a member of the legendary Farmers Manual, who started their glitching, generative techno/idm/breakbeat work in the mid-’90s, pioneered net labels and webcasts before they were a thing, and are now releasing idiosyncratic idm & related music on their generate and test label through Bandcamp. Solo, Berthold has been releasing glitchy beats under the name tsx (it stands for different things depending where you look), at times with collaborators like English performance artists Sue Tompkins and the mysterious psygod. It’s all good and worth checking out.

Bienoise – FFF THIS MEANING TODAY [Mille Plateaux]
Bienoise – LAC – Silence Half Speed [Mille Plateaux]
Piedmontese musician Alberto Ricca is Bienoise. He’s studied electronic music, and now teaches it too, and his album THIS MEANING TODAY has a typically elusive philosophical concept as per Mille Plateaux‘ usual tendencies. As well as intense stuttery barrages, there’s a rather beautiful Autechrian ambient piece.

Luis & Lis Dalton – timmy chalamet [AD 93/Bandcamp]
Luis – or anyone said it [AD 93/Bandcamp]
New York house master DJ Python revives little-used alias Luis for an EP of delightful Boards of Canada-style idm for AD 93 titled 053 (Schwyn). The most BoC-like is named for the equally pretty Timmy Chalamet, and is a collaboration with UK’s Lis Dalton.

Florent Ghys – Quatre Fromages [Cantaloupe/Bandcamp]
Florent Ghys – Météos [Cantaloupe/Bandcamp]
Florent Ghys – Véranda [Cantaloupe/Bandcamp]
French musician Florent Ghys is a composer, double bassist, electronic musician and video artist. He’s a longtime Bang on a Can collaborator, so it’s no surprise to find his latest album released on the New York collective’s Cantaloupe label. It’s two albums, Ritournelles released on CD and the accompanying digital Mosaïques (tracks from both will appear on a special vinyl edition later in the year). The former album focuses on double bass and other instruments, but they’re often sampled and edited into complex tapestries, while the latter is more electronic, with Ghys’ penchant for sampled speech coming to the fore, but there’s also plenty of double bass on that album too. They’re cut from the same cloth, and are well taken together. Fans of The Books will love what they find here – a wonderful revelation.

Flora Wong – Heroes (Movements I II) [Corella Recordings/Bandcamp]
Fans of The Books will also appreciate the work of Brisbane’s MJ O’Neill, performed by Brisvegan violinist Flora Wong on her solo album of recent Australian compositions, Geburtstag, released on new label Corella Recordings run out of the University of Queensland School of Music. All the works are very creative and somewhat transgressive, performed with gusto by Wong, and “Heroes” juxtaposes Wong’s looped violin with samples from school climate strikers arguing passionately for a future they’re being denied.

Frances Shelley – For Now We See Darkly (Drexler Rework) [Drexler Bandcamp]
Finishing with a lovely piece of neo-classical piano meeting with electronics when London-based ex-Sydney composer Drexler reworks a track by UK composer & pianist Frances Shelley. It’s a nice follow-up to Drexler’s debut album and accompanying remixes from 2020.

Listen again — ~206MB

From idm to sound-art, classical-referencing electronica to experimental classical…

It’s never too late to LISTEN AGAIN! Stream on demand on the FBi website, podcast here.

µ-Ziq – Turquoise Hyperfizz [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
µ-Ziq – Uncle Daddy [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
So here it is, the album we’ve been waiting for… While in a scant few weeks Mike Paradinas’ own Planet µ will be re-releasing his classic µ-Ziq album Lunatic Harness for its 25th anniversary, Paradinas was inspired while collating & remastering the album & bonus EP tracks to create a whole slew of new tracks inspired by jungle & hardcore and Paradinas’ penchant for melding melody with harshness. So now we get Magic Pony Ride, whose saccharin title partially describes the contents: his trademark melodies, sampled female vocals (as stand-ins for jungle divas?), lots of prettiness and lots of chaotic breakbeats in the style of the idm & drill’n’bass that µ-Ziq was a beloved pioneer of alongside Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert et al. It’s an absolute delight. I’ll no doubt revisit it when we get the remaster of one of my favourite idm albums of all time, coming very soon…

Osheyack – Usually Never [SVBKVLT]
Osheyack – Piecemeal [SVBKVLT]
It’s hard to imagine that the US-born, Shanghai-based Eli Osheyack isn’t influenced in some way by the post-club experiments of µ-Ziq and co, a couple of decades down the line. The second album from Osheyack comes courtesy of Shanghai-based SVBKVLT, and concerns itself with Intimate Publics, a concept from American scholar Lauren Berlant which describes the social spaces inhabited by people with shared interests – and the contradictions and challenges inherent therein. Osheyack’s music emodies the contradictions of “deconstructed club music”, built from body-moving bass and beats, but wrong-footing the listener with stylistic mashups and glitches. It’s a lot of fun, and as the album progresses I enjoyed the synth strings which reminded me a lot of µ-Ziq’s faux-classical pieces.

Gabriel Prokofiev – HOWL! III – Swarm [Oscillations/Bandcamp]
Gabriel Prokofiev – HOWL! – Afterlude [Oscillations/Bandcamp]
British composer Gabriel Prokofiev is a founder of the Nonclassical, and came to my notice with the label’s earliest releases, with composed works for string quartet, piano etc accompanied by remixes from artists in the dubstep, club and idm spectrum. Despite this long-running interest in electronic music, his new EP HOWL!, named for the Allen Ginsberg poem, seems like the most pure expression of electronic music I’ve heard from him – previously he’s mutated samples of his own compositions and remixed his own and other’s work, but the pieces here are primarily produced on an ARP Odyssey Synthesiser, processed on computer into an energetic set of abstract rhythmic tracks.

Ben Peers – Lupoca [Ben Peers Bandcamp]
A number of Ben Peers‘s works have described in their titles or release notes the generative concepts behind the music – iterative versions of pieces for modular synths and drum machines etc. But the three tracks on Cold Slad are just… music. Generative pieces almost definitely, with the characteristic sound Peers has developed, coming together very musically here.

T. Gowdy – Déneigeuse [Constellation/Bandcamp]
T. Gowdy – Transcend I [Constellation/Bandcamp]
Montréal producer T. Gowdy follows up his previous album on Constellation with another work of flickering synths and rhythms. It’s a shimmery, often beatless, kind of techno, inspired by visuals as much as music, and although the music on Miracles is connected to an installation work concerned with surveillance technology, it’s not too far from the sound of his previous work – not a bad thing at all, mind you!

Nightswimmer & Scanner – The Machinist [Shifting Sounds/Scanner Bandcamp]
Nightswimmer & Scanner – Subaqueous [Shifting Sounds/Scanner Bandcamp]
Here are some unearthed recordings that Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner made around 2001-2002 with Melbourne-based musician Andrew Day aka Nightswimmer. Red Sails, now available on Scanner’s Bandcamp with a bonus track, is the kind of dubby ambient/techno/breaks that is essentially timeless. No deconstructed dancefloors or growling industrial subs here, perhaps, but nothing particularly dated either.

Maral & Lara Sarkissian – entropy & kindness [Maral Bandcamp]
New track “entropy & kindness” is the first collaboration between Iranian-American Maral & Armenian-American Lara Sarkissian. It’s a strange slow-moving piece of chunky beats and mutated melodies drawn from the two women’s homelands. We can only hope there’s more coming from this partnership.

Nobuka – Miniatüre 03 [Difficult Art And Music]
Nobuka – Miniatüre 04 [Difficult Art And Music]
Nobuka – Miniatüre 08 [Difficult Art And Music]
Nobuka – Miniatüre 17 [Difficult Art And Music]
Nobuka – The people (w/ Machinefabriek) [Esc.rec./Bandcamp]
Last year I was introduced to the music of Dutch sound-artist Nobuka aka Michel van Collenburg via his beautiful concept album Reiko released by Esc.rec.. Now UK label Difficult Art And Music brings us a suite of compositions entitled Miniatüre. Each miniatüre is under 3 minutes – some a lot shorter – and tends to be based around one instrument, whether it’s strings or stretched out electric guitar or percussion, but then sometimes surprises occur, like the free jazz breakbeats that shatter the end of one track. Whether it’s contemporary composition, sound-art, drone or lo-fi, it’s considered and compelling, not nearly as “difficult” as the label’s name might imply.

Timothy Fairless – Wavemaking (excerpt) [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
Brisbane artist Timothy Fairless graced us with the remarkable album Common Electric Glare last year, combining industrial drone with acoustic instruments in unusual ways. New album Rising Water is in some ways even more adventurous, however. In the wake of the horrific flooding across Queensland and northern NSW last summer, Fairless composed this suite of three long tracks entirely using the sounds of glasses filled with water. And while there are lots of gorgeous wobbling, warping submerged drones, there is also the clatter & crash that reminds us of the implacable destructive power of water. A powerful & engrossing work.

Claudia Molitor – Change [Nonclassical/Bandcamp]
Claudia Molitor – I am chilled [Nonclassical/Bandcamp]
Utterly idiosyncratic is the work of English-German composer & sound-artist Claudia Molitor. Well-versed in composing for orchestra, chamber groups or solo instruments as well as creating installation works and other sound-art, here Molitor is working at song length, often indeed writing songs – but with field recordings or abstract drones at their base, contemporary poetry sometimes forming the lyrics, and avant-garde composition rubbing up against songwriting. A must for connoisseurs of strange music.

Patrick Shiroishi – Waiting for Friends at Tokyo Station [American Dreams/Bandcamp]
Devin Shaffer – Cryotherapy [American Dreams/Bandcamp]
The American Dreams label is home to experimental music of all stripes, and here presents a compilation of mostly ambient music from mostly artists associated with the label. In The Deep Drift You Will Find The Most Serene Of Lullabies allows artists to create music outside of their usual comfort zone too, thus Los Angeles saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi combines a field recording with gorgeous layers of reeds on “Waiting for Friends at Tokyo Station”. Meanwhile Chicago experimental songwriter Devin Shaffer allows a song to emerge from ambient layers of guitar.

Silvia Tarozzi & Deborah Walker – Il bersagliere ha cento penne [Unseen Worlds/Bandcamp]
Silvia Tarozzi & Deborah Walker – Tita [Unseen Worlds/Bandcamp]
In 2020, US label Unseen Worlds released a remarkable album from Italian violinist, singer & composer Silvia Tarozzi somewhere between folk, jazz & modern composition. On Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d’amore (“Songs of war, work and love”) Tarozzi joins with cellist Deborah Walker to present a collection of music inspired by folk songs from rural Emilia which came from working class women involved with the partisan resistance in World War II, including songs sung by choirs of female rice field workers. Tarozzi and Walker grew up with this music, but are now both highly experienced within contemporary composition and improvisation, working regularly with the likes of Eliane Radigue, and thus these traditional, political, working songs are couched in extended instrumental and vocal techniques – but the songs are also allowed to shine.

Matthew Bourne – Dušan [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
Matthew Bourne – Jane [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
Here’s a small collection of recordings by British contemporary pianist Matthew Bourne for prepared piano, recorded in one improvisatory session after creating a substantial film soundtrack with the same piano setup. The pieces range from challenging to touching, with the usual percussive and pitch-altering effects of piano preparation. A studio afterthought it may be, but it’s proof that Bourne is a consummate musician.

Gregory Paul Mineeff – Orientation [Cosmic Leaf/Bandcamp]
Gregory Paul Mineeff – Walking Away [Cosmic Leaf/Bandcamp]
Finishing tonight with a local pianist and synth player, Wollongong’s Gregory Paul Mineeff, whose latest album Incidental finds him continuing his talent for post-classical (or is it “neo-classical” now?) piano works and dreamy synth pieces with analogue effects – but here “Incidental” indicates that the music is intended as incidental music for films or documentaries. It’s a space which Mineeff would excel in, so hopefully someone will take this album as a kind of calling card. In any case, it’s very emotive listening on its own.

Listen again — ~193MB