Utility Fog

Monday, 23rd of May, 2022

Experimental music for a new government! Things are looking better for the climate, the arts, a Federal ICAC and much more today in Australia.

LISTEN AGAIN because who's gonna stop you? Podcast here, stream on demand there.

Joe Rainey - jr. flip [37d03d/Bandcamp]
Joe Rainey - ch 1222 [37d03d/Bandcamp]
I've been looking forward to this album since I first heard "No Chants" back in February. Ojibwe singer Joe Rainey has collected and made recordings of Pow Wows from his Native American culture for many years, and on this album his powerfully moving vocals are combined with heavily distorted percussion and spoken word from his archives, filtered through the incredible production of Andrew Broder, whose Fog project started as lo-fi hip-hop and migrated through free jazz indietronica to post-IDM bass music. These stunning songs are probably unlike anything you're going to hear anytime soon, both due to the tradition Rainey's preserving here, and through his inspired collaboration with Broder.

Marina Herlop - abans abans [PAN/Bandcamp]
Marina Herlop - lyssof [PAN/Bandcamp]
Barcelona-based singer and pianist Marina Herlop is classically trained, and lists Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartok and Aram Khachaturian among her influences. But then you notice Holly Herndon, Venetian Snares and Plaid in there too and you start to see how her latest album is released by PAN. Aided by James Ginzburg on the mix, the songs here shift and scatter with technological interventions, while retaining the classically-trained vocal precision and pianistic technique. Piano lines are glitched and stuttered while experimental beats drop in & out, and Herlop's vocal style draws from Southern Indian Carnatic traditions, Jewish cantorial singing, Eastern European folk choirs and of course r'n'b and pop as well as classical. There's a lot of joy in this work, a lot of emotion and a lot of that acoustic/digital slipperiness that Utility Fog loves so much.

Cult of Luna - Beyond I feat. Mariam Wallentin [Metal Blade/Bandcamp]
Cult of Luna - Into the Night [Metal Blade/Bandcamp]
It might seem strange to move now to Sweden's post-metal legends Cult of Luna, but their "post-" status and influences from industrial and experimental music are a good fit for UFog, even without the excellent guests on their new record The Long Road North. On a few tracks, Colin Stetson's multiphonic circular-breathing saxophone features, and one particularly calm piece is adorned with the vocals of fellow Swede Mariam Wallentin, aka Mariam The Believer, of Fire! Orchestra and Wildbirds & Peacedrums. There's a deep emotiveness to this music, with guests or not - as found in Kristian Karlsson's vocals on "Into the Night", with its chromatic harmonies and gradual postrock crescendo.

Aidan Baker - Dramatic Illumination I [Cruel Nature Recordings]
Aidan Baker - Done [Improved Sequence]
Another versatile metal legend, Aidan Baker of Nadja, kept himself busy during lockdowns creating album after album of solo music. While Baker collaborates far and wide, he's also prolific on his own, whether it's drone guitar, krautrock grooves with free jazz drums or drum machines, undistorted minimalist songs or epic shoegaze metal. So just this year, along with a solo bonus with Nadja's Nalepa album on Midira Records, and a host of compilation appearances, there was the great experimental book soundtrack The Sheep Look Up (which I've already featured), ambient/drone on Cloud Chamber, drone also on Slow Tone Collages, and tonight's entries: Tenebrist on Cruel Nature Recordings is a selection of free rock pieces with jazz-influenced drums that morph into krautrock jams or psych noise freakouts. Meanwhile Songs of Undoing on Improved Sequence collects slowcore and deconstructed grunge songs, although tonight's slow piece is an instrumental.

Zeno van den Broek & Otto Kokke - Cloud Chamber [Moving Furniture Records/Bandcamp]
Gemma Bass & Coen Oscar Polack - Happenstance [Moving Furniture Records/Bandcamp]
Kay Stephen & Production Unit - I Played With Everyone [Moving Furniture Records/Bandcamp]
This is release MFR100 is the self-referential title of - you guessed it - the 100th release from Dutch experimental label Moving Furniture Records. And, as well as raising money for Dutch suicide prevention organisation 113, it's a powerful overview of the kind of experimental music the label presents, through 25 duo collaborations, all clocking in at 4 minutes precisely. There's an emphasis on Dutch artists, but contributions are found from Canada, Scotland, Turkey, Norway, Greece, Italy, and no doubt other places I couldn't identify. Tonight's selections give an idea of what's to be found: Dutch sound-artist Zeno van den Broek & saxophonist Otto Kokke of Dutch noise duo Dead Neanderthals present a beautiful, disturbing soundscape of smeared sax and field recordings; British violinist Gemma Bass plays expressive violin fragments over percussive found sounds (maybe glass?) from Dutch musician Coen Oscar Polack. And the viola of Scottish musician Kay Stephen competes with lurching spoken words glitched beyond recognition from fellow Scot Production Unit.

nightports w/ tom herbert - lumin [Leaf/Bandcamp]
nightports w/ tom herbert - hydrodynamica [Leaf/Bandcamp]
The latest album from UK duo Nightports' series on The Leaf Label, each based purely on the sounds of their collaborator's instrument, has as its subject the double bass of Polar Bear's Tom Herbert. At times Herbert's playing is seemingly untouched, with long bowed melodies and drones, sawing tremolo and rhythmic bowed ostinati, pizzicato basslines, but all these and percussive sounds from the instrument's resonant wooden body contribute to tracks which echo IDM and minimal techno. It's a worth addition to Nightports' previous work with pianist Matthew Bourne and percussionist Maxwell Hallett.

YOUTH - Nuclear Winter [YOUTH]
Manchester label YOUTH specialise often in an overdriven, ultra-compressed form of dubstep & UK bass music, and that's well represented on this uncredited 12". "Nuclear Winter" is so compressed that its waveform hardly varies, held down by an almost droning bassline while a broken post-garage/dubstep beat drops in and out.

Walton - Rush [Sneaker Social Club]
Walton - Detach [Sneaker Social Club]
Also from Manchester, Walton also resides in a post-dubstep/grime/uk garage/uk funky club-adjacent world generally, and his short album on Sneaker Social Club highlights these uk bass forms, with the title track "Rush" a particular hard-hitting highlight. But interludes like "Detach" let the ambient synths do the talking, until a simple kick and bass hit underline dancing synth lines.

Jurango - Concrete Blossom [[re]sources]
Meanwhile, over in Bristol, Livity Sound-affiliated Jurango returns to Paris label [re]sources with an EP that blends his dancehall influences with uk bass and techno... leading us into...

Deena Abdelwahed & Basile3 - Alpha GPC [InFiné Music/Bandcamp]
Toulouse-based Tunisian producer Deena Abdelwahed here teams up with French producer Basile3 for three tracks of bass-inflected techno on InFiné Music. It's infectious stuff.

COH - Gear Chill Spell [Noton]
COH - Fear into Dust [Noton]
Russian musician Ivan Pavlov's CoH (or sometimes COH) reads as "SON" in Cyrillic script, and is convenient in its ambiguity - it means "dream" or "sleep" in Russian, and he's punningly titled an album CoHgs (combine the two scripts to read "SoNgs"). Many of his albums are themed, around his love of postpunk or doom metal or '80s electro-pop or industrial pioneers, around voice (including a whole album with Throbbing Gristle's Cosey Fanni Tutti), or indeed around Strings (specifically piano strings, guitar strings, and those of the oud and saz). So to his latest album, from Alva Noto's Noton, which is entitled WYFF (While Your Guitar Gently) and it is indeed all guitar, from soft walking basslines and pulsating glitched fragments to IDM & shattered techno and estranged riffage. Whatever the influences and whatever the source material, CoH's minimal glitch core is retained, producing in total an impressively wide-ranging yet consistent ouevre.

Matmos - Cobra Wages Shuffle / Off! Schable w gurę! [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Matmos - Flight to Sodom / Lot do Salo [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Baltimore duo & couple Matmos are also consistent in their techniques of sonic estrangement and collage, exploring a vague terrain of IDM, glitch, folktronica, contemporary classical and avant-garde over 3 decades now. Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer finds them in Poland, where they were given access to the entire catalogue of Polish avant-garde composer (and musicologist and graphic artist) Bogusław Schaeffer. As always with Matmos, this is no literal interpretation or remix of Schaeffer's work. Fragments from many compositions are sampled, edited and rearranged by M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, interpolated with additional performances from Schmidt and various other collaborators. Few people outside of Poland are familiar with Schaeffer's work, so this is quite a cryptic tribute. Nevertheless, Matmos never fail to entertain, and the source material was provided much grist for their technological mill, whether in more abstract form or with glitchy, crunchy IDMish beatforms.

Carl Stone - Wat Dong Moon Lek [Unseen Worlds/Bandcamp]
LA/Japan-based computer music pioneer Carl Stone has seen a renaissance since the Unseen Worlds label released two archival albums of his a few years ago. Active since the mid-1908s, Stone developed a technique to time-slice through existing recordings using granular synthesis to produce garbled yet musical live remixes & mashups. On his last couple of albums this has resulted in strangely rhythmic stuff that's like dance music as interpreted by 19th century robots(?) - and on the title track of his latest, Wat Dong Moon Lek (all his titles come from the names of Asian restaurants), a Thai lounge jazz track is the source, smeared and sliced for 5 minutes, while the intro and coda are charmingly left untouched.

Listen again — ~210MB

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