Utility Fog

Sunday, 19th of January, 2020

It's the middle of January and I'm playing a show that's 100% 2020 music (give or take a couple of flashbacks from artists with new music being featured). Life moves pretty fast.

LISTEN AGAIN to the sounds of now! Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

NERVE - Psycho Mafia (excerpt) [A Colourful Storm]
Last week on the show I featured a track from Melbourne's Joshua Wells aka NERVE, alongside something from his duo with David Coen (Sow Discord/Whitehorse etc) called Hemlock Ladder. Those tracks were released on new label AR53 Productions, but now NERVE is back on the great Melbourne label A Colourful Storm for a cassette called Psycho Mafia, documenting a live performance from last year. It's frenetic industrial techno, with frequent distorted breaks interjecting, making it sit somewhere just on the edge of drum'n'bass or breakcore. The entire awesome track is 22 minutes, but I played about half.

The Chap - I Recommend You Do The Same [Lo Recordings/Bandcamp]
The Chap - I Am Oozing Emotion [Lo Recordings/Bandcamp]
The Chap - Nevertheless, The Chap [Lo Recordings/Bandcamp]
The Chap - Don't Say It Like That [Lo Recordings/Bandcamp]
After five long years, it's really nice to have a new album from the very English, very European five-piece The Chap. Their sense of humour and irreverence is as English as it comes, but the way they mix indie rock with electronics, krautrock and string arrangements, and whatever else they care to seems more, er, Continental? It's delightful that they have lost neither their experimentalism nor their sense of fun - although the first track I played is quite dark! And the title of their album from 10 years ago, Well Done, Europe might feel a little bittersweet in these post-Brexit days, so let's take the fun and just be in the moment with the deliberately archaic Digital Technology, a great continuation of everything they do so well. I'm jealous of anyone in the UK & Europe who can see them play live soon.

Keeley Forsyth - It's Raining [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
Keeley Forsyth - Butterfly [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
A single late last year announced this extraordinary debut from English actor Keeley Forsyth. She wrote these songs in private, with no expectation that they would be heard by the public, but when she heard the music of composer Matthew Bourne on the radio she got in touch with the idea of setting the songs with his arrangements. Bourne turns out to be a very sympathetic foil for Forsyth's raw, minimalist songs and her expressive, vibrato-laden voice. Bourne contributes strings, harmonium, piano and synth, alongside Mark Creswell's guitar & bass, and Sam Hobbs' keyboards and occasional drums. Forsyth's voice has led reviewers to compare her to Scott Walker, but I hear Nick Drake, Jessica Sligter, Mark Hollis, and even Joni Mitchell in there - and nobody is quite right; this is singular music from a very personal place. It's quite desolate and monolythic, music to listen to in the dark.

Kate Carr - Highway Bridge Drain Pipes, Saskatoon, Canada [Nonclassical/Bandcamp]
London label Nonclassical started off as a showcase for stretching the boundaries of contemporary classical music - string quartets & piano music backed with remixes by club producers, etc. More recently they have become interested in extending further into "non-music", sound-art, sound walks, and field recordings. British radio DJ Nick Luscombe has compiled Vol.1 of a compilation series they're calling fieldwave, featuring works ranging from location recordings of music to documentations of spaces and events (including a recent Hong Kong protest). Ex-Sydney artist Kate Carr is a master at mixing fascinating location recordings with musical elements in an alchemical way, as shown on her contribution tonight.

Machinefabriek - Stillness #6 (Lemaire Channel, Antarctica) [Glacial Movements/Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Machinefabriek - Stillness #1 (The FRAM, Greenland) [Glacial Movements/Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Machinefabriek - Stillness #10 (Antarctic Sound, Antarctica) [Glacial Movements/Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
In 2014, Dutch composer/producer Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek released Stillness Soundtracks on ambient label Glacial Movements. His drones, sound recordings and slow rhythms were written to accompany a series of flims created by Dutch filmmaker Esther Kokmeijer in Antarctica. Some of these stunning visuals can be found online. Now Glacial Movements have released the a second album, Stillness Soundtracks II, with music created over the last 5-6 years for further Antarctic films by Kokmeijer. They lean back towards drone compared to some of the earlier works, and evoke a sense of otherworldliness - not-quite-peace. Works of a composer at the height of his skills.

The Necks - Lovelock [Fish of Milk/ReR Megacorp]
Every couple of years the world is blessed with a new album from one of Sydney's greatest musical products, The Necks. Never a typical jazz piano trio, they've moved so far with their recordings that you know you can get anything, but you also know just what you'll get. Chris Abrahams on piano & organ, Tony Buck on drums, percussion and increasingly electric guitar on record, and Lloyd Swanton on double bass and electric bass (often including spectral bowed passages) are best known for near-60-minute works that subtly shift over their long period as a kind of minimalist jazz, or a kind of jazz-informed krautrock, or ambient soundscapes or whatever else they care to do.
Occasionally though they'll split their albums into shorter tracks - a few years ago it was to accommodate the 22-minute limit for vinyl sides, on an album for Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ, but in the past (e.g. 2006's Chemist) that's just been the musical ideas they want to get down, and that seems to be where we are with new album Three. Each of the three tracks is a bit over 20 minutes long, with a motorik rock-ish number, a relentless 5/4 jazz-ish number, and a gorgeous ambient work in between. The middle track is a slow-rolling ode to their old friend Damien Lovelock of hard rockers the Celibate Rifles, who died of cancer last year. Chris Abrahams in particular had worked with Lovelock since the '80s, and I remember a particular Newtown-centric indie-jazz number from the early '90s. That this track sounds nothing like Lovelock's music is beside the point. To me it sounds like a journey into a submerged afterlife, and the dedicated surfer would be very happy floating away in it.

Oval - Twirror [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Oval - Mikk [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Back in the '90s, Markus Popp's Oval band (or solo project) was a cerebral, mostly ambient affair that pioneered one branch of glitch music - based around the accidental digital artefacts CD players freaking out from deliberately scratched CDs. That technology itself became redundant in the years since - I mean, I still buy CDs! But the skipping freakouts of CD players tend not to be heard now, even in car stereos. Popp created custom software to digitally randomize and process sound sources, and was never totally married to that particular technique, but in the early 2000s Oval went on hiatus for some time. In the last 10 years, however, Oval Mark 2 emerged as an outlet for a new phase of Popp's production - tiny samples, chopped up instrumental performances, sometimes danceable beats, built into meticulous, dense constructions. It's very different from his earlier phase, but somehow you can feel the same musical impetus behind these works.

Pentagrime - The Devil's Burlesque (13" Extended Mix) [James Plotkin Bandcamp]
James Plotkin is one of the great mastering engineers working in experimental and heavy music these days, but also one of the great musicians of the last 3 decades or so. From the early '90s he was associated with some of heaviest and weirdest music in the metal world - OLD started as grindcore, and went into various different directions, then with Khanate he created hellish blackened doom, and in between he worked with metal-turned-dub masters Scorn, and created dark ambient works with the likes of KK Null... But then there was the one-two punch of the Atomsmasher/Phantomsmasher records, terrifyingly (re)constructed grindcore/breakcore that merged speed metal with glitchy electronica. On his dedicated Bandcamp he's just released two bizarre tributes to his love of expeirmental electronic music as Pentagrime. They're modular synth excursions, complex blurting beats in the vein of Aphex, Autechre, Venetian Snares and the like. Everything he does is brilliant and utterly bent (the ridiculous idea of a 13" Extended Mix...)

Listen again — ~195MB

Sunday, 13th of November, 2016

Everybody knows that the good guys lost... Oh, Leonard.

LISTEN AGAIN and dance me to the end of love. Stream on demand from FBi website, podcast here.

Well, it's been an... eventful week. For my own sanity I have to believe that the USA isn't about to sleepwalk into fascism, although the less said about post-Brexit Britain and pre-Le Pen France the better...
In any case, the not unexpected news of Leonard Cohen's death was a bit of a twist of the knife this week. Many of us have been pointing out the pertinence of so many of his lyrics to this week's events ("Democracy is coming to the USA" anyone?), and ultimately "Everybody Knows" is also one of my favourite songs, appearing notably in the cult 1990 movie Pump Up The Volume (one of those "Christian Slater as the cool kid" films) for extra credit points. Leonard, we do want it darker... but we didn't want the darkest timeline.
Cohen has of course been covered by just about anyone you can name, and I don't need to go into the details here - but Nick Cave has done justice to many a Leonard Cohen song in his career, and tonight we go way back to the first Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, only just post-Birthday Party, sinister and very, very dark, covering the opening track from Songs of Love and Hate.

Sydney composer Andrée Greenwell has been walking the line between contemporary classical composition and other genres for a long time. Her new album Gothic, which will be launched on Friday the 25th of November at Giant Dwarf in Sydney, explores the gothic in all its forms, from the postpunk goth pop of The Cure to a setting of Edgar Allen Poe. She also collaborates with the likes of Alison Croggon, Felicity Plunkett and others. The combination of folk, classical and electronic tendencies is very interesting in this work - by no means are the classical elements watered down, but nor are the glitchy beats and sound design elements.

I discovered classically-trained Sydney artist Lupa J in the support slot at a Marcus Whale gig earlier this year, so it's appropriate to find him, in fine form, on her new remix EP. Imogen Jones aka Lupa J is not long out of school, and already has a number of EPs and singles under her belt of polished, highly accomplished electronic pop that melds electronics with her violin and vocals. She carries this off live effortlessly with a couple of mates too. The remixes here range from club-focused beats to more glitchy abstract sounds. Land Systems is somewhere in between with some nice crunchy techno.

This week saw the death of one of the great poets of the songwriting world. For my money Leonard Cohen was far more deserving of a Nobel Prize than Bob Dylan, but then I'm more of a fan of his music & singing than of Dylan's.
I feel that Kate Tempest is one of the great poets of our current age. She draws strongly on a background involved with some great hip-hop poets of the UK and no doubt the USA, but she does something quite special on her two recent albums, chronicling the day-to-day lives, inner thoughts and fears of an interlocking set of characters. On Let Them Eat Chaos all her characters are awake at 4:18am, and their experiences give Tempest various ways to explore and deconstruct working class life, queer life, gentrification, corporatization and more. In the last two segue'd tracks Tempest brings all her characters together in almost Shakespearean fashion for a shared experience of humanness...

Fred Warmsley has appeared a lot on this show over the last few years, with his post-junglist/idm/hip-hop sounds as Lee Bannon and then ¬b, and now Dedekind Cut. He's released ambient music in the past (there's a bewildering amount of stuff out there by him in his various guises) and the new one is about as genre-ambivalent as ever, with post-club sounds leaking in around the ambient edges.

Along with Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions (and Warmsley's own Bandcamp where it features a few excellent bonus tracks), the new Dedekind Cut album is co-released by the extraordinary label NON, which started operation only a year or so ago. The subject of a feature in the December issue of The Wire, the label showcases innovative and challenging electronic music from Africa and the African diaspora, including African American artists, artist from the UK, Mexico, South Africa and Egypt among others.
From last year's NON WORLDWIDE COMPILATION VOLUME 1 we heard Egyptian artist Amr Al-Alamy aka 1127 with a piece of propulsive percussion-heavy techno. Then we hear from one of the founders of NON, South Africa's Angel-Ho, with a track from his EMANCIPATION EP from earlier this year, grime built from cocking and firing guns...
Also from South Africa are the duo Faka, with a form of gqom. Faka represent queer South African youth, and it's fair to say that the queer experience is central to a lot of what NON do. There's an amazing 18 minute track in the minute of Faka's Bottom's Revenge EP - check the whole thing out on Bandcamp.
Mexican artist Mya Gomez recently put out her Inmate EP on NON, which is about the experience of England's detention centres for immigrants. It's harrowing stuff, and while the final track which we heard tonight is titled "Released", the emotional and musical release is juxtaposed with a piercing high-pitched noise which reminds us that traumatic experiences ring through people's lives long after they're finished.
Finally we hear from Chino Amobi, Virginia-based with Nigerian roots and another co-founder of NON. His latest EP Airport Music For Black Folk puns on the Brian Eno ambient classic while commenting on the often fraught experience of flying while black. Spooky ambient sounds, computer vocals, and again trap/grime-inspired beats maybe from gunshots make for unsettling listening.

Berlin-based Yair Elazar Glotman has appeared on this show under his own name close-mic-ing his double bass or creating beautiful electro-acoustic sound design, and making deep, immersive bass techno as KETEV. He now unveils his new moniker, Blessed Initiative, for a self-titled release on the Bristol-based Subtext label. In some ways it's a continuation of his first solo album on Glacial Movements - but as the titles suggest, it's a little more paranoid and freaky, with some heavy bass and hints at glitchy beats here and there. It's billed as ambient, but at most that's only in contrast to the techno work as KETEV. Compulsory listening in any case.

And finally we have one track from the new LP by Brisbane's Mirko, released on Room40 in a week or two. There's a lot of ambient synth work on this album, but here it's augmented with glitch textures around acoustic piano. It's a lovely album altogether.

Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows [Columbia Records]
Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker [Columbia Records]
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Avalanche [Mute]
Andrée Greenwell - A Forest [available from Bandcamp and iTunes]
Andrée Greenwell - Maria Walks Amid The Thorns [available from Bandcamp and iTunes]
Lupa J - Teeth and Loud Talk (Marcus Whale Remix) [Lupa J Bandcamp]
Lupa J - Game (Land Systems Remix) [Lupa J Bandcamp]
Kate Tempest - Perfect Coffee [Lex Records]
Kate Tempest - Breaks [Lex Records]
Kate Tempest - Tunnel Vision [Lex Records]
Dedekind Cut - bonus {3} "Ayahuasca binary 0|0" [NON/Hospital Productions/Dedekind Cut Bandcamp]
Dedekind Cut - Maxine [NON/Hospital Productions/Dedekind Cut Bandcamp]
1127 - It Never Drops [NON]
Angel-Ho - CLOCCCC [NON]
Faka - Isifundo Sokuqala [NON]
Mya Gomez - Released [NON]
Chino Amobi - LONDON II [NON]
Chino Amobi - MALMO [NON]
Blessed Initiative - as cyber shaming may be [Subtext]
Blessed Initiative - Borderling Spamming [Subtext]
Mirko - Cloud Chain [Room40]

Listen again — ~185MB

Sunday, 9th of October, 2016

Hey there! So much great stuff this week, from windswept post-classical/electronic from Melbourne by way of Iceland, to experimental songwriting to shimmering electronic jazz improv to murky techno...
I'm off for the next 3 weeks, so listen in to Heli Newtown and Jordan Sexty as they experty shepherd the show until I'm back on Nov 6th!

LISTEN AGAIN to this show as you know you want to - stream on demand from FBi, or podcast from here.

Three new releases came out from Thrill Jockey in the same week, and the only reason I'm not playing all three is because of time constraints. When faced with the choice, it was a no brainer that doom cellist Helen Money would be the one who gets the first look-in. Alison Chesley (as her friends & family call her) has been doing the amplified cello thing for almost 10 years, collaborating with heaps of excellent people and touring with metal and postrock bands, where her performances with cello, looper and other pedals have impressed people the world over. Heavy riffs and beautiful melodies are the order of the day on all her albums, and once again Chesley is joined by Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder on a few tracks - as well as The Rachels' pianist Rachel Grimes.

Justin Vernon aka Bon Iver is an interesting fellow. He became known for his pastoral, soulful folk music under the Bon Iver name, but (even though that's a big part of his musical identity) he has a lot more to him than that. He contributed guest vocals on a recent Colin Stetson album, including some awesome gruff quasi-hardcore-metal barking... and now he's come out with this piece of weird, glitchy, crunchy electronica. With his usual vocals of course. It's a great piece of hybrid work which I've been enjoying a lot.

The latest album from Thomas Meluch aka Benoît Pioulard comes out of a period of grief and, as he describes it, self-medication. Sad times can beget great art, and in this case we now have the most song-oriented and catchy piece of work from Meluch in quite some time. There are some of his beautiful washed-out ambient tape creations on here as well, but mostly it's jangly sing-song indie that you'll be tapping your feet to and looking up the playlist to see what it is.

Melbourne composer Tilman Robinson spent some time a year or two ago at Valgeir Sigurðsson's studio in Iceland, where people like Ben Frost, Björk and others have worked... He returned there to record his second album - quite a switch from his first, which was jazz composition with a bit of an electronic bent. Here the electronics merge with post-classical and postrock sounds, whether Steve Reichian ostinati or stark Icelandic string lines, lonely piano or growling bass. It's a stunner, and will be among my top Australian albums of the year easily. Out this Friday!

Norwegian post-jazz, electro-acoustic improv trio (originally a quartet) Supersilent have now been going for well over a decade, but from their earliest, noisier incarnation they already had an incredible instinct for group composition. By their 6th album, they were creating mindblowingly gorgeous musical structures with ease, and their new album (their 13th), while in some ways more challenging, is also full of beauty. I didn't have time to play one of the over 12-minute tracks, but the one I selected is lovely and crunchy!

Sticking in Norway, there's a new album out now from experimental guitarist Kim Myhr on the consistently excellent Hubro label. We recently heard Myhr in collaboration with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and none other than Jenny Hval. In fact 2010 was the first time Myhr collaborated with the Trondheim Jazzo Orchestra, in a recording of a live set with vocals from sometime member Sidsel Endresen. It's equally beguiling stuff, but we're hearing this tonight because of Myhr's new album, on which his idiosyncratic, rippling guitar playing is augmented by various electronic & computer effects. If you've ever wondered what "scintillating" sounds like, look no further...

Council Estate Electronics is one of the many projects of the great Justin K Broadrick, along with fellow Jesu member Diarmuid Dalton. The first two albums are murky electronic music of a somewhat krautrock flavour, but on this new one for usually quite ambient label Glacial Movements, they've moved into more of an industrial techno realm - or perhaps Justin's recent JK Flesh is really industrial and this waters it down with a bit of a Basic Channel stype minimal techno! This album is very good. Of course.

Kikimora Tapes is a relatively new Toronto label releasing beautiful limited-editions cassettes (and digital), who have just released their first compilation Knock Knock Who's Dead? - featuring some well-known names in grainy electronic music including Beppu (aka Andrew Hargreaves of The Boats) and Toronto musician Mitchell Akiyama, who ran the trailblazing electronic/folktronic label intr_version and who I haven't heard from for ages - and now I discover that recently they also released something from his beloved duo Désormais also released a new cassette recently! Mitchell's track is great submerged techno. Meanwhile I have NO idea who "The North" are, but their crunchy techno track here is excellent.

For many years, Matt Christensen led the lo-fi indie/postrock band Zelienople, making mostly slowcore, hazy beautiful songs. The last album (I think their official last) actually featured a bit more "fire" in their bellies, so to speak... But Christensen's new solo album on the mighty Miasmah sees him accompanying his songwriting with drum machines and some electronics on top of the shoegazey guitar sounds. It's a new direction, but still very recognizably his jam, and a great success.

Helen Money - Leviathan [Thrill Jockey]
Helen Money & Jarboe - For My Father [Aurora Borealis]
Helen Money - Machine [Thrill Jockey]
Bon Iver - 10 d E A T h b R E a s T [Jagjaguwar]
Bon Iver - 29 #Strafford APTS [Jagjaguwar]
Benoît Pioulard - Narcologue [Kranky]
Benoît Pioulard - Defect [Kranky]
Benoît Pioulard - Ruth [Kranky]
Tilman Robinson - Pareidolia [Hobbledehoy Records]
Tilman Robinson - In the Always [Hobbledehoy Records]
Supersilent - 6.2 [Rune Grammofon]
Supersilent - 13.1 [Rune Grammofon]
Trondheim Jazz Orchestra & Kim Myhr - Aeolian Bloom (vocals by Sidsel Endresen) [MNJ Records]
Kim Myhr - Sort sol [Hubro]
Council Estate Electronics - 567 foot 33,500 ton [Glacial Movements]
The North - The Deliverance Ov Aismal (W.H.) [Kikimora Tapes]
Mitchell Akiyama - With Rift [Kikimora Tapes]
Matt Christensen - Someday I Won't Matter [Under The Spire]
Zelienople - Show Us The Fire [Zelienople Bandcamp]
Matt Christensen - I'm See Through [Miasmah]

Listen again — ~110MB

Sunday, 17th of January, 2016

What a week. Obviously it's sad when anyone dies, but two very special people who touched a lot of the world died this week.

LISTEN AGAIN and cry with me... not really, there's happy music too! Podcast it here, stream it from FBi.

A few days ago I was going to bed when I got a notification on my phone that the wonderful English actor Alan Rickman had died. It took me an hour and a half longer to get to bed as I trawled through clips of all his films I remembered, and read people's reminiscences. But my favourite is always going to be the sweet romantic comedy (because it is a comedy) about a cellist who comes back from the dead to be with his widow - Truly, Madly, Deeply. And I still remember when I first heard my favourite indie band of the early '90s, The Clouds, playing their song "Ghost of Love Returned" - their most shoegazey song- and realised it's a tribute to that movie. So farewell, Alan, you were one of the best.

Well, when I started last week's show with David Bowie I knew that his new album was a remarkable event, but none of us had realised yet that it was his farewell to us all. I wasn't planning to do my own tribute, but I did listen to an awful lot of Bowie this week and those instrumentals on side B of "Heroes" snuck up on me and tapped me on the shoulder... And the "drum'n'bass album" from 1997, Earthling is actually really great so let's hear something off that too.
It wasn't until later in the week that I remembered that Atom™ had done a cover of my favourite Bowie song way back in 1999 under his Lassigue Bendthaus alias. It's glitch-pop in excelsis, and a great tribute to the original song's experimental production.

Some years ago young New Zealand pianist Aron Ottignon was living in Sydney - his brother Matt still lives here but Aron's been based in Europe for some time. His first album came out with his band Aronas while he was based here - weird electronic production rubbing up against funky melodic piano jazz. From the sounds of his latest couple of EPs, the sound hasn't changed that much, and it's still utterly joyful music.

In 2014 my favourite new artist was an Israeli contrabassist based in Germany called Yair Elazar Glotman, making extraordinary bass/techno music as KETEV and equally extraordinary sound art/ambient stuff under his own name. Last year under his own name came an enveloping album of double bass sonics, and it's great to have KETEV back at the start of this year - back on Where To Now?, who released his second EP in 2014 after the self-titled KETEV EP on the legendary Opal Tapes label. Like so much Opal Tape stuff it's a combination of the lo-fi scrapes and saturation of tape with high-tech contemporary sound design and perfectly-honed beats, while under his own name he concentrates more on ambient electro-acoustic sound design, spectacularly focusing on the highly-amplified sounds of his double bass last year.

I discovered composer Brian Harnetty a number of years ago when I heard about his first album of recontextualised archival recordings of Appalachian folk music. He embedded himself in the Brerea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, where he was able to use amazing recordings from the early in the 20th century, weaving his own compositions around this music. A couple of years later, he visited some more of these recordings along with Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and he returned to them last year in a double CD that brings us the sound of schoolchildren telling some quite gruesome Appalachian folk tales.

The Clouds - Ghost of Love Returned [Red Eye Records]
David Bowie - Neuköln [Sony Music]
David Bowie - Little Wonder [Sony Music]
lb - Ashes to Ashes [Form & Function]
Aron Ottignon - Waves (à la Reunion) [Aron Ottignon Bandcamp]
Aronas - Happy Song [Vitamin Records]
Aron Ottignon - Waterfalls in Tanzania [Aron Ottignon Bandcamp & digital everywhere]
Aron Ottignon - Jungle [Aron Ottignon Bandcamp]
KETEV - Linger [Where To Now?]
KETEV - Uruk [Opal Tapes]
KETEV - Akko [Where To Now?]
Yair Elazar Glotman - Sunken Harbour [Glacial Movements]
Yair Elazar Glotman - Retenant [Subtext]
KETEV - Probabilities of a stranger's eyes [Where To Now?]
Brian Harnetty - Merrywise [Dust to Digital]
Brian Harnetty - i'll cross the briny ocean, i'll cross the deep blue sea [Atavistic]
Brian Harnetty & Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Night Is, And Lights Are [Atavistic]
Brian Harnetty - Jake and His Master (Instrumental) [Dust to Digital]

Listen again — ~187MB

Sunday, 26th of July, 2015

Four part feature show tonight, each quarter highly deserving of some attention!

LISTEN AGAIN to all four and seek out their musics... podcast here, stream at FBi.

Starting tonight with Ambrosia(@), a UK duo I discovered last week via The Wire Magazine's Wire Tapper 38 compilation. Their characterisation of "noise-folk" is a fair description of some of what they do - a droney, shoegazey folk - but there's also everything from glitch to processed field recordings to crunchy beats... and it's all gorgeous. There's a new album on the way, so you'll be hearing more from them in a couple of weeks!

Next up, a stunning project from ACT musician Charlie Sage (this may not be 100% accurate as last time I checked he was based in Queenbeyan, which is in NSW...), aka y0t0 (Year of the Ox) and one half of renowned ambient duo Hessien. Since 2012, Sage has been working on a multi-media project called Internecine, and I exhort you to read more about the project at that link. Inspired by Albrecht Duemling's 2012 book The Vanished Musicians "about ninety-six German nationals who fled Nazism and settled in Australia", it's a powerful examination of the positive impacts of welcoming refugees - for the host country as well as those fleeing persecution and murder. It wouldn't be far off the truth to say that Australia's musical and art scenes would be nothing like what they are today without the influx of these strange foreigners so many decades ago. Sage's music approaches its material in a subversive way, with these "vanished" voices sometimes haunting the drones, sometimes merely informing the moods. It's absolutely beautiful, and his collaborators also rise to the challenge.

Next little feature is for Montreal duo AUN, Martin Dumais and Julie Leblanc on guitars, synths, percussion and various other instruments. Their music has a kosmische psych/krautrock feel, frequently with no drums or beats, but sometimes exploding into tribal, almost metal batteries, and on their new album featuring guest contributions from some recently-familiar French contributors like Frédéric D. Oberland and Philippe Petit. But their music is equally compelling sans guests, and I feel that their last few releases (as exhibited tonight) have seen them find a unique, absorbing musical palette.

Finally we have some incredible sounds from one of my artists of the year last year, Yair Elazar Glotman aka KETEV. As KETEV he makes subterranean bass, underwater beats, tape-drenched sounds, and occasionally employs his double bass, and his previous "solo" release saw him exploring sound design with acoustic instruments and field recordings (and plenty of electronics) - but under his own name he is now exploring his main instrument, the double bass. A collaboration with James Ginzburg of emptyset preceded the new album on Bristol post-bass label Subtext (a label run by ex-Sydney ex-dubstep musician and composer Paul Jebanasam), on which Glotman played double bass and Ginzburg contributed electronic sounds and processing. The new album sees Glotman mic-ing up his instrument in every way possible to get the darkest and heaviest tones he can from bowing, plucking and tapping, and further enhancing the aural weight through overloading the analogue equipment. A hefty amount of smart sound design and a fine ear for melodic and sonic mise-en-scène (and rhythm) make this compulsory listening - surely Glotman will blow up like cellist & sound master The Haxan Cloak did a few years back...

Ambrosia(@) - Go Your Way [Bomb Shop]
Ambrosia(@) - Yacht [Bomb Shop]
Ambrosia(@) - II (from Pevensy NLZ) [Bomb Shop]
y0t0 - How Goodly Are Your Tents of Jacob [Internecine Bandcamp]
y0t0 - Should Voices Flood Your Vision [Internecine Bandcamp]
y0t0 - Interlude, Pitched [Internecine Bandcamp]
The New Honey Shade - Internecine VI [Internecine Bandcamp]
Markus Mehr - Internecine II [Internecine Bandcamp]
y0t0 - Damnatio Memoriae [Internecine Bandcamp]
AUN - Dark Energy [Cyclic Law]
AUN - Shining [Cyclic Law]
AUN - Travellers [Denovali]
AUN - Voyager [Denovali]
AUN - Crystal Towers feat. Frédéric D. Oberland and Philippe Petit [Cyclic Law]
Yair Elazar Glotman - Drifts [Subtext]
KETEV - Akkad [Opal Tapes]
KETEV - Akko [Where To Now? Records]
Yair Elazar Glotman - Home Port [Glacial Movements]
Yair Elazar Glotman - Ulterior [Subtext]
Yair Elazar Glotman - Lamant (Coda) [Subtext]

Listen again — ~105MB

Sunday, 21st of December, 2014

It's that time of year! This is Utility Fog's Best of 2014 Part 1! What a year for music it's been...

LISTEN AGAIN because it's the best of the best! Download/podcast here or stream on demand over there.

But first up, we feature a song from Crow Versus Crow's For Scant Applause: A Collection of Christmas-ish Songs, by longtime Utility Fog favourite Oliver Barrett aka Petrels aka Bleeding Heart Narrative etc.

This year of course had the excitement of the "return" of Aphex Twin, but cool though that was (and I'll almost certainly be playing him in Part 2) for me there was a far bigger return to releasing music: that of Chris Adams, once lead-man of Hood, who brought back not just his indietronic magic as Bracken but also his drum'n'bass/proto-breakcore alias Downpour. Needless to say both releases are right up there in my top of the year.

Meanwhile, his once Hood compatriot and one half of The Remote Viewer, Andrew Johnson, released his first solo album as a new line (related), with subtle minimalist beats of all sorts, ending the 2LP set with some fab vocal loops and pulses.

Discovery of the year is double bassist, sound designer and beatsmith Yair Elazar Glotman, who put out two cassettes of deeply-processed beats and sounds as KETEV, plus a stunning ambient album under his own name. He also released a collaborative 12" with James Ginzburg of emptyset. I'll be keenly on the lookout for what he does next.

Probably the album I've seen on more people's best of lists than any other is Andy Stott's incredible Faith In Strangers. And no surprise - it actually fulfils the promise of his genius previous LP Luxury Problems, while pushing in different directions. It features a lot more of the vocals of Alison Skidmore, and also draws a lot on the brilliant drum'n'bass/breakbeat excursions of his Millie & Andrea project with Miles Whittaker of Demdike Stare, who incidentally also finally released an actual album this year...

Well, Millie & Andrea's original 12"s in 2008 or so (along with their still semi-anonymous Hate (Unknown) project) predate the junglist revival of the last year or so, but it's fitting that the album came out this year. Last year's wrap-up focused on the sounds of '90s jungle mixing with contemporary footwork and post-dubstep sounds, but this year jungle has come even more to the fore, with the mid-year jungle warz a particular highlight.
Early in the year grime/dubstep producer Sully took to '94-style jungle with relish on his Blue double EP, perfectly reproducing the sounds of 20 years ago, albeit with today's mastering & production chops :)
And jungle album of the year, if not electronic album of the year, needs to go to Om Unit's album (or is it also some kind of double EP? Also a CD though) on Metalheadz, Inversion, which perfectly combines the post-footwork buzz, the post-dubstep head-nods of the slow/fast movement he helped pioneer, and the euphoria of Metalheadz-style breaks.

Akkord worked separately & together on dubstep, techno & drum'n'bass as Synkro & Indigo, but when they paired up officially as Akkord something seems to have instantly clicked - nothing out of place, ascetic electronic tones & beats, almost disquietingly pure. Their album from last year was brilliant, but the HTH020 EP this year was a masterpiece off odd sounds (purring engine!) and rhythms (syncopation that only resolves every four bars)... but I love the slowed-down jungle of the second track.
This release also spawned a celebrated remix 12" later in the year, with a remix of the whole EP by The Haxan Cloak, which is great but I probably didn't love as much as a lot of peeps...

One of the hugest releases for 2014 was the new album from The Bug, Angels & Devils. Kevin Martin's a genius and he's only been getting better over the last few years. The last Bug album was a massively important, and then he went off and formed the softer King Midas Sound and stunned everybody with that album... Some of that softness rubbed off on the first half of this new album, and the opening track with Liz Harris of Grouper is particularly stunning. But then an EP called Exit came out a month or two after the album, featuring, if possible, an even more heavenly collaboration with Harris.
On the album, there's also a gorgeous floating, marching instrumental piece that I played this evening, and a number of other hard-hitting vocal contributions including frequent collaborator Flowdan. Tonight's track also features another UFog fave Justin K Broadrick on guitar - appearing as JK Flesh, as he often did as far back as the '90s in colaboration with Martin (the two's projects included Techno Animal, GOD and various others). Broadrick's reformed Godflesh put out another highlight this year, which will probably appear in the next couple of shows...

Mixing noise and hip-hop in ultimately fairly different ways from The Bug is the brilliant trio clipping., made up vocalist Daveed Diggs and well-pedigreed noise/drone/experimental electronic artists Jonathan Snipes (of breakcore/pop/hardcore party band Captain Ahab!) and William Hutson. Their mixtape/debut album of last year was fantastic, and perhaps leaned more towards the noise side than the new one, but CLPPNG, their debut for Sub Pop of all people, still hits hard without toning down the challenging side that much at all. A passel of insanely brilliant videos brought them to a whole internet of audience... everybody should watch those videos my god.
Here you go, no excuse: Work Work | Body & Blood | Story 2 | Inside Out | Get Up

The Books are still the most-lamented broken-up duo ever in the history of my kind of music. I probably feel a little unreasonable resentment for the break-up (although their last album never really appealed that much to me), and it may have rubbed off on Nick Zammuto's Zammuto project, which is ridiculous because I've loved just about anything he's ever done. Anchor, the second album, doesn't quite shine as brightly as I'd like it to for me, but the second track I played tonight sure is a beauty.
Meanwhile, Books cellist Paul de Jong hasn't done as much as prominently as Nick since the breakup, but I've tried to showcase everything I could find. This track comes from the Red Hot + Bach compilation from AIDS charity Red Hot, which featured a whole lot of interesting takes (and a few boring ones) on good ol' JS. This one is de Jong's take on the well-loved first prelude from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, through the lens of the Ave Maria, a melody added by French composer Charles Gounod a century & a half later. This history aside, de Jong weaves a beautiful piece of electronic pop around the original, with help from the wonderful Mia Doi Todd on vocals. It's a beautiful song regardless, and then about halfway through, the familiar melody appears and it's next-level gorgeousness.

Tune in next week for some considerably darker, heavier sounds along with more electronics, beats and drones.

Petrels - More Than You Could Ever Know [Crow Versus Crow]
Bracken - Presence (in close focus) [Baro Records]
Downpour - Do you remember when it was all about the drums? [Downpour Bandcamp]
Bracken - Grace abstract dying sun [Baro Records]
a new line (related) - great palaces [Home Assembly Music]
Yair Elazar Glotman - Home Port [Glacial Movements]
KETEV - Zelah [Opal Tapes]
Andy Stott - Violence [Modern Love]
Andy Stott - Faith In Strangers [Modern Love]
Millie & Andrea - Drop The Vowels [Modern Love]
Sully - M141 [Keysound]
Om Unit - Parallel [Metalheadz]
Akkord - Continuum [Houndstooth]
The Bug - Black Wasp feat. Liz Harris of Grouper [Ninja Tune]
The Bug - Fat Mac feat. Flowdan & JK Flesh [Ninja Tune]
The Bug - Ascension [Ninja Tune]
clipping. - taking off [Sub Pop]
clipping. - work work (feat. cocc pistol cree) [Sub Pop]
Zammuto - Don't Be a Tool [Temporary Residence]
Zammuto - Sinker [Temporary Residence]
Paul de Jong - Number Man (feat. Mia Doi Todd) [Red Hot] {based on the well-known 1st Prelude in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier by JS Bach as adaped by Charles Gounod}

Listen again — ~108MB

Sunday, 30th of November, 2014

Dark ambient and techno are the order of the day tonight, including a big feature on a pretty much new artist for 2014, double bassist & sound-artist Yair Elazar Glotman.

LISTEN AGAIN because this is where it's at. This meaning either here or other there at FBi Radio where you can stream on demand with the advantage of STEREO.

Starting with TJ Hertz' Objekt, a projekt that appeared fully-formed in 2011 with his first self-released EP. There's a definite dubstep/bass influence to his techno, and not just because the bottom end features so, er, heavily. It's also because unlike a lot of techno, he focuses a lot on syncopation and gaps - indeed, he loves pulling the rug out from under the listener, no more so than on his stunning remix of Radiohead from later in the very year he released his first EP. Almost as soon as the vocal enters, it gets viciously glitched so (even in this day and age) you almost think something's gone wrong with your download (or CD player). Beats drop out or dissolve at weird junctures, and then the bassline re-enters with perfectly-engineered funk. So it's about time he released an album, and as is only proper, it's a mix of shorter and longer tracks, more ambient, more electro and more technoey tracks. It's a great showcase of a huge talent.

From Oslo, Norway comes the considerably more fucked-up techno & ambient of Lars Holdhus aka TCF. Those strings of hexadecimal pairs that title his tracks lead to a disorienting effect, and the music is almost as-if created by some kind of futuristic, slightly malfunctioning AI. Like Giant Claw from last week there's a sense that this music could only have been created now, in this post-everything world, and it also shares a distinct focus on sub-bass with the other artists from tonight. Very fine.

Next up, a big focus on one of the artists of the year, Yair Elazar Glotman and his post-techno guise KETEV. An Israeli double-bassist now based in Berlin, he's trained in sound art and has some fascinating installation work documented on his site, as well as two cassette releases under the KETEV moniker and a stunning piece of deeply-textured ambient under his own name, combining double bass, acoustic guitar, field recordings, synths, plenty of sub bass and some submerged beats. The KETEV stuff isn't that far removed, but has a lot more focus on beats obviously, sometimes even recalling Andy Stott (and actually being good enough to dare to do so)...
All this attention on Glotman comes from my discovery of him via a collaboration with James Ginzburg out this week on Subtext Recordings (run by quasi-Aussie-expat Paul Jebanasam). Ginzburg is one half of Bristolian post-techno duo emptyset, whose reconfigured techno hit my right in the brain cavity a few years ago (see my review for Cyclic Defrost). They've gone on to abstract their sound further from techno & dubstep into explorations of pure electronics, distortion and space. Meanwhile, Ginzburg put out a gorgeous and surprising album of acoustic & folktronic pop last year as Faint Wild Light... We can only hope that the Glotman/Ginzburg duo produces more music, as this is enthralling and enveloping, and sees Glotman exploring his double bass more thoroughly than in his solo work.
It recalls the more experimental pairings of Hildur Guðnadóttir's cello on the Pan Sonic-related Angel project (including an album from this year) and another cellist, Arne Deforce's collaboration with the other half of Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio. But of course the added depth of the double bass (almost an octave lower) creates an even heavier sound, amplified and bowed so it's almost like some eldritch, organic motor grinding away... Fantastic.

I thought we should hear Ginzburg's Faint Wild Light music as it's truly excellent and under-appreciated, and conveniently there's an excellent remix by Brazilian percussionist (by way of Boston) Ricardo Donoso, our last artist of the night. Donoso released a number of noise cassettes and then a few amazing EPs and albums on Digitalis Industries, and has now signed to the all-consuming Denovali, who are releasing the astonishing Saravá Exu album early next year. It's the best thing he's done, which is saying a lot after some very impressive ambient/techno synth albums. All the synth stuff is still there, along with glitchy bursts of noise, live percussion and some beats. Definitely one to look out for at the start of 2015.

Objekt - One Fell Swoop [PAN]
Objekt - The Goose That Got Away [Objekt]
Radiohead - Bloom (Objekt remix) [Radiohead]
Objekt - Agnes Demise [Objekt]
Objekt - First Witness [PAN]
TCF - D7 08 2A 8D 2A 37 FA FE 17 0E 62 39 06 81 C8 A1 49 30 6F ED 56 AD 5E 04 [Liberation Technologies]
TCF - 8B 2E E5 32 7B 5A 0B 33 73 B7 00 A9 F5 C2 A5 E4 0F D9 E5 17 DC 5F 3D BC 54 98 20 2C 55 F0 E6 87 6B 06 0C 5A 0E 3B EA 9B C1 4F 7C 50 45 E1 31 4D 8F B0 36 F9 89 AD A8 62 D1 96 D9 63 4C C8 40 05 [The Wire/Unsound]
TCF - 54 C6 05 1C 13 CC 72 E9 CC DC 84 F2 A3 FF CC 38 1E 94 0D C0 50 5C 3E E8 [Liberation Technologies]
KETEV - Zelah [Opal Tapes]
KETEV - Akko [Where To Now? Records]
Yair Elazar Glotman - Sunken Anchor [Glacial Movements]
Yair Elazar Glotman - Home Port [Glacial Movements]
KETEV - Uruk [Opal Tapes]
James Ginzburg & Yair Elazar Glotman - Nimbes [Subtext Recordings]
emptyset - Gate 3 [Caravan Recordings]
Faint Wild Light - Halfsleep [Digitalis]
Faint Wild Light - Debris (Ricardo Donoso remix) [Digitalis]
Ricardo Donoso - Galliciniuim [Denovali]
Ricardo Donoso - Conticinium [Denovali]

Listen again — ~104MB

Sunday, 19th of February, 2023

Experimental forms of hip-hop, grime, dubstep, bass music of all forms, jungle of course, with Palestinian, Turkish, Burkinabè, Algerian, Peruvian, Mexican, Polish, Japanese and Asian-Australian artists in the mix...

LISTEN AGAIN to a world of sound... stream on demand at FBi, podcast here.

Sleaford Mods - Force 10 From Navarone ft. Florence Shaw [Rough Trade/Bandcamp]
Once upon a time Sleaford Mods were obscure Nottingham punk-hip-hop dudes, darlings of Norman Records while the world scratched its head and went "Uh? Huhhhh?" But the world's caught on, thankfully, and so Jason Williamson's voice is found all over the place, and while Andrew Fearn's minimalist beats remain tightly constrained, they're just as much informed by today's electronic processing as they are by punky bass loops and RZA. With UK GRIM the 'Mods are surfing the zeitgeist with flare, and choosing Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning was nothing short of masterful: her delivery perfectly matches the tone of this piece. Williamson and his collaborators are always political, but also always poetic and surrealist. You only need to follow him (and them) on Twitter to see how deeply thoughtful they both are, as well as fucking funny. So Jason, why does the darkness elope?

Skrillex, Nai Barghouti - XENA [Skrillex via Warner Music]
Skrillex, Flowdan, Fred again.. - Rumble [Skrillex via Warner Music]
Skrillex, Missy Elliott, Mr. Oizo - RATATA [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. Just after Quest For Fire dropped, Sonny popped out a second album, Don't Get Too Close. I hadn't heard it at the time of putting the show together, and its emo-sadboi-rap vibe doesn't do much for me anyway, so here we're focusing on the brash dancefloorisms of Quest. I'm not the only one to note that Sonny Moore has maybe gone and worked out how dubstep really worked in the time since he started, 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. 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.

IFS MA - Hanpuku [outlines]
IFS - fractal run [U Know Me Records/Bandcamp]
Prykson IFS - Alarm feat. Dj Chederac [U Know Me Records/Bandcamp]
IFS MA - Heddchara [outlines]
Polish duo IFS (Mateusz Wysocki aka Fischerle and Krzysztof Ostrowski) released their first album on the great Portuguese experimental label Crónica, and while a lot of their latter output has bean beat driven, it's resolutely weird and fucked up. 2021's Fractal Run LP on the Polish label U Know Me Records draws influences from footwork, dub, glitch and hip-hop, and the hip-hop connection really comes to the fore with their 2022 EP on the same label with Polish rapper Prykson Fisk, featuring a number of local scratch DJs amongst the glitchy beats. But while a full-length is also on the way with Prykson, the (also Polish) experimental/abstract footwork label outlines has just released an album recorded with the adventurous Japanese rapper MA - titled REIFSMA. MA's stream-of-consciousness rapping is perfectly supported and confounded in its pairing with IFS's jittery beats and avant-garde production - unsurprisingly given the rapper's previous work includes a collaboration with Italian sound-artist Nicola Ratti (Shinkai) and a release on adventurous German label Morphine Records.

Morwell - George Michael - Jesus to a Child (Morwell remix) [Morwell Bandcamp]
Max Morwell has honed his skills at post-rave production for some time, but in between his own compositions he's long had a love of the pop edit - the unauthorised remix. So tonight we get a sneak preview of the forthcoming Remixes Vol. 6. I was stoked to hear a rework of the adventurous vocalist Pamela Z there, but in the end I couldn't go past this ridiculously lush jungle refix of Saint George Michael.

Basic Rhythm - 4 Tha Streets [Straight Up Breakbeat]
Essex-based Anthoney J Hart grew up in London's soundsystem culture and has released music under a number of different names, including for a long time the noise & industrial-centred Imaginary Forces, and his particular take on grime & dancehall as East Man. But under Basic Rhythm he's been taking things back to the jungle/hardcore roots, including an EP last year on Planet µ. Now Finnish drum'n'bass/jungle powerhouse Straight Up Breakbeat has enlisted him for their Zero Three, with a full EP on the way. This track is sweet, sweet junglism all the way from the early '90s through a 2020s lens.

Photek - Phaze 1 (Gremlinz & Jesta Remix) [Odysee Recordings]
Photek - Phaze 1 (2022 Remaster) [Odysee Recordings]
Odysee Recordings is one of those original jungle labels from back in the day that's found a home on Bandcamp both re-releasing remastered classics (especially Source Direct, although they're apparently about to setup their own place?) and releasing some very very nice new jungle from old artists including Andy Odysee. Once upon a time, Rupert Parkes was indomitable, as Photek or under various aliases - and no matter what guff he's up to these days, everything up to the Form & Function collections is still untouchable. Phaze 1 / Try A Style was the second single on Odysee Records back in 1995, under the name Phaze 1, and the title track has now been remastered with beautiful EQ range and punchiness. Also included are remixes by Andy Odysee (super sped up, which works once you get over the initial shock) and currrent-day d'n'b masters Gremlinz & Jesta.

黑芝麻 (Hēi zhī ma) - 黑芝麻 & Merph - I Miss You [Pure Space/Bandcamp]
黑芝麻 (Hēi zhī ma) - 黑芝麻 & Shoeb Ahmad - Associations (ft Zhi) [Pure Space/Bandcamp]
The latest release from the ever-gregarious Pure Space, Eora/Sydney label, radio show & more helmed by Andy Garvey, comes from the Naarm-based 黑芝麻 (Hēi zhī ma). Originally, I believe, from Ngunnawal country, the artist is also a graduate of FBi's Dance Class, and the appropriately named Hēi zhī ma and friends EP assembles collaborators from all over. There's a restless genre-agnosticism to the whole EP, ably demonstrated on the track "I Miss You" which features Eora/Sydney DJ Merph aka Sarita Carol Herse, veering from uneasy ambience into junglist techno halfway through. There are also spoken word contributions from Cham Zhi Yi, the other half of the sound & poetry project 莎瑜 (Shā yú) with Hēi zhī ma, and none other than Ngunnawal Country/Canberra visionary Shoeb Ahmad. This is evocative music that's a tribute to the richness of Asian-Australian exploratory culture at the moment.

Prado - Virus [Buh Records]
Prado - Error [Buh Records]
Prado - Invasión [Buh Records]
Two previous releases exist from Nicolás Prado under the name Blxzey, but those 2021 releases seem to only exist on the streaming services, and from what I can see aren't licensed for Australia either. So for us, London-born Peruvian producer's Machines is a highly impressive debut from a creative young artist, released on the influential, exploratory Buh Records. It's a very now combination of ADHD/videogame hyperactivity and jungle/breakcore/IDM influences. There's heavy bass and glitched up beats (particularly see "Error") and a surprising outburst of double-kick drum metal at one point. Fun insanity.

Damos Room x LYAM - Data Ponzi [Accidental Jr/Bandcamp]
Damos Room x LYAM - EIN [Accidental Jr/Bandcamp]
London's Damos Room are an experimental trio who exist somewhere between underground hip-hop, noise, glitch and art - don't be put off by the offline Twitch embed on the front page of their website; every time you click "Rooms In Your Area" you get another of their seemingly endless bizarro videos, which give you a bit of a taste of where they're at. They were meant to team up with innovative UK rap experimentalist LYAM (Liam Harris-Williams) a couple of years ago, but somewhere a long the way a hard drive malfunction lost them a lot of the resulting material (multiple backups everyone! One local and at least one in the cloud! Don't avoid this), and we can be grateful for this loss as we get the excellent EIN EP (it stands for "Everything Is Noise") as a result. Released by Accidental Jr as part of their Room 2 series (a sub-label of a sub-label?), the EP eschews any vocals, instead being constructed from fidgety beats and mostly rhythmic noise samples. It's not representative of either artist's sound, but while that's part of the pleasure of it, it's also well worth looking into both more deeply.

Nondi_ - FCD (Floaty Cloud Dream) [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Johnstown, Pennsylvania artist Tatiana Triplin is the latest signing to Planet µ, combining the IDM & experimental roots of the label with its footwork archivism - although footwork is only one input into her music, which feeds influences like breakcore and Detroit techno through a hazy vaporwave fog. Triplin runs the netlabel HRR, specialising in "Web Folk, Nightcore, and Dubst", and given how much of Nondi_'s music appears on the label, those lovely terms can handily be applied to her own music: this first single hints at club music somewhere behind the clouds of audio debris. The album is an evocation of life in Johnstown, dominated by the impact of the 1977 floods which saw the town's economic base from the Bethlehem Steel Company withdrawn - a classic failure of capitalism which is in fact capitalism doing just what it's designed to do.

Santa Muerte - Coahuiltecan [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Mexican-raised Panch Briones, now based in Houston, Texas, and brings a Central American aspect to music that's influenced by the low-slung hip-hop and trap of his hometown as well as the more experimental electronics that Hyperdub has often championed.

Acid Arab - Leila Feat Sofiane Saidi [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
٣ is the Arabic numeral 3, and naturally is the third album from Algerian-French collective Acid Arab (it's officially parenthetically titled "Trois"). The band insist that "this is not fusion. this is not a mix. this is a meeting ?", which is reassuring as European-initiated club music versions of MENA music can be uncomfortably colonial. This is not the Amazigh-Tunisian dubby club music of Azu Tiwaline, or the bass music with North African/Arabic themes of Cassablanca producer 3xOJ. But AMMAR 808, the excellent Denmark-based Tunisian producer, does appear here, along with many Algerian and other musicians from the region. Indeed the legendary Rachid Taha turns up on one track, but tonight we heard squiggly club-ready Arabic melodies underscoring the gruff rapping of contemporary French-Algerian vocalist Sofiane Saidi, who has worked with Acid Arab since their first album. The white French DJs who initiated the band heard sounds in Arabic and North African music that gelled with acid house, and tracks like these certainly make a case for this fusion, but it's hard to avoid the idea that it's still a "fusion".

Avalanche Kaito - Moulin [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
Avalanche Kaito - Goomde [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
From the Belgian Crammed Discs to German label Glitterbeat, but it turns out that Avalanche Kaito are 2/3 Belgian, made up of Brussels noise/post-punk duo of Benjamin Chaval on drums & electronics and Nico Gitto on guitar, who were found on his first visit to Belgium by Labalou Kaito Winse, an urban griot from Burkina Faso who plays many West African instruments and is also a remarkable vocalist. This is a true meeting of minds, with noisemaking, post-punk/dub basslines, guitar distortion and granular processing merging with Winse's talking drums, Peul flute, mouth bow and of course his wildly versatile vocals. The digital-only Dabalomuni EP preceded their self-titled album by a few months, and seems particularly, spectacularly new and uncompromising. I can't imagine that there's much difference in time between those recordings and those on the album, but there's a difference in perspective perhaps. Either way, there really seems to be something different about this group's music, and I'm ashamed I missed it in the middle of last year. Better late than never!

The God In Hackney - Heaven In Black Water [Junior Aspirin Records/Bandcamp]
I was thrilled to discover UK band The God In Hackney in 2020 via a feature track in The Wire Tapper. There's no doubt that they do so much that is tailor-made for this here radio show, with skittery drums, krautrocky grooves and dub effects, bizarre non-sequiturs, acoustic instruments rubbing up against electronics of all sorts, and all this with great songwriting! "Heaven In Black Water" is the first single from their new album The World In Air Quotes, which I've listened to and can tell you is very good, and you will be hearing more from it in due course.

Sinemis - Only Breath (Hüma Utku Remix) [Injazero Records/Bandcamp]
Sine Büyüka is a Circassian-Turkish producer from Istanbul, based in London at the moment, studying at Guildhall. She has had a career as a journalist and television presenter while in Turkey, and now runs the fantastic Injazero Records from London, while also making music under the name Sinemis. In a terrible confluence, the Dua Remixes EP (remixing tracks from her debut album) came out just as the massive earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria; so all profits from the EP will go to an on-the-ground NGO in Turkey called AHBAP as well as the White Helmets in Syria. The remix artists are inspired: Nairobi's KMRU, Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti and brilliant Turkish experimental artist Hüma Utku, whose remix builds to her favoured distorted bass tones and minimal rhythms. Fantastic work all-round.

Kevin Richard Martin - Hustle [KRM Bandcamp]
Kevin Richard Martin - Nishinari [KRM Bandcamp]
Kevin Richard Martin - Forever Falling [KRM Bandcamp]
If you're a listener of this show you surely already know who Kevin Richard Martin is - crafter of bass terror as The Bug, one half of Techno Animal & Zonal & Ice etc with Justin K Broadrick, compiler of brilliant '90s compilations and more. Under his given name he's been making glacial ambient music the last few years, but over 3 albums from last last year he's turned also to what he's variously described as drone-jazz, narco-jazz, or dubbed out ambient jazz and smudged drone. It really is all of those things. It's way less ambient than the Frequencies for Leaving Earth series and others, but less tough and dancefloor-focused than what tends to eventuate from The Bug. It has a jazz-noir feel to it with sounds of acoustic bass, sax (Martin's first instrument) and minimalist harmonies hinting at rainswept streets lit by lamplight - and indeed these three albums take three different perspectives on the dark late-night city, with the recent final installment Above The Clouds flying us above the streets and buildings. The closest predecessor to these sounds is Martin's collaboration with Dylan Carlson of Earth, appropriately titled Concrete Desert. It's deeply evocative work.

Listen again — ~206MB

Sunday, 29th of November, 2020

From delicate free jazz songs through glitched easy listening and soundscapes to various forms of bass'n'beats, it's your Utility Fog for the week!

LISTEN AGAIN to the sounds of the past, the sounds of the present, the sounds of the future! Stream on demand @ FBi, podcast here...

Ashley Paul - Light Inside My Skin [Slip/Bandcamp]
Ashley Paul - Bounce Bounce [Slip/Bandcamp]
Ashley Paul - Lost Memories [Slip/Bandcamp]
London-based American multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Ashley Paul creates very strange, beautiful songs with ensembles of free improvisers, which somehow feel simultaneously free and composed - like Tom Waits' right-in-their-wrongness arrangements. She's released albums on many interesting labels including Important Records and Orange Milk, but as Slip have just released her new one, Ray, tonight we hear 2 songs from that album, plus an instrumental from her 2018 record on the same label, Lost In Shadows. Derek Bailey can be heard in her scrabbling guitar, Ornette Coleman in the screaming saxophone and clarinet swiftly switching into queasy or sweet harmonies - but the fusion of these techniques with affecting songwriting with fragile vocals is absolutely her own. This can be challenging to get a grip on, but listen in the right frame of mind and it will touch you.

curd duca - california [Magazine/Bandcamp]
curd duca - touch [Mille Plateaux/Bandcamp]
curd duca - nancy [Mille Plateaux/Bandcamp]
curd duca - quiet nights intro [Mille Plateaux/Bandcamp]
curd duca - quiet nights (feat. carin feldschmid) [Mille Plateaux/Bandcamp]
curd duca - avant org [Magazine/Bandcamp]
curd duca - oui [Magazine/Bandcamp]
Give or take a couple of odd appearances, it's been the better part of 2 decades since we last heard from Austrian glitch musician curd duca. He released in the '90s two different series of minimalist, simple, yet evocative cut-up music (all now available again at his Bandcamp): first a series of 5 easy listening albums, and then the 3 wonderful elevator albums through Mille Plateaux. Particularly on elevator 2 and elevator 3 (from which I played two tracks each tonight) he strikes an uneasy balance in his "digitalanalogue" "cut-up easy-listening" works, not quite trip-hoppy electro-lounge cheesiness, nor quite the austere, conceptual computer music Mille Plateaux could lean towards. I particularly adored the stuttering granular vocal processing on elevator 2's "touch" in 1999 - more revolutionary-sounding back then than it would be now. Now he has another series of releases coming, the first out now, the two early and late 2021. Called waves, the three albums are released through Cologne label Magazine - for some reason vinyl + CD together - maybe I can get the collection of three just on CD when they're all released? In any case, it's a delightful continuation of the elevator sound, including some new renderings of old pieces ("touch" gets revised in fact). As before, the cut-ups and shimmering granulation transform the sometimes-mundane source material into magical alternate worlds if you let them. I for one couldn't be happier that we have this with more to come!

Jasmine Guffond - Ausland, 19th November, 2016 [Music Company/Bandcamp]
Matthew Hayes - Plein de Nuages [Music Company/Bandcamp]
Gail Priest - Stuttered unutterables [Music Company/Bandcamp]
Only a few months after their first Vector Fields compilation, this Friday Dec 4th sees Melbourne's Music Company release Vector Fields 2, once again mixing up contemporary composition with various forms of electronic production. It's a phenomenally strong collection of music, with plenty of great representation from women and non-binary artists too - aside from the people I played tonight, there's excellent work from Madeleine Cocolas, Alexandra Spence, Shoeb Ahmad, Aarti Jadu (heard below), Lily Tait and many others. Following on from the return of curd duca, Sydney's Jasmine Guffond has been mining glitch since her late '90s and early '00s releases with Minit. In the vein of her music from the last few years, her track here builds a vibrating sound space from granular samples of voice, violin, percussion and electronics. Melbourne jazz musician Matthew Hayes combines the processed residue of jazz drums with piano, guitar, strings and drones, into a thing of cinematic, folktronic beauty. And the fabulous Gail Priest, now based in the Blue Mountains, delivers as always with an evolving piece made of cut-up vocals, glitches and beats.

Minced Oath - Prison Issue Pillow [Countersunk Bandcamp]
Minced Oath is Dunk Murphy, best known perhaps as Sunken Foal, and half of Planet µ duo Ambulance. Over many years, Sunken Foal has been a reliable favourite at Utility Fog, with exquisitely surprising harmonic movements under melodic lines and intricate idm beats. With Minced Oath, he tones things down a notch: first album Supercede was pure floating ambience, but the just-released Supervene does incorporate minimal percussion and melodies, albeit at a more glacial pace than Sunken Foal.

Jakoby - Gate [Health/Jakoby Bandcamp]
Jakoby - Leine [Health/Jakoby Bandcamp]
UK-born, Berlin-based electronic musician Lee Bowden is Jakoby, returning this Friday with his second release on the Health label, run by Kirk Barley aka Church Andrews aka Bambooman. Generative rhythms, crunching bass, and little melodies combine in strange ways which seem well-suited to whatever the Health aesthetic is - maybe it's only because I'm hearing it in the context of their last release, Barley as Church Andrews with the complex percussion of Matt Davies, but this music seems equally idiosyncratic, difficult to pin down, yet oddly zeitgeisty.

HAND - note to self [Elli Records/Bandcamp]
Sascha Bachmann's new album as HAND brins us some quite wonderful processed cassette loops and found sounds, processed on computer. There are skittering half-remembered jungle breakbeats at times, but also drones and pulses, distant sub-bass thuds, spluttering drum machines and warbling klaxons. Really recommend grabbing a listen, especially as right now it's Pay What You Can (with no minimum!) - from excellent French label Elli Records.

Hextape - Yubaba [Anterograde/Bandcamp]
Hextape - How To Walk Away From Something That's Hurting You (Aarti Jadu Remix) [Anterograde/Bandcamp]
Hextape - Etude For Sword [Anterograde/Bandcamp]
Having recently heard from Melbourne musician Bridget Chappell under her own name, we're now treated to her rave-nostalgia cut-up electronic alias Hextape, as Anterograde are re-releasing her excellent 2 Fast 2 Furious album from last year, remastered and with bonus remixes. On "Yubaba", alongside chopoped-up vocals and beats we hear her cello near the end; "Etude For Sword" on the other hand swiftly crescendoes into jungle chaos. Fellow Melburnian Aarti Jadu brings out a glitchscape of vocals with flittering synths, bass drones and snatches of drum breaks.

Barking - Sham Paradise [Barking Bandcamp]
Sydney's Gareth Psaltis made a brilliant EP with Hannah Lockwood as phile in 2017, and has released music as Barking for a few years. Currently based in Berlin, he put a few tracks out this year, and this latest draws on drum'n'bass and industrial in reflection of the personal & political.

E-Saggila - Cellygrin [Hospital Productions/Bandcamp]
E-Saggila - Slowland [Hospital Productions/Bandcamp]
The latest album for Iraq-born, Toronto-based musician Rita Mikhael aka E-Saggila comes from Prurient's Hospital Productions label, which mixes in techno, ambient and more straightforwardly industrial music alongside the noise. All of this makes it quite an inspired home for an E-Saggila release, with her influences ranging from techno and jungle through forms of industrial and noise. Corporate Cross is impressively varied, and surprisingly not all dark either - "Slowland" sits at a dubsteppy tempo and its murky synth melodies echo the prettiest of '90s Aphex Twin or early Autechre.

Commodo - Loan Shark [Black Acre/Bandcamp]
Commodo - Stakeout [Black Acre/Bandcamp]
Commodo - Procession [Deep Medi/Bandcamp]
It's great to hear UK dubstep artist Commodo back on Deep Medi, nearly 10 years after his first release with them. We're hearing the title tracks of all three 2020 releases - the first two were through Black Acre, each with a kind of cop/crime show vibe; now Procession finds him imagining a detective investigating some kind of Lovecraftian paranormal shenanigans. Commodo's really good at this kind of thing, melding core dubstep bass-led dancefloor beats with evocative TV soundtrack vibes.

GILA - Energy Demonstration [Lex Records/Bandcamp]
GILA - Rider 1 (Darq Windows) [Lex Records/Bandcamp]
GILA - Aloe Drip [Lex Records/Bandcamp]
Having first encountered him in 2016, it was awesome to rediscover Kyle Reid's GILA a few months ago, and now finally his debut album proper, Energy Demonstration is with us! It's all about the low-slung bass and slippery, sparse, syncopated beats. Reid is from Denver, and as much as you can hear the influence of UK styles like dubstep and grime, it's clear that trap and US hip-hop production is a big part of his music, as much as his own background as a drummer before his live career was hindered by rheumatoid arthritis. I absolutely love the head-nodding, deep yet sharp sounds here.

Listen again — ~202MB