Utility Fog

Sunday, 21st of November, 2010

Some interesting sounds tonight from both local and overseas sources, including an entire 20 minutes, over 5 tracks, from an excellent local EP.
LISTEN AGAIN by scrolling to the bottom of the playlist, and then read along!

Started with US label Lost Tribe Sound’s first compilation, Volume One, which features a few great Australian artists. Cock & Swan, though, are from Seattle (Washington state, not DC as I'd thought), and they're actually an electric and even electronic group, but this acoustic version of one of their songs is very pretty!
Melbourne's Part Timer follows, with a track featuring a couple of his frequent collaborators, both of whom are familiar to UFog listeners.
He sent me a couple of exclusive new tracks recently — first is a remix of the Lost Tribe Sound track with his usual nice clicky beat, and then an even more head-nodding beat for a remix of Lost Tribe peeps Tokyo Bloodworm.

And from last week's New Weird Australia compilation, Shoeb Ahmad has an almost indie tune!

Next up, something of an epic from a new Sydney duo, Domeyko/Gonzalez, whose debut EP is psych/krautrock in sound & attitude, 5 tracks with nothing much in the way of separations — in fact, any small gaps that there are happen in the middle of the tracks. So I played all 20 minutes, from the beginning's chants through postrock, something with an almost housey beat, and raucous noise.

I've been meaning to play something from Grün’s debut EP, back when they were Greenland, for a while. It's as good as their new album, and surprisingly matched the tempo of the dub/rock/drum'n'bass of The Blood of Heroes, who featured a couple of weeks ago on the show. Find that playlist for the full low-down, but these two tracks had the familiar onslaught of Enduser’s beats.

Keeping it drum'n'bass (of a sort), we head to Dntel’s earliest works, and some recent reworkings: I can't find out specifically who AKiko is, so I haven't provided a link (sorry!) but it's a very nice skittery remix of one of Jimmy Tamborello's earliest Dntel tracks. We then heard one of those, as skittery as you'd want and very very lovely.

Skittery is what Grasscut’s remixes on the Ninja Tune XX are too — of both Jaga Jazzist and (even moreso) Coldcut. Embarrassingly, it was only after hearing these tracks that I went back and found Grasscut's album from earlier this year. With elements of Tunng and Sweet Billy Pilgrim in their evocation of the English countryside and the sound of the Britain of bygone years, mixed like those acts with electronic production techniques, it's great stuff.

From England to the west coast of the USA, we join Gonjasufi with a track from his remix album; but it's a trick, because the remixer is Glasgow's Dam Mantle, who straddles the US wonky sound, East London dubstep and the purple sound of Glasgow. Both this remix and his own track from tonight are pretty heavy on the bass, and also heavily chopped.

And with some bass drops of their own, Future Sound of London delve back into their archives again for the 6th volume, still dredging up some wondrous sounds. They may not be the "future" anymore, but then the future is now innit!

From the futuristic present, another track from Skjølbrot, featured a couple of weeks ago on the show. His album comes highly recommended from these quarters.

The Digitalis label brings us Roll The Dice, from Stockholm — a Swedish take on the hypnotic analogue synth music we're being treated to these days. I will be playing more of these guys in future shows.

Next up, a bit of a Brian Eno special. This despite the fact that I've expressed ambivalence about his new album, in collaboration with Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams. I love Jon Hopkins, and those sections where his influence shines out are particularly great; but I've never warmed to Eno's ambient work, and so a lot of this just leaves me unmoved.
So we heard a few other Eno collaborations - first, Talking Heads’s finest hour, produced by Eno, with post-punk funk guitar riffs, layered vocals and cross-rhythms galore. Then more David Byrne with Eno, from their justly famed album of the following year, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in which they cut up miles of taped radio recordings — found sounds and mainly crazy American preachers. This track, though, has Muslim sources, and was left off every version of the album after the first, sadly.
And finally, from my late high-school (and therefore formative) years, Eno with John Cale, on which their two voices mesh uncannily well, and Cale layers beautiful violin/viola lines.

And so to strings. From the same album we sampled last week, Ryuichi Sakamoto arranges his work for piano trio, and in particular here the legendary Brazilian cellist Jaques Morelenbaum acquits himself brilliantly with wild cello noise in the middle.
And also following on from last week, Paris-based American cellist Zach Miskin here pairs up with violinist and electronic musician Todd Reynolds for a rhythmic piece from his new album.

The harmonics in the previous track led very nicely into a piece from Littoral Plain, which is a solo project of Peter Richardson from legendary '80s Australian band The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast. It's electronic music that couldn't quite have been made in the 1980s, but seems pleasingly anacronistic in the here and now as well. Definitely recommended that you check him out on SoundCloud.

To finish, whiz-kids Collarbones remix another whiz-kid, Sydney's electronic punk upstart Simo Soo. It's all chopped and screwed in the contemporary fashion, just how we like it.

Cock & Swan - Unrecognized (Acoustic) [Lost Tribe Sound]
Part Timer - Unfound (feat. Aaron Martin & Heidi Elva) [Lost Tribe Sound]
Part Timer - Unfound remix [unreleased]
Tokyo Bloodworm - Mergers and Acquisitions (Part Timer remix) [unreleased]
Shoeb Ahmad - Out Of Breath [New Weird Australia] {download free at Bandcamp!}
Domeyko/Gonzalez - Shadow March [Death Strobe Records]
Domeyko/Gonzalez - I. Eschatol; II. Memory Center; III. Unanchor [Death Strobe Records]
Domeyko/Gonzalez - Exit Being [Death Strobe Records]
Grün (Greenland) - secret rat and the bag of happiness [Gizeh/Laughing Outlaw]
The Blood of Heroes - Chains [Ohm Resistance]
The Blood of Heroes - Salute to the Jugger [Ohm Resistance]
dntel - termites in the bathtub (AKiko: Off to Slumberland mix) [Phthalo]
dntel - loneliness means having no one to miss [Phthalo]
Jaga Jazzist - Toccata (Grasscut Remix) [Ninja Tune]
Grasscut - High Down [Ninja Tune]
Grasscut - The Tin Man [Ninja Tune]
Coldcut - Sound Mirrors (Grasscut dub) [Ninja Tune]
Gonjasufi - Ageing (Dam Mantle remix) [Warp]
Dam Mantle - D2 [Growing Records]
Future Sound of London - Then Departed [Jumpin' & Pumpin']
Future Sound of London - Protractor [Jumpin' & Pumpin']
Skjølbrot - Idle Fleet [self-released]
Roll The Dice - The New Black [Digitalis]
Brian Eno with Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams - Horse [Warp]
Talking Heads - The Great Curve [Sire]
David Byrne & Brian Eno - Qu'ran [not on the remastered version of My Life In The Bush of Ghosts. See discussion & links of possible interest here]
Brian Eno/John Cale - Spinning Away [Hannibal]
Ryuichi Sakamoto - 1919 (piano trio version from 1996 with Jaques Morelenbaum, cello, Everton Nelson, violin) [Milan]
Zach Miskin - Seatbelt Assembly (feat. Todd Reynolds) [Naïve]
Littoral Plain - Events Emit Time [self-released] {download from SoundCloud!}
Simo Soo - I Smashed My Face (Collarbones rmx) [Lesstalk Records]

Listen again — ~ 173MB

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