Utility Fog

Sunday, 23rd of July, 2017

Just played the second of two gigs at City Recital Hall in Sydney tonight, and dashed over to play some awesome tunes on the radio. So excited about this new trove of mostly-old Aphex Twin music!

LISTEN AGAIN because you missed that cool thing last time, you know the bit… FBi gives you the good stream on demand, or you can podcast here.

So yeah, Aphex Twin likes to do this – as happened a couple of years ago when he semi-anonymously, without any warning started uploading unreleased tracks by the bucketload to SoundCloud… But this time it’s all officiall, on a dedicated online store at aphextwin.warp.net. Almost every album in his back catalogue has had bonus tracks tacked on, some of which are essentially “more of the same” – tracks from the same period that are presumably out-takes from the albums. So we have another track from the Hangable Auto Bulb sessions, complete with samples of a child talking from the classic 7 Up TV series – awesome of course… but then we have some pretty special stuff like some unfiltered prepared piano from the drukqssessions! There are so many gems from all the way back in the rave days, plenty of acid techno, and for me a number of awesome drill’n’bass tracks from the middle period. So great.

Next up, a bloke who’s been around not quite as long as Mr Richard D James above, but since the ’90s at least, and was pretty central to Sydney’s electronic music scene right up through the mid-’00s. Luke Killen used to be known as Disjunction Reunion and ran a much-loved label and distributor of electronica in Oz called Couchblip. He’s now making fantastic sounds with modular synths, the usual head-nodding beats and lovely melodies and basslines. His new album, after a long break, is released via the DataDoor cassette label, run out of Adelaide by none other than Tim Koch, another Oz electronic music mainstay & hero since the mid-1990s.

We heard James McGauran recently on this show with his industrial postrock group The Black Hundred, but he’s just released a spectacular mini-album of ambient glitchscapes and occasional beats on his Bandcamp under the name S O L I L O Q U A. He’s a Melbourne musician recently relocated to Sweden, and he’s killing it right now. If you like the ‘Fog, definitely be checking this one out.

Moving now to Norway, Espen Sommer Eide has made some of the most important music for this show over the last couple of decades. He’s one half of the groundbreaking folktronic/sound-art/experimental electronic duo Alog, and has also released a bunch of solo stuff under the name Phonophani. He’s also collaborated in the last few years with the wonderful Norwegian singer Mari Kvien Brunvoll as Kvien & Sommer, but it’s been a while since his last solo album. Most of his previous stuff & Alog’s came out on the massively influential label Rune Grammofon, but the new one appears on the slightly younger, supercool fellow Norwegian label Hubro. As usual it’s based around electronic manipulation of organic sounds & field recordings. Somewhat dark, totally absorbing.

Island People is a new American quartet of producers & sound engineers and a guitarist whose new album appears on Olaf Bender‘s newly re-minted Raster, separated again from NOTON. The group make absolutely gorgeous ambient music, sometimes with delicate beats and guitar reminding of the early freeform days of postrock.

New Zealand producer Fis started on the outer reaches of the drum’n’bass dancefloor, and after a few releases in which the beats got weirder & more buried, he’s ended up in that interesting world of bass-heavy sound-art inhabited by various dubstep & drum’n’bass exiles. His latest album on Bristol’s Subtext is a collaboration with Maori artist Rob Thorne, whose various traditional percussion and wind instruments are swathed in cavernous, sympathetic electronic amplification & treatment by Fis. It’s bafflingly exquisite stuff.

Keeping with blown instruments, we move to that surprisingly melodic and sweet jazz instrument the trumpet. Here it’s played by Cologne musician Pablo GIW, who mixes his accomplished jazz trumpet playing with electronics, sometimes moody, sometimes quite extreme, along with beat-influenced poetry and singing. Quite a special album that might have slipped under a whole lot of people’s radars…

And finally, we have the trumpet, bewitching vocals and electronics of Norwegian master Arve Henriksen. Among his collaborations is the legendary improvisatory band Supersilent, who can move effortlessly between other-worldly ambient jazz, arcane electronics and noise metal. Henriksen’s solo work has tended to stick in the fourth world ambient and jazz spectrum, and his new album is no exception – except that it’s some of his best work in a while. Podcast listeners get to hear the entirety of the glorious Supersilent track I finished up with, cut for our segue into the lovely sounds of After Hour on-air.

Aphex Twin – clissold 101[dat28 otari] [aphextwin.warp.net]
Aphex Twin – no cares [aphextwin.warp.net]
Aphex Twin – get a baby [aphextwin.warp.net]
Aphex Twin – forgotten life path [aphextwin.warp.net]
Aphex Twin – dRuQks Prepared uN 1 [aphextwin.warp.net]
The Tuss – oslo 2 + 6.1 [aphextwin.warp.net]
Aphex Twin – End E2 [aphextwin.warp.net]
Luke Killen – 11-08-15 [DataDoor]
Luke Killen – DataDoor-14 [DataDoor]
Luke Killen – DataDoor-12 [DataDoor]
S O L I L O Q U A – The White Noise of Fuckery [The Black Hundred Bandcamp]
S O L I L O Q U A – A Collection of Archetypal Champagne Socialists [The Black Hundred Bandcamp]
Phonophani – A dark, sharp, heartless [Hubro]
Phonophani – Sirma, 1997 [Hubro]
Island People – Ember [Raster]
Island People – Distance 7 [Raster]
Fis & Rob Thorne – Wooden Lung [Subtext]
GIW – Morning Machine [ti-Records]
GIW – The Golden Calf [ti-Records]
arve henriksen – towards language [Rune Grammofon]
arve henriksen – groundswell [Rune Grammofon]
Supersilent – 6.2 (excerpt) [Rune Grammofon]

Listen again — ~195MB

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