a wholly owned subsiduary of
Frogworth Corp
raven
experimental electronica
FourPlay
electric string quartet

Utility Fog


Your weekly fix of postfolkrocktronica, dronenoise, power ambient, post-everything improv... and more?
Sunday nights from 9 to 11pm on FBi Radio, 94.5 FM in Sydney, Australia.
LISTEN ONLINE now!
Click here to find the start time for the show at your location!

{Hey! Sign up to Utilityfoglet and get playlists emailed to you after each show!}
Please Like us on Facebook! Here it is: Utility Fog on Facebook

Playlists are listed with artist name first, then track title and (remixer), then [record label]. Enjoy the links.

Monday, 30th of August, 2021

Playlist 29.08.21 (12:38 am)

Heavy bass music of various sorts, and then "post-classical" music of various sorts. Also a number of premieres tonight!

LISTEN AGAIN, what are you waiting for? Stream on demand at FBi. Podcast here. Options.

The Bug - War (feat. Nazamba) [Ninja Tune/Bandcamp]
The Bug ft. Flowdan - Jah War (Loefah Remix) [Ninja Tune]
The Bug - Black Wasp feat. Liz Harris of Grouper [Ninja Tune/Bandcamp]
The Bug Ft Dis Fig - Destroy Me [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Moor Mother x Zonal - On The Range [Adult Swim Singles 2018-2019]
The Bug - Vexed (feat. Moor Mother) [Ninja Tune/Bandcamp]
The Bug - The Missing (feat. Roger Robinson) [Ninja Tune/Bandcamp]
It's weird really to think that it's been so long since the last "album proper" from The Bug. Kevin Martin has been plenty busy, whether the re-formed duo with Justin K Broadrick (previously Techno Animal, now Zonal), various singles, lysergic barely-there ambient under his own name, or the stunning "narco-dancehall" album In Blue last year with Dis Fig. And yet, the last album just as The Bug was 2014's Angels & Devils - probably one of my favourite albums of all time. Big call, especially because 2008's London Zoo is so crammed with masterpieces of dubstep-meets-grime, including "Skeng" with Roll Deep's Flowdan and Killa P, and "Jah War" with Flowdan - and if the dubstep connection wasn't clear in the music, Loefah's remix here is a masterpiece of the genre (in 2007, just as things were getting big). The new Bug album Fire is described as the third in a trilogy of albums, following these two - all released by Ninja Tune, and all featuring low-end pressure and powerful vocalists. While I didn't venture back past London Zoo to the 2003 album Pressure, released on Tigerbeat6 and Rephlex, the abrasive dancehall found therein is certainly a precursor to this trilogy, as was so much of Martin's work through the '90s (seek out the two massive Macro Dub Infection compilations he curated for Virgin Records). The "Angels" side of Angels & Devils allowed for some vocal contributions aside from MCs, and two gorgeous tracks were created with Liz Harris from Grouper - "Black Wasp" appearing on the Exit EP later the same year. But mostly Fire is about hard-hitting MCs, including many of Martin's longtime collaborators. Jamaican poet Nazamba delivers one of the scariest contributions with "War", while Moor Mother is in gutteral form on "Vexed" (after a side-long collaboration with Martin & Broadrick on the Zonal album in 2019). But the album ends with a stunning poem by Martin's King Midas Sound compadre Roger Robinson, giving the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster a heartbreaking send-off.

My Disco - StVO [Heavy Machinery Records]
Like many of Heavy Machinery's releases for the latter part of this year, My Disco are part of the Flash Forward festival taking part in the laneways of Melbourne - as well as online. The Melbourne band have made a number of sharp left turns in their career, after some years making angularly rhythmic post-punk/math rock and then shifting gears into bleak industrial ambient & percussion for 2019's Environment. That's the context for StVO, the first single - premiered tonight - from Alter Schwede, their new album to be released in late November. Recorded at andereBaustelle by studio owner (and Einstürzende Neubauten member) Boris Wilsdorf, the track was to be instrumental, but ended up featuring Wilsdorf reading from the Berlin Straßenverkehrsordnung (Road Traffic Regulations) because I guess it sounds cool? And let's be clear, it sounds menacing in amongst the clattering sounds of metal on metal and rumbling bass. But it's clearly also humourous, as is titling their album Alter Schwede, an expression of surprise in German, which literally means "old Swede"! Can't wait to hear more...

Mitchell Elliott - Kurosawa Daydream [Mitchell Elliott/Bandcamp]
Next up, some sound-painting from Newcastle's Mitchell Elliott, inspired by the Dream movies of Akira Kurosawa. Elliott comes from a proud tradition of noise music from Newcastle, feeding threads of melody (including vocals from Sydney's Maira Kei) and field recordings along with the harsh static. The two other tracks are longer but equally evocative.

Minder - Space [Sneaker Social Club]
The enigmatic Minder has very little info about them online, but they've just dropped a massive cache of sounds on Sneaker Social Club - a double cassette reaching to over 100 minutes. In keeping with SSC's love of UK hardcore, Telepathy is jungle techno, but it's just not just an early '90s breakbeat throwback. There are ragga, hip-hop and diva samples all over this, and breaks a-plenty, but also strange rhythmic treatments and structures befitting a mixtape, and elevating this into an intriguing modernisation of the sound. Worth diving into.

Andy Odysee - Ruthless (In Purpose):Insidious (In Design) [Odysee Recordings/Bandcamp]
Andy Odysee - Like Jazz [Odysee Recordings/Bandcamp]
Andy Baddaley joined Tilla Kemal aka Mirage as partner in drum'n'bass label Odysee Recordings in 1999, and made some records as Cloaking Device. He went to school with Jim Baker of Source Direct and it's that Photek/Source Direct sound that permeates his music as Andy Odysee - complex, fine-tooled beats after jungle but before tech step's simplistic aggression. The new Ruthless:Insidious EP is third in a trilogy of EPs Baddaley has released in the last couple of years on Odysee Recordings. They're excellent, and one I often return to is "Like Jazz" from the first of these, 2019's Cause Damage EP. Delicious.

Arrom - Can't Ask This [Provenance Records]
Another premiere tonight comes from Arrom, aka Melbourne's Melissa Vallence. Vallence has spent time singing in choirs, but her classically-trained voice increasingly takes the back seat - heavily processed here - to techno beats. New single "Can't Ask This" isn't exactly a party banger, with sub-bass drones and churning distorted beats accompanying chopped up, electronically harmonised vocal lines, but it's still got an infectious rhythm and uncanny beauty to it.

Gudrun Gut + Mabe Fratti - El Cielo Responde [Umor Rex/Bandcamp]
Berlin producer Gudrun Gut began her career in the 1980s in the same scene as Einstürzende Neubauten, but is known well-known as an electronic music pioneer herself and through her Monika Enterprise - especially supporting female musicians. Young Mexico-based Guatemalan musician Mabe Fratti grew up learning cello, and incorporates it into her music along with synths and vocals - I've played her a lot on this show too. It's lovely hearing these two very different musicians together. Let's Talk About the Weather would be how they began their online conversations, with Gut in a cold German town and Fratti in the Mexican heat. Mexican label Umor Rex also straddles the globe, with its physical distribution and promo coming via Morr Music in Germany, so they are the perfect home for this uncompromising music. At times it's rhythmic, at other times slipperily ambient, with field recordings, spoken word and Fratti's singing all combining to evoke a changing world.

Yann Tiersen - Ar Maner Kozh [Mute Records/Bandcamp]
Yann Tiersen - Poull Bojer [Mute Records/Bandcamp]
It's unfair that to a lot of the world, Yann Tiersen is synonymous with the twinkly prettiness of his soundtrack to the sweet French film Amelie. He's known and loved in France (and Europe and to those who know the world over) also for indie rock, chanson and postrock, but he does do that post-classical piano thing really well, as evidenced by new album Kerber, part of a more ambient turn of late. It's a very intimate album, and the glitchy electronics that envelop the piano and other instruments at times are welcome. There are jazzy drums in "Poull Bojer", but mostly the album focuses on piano, hints of strings, and these electronic effects. It's often quite lovely but simple quasi-classical fare, but at times the French sentimental melancholy surfaces, as with "Ar Maner Kozh". Inspired by living on the remote island of Ushant, off the north-west tip of France (hence the strangely-spelled track titles), the album soundtracks a film that you can watch online now.

Rakhi Singh - Dhura [Bedroom Community/Bandcamp]
Vessel - Red Sex (Re-Strung, feat. Rakhi Singh) [qu junctions Bandcamp]
Welsh/Indian violinist Rakhi Singh straddles not only the heritage of her background, but also the English cities of London and Manchester. She is Music Director of contemporary ensemble Manchester Collective, who record for Bedroom Community, but her name jumped out at me immediately due to a collaboration last year with Bristol's Seb Gainsborough aka Vessel, reworking his bendy, twisted "Red Sex" with virtuoso violin and keeping the rattling rhythms. But even this excellent pedigree didn't prepare me for the brilliance of the three-track Quarry EP released by Bedroom Community. Singh's violin is indeed virtuosic, but she is happy to take multi-tracked trills and short phrases and chop them into industrial rhythms, or take time with strung-out violin and vocal drones, with exquisite avant-garde harmonisation. Don't let this one slip you by.

Gaspar Claus - 2359 [InFiné/Les Disques du Festival Permanent/Bandcamp]
Gaspar Claus - Un Rivage [InFiné/Les Disques du Festival Permanent/Bandcamp]
French cellist Gaspar Claus has featured on these playlists quite a lot, in collaboration with people like Aidan Baker, Third Eye Foundation, Efterklang's Casper Clausen and many excellent releases on his label Les Disques du Festival Permanent. So it's surprising that InFiné Music refer to new album Tancade (released on September 10th) as his debut solo album. Technically I would say that's 2013's Jo Ha Kyū, but the Japanese-inspired contemporary composition therein is ensemble music, and Tancade is very much Claus solo. Claus' cello is used in every way possible, multi-tracked for its expressive qualities, but also plucking basslines and played percussively. Often the music sounds like a live ensemble of cellists, but "2359" (one minute to midnight) is constructed from painstaking edits into impossible-to-perform arpeggios, a skittery IDM of acoustic cello. "Un Rivage" takes us to the shoreline, perhaps spying the naked men on the beach who adorn the album's cover, with strummed chords and fluttery multi-tracked melody. It's surprising to hear music so nakedly sentimental from Claus, but it's no less avant-garde for that. Brilliant work.

Laura Cannell, Kate Ellis, Rhodri Davies & Stewart Lee - Spend The Day With Me [Brawl Records]
English violinist Laura Cannell and cellist Kate Ellis continue their monthly releases for 2021 with AUGUST SOUNDS, joined this time by two guests: Rhodri Davies on the Welsh bray harp, which sounds strangely sitar-like - and Stewart Lee, who reads the moving poem "Spend The Day With Me". This is contemporary acoustic music with deep roots in the strangeness of English folk.

Lucy Railton & Kit Downes - Lazuli [SN Variations/Bandcamp]
And one more cellist to finish the show off - Lucy Railton is comfortable performing contemporary composition, but also created an incredible electro-acoustic work at Ina GRM in 2019 called Forma, which featured Kit Downes on organ. Downes and Railton have been collaborating for some 13 years now, so it's no wonder their improvisations on Subaerial are bewitchingly, instinctively organic. At times it's like naturally-occurring contemporary composition - not-quite tonal melodies in counterpoint with each other. Elsewhere it's imperceptibly mutating, discordant drone, aching sighs and yowls from the deep. It's unlikely you'll hear anything else quite like this this year.

Listen again — ~201MB


Comments Off on Playlist 29.08.21

Monday, 23rd of August, 2021

Playlist 22.08.21 (1:05 am)

Tonight we alternate between complex beats, sweeping soundscapes and dizzying tape manipulations.

LISTEN AGAIN for heck's sake! Stream on demand via FBi, podcast here.

Sandpit Alias - Gawl Mountain [Empirical Intrigue]
Sandpit Alias - New Venice [Empirical Intrigue]
Aidan Psaltis, originally from Sydney but now based in Melbourne, releases his first album of his own productions on Sydney's Empirical Intrigue, mystery-laden electronic music as of the label's general aesthetic. Psaltis DJs as Sandpit Alias, and that anagrammatic artist name is what he's used for his anagrammatic album Spinal Data, with warm synthesiser productions and beats reminiscent of the best '90s bedroom productions. Well worth your time.

Lara Sarkissian - BTWN Earth n Sky (aya Grounded dub) [All Centre]
Jennifer Walton ft. BFTT - Flash On (Breaks Mix) [All Centre]
London label All Centre celebrate their 3rd anniversary with a compilation of collaborations showcasing their gregarious left-of-centre club tendencies. San Francisco-based Armenian producer Lara Sarkissian appears here remixed by Manchester's aya (herself recently signed to Hyperdub!) with dubby 4/4 with intricate beats spinning off it, while Jennifer Walton reprises her single with Manchester's BFTT, accelerating into jungle bliss.

Max Cooper - Penrose Tiling (Max Cooper Remix) [Mesh]
Max Cooper - Penrose Tiling 3D [Mesh]
Max Cooper - Movement Maps ft. Samad Khan [Mesh]
Max Cooper ft. Alison Moyet - Scalar (HAAi Remix) [Mesh]
Keeping it skittery, we join London's Max Cooper in the IDM/drill'n'bassy side of his productions, with a self-remix from his new Yearning for the Infinite Remixed collection. Cooper is known for visually lush multimedia works exploring the connections between science & art, with Penrose Tiling referring to the never-repeating but surface-covering mathematical marvel discovered by Roger Penrose - so the intricate beats are a nice reference. It was a favourite of mine from the original Yearning for the Infinite, and I also loved the immersive binaural rework from the 3D Reworks EP Cooper released last year. When listening through these new remixes I realised I never played anything from Cooper's Maps EP from earlier this year either - a collection of tracks adapted from a soundtrack to a movie of a dance work, featuring vocals from Indian classical singer Samad Khan. It's beautiful work (as is the original video!)
The new remixes mostly veer more to the club side, and notably feature a reworking of another album favourite by London-based Australian DJ HAAi, aka Teneil Throssell, originally from Karaatha in WA.

Maarja Nuut - on vaja_in need (feat. Nicolas Stocker) [Maarja Nuut Bandcamp]
Maarja Nuut - subota [Maarja Nuut Bandcamp]
Maarja Nuut - jojobell (feat. Nicolas Stocker) [Maarja Nuut Bandcamp]
My first encounter with Estonian musician Maarja Nuut was a performance for Sydney Festival of Estonian folk music and storytelling performed with violin and voice. Not long afterwards, she released an incredible album with fellow Estonian Ruum on Fat Cat's 130701 offshoot that embedded traditional Estonian music in contemporary beats & electronics. A second Maarja Nuut & Ruum album followed, along with an experimental album of duets with Sun Araw, and now we get to hear Maarja on her own, but very far from the acoustic folk storyteller... Hinged is a play on words, meaning in Estonian "departed spirits and soul", and this album sees Nuut moving to her grandmother's old farm and finding herself among generations of life possessions and creations, while musically she almost discards the violin entirely, and even leaves the vocals behind on many tracks, creating instead layered pieces from her Eurorack modular setup - joined on a few tracks by the renowned Swiss jazz drummer Nicolas Stocker. Stocker inserts himself effortlessly into the tracks her appears on, but is supporting a rhythmic bass that's already present in Nuut's idiosyncratic constructions, as we can hear on the purely solo tracks. There are hints of techniques from electronic dance music, but Nuut's grounding in her native Estonian tradition gifts the music with a syncopating lope, quite unconcerned with the concept of bar lines. There are still gorgeous passages of Eastern European vocal harmonies and melodies on an album that's challenging but immensely rewarding.

Timothy Fairless - Half Life [Timothy Fairless Bandcamp]
Timothy Fairless - Common Electric Glare [Timothy Fairless Bandcamp]
Meanjin/Brisbane based composer Timothy Fairless has composed soundtracks and installations, and released a number of EPs before this new album, Common Electric Glare, which is released this coming Friday. A document of our times, it began as a response to the thinning of our world through our dependence on technology, and became a personal reflection of the composer's own experiences - as with all great music. It's instrumental music that draws much from drone and dark ambient, but it's also very expressive, and anything but static. There are beautiful passages where electronics give way to prepared piano, plucked and bowed violin and other physical sound sources, there are shimmering pulsating passages just this side of techno, and seemingly there are anguished vocals just on the edge of perception. I'm reminded of Ben Frost's early albums for Bedroom Community, and that's high praise.

Jeremy Young - Frequenza Bianca (T. Gowdy remix) [Jeremy Young Bandcamp]
Jeremy Young - Suprabhatan Heterodyne [Silken Tofu/MEG/Jeremy Young Bandcamp]
Jeremy Young - Iroquois Lullaby [Silken Tofu/MEG/Jeremy Young Bandcamp]
Jeremy Young - Trafic (with Tomonari Nishikawa) [Thirsty Leaves Music/Jeremy Young Bandcamp]
Jeremy Young - Trafic (Machinefabriek remix) [Jeremy Young Bandcamp]
I've come across Montréal sound-artist Jeremy Young on a number of collaborations, but had failed to investigate his solo work until recently, to my shame! He has just released a remix EP, Amaro Extensions, in which tracks from this year's earlier album Amaro are reworked by some wonderful musicians from Montréal and beyond, including Constellation artist T. Gowdy and a familiar face 'round here, Machinefabriek. The earlier album is also a set of collaborations, in which Young uses a custom-made set of three hand-tuned oscillators plus found objects and surfaces as rhythmic foundations, tapes and signal processing, while his guests sometimes contribute voices or traditional instruments, and sometimes what you might call "featured found sounds". Meanwhile, back in 2017 Young created a spell-binding album entitled The Poetics of Time-Space out of the audio archive of Musée d'ethnographie in Geneva. The hiss and crackle of the old media from these recordings is treated equally with the sounds therein, but it's far from academic - there's humour here, and sensitive settings of ethnographic recordings (for all the dodgy colonial baggage that comes with such things). Also recommended is the 14-minute "Elegy in C Minor for the Victims of Police Brutality", produced in the wake of George Floyd's murder, with all proceeds to the Bail Project.

Panoptique Electrical - A Lost Love (Othello, 2014) [Panoptique Electrical Bandcamp]
Panoptique Electrical - Darkness Falls (topia, 2018) [Panoptique Electrical Bandcamp]
Adelaide's Jason Sweeney has over 2 decades of experience making a wide variety of music, including some of the best Australian IDM of the late '90s with Pretty Boy Crossover, indie as Simpático, varieties of indietronica and post-classical and drone. For many years much of his solo work has appeared as Panoptique Electrical, and it's under that name that he's now releasing a major 2LP set of archival work for theatre, documentaries, installations and the like called Decades (2001-2021). Over 31 tracks there are field recordings hazing into drone and noise, piano and slow strings, and sparsely strung-out billowing tones... It's not so much a summation of a career so far as an addition, but it's certainly a rich new addition.

Loose-y Crunché - It s Got a Groove (Industrial Murk) [Oxtail Recordings]
Talbert Anthony - Kotokymomaster 20210428 [Oxtail Recordings]
Here's something I should have played a week or two ago, but neglected because I have a raven track on it - oops! Mike Nigro has run cassette label Oxtail Recordings since before he arrived in Australia a couple of years ago, but now that he's been here for a while he decided to compile a compilation of local experimental & ambient artists. This cassette/digital release Undercurrents is an impressive document of part of the local scene, with electronic drones, layered vocals, murky industrial techno (see Lucy Cliché as Loose-y Crunché), live processing (e.g. my own cello piece), and more - I particularly loved the processed guitar of Talbert Anthony, who was probably responsible for introducing me & Mike in the first place. With all proceeds going to Change The Record, it's a no-brainer.

Listen again — ~204MB


Comments Off on Playlist 22.08.21

Monday, 16th of August, 2021

Playlist 15.08.21 (12:41 am)

A ride through the borderlands tonight, with much music fitting the Utility Fog Charter of music that blurs genre - from indietronica to glitched, mashed soundtrack cues to African electronica, futuristic footwork and more...

LISTEN AGAIN, live life on the edge! Podcast here, stream on demand there.

Dntel - Moonlight [Morr Music/Bandcamp/les albums claus/Bandcamp]
James Figurine - Apologies [Monika Enterprise]
Dntel - Anywhere Anyone feat. Mia Doi Todd [Plug Research/Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
Dntel - Fall In Love [Morr Music/Bandcamp/les albums claus/Bandcamp]
Dntel - I made something [Morr Music/Bandcamp/les albums claus/Bandcamp]
The music of Jimmy Tamborello, particularly as Dntel, is without doubt one of the instigators of what I wanted Utility Fog to be when it started. Electronic at its core, influenced by IDM as well as electronic pop, Dntel became a vehicle for something transcendent on the 2001 album Life Is Full Of Possibilities, when Tamborello brought in singers & other musicians from the indie music scene, creating hazy, granulated floating soundscapes and deconstructed songs among the glitched beats. Tamborello's an inveterate fan himself - presenting Dying Songs on LA's dublab - and that comes out in his approach to music, I think. This year he's released two Dntel albums, and they're both wonderful. The second, Away, is just released by Belgian label/gallery les ateliers claus, and out in a couple of weeks from Morr Music. It's his paean to pop, while March's The Seas Trees See showcased his more introspective, experimental & quiet side. Both albums, though, feature vocals, always highly processed (see tonight's gorgeous "Fall In Love" from that earlier one) - and on Away it's notable that although the soft-voiced vocals sound female, they are all sung by Tamborello, using auto-tune and other techniques to create a cyborg idoru version of himself. It's wonderful of course. We also heard a piece of more straightforward pop from 2006's Mistake Mistake Mistake Mistake, released under the name James Figurine, and from that 2001 album Life Is Full Of Possibilities we heard the exquisite "Anywhere Anyone" introducing the brilliant LA singer/songwriter Mia Doi Todd.

Wolfgang Mitterer - temp [col legno]
Wolfgang Mitterer - temptation [col legno]
Wolfgang Mitterer - tempo [col legno]
Wolfgang Mitterer - tempt [col legno]
Austrian composer & musician Wolfgang Mitterer writes music for orchestras, operas, and the stage, but is also a composer for the screen. His new album temp tracks is a postmodernist take on the standard practice in filmmaking of using "temp tracks" while editing the work, standing in for the final music. Across 37 tracks, some short cues and some longer, he deconstructs the idea of film music (and presumably some of his own work), into granulated, degraded, glitched samples - and surprisingly often with IDMish flittery beats. There are the hissing ghosts of orchestras, flickers of vocals operatic and international, and even scattered hints of hip-hop on "tempt". The closest thing I can think of are the glitched easy listening miniatures of Curd Duca. It's really highly enjoyable & touching, and surprisingly cohesive despite the number of tracks. Highly recommended.

STILL - Nkwaata (feat. Blaq Bandana) [PAN/Bandcamp]
STILL - Rough Rider [PAN/Bandcamp]
STILL feat. Omutaba - Rollacosta (feat. Swordman Kitala) [PAN/Bandcamp]
STILL - Ahlam Wa Ish السماء هي الحد (feat. Winnie Lado) [PAN/Bandcamp]
Milan artist Simone Trabucchi, as well as running the Hundebiss label, started the project STILL in 2017 with an album on PAN featuring a variety of African-Italian vocalists and exploring the connections between Italy, Jamaica and Africa with high-tech dancehall productions. Unfortunately at the time the vocalists weren't credited, although you can find the credits on Bandcamp now. Far better this time, the new STILL album KIKKOMANDO is in fact credited as a "V/A" release, treated as a mixtape, and all tracks are collaborations. The music isn't far from the template of labels like Hakuna Kulala, who are co-releasing this album: created in a temporary studio in Kampala, Trabucchi invited many Ugandan musicians and others based in Kampala to work on tracks with him. Among others there's rap storytelling from Kampala's Blaq Bandana, there's the celebrated, lively Swordman Kitala, and two appearances from southern Sudanese singer Winnie Lado, rapping once in English and delivering beautiful spoken word in Arabic. Trabucchi's varied productions support these vocalists very well, a highly worth release.

Jana Rush - Drivin Me Insane (feat. Nancy Fortune) [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Jana Rush - Frenetic Snare [Objects Limited]
Jana Rush - Mynd Fuc [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
In 2017, Lara Rix-Martin's Objects Limited released an album from Chicago footwork producer Jana Rush, brilliant productions full of bass energy and the typical skittering drum machines and chopped vocal samples of the genre (even incorporating junglist amen breaks on the last track, "Frenetic Snare"). Rush was involved with the Tek Life crew back in the '90s, but left music for some time and is widely skilled - paramedic, firefighter, chemical engineer, CT scan technologist! Even more than her previous work, Painful Enlightenment (now released on Rix-Martin's partner's Planet µ label) expresses her experiences as a queer woman, and stretches footwork to its very limits. A genre that's always been aimed at more fleet-footed dancers, footwork here is pushed into all sorts of strange shapes, so that the drums on "Mynd Fuc" are almost more a sonic effect than a beat, clattering around a mournful slow piano fragment; elsewhere the vowels from a sample of a woman saying "Drivin Me Insane" are stretched and repeated over a slower beat in a collaboration with French producer Nancy Fortune. Coming straight from the core of the scene, this should be a landmark for the genre.

MF DOOM - Gazzillion Ear (Thom Yorke Man on Fire Remix) [Lex Records/Bandcamp]
Back in 2010, Lex Records released the Dilla-produced "Gazzillion Ear" as a single from MF DOOM's 2009 album Born Like This, with a number of remixes including one from Thom Yorke. Lex are currently celebrating their 20th anniversary, and as part of that they're unearthing a number of unheard gems from their history (a second Boards of Canada Nextmen remix appeared recently too). So it turns out Thom Yorke submitted two remixes, and the one we heard 11 years ago was the "Monkey Hustle Remix". Now we get to hear the "Man on Fire" remix, quite radically different from the other, with chaotic noise and a buried groove, very comfortably accompanying the late DOOM's lyrical flow.

ØNNΔ - ACID CROSSING (Reesepushkin Remix) [Deep Scan]
A few months ago, Sydney's Deep Scan released a split EP from AIR GOD and the mysterious ØNNΔ, both contributing dirty 4/4 grooves. This coming Friday a remix EP will appear, steering those tracks into broken-beat territory. Vancouver/Sydney artist Reesepushkin here keeps the bass pressure from ØNNΔ's original "ACID CROSSING", but chops the groove and pads, and inserts vocal gasps throughout.

Match Fixer - Rubble 4 [Match Fixer Bandcamp]
Match Fixer - Smile [Match Fixer Bandcamp]
Melbourne's Andrew Cowie produced a number releases as Angel Eyes some years ago, for labels like Bedroom Suck and Not Not Fun. More recently he's been Match Fixer, with an EP on Nice Music and a few subsequent releases on his own Bandcamp. 2018's Rubble explored IDM & drill'n'bass, but new 2-track single Smile floats in an ambient dub space, with a slow pulse and breathy textures over disquieting drones.

Kristen Gallerneaux - Dressing A Skin [Shadow World]
I discovered Detroi-based artist Kristen Gallerneaux on The Leaf Library's Object Ten compilation for their Objects Forever label earlier this year. A folklorist, film-maker, writer and musician, Gallerneaux has just released her album Strung Figures through Shadow World - the title refers to a work by Caroline Furness Jayne about Cat's Cradles and the like - looping string games played on the hands - but also references that strung out feeling of lockdown & pandemic exhaustion. The craft focus also connects to Gallerneaux's Native family-members, Navajo Nation people who were particularly badly affected by COVID - something which hits home at the moment, as we're learning of the seemingly inevitable, awful & dangerous lag in providing vaccinations to the Indigenous population of western NSW and the rest of the country. Gallerneaux's music inhabits a fuzzy, dub-inflected techno world with arcane industrial influences, handmade found-sound samples, disembodied voices and flittering drum machines. An immersive listen.

Dasdreieck - Tearing Paper [Dasdreieck Bandcamp]
Dasdreieck - Timing [Dasdreieck Bandcamp]
Sydney's Josh O'Connell made generative music as Die Erzeugung and now produces electronica as Dasdreieck. His latest album, Yaspir draws on '90s IDM. Melodic drum'n'bass track "Tearing Paper" features an unidentified English voice speaking eloquently about depression; it's a well-chosen speech. And on "Timing" a bass-driven deep house accompanies arpeggiating patterns that wear their Plaid influence on their sleeve. It's skillfully produced stuff that should appeal to all all fans of this kind of electronica.

JK FLESH vs ECHOLOGIST - Fleshology 0202 B [JK Flesh Bandcamp]
Second volume of murky dub techno by Justin K Broadrick working under his JK Flesh alias with Brendon Moeller aka Echologist. Two tracks are harsher, faster acid techno as of much of the recent JK Flesh stuff, and the other two are much more spaced out dubby numbers like this one.

Eek - Echo Siren, La Return [Anterograde/Bandcamp]
Eek - We're Fucked [Anterograde/Bandcamp]
The Melbourne-based Hong Kong artist Eek provides much of the incredible artwork for Melbourne's Anterograde label. Their hallucinatory, lush computer artwork can be seen at their Instagram. For the album Worms Can Talk, the artist sourced huge amounts of audio from YouTube videos, most of which are credited in a massive list on the Bandcamp page. The result, incredibly enough produced & mixed in iMovie, sounds like the outer limits of contemporary industrial techno, albeit mostly without beats - collaged drones and fragmented samples, shuddering surges of bass and all. It's astonishing and at times overwhelming, an album for the times.

Klara Lewis & Peder Mannerfelt - My Clementine Is Making Paella Tonight [Trilogy Tapes]
Klara Lewis & Peder Mannerfelt - Styrofoam Tone [Trilogy Tapes]
Ahead of a number of stunning releases for Editions Mego, Swedish composer & producer Klara Lewis released an EP in 2014 on Peder Mannerfelt Produktion. Mannerfelt, a mainstay of the Swedish pop and club scenes (and one half of Roll The Dice), was using his personal label to promote the music of a number of female Swedish producers, and Lewis' musical vision is particularly creative (something she shares with her Dad, Graham Lewis of Wire, who we heard very recently on this show). Now for Trilogy Tapes Lewis & Mannerfelt have teamed up together for a release which is somewhat more abstract than Mannerfelt's usual fare, and perhaps inserts more humour and chaos into Lewis' usual work. Warped soundtrack samples, field recordings and drones fizzle and crackle through these 5 tracks - think Fenn O'Berg (RIP Pita!) and you'll be on the right track. Genius stuff.

Listen again — ~208MB


Comments Off on Playlist 15.08.21

Monday, 9th of August, 2021

Playlist 08.08.21 (12:09 am)

Everything tonight: choral anarchist punk, indie cello, faux-orchestral, experimental music for dance, ambient, breakbeat, jungle, and other UK bass styles.

LISTEN AGAIN to everything, everything. Stream on demand the FBi way, podcast here.

Crass - G’s Song (Commoners Choir Remix) [Crass Bandcamp]
It's so good that the ongoing remix 7" series from the original English anarchist punks Crass continues... All profits go to UK domestic violence charity Refuge, and the political power of the original songs (currently all from their debut album The Feeding of the 5000), is retained - including this, the eponymous song for the collective's artist Gee Vaucher. This stunning version adds 5 minutes to the original 36 second punk jab, courtesy of the collected voices of the Commoners Choir, pulled together by none other than Boff Whalley of those other anarcho-punks (yep!) Chumbawumba.

Gareth Skinner - Here U R Where R U [Gareth Skinner Bandcamp]
bZARK - They are the worm [Rubber Records]
Gareth Skinner - zero minus X [Rubber Records/Gareth Skinner Bandcamp]
Gareth Skinner - Yer Pointless Life [Rubber Records/Gareth Skinner Bandcamp]
Gareth Skinner - When It Falls [Gareth Skinner Bandcamp]
Melbourne cellist Gareth Skinner is releasing his new album In Turmoil later this month. It's his first proper album of songs since 2009's Looking For Vertical, and that's cause for celebration in these parts. Skinner's musical tenure goes back to the mid-'90s, when he & a couple of Uni mates put out a few singles & two albums as bZARK - great indie rock songs with some creative production, and Skinner's cello riffing up front & centre a lot of the time. They're fun albums, and Skinner followed up with a couple of solo albums also on Rubber Records - his skills with riffs and basslines on the cello is equalled by his talent for hooky songwriting and cutting lyrics, but he'll just as easily turn in a beautiful pillow of cello layers. I'm particularly taken with "When It Falls", in which bowed cello and plucked bassline loop under a melancholy but matter-of-fact song about the coming societal collapse. It's a crying shame that Gareth's not better known - check his back catalogue and preorder this gem now!

Tomasz Sroczynski - Diablak [Ici D'ailleurs/Bandcamp]
Polish composer & violinist Tomasz Sroczynski has titled his latest album Symphony Nº2 / Highlander, and it does sound symphonic - but it's all created by him, with multitudes of samples of his violin and who knows what else. It's somewhere between classical composition, Eastern European folk music, techno and industrial. It's a surreal feeling of hearing acoustic instruments but knowing that they couldn't be performed in this way. Very clever production creating some otherworldly beauty.

Machinefabriek - Music for A Measurable Existence (excerpt) [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp/Bandcamp]
Last year Dutch musician Michel Banabila released a double LP of works for dance that included an extended work for New York choreographer Yin Yue. Now another Dutch musician is releasing works commissioned by Yin Yue - none other than Machinefabriek, and the album Re:Moving (Music for Choreographies by Yin Yue) will be released in September by Phantom Limb's Geist im Kino film soundtrack label. It's unusual for Machinefabriek in having a lot of rhythmic material, including beats - but not unusually, they're both quite long tracks (about 20 minutes), so we heard the first half or so of the first track. These are complex, through-composed works that flow beautifully; ideal accompaniments for graceful body work.

Laurin Huber - Hostage to History (excerpt) [Hallow Ground/Bandcamp]
Laurin Huber - Nickel [Hallow Ground/Bandcamp]
Swiss producer Laurin Huber released his first solo album under his own name last year on Swiss label Hallow Ground. A collection of four dark works, it sat somewhere between industrial synth ambient and techno, particularly through its use of flittering drum machines on the wonderful "Hostage to History". Huber's follow-up, Dog Mountain, maintains a similar disposition, but is much more subdued, with acoustic guitar and field recordings added to the synths. It's a touching work, inspired by the composer's meditations on borders.

Tom Hall - Regression of Consciousness [Superpang/Bandcamp]
Tom Hall - Graves for Failed Theories [Superpang/Bandcamp]
Aussie producer Tom Hall is originally from Tasmania, and released some incredible noise albums as AXXONN before turning to more ambient climes under his own name. There's always been a sense of vastness about his music, of spaciousness and the power of nature. He's a master sound designer - and indeed he works for Cycling '74, who make Max/MSP and Jitter. Failed Attempts at Silence finds him on ambient label of the moment Superpang, sees him investigating how to find or produce space inside time. Thus his usual immensity is in-folded here, stretched out over long tracks but seeking something inside the moments.

Stigma - Believe In Me ft. L [Pessimist Productions]
Stigma - No Garden ft. Justin K Broadrick [Pessimist Productions]
As Pessimist, Bristol's Kristian Jabs makes some of the most minimalist, dark drum'n'bass around - so stripped back it's basically dub techno, except when it lashes out... His new project Stigma slows the tempo down on the Too Long LP, with various collaborators adding vocals on about half the tracks to create a hard & dark form of trip-hop. DVA Damas' Taylor Burch contributes cutting vocals to a longer track, but tonight we heard Lola Thomas-Townsend on "Believe In Me", and Justin K Broadrick on "No Garden". The pace and bass put it in the space of Broadrick's compatriots The Bug and Mick Harris, and at this tempo there's more room for variation and movement than Pessimist. This might be my favourite material yet from Jabs.

Sully - 5ives [Over/Shadow/Bandcamp]
Nobody has the flittering, dazzling rhythms of jungle down pat like Sully these days. His shift from grime to jungle & drum'n'bass in 2014 was inspired, and if anything he's only gotten better. His new 12" 5ives/Sliding comes courtesy of Over/Shadow, whose usual playing field is mid-to-late-'90s style drum'n'bass, but the Moving Shadow connection goes right back to the early days, and Sully here makes the drum breaks not just dance but sing. A masterclass.

LMajor - Can't Do It [Astrophonica/Bandcamp]
It's hard to follow Sully in the jungle stakes, but LMajor gives him a run for his money on the first & last tracks of his new 12" from Astrophonica. This renewed Bandcamp Friday just gone actually brought a stack of new jungle & drum'n'bass releases, but along with Sully this does stand out as an infectious piece of melodic & rhythmic joy.

Leo - latex skies [YOUTH]
Leo - slumped [YOUTH
A member of Manchester collective Manteq in which Iranian refugees work with bass producers, Leo has produced some futuristic grime cuts for MC Tardast (rapping in Farsi) as well as DJing in various bass styles in that northern city. Leo's second album is released by Manchester's YOUTH this week, and as typical of that label, it refuses to sit still long enough to pin down the genres or themes - like a mixtape, showcasing this young producer's skill, whether it's crazily chopped breaks, instrumental grime or drill, mutated with strange distortions.

FUMU - Skhs Pt.9 [YOUTH]
FUMU - 4 Mika [YOUTH]
FUMU - Extra 10 [YOUTH]
With a few releases on YOUTH under his belt, Michael Steel's FUMU is a key player on the label and in their segment of the Manchester scene. Different aspects of UK bass, from grime and drill to garage and techno, are distorted and reshaped, like Leo's album, in mixtape style, with longer tracks broken up with shorter ideas that cut off mid-flow. It gives the sense of something exciting & new that you're just missing out on (FOMO for FUMU?), suggesting that Manchester (home of course of the SKAM label, Autechre, Boards of Canada, and earlier 808 State et al) still nurtures a cutting-edge club scene.

Listen again — ~208MB


Comments Off on Playlist 08.08.21

Sunday, 1st of August, 2021

Playlist 01.08.21 (8:41 pm)

Tonight goes all over - it's a kind of postpunk krautrock glitch post-jazz drum'n'bass dub deep house deconstructed club deconstructed field recordings thing? Yeah.

Come with me, LISTEN AGAIN. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Elegiac - He Folds [Upp Records/Bandcamp]
Ted Milton, Sam Britton - The Incubating Period [unreleased]
Edvard Graham Lewis - Where's The Affen? [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
Elegiac - The Swish [Upp Records/Bandcamp]
About 5 years ago I'd been talking to Sam Britton of the great London experimental drum'n'bass duo Icarus (the other half of which is his cousin Ollie Bown, who plays with me in Tangents), and I was quizzing him about the work he's done with the incredible avant-garde musician Ted Milton. Milton has led the postpunk/jazz group Blurt since the late '70s, and Britton produced their 2010 album Cut It! (which incidentally has just received a re-release on vinyl - and I've yet to track down the original CD edition). Sam told me that not only have he & Milton worked a lot together over the years, but they recorded an album with another legendary postpunk adventurer, Edvard Graham Lewis of Wire - and then Sam kindly sent me the masters! So for 5 years I've been sitting on this incredible collaboration, unable to share its mastery - and I just discovered that it's finally been released. Elegiac (now the name of the group as well as the album) comes out from Lewis' Upp Records (presumably, as it's based in Sweden and named after Lewis' longtime home of Uppsala), and while it's fair that Milton & Lewis' names are the ones emphasised, Britton's juddery, glitchy production hands are all over this music. Of course there's also plenty of Milton's Burroughs-like poetry, singing and sax squawks, and Lewis' heavily-effected guitars and rhythms (also heard on a cut from his pair of albums released on the late lamented Peter Rehberg's Editions Mego in 2014). It's a phenomenal album, and timeless enough in these post-everything days that the 5+ year release gap hardly matters (let alone the 5 month gap before I realised it was out!)

HOLY TONGUE - CURSE REMOVING [Valentina Magaletti Bandcamp]
Speaking of postpunk, that seems like a frequent signifier for the versatile drummer Valentina Magaletti's music, whether her recent collaborations with Raime as Moin, the already much-missed Tomaga, or the quartet UUUU released by Editions Mego and also featuring Edvard Graham Lewis. In HOLY TONGUE Magaletti works with UK producer Al Wootton, purveyor of dubby club sounds of all persuations, and the second EP from this duo features muscley rhythms and dubbed out textures.

Max Winter - How I Got Rid Of Me [Where To Now? Records]
Max Winter - P.O.S [Where To Now? Records]
UK composer, producer & musician Max Winter's debut album One Thousand Lonely Places covers a breadth of styles that can't be captured by a couple of choices. Along with skittery electronics there are chamber classical arrangements, live jazz drumming and vocals from Winter and collaborator IMOGEN. As you can hear I love the most IDM-ish drum programming, but there are also moments of beautiful peace. Highly recommend that you check the whole thing out.

Downpour - Infinity [Home Assembly Music/Bandcamp]
Downpour - Red Flag [Home Assembly Music/Bandcamp]
Chris Adams has long been a favourite artist of mine, longtime leader of the indie/postrock/indietronic legends Hood. Post-Hood he has occasionally stretched out with brilliant work as Bracken, but Downpour was the project where I first discovered him in the '90s, making unhinged proto-breakcore & IDM. The project was revived in 2014 for a Bandcamp EP called Do you remember when it was all about the drums?, with a second EP in 2016, both of which have now been re-released on cassette by Home Assembly Music. Do you remember when it was all about the drums? Parts I & II features flowing drum juggling and sub bass swoops for the ages, and comes with a bonus track not on the original EPs, "Red Flag", which is a reworking of Downpour's remix of Stewart Anderson's political punk band Hard Left from around the same period.

O C O S I - This Year's Hex [Ohm Resistance/Bandcamp]
O C O S I - Amount [A Matter of Traces]
O C O S I - LOOSE CANNONS [Ohm Resistance/Bandcamp]
Having just released a new album from Mick Harris's Scorn, Ohm Resistance have also brought to light a similarly heavy dub-hop project from Simon Smerdon and Paul Molyneux called O C O S I. In fact some of O C O S I's earliest work from 1999 features chopped up recordings of Harris's live drums, and the general atmos owes a lot to Scorn (although they align themselves with the NYC dub-hip-hop blend, describing themselves as "illbient"). The dark dub basslines and chopped drums are a place I'm always happy to go, so it's a very nice discovery.

Robag Wruhme - No [Kompakt/Bandcamp]
Robag Wruhme - Quokka Supra [Tulpa Ovi Records/Bandcamp]
Two new tracks from one-time IDM producer (in Beefcake) and longtime techno/deep house producer (as Wighnomy Brothers and Robag Wruhme) Gabor Schablitzki. Schablitzki has just founded his own label, Tulpa Ovi Records, with Robag EP Spoddy Spy as the debut release. There's no drill'n'bass or overt glitch madness here, but it's a mix of head-nodding 4/4 and some more broken beats (the humourous press release mentions trip-hop, which is a stretch but not too much). Meanwhile his Speicher 117 EP for techno/ambient institution Kompakt follows last year's Speicher 115, with last year's lead track "Yes" contradicted by this year's "No", but there's nothing negative about it, just deep driving techno.

Tennis Pagan - tumi [Spirit Level/Bandcamp]
The still mysterious Tennis Pagan (instrumental alias of a Melbourne producer associated with Spirit Level, if that helps) continues his run of EPs after four releases last year. Each release has leaned towards different aspects of the experimental electronic world, and here we have murky house of a sort (hence last year's all-caps switching to all lower case?)

Myriam Bleau - Stills Upstream [Accidental Records/Bandcamp]
Loula Yorke - YES [Accidental Records/Bandcamp]
Matthew Herbert's Accidental Records has been a home for not only Herbert's self-sampling glitch, house, jazz & classical permutations, but also other artists, often up-and-coming, working in a similar space. New compilation Antechamber Music explores that space with tracks that run from strings & drones to layered harps, frenetic robot-performed rhythms and more. First up tonight we have Montréal audiovisual artist Myriam Bleau (whose 2019 album Lumens & Profits was released by Where To Now? Records) with arpeggiating synths undercut by ominous held notes. Meanwhile synth maker & audiovisual artist Loula Yorke opens the compilation with cut-up poetry and organ.

Louv - Power [Provenance Records]
Coming next week from Provenance Records, recently relaunched as an artist collective led by Becki Whitton, is a new single from Louise McKnoulty aka Louv. Electronic rhythms underpin a vocal melody, but soon the vocals are caught up in pitch-shifted rhythmic sampling. If the Björk influence wasn't already clear, the song ends with the repeated refrain "All is full of love" - but this is no cover, and I'm sure the Icelandic goddess would be glad that young female musicians are empowered to go solo in such creative directions. "Power" indeed.

r hunter - V / VI [AR53]
r hunter - Vienna Residue [Genot Centre]
r hunter - IX / X [AR53]
Following last year's Dead Ambient release on .jpeg Artefacts, Asher Elazary's r hunter is back with the suitably-titled Chill Beats To Suffer And Die To, released on Melbourne's AR53 Productions. It's about equal parts chill-as-in-ambient and chill-as-in-chilling, morphing between unsettling and melancholy as quivering ambient dreamwave rubs up against juddering deconstructed club passages. It's the kind of thing he's been exploring since his 2016 release on Nice Music, and can be heard also on his 2019 record rrrrrrafael for Prague's Genot Centre. It's pretty remarkable stuff.

Kate Carr - nothing is immobile [Kate Carr Bandcamp]
London-based ex-pat Aussie Kate Carr is one of my favourite artists embedding field recording deep in her practice. Her new album dawn, always new, often superb, inaugurates the return of the everyday is self-released but not on her indispensable label Flaming Pines, with a beautiful-looking custom vinyl edition as well as digital. Commissioned by Forma Arts as they relocated to the Bricklayers Arms roundabout in London, it meditates on that space and how it changed sonically and emotively during pandemic lockdowns as well as Brexit. Tiny rhythms spread through this subtle work, along with soft drones and pure sub-bass tones at times. It's one to settle into at a quiet time.

Listen again — ~205MB


Comments Off on Playlist 01.08.21

 
Check the sidebar for archive links!

36 queries. 0.103 seconds. Powered by WordPress |