LISTEN AGAIN if you dare! Podcast here, stream on demand @ FBi.
Kim Gordon - The Believers [Matador/Bandcamp]
Kim Gordon - I Don't Miss My Mind [Matador/Bandcamp]
The second album from Kim Gordon continues her collaboration with producer Justin Raisen, who provides overdriven beats that back Gordon's familiar speak-singing drawl - often stream-of-consciousness stuff, as encouraged by Raisen. If No Home Record was a shock, the first solo album from a figure of such huge significance in indie rock/postpunk for over 4 decades, The Collective has no less impact from following it. Career highs from an artist now in her 70s.
Moor Mother - Liverpool Wins (feat. Kyle Kidd) [ANTI-/Bandcamp]
Moor Mother - My Souls Been Anchored [ANTI-/Bandcamp]
Camae Ayewa has been one of the most in-demand guests on experimental albums of the last few years, but meanwhile keeps up her work with Irreversible Entanglements, 700 Bliss and Black Quantum Futurism - and of course solo work as Moor Mother. Moor Mother albums have never exactly been typical hip-hop, although the genre is so malleable and experimental to its core that this isn't saying much. The Great Bailout relentlessly dissects British colonialism and the slave trade, and their connections to capitalism & power today. It's musically challenging, as Moor Mother is nothing if not uncompromising, and this extends to collaborators like Lonnie Holley and Kyle Kidd. As impressive as Ayewa's poetry and delivery are, her genius is such that everything other than those guest spots is performed and produced by her too. The instrumental "My Souls Been Anchored" is no less political, with its collaged samples of blues and spirituals overlaid with the rumblings of industry. This album is challenging but essential listening.
Dali de Saint Paul & Maxwell Sterling - 4 [Accidental Meetings/Bandcamp]
The vocals and effects of Bristol artist Dali de Saint Paul have been found in many contexts over the last many years, including on Moor Mother's 2019 album Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes and UKAEA's recent Birds Catching Fire in the Sky. I first came across double bass player & electronic musician Maxwell Sterling on a collaboration with Martha Skye Murphy called Distance on Ground, although he also had a well-praised album on AD 93 in 2021. Their duo Penumbra came out of an improvised session on BBC Radio 3's Late Junction. Both musicians loop and process their sounds live - de Saint Paul's voice chopped into short rhythmic phrases or singing long melodies; Sterling's double basses and Lyra stretched into waves or sped up into high-pitched streams. Intriguing, engrossing stuff.
Erika Angell - Good And Bad [Constellation/Bandcamp]
Erika Angell - German Singer [Constellation/Bandcamp]
Swedish musician Erika Angell has been based in Montréal for many years, which explains her new album The Obsession With Her Voice appearing on the legendary Constellation label. Angell is a classically- and jazz-trained singer who's played in indie rock and industrial outfits and collaborated wide and far. On the new album, her shapeshifting vocals are accompanied by her synths and electronics, along with live drums from Mili Hong and a string section of cellos and violas. The abstract aspects of jazz, classical and electronic music all contribute to songs which nevertheless are song-shaped, whether Angell is whispering or howling, singing richly or processing her voice robotically. For those of us new to her work, a revelation.
Shoeb Ahmad - demotion [Provenance/Bandcamp]
Aphir - HAND ON YOUR HEART [Provenance/Bandcamp]
Hey! Lucky you, you get a preview of Marks of Provenance VII, the latest label compilation from the Provenance Collective. It's out this coming Friday, March 15th, and is choc full of Provenance artists like Arrom, Happy Axe, Sebastian Field, ROMÆO, Imogen Cygler, Ashleigh Hazel and... Avril Lavigne? All will be revealed, but tonight we heard a wonderful piece of creepy industrial looping from friend-of-'Fog Shoeb Ahmad, and a tour de force from Aphir featuring slamming beats, processed voice and her multi-tracked choral work.
Vanessa Bedoret - Choice [Scenic Route]
Vanessa Bedoret - 1/2 [Scenic Route]
It's disarming to find the an album as accomplished as Vanessa Bedoret's Eyes is the artist's debut. Bedoret (French, but now based in London) learned classical violin from childhood, played guitar in punk bands, and her violin and love of punk & metal are present in this album, even though its most comfortable category is experimental electronic. The music on Eyes bears the hallmarks of today's deconstructed club music, occasionally reconstructing itself into something that might be danceable, but equally using the bass drops and fragmented beats as splashes of sound alongside her string lines and, at times, vocals. On these tracks, Bedoret's voice is used more as an instrument than a lead - multitracked into choral parts that are then chopped as fodder for electronic processing - although there are some more conventional song-like tracks. It's music that will appeal to fans of experimental electronic music past & present, as well as post-classical and the experimental end of shoegaze (e.g. Seefeel). So that means YOU!
Marcus Whale - Shepherd's Voice [Marcus Whale Bandcamp]
Marcus Whale - ∞ [Marcus Whale Bandcamp]
The new album from Sydney polymath Marcus Whale comes as CD, if you want it, which contains a great discussion of some of the album's themes between Marcus and his flatmate/Sleepless in Sydney co-host Gus McGrath. So what's it about? Well, Ecstasy innit? It's a concept of infinite potential: the idea of going outside of oneself, of losing the bounaries between the self & the universe is one encountered in music and dance, in all creative practice really - as well as in sex and extreme sports and no doubt drug use. Of course on the album the ecstasy of the dancefloor looms high, those hammering kick drums recurring through the album - as does queer love and loving. The kick drum assault and snarling bass somewhat offset Marcus's choirboy-sweet voice, but mostly it's an album of sweetness, maybe sweetness found in the dark.
New Corroded - Tap Out [Vast Habitat/Bandcamp]
New Corroded - Chromosphere [Vast Habitat/Bandcamp]
Last year we heard quite a bit from Guy Brewer, known for his dark techno as Shifted but recently releasing more syncopated, higher-paced music as Carrier. I wasn't expecting to find this collaboration, though, which pairs Brewer with Daniel Lea, most recently released as CURA MACHINES on Bedouin Records, but previously appearing as half of Heliochrysum on Bedroom Community, having released two brilliant Talk Talk-inspired albums as L A N D - Night Within and Anoxia. Initially, New Corroded's debut Pass Lightly seems more like Brewer's work - imposing industrial techno - but there are elements of the glimmering synths found in Heliochrysum, and L A N D's rhythmic variation. Released on Lea's Vast Habitat on transparent vinyl, the album comes highly recommended.
Oliver Coates - France [Invada/Bandcamp]
Oliver Coates - How can you say [Invada/Bandcamp]
I said last week that Invada snuck out a couple of tracks early from Oliver Coates' sound track to the Mary & George TV series, a period drama (although it seems more like dark comedy?) about the gay lover of King James I in the early 17th century. Coates is an accomplished cellist in the contemporary classical world, as well as working with indie rock & pop acts, and has released some great experimental electronic music too. Given the period this show is set in, I expected mostly classical-sounding music, so it's a surprise to find the wonky junglisms of "How can you say", or the sparse, almost industrial (yet acoustic) rhythms found elsewhere. There are a lot of tracks, and a lot are just short cues, but there's lovely more developed music there too. I imagine Invada are banking of the show being a success, and reviews so far as very positive. Congrats Coates!
T Goldsmith - Accidentally Carelessly Thoughtlessly [DRUT Recordings/Bandcamp]
Until recently, Tom Goldsmith was better known playing in folk rock bands like Circulus, but Kelpe released an electronic EP last year on his DRUT Recordings, and thus T Goldsmith was born. His second EP Antimeta is a real pleasure, with some of that psych folk aesthetic bleeding through (Kelpe himself came out of the folktronica scene, such as it was), and flowing jungle/drum'n'bass beats. Lovely for home listening and chillout rooms (I wish they still existed!)
Ruffie - Perception [Locked Up Music]
From Romanian DJ/producer Ruffie, an excellent new EP of jungle-tinged d'n'b on Section's label Locked Up Music. Different styles, from clipped breaks to more flowing, sci-fi synths to jazz samples, very tasty.
DJ Birdbath - Kitsch Memory [Theory Therapy/Bandcamp]
New Zealand producer DJ Birdbath, who I believe had been based in Naarm/Melbourne but is now in Wellington, releases a full album, Memory Empathy, through Eora/Sydney's own Theory Therapy. It's equal parts vaporwave and jungle/trip-hop, coming in at a different angle from, say, Yunzero. In DJ Birdbath's hands '80s samples (there's definitely Kate Bush in there) and internet detritus can be reshaped around more familiar beat structures - of course jungle & "trip-hop" or "downtempo" or whatever we want to call it are themselves echoes of a now-distant past for anyone older than their mid-20s. DJ Birdbath approaches these memories with empathy, but recognizes how they are transformed at distance ("Kitsch Memory"). Memory Empathy will reward repeat listens.
woodgraves - Izanagi [Tree Critters]
The Massive Dragon - Deeper [Tree Critters]
Delightful breakcore/idm duo Bagel Fanclub directed me to this new compilation, and I want to say at the outset that their track "applebees iceblock" is a lovely melodic breakcore track that I would've played if I could fit it in. Both members also have tracks themselves on this 29-track compilation. Entitled Sounds for Solidarity: Palestine Relief Music Compilation, it will send funds to Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and Palestinian Red Crescent Society. And it's full of gems. Broadly, "Side A" is breakcore and junglish stuff, represented here by Chicago DJ/producer woodgraves with some warm & dark breaks at speed. "Side B" then is IDM at a more sedate pace (with exceptions), and Colorado's The Massive Dragon is one of the Tree Critters who put the comp together, with ping-pong (literally!) beats and calm synth pads.
Kevin Richard Martin/KMRU - If (Dub) [PTP/Bandcamp]
Saint Abdullah x Withdrawn & Birthmark - An Array Of Policy Options [PTP/Bandcamp]
Geng of PTP has always been a visionary of social change and resistance - many releases come with a free PDF of The End Of Policing by Alex S Vitale. The massive 95-track compilation RESIST COLONIAL POWER BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY features everyone, with no particular genre except probably somewhat experimental - there's hip-hop, rock, r'n'b, electronic music, acoustic music... A few tracks are missing - the compilation was delayed for a few weeks and Geng says the other tracks (currently 4 seconds of silence) will be uploaded eventually. I'm particularly keen for ELUCID, NikNak and Mariam Rezaei x Maria Chavez, but it's worth getting now anyway. I'd heard that Kevin Richard Martin (aka The Bug) was working on something with Nairobi ambient/experimental artist KMRU, and If (Dub) seems to be the first thing to venture out, very much melding Martin's desolate dub with KMRU's atmospherics. I first discovered NYC-based Iranian brothers Saint Abdullah via PTP, and they appear here with acerbic beats accompanying raps from Bristol's Withdrawn & Birthmark.
Joseph Franklin - the tension of things-in-motion [Nice Music/Bandcamp]
Joseph Franklin - of other potentialities quietly planting doubts [Nice Music/Bandcamp]
Finally for tonight, Naarm/Melbourne composer and bassist Joseph Franklin has released his debut solo album a thousand tiny mutinies through Nice Music. While Franklin has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles and soloists before, this album is his own exploratory performances on a semi-hollow six-string contrabass guitar, which he prepares in various ways as well as post-producing - although I believe the sounds themselves are all generated from that bass guitar, whose hollow body allows for all sorts of acoustic "effects" as well as those produced through amplification. There's an uncanny nature to many of these tracks, where scraping, buzzing sounds masquerade as glitch, harsh drones are produced mechanically, and even the more regular fingerpicking doesn't obey familiar forms of harmony or melody. But don't try and work out the provenance of these sounds - just tune in and listen and you'll be richly rewarded.
Listen again — ~200MB
]]>LISTEN AGAIN to the sign o' the times. Stream on demand at FBi, podcast here.
Armand Hammer - Doves feat. Benjamin Booker [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
Following a flurry of collaborations, many of which I've played here, Armand Hammer have released a new song - except it's been plonked at the end of last year's We Buy Diabetic Test Strips as a bonus track. Which is weird because it's absolutely incredible, right up with their best. Guitar & very fragile vocals from elusive soul/blues/rock musician Benjamin Booker plus piano lines are gorgeously smeared throughout by the dubby production of Kenny Segal, with a slice-of-life rap from billy woods only appearing halfway through, while ELUCID's lines are buried in distorted noise and echoes... "Is it me?"
Cengiz Arslanpay & Michel Banabila - Stop The Genocide! End The Occupation Now [Tapu Records]
The title says it all: Stop The Genocide! End The Occupation Now. Dutch musician Michel Banabila and Netherlands-based Turkish musician Cengiz Arslanpay have created a beautiful work of electro-acoustic drone; both musicians work with all manner of instruments, and Arslanpay's ney flute and rebab can be heard here among the electronics. All proceeds go to Gaza / Lebanon relief funds, listed on the Bandcamp page.
Persher - Hymn To The Tupperbird [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
The debut album from Persher follows their mini-album from 2022, Man With the Magic Soap. It's unlikely that anyone will sleep well to Sleep Well. Although both musicians come from the dubstep/techno world (Arthur Cayzer is Pariah and Jamie Roberts is Blawan), Persher is their tribute to grindcore, hardcore punk and extreme metal, with the bass elements only leaking in at times. I definitely hear them in "Hymn To The Tupperbird": weird sound manipulation, delay effects and occasional edited grooves lurk behind the guitar & bass riffs and the gruff metal vocals. Sleep Well is not for the faint-hearted, but fans of the heavy will find plenty to enjoy.
Squarepusher - Domelash [Warp/Bandcamp]
So. A new Squarepusher eh? *raises eyebrow* I dunno, but with all the new jungle out, and brilliant "deconstructed club" stuff melding jungle and techno and who knows what else, the drill'n'bass and electric bass on Tom Jenkinson feels a bit outdated. And yet... it's fun, he does love mashing the beats in ridiculous fashion, and he still has a handy way with synth melodies. I guess it's just that, as was mentioned way back when he & Aphex Twin and the rest started making this music, there's not much in the way of (sub) bass here (it was snarkily suggested at the time that they hadn't heard jungle played out in clubs, only in their bedrooms). It's all very much in the mid-range. Still, as I said, enjoyable stuff!
Arcane - Minotaur [Over/Shadow/Bandcamp]
Well here's one of those contemporary purveyors of jungle & drum'n'bass. Bristol's Arcane has a handful of releases under his belt on the likes of Irish label Rua Sound, but debuts now on Over/Shadow, founded to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Moving Shadow label. The Minotaur EP is four tracks of jungle re-tooled for the post-footwork age, with a nod to the hardcore techno that presaged jungle, but eyes forward to the future.
Andy Odysee - Waterblade Warrior [Odysee Recordings/Bandcamp]
Andy Baddaley, on the other hand, goes way back. An old schoolmate of Jim Baker of Source Direct, he joined Tilla Kemal's Odysee Recordings a few years in, lending his jazz & classical chops to the dark & deep sound. He's now co-manager of the label as it revives old releases by Source Direct, Photek and others, while also releasing new music - in particular from Badalley under Andy Odysee (fka Angel Dust, Cloaking Device and other aliases). Odysee Black Volume IV is the latest in a series of releases aimed at expanding the label's outlook, but Badalley's broad musical background always shines through anyway. "Waterblade Warrior" is an incredible exercise in programming skill, an updated take on Photek circa "Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu (Two Swords Technique)" which in all honesty should be on all the dancefloors.
Atrice - Multiplex [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
The latest release on Munich's singular Ilian Tape label brings Swiss duo Atrice back into the fold, with an EP that rivals their brilliant Ilian Tape debut Q from 2021. The five tracks on Multiplex span bass forms from breakbeat techno to jungle, always syncopating, always changing. Premium dancefloor stuff.
Morwell - Into the Light [Spiritual TransmissionsBandcamp]
Max Morwell takes a left turn from his usual post-rave/bass/breaks obsessions here - or does he? This is still music with beats, but it's super trippy, with somewhat psychedelic spoken word samples throughout, drawing from free jazz as much as jungle or trap. Morwell's first release on his new label Spiritual Transmissions, it comes in a limited CD form (tasty!) as well as digital, and the first two tracks are streaming now. Recommended.
gorse panshawe - tie me to the maypole [Activia Benz/Bandcamp]
The artist formerly(?) known as Slugabed has been bending his weirdness in other directions as gorse panshawe for a while now, via the Activia Benz label. So where Slugabed laid down wonky blurty bass music, gorse panshawe on earth, air, fire & water seems to go a'wandrin' into the English countryside, where he finds miniature raves happening in forests & streams, and jungle bidness around the maypole. "Pagan jungle"? Sure, why not!
Wrecked Lightship - Hex [Peak Oil/Bandcamp]
The second album from Wrecked Lightship, the duo of Laurie Appleblim Osborne and Adam Winchester, comes from Brian Foote & Brion Brionson's great, unpredictable Peak Oil label. As with 2022's Drowned Aquarium, these are submerged, dub-soaked jams, sometimes with jungle breaks half-audible through the murk. Fascinating, hard to grasp.
Bushranger - Ghost Gum Transmitter [Bush Meditation]
Eli Murray, best known as Gentleforce, has revived his Bushranger alias for an album of twisted field recordings and degraded techno. With Gully Music, Murray melds these two sources together so that you can't tell where the crickets end and the glitched hi-hats begin - although to be fair, there's a lot of imposing electronics here. But the project's aim to make music about - and for - specific places is artfully achieved. Perhaps Murray's greatest achievement is that he's made industrial music about nature. Hypnotic.
Scattered Order - It was a Saturday [Rather By Vinyl]
Scattered Order - The silent dark [Rather By Vinyl]
40+ years into their career (with some minor breaks), Sydney icons Scattered Order have released what to me sounds like easily one of their best albums. All Things Must Persist has a lot of their recent hallmarks: sampled TV or movie voices, razor-sharp guitars, intricate beats, but then also pretty contemplative piano... Mitch Jones' voice rasps over & under these arrangements. All three current members - Jones, Michael Tee and Shane Fahey - likely contribute electronic and instrumental sounds. You might think that they're at an age where no fucks need be given, but Scattered Order has never felt the need to nod to audience comfort or genre norms, slipping & sliding between (post-)industrial, postpunk, sound collage and studio experimentation, and various forms of electronica. It's all here, adorned with stunning artwork from Stella Severain. Get it on vinyl from Bandcamp or at one of their up-coming shows (see their website).
Sote - Reign of Insanity [SVBKVLT/Bandcamp]
Sote - Death-dealing [SVBKVLT/Bandcamp]
By this time, Ata Ebtekar's musical outlet as Sote should be familiar to fans of electronic/experimental music worldwide. It's over 2 decades since his Electric Deaf EP on Warp left listeners gasping for air, and for well over a decade he's been exploring Iranian musical traditions - including adptations of pioneering electronic music from the country, and ways of combining his electronics with Persian instruments like santour, tar and tombak - as well as promoting the work of new generations of Iranian experimental musicians through his Zabte Sote imprint. His latest album Ministry of Tall Tales comes via Shanghai's very internationalist, forward-thinking label SVBKVLT, and as the title implies, deals with misinformation/disinformation, corruption, oppression and so on, all familiar conditions in geopolitics at the moment. The music is not as abrasive as one might expect, however. While drama and anger creep in at times, the emotions expressed here tend more towards confusion and near-resignation, given a kind of resolution with "1401 Beautiful Souls", although even there it's hard to pinpoint whether it's sarcastic or not. Another powerful work from an electronic master.
Ludwig Wittbrodt - Tulpen [Ana Ott/Bandcamp]
The duo of Edis Ludwig and Emily Wittbrodt pairs two musicians from different musical worlds, intersecting in experimentation. Ludwig is a drummer in rock bands and an electronic producer, here on laptop and occasional drums. Wittbrodt is a cellist with a classical background who also works in free improv - last year we heard her unconventional suite Make You Stay, also released by Ana Ott, with a mixture of songs, classical compositions and free jazz - and electronics. For Schleifen ("Grind") the cello and laptop become a mini-ensemble, capable of producing contemporary classical music, drones, and kosmische musik, within a consistent framework. Lovely stuff.
sinonó - qué estará pensando [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Latinx vocalist Isabel Crespo Pardo lives in New York, where they work with various ensembles in new music and free improv. Their main outlet for their own compositions is sinonó, which pairs their voice with powerhouse cellist Lester St. Louis and double bassist Henry Fraser. This combination of low string instruments makes for powerful and moving music, with haunting melodic lines sometimes played in high harmonics on the contrabass, storms of plucking or tremolo bowing, basslines from either instrumentalist. Crespo's songs patiently unfold, with plenty of room for the musicians to improvise, but with the scaffolding of a bassline here, a strummed chord there, to hold Crespo's beautiful vocal melodies. There are moments of intense discordance, which only emphasise the warmth of the simple-yet-complex arrangements. This may be the first fully acoustic album released on Subtext Recordings, although the recording is sensitively mixed by electronic musician and Subtext boss James Ginzburg (of emptyset). A deeply touching suite of what the composer calls poem-songs.
Oliver Coates - Timp X [Invada/Bandcamp]
TV audiences have just been introduced to the period comedy/dramedy(?) Mary & George, starring Julieanne Moore. Sounds like fun, but what it sounds like is also heavily influenced by British cellist/composer/producer Oliver Coates, who was - fortunately - commissioned to write the score. Coates is comfortable in contemporary classical circles, but has also worked with bands such as Radiohead, Mira Calix, Mica Levi, Leo Abrahams, Clark, MF DOOM and more. He also recently soundtracked the much-celebrated Aftersun. Just before this UFog episode went to air, Invada snuck out a couple of tracks from the Mary & George soundtrack on Bandcamp - but now the entire 2hrs of cues is available, and the previews suggest it'll be sumptuous, smart and a little avant-garde. Can't wait to dive in to the rest!
We Will Intersect - Fragment III [Ugoki!/Bandcamp]
Sydney pianist, keyboard player, composer & improviser Adrian Lim-Klumpes is best known for Triosk and the band we share, Tangents, but he recently convened a new quartet with another unusual line-up, with Microfiche's Nick Calligeros on trumpet & live electronics, Nick Meredith aka Kcin on percussion & live electronics, and Miles Thomas on drums. Their debut self-titled album was released on Belgian label Off, an offshoot of the experimental Stilll label, and new EP Fragments comes via Ugoki!, now the main home for Off's jazz releases. The music is all derived from live improvisations, edited by Lim-Klumpes & Calligeros into four song-length Fragments, which progress from soft drones and tentative piano to, ultimately, the very processed & percussive fourth fragment. Those who've enjoyed these musicians in other contexts, or are interested in Australian improv and electronics, will no doubt enjoy.
Mattia Onori - Spazio Profondo [Southern Lights/Bandcamp]
Out on Friday March 15th from Naarm/Melbourn label Southern Lights is the debut solo album from Berlin-based Italian musician Mattia Onori, who co-runs the Melantónia Collective in Berlin. Tra Vento E Oscurità is an album of sound-art at its most pristine and austere - speech processed into unintelligibility, breath and wind, resonant drones, and perhaps the occasional synth pad floating through these soundscapes. Onori's got a deft touch with organised sound, and takes us deep into the space "Between Wind and Darkness".
Tom Allum - Ø [Tom Allum Bandcamp]
A couple of years ago, I was very impressed by the watery electronics of Western Australian sound-artist Tom Allum on the CANAL ROCKS album released by Boorloo/Perth label Tone List. On his own Bandcamp, Allum has just released Out of Hand, featuring four tracks created for an exhibition by Allum and visual artist & architect Beth George. Drawing machines interact with the sound, and vice versa. Even on its own, the music is immersive, with sounds generated by wavetable synthesis coexisting with recordings of the objects in the space, placed and moving about the stereo soundstage. It makes for gorgeous listening, with the intimacy both of synthesised sounds and of objects in a room, slowly teasing out microscopic melodies and drawn-out rhythms. Listen anywhere, anytime, but consider putting headphones on and turning out the lights.
Ben Frost - Unreal in the Eyes of the Dead [Mute/Bandcamp]
Utility Fog's connection with Iceland-based Aussie composer Ben Frost goes back to the very early days, before Ben left Adelaide and then left Melbourne & Australia altogether (well, he's visited since then). His album By The Throat was UFog's album of the year in 2009. Following his debut on Iceland's Bedroom Community, Theory of Machines, it established Frost as a composer, as well as a master of snarling electronic bass sonics. His latest album Scope Neglect traces a line back to Theory of Machines' sampling of Swans, if not earlier to his Melbourne postrock band School of Emotional Engineering. Guitar riffs and ambient electronics are the scope of Scope Neglect, but here it's metal riffs pared down to their essence and turned machine-like. It can be almost too austere, with none of metal's barely controlled ferocity - not that this isn't deliberate. But I found myself most drawn to the album's final track, in which the riffs have been banished underground, or in the next valley over, leaving the listener with echoes and desolation. There's beauty in that.
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]]>LISTEN AGAIN, don't be scared! Stream on demand on FBi's website, podcast here.
Kim Myhr & Kitchen Orchestra - V [Sofa Music/Bandcamp]
Kim Myhr & Kitchen Orchestra - VI [Sofa Music/Bandcamp]
I've been a fan of Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr for many years. He's a distinctive guitarist but also an excellent composer & orchestrator - he's recorded with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and the Australian Art Orchestra, neither of which are typical orchestras, made up as they are of talented improvising musicians (and both with flexible lineups). The "Kitchen Orchestra" credited on his new album Hereafter is based in Stavanger, a city in the south of Norway, again a versatile group of musicians from jazz, classical and other contexts: there's a horn section and strings, two of whom play electric bass and electric guitar as well as double bass, a drummer, and then there are musicians credited to synthesizers & organ, voice and cassette player, and laptop. And Myhr plays drum machine, various keyboards and contributes voice as well as his guitar. As usual these are beautiful, rich arrangements, with jazz at their heart but drawing on Indian ragas, postrock and electronica, krautrock and glitch. The roman-numbered sections flow one to another, taking the listener through a meditation on mortality and transience.
fire! - the dark inside of cabbage [Rune Grammofon]
Testament, the latest album from Swedish free jazz powerhouse Fire!, is their first to only feature the core trio, playing their core instruments. Over the years the band has made albums with various experimental music legends - Jim O'Rourke, Oren Ambarchi and more - as well as convening the incredible Fire! Orchestra with Scandinavian jazz musicians aplenty and a group of brilliant vocalists. Here, recorded by the one & only Steve Albini, they've taken the Albini approach of stripping down to basics, recording material live to tape. And these three are masters for sure: Mats Gustafsson making his saxophone squeal and squall and sob in the way of Peter Brötzmann but very much his own; Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin being rhythm section to die for, holding down krautrockish grooves and riffs in tight lockstep. Hypnotic and exhilarating.
The Body & Dis Fig - Eternal Hours [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
The Body & Dis Fig - Dissent, Shame [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
A considerable part of The Body's career has been collaborations - so much so that 2021's I've Seen All I Need To See, with not a single guest and just guitar/drums/vox, was a sharp surprise. I first heard Felicia Chen's astonishing work as Dis Fig on her solo album Purge, linking her operatically-trained voice with industrial and noise music, but her collaboration with The Bug, In Blue, rightly brought her further notoriety. Orchards of a Futile Heaven is a suitably horrifying and moving piece of work, not a departure for either artist but a perfect synthesis. Rhythmic noise sputters into noisescapes of guitar or electronics; Chip King's high-pitched squeals lurk within, but Chen's voice can scream as much as sing melodies or provide a multitracked choir; Lee Buford's programmed and live drums thunder; but you really can't tell at any point who's responsible for instruments or production, and that's great. It's some of the best material from either act.
Hatis Noit - Jomon (Preservation Rework) feat. Armand Hammer [Erased Tapes/Bandcamp]
London-based Japanese singer Hatis Noit released a remarkable vocal-only album on Erased Tapes in 2022. But prior to that, she'd released music in Japan that married her self-schooled but powerful vocal techniques with electronics. So it's not too surprising to see Erased Tapes trickling out some remixes of Aura. Best so far is from seasoned underground hip-hop producer Preservation, who preserves much of the original "Jomon" but along with the controlled beats & bass invites billy woods & ELUCID aka Armand Hammer to add their own voices. They're masters of fitting in with strange music of course.
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - Silverfish [Avant Night/Bandcamp]
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - S.P.Q.R. [Avant Night/Bandcamp]
I would never have expected that in 2024 I would be playing the new Sleepytime Gorilla Museum on this show. After all, their third (and previously last) album In Glorious Times came out in 2007. But last year the band setup a Bandcamp and hinted at the long-rumoured album of the Last Human Being was on its way. During the long gap, I followed the work of violinist/singer Carla Kihlstedt (of whom I've been a longtime fan) and percussionist/drummer/etc Matthias Bossi in their Rabbit Rabbit Radio project, and that's where I first heard "Silverfish", under the name "Paper Prison". Kihlstedt's double-stopped violin refrain is insanely brilliant, as is her songwriting, and it's great hearing it with SGM, as it was always intended. The band's strength is that the jazz/classical aspects fit seamlessly with the theatrical metal & prog, but even with all of that, it's a surprise to find a cover of This Heat here - but maybe it shouldn't be, as a band that bridges late-period political art rock and punk/post-punk. "S.P.Q.R" is one of my favourite of Charles Hayward's songs (admittedly there are a lot), and the breakneck, heavy rendition here pretty much does it justice.
Sergeant Bestfriend - molehills out of mountains [200+]
Df0bad - Vichysois [200+]
Breakcore was always central to Utility Fog's mission from the start in 2003. At the time breakcore and ragga jungle were keeping the faith for rapid drumbreak destruction, and I always enjoyed the fuck-you illegal sampling and marrying of ugliness with - well, often - prettiness. Breakcore never died, but I feel that with the all-powerful jungle resurgence, it's getting a bit more prominence too. Eora/Sydney's own 200+ are dedicated to all things ultra-fast rave, and also carry on the anarchist political ideals that often came with this kind of hardcore music. So from the river to the sea and the sea of blood between is an impassioned protest against Israel's increasingly undisguised fascism (while emphasising that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism). It's also a great compilation of breakcore, gabber and hardcore techno from Sydney and across the country. Naarm's Sergeant Bestfriend gives us fun, melodic drill'n'bass, while Sydney's Df0bad brings us a journey through IDM.
ophélie - Pipa Pipa [hundert/Bandcamp]
French DJ based in Berlin ophélie drops their debut EP on the Hamburg label hundert here. Two tracks influenced by drum'n'bass & dubstep as much as IDM - the halftime/jungle feel here is reminiscent of the mid-'90s like Subtropic's Homebrew. Lushly melodic with intricate programming and bassweight, a sign of great stuff to come.
POD - Trip2Fantasia [Kinetic Vision]
POD & Tamen - Subvert [Straight Up Breakbeat/Bandcamp]
Last week I played a track from Naarm/Melbourne's POD, an alias of JXTPS for bass genres. Spacer is out on Kinetic Vision now, and "Trip2Fantasia" is even more jungle-influenced, albeit in a bass-techno context. But POD has also been collaborating with Naarm-based jungle mastermind Tamen, and one track from their forthcoming EP is available Finnish label Straight Up Breakbeat's Zero Four compilation - absolutely wikkid.
Source Direct - A Different Groove (T-Mirage V.I.P.) [Odysee Recordings/Bandcamp]
Odysee Recordings go way back to the early jungle days, but relaunched a while back to bring back material from the label's artists as well as excellent new recordings from label-head Andy Odysee and others. One of the strengths of their catalogue is a long relationship with jungle/d'n'b legend Source Direct (an old school friend of Andy Odysee's), so the label has been gradually drip-feeding remastered Source Direct tracks with some new remixes. The brilliant '95 tune Stars is remastered here along with a stompin' remix from Finnish master Fanu, but the also excellent b-side "A Different Groove" appears as a V.I.P. from T-Mirage aka Tilla Kemal, the label's founder and collaborator for Source Direct's Jim Baker. Continues the classy, dark & sharp quality from Odysee.
Alan Fitzpatrick & Reset Robot - Mule Subjective [Shall Not Fade]
Techno bigwig Alan Fitzpatrick here appears on Shall Not Fade with the Headphone Lullaby EP, exchanging high energy 4/4 kicks for breakbeats and bass syncopation. It's lovely and more than a little epic, but I was drawn to the collab with Reset Robot on a jungle/halftime tip.
re:ni - Blame is the Name of the Game [Timedance/Bandcamp]
Following an excellent debut on Ilian Tape, UK DJ Lauren Bush aka re:ni drops four tracks of techno/bass/breaks on Batu's Timedance. Suffused with dub bass and atmospherics, it's music for discerning dancefloors everywhere.
Lord Spikeheart - REM FODDER ft. James Ginzburg, Koenraad Ecker [HAEKALU]
Back in 2020 Nyege Nyege Tapes unleashed the intensity that was the self-titled album by Kenyan noise metal/grindcoreinfused duo Duma. Now Duma's incendiary singer Lord Spikeheart is launching his HAEKALU label with The Adept on April 19th, with a full house of experimental producers and collaborators throughout. "REM FODDER" brings both James Ginzburg of Subtext Recordings & emptyset and Koenraad Ecker of Lumisokea & Stray Dogs, with jackhammering beats, heavy bass and Spikeheart's voice fed through reverberating delays. Clearly the whole album is going to be intense as fuck.
aya - Dexxy Is A Midnight Runner [YCO]
Lip Flip is 4-track EP from aya to raise money for her Facial Feminisation Surgery. But basically it's four tracks of her typically savvy, well-produced deconstructed bass music - recommended!
Alan Johnson - Portal [YUKU]
We had Alan Fitzpatrick earlier, but Alan Johnson isn't a person at all - they're a duo. Between 2013 and 2020 they released just three EPs, but both 2022 and 2023 gave us excellent four-track EPs on Sneaker Social Club. They now find themselves on YUKU, a label whose aesthetic is not that dissimilar to SSC, but tends to take the bass & breaks into more experimental territory - which is reflected in the 6 tracks on Glory Days, their longest release yet. Like the Stillness EP's sampling of Bro. Samuel Clayton with Count Ossie's orchestra, Glory Days uses Jamaican voices through various tracks, and the dub side of bass music is strong, as is the sense of space.
Terminal 11 - Racing To Nowhere [Opal Tapes]
Since the early 2000s, Michael Castaneda has been making idiosyncratic breakcore as Terminal 11. It might initially seem odd finding his latest album Suffocating Repetition on Opal Tapes, a label better known for techno, industrial and noise, but they're not so far away from breakcore anyway, and as usual it's arguable whether that genre fits here. But yes, it's full of dense electronic textures and crowded, restless rhythms. As the album title may imply, it was written during and about the Covid lockdown times, and it really does evoke some of that anxiety-inducing homogeneity...
Lachlan R. Dale - Revealing a silver stream feat. Bonniesongs, Joseph Rabjohns [Art As Catharsis/Bandcamp]
It's been a long time coming, but Art As Catharsis boss (and my colleague in Black Aleph) Lachlan R. Dale will release his ambitious collaborative album Shrines in April. Every track is structured around contributions from musical friends from around the country, each a very distinctive musician themself, reacting to some initial loops from Lachlan. I suspect most of the responses were fairly abstract too, and Lachlan then de- and re-constructed the material into these final pieces. Speaking for my own, it's quite a lovely feeling hearing something that's almost entirely unfamiliar but clearly has me in there - so hopefully that goes for everyone else. On the first single, multi-instrumentalist Bonniesongs' voice and guitar are stretched into ambient textures, as is the guitar of Queensland's Joseph Rabjohns. Keep an eye/ear out for further extracts!
FUJI||||||||||TA - M-3 [Hallow Ground/Bandcamp]
One of the unquestionable highlights of last year's Volume Festival at the Art Gallery of NSW was the performance in The Tank (a cavernous underground space) by Japanese minimalist FUJI||||||||||TA. Yosuke Fujita played various self-made instruments including bells and pump organ, as well as projecting his voice into the space. Whether with his carefully-made field recordings or gorgeously close-mic'd instrumental recordings, Fujita's recordings are unfailingly absorbing. I was introduced to his work in 2020 when Swiss label Hallow Ground released the astonishing iki, fragile recordings of his pump organ, wheezing and clunking through unusual harmonies and discords. His second album for Hallow Ground, MMM, begins with a slow-evolving drone of that pump organ, with the air now pumped electrically, freeing Fujita to generate strange sonic shifts by moving his microphone around it. The second track is built from his remarkable extended vocal technique, breathing in and out in a way that creates a "third voice" from the interference patterns. It's very eerie. But tonight we hear the third track, which combines these two elements into something different again - as if the warbling sounds of organ and voice again generate some spectral Other. It's minimalism as always intended - seemingly static, but ever-changing. Masterful. Mmm.
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]]>LISTEN AGAIN to the re-listenable. Podcast here, stream on demand there @ FBi.
Yirinda - Guyu (Fish) [Chapter Music/Bandcamp]
Yirinda - Yunma (Sleep) [Chapter Music/Bandcamp]
Well, the self-titled album from Yirinda is out, and it's everything it promised to be. I got to see the duo of Butchulla songman Fred Leone and double-bassist/composer Samuel Pankhurst at the Woodford Folk Festival across the new year, performing with an ensemble of strings, horns and keyboards. It's a magical combination of Leone's songlines and Pankhurst's arrangements, creating something that I'm pretty sure has never existed before. On the album, strings and horns augment Pankhurst's double bass, and some contemporary electronics mix seamlessly in (I note Marly Lüske aka Tidy Kid co-engineered the album). But descriptions can't really do it justice - Leone's absorbing vocals fit perfectly with wonderful contemporary music. They are playing at a FREE Sunday show at White Bay Power Station for the Biennale of Sydney/Phoenix Central Park on March 10th - 2:30 to 6pm.
Marcus Whale - Borders [Blue Void]
Incoming on March 8th is the new album from Marcus Whale, storied Utility Fog associate since his mid-teens, multi-instrumentalist, multi-genreist, singer and queer icon. Ecstasy is the first album on his new Blue Void imprint/label/thing (his long-defunct 3" CD-R label released my first solo EP back in the ancient of days). Here "ecstasy" refers to the pleasure of transcending the self, of being drawn, as he says, to the void. Once again Marcus is combining pop and club electronics with influences from classical and avant-garde/experimental music, and it is Very Good.
Teether - Elbow Grease [CONTENT.NET.AU/Bandcamp]
Teether - Chrysalis (ft. Stoneset) [CONTENT.NET.AU/Bandcamp]
Early last year Melbourne underground rapper Teether released an incredible album through Chapter Music with producer Kuya Neil. But with It Must Be Strange to Not Have Lived, released on Kuya Neil (Neil Cabatingan)'s CONTENT.NET.AU, Teether returns to self-production, comfortably sauntering through indie r'n'b, sample-based downtempo beats and nods to jungle (featuring Stoneset), postpunk (working with Nerdie) and more. It's all gold, all adorned with Teether's effortlessly laconic flow.
Shit and Shine - Livid After Midnight [Antibody label]
Shit and Shine - Jogging In Jeans [Antibody label]
Wait, didn't we just hear from Craig Clouse's Shit and Shine a couple of weeks ago? We did! Joy Of Joys was a collection of strange sound-experiments; now, Masters Of All This Hell comes via the Belgian Antibody Label with a collection of experimental electronic beats and noises that reminds me most of Clouse's two great albums for Editions Mego in 2015 and 2017 - bare-bones weirdbeat shit made on drum machines and samplers, with a kind of perverse funk to them.
Philippe Petit - Within the Corridors of Hell... [Crónica/Bandcamp]
The "musical travel agent" Philippe Petit has performed various roles in the experimental music world for some decades. In the early 2000s he ran a label called BiP_HOp releasing a range of electronic albums as well as some fabulously-curated BiP_HOp Generation compilations featuring the likes of pimmon, Arovane, B.Fleischmann, Scanner, Pan Sonic's Ilpo Väisänen, Murcof and Adrian Lim-Klumpes. He's also presented various radio shows since the 1980s. And full disclosure: a decade ago(!) Philippe & I collaborated on a track - as collaborative musicians and radio presenters in this space, it was inevitable. For at least that decade's time, Philippe has been working with non-musical sound generators feeding into modular synths, creating weirdly organic squalls and slides and throbs out of physical gestures, but also making use of digital editing. These techniques are all there in his latest epic, a 2CD journey into Dante & Doré's vision of hell called A Divine Comedy. I particularly love the disturbed vocal samples in "Within the Corridors of Hell...", interacting with these audio gestures.
Andrea Belfi plays Robert Wyatt - Dondestan [Stray Signals]
Noumeno - In Spirit [Stray Signals]
As the situation in Gaza only gets worse, a problematic situation in Germany - particularly Berlin - is also getting worse, whereby any voices in support of Palestine are being branded as antisemitic, and are systematically silenced - even when they are Jewish. There couldn't be a more irony-laden illustration of the weaponising of "antisemitism" to shield Israel from scrutiny than German authorities feeling empowered to shut down Jewish self-expression. This is the background for the compilation Dedicated To Palestine from Berlin-based Stray Signals, which will donate all revenue to two German-based NGOs, Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East) and Palästina Kampagne. Among the artists featured as Emanuele Porcinai's WSR, who we featured a few times here last year, Planet µ artist Herva, Berlin-based Lebanese musician & DJ Jessika Khazrik and many others. It's a varied collection of electronic and electroacoustic work from across the Berlin scene. A revelation is Andrea Belfi's cover of "Dondestan", a beautiful fable of Palestine from 1991 by the committed leftist and (like Belfi) drummer Robert Wyatt, rich with instrumentation in support of Belfi's fragile, rarely-heard vocals. To contrast, I played some frosty ambient techno from Italian producer Noumeno.
Use Knife - Coupe d'état (Muqata'a مقاطعة remix) [Morphine Records/Bandcamp]
Belgian/Iraqi trio Use Knife combine Arabic percussion and vocals with psychedelic electronics of all sorts. They released their debut album The Shedding of Skin in 2022, and now Berlin label Morphine Records (run by Lebanese musician Rabih Beaini) is releasing a 3-track remix EP, Peace Carnival with reworkings by Zoë Mc Pherson, Beaini and brilliant Palestinian producer Muqata'a مقاطعة. "Coupe d'état" is a pun on "coup d'état", but "coupe" means "cut" (which you Use a Knife for). On Muqata'a's remix, percussion and a driving synth line are punctuated by shouted vocals, bass hits and glitches.
Chewlie - Run [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Swiss producer Julia Häller is Chewlie, whose last release was the Diagon EP for BRUK, one of the labels run by Low End Activist (also of Sneaker Social Club). Now she's back on YUKU with eight more tracks of IDMish bass music and sound design. Chewlie fits with current trends in deconstructed club and experimental bass music, but she has her own approach - there's a lightness to the sounds, not leaning so much on LOUD bass distortion and sudden shifts, but rather on glitchy, skittery beats and syncopations, body-moving, other than a couple of beatless tracks. Top tier sounds.
POD - Anteloper [Kinetic Vision]
A new project for Melbourne techno producer JXTPS aka Wu Kush, POD finds him in bass mode, with dubstep and jungle influences aplenty. Notably, POD has a proper d'n'b EP coming from SUBB later this year - a collaboration with Tamen, one track available here. "Anteloper" seems like dub techno, but as the beats get caught up in syncopating delays, hints of jungle can be heard.
Earl Grey - Prussia Dub [Rua Sound]
Jim Ehlinger aka Earl Grey has been making drum'n'bass & jungle for over a decade now, appearing on labels like Limerick's Subtle Audio, who were advancing jungle/drumfunk ages back. Another Irish label, Rua Sound has just put out the excellent Death Rattle EP from Earl Grey, with nimble break work, equally nimble basslines and dark pads. It's cinematic and unpredictable, first class.
Liquid DnB-Like Ambient Grime 2 - '06 Dubstep Mix [Sneaker Social Club]
Luke J Murray has spread his idiosyncratic take on UK bass music across pseudonyms and collabs like Iceman Junglist Kru, 1-800-ICEMAN, Roadman DSP, and notably the ambient isolationism of Stonecirclesampler. So it's not surprising that the four tracks on the eponymous Liquid DnB-Like Ambient Grime 2 are rather unorthodox takes on the four genres name-checked (garage, dubstep, techno, grime). Each track is ostensible a remix of "Liquid DnB-like Ambient Grime 2", which names the EP and the artist, with pitched-down vocal samples and, on two of the tracks, massively distorted amen breaks clattering in at entirely the wrong tempo. This wrong-footing is of course part of the aesthetic itself. You'd be unlikely to hear these tunes in a club, but as a kind of hauntological celebration of UK bass music they're pretty brilliant. I'll take this over Burial any day.
Kim Gordon - I'm A Man [Matador]
When Kim Gordon came out with her first solo album in 2019, 8 years after Sonic Youth broke up due to her husband Thurston Moore's infidelity, and some 4 decades after the beginning of her musical career, it was a revelation. As bassist and one of the singers in SY, she has played a huge part in experimental, punk/postpunk and indie rock music for decades. And then No Home Record came along, showing an artist still unwilling to do the expected, working with pop producer Justin Raisen to create distorted beats and electronic noise merging with the guitars, a beautifully messed-up accompaniment to that familiar voice. It looks like The Collective is going to continue that aesthetic. It's the punk of the 2020s, uncompromising as ever. For tonight, here's "I'm A Man" eviscerating entitled nobody-men.
clust.r - brood [business casual]
clust.r - leather [business casual]
Who is clust.r? Nobody knows (this is absolutely a lie). They released their self-titled album clust.r on Retrac Recordings in 2022, and Business Casual have just released the follow-up ever chance. Like much of the output of these labels, there's more than a nod to the indietronic breakcoreriffic days of Tigerbeat6, Planet µ circa mid-'00s - it's lo-fi glitch-pop, shoegaze-breakcore, compressed to buggery, distorted electronics and enthusiastic, unschooled vocals from various of clust.r's friends ("river" is rkgk of bagel fanclub, and that duo's other half co-produces a track here as SLUTPUNK!). Anyway, it's intense, joyful and all that other stuff - I think you'll like it.
Other Joe - dreaming out loud [Other Joe Bandcamp]
Naarm/Melbourne's Joseph Buchan runs the legendary .jpeg Artefacts label with impeccable taste, but he's also known to make varied music as Other Joe - something I wish he'd do more of (at least in recorded form)! For Valentine's Day he put out a two-track single called one billion kisses, which is a lot of kisses, but I mean go for it. This is the "b-side": both are beautiful hypnotic pieces with whispering, whistling pads and clicky, head-nodding beats, finishing with jazzy, bell-like Rhodes chords.
Adriaan de Roover - Homebound [Dauw]
Adriaan de Roover - Yet [Dauw]
Belgian sound-artist Adriaan de Roover joins Ghent-based label Dauw for the second time with Other Rooms. I'm reluctant to call this ambient - there's quasi-rhythmic movement going on throughout, and melodies that emerge out of exquisite sound-design. This is wholly absorbing music, sometimes unsettling, that I can't recommend highly enough.
India Gailey - Nicole Lizée - Grotesquerie [people | places | records]
India Gailey - Thanya Iyer - Where I can be as big as the Sun [people | places | records]
Their second album Problematica finds Canadian cellist India Gailey performing seven compositions that I believe were specifically commissioned for them and for this album. Gailey is a composer herself - her own composition on her equally uncategorisable debut album was a highlight, but she is also a first-class interpreter of others' compositions, using her cello to its full extent along with her voice on many of these tracks, and electronics on some as well. There's a lot going on in the tracks here - don't think of it as classical music! Andrew Noseworthy's composition "GomL_V7FinalMix_LessVox_MoreVerb_ Dec13_MASTERED_48k24b_FINAL.wav", created in collaboration with Gailey, wraps cellistic extended techniques in granular processing and shoegazey noise, for instance. On the other hand, some composers invite Gailey to perform expressive songs on cello and voice: the closing piece "Where I can be as big as the Sun" by Thanya Iyer accompanies a deceptively straightforward vocal melody with plucked cello. It's gorgeous. Meanwhile, renowned Canadian composer Nicole Lizée invites Gailey to send short cello phrases and whispered or shouted voice through delay effects, charmingly and a little disturbingly disorienting.
IKSRE - ripples [Constellation Tatsu/Bandcamp]
Naarm-based musician Phoebe Dubar has released five albums now as IKSRE, on various international and local labels. This month, Oakland's Constellation Tatsu released Abundance, as usual featuring ambient electronics and vocals, with subtle beats at times, very much influenced by Dubar's practice in sound healing. It's music to dive into, as there's a lot of detail. Dubar will be launching this album in Sydney on April 6th at Fatamorgana in Alexandria.
Aviva Endean - What Calls in the Quiet (Moths & Stars live set) EXCERPT I [FRIM Records]
Aviva Endean - What Calls in the Quiet (Moths & Stars live set) EXCERPT II [FRIM Records]
Naarm clarinettist and sound-artist Aviva Endean released her first solo album cinder : ember : ashes on Norwegian jazz/improv/experimental label SOFA in 2018, and the incredible Moths & Stars on Room40 in 2022. Now we're back in Scandinavia, with a split release on Sweden's FRIM Records documenting a performance at Rönnells Antikvariat in Stockholm, recorded by Aussie ex-pat John Chantler. I should note Henrik Olsson's beautiful abstract turntable manipulation as the other half of the record, but Endean's set adapts Moths & Stars' close-mic'd exploration of sounds from clarinets and other objects to a live set. The sound quality is remarkable, as if carefully recorded in a studio, scrabbling and bubbling across the stereo soundstage, sounds mostly made with breath, layered into gorgeous harmonies or strange assemblages of flitters and sighs. The full performances are over 30 minutes each, and worth every minute.
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]]>LISTEN AGAIN to all the jewels within! Stream on demand on FBi's website, podcast here.
Can - Vitamin C [Mute]
Can - Mushroom [Mute]
Damo Suzuki was only the vocalist in Can for 3 years, from 1971 to 1973. But in that time his distinctive improvised vocals, sung in no language or all languages, adorned many of Can's best-loved songs, including the two groundbreaking albums Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi. Can was the kind of group where every member was an essential part of the idiosyncratic music created, and so Suzuki's yelled, muttered, and sometimes sung vocals are integral to the sound of Can and the sound of their particular brand of krautrock. When Suzuki returned to performing after a period as a Jehovah's Witness(!), he began touring the world, performing his freeform vocals with local musicians, reproducing some of the thrill of Can's all-consuming semi- (or wholly-)improvised gigs for people everywhere - and forming the Damo Suzuki Network. Having been diagnosed with colon cancer first at only 33 years old, but survived it then, he was again diagnosed in 2014, given 10% chance of survival. So the world can count itself lucky to have gotten another 10 years from him.
Koma Saxo with Sofia Jernberg - Croydon Koma [We Jazz Records]
I'm not sure when I first came across the Finnish label We Jazz Records, but they made an impression in 2022 when they commissioned Carl Stone to remix their entire catalogue with We Jazz Reworks Vol. 2. The release I'm playing next was cause for my latest exploration of their releases, but Koma West from double bassist Petter Eldh's project Koma Saxo, this one featuring fellow Swede and brilliant vocalist Sofia Jernberg, was instantly striking. Eldh's compositions are avant-garde but still catchy, with strong orchestrations for strings, horns, piano and drums (and Eldh's mother Kiki on accordion!) and as well as Jernberg, who elevates everything she's involved with, this album features versatile cellist Lucy Railton and composer/improviser/organist Kit Downes on piano. In the end, though, it was the clattering drums of Christian Lillinger that gave this 2022 album the prime slot after Can!
divr - As Of Now [We Jazz Records]
divr - Echo's Answer [We Jazz Records]
From Sweden to Switzerland (again via the Finnish We Jazz), the new album from Swiss jazz piano trio divr, Is This Water, is a thing of beauty and wonder. They range from delicate beauty to post-bop intensity at times, incorporating snippets of field recordings and sound manipulation courtesy of Dan Nicholls which give the music an other-worldly uncanniness. There are three covers out of nine tracks: a jazz standard, Radiohead's "All I Need", and a gorgeous rendition of the lovely "Echo's Answer" by Broadcast. This is complex and deep music that's still rewarding for all.
Teiku - Psalm 113-114 [577 Records/Bandcamp]
Here's the first single from a new jazz group with a unique take on what was called "Radical Jewish Culture" when John Zorn started highlighting the avant-garde music of the Downtown New York scene in the 1990s. Here, pianist Josh Harlow and drummer Jonathan Barahal Taylor explore and recontextualise their ancestral music as sung at Passover Seders, inherited from their families' roots in Ukraine (my mother's ancestry is also Jewish-Ukrainian as it happens, although we never learnt these songs). Recordings of these liturgical songs are directly incorporated into the recordings, juxtaposed with fiery playing from Harlow and Taylor along with Jaribu Shahid's double bass, horns from Peter Formanek and Rafael Leafar, and electronics from various members. It's quite striking and powerful. The two bandleaders write of the band's music: "As its humble stewards we offer it as a call for justice for all oppressed peoples; as Jews, we decry the senseless violence, displacement, and killing perpetrated in our name." Co-signed.
Ryan Teague - Unbound [Bigo & Twigetti/Bandcamp]
Since 2005, Bristol composer & multi-instrumentalist Ryan Teague has blurred the boundaries between electronic music and classical composition. For post/neo-classical label Bigo & Twigetti his upcoming album Pattern Recognition is in some ways his most electronic, with synth patterns and beats rubbing shoulders with sampled classical arrangements on acoustic instruments. I can tell you the rest of the album is well worth the wait, released on March 22nd.
Chelsea Wolfe - Tunnel Lights [Loma Vista/Bandcamp]
Chelsea Wolfe - Whispers in the Echo Chamber [Loma Vista/Bandcamp]
For 14+ years and over a dozen albums, Chelsea Wolfe has combined her love of heavy metal with gothic folk and, increasingly, electronics, and an undeniable ear for great songwriting. On She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, Wolfe and longtime musical partner Ben Chisholm conjure songs that can move between shoegaze, darkwave, folk and industrial metal. It's really good.
Yuko Araki - ‡Otiron (Portal Remix) [Room40/Bandcamp]
Yuko Araki - ‡Magnetar (Jonathan Snipes Remix) [Room40/Bandcamp]
Last year, Yuko Araki released IV, an incredible album of industrial noise, beats and exotic samples, a highlight of the year for me. She invited a number of musicians to remix two of the tracks from the album, ‡Magnetar and ‡Otiron, starting with Jonathan Snipes of clipping., who takes the ritualistic vocal samples and crunchy beats and gives them more of a club-ready makeover. Perhaps the most audacious choice was Australian extreme metal band Portal, who drench those vocal samples in distortion and general ugliness. Great stuff!
Gantz - howidowhatyoudoisnotwhatiwoulddowhatyoudoyetido [Gantz Bandcamp]
For his first EP of 2024, Turkish post-dubstepper seems to have given up on titles. untitled EP features such tracks as "variations on a drum loop" and "livetakeone". Mostly they are indeed variations on drum loops, mulched up in Gantz's machinery but retaining just enough funk.
Ivy Lab - Look Away [Sneaker Social Club/Bandcamp]
Having started out making drum'n'bass as Sabre and Stray, Gove Kidao and Jonathan Fogel teamed up almost 10 years ago as Ivy Lab, mostly putting out half-time and hip-hop-paced music. Last year they started veering back towards drum'n'bass and jungle, and they arrive on Sneaker Social Club with a mélange of UK bass styles, break-juggling at various tempos. It's bass music, not quite jungle, not quite what's going on in drum'n'bass at the moment, but 100% quality.
Gremlinz & Jesta - Big White [Metalheadz/Bandcamp]
Gremlinz & Jesta - All 7 [Metalheadz/Bandcamp]
Following numerous 12"s on Metalheadz as well Gremlinz' UVB-76 and DROOGS labels, the power duo of Gremlinz & Jesta have just released a full album through the 'headz, The Lee Garden Historical Preservation Society (it's named for a Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where the pair originally met). As we heard in the first cut tonight, there's some quality breakbeat stuff at lower tempos, but mostly it's drum'n'bass with plenty of jungle love. There's a lovely vocal tune featuring enthusiastic Ukrainian-born d'n'b singer flowanastasia, and among the dark'n'heavy electronics there are also hints at jazz and organic sounds. A great entry into the annals of Metalheadz albums.
Kloke - Digital Tribes [Future Retro]
A Brit based for many years in Melbourne, Kloke (aka Andy Donnelly) has been at the top of the jungle game for some years now. When Tim Reaper toured Oz & NZ last year, the pair spent some good time together - there are a number of collaborative releases from them out there already - and Reaper took home a huge cache of unreleased productions from Donnelly. There was clearly a lot of quality stuff in there, from which 12 tracks have been selected for Kloke's first album, and the first album on Future Retro. To his credit, On Rhythm doesn't get tiring, shifting around from typical amens to percussive breaks and severely chopped and manipulated beats, with basslines to order. Thanks to Tim Reaper's neverending enthusiasm for bringing this collection to the world.
Lakker - Dredger [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Czech label YUKU continues its dedication to dominating the bass & experimental electronic music scene with a new EP from Dublin's finest (via Berlin) Lakker. Gateway goes everywhere, from the techno of their R&S breakthroughs like Mountain Divide through to mad gabber shit, and some equally mad jungle deconstruction.
Tidy Kid - Social Butter (Yürke Deconstructed Dub Remix) [Hauch Records/Bandcamp]
Tidy Kid - Fragment 2 [Tidy Kid Bandcamp]
Tidy Kid - Toy Plane In Ice [Tidy Kid Bandcamp]
Tidy Kid - Flower (Copper Beach Remix) [Hauch Records/Bandcamp]
Way back in 2010 a Brisbane artist called Marly Lüske sent me a demo CD-R of tracks under his moniker Tidy Kid, which combined IDM, folktronica and indietronica influences. Some of those tunes appear on a collection he released in 2019 called selected works 06-10, of which a few copies of the vinyl are still available! It was released with Düsseldorf electronic label Hauch Records, who have now - apropos of what I'm not sure - released 10 Mixes For No Cash (lol), in which 10 of the label's artists remix tracks from that old Tidy Kid collection. It's all excellent, highlighting the melodic and textural quality of the source material, some keeping the glitchy, crunchy style of beats, and some heading in other directions. Yürke take "Social Butter" into almost dubstep territories, nice and dark, while Copper Beach pulls apart the vocal-led "Flower" and turns it into a miny-epic of harmonised vocals, stuttery beats and soundscapes. Lüske has both a new album of lo-fi stuff under his own name, and a new Tidy Kid collection coming.
Shugorei - Ghanima [4000 Records]
Timothy Fairless - Inevitable Drone [4000 Records]
This week, Brisbane label 4000 Records will release a huge compilation of 37 tracks and over 3 hours of music called Solidarity Soundwaves, an anti-war, non-violence-promoting collection to raise funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). As Israel's relentless destruction of life and livability in Gaza rolls on, the humanitarian crisis gets worse every day. So put $10 or more aside for this compilation, and I guarantee you'll find some musical revelations in there from up north, like the "inevitable" drone from talented composer & electronic musician Timothy Fairless, or the incredible mix of live drums and electronics from Shugorei, the duo of Japanese percussionist Nozomi Omote and producer Thomas Green.
Mark Van Hoen - Electric Lights [Dell'Orso/Bandcamp]
Although he's put out plenty of music on Bandcamp over the past few years, it's been a while since there was a new Mark Van Hoen album - although The First Cause came out last year under his Locust moniker. In the past he's released ambient, techno, distorted hip-hop beats and IDM with female vocals, jungle and more. Plan For a Miracle is a melancholy, soul-stirring album touched by the tragic death of Van Hoen's wife Osho, who fell ill during the latter parts of the album's recording. Grab this on vinyl before it sells out.
Munma - Midday Shoulder Surfing [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Between 2006 & 2009 Beirut musician Jawad Nawfal released his first three albums as Munma - it's mostly instrumental electronic music, dark, with dynamic beats and only a few news samples, but was recorded as a response to the deadly attacks by Israel that reached far into Lebanon during the 2006 war. These albums were released on Ruptured Records, the label run by Nawfal's brother Ziad, and while Nawfal has been busy with collaborative releases of all sorts , including on his VV-VA imprint. Now Munma returns to his brother's label for Transient Organ, a mostly-instrumental album other than artist/photographer Caroline Tabet's murmered French poetry on two tracks (Tabet also provides the evocative cover art). The music is minimal electronica made mostly on modular synths, with a general air of mystery, of a slightly disturbed quiet - only emphasised by the smudged, half-heard spoken words. Recommended.
Senking - i might be wrong (feat. Bonnie B) [Senking Bandcamp]
I know Jens Massel's music as Senking via his album Capsize Recovery, his fifth on the legendary German minimal electronic label Raster-Noton. So it's interesting to discover that the music on his Bandcamp - one 7" from 2016 and a series of single tracks since 2022 - is a series of very organic-sounding analogue synth jams, very live-sounding even when there are drum machines involved. The latest, "i might be wrong" is a gorgeous further departure, starting with two looped chords perhaps played on a cello or double bass, spacey electric guitar strums and sparse vocals from his mate Bonnie B. It's like a lost Flying Saucer Attack track or something, and I would 100% enjoy an album of this stuff and mysterious analogue bass throbs...
MJ Guider - Primavera (Ritmo Joven) [MJ Guider Bandcamp]
A departure for MJ Guider here too, who eschews her post-industrial shoegaze for freeform sonic constructions that all centre around flute, played and processed in various ways, along with guitarscapes and electronics. It's very unusual and enveloping stuff, recorded in - and steeped in - humid heat.
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Derek Piotr - East Tennessee feat. Ican Harem [forthcoming, check Derek Piotr Bandcamp]
On May 10th, Derek Piotr's new album Divine Supplication will be released, and tonight we've brought you the first single, "East Tennessee". Derek's music has various tendencies: far-out glitch; vocal avant-gardism and vocal manipulation; recontextualising folk and classical music (he is a folklorist as well as composer and vocalist); and manipulation of field recordings. The new album will be a goldmine of guest collaborations - vocals from brilliant Norwegian singer Maja Ratkje and, on this track, Ican Harem of Gabber Modus Operandi; composition interpolations from My Brightest Diamond and Dirty Projectors; appearances from Fennesz, Brian Chippendale of noise rockers Lightning Bolt; and Piotr makes use of Olivier Alary's processing patches from the fabled first Ensemble album Sketch Proposals. Piotr's music can lean towards arch-postmodernism at times, but this album promises to be emotionally dense along with the referential and technical aspects.
aya - Lip Flip (ft. LOFT) [YCO]
Aya Sinclair has been known as aya now for long enough to drop the "fka LOFT", but I think there's a combination of humour and pointed commentary to the former alias's continual re-references. On the title track of her forthcoming EP Lip Flip, the pseudonym is given a "featuring" credit, perhaps as a farewell, as the EP is aimed at raising funds for Aya's Facial Feminisation Surgery. The music itself is a glitchy piece of 4/4 funk, digi-house with off-beat sprays of synth glitter and occasional vocal snippets.
Patrick Carpenter - The Revenant (Blushing Panda remix) [Patrick Carpenter Bandcamp]
Patrick Carpenter - Lucky 7 [Patrick Carpenter Bandcamp]
Although Patrick Carpenter has been an important figure in the intersection of UK hip-hop, electronic music and jazz for decades, there's been precious little in the way of solo work. He was the "PC" half of PC & Strictly with Strictly Kev aka Kevin Foakes, who as a duo complemented Matt Black and Jonathan More of Coldcut when contractual obligations led them to form DJ Food to experiment in instrumental, sample-based music outside of their usual alias. A few years in, they retrieved control of "Coldcut", and DJ Food was passed on to PC & Strictly, who together authored the incredible Kaleidoscope album in 2000 (augmented with the beautiful Kaleidoscope Companion a few years back). Along the way, PC & Strictly also joined More & Black in what many consider the greatest DJ mix of all time. Meanwhile he was also part of J Swinscoe's Cinematic Orchestra for a number of albums, but for a while now I believe he's been mostly working in an engineering/production capacity. But some creative projects have been happening behind the scenes, so we now have the eight-track Electric Envelope on his *ahem* Minestrone of Sound, in which you can hear the jazz orchestrations and trip-hop bass/beats of those older projects, but also tight & controlled electronic beats. Eight brilliant productions, but importantly eight compositions steeped in humanity.
toechter - Me she said [Morr Music/Bandcamp]
toechter - Mercury [Morr Music/Bandcamp]
So how does a trio of string players end up being released on the Morr Music label? The three members of German trio toechter, Marie-Claire Schlameus, Lisa Marie Vogel, Katrine Grarup Elbo play cello and violin, and classical composition filters through their self-composed works, but they also use their instruments to create percussive sounds and process them in other ways, and the musicians' voices join these acoustic & electronic elements so that what we hear is a seamless blend of songwriting and composition with electronics. In the early days of Utility Fog, Morr Music was home to various Notwist side-projects (Lali Puna, Ms John Soda etc) as well as acts like Styrofoam who feel awkwardly under the umbrella of "indietronica". Here, another generation takes those tropes and somehow reconstructs the sounds purely on strings. It's a thing of beauty.
Gareth Skinner - Sangfroid Aloha [Kasumuen]
Gareth Skinner - Bitching [Kasumuen]
Melbourne cellist Gareth Skinner was an indie rocker in the '90s, playing bass guitar but also quite prominently featuring the cello in the great, wild indie rock band bZARK. I've been a fan of Gareth's solo music too for a long time - songs from 2009's Looking For Vertical still appear unbidden in my head at odd times. So you can guarantee my ears perked up to the news of a new solo album. Off // Axis is out now via Kasumuen - sadly vinyl only (and digital) - and like Gareth's other records, most of the instrumental load is carried by multi-tracked cello. There's drums via Drew Caldwell, who played with Gareth in Disaster Plan and The Ergot Derivative, and a few other guests (including Joel Silbersher of notorious Melbourne punk/rock bands GOD and Hoss), but there are riffs and melodies and unhinged solos on the cello, as well as Gareth's somewhat deadpan vocals. I love it, hope you do too!
Panghalina - Not Super [Room40/Bandcamp]
Panghalina - Whale Dance [Room40/Bandcamp]
Room40 have already started the year strongly, and Lava, from new Australian trio Panghalina is already a highlight. This music is simultaneously abstract and representational - the slow-moving molten rock that is lava flows through the music. Helen Svoboda's double bass serves as the melodic instrument a lot of the time, with gorgeous mournful harmonics floating through the scattered percussion of Bonnie Stewart and Maria Moles. Svoboda's and Stewart's voices also provide eerie melodies, and despite 2/3 of the band being drummers, this isn't rhythmic music at all much of the time (not surprising given Moles' prior solo work!) Really you need to sink into Panghalina's volcano and trust that it stays dormant. Your trust will be richly rewarded.
Tot Onyx - Naked Repugnance [group A Bandcamp]
Way back in 2018, the Berlin-based Japanese techno/noise/experimental duo Group A performed at Dark Mofo and I was blown away by the flow of uncategorisable sound the two women produced - Sayaka Botanic on violin and electronics, Tommi Tokyo on all sorts of other electronics, both also adding their voices to the layered, pulsating madness. The duo haven't seemingly been that active for a while, but Tommi Tokyo introduced her solo act Tot Onyx a couple of years ago, and a slew of releases has followed. The start of 2024 brings her first self-released EP, T.O.1, made up of fragments of live performances over the last year or two, and it brings some of the bewildering energy of that performance in 2018, albeit considerably abstracted from any kind of beats. This is noise as sound-art, from a serious and talented practitioner.
sonaura - Vymazané Scény #1 (by The Owl) [Perceptual Tapes/Bandcamp]
sonaura - Deleted scenes #1 [Perceptual Tapes/Bandcamp]
sonaura - No Way of Telling (Ben Nodes Remix) [Perceptual Tapes/Bandcamp]
Last year, the nipaluna/Hobart label Perceptual Tapes sent me a beautiful album of processed piano by label head Timothy Allan aka Spectrical. The follow-up album Noumena came from UK artist sonaura, and I'm sad I didn't manage to play it at the time, as it's lovely subtly surreal tape and glitch stuff. I played "Deleted scenes #1" tonight along with a couple of pieces from the remix album Sonaura have released, Noumena: Reimaginings, which expands the pallette into stuttering granular processing like that of prolific Czech band The Owl, glitchy beats like those from UK's Ben Nodes, along with more tape manipulation. You can download the album for free, but anything contributed will go to MAP/Medical Aid for Palestinians. It's also nice to pay something for Bandcamp releases because the release will then turn up in your Bandcamp library and will turn up in the timelines & notifications of people you're connected to.
Madobe Rika - Ordinary days SNAFU [Virgin Babylon Records]
Here's another piece of breakcore-J-pop from the mysterious "virtual girl" Madobe Rika. It's perfect Virgin Babylon music really, embodying (or rather... not embodying) Japanese aesthetics of prettiness and harshness in equal amounts, with a little wink of humour throughout.
Match Fixer - Rats [SE:CD]
Match Fixer - See Me [SE:CD]
Naarm/Melbourne musician Andrew Cowie has released music under the name Angel Eyes, but switched to instrumental experimental electronica as Match Fixer some years ago. I was hooked from just about the start, through to an excellent album last year on Melbourne's Nice Music, but it's still great to find him now on the Berlin-based SE:CD, which launched last year with the great exael. Cowie's music bears the influence of IDM and contemporary experimental sounds, but with a sure understanding of techno and bass musics. New EP Done brings him as close to jungle/drum'n'bass as he's been, with an album promised around the corner from the same label. And MAP/Medical Aid for Palestinians will also be the beneficiary of any Bandcamp purchases.
Tawdry Otter - What She Knew [Adrien75 Bandcamp]
Adrien Capozzi is best known as Adrien75 in the IDM world, and as part of various ensembles uner the Carpet Bomb label umbrella - I've said before that I wish the Highways Over Gardens comp was still available to share with you. Maybe I'll bug them about it, but in the meantime, Adrien has continued making weird beats and genre-agnostic stuff under the Adrien75 moniker, and for a little while now also as Tawdry Otter, all-electronic, beat-based releases which I think are probably mostly created on the Koala Sampler mobile app. In any case, it's sample-based and beat-based fun, light of touch and fleet of foot.
Shit & Shine - Joy_14 [OOH-sounds/Bandcamp]
Shit & Shine - Joy_04 [OOH-sounds/Bandcamp]
Craig Clouse has been a lot of things through his career, and Shit & Shine is his vehicle for solo shenanigans. I've always through of it as a noise act, but there are memorable lo-fi loop-disco, heavy dubstep, glitch, hardcore punk and metal forays as well... at the very least. It's also at times been a band (oh, and don't forget the grind/doom of Todd while we're at it!) but my impression that for ages it's been the outlet for anything Clouse solo chooses to do. So we get to Joy of Joys, released by Italian experimental label OOH-sounds. It's actually not out of order to call this noise, among other things. It's definitely experimental music in the real sense of experimentation. Each track is a relatively short vignette made of short blurted samples that only accidentally form any kind of rhythms - and yet vocal stabs and delay effects at times remind one of the in-between bits of some dub techno or industrial record, the sound of a warm-up, a soundcheck. But, you know... in a good way.
Wraz. - Dreadbox [Artikal Music/Bandcamp]
I discovered Québecois dubstep producer Wraz. via UK label Artikal Music about a year ago with the excellent Wraith EP, so it's great to find him back on the label with another winner, Dreadbox: four tracks of heavy bass action, great sense of dynamics and creative beats. For my money one of the essential dubstep artists at the moment.
Cartridge - Dem God [DEEP MEDi/Bandcamp]
You always know you'll get quality from DEEP MEDi, one of the most consistent dubstep labels (of course, given it was founded by Mala). Prolific Manchester producer Cartridge has made a mark on the dubstep scene, with collaborations and a growing amount of mastering work, and the Altitude is a killer debut on DEEP MEDi. "Dem God" keeps the dub in dubstep, as well as the good ol' 'ardcore continuum...
The Bug - Gutted(Human Filth) [Pressure/Bandcamp]
Following 4 filth-ridden EPs last year, The Bug concludes the Machine series with Machine V, five tracks of sludgy industrial dub, as always dubstep-adjacent but in that special way that Kevin Martin has honed over 3+ decades of production. These tracks were debuted at one of The Bug's many appearances with grime legend and recent Grammy winner Flowdan, and one can only imagine the intensity.
jesu - Hard To Reach (2024 Remaster) [jesu Bandcamp]
Of course JK Broadrick is a longtime associate of Mr Martin, and their OG duo Techno Animal is seeing its '90s albums re-released with heavy-as-fuck remasters from Broadrick. But Jesu is a well-loved identity within JKB's massive oeuvre, his visionary take on shoegaze-metal, and home to many blissful searing songs of melancholy. The Hard To Reach EP is not technically new: the two opening tracks appear on Jesu's somewhat legendary split with Japanese emo/screamo band Envy, released in 2008, but they appear here remastered by Broadrick - along with two contemporary unreleased gems and an alternate version of the title track, which we hear tonight in all its 13+-minute glory. A super-punchy drum machine beat, albeit different from the beats he programs for Godflesh, motors through, eventually almost overwhelmed by the layers of reverbed guitars, electronics, and Broadrick's clean vox. Seriously wondrous stuff.
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Yirinda - Nyun (Brother) [Chapter Music/Bandcamp]
I was very pleased to get to see the full-band version of Yirinda, the duo of Butchulla songman Fred Leone and double-bassist/composer Samuel Pankhurst at the Woodford Folk Festival over the new year, with an ensemble of strings, horns and keyboards. It's a magical combination of Leone's songlines and Pankhurst's arrangements, creating something that I'm pretty sure has never existed before. In the leadup to their self-titled album's release on Feb 16th, the third single "Nyun" (Brother) has been released, and it's as lush as the predecessors. Much recommended.
The Smile - I Quit [XL Recordings/Bandcamp]
I'm a longtime signed-up Radiohead fan, and so I came to The Smile with open ears, and by and large enjoyed their first album. The addition of Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner is well-chosen, but much of the time his drumming doesn't stand out compared to Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood's usual drummer Phil Selway. And is The Smile distinct enough to be a different matter from Radiohead? I'm not sure. It's certainly a lot closer to Radiohead than Thom Yorke's excellent solo work, or Jonny Greenwood's composition work. For the first half of the new album I was struggling to find anything that stood out (even the obvious Robert Wyatt-ism of "Friend of a Friend"), but the last three tracks are excellent. Funnily enough Pitchfork singled out "I Quit" as the only dud on the album, so fuck them. The stuttering guitar and acoustic piano are joined by a programmed bassline, barely-there beats and soaring keyboards and at times discordant strings. Sure, it doesn't have a contrasting rousing chorus, but I'm sorry if you expected standard song structures from these guys...
Astrid Sonne - Say you love me [Escho/Bandcamp]
Astrid Sonne - Do you wanna [Escho/Bandcamp]
The third album from Danish composer Astrid Sonne is perhaps her most "pop" work, complete with her own vocals along with electronics and her trusty viola. A few other musicians join her on a few tracks, but the drums, where they are appear on two tracks, are her own, muscular and steady. So I should note that my choices - one track with drum machine and one with live drums - are slight outliers on an album that's mostly orchestrated with new age synths and acoustic instruments. While her vocals are unassuming and cool, there's power in these songs: "Do you wanna have a baby?", she asks on the second track, but that refrain is sharply reframed with her last words: "I really don’t know". Sonne's strengths as composer & arranger are easily supported by her songwriting talents here.
Marla Hansen - Chains [Karaoke Kalk/Bandcamp]
American violist/violinist Marla Hansen has played with Sufjan Stevens, My Brightest Diamond and others in the indie world over many years, and that hasn't stopped since she's been based in Berlin. In 2007-8 I played her debut EP Wedding Day quite a lot, a collection of indie/folk songs based around her viola and voice. Her last album Dust came out on the Cologne label Karaoke Kalk in 2020, an album of full band and electronics alongside her string arrangements, with musicians sourced from the Berlin scene. Follow-up Salt comes out from the same label in March, produced by Berlin-based English violinist Simon Goff, featuring string and brass arrangements along with electronics. First single "Chains" is just a beautiful song, a yearning melody with electronic pop backing that folds down to simple strings. No doubt we're in for something special when the full album drops.
Elena Setién - Surfacing [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Elena Setién - Coloured Lizards [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Basque singer and multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién has recorded three albums now for the legendary Chicago label Thrill Jockey, as well as two earlier solo albums and albums as part of the jazz duo Little Red Suitcase with pianist Johanna Borchert formed when based Copenhagen. Her previous albums mix folk and country with thoughtful arrangements, but Moonlit Reveries finds her back in Spain, and working with (legendary Chicago) drummer Glenn Kotche of Wilco (and so much more). Here her folk tendencies reach to Latin music - "Coloured Lizards" in particular has a samba feel - but also sidle in avant-garde directions. The moonlight here represents motherhood and the feminine, but also the half-seen, disquieting sense of dream states. Put this album on in a quiet room let it gently distort your sense of reality.
Domenico Lancellotti - Um abraço no Faust [Mais Um/Bandcamp]
Domenico Lancellotti - Diga [Mais Um/Bandcamp]
The intentions of Brazilian innovator Domenico Lancellotti's album sramba can be found in the title of the second track, "Um abraço no Faust". A repetitive groove of close Latin harmonies (with a gorgeous major key middle-eight), it's named for João Gilberto's instrumental "Um Abraço no Bonfá", but where Gilberto offered a hug to guitarist Luiz Bonfá, Lancellotti here is hugging the strangest of the key krautrock bands, Faust. Working with Ricardo Dias Gomes, another Brazilian familiar with the classics but very willing to mutate them, Lancellotti takes samba into new directions - "samba de máquina" - but as his clear forefather Tom Zé proved more than four decades ago, samba deconstructed is still samba.
DJ Swagger - Off The Dime [Kommerz Records/Bandcamp]
Lutz Reineke has been releasing music since he was only 18, starting with house and moving through deep house, techno and breaks. But of late (at the ripe old age of 25) he's been making a sharp left turn into neo soul and indie, as will appear on his Chemistry Forever on Kommerz Records in March. Single "Off The Dime" is a smooth r'n'b/soul song that switches gears in the last third into a kind of low-slung digi-hip-hop mode, which reminds me of later Funkstörung. Nicely done.
STATIC CLEANER LOST REWARD - Mirage Game [Low Company]
STATIC CLEANER LOST REWARD - Fair Game [Low Company]
STATIC CLEANER LOST REWARD is one of many aliases of Naarm/Melbourne musician Tarquin Manek - one in fact that was last used (and first used?) 10 years ago for a cassette on Nipaluna/Hobart label Altered States Tapes. Tarquin's a member of noise/weirdo band Bum Creek, was in F ingers among other things with Carla dal Forno, and Kallista Kult with Y L Hooi - many of these also involving Sam Karmel of CS + Kreme. Oh and he played in the band version of Evelyn Ida Morris's Pikelet yo! All of which is to say that Tarquin's underground-Melbourne cred couldn't be more impeccable. Breathing Under Honey is the last release on London's Low Company and it's absolutely a minefield of weird left-turns, while still being some of the most focused work from Tarquin. A kind of dubby post-punk techno thing permeates the productions, with zonked-out vocoded vocals slivering around in the murk. It's rhythmic - except when it isn't - and whatever else it may be, it's never conventional.
LOUFR - dark [Pointless Geometry]
LOUFR - h0pe [Pointless Geometry]
Polish composer Piotr Bednarczyk has recorded a few albums now as LOUFR, inhabiting the space between contemporary classical, post-club and other experimental electronicism, as well as a very leftfield kind of electronic pop. New album FEARS is out this coming week from the adventurous Polish label Pointless Geometry, and you can hear all of that here: seemingly ambient music with sharp glitch interruptions and seemingly acoustic strings; UK bass-influenced beats with vocoded vocals. There is a surprising amount of vocals on this album, but like everything else it's morphed and blended so that all those elements are hard to tease out. And because of that, it's striking when those contrasts do happen - the heavy glitch, the acoustic piano or string instrument, the straight beat. Bednarczyk knows what he's doing and has the skills to make it work beautifully.
cadeu - slow fade [Hyperboloid Music]
Broosnica - Ways Of The Underground [Hyperboloid Music]
From Poland to Latvian label Hyperboloid Music, who released their Hyperboloid 2024 on the 31st of December 2023. Here are experimental electronic artists from all around Europe and beyond, covering plenty of genres but generally dancefloor-worthy. German producer cadeu is a good example, with hyperpop vocal samples and an infectious bass-heavy groove, while from Russia, Broosnica takes things into proper drumn'n'bass territory with a well-used rap sample and breakbeats. Leading us into...
When 2 - Away [Blorpus Editions]
You might know Mike Meegan for his music as RXM Reality, usually released on on-point labels Hausu Mountain or Orange Milk Records. Meegan's music is a hyper-everything stew of metal, pop, rock, whatever, all banged together into shapes resembling IDM, jungle, footwork and techno - and plenty of glitch. So on paper you'd think that his new project When 2 - whose debut album Here is released on Blorpus Editions, run by Max Allison/Muqks, one half of Hausu Mountain - would be just an extension of RXM Reality. Here Meegan is directly inspired by the genius of Carl Stone and his specially-developed Max/MSP patches the let him create skittering glitchscapes. And what we get is indeed like the bastard son of Carl Stone and RXM Reality - hyperspeed granular rides through samples of pop and rock, which I mostly can't identify, stuttering and crashing into kaleidoscope visions of jungle or footwork - see how comfortably "Away" segues out of the drum'n'bass ahead of it. Really this is masterful stuff.
bagel fanclub - smeegle premonition [Maulcat/Bandcamp]
rkgk - train2catch [Retrac Recordings/Bandcamp]
rkgk - you4me [Retrac Recordings/Bandcamp]
apollo bitrate - sequels that nobody asked for [slut punk]
Big thanks to Miles Bowe, whose Acid Test column in Bandcamp Daily introduced me to the music of River Everett and Caybee Calabash, who together make up bagel fanclub. Last year's how are your cars driving? is an intense ride through chiptune breakcore and idm, heavily reminiscent of the Kid606/Datach'i/OVe-NaXx/early VSnares days. Harsh but with heart, seen through a hyperpop-smeared lens, this is fun and cheeky music that sometimes mines beauty from its relentless distorted digital maximalism, and the same goes for their recent separate work. River Everett, based somewhere in the US, makes ultra-lo-fi hypnagogic ambient synth stuff as New Mexican Stargazers, but as rkgk contrasts those tape-distorted longform wanderings with breakneck digital cuts'n'breaks, and like his predecessors from the '90s and '00s imbues every track with genuine melody. I recommend you go4it. The other half of bagel fanclub is Caybee Calabash, across the pond somewhere in the UK, whose many aliases can be found at slutpunk.bandcamp.com. Her music tends towards the noiser end of the breakcore/glitch spectrum, but as amply shown on "sequels that nobody asked for", can pull emotion from the chaos, with lovely harmonic progressions in a slow 3/4 time signature splattered with distorted breaks. World's End Girlfriend eat your heart out. Calabash's despectral maid (as apollo bitrate), and Everett's rkgklp came out this week and last week respectively.
Rutger Zuydervelt - Malheur 7 [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Out this coming Friday is the latest all-electronic beats work from Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek, which like the last few will be available on a limited 3" CD as well as digital. Malheur has some of his best work yet in this space - informed by decades of refined sound-art, drone, and collaborations across free jazz, modern classical and minimalist postrock. You can feel Zuydervelt's appreciation of drum'n'bass and IDM in these tracks, affectionate tributes to the music of his youth despite their crunchy rhythmic darkness.
Sote - River of Pain [SVBKVLT/Bandcamp]
By now, Ata Ebtekar aka Sote ("Sound" in Farsi) is a firm fixture on this show, going right back to his quasi-breakcore debut EP on Warp, and through his many gorgeous, uncanny explorations of Persian classical & traditional music and Iran's extremely fertile electronic & experimental music scene. His new album Ministry of Tall Tales will be released on the influential Shanghai label SVBKVLT on February 29th, with the beautiful single "River of Pain" available now. It's entirely electronic, but its microtonal motifs evoke traditional Persian music played in a dream-space. Following 2022's Majestic Noises Made In Beautiful Rotten Iran, Ministry of Tall Tales reflects more on the corrupted, oppressive situation in his homeland and its surrounds - made all the more desperate by the governments of "Western" countries.
Nadah El-Shazly - Breakup By The Sea [Asadun Alay Records/Bandcamp]
Now Montréal-based, but a pivotal figure in the Egyptian experimental music scene, Nadah El-Shazly is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and singer: most recently she made a stunning vocal contribution to Algiers' 2023 album Shook, and back in 2019 she joined the Egyptian/Lebanese/Turkish psych-rock/jazz supergroup Karkhana. Out late March is her soundtrack to British-Moroccan director Fyzal Boulifa's film The Damned Don't Cry. El-Shazly's music is heartfelt but uncompromising, using harp, double bass and violin along with her voice and production. We'll hear more from this closer to the release.
Mike Cooper & Pierre Bastien - Tuangku [Keroxen/Bandcamp]
From Keroxen, a sublabel of Discrepant based in Tenerife, in Spain's Canary Islands off the north-west coast of Africa, comes Aquapelagos Vol.2: Índico, the second volume in the label's series reimagining archipelago life with emphasis on the watery surrounds. And who better than the pioneer of watery experimental exotica, Mike Cooper? Here Cooper's processed guitar tones are joined by the distinctive, always bizarre sounds of Pierre Bastien's musical robots and his expressive, eerie trumpet - especially on "Tuangku" where the trumpet is heard in an impossibly low register, sounding out from beneath waves of looped guitar. Incredibly evocative.
Open to the Sea - The Room of the Hungry Blind Sheeps [Matteo Uggeri Bandcamp]
One of the various sound-art and experimental electronic projects of Matteo Uggeri, Open to the Sea initially saw Uggeri join with instrumentalist and sound-artist Enrico Coniglio and a host of guests, making gentle, mostly-instrumental music redolent of folk, postrock, jazz and post-classical: music in the vein of Rachels, Piano Magic, Dakota Suite or Astrïd. Lately they've been joined by Saverio Rossi aka leastupperbound - of course, along with many guests. The beautiful Ten Rooms Under The Sea (fortuitously echoing the previous track's themes) is some of their best work yet, and the drums of frequent Uggeri collaborator Mattia Costa enhance the ambient jazz of two highlight tracks.
BlankFor.ms, Jason Moran, Marcus Gilmore - Little Known [Red Hook Records/Bandcamp]
BlankFor.ms, Jason Moran, Marcus Gilmore - Tape Loop D [Red Hook Records/Bandcamp]
Stepping from Open to the Sea into "real jazz" to conclude tonight's show, we find ourselves nevertheless in a strange liminal world, in which accomplished jazz improvisors Jason Moran (piano) and Marcus Gilmore (drums) are captured in the grainy magnetic spools of BlankFor.ms' tape manipulation. The music on Refract, released on Red Hook Records in September last year, sometimes favours the jazz phrasing of Moran's virtuosic piano lines and its interplay with the nimble, sensitive drumming of Gilmore, but their live playing is always sampled, looped and manipulated by BlankFor.ms. Much of the material seems to rise up out of the abstractions of BlankFor.ms' tape loops, but what's particularly special is the restraint from all three musicians. On the album closer, the anonymously-titled "Tape Loop D", the tape rumble is allowed to spin out for almost half a minute before the delicate piano re-enters. It's a gorgeous moment on an album full of delicious surprises.
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]]>So LISTEN AGAIN via FBi's stream on demand or our podcast here - you owe it to yourself.
Jeremy Young - SFKP Second [Jeremy Young Bandcamp]
We start tonight with one of the two tracks on Montréal sound-artist Jeremy Young's December release Stop F*king Killing People because I cannot support this sentiment enough, and also they're lovely ambient pieces. He's giving all profits to Mercy Without Limits, so go ahead and purchase some processed guitar & oscillators.
He Can Jog - Lavender Soap - Seakn [Audiobulb/Bandcamp]
He Can Jog - Perfume Eater - Q7XL feat. YoungGettem & DJ Milkman [Audiobulb/Bandcamp]
I've followed the music of Eric Schoster's He Can Jog here on Utility Fog for over 13 years. It's ranged from folktronica to drone to generative electronica, and thus the music on these two cassette volumes is similarly far-reaching. For the start of 2024, with the Audiobulb label Schoster has compiled Audiobulb Plays He Can Jog - Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, featuring remixes, reworkings and even covers of He Can Jog's music through many years. For a mere £3 each, it should be cinch for experimental electronic music fans to grab these. Tonight, two Milwaukee-based artists for some reason: Seakn gives us glitchy sounds, sparsely accreting into accelerated beats, while Q7XL unexpectedly takes the glitchy rhythms into hip-hop, with YoungGettem (maybe an alter-ego?) and DJ Milkman.
Sage Francis - Master Cleanse feat. OldBoy Rhymes, Rituals of Mine, alxndrbrwn [Strange Famous Records]
Released this week is a single from the always-political Sage Francis along with new Strange Famous Records artist OldBoy Rhymes and "heavy electronic r&b" artist Rituals of Mine, produced by alxndrbrwn. It's a strong condemnation of Israel's destruction of Gaza, touching on much more.
UKAEA - Rabbia [The state51 Conspiracy/Bandcamp]
Hoo boy, I've been hanging out to play this album since it was first put out as part of the monthly commissions by The Quietus for their subscription program. UKAEA is primarily the work of producer Dan Jones, with deep roots in techno and rave culture, filtered through industrial and noise (it's mixed by veteran breakcore and noise-rock dude Wayne Adams of Petbrick, Big Lad et al at his Bear Bites Horse studio). But this album features an array of vocalists, the violin of Agathe Max and various other live instruments, giving the music a deep sense of (multi-)cultural heft. Listening to the album is an intense experience, delivered by the vocalists and other contributors as much as the heavy beats and electronics, but rather than oppressive or exhausting, it's electrifying. I feel like whatever expectations you bring to the music, you'll be surprised, so please dive in!
Tangerine - Peripheral [Steeplejack Records/Bandcamp]
Naarm-by-way-of-Amsterdam label Steeplejack Records put out this compilation in mid-December. Entitled Have You Heard of Radiohead?, it's credited to "Faultlines", but I haven't been able to work or what that represents. It's impeccably curated, with artists both known and unknown to me, covering bass genres, d'n'b, techno and IDMish stuff. Here we have Clementine Girard-Foley aka Tangerine, who among other things is co-curating Absorb(ed) III, a 2-day festival in Naarm in March with an excellent line-up. Her track is a lovely piece of controlled distortion and head-nodding beats.
Vladislav Delay - Nomen Nescio [RAJATON]
Over a yearlong period, Sasu Ripatti has now released vols 1-5 of two EP series: Hide Behind The Silence reflects the familiar aspects of Ripatti's most common moniker Vladislav Delay, with glitchy textures, abstracted rhythms and dub-influenced production, while Dancefloor Classics is a Delay-style take on footwork and other club influences. In general I've enjoyed the former releases more, and some of the best material is on Hide Behind The Silence EP 5 - although now they've all come out, we can review them together, and each series has been collected into a single release (HBTS and DC) if you want to catch up.
Vittorio Montalti / Blow Up Percussion - 5D+5E [col legno/Bandcamp]
Austrian contemporary music label col legno have long championed electro-acoustic music and other forms of contemporary composition, including more playful contemporary approaches such as those taken by Wolfgang Mitterer in his feints towards electro-pop, IDM and glitch. On The Smell of Blue Electricity we find Italian composer Vittorio Montalti working with the ensemble Blow Up Percussion, in a work that blurs genres and roles, with the composer performing live electronics while also directing the percussion musicians. As such, it's music that is as easily parsed as experimental electronic, contemporary jazz or contemporary composition, and tonight it slides comfortably into the experimental beats.
Roman Rofalski - Perpetuum [Oscillations/Bandcamp]
German musician Roman Rofalski is a classically-trained pianist and a jazz musician, releasing recordings of contemporary composers as well as jazz piano trios. He's also interested in extending these forms into electronic realms, and we've heard him on this show as one half of electro-acoustic duo Saving Kaiser. For London-based Oscillations Music, he's deconstructing his piano on new album Fractal. Starting with beautifully-recorded prepared piano, he's ripped apart the sounds, so that complete melodic gestures slide in between heavy drones based on single piano notes, or heavy sub-bass lines. There's live drums (also heavily edited) from Felix Schlarmann on opening track "Perpetuum", but there's also a rhythmic groove to a lot of the other tracks. You'll hear contemporary experimental techno, glitch from the late '90s, the post-jazz of the mid-'00s and more in these tracks which strike a satisfying balance between catchy and challenging.
JK Flesh - PI11.1 [Pi Electronics (π)/Bandcamp]
Out mid-December was the second EP from Justin K Broadrick's techno alias JK Flesh on Greek label Pi Electronics (π). While it's still dark and intense as fuck, the tracks here seem a little less maxxed out and relentless. Which is great as Broadrick is a master of musical progression as well as aggression, so here we have his industrial dub take on techno, hypnotic and body-moving.
Roma Zuckerman - Juldish [Gost Zvuk]
Siberian techno mage Roma Zuckerman is a frequent contributor to Nina Kraviz' ТРИП (trip) label, but also to ГОСТ ЗВУК / Gost Zvuk, who released the very trippy Hoavi album Phases last year. His new album for Gost Zvuk, Phenomenon of Provincial Mentality, out on Feb 2nd, is trippy and disorienting, with juddering beats that stick to 4/4 but clatter around with distorted voices and weird noises. Home listening fun.
Batu - Other Means [Batu Bandcamp]
Since his brilliant Opal album in 2022, Timedance boss Batu has gone down some ambient side-quests and is now dropping single tracks at odd intervals. With "Other Means" we have fast-moving percussive techno with syncopated bass and kicks, very very nice.
Jlin - The Precision Of Infinity (ft. Philip Glass) [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Jerrilynn Patton's music as Jlin has always been at the sharpest cutting edge of footwork, with her love of odd-numbered time signatures and her merging of dance genres and influences far outside the electronic world. But it's still quite a spin-out to hear Philip Glass's piano featuring on the first single from her new album Akoma. Further guests will include Björk and Kronos Quartet, so this is shaping up to be the most highly anticipated album of the first quarter of 2024. Amazing stuff on this single anyway.
Ourobonic Plague - Bound///Rebound [Ourobonic Plague Bandcamp]
The anonymous Aussie artist behind Ourobonic Plague continues to put out fucked up industrial beats on Bandcamp - with tags like indubstrial, glitch hop and hyperdungeon... Activated Sludge is the latest, with a breakbeat groove on tonight's selection that reaches into jungle influences.
Eastern Distributor - Sand Shaper [Pure Space/Bandcamp]
Pure Space's last release of 2023 - but actually their first of 2024 - is a "split" release between Eastern Distributor and Jörmungandr, both of which are aliases of Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Daniel Jakobsson. The An Xileel EP references the titular political faction of the Argonians in Elder Scrolls. In the middle of the EP is "Sand Shaper", with organic sounds mixing with the flittery complex percussion.
Catnapp - Talking Trees (Lila Tirando a Violeta & Sin Maldita Remix) [Lila Tirando a Violeta Bandcamp]
Last year Berlin-based Argentinian musician Catnapp released a remix EP of tracks from her second album on Modeselektor's Monkeytown Records. Ireland-based Uruguayan producer Lila Tirando a Violeta, aka Camila Domínguez, contributed a remix to that EP, but now she's released a second one, taking "Talking Trees" into experimental jungle territory. It's a collaboration with Sin Maldita, her collaborator on her debut album for Hyperdub last year. Futuristic.
Drumskull - Unknown Structure [Hooversound/Bandcamp]
Hooversound, the label run by DJs Naina and Sherelle, has tended to concentrate on those areas where jungle bleeds into other things - whether the jungle tekno that it rose out of in the early '90s, or footwork, dubstep etc. Here Drumskull contributes two hardcore jungle teckno tracks, and two seriously rattling jungle tracks (one a remix by Dwarde). Joyous dancefloor mayhem.
Hologroove - Glider [Straight Up Breakbeat/Bandcamp]
More jungle here from Finland's great drum'n'bass/jungle label Straight Up Breakbeat. Their latest Zero Four compilation showcases recent music from the label, and unreleased/forthcoming tracks. It's all quality, but tonight we have Sweden's Hologroove with a storm of junglist beat-choppery within a modern d'n'b framework.
gyrofield - gossamer [Metalheadz/Bandcamp]
One of the most notable names to come up in the drum'n'bass/jungle world (and beyond) of late is Hong Kong's gyrofield (now based in Bristol). Her talents for almost-breakcore drum'n'bass were picked up by Metalheadz last year, and have now resulted in the EP A Faint Glow of Bravery, which adapts and remoulds drum'n'bass into new shapes. The bass-weight and breakbeats are there, but pressed into unexpected new roles.
Gantz - Leave Me Alone [Gantz Bandcamp]
Istanbul's Gantz will not be stopped, and after a strong year he dropped a whole album, MEGA, on December 29th. Here the dubstep, trip-hop and Autechre-style glitch-beats even morph into some kind of drum'n'bass at times. A great place to dive into what Gantz has been up to recently.
Nicholas Thayer - Pt 2: Trigger [Nicholas Thayer Bandcamp]
Following his phenomenal 3EP dance soundtrack in:finite on Oscillations Music last year (pt 1, pt 2, pt 3), ex-Melbourne Dutch composer Nicholas Thayer has released another dance soundtrack EP, All In Passing. Like the previous work, Thayer combines classical influences with glitch and beats that lean toward jungle. It's really excellent stuff.
Gi - Bashing [Altered States Tapes]
On her debut EP Orange Chorus Blonde Reveal, Sydney's Gi travels deep and wide in a mere four tracks and less than 20 minutes. The ambition is shown from the start, with guest cello lines contributed by Melbourne's Abby Sundborn, while eventually flittery insectile beats appear. On second track "Bashing", the cello is replaced by careful sound-design, joined by sub-bass pulses and tumbling percussion that eventually coalesces into an IDM-influenced jittery jungle techno thing. There follows a more dub-techno-leaning track, and a more abstract piece of granular sound-design. Phenomenal stuff from October last year, and a follow-up album was slated for December but hopefully is still on the way. For those in Naarm/Melbourne, Gi will be appearing with Marcus Whale at the abovementioned Absorb(ed) III.
connect_icut - Pre-penultimatum [Blasted Gorse Bandcamp]
connect_icut - Mark and Sarah, Ghost and Rae [Blasted Gorse Bandcamp]
I've been following the work of Samuel Macklin aka connect_icut for well over a decade, although shockingly there's no evidence in the Utility Fog playlists. Macklin's work, a little like He Can Jog above, has ranged wide in experimental electronic waters, from drone and more ambient climes to glitched-out postrock/shoegaze, IDM and more. He's announced new album Mars Maps Waterloo Moon as the last connect_icut album, which is a real shame, but hopefully his work will live on as part of the shoegaze-tronic duo The Bastion Mews and perhaps under another alias? A large amount of connect_icut's music can be found on the CSAF Bandcamp. On this new album we have gossamer granular work, grinding black metal murk, looped dub-glitch, and even scrabbly IDM beats. Surely anyone into what Utility Fog is about will love this.
Pyur - Night / Sea [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based Sophie Schnell aka Pyur put out her first release on Hotflush Recordings, but then in 2019 the breadth of her ambition was realised in the sprawling, multifarious Oratorio For The Underworld, suitably released on James Ginzburg's Subtext Recordings, in which classical strings, keyboards, and vocals were fluidly enmeshed in bass, IDM and techno beats. Almost 5 years later, follow-up Lucid Anarchy drops both beats and acoustic instrumentation, but it's still firmly based in rhythm, with lush synths pulsing and shuddering in a narcotic haze. It's rich and emotive, and frequently beautiful.
Listen again — ~215MB
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Rutger Zuydervelt - Part 4 - Point of No Return [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Starting tonight with an unexpected entrant for a dance music special - Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek is known for sound-art and drone (and he appeared in the second 2023 Best of as well), but in 2023 he also composed the music for a performance titled Kaleiding by Lily&Janick, who combine dance and acrobatics in their work. There's a lot of movement in Zuydervelt's pieces, whether through chiming pitched percussion, more sinister bass surges, or lovely interlocking motorik grooves. There's an organic, acoustic feel to the sounds, whether digitally modelled or sampled, that convey a warm humanity even when programmed into complex patterns. One of the most enjoyable Machinefabriek works of late.
Air Max '97 - Kaiba [Pure Space/Bandcamp]
The third compilation from Andy Garvey's Pure Space, Proximity III once again featured electronic musicians from across the club and club-adjacent landscape from Eora and across so-called Australia. There's techno and bass music, breakbeat and drum'n'bass, IDM and garage, including the typical bass-heavy syncopations of Air Max '97.
Gantz - Spineless (Pleasuremodel VIP) [Gantz Bandcamp]
Turkish post-dubstep beatmulcher Gantz continued his regular EP releases in 2023. Pusher Acid VIP is all VIPs versioned from the original Pusher Acid, and includes an appearance from the highly vocoded bass music entity Pleasuremodel. It seems like Gantz has slightly reined in the post-Autechre sonic destruction here - controlled chaos.
Neinzer - Flurry [YUMÉ]
Very pleased to be able to play a new track from Berlin producer Neinzer, whose EPs on the likes of AD93 and Where To Now? have been among the most creative and emotive house/techno releases I've heard over the last few years, with acoustic instruments, gorgeous sound design and complex harmonisations along with head-nodding beats. I got to play Flurry/Obsoletion a little early, but it dropped on YUMÉ on the 17th of November, with two tracks of fast-paced 4/4 club tools, one with syncopated breakbeats and ring modulation, the other with warm percussion, both grounded in delicious sub bass.
KIDIZDEY - Dub Taton [raghoul/Bandcamp]
Moroccan indie-pop producer Saad El Baraka surprises fans in his homeland with an album of electronic beats in his new project KIDIZDEY. Following their incredible compilation Crocodile Tears in a Reptilian World earlier this year, the fledgling Moroccan label raghoul (we're told it means "bass" in Amazigh) now releases a single-artist album. KIDIZDEY packs plenty of variety in, with off-kilter beats of heavy bass varieties (you can hear the Dilla influence), sampling Arabic vocals and traditional regional instruments. Apparently there's plenty more to look forward to, but check Lketma out now.
Barker - Birmingham Screwdriver [Smalltown Supersound/Bandcamp]
After some select releases on Berghain's in-house label Ostgut Ton, Sam Barker's latest EP comes from the gregarious Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound. Unlike the recent kickless techno for Ostgut, all four tracks here have a rhythmic drive from the kick drum, although Barker is never one to stick to convention. So scribbly acid synth lines are accompanied by sputtering kick drums a la footwork, and even when the synths are gentle pads or jazz stabs, the beats mutate and syncopate in unpredictable patterns. Lovely stuff.
BAMBII - WICKED GYAL (feat. Lady Lykez) [BAMBII Bandcamp]
Toronto DJ BAMBII is joyously gregarious in the sounds she pulls together for her DJ sets, and for her own music. She wrote a fantastic essay for Dazed last year on her experiences becoming a DJ - and a successful DJ - within scenes that marginalised blackness and queerness despite the obvious roots of the music. Her own Jamaican roots inform her music as much as footwork, r'n'b, techno and the like - there's jungle in there too, but "Wicked Gyal", from mini-album INFINITY CLUB, brings in Lady Lykez for a grime-meets-dancehall bounce.
Toumba - Duel [Toumba Bandcamp]
The UK-based Medical Aid for Palestinians is an organisation I've seen reliably mentioned for helping Palestinians in Gaza. Jordanian producer Toumba makes beats that fit with UK bass and club forms, but with a lot of input from Levantine music - rhythms and scales and instrumentation. He released For Palestine, a collection of dubs and unreleased material, to raise funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians, and the tunes are well up to the standards of his official releases. There's a nice remix of Palestinian MC/producer Julmud on there too.
Morwell - Loving You [Morwell Bandcamp]
Max Morwell released five EPs in 2023, from bootleg remixes to various rave adaptations and mutations, On a mixtape called Resonance he explicitly placed the breakbeats and vocal samples of rave into a short non-stop mix (split across 3 tracks on each side of the cassette). As with Morwell's usual strategies, the music here is redolent of '90s rave styles, but could only have been made now. The vocal sample is perfectly chosen - the "um" never fails to make me smile. A little bit later he remixed the Resonance tracks with pitched-down stretched out versions, very nice too.
Kahn & Neek - Rally (feat. Riko Dan, Killa P, Irah, Long Range & Armour) [Kahn & Neek Bandcamp]
Bristol's Kahn & Neek have worked together for years - both are members of legendary post-dubstep collective Young Echo and together previously formed Gorgon Sound - but 2023's Lupus et Ursus (Latin for Wolf & Bear) was their debut album together. There's a selection of more abstract textures a la Young Echo (always heavily dub-infused), but lots of lovely dubstep, with many guests from UK grime crew including the big team-up on "Rally". It's altogether prime UK bass music, not to be missed!
E S P - Open Mind [Infernal Sounds]
Stoke-on-Trent-based label Infernal Sounds is a specialist in 140bpm bass music - thus generally dubstep. Their Future Forms comp came out in late Januray, featuring mostly young artists from all around the world, but it was especially nice to find Brisbane's E S P there, with a blissful piece with smooth bass tones, bell-like synths and burbling dub effects through out.
Wraz. x PAV4N x ILLAMAN - Yung Ghost [4NC¥/Bandcamp]
Quebecois dubstepper Wraz. is joined by two UK rappers for "Yung Ghost": Foreign Beggars frontman PAV4N and the versatile ILLAMAN. It's hard-hitting dubstep with thick bass and amen breaks clattering away in the background, merging dubstep, jungle and grime in one song. I was introduced to Wraz via the Wraith EP released by Artikal Music earlier this - killer sounds too.
Somah - Eve 2 [Somah Bandcamp]
Joe Somah's someone I tend to think of in the dubstep context, but this year dropped a number of white labels on his Bandcamp, along with the excellent Memory Screen EP, that hibridized dubstep & drum'n'bass in really nice ways.
T5UMUT5UMU - T5 06 [T5UMUT5UMU Bandcamp]
Japan's T5UMUT5UMU melds jungle, grime and breakbeat with contemporary percussive techno sounds that have found him released on Ugandan experimental powerhouse Hakuna Kulala. His latest track T5 06 wrong-foots the listener with a rhythm that turns out to repeat every third quaver once the heavyweight bassline enters. It's not so far-fetched to call it dubstep (as it's labelled on SoundCloud), but whatever it is, it's immense and supremely energetic.
The Bug - Drop(Machine Sex) [Pressure]
In 2023, Kevin Martin aka The Bug dropped four Machine EPs on his Bandcamp - bass-destroying tools custom-made to test the limits of his Pressure rig wherever he can take it with him. The basslines and crunching beats are unmistakably Bug-like, and for all their ferocity, these tracks evoke desolate cityscapes as much as crowded dancefloors.
3Phaz - Shoulder Dance [Discrepant/Souk Records/Bandcamp]
Discrepant sublabel Souk Records preserves the parent label's world-ranging interests but with a beat focus. Souk's very first release is where I discovered Palestine's Muqata'a, and now they bring us the second album of Cairo's post-shaabi anonymous producer 3Phaz, whose debut album Three Phase took Egyptian urban genre mahraganat/electro-shaabi and threw it in the blender with harddrum, jungle and techno. Ends Meet certainly carries on from where the debut left off - indeed one of the tracks appears in a reworked form here - but lessens the distortion and pulls back from explicit references to UK & US dance music, so that North African percussion and melodies lead the music (alongside hefty 808 kicks and sub-bass). This is futuristic Arabic dance music.
Skrillex, Nai Barghouti - XENA [Skrillex via Warner Music]
Time was when I would've laughed in your face if you suggested I'd play Skrillex on my show. That American kid who redefined dubstep as "EDM at any tempo with big drops for drunk white college kids to flail around to". And yet, he always had good taste, just with an ear for mass appeal. I'm not the only one to note that Sonny Moore has maybe gone and worked out how dubstep really worked in the time between his original stuff and 2023's Quest, and so not only do we get the absolute don of grime, Big Flowdan, on two tracks, we get a lot of nice syncopation and low-slung bass. Of course the album's choc full of collabs, and there are both canny choices and out-of-leftfield lightning strikes - featuring Palestinian prodigy Nai Barghouti, a flautist, composer, singer and activist, is a stroke of genius. Elsewhere on the album, both Flowdan tracks are great, but "Rumble" is pure fire, both because of and despite the presence of phenomenon-of-the-moment Fred again.., whose Boiler Room set it appeared in, and which wowed all the kids who are presumably too young to have ever seen someone mashing an MPC. And what the hell, let's just throw in Missy "Misdemeanour" Elliott reworking an old refrain (among other self-quotes) alongside French tech house/electro prankster Mr. Oizo, and make it a ridiculously huge banger with, yeah, That Drop? Sure.
nickname & Tim Shiel - Druidz [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
Heading to Naarm/Melbourne now on our jungle quest. Young producer nickname released a couple of great EPs last year mixing up genres with bass & breaks and syncopation galore. This single track "Druidz" is possibly the furthest into jungle that the good Mr Shiel has headed, but it's equally sweet on those jungle-tekno 4/4 kicks. Whatever it is, it's a whole lot of fun.
Scuba - Mr Anderson (Digital Underground) [Hotflush/Bandcamp]
In April, Hotflush Recordings boss and dubstep don Paul Rose aka Scuba released a 12" called Hardcore Heaven for Record Store Day. For the non-vinyl-lovers among us (or those just not lucky enough to score a copy before they sold out), he later put out a selection of the tracks in "Digital Underground" versions, and also released a mix CD with the digital versions. These are apparently different from the vinyl versions, but they live up to the EP's name, with bouncing breakbeats and synth stabs and bass weight. "Mr Anderson" is a highlight, with classic rave energy and sounds. I can't find any Matrix samples in it, but it's got that '90s future vibe to it for sure.
Many Seg - i guess [zzaapp records]
Non-binary Melburnian-via-Darwin Serge Balaam released their debut EP as Many Seg on Kris Keogh's ZZAAPP Records, and it's a helluva opening bout. First track "wash ur mind" has crescendos of drone that seem mostly made up of stretched vocal samples, glitching disturbingly while voices state "I want u to be happy". The other two tracks are both driven by fast-paced kicks, but "the messages" overlays the stuttery kicks, and eventually harsh snares, with a kind of dub techno dronescape, while "i guess" leans on its repeating bass pulses to evoke a kind of dubstep-footwork hybrid by way of early Autechre. Big tip!
Carrier - Markers [FELT/Bandcamp]
Guy Brewer, best known for his dark, sometimes industrial, minimal techno as Shifted, unveiled new project Carrier with a cassette on Trilogy Tapes early in 2023. It clearly has a lineage from Shifted's techno, but also seems to point back to his brief, early membership in drum'n'bass group Commix (originally a trio, now a solo project). There's strangely slowed-down techno, frenetic IDM, electro and some kind of electro-drum'n'bass? The subs are pushed, the snares and hi-hats skitter and trill. Accomplished artists changing focus to other genres are often an exciting prospect, and with now three Carrier releases for 2023, I hope to hear more of this from Brewer in 2024.
NERVE - Zendo [Heavy Machinery/Bandcamp]
Here it is! Courtesy of the ever-industrious Heavy Machinery Records, here is the debut "proper" EP from Naarm/Melbourne's Joshua Wells under his NERVE moniker. For the few years, Wells has been releasing excerpts from live sets and other tracks via AR53 and A Colourful Storm. It does feel odd to declare this a debut of any sorts, but it does collect four fantastic NERVE tracks together in a traditional 12" format - and it's all heckin' good. The NERVE style is a special sauce of tightly programmed beats that somehow speak of drum'n'bass while being techno, captured in electro's straitjacket and smothered in industrial noise. It's a mixed metaphor for a reason alright? That's what NERVE is, you need it, don't deny it.
Toumba - Duel [Toumba Bandcamp]
See above for the full text - Jordanian producer Toumba appears here twice, purely because his beats work so well at multiple tempos and at this spot he's helped guide us into footwork and jungle territory. The EP was one of many releases raising funds for Palestine/Gaza charities, and the horrible asymmetric war carries on yet still. Don't let us close our ears to the human suffering in Gaza.
DJ Manny - Control [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Planet µ released the Control EP by DJ Manny in August and followed it up with Hypnotized in November. A more recent member (relatively) of Chicago's Teklife footwork crew, Manny is a highly musical producer, one of my faves in the genre. Both releases extend Manny's sound from the expected footwork into jungle and r'n'b influences. It works incredibly well.
Meemo Comma - Loverboy [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
After her 2021 album Neon Genesis: Soul Into Matter², which combined Jewish mysticism with cyberpunk & computer game aesthetics, Lara Rix-Martin aka Meemo Comma now takes us back to '90s raves, drawing from jungle, breakbeat hardcore and trance as well as melodic IDM such as her husband Mike Paradinas likes to make. Rix-Martin's agnostic relationship to gender norms is is neatly encapsulated in the album's title - and protagonist - Loverboy. Indeed, while "she/her" is used in the album's write-up, "they/them" is used the artist bio, so. The production here is first class, easily evoking rave stylistics with style & humour, even on the more experimental glitched-up tracks like "Crisis". Honing their own artist craft has meant less time for Rix-Martin to give to their Objects Limited label, but they are also involved in A&R and press for Planet µ, and to my mind instrumental in pushing the label to address its own gender balance problems.
Nectax - Voychek [Over/Shadow/Bandcamp]
The Over/Shadow label was formed a few years ago by hardcore/jungle originals 2 Bad Mice, aiming to bring back the halcyon days of the Moving Shadow label, including artists of the time like Dom & Roland, DJ Trax, Paradox and others. Their latest project features four contemporary producers with an EP each making up Quadrant Vol 1. Detboi, Overlook and Abstract Drumz all contribute great tunes, but tonight I included Nectax from Quadrant 4, on a dark & heavy tip.
Baby T - Ultrafunkiller [Banshee]
London-based Canadian DJ Brianna Price is best known as B.Traits, as a DJ, promoter and radio presenter, but has flipped the name to Baby T for her own jungle & drum'n'bass productions. The first release on her Banshee label is four cuts of hard-hitting drum'n'bass to make your subs shudder.
Sully - Stop [Uncertain Hour]
In 2014, Jack Stevens aka Sully, who had heretofore made grime and 2-step-inspired music, released the extraordinary double EP Blue on Keysound, in some ways kickstarting the jungle revival. In 2023 there were only a few split releases from Sully other than this, the third 12" on his Uncertain Hour label. Proving again what a master Sully is of jungle beats and pacing, they're both killer tracks worthy of dancefloors anywhere & everywhere.
Keith Fullerton Whitman - STV 2-2-1.2-2-2 [KFW Bandcamp]
In the mid-1990s, Keith Fullerton Whitman was THE MAN if you were looking for amen break dissection and proto-breakcore. Under the name Hrvatski, often known as Våt online, he initially uploaded a lot of his experiments onto mp3.com as 128k files, yeesh! Of course in the years since he ventured into Max/MSP-processed guitar "Playthroughs", krautrock-inspired multitracked one-man bands, and then he became the patron saint of modular synthesis. Much of the Hrvatski stuff can be found on his Bandcamp, and Keith is by all accounts no longer interested in the intricate editing work that was required to construct all that crazy shit. He'd rather do the intricate work of wiring up modular synth components - but somehow in the last few years since he decamped back to NYC after some years in Melbourne with his Australian wife, he found himself visiting Brooklyn dance clubs, and techno's energy found its way into his Eurorack sets. Some of that material is now available on Acid Causality (H) ("Hi-Fi" recordings, largely in-studio) and Acid Causality (L) ("Lo-Fi" self-bootlegs of live performances). It's exhilarating stuff, full of energy and madness. Happily, Keith has resumed his hardware builds after a period of selling off gear for food (so he claims - and modular gear is $$$), so who knows what sonic wizardry we have in store next...
Wordcolour - Volta [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
Of recent UK DJ producers mixing jungle with other dancefloor forms as well as impeccable sound design, contemporary jazz and classical, Djrum immediately comes to mind - but he's been joined in the last couple of years by another young Londoner, Wordcolour. His album The trees were buzzing, and the grass. was among the very best of 2022, and in 2023 he was back on Houndstooth with the first two in a series of Ratios EPs. A variety of club sounds are dissected and examined from strange angles, and from the first EP, "Volta" is experimental junglism with shiny vocal stabs and jazzy chords over a 6/4 jungle groove that eventually switches to what the label copy describes as 4-to-the-floor but I would class as 3/2. Regular kicks anyway, but grouped in 3s folks! A nice switchover anyway from an artist brimming with creativity.
dgoHn & Badun - Not Just A Best [Love Love Records/dgoHn Bandcamp/Badun Bandcamp]
I first heard of Danish producer Badun aka Oliver Duckert via a split release between Badun and Icarus back in 2011. Badun makes a kind of wonky electronic jazz that's somewhat adjacent to the post-drum'n'bass electro-acoustics of Icarus, so it's not all that strange to find Duckert collaborating with English drumfunk/jungle master dgoHn on new EP Talk to the Planets, released on Love Love Records. The syncopated drum patters created by dgoHn don't need much coaxing to fit in with jazzy keys and more psych-ish passages, so if that sounds like your jam, you're in luck.
Pugilist & Tamen - Extract [RuptureLDN]
Perfect liquid junglism from Pugilist & Tamen, from NZ & UK respectively but now based in Naarm/Melbourne. Pugilist's roots in dubstep inform the bass weight here, and footwork and techno bubble under the chattering rhythms.
R.A.W. - Take Your Soul (6 Ft Deep Mix) [Mictlan]
Raoul Gonzalez is one of LA's earliest proponents of jungle and UK-style hardcore techno, since the early '90s, and while 6Blocc is his most common alias these days for jungle, footwork and dubstep mashups and originals, R.A.W. was his first moniker I believe. These tracks aren't mashups but still, on The Serpent and the Rainbow Remixes the tracks all sample liberally from the Wes Craven movie of that name - exhilirating and sinister junglism, classic-sounding but with modern production values.
Pl4net Dust - Bunny Hat [[re]sources]
Paris producer Pl4net Dust seems to comfortably switch between dance genres, but on the Freefall EP for the Paris bass label [re]sources, we get two tracks of fantastically syncopated jungle and lovely vocal samples. I'd love to hear more of this.
Architectural - Clothed In Light [R&S Records/Bandcamp]
Spain's Architectural is not a name you'd usually associate with jungle or breakcore, with a background in beautifully immersive minimal techno, but for his second EP on R&S Records the 4/4 beats are spattered with amen breaks in an almost breakcore fashion. That said, under his well-known Reeko moniker he released an intense EP of percussive d'n'b on Samurai Music in 2023 too.
AMIT - 'Flow Off' [AMAR]
AMIT Kamboj has been making drum'n'bass for about 2 decades (maybe more), but for most of that time he's been a pioneer of the halftime and slow/fast melding of dub & drum'n'bass, and more to the point dubstep sensibilities with drum'n'bass. Earlier this year he dropped two tracks which chatter & skitter along at around 170bpm but thump the bass on the four beats of the bar, creating a menacing hybrid of techno, drum'n'bass and dubstep all together. 'Flow Off' is a single track with a halftime feel that would be straight dubstep if it was 30bpm slower, and the pitched-down vocal snippets and horn stabs make it deliciously dark.
Chimpo - Screwball Scramble [GutterFunk]
Manchester's Chimpo is a charming character whose personality makes it into all his tracks. So much character, in fact, that I played the excellent "All of the Above" in the "vocal"-centred Best of 2023, Part 1. Here, though, is a filthy, bouncy piece of d'n'b with ragga samples and an incredible swooping, sliding bassline, released on Bristol's GutterFunk.
Saint Abdullah & Eomac - Lonely Is Our Non-Existent House Yard [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Collaborating with Eomac has really allowed NY-based Iranian brothers Saint Abdullah to bring their IDM love to the fore. Weird beats abound on Chasing Stateless, their second album together, and second Planet µ release following the excellent EP A Vow Not To Read earlier this year. The beats and occasional pretty synth melodies coexist with the middle eastern melodies and rhythms, spoken samples and field recordings that the brothers have always featured in their work, whether underpinned by epic dubby breakbeats, free jazz samples or arcane experimental electronics. Ian McDonnell is also well credentialled in the use of traditional sounds, whether the Arabic/Islamic samples used in the two Bedouin Trax albums, or the Irish bodhrán and other percussion on Reconnect. These collabs are certainly up there with the best releases from these talented artists.
RSD - Let's Go [RSD Bandcamp]
Rob Smith has been active in the Bristol music scene since the 1980s. One main outlet was the groundbreaking duo (sometime trio) Smith & Mighty, who helped forge the Bristol sound of hip-hop, r'n'b and dub-reggae soundsystem culture that also birthed Massive Attack. In the '90s Smith was also highly active with More Rockers, a DJ & production duo with Paul D (also much involved with Smith & Mighty) who released many incredible early jungle 12"s and dubplates which have found themselves in countless DJ mixes over the years, and were collected in various ways on mix CDs, but unsurprisingly as incomplete versions. So it was something of a miracle (or rather a gift) to find Smith loosing TWO massive compilations of his jungle productions on us on Bandcamp in early 2023 - grab Jungle Archive Collection 1 first, get the 50% off code for Jungle Archive Collection 2 and you're set. Everything's basically credited as RSD - i.e. "Rob Smith Dubs", under which Smith continues to release dub, dubstep, jungle and whatever else he likes - but it's possible to piece together the probable original credits from the relative timeframe of a lot. "More Rockers" tracks were always just Smith or Paul D (not co-productions), so many of these would be More Rockers by any other name. A third archival jungle comp came later in the year too. All in all this is an important missing link from UK dancefloor history, and just a whole lot of absolute bangers.
The Blood of Heroes - New Orleans [Ohm Resistance]
Kurt Gluck's Ohm Resistance label has provided consistent fodder for Utility Fog basically since the start. In the early-to-mid 2000s, breakcore was a big part of the show's genetics; a little later there was dubstep, and industrial influences have always been favoured too. Gluck's own music manifests in solo form as Submerged (it was very briefly a duo at the start), with tough, heavy drum'n'bass that's moved with the times and has room for other heavy musics like metal guitars and industrial textures, and at times some respite from the storm. Submerged re-emerged in 2023 with FURY, an intense & angry album over 2 CDs with clever rhythm-work and sonic detail that initially masquerades as a relentless tumult of beats and distortion. The second CD holds something magic though, with a 20-minute and a 12-minute track which cast the net wide, capturing classical samples and almost-calm sorrowfulness as well as further bouts of FURY.
But that wasn't Gluck's only release for 2023: it was followed by a new album from the brilliant The Blood Of Heroes, a supergroup of sorts that began in 2010 with an album featuring Bill Laswell on bass (a frequent collaborator with Submerged on many of his own fusions of jazz & other genres with drum'n'bass), the ever-great UFog favourite Justin K Broadrick on guitar, Enduser providing beats & textures alongside Gluck, and Dr Israel on vocals (there are more but that's the core). Dr Israel's lyrics base themselves around the rich post-apocalyptic world of the Australian-American cult movie The Salute of the Jugger (released in the United States as, yes, The Blood of Heroes), which featured not only Rutger Hauer, but also Joan Chen & Vincent D'Onofrio among others - oh, and it was written & directed by David Webb Peoples, co-writer of Blade Runner and later co-creator of 12 Monkeys. If you're choosing a film to immerse your industrial metal/breakcore/dub supergroup in, you probably couldn't choose better - but really, the self-titled debut of this group easily transcends the "supergroup" concept as well as its Mad Max-ish setting with the evocative thrums and thrashes of Broadrick's guitar (somewhere between Godflesh and Jesu), Laswell's bass grounding, the dub/dubstep/drum'n'bass beats rising and falling (along with Balázs Pándi's live drums on a few tracks)... and Dr Israel's righteous delivery. There was a second album from the collective in 2003 and then it seemed to be over... yet here we are in 2023, gifted with Nine Cities, once again with Broadrick's guitars, Dr Israel's further vocal riffs on the movie's setting, both Submerged and Enduser along with Mick Harris (Scorn), Fear Factory's Burton C Bell, and many others. Again it's that kind of massive collaboration that suggests overblown overreach, but thanks to Gluck & co's good judgement, it's just another collection of great songs merging these very sympathetic genres together. Long may they reign!
Fiesta Soundsystem - diaphphanousdiaphophresis [YUKU/Bandcamp]
In August the mighty Czech label YUKU released their 3 Year Birthdizzle Compadoodle (Pay What You Want), a massive 50-track intro that more than adequately makes the case for YUKU as a trailblazing label for experimental electronic music, with jungle, dubstep, breakbeat and other bass musics sent through the blender in myriad ways. I was glad to be forced to look into the back catalogue of UK's incredible Fiesta Soundsystem, who's amassed a sizeable corpus on YUKU and various other labels, in many different genres but especially bass musics around dubstep & drum'n'bass, and moreso breakcore and idm/drill'n'bass. The insane programming here is a case in point.
Ruby My Dear - SHA [Blue Sub Records/Bandcamp]
French breakcore producer Ruby My Dear has always liked to mix classical (or classical-ish) arrangements in with his breakcore & acid shenanigans. Sometimes that's involved quoting Chopin, Debussy, Ravel and others, and sometimes they seem like his own compositions. The piano phrase that's looped and pitch-shifted in "SHA" is reminiscent of something, and maybe someone will tell us what. But it's classic Ruby My Dear - prettiness and breakneck breakbeat mayhem, always fun.
Buttress O'Kneel - Great Attention (Yo Mama Mulched Mix) [BO'K Bandcamp]
In the first decade of Utility Fog, I discovered Melbourne mashup/breakcore/pop culture-jammer enigma Buttress O'Kneel through a series of themed mixes they created that worked perfectly for FBi's Sunday Night at the Movies show that was on before me for many years. BO'K is a genius at re-contextualising spoken word and other people's music for politically incisive purposes, and she's also highly adept at complex beat programming and at granular glitch-processing, often using the Australian-created software AudioMulch. The BO'K Bandcamp is choc full of a dizzying array of brilliant madness, and near the end of 2023 she put out a gradually-expanded collection of adaptations of Doja Cat mashed up with NIN. Called Great Attention, it took a drunken rant from Doja Cat mixed with her superb "Attention" and Nine Inch Nails' "The Great Below" (hence the title) - but slowly it was transformed further, so that on the "Yo Mama" mixes we find a sample from Finn The Human from the greatest TV show ever, Adventure Time. Equal parts genius and irreverence.
Yunzero - Invisible Dog (Slo Version) [.jpeg Artefacts/Bandcamp]
Suddenly one weekend in July, a new album appeared from Naarm/Melbourne iconoclast Yunzero. His 2022 album Butterfly DNA came out via Huerco S's West Mineral Ltd but here he was back on Naarm's influential .jpeg Artefacts with Donkey Laundromat. The music here was created for a "video + meme compilation" presented just last week at Collingwood moving image agency/venue Composite - and when you purchase the album on Bandcamp you get a link to download the entire 40-minute video. The funny thing is, Yunzero's music has always been made up of lo-fi YouTube snippets and other cultural detritus, rearranged and built into hi-fi post-club concoctions. The music here is as compelling and strange as ever, whether it's bass-heavy beats or unsettling atmospherics. It's also funny that this is the "Slo Version" of "Invisible Dog", somehow sitting perfectly in the end-parts of the drum'n'bass/jungle/breakcore part of the mix.
Wakati - Wak [Wakati Bandcamp]
Naarm/Melbourne's John McCaffrey aka Part Timer introduced new alias Wakati in 2023 - in fact three Wakati EPs appeared in quick succession on the Wakati Bandcamp! The closest comparison would be Plaid, with minor key piano-ambient morphed into joyful cyclical beats and back again. Seriously great, ridiculously considering this is a throw-away side-project!
Tristan Arp - A Livable Earth [3024/Bandcamp]
Tristan Arp is a brilliant purveyor of percussion-heavy techno, based in Mexico City. His 2023 EP End of a Line, or Part of a Circle? came courtesy of Martyn's 3024 label, but it's basically vintage Tristan Arp - studio-perfect percussive rhythm play, judicious bass weight, lovely bloopy sounds. It's like micro-house but syncopated and with subs. So, you know: great.
Pole - Stechmück (Version) [Mute/Bandcamp]
One of the original European glitch pioneers, mastering engineer Stefan Betke aka Pole has long been a master of electronically-degraded dub. 2022's Tempus was another exercise in abstraction and minimalism, and in 2023 was given the remix treatment by... Sleaford Mods? Yes, "Stechmück" is sped up to suit Jason Williamson's funny-but-serious raps, while Rrose reshapes the same track into minimal techno, and Nine Inch Nails member and modular synth devotee Alessandro Cortini stretched the title track into an ambient dirge. But Betke himself also versioned Stechmück, thickening the bass and emphasising those freaky klaxons.
Sunken Foal - Esmeralda [Front End Synthetics]
I realised recently that Dunk Murphy's music has been with me since the very beginning of Utility Fog in 2003, as he was (and is) a member of Ambulance, the Dublin duo who were released on Planet µ as early as 2002. The first EP and album from Murphy as Sunken Foal were also released on Planet µ, but he and Ambulance had a connection to Dublin label Front End Synthetics since the late '90s, and of late Murphy's more ambient releases as Minced Oath as well as the some Sunken Foal have come out through that label. The Ambulance sound was IDM characterised by processed guitar sounds, granular fizz and occasional vocals. With Sunken Foal, Murphy introduced acoustic instruments from the start - the piano and acoustic guitar on Dutch Elm, along with the vocoder vocals, still tingle my spine. Murphy's talent for unusual, emotive chord progressions and melodies - and acoustic piano too - are present and correct on Reveal in Finder, his ninth official full-length. Never not blissful.
Listen again — ~225MB
]]>LISTEN AGAIN, careful now! Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.
soccer Committee - No Turn To Harm [morc tapes/Bandcamp/soccer Committee Bandcamp]
I have been a dedicated fan of Dutch singer-songwriter Mariska Baars for many years, via Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek - both working with him under her own name, and then in equally mysterious projects such as Piiptsjilling and FEAN with the Kleefstra brothers and others. Where Jan Kleefstra performs his poetry in Frisian, Baars sings either wordlessly or in English. Her work, as soccer Committee and in other groups, is characterised by an exquisite restraint, whereby if you're listening you can't help but be drawn into the patiently unfolding melodies and subtle but essential textures. Even without Machinefabriek's sensitive deconstructions around the edges of their collaborative work, Baars seems to dismantle and rebuild the fabric of her songs so that they are as attenuated as possible while still holding together. In 2023 she released ❤️ /Lamb, her most confident and fully-realised album yet. I do want to point you to where I discovered Mariska Baars, with Machinefabriek on their incredible album Drawn, which birthed the Redrawn compilation of remixes and covers - an album I return to frequently.
Yara Asmar - objects lost in drawers (found again at the most inconvenient times) [Hive Mind Records/Bandcamp]
The artistry of Beirut's Yara Asmar doesn't end with synth waltzes and accordion laments, beautifully descriptive though this album title is. She creates delightful video art on Instagram that's somehow lo-fi and modernist at the same time, and beautiful, strange puppetry. All is tied together with whimsy and delicateness, with her own music accompanying the performances and videos. It's a very different take on the YouTube-archaeology of vaporwave, all her own, and these synth walzes and accordion laments feel like they come from somewhere outside of time.
DAAU - Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung - Cinema [Sub Rosa/Bandcamp/DAAU Bandcamp]
This was a really nice surprise. I discovered Belgian shapeshifters DAAU (short for Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung, or "the anarchist evening entertainment") in the late '90s, by accident in a European CD store, noting that they were a kind of cross between a classical chamber group and an indie band. In 2000 they appeared on my radar again contributing an incredible remake of The The's song ShrunkenMan (you can listen here, switching between chamber classical, jazz and almost industrial rock - there are also interpretations by Foetus and John Parrish, each as different from each other as they are from the original).
It took me a while to collect DAAU's catalogue, which ranges from acoustic classical, folk and jazz (the original lineup was violin, cello, clarinet and accordion) to electronic, indie/hip-hop hybrids and more. Releases are so few and far between now that one keeps thinking they're gone for good, but while the lineup has changed frequently, here they are again, in a collaboration with Rudy Trouvé, an original member of another legendary Belgian band, dEUS. Musik für Animierten Tonspurfilm is, well, "music for animated soundtrack film", or rather music for a series of animated films by Trouvé. The writing process was a back-and-forth between acoustic/analogue and electronic, originating with tape recordings of accordion, double bass, clarinet and percussion, which were passed to Trouvé who sampled, edited and chopped them up into loop-based collages. These were then overdubbed by the band using electronic instruments: not double bass but bass guitar, not accordion but synths etc. The music retains a kind of cabaret vibe of twisted jazz and classical, filtered through krautrock and electronic aesthetics. In some ways DAAU have always been an alternate-universe version of Utility Fog's aural obsessions, a strange bridge between my "other" musical side of rock string quartet, gypsy/klezmer and 20th century classical which only surfaces occasionally within these playlists. Here, more than ever, DAAU have found their way right into the core of what this show of mine's all about. I don't like to make this all about me, but maybe this will explain why this release is really special to me. (Now to convince Guy-Marc and Fred of Sub Rosa to put it out on CD!)
WSR - Flatwound [WSR Bandcamp]
Aperture - Siren [Stray Signals/Bandcamp]
Siblings Elisabetta and Emanuele Porcinai, Italians based in Berlin, work together in various ways. Elisabetta's artwork has adorned the releases by Emanuele under the name WSR as well as other releases from the wider Berlin scene that Emanuele has appeared in. But with Threads in 2018 the brother & sister became a musical duo, Aperture, in which Elisabetta's poetic spoken words, in Italian and English, are embedded in Emanuele's productions. The debut album was described as an exploration of "aural intimacy", an apt description also of their follow-up Stanze five years later. The self-described intimacy is achieved through explicitly spatial mixing and recording techniques, in which acoustic and electronic sounds creep and rattle around virtual rooms while the voice whispers close, or finds itself shudderingly degraded through slap delays. Simple poised acoustic guitar or piano lines are interrupted or underlined with huge industrial bass thrums or unplaceable percussive anti-rhythms of found-sound. Many of these techniques are common to both albums, but on the new release the duo are joined by guests on a few tracks - including brief, crushing drums from Andrea Belfi on one track - and notably Elisabetta's words are sung by Emanuele on two pieces. This is uncompromisingly avant-garde, experimental music, but sonically engrossing in a way that should have broad appeal.
When Aperture's brilliant debut Threads came out in 2018, I initially didn't realise that I'd been following Emanuele since his second EP Chambers, released under the name WSR. Now, three years after the last WSR release, Dicasmia showcases a similar aesthetic to the earlier releases: close-mic'd acoustic instruments - notably cello - are moulded into dark, heavy masses of sound, seamlessly mutated into industrial electronics. The juxtaposition of acoustic and electric instruments with digital sound-design is very much what WSR is about, and as you know it's very much what Utility Fog is about too, so I couldn't be happier to have both these new works out in 2023.
tom schneider - serpentines [Macro/Bandcamp]
The first solo album from German pianist Tom Schneider should be no surprise to followers of his recent band Loom & Thread, which took the traditional jazz piano trio into the cyber realm with live sampling and manipulation - and the sampler as instrument is something Schneider has perfected in his other band KUF, in which Schneider plays the role of lead vocalist entirely from the sampler. The surreal piano manipulations are found throughout Isotopes, which, like both previous projects, is released on Stefan Goldmann & Finn Johannsen's Macro Recordings. Virtuoso jazz piano runs and sensitive melodies coexist with granular processing and re-sampling of the instrument, sending the sounds into stratospheric pitch-shifting, or stuttering glitches, blended together so that it's impossible to tell what's composed or improvised, produced live or processed in post. It's mastered very quietly, and works best as listening music to close your eyes to.
Leah Kardos - Pegs [bigo & twigetti]
Australian-raised academic, composer & producer Leah Kardos is busy writing books, writing reviews & features for The Wire, and organising the Kingston University Stylophone Orchestra. In 2023, the bigo & twigetti label coaxed one track out of her for their Perceptions Vol. 4 compilation of piano music. Kardos offers here a piece in her vein of cyclic prepared piano (Aphex Twin drukqs fans will be in familiar territory) - and Kardos has a keen ear for the heart-pulling chord changes. It's simple enough, with a couple of crescendos bringing a bassline in and tapering back to finish, but it's the kind of stuff I'd happily leave on repeat for hours.
Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective - What Cherubs [Nhạc Gãy/Bandcamp]
When I first came across Vietnamese musical explorers Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective it was through their wonderful collection of sodden glitchscapes on Flaming Pines called Degradation. But everything about them changes radically from release to release, whether it's lo-fi punky indie or post-rock, messy proto-hyperpop, or deconstructed club sounds. Last year's album on Subtext, with production help from Ziúr, gained them a substantial new following, and on follow-up *1 key member Zach Sch is on most mixing duties, with production shared collectively (two tracks are mixed by Raphäel Valensi aka Nahash). The result is an album that combines all their previous influences and more - there's a lot of World's End Girlfriend there with breakcore and hard-chopped digital edits, and then there are choral vocals from a host of members, confounding switches to live guitars or equally to plunderphonic collages. Like their catalogue as a whole, you never know what's coming next, and that makes for highly enjoyable repeat listens.
world's end girlfriend - FEARLESS VIRUS [Virgin Babylon/Bandcamp]
Katsuhiko Maeda's music as world's end girlfriend is absolutely emblematic of Utility Fog's mission: genres such as IDM, breakcore & glitch are mashed up with post-rock, punk, classical and J-pop, in a fashion, mind you, that's perfectly natural within Japanese culture/counter-culture. Maeda also runs the phenomenal Virgin Babylon, collecting a diverse array of artists covering most of those aforementioned genres - think Vampillia, Kashiwa Daisuke, DRUGONDRAGON, and more recently idoru figure Madobe Rika. From a varied career over 2+ decades, including acclaimed movie soundtracks as well as many albums, Resistance & The Blessing seems like a suitable capstone (although I hope it's not his last!) It's released on 3CDs or 4LPs, many of which are now sold out, as well as a 35-track download. The physical editions are gorgeous - the 3CDs are slipped into a vinyl-sized package in a box with cut-outs... Three CDs allows ample space for Maeda to indulge all sides of his work, so we have pretty piano passages switching into thrashing guitars, plenty of breakcore splatter-breaks, glitch and ambient interludes, spoken word, song... and in amongst it all are some absolute gems, as great as anything in his catalogue. I didn't play it tonight, but his setting of Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria" is superb, in which the sampled soprano's voice is drowned in static or heard through layers of crackle, but the music surges in time with Schubert's beautiful progressions - until eventually everything's subsumed in blast-furnace noise, dissipating back into Schubert to finish. Bracing, yes, but also euphoric.
Noneless - Neurocannibal [☯ anybody universe ☯]
The North Sydney/Kuringgai artist now known as Noneless previously released some pretty crazy breakcorey hybrid music as elfaether, but has returned to music production a couple of years later with their amazing album A Vow of Silence. It has the well deserved cachet of being released on ☯ anybody universe ☯, the label run by Japanese IDM/breakcore latter-day legend Laxenanchaos. On this album their classical violin training and love of erhu is married with breakcore splatterbeats, joyous distortion and a bit of Zen Buddhism. Lovers of World's End Girlfriend or Kashiwa Daisuke, not to mention Venetian Snares, will gobble this up. Compulsory listening.
DREAMCRUSHER - In Due Time [PTP/Bandcamp]
Non-binary New York-based interdisciplinary artist DREAMCRUSHER has been plying their trade for 2 decades, and is as energetic and creative as ever. Suite One, released through PTP, collects two short tracks which combine heavy shoegaze textures, heavy beats, warped samples and plenty of oversaturated distortion in patented DREAMCRUSHER style. Both cuts essential IMHO.
Deepchild - Underworlds [Seppuku Records]
2022 was a big year for Sydney's Deepchild, now comfortably ensconsed on Gadigal land after many years in Berlin. His deep techno know-how is evident in releases like last year's Black Atlantic and the recent 77, a set of DJ tools in tribute to the long-running Club 77 where he has a residency. But in 2022 Rick Bull also unleashed his ambient side, harkening back perhaps to his days with Frigid/Cryogenesis and Club Kooky in late '90s and early '00s. The archetypal '90s ambient underground label Mille Plateaux (sister label to techno heavyweights Force Inc) released Fathersong, his moving tribute to his late father, and then LA-based idm/ambient lovers A Strangely Isolated Place released a postscript to Fathersong, Mycological Patterns, which spread like fungus into the nooks and crannies of the ambient internet - a highly deserved success. Deepchild's follow-up ambient (or at least non-techno) album Portals came out in August through his own Seppuku Records, with more murky and profound electronic works, still redolent of life's passing. Lots of humanity goes into these pieces as always.
Saint Abdullah & Eomac - Wali [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Last year's Patience of a Traitor was a revelation from two forward-thinking acts, the New York-based Canadian-Iranian brothers Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani aka Saint Abdullah and Irish IDM/techno producer Eomac (Ian McDonnell of Lakker). 2023 saw two new releases from the group: the EP A Vow Not To Read in July and the album Chasing Stateless in October. Despite the brothers and McDonnell still not having met in person, there's a clearly sympathetic resonance between the artists' styles, across cultural and physical distances, and even with Saint Abdullah working on outboard gear and Eomac in the box. There are electronic beat workouts and pieces with the location-based recordings Saint Abdullah often use (Shia mourners on "Wali"), and the EP is just as great as the album. Essential work, all of it.
Yuko Araki - ‡Magnetar [Room40/Bandcamp]
Japanese multi-instrumentalist Yuko Araki is the drummer in psych-rock trio Kuunatic; her earlier solo EPs & albums drew from harsh noise, rock, free jazz and more, culminating in End of Trilogy for Room40 in 2021. It seems it wasn't really the end, nor a trilogy, because IV appeared this year, again via Room40. This seems like her strongest work yet to me: a kind of industrial post-club music, still with noise references, with a sinister throughout.
Starving Weirdos - Haiku Nagasaki [Discrepant/Bandcamp]
Brian Pyle aka Ensemble Economique and Merrick McKinlay have made uncategorisable weirdo music for almost 2 decades, but it's been over a decade since their last, 2012's Land Lines. It's very hard to pin down what they do, which makes it archetypal Utility Fog music - anything from drone to psych rock, folk, postrock... To me, it feels like "noise" in the very broad sense that includes Burning Star Core and Wolf Eyes and so on. This album surprises from the get go with percussive electronic bass drops triggering delay tails, slowly being subsumed under churning drones. There are layers of sound densely packed with sounds and styles that probably shouldn't go together, but somehow work. Coming in without expectations, I was pretty floored - especially the sonic elements that seem to come from that deconstructed club/bass music.
Simone Sims Longo - Babele [Esc.rec/Bandcamp]
The highly dependable Dutch experimental label Esc.rec brought a number of excellent releases this year. Paesaggi integrati (integrated landscapes) is an album of electro-acoustic sound-art from Italian composer-producer Simone Sims Longo that takes sound from a host of acoustic instruments - sax, cello, horn, violin, accordion, tuned percussion and clarinet - and transforms them into electronic music, split into granular fragments, flittered across the stereo field in rhythms that accelerate and decelerate, seemingly referencing deconstructed club techniques but outside of the club context. The sense of discombobulation is only heightened on headphones by the use of mid/side technique - technically this means that the left & right are in opposite polarity (so if you try to listen in mono you'll lose a lot of the signal!), but it also means that the stereo image is particularly vivid.
David Bird - Aetheric Resonance [Oxtail Recordings/Bandcamp]
The now Sydney-based Oxtail Recordings also had a very strong year. The stunning album Wire Hums sees NYC/Chicago composer David Bird deconstruct and reimagine the cello in ways never before seen. Inspired, we're told, by the (gut-wrenching) sound of a cello falling to the floor and snapping its neck, Bird set out to recreate the physicality of the instrument itself through software modelling. There are no real cello recordings here, yet in amongst the frenetic layering, smudged melodies and glitches, it's impossible not to hear vibrating strings, resonating (and sometimes splintering) wood, catgut and rosin. The techniques of modern composition and electro-acoustic production combine to create a set of uncanny solo cello études twisted through folded dimensions. I'm sure that as a cellist I'm particularly attuned to these resonances, but I'm also sure that anyone interested in sound-art, glitch or contemporary music will be highly rewarded.
Kirk Barley - Courtyard [Odda Recordings/Bandcamp]
I'm very pleased to say I've been supporting Kirk Barley's delicate, rhythmic music on Utility Fog since his 2019 album Landscapes. Although that's the debut from "Kirk Barley", it wasn't by any means his first release - he'd previously appeared as Bambooman among others, at times making feints towards the dancefloor - but under his own name he consolidated a sound that filtered acoustic guitar, cello and field recordings through an idiosyncratic electronic lens - and often with drums from Matt Davies, with whom he has since frequently collaborated under the name Church Andrews. For the second release on Thea Hudson-Davies' Odda Recordings, he's Kirk Barley again, presenting a mixture of new and previously-digital-only recordings. The music on Marionette comes from modular synths, guitars, and on this track cello upon cello, looping little phrases, undulating in amongst the sound of running water. Unassuming music, but please give it your attention!
Nicholas Thayer - on growing [Oscillations/Bandcamp]
I'm so glad that I'm following new London label Oscillations, which started operations last year with an EP from Gabriel Prokofiev, the composer who founded the nonclassical label back in 2004. Oscillations calls itself an electronic music label, but so far has had a "composer" bent to it, and it has gifted us with this brilliant album from Nicholas Thayer, a composer & producer from the Netherlands who happens to have some ties to Australia - he's composed for Sydney Dance Company and Queensland Ballet, although he's now based in Groningen the north of the Netherlands I believe. Actually it's not an album, although it briefly appeared as such before being split into 3 in:finite EPs. The music here is again for a dance work, titled in:finite, commissioned for the Swedish Skånes Dansteater, and in the vein of contemporary dance, it encompasses abstract sound-art, contemporary composition, glitched audio and even some beat-heavy sections. Thayer clearly has a love for drum'n'bass in there, with fidgety programmed breaks on some tracks, and growling neuro basslines elsewhere (d'n'b/dubstep legends Noisia happen to hail from Groningen too). I also can't pass by the Motley Crüe reference in his bio! Cello is the main acoustic/classical instrument here, beautifully performed by Mikko Pablo, expressively interpreting Thayer's score which is at times straightforwardly melodic, elsewhere processing the sound or employing extended techniques. It makes sense that the performance this music is written for is considered a work of "multilayered hybrid art", combining choreography, music, set and costume design, as this is not just music for accompanying a stage performance - it's a very rich, satisfying listen on its own, highly recommended.
Helen Money / Will Thomas - Thieves [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
As Helen Money, Alison Chesley has never been a conventional cellist, preferring to play through guitar pedals and amps even on her solo work, as well as playing with the likes of Earth, Neurosis, Russian Circles - and I do believe she used to call herself a "doom cellist". Her last album Trace - her third on Thrill Jockey - drew away from the looped metal riffs which on the previous two had been augmented with drums from Neurosis' James Roeder, instead complementing riffs with drones and melodies accompanied with piano and synthesizers, including electronics from soundtrack composer & producer Will Thomas. Now we have a whole duo album from Helen Money & Will Thomas, even more sumptuous and experimental than the last. On "Thieves" shimmering loops of cello harmonics are accompanied by stop-start industrial techno beats and thrums of distorted cello. It's cinematic stuff, the work of two excellent musicians working on the same wavelength.
Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci - Geology Of Fire [American Dreams/Bandcamp]
The quite incredible first collaboration between sound-artist/composers Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci, Chthonic, came out on American Dreams in August this year. This is the sound of tectonic plates moving against each other, of mountains slowly rising. Across these 5 tracks, Bertucci's many instruments (cello, viola, flute, lap steel guitar) blend with field recordings and electronics from English, sumptuously mixed in cavernous ultra-widescreen. This is very different from the tape manipulations and acoustic instruments of Bertucci's two duo releases last year. Differently brilliant.
Koenraad Ecker - Copper Mountain [Koenraad Ecker Bandcamp]
Belgian cellist and sound-artist Koenraad Ecker is known to me equally for his mutated club music with duos Lumisokea and Stray Dogs (both of which strayed into beatless sound design frequently), and for his electro-acoustic works involving cello and myriad sound sources. Ecker has recently uploaded a stash of unreleased music to his Bandcamp, encompassing stereo mixes of installation works, high-definition field recordings, found-sound constructions, and more. Copper Mountain is a rich and wondrous electro-acoustic stew of differently pitched (and re-pitched, stretched, bent) chimes (including a "very drunk carillon"), field recordings, and one one track, the haunted voice of fellow cellist and vocal experimentalist Audrey Chen. It's beautiful and surprising. I do recommend checking RACING MUSIC for the contrast to this track: two short, sharp electronic tracks made, but not used, for a car racing game - perhaps the level of distortion along with hammering kicks was too much for the game designers.
emer - sea salt [Lillerne Tapes]
sea salt is the debut release from Brussels-based Lithuanian sound-artist Marija Rasa under the emer moniker. Rasa is one half of electro-acoustic/electronic duo Ugné & Maria, from whom we heard a lovely album in May. With Ugné Vyliaudaite, Rasa hosts a monthly show on Kiosk Radio; similarly with Konradas Žakauskas she makes experimental electronics as Forgotten Plants, and they too have a monthly show, on Radio Vilnius. So it's no wonder, perhaps, that this "debut" solo release is so accomplished, but it is truly special - downtempo ambient beats and synth pads, with pitch-shifted vocals and an estranged, slightly flanged sheen to the sounds. It could almost come from some '90s ambient, post-rave compilation - almost, but there are reminders throughout that this is music of now. Superb.
Daniel Bachman - Someone straying, long delaying [Three Lobed Recordings/Bandcamp]
"American Primitive", the fingerstyle guitar technique pioneered by John Fahey in the 1950s, was from the outset a way of playing folk and country blues but transforming it in experimental ways. The incredible Imaginational Anthem series released by Tompkins Square charts the style from its earliest days to the futuristic present, and our man Daniel Bachman has indeed appeared there. This is all to say that When The Roses Come Again, Bachman's remarkable new album, is perhaps not as radical as it may appear, despite the lovely fingerstyle guitar being sent through all manner of processing, turning into distorted noise, crackling drones, or fizzling glitches. The album is really one long work split into separate tracks (and the track titles are the lyrics of the Carter Family song from which the album takes its title). It's stretched-out and deconstructed, but it's still American Primitive in all its freeform gregariousness, and it's a beautiful listen from start to finish.
Jamie Hutchings - Everything Alive is at War [Jamie Hutchings Bandcamp]
Jamie Hutchings was lead singer/songwriter for legendary Sydney indie band Bluebottle Kiss and more recently fronts the krautrock-inspired rock band Infinity Broke. In both these bands, Hutchings and cohorts have been comfortably uncompromising with their experimental aspects - free jazz references, unusual structures and harmonies - along with his emotive singing. Making Water, however, is something different. At least, superficially it is: these are not songs, even if there's some singing at times; this isn't a band at all, in fact most of the playing is done by Jamie himself; and the instrumentation shifts from clattering found-object percussion to abandoned piano to scrabbling, detuned acoustic guitar, often recorded in unusual ways. And yet there's a definite Jamie Hutchingsness to the proceedings, and not just the occasional wordless vocals. Maybe because this adventurous musical spirit has always been present in his work, this seems almost like a logical progression. There's a purity to it, messy and primitive and spontaneous as it is. Listen with open ears.
Megan Alice Clune - Sonic Metaphor [Room40/Bandcamp]
Following her exceptional album If You Do, released in 2021, Eora/Sydney singer/composer/sound-artist Megan Alice Clune is back on Room40 with the beautifully deceptive album Furtive Glances. It's derived from a large collection of piano improvisations recorded as voice memos on her phone, generally little asides when preparing for something else. These unpretentious non-compositions have been repurposed via MAC's impeccable ear and craftsmanship into something new, with little added except vocal snippets - but there are other extraneous sounds allowed to be present, like the feedback that opens the album. Even the most contemplative of tracks are accompanied by distant, filigree distorted drones, or almost-inaudible vocal layers, or that robust feedback heard here... It's a disturbed peace, but peace all the same, in Clune's capable hands.
Machinefabriek - + Christine Ott [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Machinefabriek - + Jeremy Young [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
The first release for 2023 from Machinefabriek was comprised of 52 tracks, each derived from a 1-minute improvisation contributed by a different musical friend of the artist. It presented a solution to Rutger Zuydervelt's circumstances in the latter part of 2022, having become a father for the first time, trying to work out how to balance his time with making music, design work and parenting. Creating a collection of short works seemed like the ticket, and the result is the monumental album simply titled +. As you'd expect, Zudervelt's collaborators range from acoustic instrumentalists to electronic experimentalists. Canadian tape manipulator and sound-artist Jeremy Young contributes the sine waves and radio that he's been using lately, and Christine Ott her signature ondes martenot. Ott's track is a good example of how Zuydervelt absorbs and reworks the sounds of his collaborators, with jungle's amen breaks buried somewhere in the analogue sounds.
Ben Carey - Towards the Origin [Hospital Hill/Bandcamp]
When I first met Eora/Sydney musician, composer & academic Ben Carey he was playing saxophone with autonomous electronics, investigating computer improvisation. For some time now, though, he's become more & more proficient in the fractally deep world of modular synthesis. His first album on Matt McGuigan's Hospital Hill came out of some of his early work with Eurorack modular systems, but Metastability was produced in two sessions at Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS) with the LaTrobe Serge modular synth, designed in the mid-'70s by Serge Tcherepnin for the La Trobe University Music Department, and restored more recently so that anyone can work on it at MESS. Linking back to my first encounters with Ben, he describes working with the so-called "Paperface" Serge as a process of dealing with the human/non-human interaction necessitated by the complex way that it works, and the delicate balance required to produce desirable sounds. This complexity aside, the pieces Carey has created are beautifully refined and incredibly organic-feeling, tactile and emotive, and the interleaved drones of closing track "Towards the Origin" are exquisitely detuned, like separate alien transmissions hesitantly singing their lonely chorale in deep space.
Later in 2023, Ben and Sonya Holowell released their first studio album as Sumn Conduit, Valve Is Released, which I also cannot recommend highly enough.
Martyna Basta - Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering [Warm Winters, Ltd./Bandcamp]
Like many, I was stunned by the debut release from Kraków-based sound-artist Martyna Basta, 2021's Making Eye Contact With Solitude. Her equally wonderful second album Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering came out early in 2023, again released by Adam Badí Donoval's Warm Winters, Ltd.. This is again patient music build from found sounds, vocal snippets and layers, guitar loops, zither, violin... These elements (including a guest spot from fellow sound-conjuror claire rousay) serve to build half-remembered emotional resonances, gentle tension and subtle release - and they add up to undeniable beauty. Also notable, in December Belgium's STROOM.tv released her EP Diaries Beneath Fragile Glass.
Ryuichi Sakamoto - 20220404 [Milan Records]
Tragically lost in 2023 was Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose cancer returned and took him from us. While he was in remission, Sakamoto recorded an album of 12 pieces mostly improvised on dates throughout 2022, either on his signature piano or synthesisers or both. These are very sparse works even when involving the electronics, ranging from quite short studies to still quite short, beautiful contemporary classical works. Sakamoto was always brilliant at heart-pulling little melodies - he was after all a soundtrack composer as much as a pop musician, electronic trailblazer and all the rest. As well as melodies, there are little ambient works along the lines of his old friend Brian Eno, and also some more avant-garde piano works. I was honestly expecting something much thinner than what we have here - it's a genuinely captivating work of some substance, only made more touching as it's his last recording.
Listen again — ~199MB
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