Utility Fog

Sunday, 9th of July, 2017

We’ve got yr post-industrial drone, glitch guitars, twisted dancefloor numbers and yr live trip-hop/drum’n’bass all lined up for you tonight. Tuck yourself in and get ready…

LISTEN AGAIN to sate yr sonic appetite… Stream it on demand from FBi at any time, podcast over here.

Joe Acheson’s Hidden Orchestra have for 7+ years now been putting together amazing live shows and albums which perfectly evoke the collagey cut-ups, breakbeats and film music samples of ’90s instrumental hip-hop and drum’n’bass with (mostly) live performers. Acheson is a first-class orchestrator, and his musicians (especially drummers Tim Lane and Jamie Graham) are top notch. It’s evocative and yes, cinematic, but also totally dedicated to the groove when it wants to be. For his new album, Acheson has based all the tracks around different recordings of the “dawn chorus”, the joyful tweeting of birds waking up and greeting the morning sun. He’s gathered together collaborators including various artists remixed on the impeccable Reorchestrations set from a couple of years ago – Czech classical crossover artists Clarinet Factory make an appearance, as does Scottish artist Mary Macmaster on two different types of Celtic harp. It’s wonderful stuff.

“Impeccable” is one of the words I often use to describe UK electronic duo Akkord, whose de/reconstructions of UK dancefloor genres are spot-on, equisitely produced, and frequently head-nodding/foot-shuffling. It’s music that certainly works for the dancefloor (some dancefloor, somewhere), techno drawing on jungle/drum’n’bass as much as dubstep, uk garage and idm. There’s always been something pure about their music to me – every break, bassline, synth pad in just the right place. Samples perfectly cut & everything EQ’d to perfection. But it’s not clinical and heartless at all – just damn good.

Hemlock Recordings boss and post-dubstep/uk garage pioneer Untold moves back to his roots, I feel, from some more house-inflected sounds to broken beats, almost literally broken, as he interprets “Tear Up The Club” to mean breaking down the beats & basslines. It’s an infectious kind of stop-start approach though…

From the rainforesty outskirts of Melbourne hails 4096 salts, a video game maker and electronic musician who’s been pretty underground since first releasing experimental beats 17 years ago… Now re-unearthed by Kris Keogh’s ZZAAPP, he has an excellent mini-album coming out this week with some crunchy, squelchy beats and some glitchy soundscapes in there, all quite insectile.

The glitchy soundscapes continue as part of the sonic armory of the brilliant Jasmine Guffond, whose second album Traced on boutique Berlin label Sonic Pieces is a reaction to the ultra-surveillance of the contemporary digital world. Guffond’s musical history extends back to the mid-’90s with with the unclassifiable all-female Sydney trio Alternahunk and in the late-’90s the minimal electronic/glitch duo minit. More recently Guffond was based in Berlin, making unusual indie songwriter material as Jasmina Maschina, but her two albums on Sonic Pieces find her back in experimental electronic mode, sampling her vocals and subtle guitar along with basslines and homemade beats to create tremulous granular soundscapes and unsettling grooves. The new album is one of the best things I’ve heard this year, don’t sleep on it!

Somehow sidling into our playlists for three weeks running with three different releases is the lovely Shoeb Ahmad from Canberra. This week he appears on a split cassette from the great Tandem Tapes, giving us 6 minutes of glitchy guitar drone and vocal snippets. It’s quite unlike the indie-soul of his up-coming album, but indicative of a lot of his oeuvre.

Shoeb’s label hellosQuare has recently put out a 7? from Melbourne trumpeter Ben Marston working with Norwegian sound artist Simen Løvgren. Expansive and shimmering electronics and beautiful trumpet and delays on this track, it goes in more challenging directions on the flipside. Marston is playing with UFog fave Hence Therefore this Tuesday night at Freda’s in Chippendale – Facebook event here.

And we finish up with Sydney duo Party Dozen who’ve been tearing up venues around town for a while with their raucous electronics, sax and drums. Kirsty Tickle’s saxophone wails and screams out heavy distorted riffs while Boulet batters his drums and insane guitars & electronics clatter away. There are some quieter moments too. It’s a vital listen, and a well-deserved, if surprising, album of the week for FBi!

Hidden Orchestra – Western Isles [Tru Thoughts]
Hidden Orchestra – Night Walks [Tru Thoughts]
Macmaster / Hay – Thograinn Thograinn (Hidden Orchestra remix) [Denovali]
Hidden Orchestra – East London Street [Tru Thoughts]
Akkord – RCVR [Houndstooth]
Untold – Tear Up The Club [Hemlock Recordings]
4096 salts – Green Ant Sound [ZZAAPP]
4096 salts – Shape Dust [ZZAAPP]
Jasmine Guffond – Vision Strategy Coordinators [Sonic Pieces]
Alternahunk – Over & Out [Dual Plover]
minit – bootleg [Tonschacht]
Jasmine Guffond – rr variation [Sonic Pieces]
Jasmine Guffond – Post Human [Sonic Pieces]
Shoeb Ahmad – Dragonfly [Tandem Tapes]
Ben Marston & Simen Løvgren – A [hellosQuare]
Party Dozen – Attention Age [Grupo]
Party Dozen – Wide World [Grupo]

Listen again — ~202MB

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