Utility Fog

Sunday, 8th of May, 2016

Lots of UFog-stylee sounds this evening, with glitchy postrocktronica, ambient, experimental dancefloor beats, industrial beats, post-industrial collaborative works and experimental Americana...

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So great to have some new music from Bob Streckfuss aka 0point1. I thought he was originally from the Blue Mountains, outside of Sydney, but he's certainly now based in Melbourne. His style hasn't changed much in the last few years - incredibly intricate electronic production, often with manic drill'n'bassy beats or edited drums; in fact, everything glitchily edited, sometimes including his vocals, but as often as not his vocals float over the rest in Sigur Rós style, making for a lovely amalgam of blissful postrock and idm.

The Sounds are Sounds label from Sydney mostly releases different aliases of the work of Jacques Emery, as far as I can see. Which is a good thing, mind you. The latest release as golden window house has him in ambient mode, with varispeed string samples, or slightly unsettling field recordings with sparse, clattering piano and percussive sounds... Well worth your while checking it out.

Melbourne's Wabz aka Nick Wuksta produces prodigious amounts of music, but his actual releases are a little few and far between (as of now). He did a great jungle-influenced remix of Dylan Michél on Feral Media's recent Strain of Origin comp, and his latest EP is a moody, experimental, revisionist take on UK Garage. It's really one long piece in 5 tracks, so I played the first three as a block tonight. One you shouldn't miss!

Berlin's Gainstage put out an EP last year that I really enjoyed but for some reason it never made it on to the show. So tonight we'll hear tracks from their two releases so far. While it's quite heavy and noisy, it seems of a piece with some of the other "industrial techno" coming out of Berlin at the moment (e.g. These Hidden Hands, even expat Dubliners Lakker), but the distorted electronic beats are, I believe, augmented with live drums. Alongside these tough, tricky beats are sometimes surges of electronic noise, but also delicate, lonely melodies, reminiscent of similar juxtapositions from two decades earlier from the likes of Seefeel and Mark van Hoen's Locust. It feels to me that these guys don't quite have the nororiety they deserve, next to some of their compatriots in messed up, beautiful electronics.

Italian experimental composer & electronic producer Teho Teardo first teamed up with Blixa Bargeld on a soundtrack in 2010, but they ended up putting out a whole collaborative album in 2013. Clearly I wasn't the only one to adore its combination of post-industrial experimentalism with Teardo's soundtrack-influenced strings and the pair's love of sentimental Italian songwriting. Their second duo album Nerissimo has just come out on Teardo's Specula Recordings, and it's just as lovely. I thought I'd go back and play a few of Blixa's colalborations through the years - mostly more recent ones including the duo with alva noto as anbb and an appearance with avant-garde metal/punk/rock supergroup Book of Knots. But it was also cool to revisit the epic darkwave drum'n'bass remixes by Darkus, an alias of classically-trained composer/producer Mark Rutherford who, as well as working with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Mike Oldfield, was an original member of jungle/drum'n'bass pioneers Metalheadz.

I played some tracks off the new album by René Gonzalez Schelbeck aka Western Skies Motel a few weeks back; it's a great fit for Lost Tribe Sound, and as their press suggests, surprisingly "American"-sounding for a Danish musician. Schelbeck is adept at fingerstyle guitar, and can produce perfect Americana-styled folk pieces; but he also loves washing things out with droning guitarscapes and field recordings. I was pleased to discover a wealth of earlier work from the last couple of years, available on his own Bandcamp, as well as on the sadly now-defunct Perth label Twice Removed and the excellent Polish experimental/ambient label Preserved Sound.

0point1 - Sleep rebuilds machine [0point1 Bandcamp]
0point1 - Animal magnetism [0point1 Bandcamp]
0point1 - Bedroom universe [0point1 Bandcamp]
golden window house - method actor [Sounds are Sounds]
golden window house - holding on to an object [Sounds are Sounds]
Wabz - NightRider [Solitaire Recordings]
Wabz - Bells Ring Out [Solitaire Recordings]
Wabz - Melrose Park [Solitaire Recordings]
Gainstage - Light Change [Portals Editions]
Gainstage - Sun Burnt Cloud [Portals Editions]
Gainstage - Four Pipes [Portals Editions]
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld - DHX 2 [Specula Records]
Einstrürzende Neubauten - NNNAAAMMM (The Dark Welcome Mix by Darkus) [Mute]
anbb - ret marut handshake [raster-noton]
The Book of Knots - Drosophila Melanogaster (feat. Blixa Bargeld) [Ipecac]
Teho Teardo - Nemmeno Io [Specula Records]
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld - Axolotl [Specula Records]
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld - The Empty Boat [Specula Records]
Western Skies Motel - Myraids [Lost Tribe Sound]
Western Skies Motel - Here and There [Western Skies Motel Bandcamp]
Western Skies Motel - Through the Branches [Preserved Sound]
Western Skies Motel - Black Sea [Twice Removed]

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