Utility Fog

Monday, 28th of June, 2021

Thanks to Gus McGrath for filling in last week while I was at Dark Mofo! Safely back in locked-down Sydney now, for a show focusing on low-key songwriting, cello & violin, hazy electronics and melodic percussion.

LISTEN AGAIN for the subtle sounds... Stream on demand at the FBi website, podcast here.

soccer Committee - Hazy [Morc Records/Morc Bandcamp/soccer Committee Bandcamp]
soccer Committee & machinefabriek - for i have none [Morc Records/Digitalis/soccer Committee Bandcamp/Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
soccer Committee & machinefabriek - high jacked drone 1 (by andrea belfi) [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
soccer Committee - Interstellar [Morc Records/Morc Bandcamp/soccer Committee Bandcamp]
soccer Committee - While you're in the world [Morc Records/Morc Bandcamp/soccer Committee Bandcamp]
I first discovered the Dutch musician Mariska Baars through her work with Rutger Zuydervelt Machinefabriek - drawn from 2008 is a masterclass in heart-stopping slowcore, glistening songwriting coupled with expert sound art, and the following year's redrawn collected magical reworkings from the cream of the crop from the time. Meanwhile, Baars and Zuydervelt formed an array of minimalist ensembles such as Piipstjilling, FEAN and many others - and in 2019 the pair released the 30-minute single track eau, a drifting sea of processed voice and electronics. But Baars' very low-key songwriting and performances really shine on their own, so it's an unexpected pleasure to have this solo album, Tell from the grass, a mere 14 years after her only other solo release!

Mabe Fratti - Que Me Hace Saber Esto [Unheard of Hope/Bandcamp]
Mabe Fratti - Creo que puedo hacer algo [Unheard of Hope/Tin Angel Bandcamp/Mabe Fratti Bandcamp]
Mabe Fratti - Hacia el Vacío [Unheard of Hope/Bandcamp]
It was wonderful to discover Mexico-based Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti last year. Her Pies sobra la tierra showcased beautiful, creative songs accompanied live with cello and electronics, and there's more of that to be found on her new album Será que ahora podremos entendernos ("Now we will be able to understand each other"). The album contemplates the idea of communication, and of how often people make understanding more difficult. Fratti's involvement in the Mexican improv & experimental scene resulted in many collaborations on this album, but the vision is all hers.

Laura Cannell & Kate Ellis - We Took Short Journeys [Brawl Records]
Laura Cannell & Kate Ellis - Follow me to the Lantern Marsh [Brawl Records]
Laura Cannell & Kate Ellis - In the Sun Shadows we Walked [Brawl Records]
More cello now, from English musician Kate Ellis, collaborating on a yearlong monthly series with the brilliant English folk musician Laura Cannell, who has recorded a number of stunning albums with overbowed violin, vocals and wind instruments in churches and other spaces in the UK. The monthly releases allow for a gradual exploration of what two string players can do, so we have a touching poem with cello from May's edition, exquisite close discords from February, and strings through bouncing delays from June. At the halfway mark now, this collaboration has produced music to savour.

Gabriella Smith & Gabriel Cabezas - Tarn [Bedroom Community/Bandcamp]
Gabriella Smith & Gabriel Cabezas - Bard of a Wasteland [Bedroom Community/Bandcamp]
Our next cellist is American musician Gabriel Cabezas, who's working here with the composer & signer Gabriella Smith, along with violist Nadia Sirota, who produced this album and contributed viola to some tracks. Lost Coast, released by Bedroom Community, collects the eponymous three-part work with related songs, some written during the terrifying 2019 wildfires which engulfed much of the west coast of the USA (and ended up overlapping with Australia's horrific 2019/2020 bushfire season) and others in the opposite weather in Iceland. There's a sense of nature's power in these works, but they're also strongly based in the physical nature of the wood, gut & hair of the cello and the singer's body. The cello & viola are often used as percussion, and even when bowed & plucked they are quite rhythmic in some passages - contrasted with simple but un-straightfoward harmonies on strings & voice. It's ultimately an intimate album that lets us find our place in a big, uncontrollable world.

Dau - Hangman's Cricket [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp]
UK musician Phil Self started his new project Dau as a space for creating ambient & drone works. About half feature, yes, the cello - layered in pulses or drawn out in drones. The loveliness of these pieces is accentuated by the inteleaved pieces for accordion or gentle percussion.

Seabuckthorn - Old Storms [Seabuckthorn Bandcamp]
Now we leave strings behind, except - do we? The guitar is a stringed instrument, and as Seabuckthorn Andy Cartwright has recorded some gorgeous fingerstyle works, but on And Spark And Singe we find him frequently bowing his resonator guitar - it's quite eerie, especially with the sliding notes in this track.

Passepartout Duo - Plainness [Passepartout Duo Bandcamp]
Passepartout Duo - Hue [Passepartout Duo Bandcamp]
Although Passepartout Duo are back in Europe now, the two musicians (pianist Nicoletta Favari and percussionist Christopher Salvito) spent some time in China in the last couple of years, and took their time travelling there, creating musical in a portable way in their travels, with homemade percussion and synths. The fruits of these adventures and residencies have been heard on their last few releases, and Daylighting (released on cassette by Chinese art label AnyOne) continues with the synth focus, with a subtle theme of duality & symmetry through the two musicians' performances. It's rich, surprising music disguised as something simpler than it is.

Gregory Paul Mineeff - Dissolution [Cosmic Leaf Records]
Gregory Paul Mineeff - What Wonderful Things [Cosmic Leaf Records]
After a series of singles over the last few months, Wollongong pianist & electronic musician Gregory Paul Mineeff returns with his new album Scrape Away The Snow, which covers his various interests from late-night piano to shimmering synths and tape effects. It's organic, genuine, expressive music.

Dear Hughes - Castle [Internet & Weed/Bandcamp]
Christian McKenna aka Christian Alexander keeps on adding new projects to his credits. End Christian apparently still exists, but The Brazilian Gentleman seems to be the main thing now - but there's also the excellent hip-hop duo C Trip A. Most of this seems miles away from the psych & metal he started in, and that's certainly true of Dear Hughes. Released on Internet & Weed, the label of frequent collaborator Alap Momin (once upon a time producer with industrial hip-hop legends dälek), Dear Hughes has Christian joining with fellow Brazilian Gent Mark Anthony, and pop singer River Hooks. It's pop with a psychedelic sheen, and I'm looking forward to what comes next.

Eli Keszler - Static Doesn’t Exist [LuckyMe/Bandcamp]
Eli Keszler - The Accident [LuckyMe/Bandcamp]
On new album Icons, New York percussionist Eli Keszler strays even further from the avant-garde world with an album that strangely fits well with the Glasgow label LuckyMe who are releasing it. The album makes a little more sense when you note that Keszler's worked with Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin on a few projects lately - there's a hazy neon street sheen to some of the ambience here. There are some of the skittery beats that made 2019's Stadium so incredible, but there are also nods at downtempo as well as free jazz. It's not an album that welcomes a single interpretation, but it's always fascinating.

Felicity Mangan - Double-headed emu [Mappa Bandcamp/Felicity Mangan Bandcamp]
Felicity Mangan - Cyborg bugs [Mappa Bandcamp/Felicity Mangan Bandcamp]
Creepy Crawly is the latest work in Australian artist Felicity Mangan's electronics powered by her archive of Australian wildlife sounds. Bugs and birds are corralled into glitchy IDM beats. I'm always pleased to find something new from Mangan, and missed this when Mappa released it on cassette last year.

Peon - No Code [Peon Bandcamp]
Melbourne duo Peon put out a few releases a decade or so ago, but since then there's only been one in 2019 (which I missed, although it's great!) They're a percussion duo, although both musicians also play electronics. Sam Price has been rather active with his live drums & electronics, and has of late been involved with new label echogene. Ronny Ferella plays in a variety of jazz acts. Together they create a pleasing clatter in just the way two drummers playing together should, along with bloops and blurts and what sound like sharp edits but could just be very clever playing. New EP The Fracture of Meaning has just been released.

Masayoshi Fujita - Stellar [Erased Tapes/Bandcamp]
el fog - Broken [FLAU/Bandcamp]
Masayoshi Fujita - Gaia [Erased Tapes/Bandcamp]
When I first discovered Japanese dub vibraphone musician Masayoshi Fujita he was releasing albums as "el fog" on UK electronic labels, and then on the excellent Japanese label FLAU. He was found by Erased Tapes some years back and has now released a number of albums under his own name. His core instrument of vibraphone is here replaced by the warmer tones of the marimba (wood rather than metal), and while there's not so much of the glitchy digidub vibes now, there's still lots of electronic processing through these tracks - who knew that distorted marimba would sound so cool?

Listen again — ~198MB

Sunday, 13th of June, 2021

Tonight was gearing up to be mostly jungle/drum'n'bass, but that's ended up about half the playlist, along with dub, electronic pop, electronic mutations from Iran & Baluchistan, and contemporary electronic & vocal composition...

LISTEN AGAIN to these vital sounds. Stream on demand via FBi, podcast here.

Aphir - Negative Space [Provenance/Bandcamp]
We start tonight with a new single from Becki Whitton's Aphir, her first release since last year's Republic of Paradise. This is perhaps more of a 3-minute pop song than the tracks on that fairly experimental album, but it's still dark and political, still dealing with the consequences of the pandemic and lockdowns. Here, Whitton takes aim at the structural inequalities which have only been exacerbated over the last 12+ months, as billionaires cement their power and the most needy are discarded.

Sote - Pipe Dreams Metempsychosis [30M Records/Bandcamp]
Ehsan Abdipour - Sorna Lorestan [30M Records/Bandcamp]
30M Records is a new label based in Hamburg but focused on experimental and contemporary music from Iran. Their second release is the excellent compilation This Is Tehran?, which answers its question through 10 tracks, ranging from solo kamancheh (a bowed instrument) to traditional instruments processed electronically, to classical composition, to trip-hop. It's fitting that the first track I play is from Ata Ebtekar aka Sote, who I've been a fan of for decades, and who's introduced the world to countless artists from Iran & the Persian diaspora through his Zabte Sote label. He contributes a modified version of a track from his Parallel Persia album. He's followed by traditional musician Ehsan Abdipour, with frantic melodies over percussion.

Hooshyar Khayam, Bamdad Afshar - RAZZ [30M Records/Bandcamp]
Hooshyar Khayam, Bamdad Afshar - Chār [30M Records/Bandcamp]
30M Records' first release came out last year. Musicians Hooshyar Khayam & Bamdad Afshar put together a special project called RAAZ in which they took traditional folk music from Baluchistan - between Iran, Pakistan & Afghanistan - and embedded it into various musical genres, from classical composition (with piano and string quartet) to glitchy, dubby hip-hop rhythms. It's inspired madness, fascinating and well done.

Mick Harris - Devonshire drive [Mick Harris Bandcamp]
Mick Harris - Ritec (recede v) [Bandcamp]
Mick Harris - Doors v 1 & 2 [Bandcamp]
The legendary Mick Harris is a hardworking musician from Birmingham who's had a huge impact on a number of musical scenes - starting with popularising, if not inventing, blast beats as an originator of grindcore as drummer in the original lineup of Napalm Death. His involvement with extreme metal didn't end there, but he soon became fascinated with samplers, looping and dub music, and formed Scorn with Nik Bullen, also ex-Napalm Death. Bullen left fairly early on, but Scorn continued to leave its mark with incredibly heavy, pared down industrial dub, and a strange sideways precursor to dubstep. Harris also made drum'n'bass as Quoit, among many other pseudonyms and collaborations. There's a new Scorn album just around the corner, but meanwhile he's revived another project, the HedNod sessions, to showcase pared-down dubby hip-hop. It's not that far from the Scorn material, but a little more casual, and a pleasure to listen to. He was broadcasting studio sessions on Twitter from last year, but I only just twigged to the Mick Harris Bandcamp, which now has HedNods Five to Eight, as well as a short but great Scorn radio/live session from the mid-'90s.

Skee Mask - Rio Dub [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
Skee Mask - Testo BC Mashup [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
Somewhat mysterious German producer Skee Mask now takes us from dub to jungle, on the German techno label Ilian Tape that likes mixing breakbeat & drum'n'bass/jungle feels into its sounds. Skee Mask is one of those contemporary producers whose productions nod towards jungle breaks while not generally quite breaking out of the techno world. It's a modern approach which shows nicely how dance music forms can evolve while acknowledging the past.

Andrea - AuxL [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
Andrea - Drumzzy [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
I discovered the Turin-based Andrea only fairly recently too - another Ilian Tape mainstay who does that post-Shed breakbeat techno thing extremely well. His 2020 album Ritorno had some lovely jungle-inflected vibes too it, and new EP Sktch mostly sticks to slightly lower BPM, but still with the breakbeats, and some hints at junglist skitter in there.

Kelly Lee Owens - Jeanette (Haider Remix) [Smalltown Supersound/Bandcamp]
Here's a surprising one. The beautiful album from Kelly Lee Owens last year, Inner Song, has been treated to a series of remixes recently, now collected, and snuck in at the end is this remix from the Berlin-based, Sheffield-raised Haider, who's swapped the grime/bassline house for blissful jungle for this remix.

Eusebeia - You Reap What You Sow [RuptureLDN/Bandcamp]
From a little bit further south, Eusebeia contributes the latest 12" to RuptureLDN's roster. It's classic jungle/drum'n'bass, with windswept pads, sub bass and mashed breaks.

Thugwidow - Invisible Shell of Energy [Sneaker Social Club]
Welsh producer Thugwidow has been extremely prolific since his earliest releases in 2017, rolling out perfect jungle tunes with a conscious hauntological bent. His new Post Modern EP brings him into the Sneaker Social Club fold with four classic '90s style jungle tracks.

Yaporigami - Non-Acid Classic #2 [The Collection Artaud/Bandcamp]
Yaporigami - Rhythm Study V [The Collection Artaud/Bandcamp]
Yaporigami - Gogh Did His Thing. I Will Do My Thing. [The Collection Artaud/Bandcamp]
The Berlin-based Japanese musician & engineer Yu Miyashita has many aliases, but may be best known as Yaporigami, under which he's been released on World's End Girlfriend's Virgin Babylon label among others. His own The Collection Artaud releases limited 12"s and occasional albums, mostly I believe of his own pseudonyms (I recently learnt that &nbsp is indeed him too). His latest album is IDMMXXI-L, following the earlier IDMMXX, and finds him destroying breakbeats, glitching melodies and generally creating mayhem. The song titles are somewhere between hilarious & profound, and musically it's a great continuation of the glitchy, complex, hyperactive experimental electronic music that Japan has produced over the last 2-3 decades.

Yunzero & Body Clock - Spuzzem [Lillerne Tapes]
Yunzero - I Didn't Smudge So Easily [Lillerne Tapes]
Yunzero & Body Clock - Ogre [Lillerne Tapes]
Yunzero & Body Clock - Wall of Junk [Lillerne Tapes]
Melbourne's Jim Sellars has been making some of the most compelling & strange music to come out of this country for the last few years, under a few aliases - most recently Yunzero. I discovered him on the excellent .jpeg Artefacts label, but some much earlier work on Nice Music prefigures this sound. Abstract beats and textures are sampled seemingly willy-nilly from YouTube and who knows where, with a shimmery sheen - words like "Smudge" and "Blurry" turn up in titles, and his latest is a Wall of Junk. His last album and this have found a home at the legendary Chicago label Lillerne Tapes, and for the new one he's joined by fellow Melbournite Body Clock. The beats, abstract as they may be, are less present here, with wavering ambient soundscapes the main event. It's as magical as ever in any case.

Pamela Z - He Says Yes (from Echo) [Neuma Records/Bandcamp]
Pamela Z - Scared Song (composed by Meredith Monk) [The House Foundation]
Pamela Z - Site Four (from Occupy) [Neuma Records/Bandcamp]
Finishing up with the groundbreaking African-American composer & performer Pamela Z, whose new album A Secret Code is only the third album in her repertoire, in a career spanning over 3 decades. Her works have appeared in performance and in installations and artworks. I heard Pamela Z's work a while ago on the compilation Monk Mix: remixes & reinterpretations of the music of Meredith Monk, and Monk's extraordinary vocal techniques certainly inform Z's approach in her own composition. Z's voice is deconstructed & layered using Max/MSP and other technologies - and she often does this in realtime with incredible skill using gestural interfaces, as seen in the video of "Typewriter" on the Bandcamp page. Her work has a lot of humour and a lot of depth - kudos to Neuma Records for bringing us this collection of work by an important artist.

Listen again — ~206MB

Sunday, 6th of June, 2021

There's a strong, ruff thread of jungle, drill'n'bass & idm through tonight's selections, shot through with dub and ambient.

LISTEN AGAIN with me via podcast here, or stream on demand from FBi.

Squarepusher - Tundra [Rephlex/Warp]
Squarepusher - Theme From Ernest Borgnine [Rephlex/Warp]
In 1996 jungle was just starting to morph into drum'n'bass, and the genre was itself only unevenly starting to spread around the world. Here in Sydney, I was discovering the sometimes scrappy "drill'n'bass" of "IDM" artists in some ways simultaneously with dancefloor jungle & drum'n'bass, and since Aphex Twin's experiments on the Hangable Auto Bulb EPs and Like Vibert's EPs as Plug were only limited vinyl releases, it was probably Squarepusher's Feed Me Weird Things that was one of the first places to encounter jungle's insane rhythmic complexity - and since drum'n'bass was taking over with less intensive, through-composed beat programming, it was easy to assume that this was the, you know, "intelligent" shit. Decades hence, various histories of the period plus YouTube and digitisation allow us to have a clearer picture of the timelines, but even so, the bedroom productions of these folks have a relentless creativity that mirrors that of jungle's originators and goes in unexpected directions - not least the melodic aspects. With Tom Jenkinson aka Squarepusher, no doubt the other characteristic twist is his showy but talented funk bass soloing which accompanied the sampler programming and windswept synth pads - almost all, at this early stage, primitively mixed in mono. Of course it didn't take long for Warp to sign Jenkinson after this first album on Aphex's own Rephlex, which he co-ran with Grant Wilson-Claridge, and Warp proceeded to collect some of Jenkinson's earliest 12"s on Spymania which preceeded this album. Now they've requisitioned that first album from the defunct Rephlex, and remastered it so that those lo-fi old mono mixes actually sound somewhat professional. The hazy nature of the recordings is part of their charm, though, and great remastering or no, that's still unavoidable here. The two bonus tracks, previously only available on a limited 12" and the Japanese CD, are pretty good - but it's the extensive liner notes which seal the deal here, detailing the instrumentation & recording techniques of each track, the recording date & location, and some notes about inspiration as well.

µ-Ziq - Slade Treacher [Analogical Force]
µ-Ziq - Sketty [Analogical Force]
Another essential character in the mid-'90s IDM & drill'n'bass scene was Mike Paradinas aka µ-Ziq, with two crunchy & melodic albums on Rephlex, a major label signing with wide-ranging remixes, and then of course the founding of his impeccable Planet µ label. It's been some 8 years since a proper new µ-Ziq release, and this year we're apparently getting two, with a Planet µ album on the way as well as this newie, Scurlage, which comes courtesy of Spanish IDM/acid label Analogical Force. Mike's music always had a strange otherworldly quality, drawing from his deep knowledge & love of rave genres but filtered through his particular odd way of producing music, with a great talent for melody and a penchant for juxtaposing beauty with harshness. There's junglish bits, acidish bits and hints of footwork, but most of all the tunes here are absolutely recognizable as the sound of µ-Ziq. What a joy.

CORIN - Enantiodromia [UIQ/Bandcamp]
CORIN - Rivalry [Bedouin Records/Bandcamp]
CORIN - Mnemosyne [UIQ/Bandcamp]
Filipina-Australian artist CORIN, once from Sydney and now based in Melbourne, goes from strength to strenth with international recognition courtesy of Bedouin Records' 2019 release of Manifest now extended to Lee Gamble's incredible UIQ records, who've just released her Enantiodromia album, which I think is her best yet. The dark, cyberpunk-inspired sounds of the previous album are further exercised with propulsive beats and eerie ambient tracks exploring the idea of impermanence, the observation of things gradually turning into their opposites. An album for the times, and another great step for this talented producer.

Loraine James - On the Lake Outside (feat. Baths) [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Loraine James - Self Doubt (Leaving the Club Early) [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Like many, I was blown away by Loraine James' debut album for Hyperdub in 2019, For You And I. I'd already heard the glitchy breaks of Button Mashing earlier that year on New York Haunted, and Sydney's Hence Therefore had alerted me to her talents when he remixed her "+44-Thinking-Of-You" the previous year. She's an anomaly and a product of the times - a young London-based queer black woman, who grew up listening to IDM and didn't quite fit into any scene. Her music blends IDM's experimentation and boundary-pushing with contemporary club sounds, r'n'b, jazz and more, and doesn't avoid directly addressing the personal toll of being queer and black. She also continues to collaborate widely, bringing in Antion alumnus Baths for some melodic indie vocals, as well as singing & speaking on a number of tracks herself.

Loraine James - I'm Feeling (w/Morwell) [Loraine James Bandcamp]
Morwell - Biosonics [Morwell Bandcamp]
Morwell - Disintegration [Morwell Bandcamp]
I mentioned first discovering via the +44-Thinking-Of-You Remixes in 2018, and as well as Hence Therefore, young UK producer Morwell contributed a mix. At the beginning of 2020, James released her second New Year's Substitution collection of collaborations, and Morwell again appeared - so when Max Morwell contacted me a couple of months back about a new release, his name rang faint bells in the back of my mind. His new album Souls is out on June 18th, and I cheekily played a couple of non-singles ahead of that date tonight. Its exploration of the tension between euphoria and collapse in club music (and its pandemic absence) leads to a collection of tracks influenced by UK's bass/hardcore continuum through house & techno, jungle, garage & dubstep, with disembodied, often incomprehensible vocals in amongst the beats. Although the subject matter is sometimes dark, it's a fine ride.

DJ C - Circe [Mashit/Bandcamp]
Electro Organic Sound System - Wacko Macko is Backo (DJ C's Babylon A Fall Mix) [Mashit/Bandcamp]
DJ C - Billy Jungle [Mashit/Bandcamp]
DJ C - Dread Bounce [Mashit/Bandcamp]
Also dedicated to fun on the club fringes is Chicago's Jake Trussell aka DJ C. Ten years after his last album was released, Jake is back with Do Radly, a genre-hopping club album for the home, a late-lockdown album for dancing to... And he's revived the Mashit label into the bargain, which is great as those brilliant 12"s of the 2003-2005 jungle revival finally get digital releases on Bandcamp! "Circe", the single from the new album, reworks a jungle-dub track from Trussell's 2000 album RootsWreck in his old Electro Organic Sound System incarnation, tightening the 11-minute "Magical Condition" into under 5 minutes of pulsing, dubby junglist fun. But Mashit released a series of eight superb 12"s between 2003 & 2005, mostly the work of DJ C with a few top-tier remixers, mostly in that "ragga jungle" style, appropriating dancehall & reggae classics as jungle workouts. 2004's "Wacko Macko is Backo" takes some of Trussell's soundtrack work (he's nothing if not versatile!) and weaves Sizzla & Capleton vocals amongst the synth strings & jungle breaks. From the same year, "Billy Jungle" adapts Shinehead's highly successful Michael Jackson cover into the perfect ragga jungle anthem.

Subtle - sinking pinks (Bracken loves Dax mix) [Bracken Bandcamp]
Odd Nosdam - Sisters (Bracken's second place edit) [Bracken Bandcamp]
Although his jungle escapades were never particularly of the "ragga" variety, Chris Adams of Hood released some of the most unhinged early breakcore and drill'n'bass as Downpour, and revived the alias for some Bandcamp EPs from 2014 to 2017. Now he's brought his other solo alias Bracken to Bandcamp, collecting most of the albums & EPs barring a few deep cuts, and also compiling many of his brilliant remixes on Selected Remixes - with a twist, because many of tracks here are edits. They're also rather nicely remastered, so it's easily worth the price of entry. For instance the Subtle rework, dedicated to their keyboard player & beatmaker Dax Pierson (who was rendered quadriplegic in a touring van accident but continues to make creative music), is about a minute longer than the original and sounds way better. Some others are shortened, including the edit of his phenomenal remix of Odd Nosdam's "Sisters", 17 and a half minutes in its original glory but also gorgeous clocking in at 7 minutes here.

Gantz - FATALIST [Gantz Bandcamp]
Turkish dubstep producer Gantz, known for releases on Deep Medi, Exit Records and others, continues to release EPs on his own Bandcamp, the latest being the KİLL GANTZ EP. As usual genre is at most a guideline, with subdued creepiness and cinematic evocation the order of the day, even while the the beats & bass move the body.

Other Joe Quartet - Lavender Pill (Live at Colour) [Music Company/Bandcamp]
Megan Alice Clune - Cut Space [Music Company/Bandcamp]
Melbourne's Music Company continue their compilation series with Vector Fields Vol. 3. It feels like I was sent this ages ago, but it was actually only a month ago that I played a couple of tracks. These comps are always of the highest quality though, so here's two more now that it's out. Joe Buchan aka Other Joe, who also mastered the album and runs the .jpeg Artefacts label, contributes a live performance by his quartet, a gorgeous bit of jazzy, electronic postrock. And Sydney's Megan Alice Clune brings glitchy vocal drones, peaceful yet slightly unsettling.

Listen again — ~206MB