Utility Fog

Sunday, 7th of February, 2016

Full playlist of awesome music for you tonight!

LISTEN AGAIN for twice the recommended dose of daily aural nutrition. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast from here.

Starting with some stunningly lovely stuff from Cave In The Sky, the project of Australian multi-instrumentalist Cye Wood, recorded predominantly in Byron Bay, produced by Paul Corley and mastered by Icelandic master Valgeir Sigurðsson. It's got a bit of that Icelandic wind-swept epic feel to it, and it's got that feel of acoustic postrock, with piano and strings and guitar with occasional softly-sung vocals, lush sub-bass and in general envelopingly lush production. Highly recommended when it comes on 26th of February from 1631 Recordings, a label setup by Mattias Nilsson from Kning Disk and David Wenngren from Library Tapes to release quality contemporary/post-classical and electronic music.

From Melbourne, Jade Foster is waterhouse. She's been making electronic music for a few years and has collected some of those on a new mini-album on Melbourne's Decisions Records. It's not as dancefloor-focused as much of that label's output (see the deservingly successful Air Max '97), but there are some nice thudding beats on some tracks, as well as some late-night ambience and some dronenoise stuff.

Oren Ambarchi's second collaboration with Swedish bass player Johan Berthling (of the incendiary Fire!) came out lateish last year on Berthling's Häpna label. I picked it up finally when Fire! visited Sydney a couple of weeks ago, and it's really something. Ambarchi's love of repetitive krautrock grooves, seen over the last few years' releases, is here in spades along with Berthling's talent for the perfect bassline. There's lots of other sonic stuff going on - bouncing delays, organ drones etc. Two 15+-minute tracks to be savoured.

The latest release from Machinefabriek is a selection of his remixes from 2005 to 2015. That's quite a long period, covering most of his history as an experimental/drone/sound-artist. There are some beats here and there - he does after all remix Amon Tobin among others - but also plenty of glitches and amazing sonic textures... Tonight we heard Dag Rosenqvist's shoegaze band de la Mancha and Berlin/London post-everything improv group Fiium Shaark, an exclusive to this collection.

Fellow Dutch artist Michel Banabila oscillates between quite experimental sound work and more approachable world-beat stuff, all of which I love, and the recent Feedback + Modular + Radiowaves III is mostly in the former camp, but one track is a piece of shimmering ambience and two long washes of crescendo and decrescendo.

Like Cave In The Sky, UK's Iskra String Quartet are released on the 1631 Recordings label. The quartet have worked with some quite well-known pop and electronic acts in the last few years, as well as commissioning works from some leftfield UK composers. They have a remix EP coming out in a couple of weeks, and it's great hearing one of the beloved artist of the original folktronica crew, Minotaur Shock, still making some tunes. Here he contributes a blissful piece of Jon Hopkins-style techno. Slightly more ambient is the reworking by French soundtrack composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouche.

Spanish duo Cello + Laptop have been making music with their titular instruments for a while, fitting somewhere between the post-classical world and drone and glitch. Their latest album Transient Accidents came out in one of the lush and intricate limited CD editions from Fluid Audio and is now available digitally from their Facture sublabel's Bandcamp. It's very detailed, deep listening.

The mysterious artist haddock's eyes hails from Sydney according to their Bandcamp, but give nothing else at all away - except that some of their music is dubbed from cassette from 1993/4, whereas some is new. They range from lo-fi punk to jangly indie to lo-fi country, to granular-processed helium vocal pop, and it's pretty much amazing. Some sleuth-work suggests it's the work of Benjow, and originally-Adelaide-based artist who's played in groups like the somewhat legendary cult band The Bedridden.

Finally, we have a preview of the new album from Iranian electronic musician Ash Koosha, coming out soon on Ninja Tune. He released a free mixtape on Old English Spelling Bee last year, from which we took a couple of tracks - bass-heavy glitch-hop type stuff, which seems to be the order of the day on the new album too. Great stuff.

Cave In The Sky - Threads of the Sun [1631 Recordings]
Cave In The Sky - Sönghellir [1631 Recordings]
waterhouse - Untitled 2 (1248am) [Decisions]
waterhouse - 3415 [Decisions]
waterhouse - Song For A Prince In Exile [Decisions]
Oren Ambarchi & Johan Berthling - Tied [Häpna]
de la Mancha - Release All Light (Machinefabriek Remix) [Zoharum/Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Fiium Shaark - Krypton Tunning (Machinefabriek Remix) [Zoharum/Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Machinefabriek - John Davis [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Michel Banabila - Cycling To Pluto [Tapu Records Bandcamp]
Iskra String Quartet - Blue Notebook (Minotaur Shock Remix) [1631 Recordings]
Iskra String Quartet - Chorale (Five) (Emilie Levienaise-Farrouche Remix) [1631 Recordings]
Cello + Laptop - State Of Transilience [Fluid Audio/Facture Bandcamp]
haddock's eyes - sins / victory over the sun [haddock's eyes Bandcamp]
haddock's eyes - wednesday [haddock's eyes Bandcamp]
haddock's eyes - they die [haddock's eyes Bandcamp]
haddock's eyes - boat [haddock's eyes Bandcamp]
Ash Koosha - XXXL / Harbour [Old English Spelling Bee]
Ash Koosha - Mudafossil [Ninja Tune]

Listen again — ~192MB

Comments are closed.