Utility Fog

Sunday, 4th of October, 2020

It's a long weekend here in Sydney, and daylight savings has just started. It's a very electronic Utility Fog tonight, mostly music with beats, from Australia but also Egypt, the UK, Germany/Israel, the US and more.

LISTEN AGAIN to the glitches, percussion and the rest. Stream on demand @ FBi, podcast here.

friendships - come on in precious [Anterograde/Remote Control/Friendships Bandcamp]
friendships - Big Farm In The Sky [Remote Control/Friendships Bandcamp]
friendships - smokers area 19 [Anterograde/Remote Control/Friendships Bandcamp]
Four years after their stunning debut Nullarbor 1988-1989, Melbourne duo friendships - with music by Nick Brown and art by Misha Grace - have released their follow-up LP Fishtanks. Where the debut was driven by post-dubstep and grime beats (with the occasional jungle), the new one leans instead on booming acid techno. Where the debut drafted in various MCs on a number of tracks as well as Brown's rasping spoken word, the new one is characterised by frequent vocoded vocals. Like their debut, the dancefloor-ready beats are juxtaposed with ambient tracks, often featuring lovely meandering piano, and like the debut it's accompanied by a series of music videos - Misha Grace's visual art is a major part of the creative process. Fishtanks documents a person going through a loss of self - suitably enough for the COVID-19 era's warped passage of time. The album also features the same deadpan sense of humour as their debut - witness the disturbing ravey yelps through "smokers area 19".

Warm Stranger - Digital Sensuality [Warm Stranger Bandcamp]
After a pair of strangely disqueting EPs in 2016 and 2018, Melbourne jazz musician and electronic producer James Annesley has now released two EPs in 2020. The second Warm Stranger EP for this year is Chambers, and it moves further away from the disquieting industrial electronica of his earlier releases, with a melodic computer funk here, presaging a percussive that wafts through tonight's selections.

DJ Plead - Ess [Livity Sound/Bandcamp]
Jared Beeler was a fixture in Sydney's dance music scene for many years, as a writer, DJ, and producer in particular with the beloved Black Vanilla/BV. Now based in Melbourne/Naarm , as DJ Plead he's making a name internationally with music that incorporates percussion and drum patterns from his Lebanese background into UK club styles. Each track on his new Going For It EP for the great Bristol label Livity Sound is better than the last, culminating in the driving "Ess", held down by a mostly one-note bassline and coloured by syncopated synth stabs.

Loraine James - Marg ft. Tardast [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
After a bunch of Bandcamp Friday odds-and-ends specials from Loraine James, she returns to Hyperdub for October's Bandcamp Friday with the excellent Nothing EP. As usual it's intricate, un-pin-downable electronica with various guests (including HTRK's Jonnine Standish on one track). On this track her glitchy jitters and thundering low-end accompany Liverpool/Birmingham-based Iranian refugee MC Tardast, rapping in Farsi.

Abdullah Miniawy & HVAD - The Dirty Canes Lake [irsh Bandcamp]
ABADIR - XLR@T [irsh Bandcamp]
Egyptian DJ Rama and Egyptian electronic producer/genius ZULI started irsh at the start of the year as a way of hanging out with friends and playing music together (and sharing it online). Unfortunately COVID lockdowns put an end to the live version and even the in-person hangouts. So that means that all around the world we get to enjoy what I hope is the first of many compilations of amazing experimental electronic music from Egyptian musicians - this one with the jokey title did you mean: irish. Tonight we have two selections from the wealth of talent. Poet, actor and musician Abdullah Miniawy, who we've heard solo & in collaboration with German trio Carl Gari, appears here with the stuttering, limping percussive loops of half-Danish/half-Punjabi producer DJ HVAD. And Berlin-based Rami Abadir abandons his recent ambient excursions with a high-energy piece of percussion, breakbeats and ravey bass drops.

TMUX - Metropolis [False Industries/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based Israeli producer Yair Etziony has been known for idm, ambient and industrial sounds under his own name and as part of Faction. His latest is under a new moniker, TMUX, finding that being under lockdown in Berlin drew out his love of '90s jungle, drum'n'bass and hardcore (Alec Empire gets a dedication among other people). It's filtered through Etziony's particular approach, but it's nice hearing the jungle breaks splattered through the melodic electronica here.

Mark Pritchard - Be Like Water [MP Productions/Warp]
Last year Sydney-based UK ambient/techno/jungle/grime/electronic music legend Mark Pritchard put out a series of electronic tracks under the banner of MP Productions. They were meant to be monthly (or at least regular) things but that seemed to stop at some point; now Warp are set to announce the release of the first MP Productions EP, coming out on either the 23rd or 30th of October. Direct from the artist, the lovely, fluid, percussive grime track "Be Like Water" might briefly be an exclusive on this show!

Hanz - Advice Ad [Tri-Angle/Bandcamp]
Brandon Juhans - Dead Weight Y [Brandon Juhans Bandcamp]
Brandon Juhans - Floating in Traffic [Brandon Juhans Bandcamp]
In 2018, Brandon Juhans released a couple of insane, detailed, glitchy EPs on the now sadly defunct Tri-Angle Records label. After a few single tracks seeped out on his Bandcamp, we've now got his first album Essential Dread, released under his own name. Strange percussive edits, glitchy rhythmic sampling and odd collage are the order of the day. I liked hearing a tiny bit of Ravel's Valses Nobles et Sentimentales in there (Mvt VI since you asked).

dgoHn - Monsoon Mercenary [Analogical Force]
Back in April, Love Love Records released one of the best albums of the year in dgoHn's Undesignated Proximate. Fans of his mix of drumfunk and jungle are lucky to get another four tracks now, on the Monega EP couresy of Spanish label Analogical Force. Hard-hitting jungle breaks and warm subs combine with synth melodies and an unerring sense of rhythmic flow - early Dillinja if he went idm, early Squarepusher if he was less lo-fi and more dancefloor-friendly.

Rian Treanor - Debouncing [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Rian Treanor - ATAXIA B2 [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Rian Treanor - Metaplasm [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
For his second album on Planet µ, Rian Treanor continues his deconstruction of rave in all its colourful aspects. Indeed the title, File Under UK Metaplasm, might suggest a rearranging of UK dance music - but actually this is highly rhythmic stuff, rendered perhaps undanceable only because of its speed. It's got a lot in common with '90s drill'n'bass and idm, but with more emphasis on bass, and influences from Chicago footwork, UK garage and elsewhere. In the middle I played the Lollywood-sampling B2 from ATAXIA, which also appeared on his vinyl-only RAVEDITS from 2018.

Carl Stone - Pasjoli [Unseen Worlds/Bandcamp]
Carl Stone - Xiomara [Unseen Worlds/Bandcamp]
Active since the late '70s and early '80s, LA musician Carl Stone has seen a resurgence of interest in the last few years courtesy of two wonderful retrospectives on Unseen Worlds, demonstrating his use of granular synthesis to create live glitchy edits from all sorts of sound sources decades before we thought about glitch, drone or indeed "mashups". His new album Stolen Car was written between Los Angeles and Tokyo, and draws heavily on mashed-up pop music, with a surprising emphasis on something resembling beats - a subversive recontextualisation of pop perhaps. It's fun and weird, and fits strangely next to Rian Treanor's rave edits and dancefloor deconstructions.

Tom Hall - 1542 [Errorgrid/Bandcamp]
Tom Hall - Pre Code [Errorgrid/Bandcamp]
Carl Stone's weapon of choice has long been Max/MSP, so it's fitting that he's followed by Los Angeles-based Aussie Tom Hall, who has for some time beeen a Senior Content Developer for Cycling ’74, developers of Max/MSP and Jitter. Tom's been a staple on this show whenever he releases new music, either with the more noisy-based AXXONN or with his ambient sound-design under his own name. The sound-design is there on new album Bestowed Order on Chaos but it's in service of fidgety, often high-speed beats (except when it's not). High-tech future music.

John Wall - M - B [ version 1 ] [John Wall Bandcamp]
John Wall & Alex Rodgers - Wrongfoot the Servants & Darkshop [John Wall Bandcamp]
UK autodidact John Wall has worked since the early '90s in avant-garde electronic music, starting with plunderphonic sample-based creations, and then expanding his self-created musical language into glitchy electronic tones and careful use of silence. He's performed live improvisations with various British avant-garde and improv musicians, and also collaborated frequently with British poet Alex Rodgers; the latest release on his Bandcamp is a new pair of tracks with Rodgers' lockdown-inspired musings integrated into Wall's electronics with strange pitch-shifting and glitching. The music echoes the latest in Wall's styles, found on M - [ B ] from May this year, where warm synth chords and hover over decontextualised chopped hits of electronic beats - properly deconstructed club music.

Listen again — ~213MB

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