Utility Fog

Sunday, 2nd of July, 2017

Going from indie soul through drawn-out krautrocky hardcore punk to glitchy noise, deep dubby industrial techno, double bass electronic improv, and gorgeous minimal clicks & scratches…

LISTEN AGAIN for the nourishing warmth of it. Stream on demand at FBi’s website, podcast here.

So great to have the first single out from Shoeb Ahmad’s new album “quiver”. The album is coming out early next year I think, but we’ll have a couple of singles before then, the first of which is “mask-ed”. Exploring issues of gender & identity, it takes Shoeb the furthest he’s been yet from the intense sound processing and scattercore of his duo Spartak and indeed his work with Tangents. It’s his take on neo-soul, a kind of jangly indie-soul really, and the songs are catchy as hell in their lo-fi way, lyrically poetic and heartfelt. Luckily for me, the single is accompanied by a bunch of remixes, and they’re really rad. It’s weird and wild hearing Canberran indie-punk band Wives turning something in built from glitchy loops of Shoeb’s voice and a great piece of spoken word from singer Anja Loughhead.

Melbourne’s Plyers are usually a hardcore punk band, with a bit of free noise thrown in, and that’s how they sound on much of their new EP coming out from Art As Catharsis. But I was excited by the opening track, which has been released as a short, sharp 1-minute single, but is actually almost 11 minutes of slow-growing ritual drone and one-chord riffage, until it finally explodes into that song. There’s plenty of heritage for this kind of thing in the the Oz noise/doom scene, but it’s cool to hear it in this context.

Now we return to the excellent Tandem Tapes compilation For Headspace #1, raising money for an Australian mental health charity and featuring 50 amazing experimental tracks from Australia, Indonesia and all over the world for only AUD $10. You’d be crazy to neglect this. Our first selection is label boss Bright Sea, making music from time-stretched and glitched out samples off his hard drive, this one being all or mostly twisted vocals. And mysterious Sydney entity Big Geoffrey gives us a piece of arcane UFO-obsessed psych-techno.

Just released, Alain Paul & Tommy Four Seven’s Berlin-based industrial techno outfit These Hidden Hands offer up a set of really interesting & varied remixes of their last album Vicarious Memories. The heaviness factor is handled by JK Flesh, the bass with Drumcell‘s new Hypox1a project, but meanwhile the revived Telefon Tel Aviv (beloved idm/folktronic duo broken by the passing of Charlie Cooper some years back) hand in a glitchy stop-start piece of electronica, and none other than ambient dublord Lustmord.

Hubro is one of the most interesting, challenging and rewarding labels to appear in recent years, from a very fertile music scene in Norway. Like Rune Grammofon, it might look like it’s mostly about jazz, but really there’s heaps of post/krautrock, electronic stuff and more. This release is from a duo that’s half Norwegian (double bass/electronics from Jo Berger Myhre) and half Icelandic (Ólafur Björn Ólafsson on drums & keyboards), and was recorded in an abandoned factory warehouse in Reykjavik. It draws from the bleak and beautiful surrounds – both the icelandic landscape and the industrial setting – and beautifully melds luscious double bass and live percussion with expansive postrocky electronics.

From Scandinavia to Italy, we hear now from a couple of projects of minimalist electronics practitioner Giuseppe Ielasi. Along with many collaborations within Italy and further afield, Ielasi has a large catalogue of releases exploring deftly built constructions of samples and unusual sound sources (including aleatoric percussion produced by little electric motors). His recent Inventing Masks project sees him take his aesthetic into an almost straightforward beat-making realm, with two releases now of minimalist hip-hop. It’s brighter and more head-nodding than a lot of his other works, but shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention to his fantastic Bellows project with fellow Italian experimentalist Nicola Ratti. Across a variety of labels now, stretching back 10 years, they’ve managed to keep a consistent aesthetic of murky, monotone, repetitive, crackly, generally rhythmic sound work. Sometimes it’s been on the postrock end of things, sometimes on the bleepy end, usually quite dubby. And just fantastic. There’s two new releases from them that came out nearly simultaneously recently – one from Félicia Atkinson‘s Shelter Press, and one from French techno label Latency. We also revisited some earlier releases, going back to their 2007 debut, the album Bellowsreleased under their own names through the brilliant Swedish label Kning Disk, Ielasi’s own Senufo Editions, Belgian label Entr’acte and even Boomkat Editions.

Shoeb Ahmad – “mask-ed” [Shoeb Ahmad Bandcamp]
Shoeb Ahmad – “washed air – wives version” [Shoeb Ahmad Bandcamp]
Plyers – Microwave [Art As Catharsis]
Bright Sea – Blank Canyon [Tandem Tapes]
Big Geoffrey – They’re Coming [Tandem Tapes]
These Hidden Hands – Glasir (Telefon Tel Aviv Remix) [Hidden Hundred]
These Hidden Hands – Socotra (Lustmord Remix) [Hidden Hundred]
Jo Berger Myhre & Ólafur Björn Ólafsson – 1000% [Hubro]
Jo Berger Myhre & Ólafur Björn Ólafsson – Ravening [Hubro]
Inventing Masks – 4’32” [Error Broadcast]
Inventing Masks – 4’17” [Error Broadcast]
Bellows – Strand track 08 [Shelter Press]
Bellows – handcut track 04 [Senufo Editions]
Giuseppe Ielasi & Nicola Ratti – Bellows track 03 [Kning Disk]
Bellows – Reelin’ track 06 [Entr’acte]
Bellows – Rustl track 05 [Boomkat Editions]
Bellows – Sander track 01 [Latency]

Listen again — ~199MB

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