Utility Fog

Sunday, 26th of February, 2017

Last week was mostly ambient… tonight is mostly beats. thumping, head-nodding, frenetic… maybe even soothing.

LISTEN AGAIN to the crunch crunch thunk kathunk, stream on demand at the FBi website or podcast over here.

Manchester’s Alex Lewis is apparently responsible for the latest album on the Modern Love label, also based out of that city, although that’s all I can find out about him. Turinn sounds very much of a piece with the latest heavy post-rave offerings from Demdike Stare or even Andy Stott – beats that could be lifted from techno, grime, r’n’b or drum’n’bass records, distorted and compressed and chopped up into ungainly structures. It’s raw and rad.

African-Italian producer Herve Atsè Corti aka Herva first appeared on the Planet µ label for 2015’s killer Kila album, and his new album Hyper Flux has just dropped, with more mutated takes on dance music forms, sometimes verging on vaporwave, but often based around harsh and distorted heavily-edited beats. The experimental sounds date back to at least 2014, when he released an amazing album called Instant Broadcast on the Dutch label Delsin. It’s very much a case of “I don’t know what drugs he’s on but I want some of that” (except not literally).

There’s nothing like a bit of JK Flesh to clear out the cobwebs. Justin K Broadrick is a veritable genius of unlikely music, having gotten his start in Napalm Death, then founding Godflesh, but simultaneously exploring techno and dub in Techno Animal (with longtime musical partner Kevin Martin aka The Bug) and later shoegaze-metal with the beloved Jesu… In his solo project JK Flesh he’s explored the heavier end of dubstep, drum’n’bass and techno, often with the roared grindcore/metal vocals appearing in the background, but with his latest digital release (originally two painfully limited cassettes on Dominick Fernow’s Hospital Productions) he’s sidling away from the planet-smashing techno beats into some queasy melodic electronica of a sort. Anything he does is liable to be gold, anyway.

At the start of the first new track tonight from Fred Warmsley under his Dedekind Cut alias, you could imagine him headbanging to some of JK Broadrick’s earlier music, and then hitting the dancefloor to one of his drum’n’bass 12?s as Tech Level 2. In typical Warmsley fashion his new EP The Expanding Domain bounces around dark ambient and various forms of rave and idm. As last year’s 3m mixtape showed, even his cast-off tracks are excellent, and he never sits still. Looking forward to whatever comes next.

I missed the last batch of releases from Chicago label Beer on the Rug, but only just I guess – the hazy techno and stuttery ambience of Calgary, Alberta artist Aphni only came out a week and a bit ago. But Boston artist mmph‘s Dear God appeared in December last year, the latest release from a fairly prolific often frenetically glitchy artist who surfs the vaporwave but in a perhaps more engaging way than some…

Japanese trio Motoro Faam, with two pianists/keyboard players and one glitchy electronic producer, released their debut album Fragments on the Belgian label U-Cover in 2006. Their friends at the Japanese label flau are celebrating their 10th birthday around the same time that this album is, and they’ve re-released the album with, for initial CD orders, a bonus disc of unreleased gems (which I’m waiting with excitement to receive!) This and its follow-up …and Water Cycles, released on fellow Tokyo label Preco the following year, are not-quite-forgotten gems of Japanese post-classical glitch-edit sweetness and fun, so it’s lovely to have the debut available again.

Bigo & Twigetti‘s Exquisite Corpse compilation continues on their Bandcamp, with entries from various post-classical and ambient electronic artists, each remixing or reworking the track before them. It started with New York-based ex-pat Aussie Madeleine Cocolas last year and recently made its way to the wonderful Leah Kardos (also an ex-pat Aussie but based in the UK) with a composition for muted piano & electronics. And now Midlands-based ambient artist Mark Harris has remixed her track embeddeding her piano in pillowy drones. Goodnight!

Turinn – Frank White [Modern Love]
Turinn – Ovum [Modern Love]
Herva – Nasty MF [Planet µ]
Herva – Slam The Laptop [Delsin]
Herva – From The Inside [Don’t Be Afraid]
Herva – Trying To Fix Invisible Textures [Planet µ]
Herva – Kila [Planet µ]
Herva – Multicone [Planet µ]
JK Flesh – Bayley Tower (Remix) [JK Flesh Bandcamp]
JK Flesh – Thimerosal [JK Flesh Bandcamp]
Dedekind Cut – Fear in reverse 2 [Dedekind Cut Bandcamp]
Dedekind Cut – LiL Puffy Coat [Dedekind Cut Bandcamp]
mmph – Facade [Beer on the Rug]
Aphni – coca ally [Beer on the Rug]
Motoro Faam – ice floe ceiling [U-Cover/flau]
Motoro Faam – ridgeline 0 [U-Cover/flau]
Motoro Faam – and Precipitation [Preco]
Leah Kardos – Contact Mic [Bigo & Twigetti]
Mark Harris – The Drowning of the King of Straw [Bigo & Twigetti]

Listen again — ~196MB

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