Your weekly fix of postfolkrocktronica, dronenoise, power ambient, post-everything improv... and more? Sunday nights from 9 to 11pm on FBi Radio, 94.5 FM in Sydney, Australia.
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Incomprehensibly, Utility Fog has been on-air for 20 years as of this week! That means, of course, that FBi Radio has survived 20 years - something to celebrate. The station has had an undeniably massive impact on Sydney's music scene, brought fourth musical careers, provided a focal point for music obsessives all over Sydney & surrounds. I'm proud to have been part of it, and on this show I'll be celebrating music & artists who've been of significance to this show over this period. In just 2 hours I'm trying to give representation to 2 decades' worth of artistic output - and for perhaps half that time the show itself was 3 hours long! (Sheesh, don't remind me...) So forgive me for all the fades & edits and talking over music that I've done in order to tell this story.
And please forgive this very self-indulgent write-up. Hopefully it's fun & interesting!
LISTEN AGAIN to 20 years in 2 hours... Stream on demand via FBi, podcast here!
the books - the lemon of pink [Tomlab/Temporary Residence/Bandcamp]
I heard the first album from The Books right about when it came out, as I'd already come across Nick Zammuto in the old email list days. Weird laptop music with cello (Paul De Jong) - that was always going to be right up my street! When their second album the lemon of pink was announced, I knew I was going to be starting Utility Fog later that year, so I wrote to Tom at Tomlab and asked for a CD promo. It's probably accurate to say this was the first promo I ever got for UFog, at least by request - and what a top tier legendary piece of work too. This is where The Books came into their own. Beautiful folksy, quirky cello playing, impeccably chaotic digital edits, acoustic guitar, and somehow singing as well. Oh, and those unplaceable spoken word samples, often found on tapes in thrift stores by both members. What is it? Laptop folk? Neo-classical? No, it's just The Books. Sadly, after their fourth album, the pair had a falling out and that was that.
In any case, the un-pin-downable nature of The Books' music is a perfect encapsulation of what I wanted to do with Utility Fog - music that sits uneasily in musical norms, not just of genre but even of "songwriting"; composition vs improvisation, acoustic vs digital, noisy vs beautiful. Let's problematise all the binaries!!!
tunng - mother's daughter [Static Caravan & many reissues/Bandcamp]
Just want to note here that these selections are not going chronologically. I've sequenced the music much like a normal Utility Fog - a musical journey.
Still, The Books' "laptop folk" fitted a strain of music that UFog favoured from the start, call it folktronica. And when I discovered Tunng in 2004, they immediately resonated. Here were songs that sounded like they came from an arcane English past, but filtered through contemporary electronics. I got hold of Tunng's first two lathe-cut 7" singles and played those to death even before the debut album mother's daughter and other songs came along later that year. They caught the ear of Danny Jumpertz while listening to the show, who promptly licensed the album for Australia on his Feral Media label (a label that would feature frequently in UFog playlists).
65daysofstatic - drove through ghosts to get here [Monotreme Records/Bandcamp]
Here's another hugely important band in the UFog story. Like Tunng, I picked up 65daysofstatic's very first EP through Norman Records based on their description, which as I recall was "Like Mogwai being mugged by Squarepusher in a dark alley". I guess when you're a young band you notice when you're getting played, and boy did I play stumble.stop.repeat! Paul from 65 sent me cool oddities like their unreleased/unreleasable comps, and by the time their second album One Time For All Time came out, I was stoked to find my name ("Peter Hollo at Utility Fog") in the thank yous. The best story, though, came round to me later. Birdsrobe brought them out to Australia to tour with sleepmakeswaves, and they ended up re-releasing all the 65dos albums in gorgeous card sleeve editions. Around that time Mike Solo from Birdsrobe mentioned to me that it was hearing 65daysofstatic on Utility Fog that put him on to the boys in the first place. Rad.
Four Tet - My Angel Rocks Back and Forth (Four Teas on English Time - Icarus remix) [Domino]
Killing two birds with one stone here. 2003 was a watershed year for Four Tet, with the release of the still-legendary Rounds album. Hip-hop beats and acoustic samples chopped'n'glitched, it's miles away from Kieran's club-ready sounds of the last decade or more, but it was hugely influential. In the lead-up to FBi's official launch, a looped playlist was broadcasting on 94.5FM, and She Moves She was one of the tracks that would come round, hour after hour. Suffice to say it already felt like home.
Many singles were ripped from this album, and in 2004 "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth" came with this insane remix from Icarus. I'd heard of this band but only glancingly, but something in the frenetic pace of this remix felt like drum'n'bass. I quickly discovered that Icarus's debut Kamikaze in 1998, and to some extent the followup Fijaka a year later are jungle-leaning drum'n'bass perfection. Following this, the duo ventured further and further into abstraction, drawing on the history of musique concrète, granular processing and glitched jazz - but somewhere inside there's always a heart of junglist rhythm'n'bass.
I got in touch with the duo - cousins Ollie Bown and Sam Britton - and discovered that Ollie had been living in Melbourne, working as an academic. Years later, he's been a Sydneysider for over a decade and we play in Tangents together.
Department of Eagles - Sailing by Night [Isota/Melodic/Bandcamp]
Another 2004 discovery, initially feeling like they fit into the folktronica/indietronica mould, with zany sampling and rhythm programming antics befitting music written by college students on cheap computers. But Daniel Rossen's songwriting and emotive voice put Department of Eagles on a whole different level, something which created a beautiful alchemy when he joined Grizzly Bear shortly after. I love everything he does, but I'm still super fond of the awkward first album, and songs like "Sailing By Night" and "The Horse You Ride" already possess the beauty of his later work.
Hood - Over the land, over the sea. [Domino/Bandcamp]
When Utility Fog started I was already a dedicated Hood fan. Again they encapsulated so much of what the show was aimed at - my unweildy postfolkrocktronica term (intended as an amalgan of postrock and folktronica) fits this band with indie DIY/noise roots, a deep engagement with technology and electronic music, a deep understanding of the original roots of "postrock" (late period Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis), and a complicated relationship with the pastoral northern English countryside. Hood were always a hard band to sell, with obscured lyrics and self-effacing vocals, but their influence is incalculable on generations of indie/electronic bands the world over.
This track is one of my faves, postrock textures and electronic beats - as with many Hood favourites, a non-album track, here found on "The Lost You" EP that preceded their last album. Meanwhile Chris Adams' breakcore/drum'n'bass project Downpour and indie/experimental project Bracken, Richard Adams' The Declining Winter, and many other side projects have featured regularly on Utility Fog.
part timer - thinking, unthinking feat. Danielle McCaffrey [Moteer/Bandcamp]
Craig Tattersall and Andrew Johnson were both members of Hood in the '90s, as well as with their own indietronic band The Famous Boyfriend. They morphed into the minimalist electronica band The Remote Viewer, whose incredible first LP I heard playing at Pelicanneck in Manchester when travelling in 1999 (Side note: Pelicanneck became online store Boomkat a few years later, and the rest is history). I had to double back and buy the LP, which became a prized possession (and was replaced on CD some years later). Like Chris Adams' Downpour, I was a fan of this project before I knew the Hood connection.
Craig and Andrew started a boutique label called Moteer in 2003, whose first release was a self-titled 12" from a duo called Clickits, followed by an album in 2005. When I played Clickits for the first time, I was quickly contacted by John McCaffrey, one half of Clickits, who had moved to Melbourne with his wife Danielle (this moving to Melbourne thing, what's up with that). John was excited to be played on the radio in Australia, and sent me a batch of solo stuff as Part Timer. And for years afterwards I would regularly receive CD-Rs in the mail from John, charming and intricate folktronica which I would always play. Many years later, Part Timer has come back with a more post-classical bent, and John still sends me tracks on the reg, and I still play them.
billy woods / kenny segal - spider hole [Backwoodz/Bandcamp]
There'll be more UFog history coming, but here's a perfect album from recent years. East coast underground rap hero billy woods, curator of the impeccable Backwoodz Studioz, released his second album with west coast producer Kenny Segal earlier this year, and Maps will no doubt be topping many year-end lists for 2023, but for me 2019's Hiding Places is untouchable. woods' raps are sardonic and melodic, documenting the fucked-up state of America and his own psyche in surrealist stanzas, while Segal twists his samples out of shape, pitched down, reversed, chopped, interjecting and undercutting. The ascent of billy woods, his duo Armand Hammer and his Backwoodz label has been slow/fast - his first, lost releases were in 2003 (two decades, folks) but his restart was 2012, also over a decade ago. Hip-hop has always been experimental music, but this is pretty far-out stuff, and it works. Which is just right for the times.
Collarbones - Kill Off The Vowels [Collarbones Bandcamp]
So. I first played Marcus Whale when he was just 16 - here, under his early solo alter ego Scissor Lock. He'd already been sending me music for quite a while. That solo stuff was freeform improv, sound-art, drone stuff. Marcus would often chat to me online, and at one point in 2009 he told me he had a new project with a friend he'd met online (Travis is based in Adelaide) - and it was pretty different. What I was hearing were the earliest Collarbones tracks, dance beats and cut-ups, and Marcus (a saxophonist and guitarist) as front-man, singing in pop/r'n'b fashion. And it was good. So I was the first person to play Collarbones on the radio, from their debut EP in 2009, Waiting For The Ghosts. Their next singles, which ended up on the album Iconography (sadly not online), were far more accomplished, with heavily-edited samples and beats, and super catchy hooks. FBi was all over them by then.
Further pop & dance projects from Marcus included the Sydney supergroup BV (RIP) with Lavurn Lee (best known as Cassius Select) and Jared Beeler (best known as DJ Plead) - and Marcus's Inland Sea is a masterpiece.
Oh - and Marcus also ran a homegrown 3" CD label called CURT that released my first solo EP in 2010 (same year as this single).
clipping. - All in Your Head (feat. Counterfeit Madison & Robyn Hood) [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
OK, clipping. represent the intersection of so many UFog interests. Daveed Diggs, half-Jewish/half-black frontman, is a genius rapper, a smart lyricist who inserts deep cultural references into everything he does - and a charismatic front-man. Making the innnssaaaane beats are William Hutson - composer and noise musician - and Jonathan Snipes - also a composer and noise musician, but also one half of the notorious rave/hardcore hooligans Captain Ahab. Clipping are the best. They just are. And every release they do is different - well, OK, other than the duology of Horrorcore albums. And there's the thing: clipping take the tropes of sci-fi, hip-hop, horror, and turn them inside out. This song - and its intense video - is horrifying, violent and beautiful, raised ever higher by the raps of Robyn Hood and the singing of Counterfeit Madison. And that crescendo to the finale!
Oh and for true horror, before This Is America (which rules btw) there was Knees On The Ground.
Venetian Snares - Hajnal [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
But here's another axis around which Utility Fog has always revolved. Jungle's experiencing an extended renaissance at the moment, something I already started seeing at least 10 years ago... But in 2003, drum'n'bass was mostly tech-step, and breakcore was where you went for your crazy beat juggling. Along with "postfolkrocktronica", when I started Utility Fog I threw in a few other made-up genre mashups - including "orchestral breakcore". So imagine me if you will, 2 years later, when Aaron Funk aka Venetian Snares releases Rossz Csillag Alatt Született on the ever essential Planet µ. Here it is! I spoke it into being. Not really, but Aaron spent some months in Hungary, and was inspired by the poetry and history to make an album in his characteristic 7/4 breakcore, built out of impeccably sequenced and chopped classical samples. There's Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto, there's Stravinsky and Paganini - oh and of course there's Billie Holliday doing the famous Hungarian suicide song (cut to 7/4). And there's Bela Bartók. 18 years later this album still boggles my tiny mind. Sure VSnares was always clever, funky shit, but this is next level.
Exile - Silicon Chop (feat. Sub Focus) [Planet µ/Buy via Planet µ (not on Bandcamp ?)]
Yes, Planet µ has long been the place to go for forward-thinking electronic music. When Planet µ released his first album Pro Agonist in 2005, Tim Exile (at that time still going by just Exile) was a renowned producer in the drum'n'bass world. But this album saw him spreading his wings into far more experimental waters. The album is cheeky, sometimes grotesque, self-referential, and super complex, but it starts with a veritable banger, featuring - of all people - stadium d'n'b powerhouse Sub Focus. This is noughties d'n'b as jungle. Legendary.
DJ C - Conscience A Heng Dem (Aaron Spectre Remix ft. Capleton) [Mashit]
Alongside breakcore, in the early oughts there was a trend (crossing over from breakcore) for "ragga jungle". In the mid-'90s heaps of dancehall classics were given jungle makeovers - the tempo and feel of dancehall lends itself perfectly to the drums and the bass of jungle. This was taken up in the decade later by the next generation of bedroom producers and noise kids, but in a way that felt like appropriation of a slightly squicky nature: using the disembodied voices of black people for the coolness factor. I don't doubt the dedication of Baltimore's DJ C to Jamaican artforms, though, and on the very first 12" from his Mashit label (released in 2003), the voice of Capleton is credited. This is another release I played to death in those early years - both DJ C's side and Aaron Spectre's incendiary remix.
Wordcolour - Babble [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
I wanted to give some representation to current jungle trends, and I couldn't go past young producer Wordcolour, whose debut album The trees were buzzing, and the grass. came out on Fabric's in-house label Houndstooth last year. The album is gorgeously produced, with beatless sound design pieces, spoken word, quasi-classical interludes, and some of the most expertly programmed beats I've heard of late.
Loefah - Root [DMZ/Bandcamp]
But now we must switch gears again. I felt like it took me a while to get my head around dubstep when I first encountered it. Still intoxicated with jungle, the 140bpm tempo seemed to slow, and I couldn't switch perspective from music led by the drum breaks. But once I understood that dubstep is led from the bass, it all fell into place. When Mala played Sydney, hearing it on a real soundsystem really brought it home, and I was hooked. Despite this delay, playing dubstep tunes on my show from about 2006 stood out - I remember getting a call from Paul from Garage Pressure one Sunday night, who was super surprised to hear dubstep played outside of their show. While Skream and Benga became the pop stars of dubstep, Digital Mystikz were among the pioneers. DMZ was Mala alongside Coki, but the third figure in DMZ was Loefah, whose early dubstep singles were simple yet profound.
Colleen - blue sands [Leaf/Wind Bell/Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
For some reason when Colleen's beautiful album les ondes silencieuses came out in 2007, with dubstep on my mind I used mix "blue sands" in with Loefah's beats. It sort of works? This album is exquisite - a kind of lonely post-classical/folk made with acoustic instruments including the viola da gamba (an older relative of the cello). Incidentally, Colleen's more recent work is dub-inspired modular synth stuff.
The Bug - Black Wasp feat. Liz Harris of Grouper [Ninja Tune/Bandcamp]
But back to dubstep for a minute. Kevin Richard Martin, in all his incarnations, has been an ever-present fixture on the show. Pre-dubstep, I played the punked-out dancehall of The Bug's aptly-named album Pressure, co-released on Rephlex and Tigerbeat6. When London Zoo came along in 2008, I was fully signed up - in fact it started in 2007 with the immortal Skeng released on 12" by Kode9's Hyperdub - with a remix from Kode9 on the flip. It featured two grime greats, Killa P and Flowdan of Roll Deep, who improvised their lines in the studio at the end of a session. Incredible stuff. Oh look, I played both sides when it came out. And by the way, Loefah's remix of the other Flowdan masterpiece off the album, Jah War, is an oft-rediscovered masterpiece.
Again I've gone off on tangents, because what I played was not from London Zoo but from the Angels & Devils era. That album features a beautiful track with Liz Harris of Grouper, but they actually recorded two, and "Black Wasp" is ethereal beauty in a spectral dubstep frame.
Andy Stott - Numb [Modern Love]
Speaking of ethereal beauty, Andy Stott's Luxury Problems, and the preceding Passed Me By and We Stay Together represent, for me, a long-needed broadening of horizons, having for too long disdained 4/4 techno and house. The power of these records cannot be denied, especially Stott's collaborations with his childhood piano teacher Alison Skidmore. This wasn't quite the beginning - I would have already been a Matthew Herbert fan, and I'd been pulled out of my comfort zone by the pumping rhythmic variations of Emptyset's self-titled debut. Still, glorious stuff.
shoeb ahmad - the orchids [Mystery Plays]
I clearly remember the Andy Stott EPs and album of this era being the subject of music-geek conversations with Shoeb Ahmad, something we've done for about as long as UFog's been on air. My recollection of our first meeting was Shoeb sending me a message via LiveJournal (those were the days) remarking that he'd seen me at the recent Tortoise gig. Being randomly recognized was pretty bizarre, but Shoeb had great taste and we talked a lot, exchanged musical loves (we were both huge Hood fans), and eventually met in person. In fact our first physical meeting was about 2hrs before we performed an improvised duo set together at Hibernian House in Surry Hills.
A few years later we setup another improvised gig with musicians who all knew each other but had never performed together: Evan Dorrian, drummer with Shoeb in their brilliant duo Spartak; Adrian Lim-Klumpes, piano & keyboard player in Triosk; and Ollie Bown from Icarus. That first performance became Tangents' first album, after which Ollie contacted Jeremy from Temporary Residence, who'd earlier released Icarus, and Temp Res have now released three albums from us.
This long friendship aside, Shoeb's music has always featured heavily on this show - and not only Shoeb's music, but also the music released on Shoeb's impeccably-curated label hellosQuare. I'm having trouble with pronouns, as I'm very used to using she/her with Sia these days.
In any case, sometime early in the Tangents days, Shoeb released the wonderful album watch/illuminate through Mystery Plays, a label setup by Stefan Panczak of the wonderful Inch-time, an Australian medical doctor who was living in London at the time. I still feel this album was unfairly overlooked - beautiful shimmering guitars, hidden vocals, flittering rhythms. This track also has sampled piano from Adrian Lim-Klumpes sprinkled throughout.
Jenny Hval - blood flight [Rune Grammofon]
Here's another pivotal album for me. Jenny Hval spent a few years studying in Melbourne, and released two lovely indie albums as Rockettothesky, but by 2011 she'd moved back to Oslo and created the remarkable album Viscera with various Norwegian experimental musicians, including producer Helge Sten aka Deathprod, a member of Supersilent, who like this album were released on the legendary Rune Grammofon label. Thus Hval's songs, with artfully explicit lyrics, are garbed in expert experimental arrangements, Hval's voice and melodies like an even more unhinged Kate Bush. Over the following albums Jenny Hval found great success, but this one seemed to puzzle a lot of people. Well fuck'em, this is another immortal classic to me.
9T Antiope - Nocebo (B) (excerpt) [PTP/Bandcamp]
I discovered the Paris-based Iranian duo 9T Antiope first via Kate Carr's Flaming Pines label. If you're a listener to this show you've heard releases from Kate and Flaming Pines a lot. Back in 2016, Flaming Pines released a landmark compilation of experimental music by Iranian artists, Absence, curated by Arash Akbari, with an introductory essay by the excellent composer/producer Siavash Amini. Later that same year, 9T Antiope contributed to the label's Tiny Portaits series, with a track called Brobdingnagian. I quickly gobbled up all I could from them, and was pleased when, in 2019, Geng from PTP sent me an advance promo of their album Nocebo. Here we have the imposing soundscapes of Nima Aghiani and the poetry and pure vocals of Sara Bigdeli Shamloo, some kind of mix between noise, drone and classical music. Since 2020 the duo have released a series of beautiful electronic pop songs sung in Farsi as Taraamoon.
Sote - Pipe Dreams [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
9T Antiope are only one part of the tapestry of Iranian music that I've discovered in the last 8 or so years and been inspired to play. I knew Ata Ebtekar's music as Sote (literally "sound" in Farsi) from way back via a pair of heavily overdriven drum'n'bass tracks on the Warp label, Electric Deaf. Some 5 years later I found the Wake Up 12" EP on the disarmingly-named Record Label Records, which to some degree followed in Electric Deaf's footsteps, but already by then Ebtekar had moved back to Tehran from the United States, and was connecting with Persian classical music and early electronic music with Dastgaah. This engagement has generated more & more inspiring music from Sote, often in collaboration with musicians playing traditional instruments like the santour, tambour and tar, melding these sounds with intricate sound design.
I was lucky enough to interview Ata ahead of his first appearance at Soft Centre in 2019. As well as his own inspiring music, Ata runs the label Zabte Sote on which, in 2019 he released a massive four cassette, 42-track survey of Iranian experimental music, Girih - and yet this only scratches the surface of the incredible music coming out of Iran (even under brutal sanctions and an equally brutal ruling regime) and from the Persian diaspora.
ZULI - Robotic Handshakes in 4D [UIQ/Bandcamp]
But let's move now to north Africa, where in Cairo we find the master of bent bass beats ZULI, whose debut EP Bionic Ahmed was released by Lee Gamble's great UIQ label in 2016, and who's gone from strength to strength since. ZULI represents one facet of a thriving experimental music scene in Egypt. The label he co-founded in 2020, irsh, has released two excellent compilations from the Egyptian experimental scene, starting with did you mean: irish - but electronic music is only part of the story, with free jazz, psychedelic rock and more coming out of Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and elsewhere.
Of course you can also find exciting sounds from Uganda, Morocco, Jordan and more.
Muqata'a - Ikmal إِكمَال [Hundebiss/Bandcamp]
Also notable is the hip-hop and experimental music scene in the occupied territories of Palestine. Muqata'a was a member of the hip-hop collective Ramallah Underground, whose music I first came across in 2018 on an album released by Discrepant sublabel Souk. Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص was a standout in 2021, glitchy hip-hop informed by an Arabic numerological science that invokes the voices of Muqata'a's ancestors and evokes the suffocating experience of living in the world's largest open-air prison. Muqata'a is also co-founder of the Bilna'es بالناقص label, showcasing cutting-edge Palestinian music.
Ben Frost - Through The Glass Of The Roof [Bedroom Community/Bandcamp]
I first met Ben Frost around the turn of the millennium, when he handed me his EP Music for Sad Children, which I'm still fond of, even though Ben probably wants to disown it. Some years later Ben had decamped to Iceland, to work with Valgeir Sigurðsson in his studio, honing his composition skills and production expertise. The first output from this was Theory of Machines, released in 2007 by Bedroom Community, with heavy bass, dark ambient drones, Swans samples... But for me By The Throat in 2009 was where he really got started. Cold and beautiful and brutal, it evokes snowscapes and snarling wolves with a lot of acoustic instrumentation and a lot of overdriven electronics. It seems to me that the growling distorted bass surges so popular in electronic music these days can be traced back to these albums (if not exclusively - of course drum'n'bass and dubstep's basslines are another source). Anyway, epochal.
Jockstrap - Acid [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Shifting gears again, Jockstrap have only been around for around 4 years, but already have climbed the pantheon, with virtuoso electronics, Broadway-informed string arrangements and poetic, sardonic lyrics, all rolled together in glorious cacophany. Like a lot of leftfield music, the quirks and disruptions annoy some people, but... fuck 'em. I've listened to the Wicked City EP and now the self-titled album over and over.
Leah Kardos - Sexy Monday [bigo & twigetti/Bandcamp]
Back in late 2011 I was introduced to the music of Brisbane musician Leah Kardos, long resident by now in London. Her debut album Feather Hammer was a creative take on piano in electronic music, with real emotion and real production dexterity. On follow-up Machines, she enlisted the classically-trained Leah Wolk-Lewanowicz, another ex-pat Aussie, to sing sophisticated electronic/classical pop songs, with lyrics cut out of spam emails. It's strangely touching. Leah works as an academic, as well as leading projects at Visconti Studio, named for Tony Visconti, longtime producer for David Bowie. Indeed, Leah's love of Bowie led her to write an in-depth analysis of Bowie's final works, published as Blackstar Theory by Bloomsbury. She also frequently writes reviews and articles for The Wire. I'd love it if she released more music though!
I interviewed Leah back in 2013.
Aphir - Green Valentine Blues (Rework of Allen Ginsberg) [Provenance]
In the earlyish days of FBi, Stu Buchanan co-presented a radio show (with Danny Jumpertz of Feral Media) called New Weird Australia, which also served as a record label, compiling the best of Australian experimental music over a long series of releases. Some time later, post-NWA, Stu formed a new label called Provenance, in an attempt to see how to do a record label in post-Spotify times. A number of artists highlighted by the label came from a thriving Canberra and Melbourne scene of artists melding experimental electronica with a certain pop sensibility - and when Stu decided to give up the label, those artists stepped in to remake Provenance as a collective. It seemed to me that Becki Whitton aka Aphir was a driving force in this new form of the label. Becki lends her engineering, mixing and mastering skills to many artists, and her own music as Aphir has continually evolved, with highly personal songs wrapped in pop songs with adventurous production - and more recently her marathon late-night improvised vocal processing sessions have led to a plethora of textured ambient "choral" work. Tonight I chose something different though - a poem of Allen Ginsberg's set as a kind of electronic folk song, from one of Provenance's compilations.
Circling back to Stu, he restarted New Weird Australia last year with single-artist releases and compilations on Bandcamp. Absolutely essential.
Ellen Arkbro & Johan Graden - Other side [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
As we reach the end of our allotted 2 hours in which to summarise 2 decades of music, I need to fit in some of the more lower case, minimalist sound-art that I also love to feature. This album was utterly unexpected - Swedish musician Ellen Arkbro is known for her super minimalist compositions exploring alternate tunings on instruments like organ and brass. But here, working with fellow Swede Johan Graden, she has crafted a singular album of delicate, touching songs. I get along without you very well (which contains no Chet Baker inside, despite the title) is a masterpiece of songform, which carries its experimental elements with great subtlety - unusual harmonies based around discords, unusual voicings and instrumental choices, and very subtle electronics.
Here, Utility Fog's mission of boundary-crossing musical forms is given expression through the meeting of free jazz, minimalist composition and songwriting. Another example, approaching from a very different direction, is the recent albums by Ashley Paul: Ray and I Am Fog.
soccer Committee & machinefabriek - for i have none [Morc/Digitalis/Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Here, though, is the most minimalist of minimalist song, courtesy of Dutch singer Mariska Baars aka soccer Committee. This year she gifted us the beautiful ❤️ /Lamb, but my first encounters with her were via another very important member of the Utility Fog musical family, Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek. Machinefabriek's music brought me into the realms of drone and sound-art, and he's been a recurring presence in these playlists. His collaboration with Baars, 2018's drawn, pairs soccer Committee's highly understated, yet heart-pulling songs with Machinefabriek's talents in sound design and signal processing. Also indispensible is the album redrawn, made up of remixes and reworkings of the original album by the cream of experimental music as of 2012.
Burning Star Core - Beauty Hunter [Hospital Productions/Bandcamp]
As we draw to a close, we need some representation from the proper noise scene - and who better than C Spencer Yeh, leader and often sole member of Burning Star Core. The psychedelic, freeform onslaughts of BxC could range from power electronics to improvised, crashing, droning out-rock, mangled vocals and mangled violin. The noise scene has transformed many times since the '90s and early '00s, and while some projects are still alive & kicking (see Wolf Eyes), Spencer folded up BxC in 2010, following it with sporadic oddities under his own name. Some of Burning Star Core's massive discography can be found at his Bandcamp, and I strongly recommend digging in.
the body - the west has failed [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
And finally, extreme metal and hybrid metal goings-on could not be better represented than by the body, creators of beautiful ugliness and ugly beauty. Though they're ostensibly some kind of blackened doom band, they have always featured collaborators who transform and enhance the crushing guitars and drums of the core duo, such as singers Chrissy Wolpert and Kristin Hayter. In the last decade, as well as female choirs and piano, they've increasingly incorporated electronic beats and production into their music, in collaboration with Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets. This doesn't just mean industrial metal, but also draws widely from Beyoncé (really! so they say), dancehall, dub, drum'n'bass and more. Here also is music unchained from the constraints of genre. On this track, heavy guitars, industrial drums and distant black metal screetches give way to dubbed out beats and the sampled voice of Eek a Mouse.
And there you have it. This didn't even come close to scratching the surface of 20 years of musical exploration, but everything I've included here is pivotal and inspiring. Here's to the next 2 decades...
A quite international Utility Fog tonight also covers ground from purely acoustic folk to purely electronic, generative music, managing to shift into jazz, doom, and jungle from surprising quarters, with sound-art and a dash of contemporary composition rounding things out.
LISTEN AGAIN to the widest sounds around. Podcast here, stream on demand from FBi.
Mike Lindsay feat. Guy Garvey - Saturday Sun [Chrysalis Records] Camille - Hazey Jane II [Chrysalis Records] Last month I played the concertedly unfaithful cover of Nick Drake's "Parasite" by English folk revivalists & reimaginers Stick In The Wheel. It was one of a number of tracks released on a series of 7" editions ahead of the 2CD compilation The Endless Coloured Ways: The Songs of Nick Drake, released this week from Chrysalis Records. Apparently the artists were instructed to ignore the original and do their own take, which help explain Stick In The Wheel's approach, as well as for instance the punky version of "'Cello Song" by Fontaines D.C. Of course there are some (perhaps too many) rather faithful versions that add little of interest to Drake's songs which, it could be convincingly argued, are perfect in his original versions. I could be particularly scathing about Craig Armstrong & Self Esteem's "Black Eyed Dog", which sounds like the artists are blissfully unaware that this is an anguished song about depression; or Ben Harper (*sigh*) who apparently thought "What if 'Time Has Told Me' but country?", and it's, you know, fine I guess. Fine for Ben Harper. Oh well. Anyway, YMMV and there are some beautifully reimagined versions as well. Mike Lindsay is the producer behind folktronica band (as I still like to call them) Tunng, whose first incarnation with Sam Genders helped shape Utility Fog's character in the first few years. Here he enlists Elbow singer Guy Garvey for a version that's Drake-like folk, glitchy "folktronica" and... more. And it's a shame that there isn't really any fingerpicking guitar playing, a characteristic feature of Nick Drake's sound, but we do get French singer Camille's version of "Hazey Jane II", which repurposes the broken chords on plucked cello. Camille of course has form with reimagined cover versions, via her earlier gig as singer in Nouvelle Vague. I've yet to discover who the cellist is (maybe I'll update this when I get the CD?), but it's gorgeous, and Camille's singing is agile enough for the flittery melody at this slightly higher tempo, yet emotive enough for, well, Nick Drake.
Anne Bakker - Sailor [Anne Bakker Bandcamp] Anne Bakker - Summer in my Hands [Anne Bakker Bandcamp]
Like Marisa Baars aka soccer Committee last week, I discovered Dutch viola/violin player & singer Anne Bakker via her many collaborations with Machinefabriek. A verstatile musician across many genres, she works in the background of many other musicians' work, but does also write her own lovely songs which she performs solo, as found on 2017's VOX/VIOLA and now its sequel VOX/VIOLA II (LIVINGROOM SESSIONS). As well as its usual roles, her looped viola plays the role of rhythm section (including percussive sounds). Both EPs are collections of lovely indiefolk songs with creative arrangements, and particularly on the new EP a smattering of electronic experimentation that may have rubbed off from her collaborations with Machinefabriek.
Minhwi Lee - Borrowed Tongue [Alien Transistor: LP here/Bandcamp] Minhwi Lee - Swollen Foot [Alien Transistor: LP here/Bandcamp]
Speaking of versatile musicians! South Korean singer/songwriter Minhwi Lee is an accomplished soundtrack composer, jazz musician, indie rock musician, and also plays bass in doom metal band Gawthrop. She is also responsible for this wonderful solo indiefolk album Borrowed Tongue, released in Korea in 2016 and now available more widely on LP via The Notwist's label Alien Transistor. The album shows off Lee's composition and arrangement talents with instrumentals at the start and end and in between (check out the Sakamoto-like cello & piano work that closes the album!), but you'll also find classic folk and acoustic chamber pop songs that owe a lot to her composing style but also recall Japanese psych-folk like Eddie Marcon and the aforementioned Nick Drake. A thousand thanks to The Notwist for bringing this incredible music to our attention.
공중도둑 (Mid-Air Thief) - 쇠사슬 (Ahhhh, These Chains!) [Mid-Air Thief Bandcamp]
I have my brother Tim, who was recently at the Global Greens Congress in South Korea, to thank for introducing me to this South Korean musician. 공중도둑 (Mid-Air Thief) keeps their identity under wraps, but has a few albums of quirky folk-pop and folktronica under their belt, which were re-released or co-released internationally by Top Shelf Records. It's cool stuff, but from 2018's 무너지기 (Crumbling), the song "쇠사슬 (Ahhhh, These Chains!)" is phenomenal. It starts off with cascading guitar a la Department of Eagles, and flies in all directions. Blissful and thrilling.
HEKKA - Oil Slick [HEKKA Bandcamp] HEKKA - It's A Chimera! [HEKKA Bandcamp]
Made up of some top jazz musicians from Eora/Sydney, HEKKA is a jazz piano trio taking tips from postrock and techno as well as more familiar jazz trio connections. There's virtuso playing from Novak Manojlovic on piano, Jacques Emery on bass and Tully Ryan on drums - all musicians who've worked in more avant-garde realms as well - and there are electronics around the edges here too. Energetic and always enjoyable.
Lý Trang - and phosphenes... [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp] Lý Trang - look, I finally had an umbilical cord [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Following the release earlier this year of the incredible *1 from Vietnamese group Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective, Subtext Recordings have now put out the second solo album from Lý Trang, who was briefly part of the collective, but grew up in the mountains of North Vietnam, and incredibly found herself in Moscow not long before the invasion of Ukraine. Syenite was recorded under those circumstances, in the wake of massive geopolitical upheaval at the same time as personal dislocation. Although less so than on her debut Snail Skeleton, there are songs on Syenite, but they're often buried in the middle of longer tracks, or the vocals are buried in echoing drones or industrial detritus. There are references to traditional Vietnamese music, but the music is always likely to take a left turn, from thumping percussion to whispers and less forthright rhythms. It's a fascinating and complex, layered piece of work, worthy of close listening.
Divide and Dissolve - Kingdom of Fear (feat. Minori Sanchiz-Fung) [Invada/Bandcamp] Divide and Dissolve - Derail [Invada/Bandcamp]
Each album from Naarm's Divide and Dissolve builds on the last, with Systemic the least dependent on doom metal but no less intense. Although still appearing on the album, drummer Sylvie Nehill recently left (for personal reasons, no big disagreements), and the powerful musical vision of Takiaya Reed brings us looped drones and melodies on saxophone (the most beautiful yet), as well as piano and electronics - and of course pounding gloopy riffs. The band's commitment to dismantling white supremacy and honouring ancestors and Indigenous land provides the impetus and meaning to all the works here, even though as usual the only words come from longtime collaborator Minori Sanchiz-Fung. Even if you thought you knew what Divide and Dissolve is all about, you should know that this is revelatory and powerful.
Faizal Mostrixx - Muke Eka (Woven Tales) [exclusive to The Wire Tapper 62, with issue 474 of The Wire] Faizal Mostrixx - Onions and Love [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
An exclusive track on the cover CD with the latest issue of The Wire prompted me to properly check out the recent album Mutations from Ugandan producer Faizal Mostrixx, released on the Hamburg-based global label Glitterbeat. "Muke Eka (Woven Tales)" came out of the same sessions as the new album, but inhabits a dubbier and more broken-down soundworld. On the album proper, Mostrixx joyfully mixes amapiano and other contemporary African dancefloor styles with global club music, and field recordings from across the continent. Mostrixx is creating his own form of "Afrofuturism" - although Nigerian science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor has defined "Africanfuturism" to differentiate from Afrofuturism, which has originated from the African diaspora, particularly African American culture. Whatever the term, this music is a brilliant synthesis and extrapolation of forward-looking African dance music.
African Head Charge - Microdosing [On-U Sound/Bandcamp] African Head Charge - Push Me Pull You [On-U Sound/Bandcamp]
Over to Ghana by way of London, African Head Charge was always a bizarre concoction, and never a Western fetishisation of the African continent. The band is led by percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, who has almost always worked in collaboration with On-U Sound founder Adrian Sherwood, postpunk/industrial dub producer extraordinaire, often credited as Crocodile. Twelve years since their last album, with Bonjo long based now in Ghana, A Trip to Bolgatanga feels the most straightforwardly African-centric of their work, but Sherwood ensures they preserve the psychedelic dub invention that made them legendary through the '80s and into the '90s. A very different vision of Africanfuturism from Faizal Mostrixx, but awesome to have these pioneering musicians back together.
ITSUFO - Let The Beat Troll Your Body [Airlock Recordings/Bandcamp]
Bay Area DJ Edwin Garro has been active in the drum'n'bass scene since the mid-'90s, as UFO!, with or without the exclamation mark, and probably should be credited as that here, but on Bandcamp the last couple of EPs have come out as ITSUFO, so let's go with that. This is solidly in the breakbeat-juggling jungle revivalist side of things, and super fun. The trolling title is funny stuff too (of course it's "control your body" but the first syllable is rather quiet in the sample). Released on the label he co-founded, Airlock Recordings.
YOUNGSIE - HA [Richard Youngs Bandcamp]
Of all the people I'd never have expected to get on the jungle bandwagon, Richard Youngs has just dropped 2 chaotic beat-mangling tracks under the hilarious moniker YOUNGSIE. Much like the scattered electronic beats on 2012's Core to the Brave, or the never-quite-aligned electronic beats on Beyond the Valley of Ultrahits from 2009, this is not entirely danceable stuff, but it's kind of exhilarating anyway. His unique & beautiful voice does not appear here, but once you get over the shock of the sound, it's kind of vintage Richard Youngs, i.e. weird shit you'd never expect to work but it does.
Matthew Ryals - etude no. 24 (take 3) [dingn\dents/Bandcamp] Matthew Ryals - both sides know (take 13) [sound as language/Bandcamp]
A couple of years back, Brooklyn musician Matthew Ryals released his Voltage Scores on now-Sydney-based label Oxtail Recordings, a record which placed his modular synths in a strange free jazz world, with help from cellist Clarice Jensen on one track. This year he's undertaking a pretty cool endeavour: a series of EPs in three Volumes, with each of the three EPs in each volume featuring the same tracks, in different versions (each EP is also on a different label, just to make things even more complicated!). The modular synth was programmed to produce versions of his compositions within certain sets of rules (among them, a rule that the program should stop itself, which is surprisingly hard to build into any system that produces complex enough music to be interesting). This doesn't sound like randomly generated music at all, of course, and I'm looking forward to hearing just how different the variant takes are on Volumes 1.1 and 1.2 (the first is 1.0, naturally). Most of Ryals' track titles include a numbered take, suggesting that some version of these techniques has been part of his practice for some time. On 2022's Impromptus in isolation, I found a number of tracks with some real emotional heft - akin to the expressive musicality produced by Autechre's machines. "both sides know", represented here by take 13, is one such heartfelt work, and I like to think that Matthew Ryals' Eurorack modular synth poured all of its digital soul into the performance.
MonoLogue and Matt Atkins - To Find [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
Just out from Kate Carr's Flaming Pines is the collaborative work Homework from Italian composer & sound designer Marie Rose (aka Marie e le Rose, Moon RA, MonoLogue and more) and the London-based percussionist and electronic musician Matt Atkins (who is also a visual artist). The two artists' styles mesh very nicely, dense soundworlds created from Atkins' bells, gongs and rattles, decomposed by Marie Rose with various analogue techniqes (damaging tape recordings in various ways). The result is surprisingly physical-feeling but at the same time rather abstract. Typically immersive stuff from Flaming Pines.
Jim O'Rourke - One Way Or Another I'm Gone [Drag City/Bandcamp] Jim O'Rourke - Go Spend Some Time With Your Kids [Drag City/Bandcamp]
The thing about soundtrack music is that it's often background music made for a purpose, rather than to stand on its own. But it can often bring out the best in a musician too. For his soundtrack to the surreal "prairie Western" Hands That Bind, written and directed by Kyle Armstrong, O'Rourke has produced a score that evokes the starkness of the Canadian prairie as well as the tension of a movie which by all accounts has an undercurrent of deep weirdness. O'Rourke seems mostly to play detuned piano and electronics here, joined by Marty Holoubek on double bass, ex-pat Aussie Joe Talia on drums and Atsuko Hatano on violin. Within the droney atmospherics are passages that evoke Bill Frisell's chamber Americana through a distorted lens. Jim O'Rourke has many strings to his bow, so to speak, but this kind of chamber jazz/folk doesn't come up that often, and is gratefully welcomed. Thanks Jim.
Experimental music, including narration with electronics, underground hip-hop, post-acid techno, deconstructed club music, classic glitch, tape manipulation, drone-folk and more.
Yes, those are all real genres.
LISTEN AGAIN to the sounds of this world and... others? Stream on demand @FBi or podcast here.
Ayala and Zac Picker - cardamom - cinnamon - cloves [Ayala Bandcamp] Ayala and Zac Picker - wet cat - old bark - deep breaths [Ayala Bandcamp]
Based on a story by Zac Picker called "Bessamim" published in Soft Stir Vol 2, this stunning work combines Zac's spoken word with music and sound design from Ayala aka Donny Janks. Picker is in fact a physicist, but his talent for that very mathematical of sciences is balanced by a talent for very evocative prose, generating nostalgia via all the senses in a story about being (almost) 13, training for bar mitzvah. Picker's lush, wry storytelling is carried here by the sensitive setting by Ayala, allowing the spoken prose to float in a bed of electronic tones, occasionally subtly processing the vocals. I left out the core section of the story here deliberately - I can't recommend enough that you listen to the whole thing from start to finish.
Daniel Rossen - Unpeopled Space [Warp/Bandcamp] Daniel Rossen - The Last One [Warp/Bandcamp]
What a joy to have a new album from Daniel Rossen, who once sang about going to Yeshiva (Jewish scriptural school) (sortof). That first band, Department of Eagles, was an early discovery of Utility Fog which, like Tunng and indeed Grizzly Bear (who Rossen would shortly join) would define some of the show's obsessions: adventurous anything-goes arrangements backed by brilliant songwriting & musicianship. Rossen is a singular talent when it comes to hearstring-pulling melodies with unexpected harmonic progressions, with a voice to match, as well as a characteristic ringing guitar style. That's all present and correct on You Belong Here, his first solo album proper. As a whole, the one full listen I've given it so far hasn't quite brought the transcendence of some of his earlier works, but it's unquestionably beautiful.
billy woods - Wharves [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp] billy woods - Sauvage (ft. Boldy James & Gabe Nandez) [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp] billy woods - Haarlem (ft. Fatboi Sharif) [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
It feels like billy woods albums come thick & fast, but that's just because we had Armand Hammer's album with The Alchemist last year, and woods' album with Moor Mother in 2020. So, woods is back in 2022 with Aethiopes, another single-producer album, this time working with Preservation. It's almost as good as woods' album with Kenny Segal (one of the best albums full stop of the last 5+ years), and it's notable that there's a continuity of sound with all woods' work, regardless of who's behind the keyboard, knobs and faders. The movie samples are there, the tone is grimy, the beats stumble off into free jazz at times (love the piano chaos in "Haarlem"!) and the lyrics concern themselves with the horrors of the world today. Nobody carries this off better than woods and his 'woodz cohorts.
700 Bliss - Candace Parker feat. Muqata'a [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Here's the second single from the aforementioned Moor Mother's project with DJ Haram, 700 Bliss. Proving this will be a hell of an album, their tribute to the bisexual, black basketball player Candace Parker is incendiary, aided with glitched breaks from the great Palestinian producer Muqata'a.
HUMANOID - sT8818r Yage remix [FSOL Digital/Bandcamp] HUMANOID - sT8818r Acreationator remix [FSOL Digital/Bandcamp]
Way back in 1988, one half of the duo who would become ambient techno/idm legends The Future Sound of London created a masterpiece of acid techno that was dubbed Stakker Humanoid. Brian Dougans' creation charted in the UK and really solidified the UK's place in the realms of techno - and acid became central in the development of '90s rave culture (a couple of years later FSOL's Papua New Guinea made them forever synomymous with rave). In 2019, Dougans reworked Stakker as "sT8818r" for a DE:tuned compilation 12", and since then a growing collection of remixes were commissioned, including '90s acid-influenced idm heroes like Luke Vibert, Autechre and Plaid, Roel Funcken of Funckarma, techno/rave dons like Mike Dred and John Tejada and more. All these versions along with the original '88 track have been collected on CD by FSOL now. I played a downtempo version from FSOL alias Yage (often referred to as their engineer, but always just Dougans and Cobain), and some break jugglin' jungle tekno from young UK producer Acreationator.
ubu boi & r hunter - Lexiconfluence [Genot Centre] r hunter - in retrospect (ft. ubu boi) [.jpeg Artefacts] ubu boi & r hunter - Heedless [Genot Centre]
In 2020, Melbourne producer Asher Elazary aka r hunter released an excellent album called Dead Ambient on .jpeg Artefacts with two tracks featuring US producer & pianist ubu boi (a name that will generate chortles from anyone familiar with the work of Alfred Jarry). So it was great news when Prague's Genot Centre announced A Symbol For Disguise - an entire album of duo work from the two artists. Here we have highly cromulent Genot Centre fare, the sounds of rave deconstructed into scintillating ambient, reconstructed into broken beats and shuddering subs, arranged symphonically and cinematically. It's the strangeness of now, briefly pinned down like a cloud from an e-cigarette.
Whatever The Weather - 0°C [Ghostly International/Bandcamp] Whatever The Weather - 17°C [Ghostly International/Bandcamp]
London's Loraine James, rocketed to popularity through two albums on Hyperdub, inaugurates new project Whatever The Weather for Ghostly International. To these ears it's musically a continuation of her previous work, mixing IDM-like beats with deep roots from jazz, ambient, classical and pop. Her electric piano brings soulful chords, and she continues to contribute gentle and sometimes processed vocals to her tracks. The weather theme sees each track described with a temperature in degrees centigrade, a metaphor that allows a certain abstraction without full-blown randomness. As always this is essential music for anyone into future-focused electronica.
Fennesz - traxdata [Editions Mego/Bandcamp] Fennesz - Instrument 3 [Editions Mego/Bandcamp] Fennesz - aus [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
2022 marks 25 years since the original release on Mego of Christian Fennesz' groundbreaking Hotel Paral.lel. The digital micro-edits, glitches, smeared drones and resampled guitars blew my mind when I heard them at the time, and to this day it's my favourite of his albums. The original CD release came in the classic oversized card sleeves of the early Mego days, and in 2007 it was remastered & reissued in standard digipak form. This year it sees a lush vinyl edition with enough space on the double LP to fit the 1995 Instrument EP (already digitally re-released on the Field Recordings 1995-2002 CD by Touch). This is the original deconstructed club music - glitches and crunches, throbbing subs, giddy beats. It's all wonderful. The closing track from the album, "aus", is a piece of crystalline beauty, with stop-start beats and guitar thrums split into shards like the diagonally-abstracted album artwork. The reissue is released in a little under 2 weeks.
Clara Engel - Golden Egg [Clara Engel Bandcamp] Clara Engel - Murmuration [Clara Engel Bandcamp]
I first heard Clara Engel's voice on the title track of fellow Torontonian Aidan Baker's gorgeous Already Drowning album almost 10 years ago. Their name stuck with me, and it was great to rediscover them with their new album Their Invisible Hands. Elusive lyrics adorn the songs, scattered through, while other pieces are instrumental. Seemingly repetitive phrases on effected guitar slow evolve, tugged along by delays, with sighing melodies emerging from shruti box or chromonica. Like their contribution to that Aidan Baker album, the central songs here creep up on you and grab your heart when you don't expect it.
Ben Vida + Lea Bertucci - Murmurations [Cibachrome Editions] Ben Vida + Lea Bertucci - Static Pressure [Cibachrome Editions]
Following her extraordinary collaboration with Robbie Lee a couple of months ago, here's a second duo from Lea Bertucci, this time with veteran US experimental musician Ben Vida (who released three beautiful albums as Bird Show on Kranky some years ago). Here Bertucci brings her wind instruments to the studio - sax, clarinet, flute - as well as the tape manipulation that made her Robbie Lee collaboration so special, and both her voice and Vida's are divorced of meaning in cut-ups alongside the acoustic textures and the rumbles and gurgles of Vida's synths. Compellingly off-beat stuff.
Lawrence English - Viento / Patagonia (Excerpt) [Room40/Bandcamp]
I always claim to not be into field recordings per se, but the two people to consistently prove me wrong are Kate Carr and Lawrence English. Here Lawrence revisits recordings he made in 2010 on a visit to Patagonia and Antarctica, with two stunningly dense and dramatic blizzard recordings. Both could easily be musicianly-created noise performances, and are absolutely visceral in force. Originally released on LP, they're now available digitally and in a special CD+book edition from Room40.
Bill Seaman & Stephen Spera - Progressions [Handstitched*] Bill Seaman & Stephen Spera - Voix De Lumiere [Handstitched*]
Out soon on Handstitched* is a sumptuous album from two sound-artists. Bill Seaman's career covers 3 decades, and in the '90s he was active in Australia before returning to the USA. He's joined by upstate New Yorker Stephen Spera for Architectures of Light, arranged from field recordings and Seaman's signature "non-location recordings" along with piano, synths, tape deck and other devices, and various credited and uncredited vocals floating in and out of the mixes. It's hard to describe this otherworldly music, out of time and genre. Sample tracks are out now, and you can - and should - experience the whole album on April 22nd.
Electronic craziness galore tonight - from broken-down club sounds, ambient glitch & idm through musique concrète and acousmatic music, and folktronica.
LISTEN AGAIN to the electronically reproduced sound... Stream on demand with FBi, podcast here.
266sx - UN VELETA [Ascetic House/Bandcamp] 266sx - chino burbank van nuys [Ascetic House/Bandcamp]
We're starting tonight with a few selections from the 2020 batch of releases from Ascetic House, the brilliant Tempe, AZ-based label which puts out batches of releases each year that can be anything from punk to techno to idm & glitch, always with a fantastic visual aesthetic and always forward-thinking musically. Their Twitter account, run by J.S. Aurelius, reinforces this aesthetic with on-point anti-fascist & anarchist politics. All the 2020 releases appeared on the 31st of December, strangely enough. So, first up tonight we have the work of the fairly anonymous Lázaro Común as 266sx. SOMOS TU ÚLTIMA ESPERANZA ("We are your last hope") is an all-out psychic attack of glitching ambience & beats, and even some cut-up guitar and vocals. The first track here, "UN VELETA" translates as "one candle", while the second, perhaps a clue to the artist's provenance, lists a few neighbourhoods of LA.
Baby Blue - Human [Ascetic House/Bandcamp] Baby Blue - Tear Soaked Stone [Ascetic House/Bandcamp]
Also released on Ascetic House on December 31st is the very emotive, yet equally glitchy and electronic Death of Euphoria from Baby Blue. There's gorgeous glitched ambient textures here, and some bass & beats in the mix, along with disqueting sampled video game dialogue and more. Fantastic work from this Vancouver-based artist. More technoid, computer gamey material can be found on her own Bandcamp.
Free The Land - Permafrost Loss and bacillus anthracis outbreak in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug [Ascetic House/Bandcamp]
Our third selection from Ascetic House's end-of-2020 drop is from Free The Land, which may not seem familiar, but is in fact the work of Frederikke Hoffmeier (aka Puce Mary) and partner Jess Sanes, who have also recorded together as JH1.FS3. Under this name, their music veers a little away from their industrial/noise roots, with a suite of tracks about climate change in the far north, with field recordings and lush electronics, albeit still appropriately heavy and dark.
sunnk - weaving ritual [Mille Plateaux] sunnk - a broken hand [Mille Plateaux]
Not too far off the sounds we've just heard is the album weaving ritual from sunnk, the third in a series of so-called "hyperglitch" releases from the new incarnation of Mille Plateaux. I'm always up for some stuttery granular electronics and what the original version of this label called "clicks & cuts", but what raises this album above the generic in this space is the piano that forms the basis of much of the chopped-up sound, and grounds the hyperactivity. There are some segments of real beauty amidst the madness.
Pierre-Luc Lecours - Impacts discrets (2014) [empreintes DIGITALes]
Now some new acousmatic, electro-acoustic work - not quite new, but not decades old either - from Montréal composer Pierre-Luc Lecours. A new album from the French label empreintes DIGITALes, dedicated to the electroacoustic, acousmatic and musique concrète forms, collects a series of four Éclats (shards) plus the work we heard tonight, "Impacts discrets", in which an artificial physical space is created, drawing from the composer's recording of snow & ice hitting the roofs of Old Quebec. In amongst the contemporary composition and academic techniques on this album appear sub-bass and percussive hits (shards?) that could be informed by the dance music strand of the last few decades of electronic music.
Bernard Parmegiani - Ponomatopées (1970) [Ina-GRM]
OK, but here's a little something from the great ground-breaking acousmatic composer Bernard Parmegiani, born in 1927. From 1970, "Ponomatopées" features garbled, cut-up liturgical voices, swathes of feedback and what sounds like a looped riff from a rock band. Forward-thinking electronic music indeed.
Patrick Charbonnier & Lionel Marchetti - Je suis gong [Lionel Marchetti Bandcamp]
And now something from the excellent contemporary composer of acousmatic & concrète works, Lionel Marchetti, along with fellow experimental musician Patrick Charbonnier. The two play a variety of instruments including clarinet, trombone, percussion, kora and other instruments from around the world, along with amplified found objects, synthesisers, tape machines and plenty of electronic treatments. The slow repetition and gradual build of this track is particularly compelling, but it's a great, immersive album.
Grasscut - Edges Of Night [Lo Recordings/Bandcamp] Grasscut - The Tin Man [Ninja Tune] Grasscut - Reservoir [Lo Recordings] Grasscut - Radar [Lo Recordings/Bandcamp] Grasscut - Coprolite Tip [Lo Recordings/Bandcamp]
It's wonderful to have a new album from English duo Grasscut. Their first album 1 inch: ½ mile came out through Ninja Tune in 2010 and sits alongside Tunng's best as perfectly poised English folktronica. They've since released 3 albums on Lo Recordings, each with evocative songwriting drawing on an English sense of place, with gorgeous orchestrations and detailed but un-showy electronics. It's primarily the work of BAFTA-nominated, Emmy-winning composer Andrew Phillips, while manager Marcus O'Dair also plays double bass and synth. All description aside, Phillips creates melodies and harmonic progressions that tug at the soul, while pulling together arrangements that use technology to hold them outside of time.
Scanner, Allen Ginsberg - Elegy for Neal Cassady (feat. Allen Ginsberg) [Allen Ginsberg Estate] Lee Ranaldo, Thurston Moore, Allen Ginsberg - Hum Bom! (feat. Allen Ginsberg) [Allen Ginsberg Estate]
Out now digitally, with CD & vinyl editions coming on June 4th, is Allen Ginsberg's The Fall of America - a 50th Anniversary Musical Tribute, which finds a very varied cast of musicians setting Ginsberg's important suite of poems to music. The collection is dedicated to the late Hal Willner, whose brilliant curation of eclectic tribute albums no doubt inspired the artistic selections here. There are songs written to some of the poems, by the likes of Andrew Bird, Devendra Banhardt and Angelique Kidjo, but a large proportion choose to use the wonderful recordings of Ginsberg reading his own poems, interpolating his very musical spoken word into their pieces, whether it's the Americana of Bill Frisell or the electronica of Howie B with Gavin Friday, or an ambient soundscape in their recent vein by Yo La Tengo... The collection opens with a beautiful minimalist work by Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner, and later there's angular jabs from ex-Sonic Youths Lee Ranaldo, Thurston Moore. Ginsberg's poems if nothing else show that in half a century America has only progressed further in its fall...
OnominO - Masza [echogene]
From new Melbourne label echogene comes a collection of improvisations for percussion (Niko Schäuble) and modular electronics (Jon Tarry). Starting with some quite sparse pieces, the album gradually works up to dense works like "Masza", with low-end drones and burbles, and motorik drumming.
still cloud - CIRCLES [still cloud Bandcamp]
The first release from new Melbourne trio still cloud is a meditative piece for percussion, synths and guitars called "CIRCLES". Guitarist & percussionist Seth Rees is a veteran of various postrock & indie acts as well as an experimental solo artist, and here he's joined by fellow musicians Clalla and Rosa. All sing and play various instruments - hopefully more to come soon!
Sebastian Field - Yellow Hearts [Provenance Records/Bandcamp]
Taken from Provenance Records's Textures, which we also featured a couple of weeks ago, is a gorgeous piece from Canberra's Sebastian Field in which his voice and guitar are smeared into, yes, lovely textures. Seb is a lovely songwriter, but I'd gladly hear an album in this style.
part timer - time just spent staring at a monitor [part timer Bandcamp]
And finally, another EP of sad piano from Melbourne's John McCaffrey aka part timer, beautiful contemplative work with sad sampled strings adding extra colour. A lot of us can identify with the opening track, "time just spent staring at a monitor".
As voted by YOU, THE PEOPLE (10 people on Twitter) last week, I am doing one more best of 2020 show. There is already a backlog of new music I want to get to, but I don't think it's going to change at all between now and next week, and everything I'm playing tonight is just as essential as the last two episodes!
Tunng - Eating the Dead (feat. AC Grayling) [Full Time Hobby/Bandcamp]
It was fantastic to find original Tunng singer & songwriter Sam Genders rejoining the band alongside producer Mike Lindsay in 2018. Genders & Lindsay's original duo incarnation of Tunng - and the following couple of albums at least - were hugely important to Utility Fog's early years, after I discovered their first single well before their debut album was released; arcane, authentic-feeling English folk rubbing up against glitchy electronic production and club memories. Following the 2018 reformation, they're back with a concept album of sorts for 2020, Tunng presents... DEAD CLUB, in which they interrogate death and grief, inspired by Max Porter's novel Grief is the Thing With Feathers. Porter (the brother of the great post-dubstep/power ambient producer Roly Porter) appears on the album reading two poignant, beautifully-written short stories, "Man" and "Woman", which I recommend checking out - but tonight we're hearing a subtle piece of electronic folk featuring a snippet of a conversation Genders had with the philosopher AC Grayling.
Sevdaliza - Oh My God [Butler Records/Bandcamp]
The glitchy trip-hop influenced music of Sevdaliza, who was born in Tehran but grew up in the Netherlands, does draw in its own way from her Persian roots. Her second album, Shabrang, continues where ISON & her subsequent EPs left off, with bending strings, chopped & spliced beats, vocals both clean and glitched. It's just great to have such a strong artist working in this space.
On Diamond - The Ocean Floor (Jules Pascoe Remix) [On Diamond Bandcamp]
Melbourne indie band On Diamond already has a solid experimental & genre-crossing pedigree through their members, fronted by dream-folk singer Lisa Salvo, and featuring experimental drummer/sound-artist Maria Moles on drums, jazz saxophonist Scott McConnachie on (avant-garde) guitar, fellow adventurous folkie Hannah Cameron on guitar & backing vocals, and Tinpan Orange's Jules Pascoe on bass. Following last year's excellent debut album, they've just released a four-track remix EP, in which bandmembers Salvo, Moles and Pascoe emphasise the experimental aspects of their songs, along with friend of UFog Shoeb Ahmad.
Oh, and all profits go to Pay The Rent, so no excuse not to buy it!
Ai Aso - I'll do it my way [Ideologic Organ]
Electrifying, simple, powerful acid folk from the wonderful Ai Aso, who has long been a collaborator with the likes of Boris (who appear on a couple of ambient tracks on this album) and Stephen O'Malley (whose imprint Ideologic Organ released this album). This music is in the vein of Eddie Marcon, Tenniscoats etc, of deceptively simple Japanese electric folk, with beauifully direct songs and strange things going on around the edges (the angularly discordant solo in the latter part of the first song for instance). Incredible.
Moor Mother & Yatta - 27 [Moor Mother Bandcamp]
Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother was on a roll throughout 2020, releasing many different collaborative and solo works on her Bandcamp. Right at the end of the year, a full album was released from the dream team duo of Moor Mother with billy woods - which I played recently, and which really is among the best of the year, but is a bit too new to appear here. But among her other works in 2020, Moor Mother also teamed up with Sierra Leonean-American artist Yatta, whose work takes in hip-hop, jazz, folk, and experimental art of all sorts. She's had two releases on Purple Tape Pedigree, and as with all great collaborations you can clearly hear both artists in the insane concoctions put together on this mini-album DIAL UP. Check it out.
Lucrecia Dalt - Disuelta / Seca [RVNG Intl/Bandcamp]
I've been a fan of Colombian experimental musician Lucrecia Dalt since I heard her as "The Sound of Lucrecia" over 10 years ago; she contributed vocals to a wonderful track by Shoeb Ahmad & Evan Dorrian's Spartak (track 7 on Verona). Her earlier albums are experimental takes on indie singer-songwriting, but since then she's moved progressively further from those roots - as well as moving to Barcelona and then Berlin. On her last two albums, 2018's Anticlines and the just-released No era sólida, her vocals are used as a sound-source, chopped up, ring-modulated, buried under pulsating modular synths and loping almost-rhythms, or sometimes present as spoken word meditations on science or philosophy. It would help to be as well-read and multi-lingual as Dalt, but without that we can appreciate the care and technological expertise with which she constructs these strange and beautiful musical theses.
Marion Cousin & Kaumwald - Las bodas de Inesilla y el Brillante [Les Disques du Festival Permanent]
The first album by French singer Marion Cousin to explore the Iberian Peninsula was made with cellist Gaspar Claus in 2016 and explored work songs from Minorca and Majorca. For her second in this open-ended series, she moves to a remote region of Spain called Estremadura, and works with experimental electronic duo Kaumwald, made up of Clément Vercelletto and Ernest Bergez aka Sourdure. The result, on both albums, is an extraordinary, hypnotic take on folk musics, freely updated and extemporised.
Silvia Tarozzi - Sembra neve [Unseen Worlds/Bandcamp]
There is a lot of violin from Italian violinist Silvia Tarozzi on Mi specchio e rifletto, but she also plays myriad other instruments, sings, and composed everything. Her wide-ranging background can be heard across this album (nearly a decade in the making), from her experience with free improv to her deep collaboration with groundbreaking electronic composer Eliane Radigue, to her work with contemporary Ensemble Dedalus - but the album is also a surprisingly accessible and delightful collection of songs, compositions and sound works. The first track is like a lost Penguin Cafe Orchestra track - joyful and slightly wonky minimalist acoustic classical-folk; elsewhere wistful vocals give way to beautifully messy slide guitar, fragmentary tape loops are manipulated, accordion accompanies ricochet violin, and on tonight's selection there's an outro with wonderfully outré vocal techniques. It's like nothing else you're likely to hear this year.
Meredith Monk & Bang on a Can All-Stars - Gamemaster's Song [Cantaloupe Music/Bandcamp] Meredith Monk is one of the most iconoclastic musicians of the last 50 years. A composer the equal of Reich, Glass et al, but also an innovative vocal performer, her music has the strangely off-kilter melodies and harmonies of Kurt Weill and the repetitive, rhythmic invention of the American minimalists. Most of her music is released in recordings of her own ensemble(s), but new album Memory Game comes courtesy of new music powerhouse Bang on a Can - although Monk and her vocal ensemble are still there. This album collects a few reworkings of classic music (including one of my favourites, "Double Fiesta") as well as a selection of never-recorded music from her sci-fi opera The Games (which I really want to see!). It was intended to be performed at Big Ears this year, another COVID casualty.
Mary Halvorson's Code Girl - Bigger Flames (feat. Robert Wyatt) [Firehouse 12/Bandcamp]
I've played American jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson before on this show as part of cellist Tomeka Reid's quartet. Her skillful playing is instantly recognizable whenever she twists her melodies with the whammy bar. Halvorson is so talented and idiosyncratic that she was recognized last year with a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. Following that comes her second "Code Girl" album, Artlessly Falling, for which she wrote all the lyrics as well as music, and she's joined by jazz singer Amirtha Kidambi on most tracks, but she pulled off the remarkable feat of luring the mostly-retired Robert Wyatt (one of my favourite musicians) to sing on three of the tracks.
Ashley Paul - Light Inside My Skin [Slip/Bandcamp]
London-based American multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Ashley Paul creates very strange, beautiful songs with ensembles of free improvisers, which somehow feel simultaneously free and composed - like Tom Waits' right-in-their-wrongness arrangements. She's released albums on many interesting labels including Important Records and Orange Milk, but her new one, Ray, appears for the second time on Slip. Derek Bailey can be heard in her scrabbling guitar, Ornette Coleman in the screaming saxophone and clarinet swiftly switching into queasy or sweet harmonies - but the fusion of these techniques with affecting songwriting with fragile vocals is absolutely her own. This can be challenging to get a grip on, but listen in the right frame of mind and it will touch you.
Leah Kardos - Into Sporks [bigo & twigetti/Bandcamp]
London composer Leah Kardos, who grew up in Brisbane but has been in the UK so long she's a native now, is a beloved stalwart of Utility Fog playlists, with her combined interests & deep capabilities in classical composition, electronica and pop - indeed she's teaching a BA(Hons) in Music Technology at the University of Kingston in London nowadays. Since her last album Roccocochet in 2017, she founded the Visconti Studio at the University with the venerable longtime David Bowie producer Tony Visconti. It's great to have a new album from her, one which looks back at her earlier work and builds a number of compositions from reversed and manipulated versions of older works. "Into Sporks", heard tonight, harkens back to the IDM beats of Leah's earlier work.
Tigran Hamasyan - Levitation 21 [Nonesuch/Bandcamp]
It was wonderful to have a new album this year from Armenian jazz piano prodigy Tigran Hamasyan, still only 33 years old but with an extraordinary repertoire behind him. In the past he's melded his technical proficiency at jazz piano and complex Eastern European rhythms with prog rock - indeed he's even worked with fellow Armenian-American Serj Tankian of System Of A Down. And that technical aspect is still there in his last few albums (with a kind of live-drum'n'bass aspect to some of the drumming), but there's also a deep connection to the gorgeous modalities and melodic mellifluence of Armenian music. New album The Call Within melds Armenian myths & legends with his interest in maps of all kinds.
Black To Comm - Rataplan, Rataplan, Rataplan (Arms and Legs Flying in the Air) [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
As Black To Comm, Hamburg-based sound-artiist Marc Richter released one of the albums of 2019 with Seven Horses For Seven Kings, the culmination of over a decade of great hallucinatory releases on labels like Type, Dekorder and De Stijl. The work is now followed by Oocyte Oil and Stolen Androgens, an album that comes with little contextualisation but once again works as high art music and low culture, spun from collaged samples and unsettling ambiences. I love how the piano follows the spoken word on "Rataplan...". A few years ago, Black To Comm was supplemented by the You Tube-sampling vaporwavey project Jemh Circs. This year we have Mouchoir Étanche, which translates as "waterproof handkerchief". I'm not sure how much this music differs from core Black To Comm - and simultaneously with the Mouchoir Étanche album Une fille pétrifiée comes another BTC album, A C of M. Both play up the more absurdist, surrealist aspects of Richter's work, and as a set, all three albums are highly rewarding.
Claire Deak & Tony Dupé - from a rooftop [Lost Tribe Sound/Bandcamp]
Back in the '90s Tony Dupé started off his career in indie bands, but he moved to production work by the early 2000s, putting his fine stamp on the early albums of Holly Throsby and Jack Ladder, and solo work of Jamie Hutchings among others. He moved from inner Sydney down to the south coast and made many legendary recordings in the town of Gerroa, and then in a cottage on Mount Saddleback, which gave its name to his much-loved organic studio-collage solo project released on Sydney's Preservation. In the meantime, he met the fantastic musician Claire Deak, who had studied music at the Uni of Western Sydney and then screen composition at AFTRS. They moved to Melbourne together, started a family, and also started work together with a studio of their own.
About a year after I first heard these wonderful recordings, their duo album was finally released, and it couldn't be better paired than with US label Lost Tribe Sound. There are a plethora of organic instruments involved here, played by both musicians (indeed, after I played cello on many of his early productions, Tony went off and learned the instrument himself!), and it's just as you'd want it - the mysterious inde/folk/postrock creations of Saddleback grown up and augmented with the widescreen arrangement & composition skills of Claire Deak. Not to be missed!
Midori Hirano - Ocean's Disconnect [Sonic Pieces/Bandcamp]
Classically-trained Japanese composer & pianist Midori Hirano has been based in Berlin for ages now, but wherever she's based she has a true talent for being in a class of her own. You'll hear lovely post-classical piano, sometimes prepared piano, ambient sound processing, classical string arrangements, but there's an edge of strangeness and a compositional style which is freer than much of what passes for (post-)classical or ambient. She also has an electronic (beats) alias in MimiCof, although she's no purist when it comes to the material under her own name. The new album Invisible Island, her second for Berlin-based boutique label Sonic Pieces, seems like a career highlight.
Mabe Fratti - Creo que puedo hacer algo [Hole Records/Tin Angel Records]
It's always wonderful to discover new cellists. Guatemalan musician Mabe Fratti, now based in Mexico City, uses her cello along with synths, effects, and her voice to create experimental music of a truly compelling nature. Her cello will produce scratchy rhythmic bowed patterns, murky drones, jazzy basslines, or bright melodies. She's clearly interested in experimenting with sound, and one of the things I love about listening to these works is how she's quite capable of creating gorgeous, pure song (see the first track tonight), but she's happy peppering these around collections of pure weirdness - tape manipulation, field recordings, strangely processed vocals etc.
Technically the stunning Pies Sobre la Tierra ("Feet on the ground") was released last year, but UK label Tin Angel released it outside of Mexico in January. Mid-year she also released Planos para Construir ("Plans to build"), which saw her handing pieces of music over to various musicians and writers - also highly recommended.
Louise Bock - Oolite [Geographic North/Bandcamp]
US multi-instrumentalist Taralie Peterson has been making experimental music for a couple of decades, notably with her duo Spires that in the Sunset Rise with Ka Baird (who together released the excellent Psychic Oscillations LP later in the year). She plays saxophone, clarinet and contributes voice (often processed), but she's also an accomplished cellist, and that's highlighted on her latest album (part of Geographic North's Sketches for Winter series) called Abyss: For Cello. Discordant multi-tracked cello is by turns rhythmic and mournfully slow. Lines overlap and intertwine, and occasionally other instruments appear, including some very abstracted guitar from Kendra Amalie on "Oolite".
Helen Money - Marrow [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Alison Chesley, as Helen Money, is a pioneering, genre-smashing doom cellist, who I've been a fan of for many years. Despite her already great history of punshing riffage and layered cello distortion, and some great collaborations including one with Jarboe, this album floored me. The riffs are there, but there are also beautiful passages of gentler stuff, multiple cellos with piano and ambient synthesisers & crackling electronics (provided by producer Will Thomas aka Plumbline and also heavy music legend Sanford Parker).
SENS DEP - Drowning Entanglement [Sens Dep Bandcamp]
Here's some wonderful doomy stuff with shoegazey and electronic elements from new Melbourne band SENS DEP, who you may recognize as members of beloved postrock band Laura. Brothers Andrew and Ben Yardley are joined by Laura's cellist Caz Gannell, with Skye Klein of Terminal Sound System (and a long time ago, doomers HALO) drumming on many tracks. Glorious, warm distortion is interrupted and complicated by studio edits, vocals enter occasionally, and Gannell's cello surfaces at times. It's beautiful and messed up, and it better not get lost in the end-of-year rush, so grab this marvellous thing now!
Sightless Pit - The Ocean of Mercy [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
This album from extreme metal/noise supergroup Sightless Pit was always going to be one of my albums of the year. All have worked together on other projects before, particularly through Lee Buford's incredible duo the body, who have recorded two collaborative albums with Dylan Walker's hardcore force of nature Full of Hell. Meanwhile Kristin Hayer is a force of nature herself, with her classical-meets-gothic-meets-metal project Lingua Ignota, and that classical/gothic influence is very evident all over this album, along with myriad electronics, heavy sounds, and (really only) occasional metal vocals. Disturbing, unsettling? Sure. But also beautiful and thrilling.
Divide and Dissolve - 8VA [Saddle Creek/Bandcamp]
It might only be a 7", but the return of Divide and Dissolve was massive and hugely welcome in this particular year. The anti-colonialist indigenous doom duo are made up of Takiaya Reed on sax and guitar, and Sylvie Nehill on drums. The B-side played here starts with ominous rumbles but really gets going in the second half where Nehill thrashes out the drums and Reed's guitar is left to thrum with disorted feedback so she can extemporize some inspired saxophone lines, whose diminished and minor intervals seem to draw from Eastern European & Middle Eastern music as much as African American. Their message of decolonization is heard loud and clear despite this being instrumental music.
shoeb ahmad - bloodwork [Shoeb Ahmad Bandcamp]
Late 2020 saw the release of Shoeb Ahmad's follow-up album to her acclaimed 2018 album "quiver". Unlike "quiver"'s pared-back indie-punk production (as pared-back as Sia will get), a body full of tears brings the full arsenal of distortion, industrial beats, processed guitars and misused keyboards, to underscore (and overwhelm) songs about about identity. It's possible to identify her love of artists as wide as Hood, Fennesz, Primal Scream and Andy Stott in here, but it's deeply personal work that reflects a musical history that's all her own.
Tomaga - Surikat [Tomaga Bandcamp]
UK duo Tomaga are so unpigeonholeable that it's always hard to find where to fit them in a playlist, even though it's music I love so much. So by the time I originally played Extended Play 2 it had been deleted from their Bandcamp! Tragically, in August bass/synth player Tom Relleen passed away too young at the age of 42, from stomach cancer. The EP is now available again, so you can hear how he and drummer/percussionist Valentina Magaletti weaved musical magic that echoes krautrock, postpunk, electronica, hauntology, and more, yet seems unstuck in time & space.
On one of the best days of 2020, we have folktronic musings on death, poppy experimental jazz, jazzy postrock, juddering electro-acoustic drone and quiet experimentalism from all round the world.
LISTEN AGAIN with more than a little relief, by streaming on demand at FBi, or podcasting right here.
Tunng - Eating the Dead (feat. AC Grayling) [Full Time Hobby/Bandcamp] Tunng - Three Birds [Full Time Hobby/Bandcamp]
It was fantastic to find original Tunng singer & songwriter Sam Genders rejoining the band alongside producer Mike Lindsay in 2018. Genders & Lindsay's original duo incarnation of Tunng - and the following couple of albums at least - were hugely important to Utility Fog's early years, after I discovered their first single well before their debut album was released; arcane, authentic-feeling English folk rubbing up against glitchy electronic production and club memories. Following the 2018 reformation, they're back with a concept album of sorts for 2020, Tunng presents... DEAD CLUB, in which they interrogate death and grief, inspired by Max Porter's novel Grief is the Thing With Feathers. Porter (the brother of the great post-dubstep/power ambient producer Roly Porter) appears on the album reading two poignant, beautifully-written short stories, "Man" and "Woman", which I recommend checking out - but I've gone for two songs which are very much vintage Tunng in sound. The first features a snippet of a conversation Genders had with the philosopher AC Grayling.
Mary Halvorson's Code Girl - Bigger Flames (feat. Robert Wyatt) [Firehouse 12/Bandcamp] Robert Wyatt - The United States of Amnesia [Rough Trade/Hannibal/Domino] Mary Halvorson & John Dieterich - vega's array [New Amsterdam/Bandcamp] Mary Halvorson's Code Girl - Artlessly Falling [Firehouse 12/Bandcamp]
I've played American jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson before on this show as part of cellist Tomeka Reid's quartet. Her skillful playing is instantly recognizable whenever she twists her melodies with the whammy bar. Halvorson is so talented and idiosyncratic that she was recognized last year with a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. Following that comes her second "Code Girl" album, Artlessly Falling, for which she wrote all the lyrics as well as music, and she's joined by jazz singer Amirtha Kidambi on most tracks, but she pulled off the remarkable feat of luring the mostly-retired Robert Wyatt to sing on three of the tracks. Wyatt is one of my favourite singers & musicians, so I headed to 1986's Old Rottenhat for a song about America's destructive colonial history. Also in the middle there, an extraordinary track from Halvorson's 2019 collaboration with Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich, featuring that distinctive sharp-edged shine of Halvorson's melodic playing.
Susanna Gartmayer & Christof Kurzmann - Little Rage [Klanggalerie/Bandcamp]
Austrian electronic musician Christof Kurzmann bridges the divide between experimental improvised music and electronica, with many projects over a decades-long career. He has a wonderful indietronic/jazz ensemble The Magic I.D. with experimental singer/songwriter Margareth Kammerer and two avant-garde clarinettists, but this new project finds him working with bass clarinettist Susanna Gartmayer, who uses extended techniques to create drones and overtones as well as melodies (and I note plays with The Vegetable Orchestra with Ulrich Troyer, among others), in combination with Kurzmann's loops, samples, processing and voice. Their album Smaller Sad as beautiful as it is challenging, really something else.
Phaeton - Silverback [Oxtail Recordings]
Following clarinet with oboe, played here by Luke Gallagher alongside his brother Matthew on synthesizer for their project Phaeton on Oxtail Recordings. Oboe is not always the most forgiving instrument, but in these siblings' hands it's the perfect melodic instrument for these slow-moving, bubbling, kosmische electronic pieces inspired as much by ecology and evolutionary biology as they are by the usual new age concepts of ambient music.
Erland Dahlen - Desert [Hubro/Bandcamp] Erland Dahlen - Monkey [Hubro/Bandcamp] Erland Dahlen - Bones [Hubro/Bandcamp]
Back to Norway and Hubro, with some more jazz-inspired postrock (or is it the other way round?) from the excellent drummer Erland Dahlen. His four albums all cover similar territory to the latest, Bones - expansive and percussive, with melodies from the whistling musical saw and countless other musical instruments and found objects, along with drum machines and electronic production. It's stirring and cinematic, an abundant sound created by one guy.
Kcin - Global South [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Sydney drummer & live electronic musician Nick Meredith has been promising the debut album proper from Kcin for a while now, and it's coming out from Spirit Level... soon? We now have the first single "Global South" from Decade Zero, a thumping number drawing on the revolutionary, much-needed politics of Naomi Klein.
Xani - Injured Animal [Xani Bandcamp] Xani - Fragmented [Xani Bandcamp]
Melbourne violinist Xani Kolac has made her mark on Melbourne's indie and folk music scene as part of The Twoks and playing with many other musicians, and has released three albums of excellent instrumental music. Her new album for 2020, From the Bottom of the Well sees her finding her songwriting & singing voice, but for Utility Fog I'm drawn again to the instrumental tracks. We've had quite a percussive show and "Injured Animal" features the drumming of Brooke Custerson along with lots of lovely violin effects and processing; "Fragmented" is a whispy piece with Erica Tucceri's flute joining Xani's violin.
Gregory Paul Mineeff - Dimanche [Cosmicleaf Records]
After a few mostly piano-based tracks from Wollongong musician Gregory Paul Mineeff, his new single "Dimanche" is a little bit of blissful Sunday synth work. A talented artist floating mostly under the radar - you can find a lot of singles and an album or two on Cosmicleaf's Bandcamp.
Subespai - City Circles (excerpt) [chemical imbalance]
Here's an excerpt from a new work composed by Sydney musician Mauri Edo aka Subespai for the 2020 Australasian Computer Music Conference. Released by chemical imbalance, City Circles buries evocative field recordings of an unnamed city with pure, enveloping, pulsating drones.
part timer - donut day for victoria [part timer bandcamp] part timer - quiet streets after 9 [part timer bandcamp]
The return of part timer in 2020, the folktronic/ambient project of UK-born, Melbourne-based John McCaffrey, was sudden but unrelenting. It's like the mid-2000s again, when John would send me music every week or so, and I'd faithfully play glitchy pieces of sampled acoustic instruments and clunky beats. Now he's taken to the piano, playing exquisite little études alongside his subtle, scratchy electronics. He's quite unfairly talented, but who can deny the pleasure of a Melbourne musician celebrating the end of their gruelling lockdown? These Satie-inspired pieces are enchanting.
Another week of amazing music... 2019, we got the tunes.
LISTEN AGAIN, wrap your ears around this... stream on demand via FBi or podcast here.
clipping. - He Dead (feat. Ed Balloon) [Sub Pop/Bandcamp] clipping. - Blood of the Fang [Sub Pop/Bandcamp] clipping. - bout.that (feat. baseck) [self-released] clipping. - inside out [Sub Pop/Bandcamp] clipping. - Hot Fuck No Love (feat. Cakes da Killa & Maxi Wild) [Sub Pop/Bandcamp] clipping. - A Better Place [Sub Pop/Bandcamp] clipping. - All In Your Head (feat. Counterfeit Madison & Robyn Hood) [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
Who knew that noise artist William Hutson and breakcore artist Jonathan Snipes would in the last half decade be making some of the most vital hip-hop ever? It helps that the half-Jewish, half-African American frontman Daveed Diggs is an incredible rapper and lyricist who throws references around with ease, even when rapping at supersonic speed, negotiating that fine line between absurdity and profundity. Their deep knowledge of science fiction (and Afrofuturism) came out in the amazing concept album Splendor & Misery in 2016, so it's no surprise that There Existed An Addiction To Blood, released this week, finds them focusing on horror movies (and the short-lived horrorcore rap subgenre) - referencing both the exploitative use of African and African-American themes in the "classic" horror genre and Jordan Peele's recent turning of the tables with Get Out and Us. It's pure genius, of course.
Billy Woods - Stranger in the Village [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp] Armand Hammer - Hunter [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp/FXCK RXP/PTP] Billy Woods / Kenny Segal - steak knives [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp] Billy Woods / Kenny Segal - bedtime [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp] Billy Woods - Shepherd's Tone (feat. Fielded) [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
Over to someone else at the vanguard of hip-hop in the late 20-teens, Billy Woods. Born in the US, grew up in Africa & the West Indies, and ended up getting involved in the New York poetry & rap scene. He often works with unusual beats, with various interesting producers including longtime collaborator ELUCID - as Armand Hammer their album Paraffin was one of last year's highlights. With west coast US hero producer Kenny Segal, Woods has already released one of the albums of the year, unquestionably to my mind - Hiding Places. But Woods is back with another solo album now, Terror Management, with various different producers (I can't disentangle who produced what, at least yet), and if it lacks something of the lugubrious consistency of the Kenny Segal collaboration, it's nevertheless vintage Woods, thought-provoking raps, strange beats, interesting collaborations (Fielded's contributions on the last selection are gorgeously strange next to the weird glitchy beat).
hyperdawn - avalanche [Them There]
A couple of months ago I played something by the experimental tape artist Michael Cutting, from a lovely album released by Eilean Records, featuring vocalist Vitalija Glovackyte. Their duo is hyperdawn and they've just dropped their debut album on UK label Them There. Glovackyte processes her vocals, auto-harmonising, and adds other electronics to Cutting's reel-to-reel tape machines and homemade instruments. It's a very experimental take on pop, perfectly suited to Utility Fog's sensibilities.
Eartheater - Lick My Tears (prod. Tony Seltzer) [Bandcamp] Eartheater - Fontanel (prod. Dadras) [Bandcamp]
After last year's brilliant album for experimental electronic label PAN, Alexandra Drewchin's Eartheater has just come out with a mixtape of sorts called Trinity, with tracks produced by a few different interesting people including in-demand underground hip-hop producer Tony Seltzer, and diverse techno/grime producer Dadras. There's plenty of opportunity for Drewchin's big vocal range and songwriting talents to shine. Despite the great producers, it's not quite as adventurous as Drewchin's solo work, but still a great collection of songs.
Julien Mier - Memories On Soil [Julien Mier Bandcamp] Julien Mier - Wet Paper Trails (feat. Tim Fain) [Julien Mier Bandcamp]
Dutch-French musician Julien Mier has been making idm, ambient and experimental music for a while now, under his own name and as Santpoort Nord. He's actually been based in Sydney for a while, and needs to be enticed to play live a little more. His latest album Industries In The Trees has the feel of a kind of environmentalist utopia - lovely twinkly folktronica with classical touches like Tim Fain's guest violin on the opening track, and a few more upbeat numbers. There was a limited vinyl edition but I think that's gone now!
Nick Wales - Under The Milky Way (feat. Alyx Dennison) [unreleased]
Sent direct from the artist, this cover of The Church's classic indie gem comes from Sydney musician Nick Wales, who's been mixing classical composition & electronics for decades. Vocals are by the one & only Alyx Dennison, who's overdue for a new album herself. The track was created for the Powerhouse Museum's Step Into Paradise exhibition about the fashion work of Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson. It's got some nice callbacks to Nick's early solo work as Altar Boy, as well as some ravey bird calls (think 808 State circa 1990).
Coda Chroma - Catacombs [Coda Chroma Bandcamp]
A lovely tune from Melbourne's Kate Lucas aka Coda Chroma, with a mournful 6/8 piano refrain that slows grows into something doomier with an overdriven bassline, with bewitching vocals.
Lochie Earl - Superyacht Party [Lochie Earl Bandcamp]
A little song about first world problems, refugees and the state of the world from Sydney artist Lochie Earl, who manages to mix a lot of strange adventurousness into his classic piano-driven songwriterliness. He skewers a kind of selfish cynicism of the current day in this new single.
Serafina Steer - Auto (words by Sally O'Reilly) [Serafina Steer Bandcamp] Serafina Steer - Peach Heart [Static Caravan/Serafina Steer Bandcamp] Serafina Steer - Time To Recover [Serafina Steer Bandcamp]
I've been following English harpist & singer-songwriter Serafina Steer for over a decade, since her first releases on the great Static Caravan, original home of Tunng (whose Mike Lindsay co-produced a few of her early tracks including "Peach Heart"). It's been a little while between albums, but her new album The Mind is a Trap is a lovely mix of electronic tracks - some instrumental - and her harp work. Her reading of a poem by Sally O'Reilly is a nice example, with harp through delay pedal - she's an ever-adventurous artist, and it's so lovely to be reminded after 6 years. It's a shame, though, that I didn't get to play anything from the intervening time since the first album, including some more full band, fully-produced songs. So enjoy this one from 2013:
Tunng - Pool Beneath The Pond [Full Time Hobby/Tunng Bandcamp, originally Static Caravan] Tunng - Magpie Bites [Full Time Hobby/Tunng Bandcamp, originally Nowhere Fast Records] Tunng - little king (feat. Summit) [disco_r.dance] Tunng - Peanuts [Full Time Hobby/Tunng Bandcamp, originally The Great Pop Supplement]
All things considered, Tunng are one of the ur-bands for Utility Fog. The show already existed when their first 7" came out, but their music became a staple on the show for a good few years after I discovered that piece of arcane English folk-meets-glitchy electronica. So it's rather nice that they've just released a collection of rarities, b-sides, compilation tracks & unreleased bits & bobs called this is... tunng (magpie bites and other cuts). The b-side of "Tale From Black", that original classic, is the first cut I've taken tonight, followed by the lovely semi-title-track of the anthology, "Magpie Bites", which came out the following year and was played a pile of times as well. I couldn't resist dropping in one track which didn't make it on to this collection - a long-time favourite, "little king" is a collaboration with trip-hoppers Summit, and maybe it's not pure Tunng enough to appear (although one third of Summit, Phil Winter, later joined Tunng, or perhaps already had by 2006). Finally, from 2007, we hear "Peanuts", another big fave in these parts which appeared on a weird-folk 12" from The Great Pop Supplement called It Happened On A Day. Another stomping, chanting bit of English folk, with reversed acoustic instruments, fun production but ultimately just a great piece of songwriting.
Thom Yorke - Not the News [XL/Thom Yorke] Thom Yorke - The Axe [XL/Thom Yorke]
Always worth a listen to new work from Thom Yorke, and this one takes off from where Tomorrow's Modern Boxes brought him, heavily influenced by the contemporary beat-makers he & Radiohead have enlisted over the last decade to remix their music, with hypnotic, repetitive refrains, programmed beats and lots of electronics. It actually sounds a lot like the Atoms For Peace stuff. There's a theme in there about technology and how it divorces us from reality and emotional connection I think (I haven't seen the accompanying movie made with Paul Thomas Anderson yet).
Modeselektor & Thom Yorke - The White Flash (Robags Vatimafonkk Rekksmow) (excerpt) [Pampa] Robag Wruhme - Komalh [Pampa] Robag Wruhme - Nata Alma (feat. Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft) [Pampa]
The first track of this batch is there as a sweet segue from Thom Yorke into Robag Wruhme, via Robag's "Vatimafonkk Rekksmow" of a lovely old tune from Modeselektor featuring Thom. It takes the head-nodding techno-funk of the original and ratchets up the 4/4 beats and also the vocal layering & repetition in typical musical, minimal techno Robag fashion. Robag Wruhme is Gabor Schablitzki, who came to enormous fame as part of the DJ duo Wighnomy Brothers (which on record was just him) and then as Robag Wruhme, doing deep, minimal techno & house, and remixing everyone left, right & centre into this sound he made his own. But prior to that he was part of the legendary, take-no-prisoners idm/acid/drill'n'bass duo Beefcake, and that's where I first became a fan. It took me ages to warm to this 4/4 incarnation, but these days I love his work, and the last couple of albums (with a long time in between) are just gorgeous pieces of subtle, soulful headmusik for late-night dancefloors.
CORIN - The New Flesh [Bedouin Records/Bandcamp] CORIN - Morning [originally self-released on Deluge EP; track available on Skydreams Bandcamp] CORIN - Ingest [Bedouin Records/Bandcamp] CORIN - Rivalry [Bedouin Records/Bandcamp]
Melbourne artist Corin Ileto released her debut EP while based in Sydney in 2014 (we heard the beautiful ambient track "Morning" tonight). Since moving to Melbourne she's put together an impressive body of work, including collaborations with ju ca (Justin Cantrell) that have been released internationally, so it's really nice seeing this new album come out on the amazing Bedouin Records (for context, the previous release on the label was from Zomby). A tribute to cyberpunk via a reconciliation of dystopia and utopia, that I hear as absorbing and inverting cyberpunk's orientalist fetishism and its often casual misogyny while making nods to both vaporwave trends and industrial techno.
S S S S - Deserter [Präsens Editionen/Bandcamp] S S S S - Information [Hallow Ground/S S S S Bandcamp] S S S S - Anywhere Is Better Than Here [Präsens Editionen/Bandcamp]
Samuel Savenberg's S S S S already released an EP this year on Haunter Records but for his debut full-length album (strange to say, given how much music he's released in the last few years) he's bringing it back to his hometown of Lucerne, Switzerland with notable label Präsens Editionen. The album Walls, Corridors, Baffles continues the disquieting industrial techno & dark ambient of his previous releases, perhaps turning things a little more widescreen, and incorporating more acoustic instruments & sounds. For the all the power and clanging noise of "industrial techno", I feel that Savenberg, in his more technoey and more ambient moments, captures something of the wrongness and disturbing nature of industrial music better than most.
Torn - Escape [Weaponry]
Continuing in the dark and heavy theme, here we have a new EP from Russian drum'n'bass artist Torn, released on the label run by Seattle's Homemade Weapons. Like the label boss, Torn re-tools jungle/drum'n'bass for a post-dubstep world. It's not tech-step, and it's not usually mashed breaks (although both producers have chops in that regard), but it's got heaps of energy and heaps of low end pulse. The tribal-meets-jungle programming on this track is really something, mind you.
SDEM - Pranging [Opal Tapes]
Tom Knapp aka SDEM has been making idm & experimental electronic music for a long time, under various guises and in various groups. He also co-runs or co-ran the Icasea label and group, that put out a massive idm-hero-packed comp after the Japanese earthquake/tsunami in 2011. "Is bacterial a genre? Can you imagine it?" asks the label. After these tracks, I daresay I can...
R - Mind Hunters [Opal Tapes] Basic House - Sleeping Sickness [Opal Tapes]
Finishing up with a couple of tunes from the brilliant new compilation from Opal Tapes, which is their 150th(!) catalogue number. Amateur Vampires features many great names from the label, including Sote, and I plan to revisit it next week. Tonight we heard some dark electronics with smatterings of jungle breaks from the mysterious R (the label aren't giving much away, but they've been on a couple of compilations). Closing the compilation is a track from Opal Tapes boss Stephen Bishop aka Basic House, a gorgeous piece of contemplative piano and noises.
Mostly lots of evocative music tonight, whether folk, folktronica, electronica or psychedelic jazz...
LISTEN AGAIN because you know you love it. Stream on demand from FBi or podcast here.
Ned Collette - June [It Records] Ned Collette - Grant's Farm [It Records]
It's an absolute delight to have a new Ned Collette album, even if it's taken a little longer than he'd hoped to get it released. I've been following Ned since the days of City City City, the quirky indie/postrock group that also featured Joe Talia. He's an extremely talented songwriter with an experimental sensibility and a down-to-earth singing style. On this album a number of tracks feature the inimitable Chris Abrahams on piano, recorded when both were in Berlin - Chris's minimalist pianistic gestures are perfectly suited to the extended repetitiveness of "June", with its slow build dropping to a long quiet coda.
Tunng - Dream Out [Fulltime Hobby] Tunng - Flatland [Fulltime Hobby] Tunng - Tale From Black [Static Caravan] Tunng - Sweet William [Fulltime Hobby] Tunng - Little King (feat. Summit) [disco_r.dance] LUMP - Shake Your Shelter / LUMP Is A Product [Dead Oceans] Tunng - Evaporate [Fulltime Hobby] Tunng - Like Water [Fulltime Hobby]
A band that have been with me since, if not the first year of this show then certainly the second. I was absolutely bowled over when I heard the first single from English duo (as they were at the time) Tunng, "Tale From Black" in 2004. It was the perfect combination of arcane English folk songwriting (as it sounded to me) and contemporary, glitchy electronic production - and not just electronic backing, but guitars and other acoustic instruments melded into the sound. Somewhere along the way, a few albums later, Tunng seemed to lose their way, with original songwriter Sam Genders leaving, and the songs became a kind of campfire folk festival folk. But this new album reunites produced Mike Lindsay with Sam Genders, along with the members of the original live band, and it's just lovely.
In celebration of this reunion of sorts, I'm going back to the archives, staring with that first stunner of a song, then with something from their equally excellent second album, and a bit of a rarity from an old compilation. Meanwhile, this year Mike Lindsay also put out a super quirky and super catchy release with another English folky songwriter, Laura Marling, as LUMP.
101BPM - Lonely Water [Countersunk]
Here's a new project convened by Irish producer Dunk Murphy of Sunken Foal, Ambulance and various other projects that I've played over the years on the 'Fog. This one sees a big collective of artists semi-anonymously releasing music weekly(!) under the banner of 101BPM, all tracks of course at that tempo. Not sure yet whether artists will be remixing each other or anything, but anything Murphy's involved with is usually lovely. You can see who else is involved (so far) at the release page.
New Optimism - Dr.My-Ho [Phantom Limb] New Optimism - Jet Setters [Phantom Limb] Miho Hatori is best known as the singer in Cibo Matto and also the voice of Noodle in Gorillaz. With these associations (Cibo Matto also collaborated with the Beastie Boys), it's no surprise the tracks on her solo EP as New Optimism have low-slung grooves and rock-meets-hip-hop arrangements accompanying her Japanese & English singing. Super fun stuff.
Hekla - Hatur [Phantom Limb] Hekla - Muddle [Phantom Limb]
An Icelandic musician based in Berlin, Hekla Magnúsdóttir is a virtuoso on the theremin, and loops and occasionally processes her instrument (and voice) to create bass rumbles and extraordinary melodies as well as singing in her native language. Her album Á is evocative and unique and you should totally check it out.
Szun Waves - New Hymn To Freedom [The Leaf Label] Szun Waves - Through Stars Into Voids [Szun Waves Bandcamp] Szun Waves - Temple [The Leaf Label] Earlier this year I had Sydney drummer Laurence Pike on the show to talk about his new solo album released on The Leaf Label. Pike is of course best known as drummer in PVT and once upon a time post-jazz explorers Triosk. Szun Waves is jazz of a somewhat different stripe - freeform, psychedelic jazz with the modular electronics of Luke Abbott and the expansive saxophone of Portico Quartet's Jack Wyllie. Their first album flew a little under the radar, so hopefully there's some more attention for this new one.
The Declining Winter - Belmont Slope [Home Assembly Music]
Still excited about the new album from Hood's Richard Adams. The Declining Winter is now (again) basically a solo project. It's out in a few weeks, slightly delayed, and like his last album brings in some lovely electronics alongside his love of jangly indiepop - if not entirely as full-on electronic as Hood could sometimes get.
Big show with sad news and exciting news...
And BIG THANKS to Krishtie Mofazzal for enthusiastically filling in for me last week!
LISTEN AGAIN for all them feels... Stream on demand from FBi alwayyys, or podcast over here...
Tunng - Flatland [Full Time Hobby/Tunng Bandcamp]
The duo of Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders as Tunng took my breath away in mid 2004 when I heard their first single, released originally by Static Caravan. Arcane English folk channeled through glitchy electronic production, it was everything Utility Fog was initially conceived to be about, and they became a staple on the show for some years. A few years in, Sam Genders left to pursue some indie & folky directions of his own, and to me the band somewhat lost its way, with grating generic singalong folk songs... (of course your mileage may vary!) So it's with great pleasure that I learned that the original duo have gotten back together, with this single auguring a full album, and what a delightful song it is too. Can't wait for more.
Flame 1 - Shrine [Pressure]
Epic teamup of Kevin Martin aka The Bug and Burial, creating basically just what you'd expect - rainswept dark post-dubstep music. It's a very low-key two-tracker, but really lovely and a nice first entry for The Bug's new Pressure label.
Zozobra - The Vast Expanse [Hydra Head] Old Man Gloom - Close Your Eyes, Roll Back In Your Head [Tortuga Recordings] Old Man Gloom - Girth And Greed [Tortuga Recordings] Old Man Gloom - Sonic Dust [Tortuga Recordings] Cave In - The World Is In The Way [Hydra Head]
In the first in two pieces of tragic news that hit the music world last week (and we've had more this week although not so much in the Utility Fog realm...), Caleb Scofield passed away in a car accident at the age of 39. Best known probably as the bass player in Cave In, who started off as hardcore/metalcore but moved into alternative rock waters, and in a way came back again... Most significantly to me, Caleb was the bass player in the immense, inventive supergroup Old Man Gloom, featuring Scofield alongside ISIS's Aaron Turner, Converge's Nate Newton and the cheeky Mexican drummer Santos Montano. Montano also played with Scofield in his heavy, rifftastic bass-led solo act Zozobra (named for the same Mexican figure that inspired Old Man Gloom).
Scofield leaves a young family. A YouCaring fundraiser was setup which far surpassed its $1,000 goal within hours, and has now raised over $100,000.
Alias - Divine Disappointment [Anticon] Anticon - We Ain't Fessin' [Anticon] Alias - Watching Water [Anticon] Alias - Unseen Sights (feat. Markus Acher) [Anticon] Sole - Every Single One Of Us [Anticon] Sage Francis - Product Placement [Epitaph] Alias - M.G. Jack [Anticon] B. Dolan - Fifty Ways To Bleed Your Customer [Strange Famous Records] Alias - Gold cLOUDDEAD Skiez [Anticon]
A few days after the death of Caleb Scofield, last Sunday for me, the news hit that Brendon Whitney aka Alias had passed away of a heart attack. It's been a while since we had significant work from Whitney - a solo album came out on Anticon in 2014, and he's had an important hand in plenty of (alternative) hip-hop releases but more in the background. But his impact on a lot of UFog favourites through the years can't be overstated. From B. Dolan's incredible 2010 album Fallen House, Sunken City that could not exist without Alias's hard-hitting beats, to many of Sage Francis's important albums including the 2005 turning point A Healthy Distrust, and early work by the likes of Sole and others, and back to his own rap work in the early days, some of which we sampled from early Anticon compilations... And of course there's that collaboration with Markus Acher of The Notwist, a plodding piece of sad-hop that I've loved for a decade and a half. We finish with a track from Alias's last solo album, from 2014, which incorporated trap & bass elements, and in amongst it a rather nice tribute to Odd Nosdam's production...
Brendon Whitney also left a young family behind. There's a GofundMe setup to support them, and I recommend dropping some cash if you can afford to.
Fake - Lo Res [SUMAC] BLACK VANILLA - SMACKS [SoundCloud] Cassius Select - Joy Mile [Unknown To The Unknown] BV - Huh [Black Vanilla Bandcamp] Fake - blame! [Fake Bandcamp] {under talking} Cassius Select - Essence [Accidental Jnr] BV - Hounds Out [BV Bandcamp] Fake - Living Hard [SUMAC]
We learned in the last week or two that Lavurn Lee, long fixture of Sydney's music scene, is returning to his original home of Toronto. As a result, the beloved BV - his trio with Marcus Whale and Jared Beeler - are going on long-term hiatus. Beeler has also moved to Melbourne, and it's him along with a couple of other Sydney ex-pats in Melbourne who've setup the SUMAC label that just released Lee's new self-titled album for his minimalist grime/trap/r'n'b project Fake. Lavurn originally came to notoriety in Sydney via his r'n'b vocal looping & electronics as Guerre, but apart from the legendary BV who trickle out pure gems every couple of years, he's received international acclaim for his techno/bass productions as Cassius Select. There's a hefty grime influence on his sounds - not just the rawness of the bass & electronics, but also in some of the cadences of his rapping (although no doubt Southern hip-hop has a more substantial presence). BV has always approached the dancefloor as a dark, post-cyberpunk battlefield, and Cassius Select tends to look to the darker ends of the dance spectrum too. With Fake, Lavurn is breaking down hip-hop into its most fucked-up & experimental formats too, processing his vocals, samples and beats as much as possible, and keeping the bass heavy. Mad props.
Peter Hollo - Utility Fog
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Since all these genre names are already pretty ridiculous, we thought we'd coin a new one. So "postfolkrocktronica" it is. Wear it.
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