Utility Fog

Sunday, 27th of September, 2015

It's FBi's supporter drive! That time of the year when we ask the people who love what we do to help us - financially - to pay our bills, and so on!

LISTEN AGAIN while you subscribe - stream on demand at FBi's website, or podcast it here.

Melbourne postpunk trio F ingers start things off with a release on the ultra-hip Blackest Ever Black (shit, I said "hip", how old am I?) Pretty great to have Oz representing on this label which is home to a great array of UK & US noise, techno, industrial, punkish, and experimental electronic stuffs. Featuring Carla dal Forno plus Bum Creek's Sam Karmel and Tarquin Manek (also ex-Pikelet).

Moscow's Alexey Devyanin releases music under a number of pseudonyms, but for a long time I only knew him as Gultskra Artikler, under which he made a number of albums of collagey acoustic doom of sorts - quite dark, woozy folk stuff along the lines of Miasmah labelmates Kaboom Karavan or Kreng. But then I discovered that Devyanin is also Pixelord - in which (to my ears) he explores kitsch of a different variety, with the computer gamey vaporwave the YouTube generation makes of late. It feels to me like his latest project as Gultskra, appropriate released as a cassette by Umor Rex, brings the experimental electronic tendencies of Gultskra Artikler and the more pop dance side of Pixelord a little closer - sampling, mulching up and spitting out the sounds he's been listening to of late. It's incredible stuff.

Strangely Gultskra's acoustic collage (and less strangely the electronic sounds) remind me a lot of the pre-eminent ambient techno collage artists The Future Sound of London, who have just released their 8th archive album, this time not "From The Archives" but Archived 8 - perhaps to denote the fact that there's a lot of rather new material to be found here.

Persian-American artist Aria Rostami has been releasing experimental electronic music from San Francisco for a few years (I was introduced to him because Ollie Bown contributed a remix to a release in 2011). Inhabiting that comfortable/uncomfortable zone between conceptual, glitchy experimental music and idm/house beatmaking, he does a fine job in covering both. For his latest release, he explores the idea of orientalism - of the "othering" of the East - through field recordings sent to him from Tehran, Kerman and even Taipei. And as well as electronics and processed field recordings, there's an array of middle eastern and western live instrumentation in there, from violin and piano to the Turkish tar.

So this new Julia Holter album has been getting crazy accolades from all round. And well deserved... we're talking about a highly accomplished artist still at a young age. This album feels like a fairly straightforwardly pop thing, albeit more of a Kate Bush style pop than Katie Perry (lol). While in the past, her albums have lyrically been based around Greek myth, French literature and American film, here there's no high-concept theme as such, although still much poetry to be found. Musically it's a lovely continuation from her past arrangements, fleshed out a little more with a larger ensemble of strings, woodwind (including some quite '80s sax), and jazzy drums along with her piano and breathy vocals. Is it the 5 stars, 10/10 album some critics are hailing it with? Well, it's as good as the older albums and that makes it superlative already. That's enough - you know you need it.

F ingers - Tantrum Time [Blackest Ever Black]
F ingers - Mum's Caress After Trip [Blackest Ever Black]
Gultskra Artikler - D [Umor Rex]
Gultskra Artikler - Fizik Dyadya Kolya [Lampse]
Gultskra Artikler - Berezka [Miasmah]
Gultskra Artikler - kartoshka [Miasmah]
Gultskra Artikler - e [Cluster]
Pixelord - I Don't Need This [Infinite Machine]
Gultskra Artikler - Destroy [Umor Rex]
The Future Sound of London - Blue Green [FSOL Digital]
The Future Sound of London - Troxós [FSOL Digital]
Aria Rostami - Delta [Aria Rostami Bandcamp]
Aria Rostami - Midori [Audiobulb]
Aria Rostami - Denizens [Crash Symbols]
Aria Rostami - Vietnamoses [Aria Rostami Bandcamp]
Julia Holter - Vasquez [Domino]
Julia Holter - Tragedy Finale [Leaving Records/Domino]
Julia Holter - Marienbad [RVNG Intl./Domino]
Julia Holter - World [Domino]
Julia Holter - How Long? [Domino]

Listen again — ~106MB

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