Utility Fog

Sunday, 22nd of January, 2023

The experimental pop of John Cale opens tonight, and we follow with other experimental twistings of pop, classical and folk before rolling into some classic jungle selections from Bristol and some new IDM.

LISTEN AGAIN because let's face it you've probably forgotten it all by now - age creeps up on us all! Stream on demand @ FBi, podcast here, we're all happy!

John Cale - Not The End Of The World [Domino]
John Cale - The Soul Of Carmen Miranda [All Saints Records/Bandcamp]
John Cale - Everlasting Days feat. Animal Collective [Domino]
John Cale - Heartbreak Hotel [Island Records]
He's older than my mother, and when you realise how old I am, that's old. John Cale is 81 years old, and sprawling and murky thought it is, Mercy is as cutting-edge an album as you could want from an octogenarian. For what surely will be the great Cale's last album, he enlisted many folks from experimental pop, rock and electronic music to contribute sounds and musicianship - even though many of their contributions are not easily decipherable from Cale's sounds and his producers. There's the likes of Laurel Halo, Actress, TOKiMONSTA and Dev Hynes on here, as well as a fairly invisible contribution from Fat White Family on a fairly hip-hoppy track! But the track with Animal Collective does have recognizable AC vocals and a good bit of their weirdo-euphoria (oh and Avey Tare's sister Abby Portner did the artwork!) Sadly Cale is no longer playing viola, but he did write the wonderful string arrangements. Outside of the two tracks from the album, I found time to slip in two older works. "The Soul Of Carmen Miranda" is a piece of electronic beauty (with viola contributed by Nell Catchpole) from 1989, and a collaboration with Brian Eno a year or so before their extraordinary collaborative album Wrong Way Up. Meanwhile, Cale first covered Elvis' "Heartbreak Hotel" in 1975, and it's surely the canonical version - a squalling horror halfway between glam and punk, as befits one of the godfathers of experimental rock, punk and so much more.

Ned Collette - Since My Baby Left Me [Penultimate Press/Bandcamp]
Dean Roberts - Lisa Marie Elvis [Penultimate Press/Bandcamp]
T.V.S.T - Aweful Staedele [Penultimate Press/Bandcamp]
So... Elvis. The guy was the subject of a feature film by Australia's most controversial director, and so... one night in late December, Australia's most controversial ex-record seller Mark Harwood (a true legend who ran Synaesthesia in Melbourne for many years and introduced many of us to scads of brilliant experimental music), now based in Berlin, came home drunk and decided to watch the film. Except he made the mistake of streaming it on some dodgy service, and the mighty forces of the European Union detected this infrimgement and sent him a bill... for nearly €1000. Ouch! So. Since leaving Oz, Mark ran an excellent little CD shop inside London's Cafe OTO for ages, and started up his Penultimate Press, which he now runs out of Berlin. So to try and offset some of this exhorbitant cost, he's enlisted many experimental music friends to contribute tracks to an album satirically dedicated to the movie's subject, Elvis. Among them are many European musos and also more than a fair share of Aussies - some, like Ned Collette, also based on Berlin. Ned's "Since My Baby Left Me" is not a cover of the song above. It's... delightfully silly and very Ned. New Zealander Dean Roberts, also a longtime Berlin resident, contributes a slightly bent, somewhat touching tribute to Elvis' late daughter Lisa Marie, partners cris cole & Oren Ambarchi appear, as does MP Hopkins, Francis Plagne and legendary Berlin mastering engineer Rashad Becker. Many contributors are more obscure, perhaps because they're tampering with recorded material. I'm not sure who T.V.S.T is, but maybe there's a connection with Jacob Stoy, credited as mastering the track? In any case, it's a varied collection with lots of fun for those interested in obscure & odd music.

Refree - Lo que esconden [tak:til/Bandcamp]
Refree - Todo el mundo quiere irse ya [tak:til/Bandcamp]
El espacio entre (the space between) is the second solo album on Glitterbeat's experimental sub-label tak:til from the great Spanish producer & multi-instrumentalist Raül Refree. Refree is famed as a great collaborator and producer of Iberian artists, including pop superstar Rosalía and Portuguese fado singer Lina. But despite his connection to pop and to European song traditions, Refree is also a restless experimental musician. I discovered him in 2019 working with the brilliant Richard Youngs on the singular album All Hands Around the Moment, and fairly simultaneously with none other than Lee Ranaldo on Names of North End Women - two albums I can't recommend highly enough. All of which is to say that a solo album from Refree (as he is often known) is something to pay attention to. What we get here is very much sui generis - it's a little bit laptop folk/folktronica, with influence from the Iberian strands of acoustic music, and also some "re-compositions" of early 17th century madrigals by Monteverdi. Throw in radio static and snippets of blast beats and you have something that's impossible to pigeonhole - a very good thing.

Ryuichi Sakamoto - 20220207 [Milan Records]
Ryuichi Sakamoto - 20220404 [Milan Records]
A couple of weeks ago I played some reworkings of the great Ryuichi Sakamoto that came out late last year, and mentioned a new album was coming too. And here it is - entitled 12, it collects 12 pieces mostly improvised on dates throughout 2022, either on his signature piano or synthesisers or both. These are very sparse works even when involving the electronics, ranging from quite short studies to still quite short, beautiful contemporary classical works. Sakamoto has always been brilliant at heart-pulling little melodies - he is after all a soundtrack composer as much as a pop musician, electronic trailblazer and all the rest - and those are certainly present. So are little ambient works along the lines of his old friend Brian Eno, but there are also some more avant-garde piano works here. I was honestly expecting something much thinner than what we have here - it's a genuinely captivating work of some substance, only made more touching because Sakamoto is again fighting cancer, with quite possibly only some months left to live - tragically!

Erem - Melantroop [Esc.rec./Bandcamp]
Erem - Bedaard [Esc.rec./Bandcamp]
New on Dutch label Esc.rec. is the debut album Aare from Belgian (mostly) acoustic trio Erem. Their core began with the meeting of jazz-trained guitarist and bouzouki player Nicolas Van Belle with accordionist Stan Maris. Their alchemical blend, however, is completed with the addition of vocalist Mirte Leconte. There's a mystery to this music, coming from sparse guitar melodies, heaving accordion drones and mostly wordless vocals. When the music opens up, it can sound like baroque chorales, the chamber folk of Bill Frisell or Tin Hat Trio, or the more abstract (post-)folk of Tape, but this is a singular music in a singular lineup, and it's bewitching stuff that you'd be inadvised to miss.

Lia Kohl - sit on the floor and wait for storms [American Dreams/Bandcamp]
Some more magic here, from Chicago cellist Lia Kohl. Kohl's debut last year on Shinkoyo, Too Small to be a Plain, was an extraordinary collection of music that refused to be pinned down, combining her cello with synthesizer, treated voices and found-sounds and "radio". Live radio will also feature on new album The Ceiling Reposes, out from American Dreams on March 10th. This first single demonstrates that the beguiling combination of cello, electronics and oddness will be present here in spades.

Batu - Built On Sand [Timedance/Bandcamp]
Opal, the long-awaited album from Timedance boss and Bristol mainstay Batu, was a slippery highlight from last year, with the many directions of UK dancefloors referenced, as long as bass is present. But the album also had its fair share of sound-designy beatless works, and this outtake from the same sessions is another sumptuous example of his skills.

YATTA - Fully Lost, Fully Found [PTP/Bandcamp]
Absolute stunner from Ricky Sallay Zoker aka YATTA, originally from Houston and now I believe based in New York. Their music has mostly come out through the mighty PTP, and twists and turns so that it can be lonely accidental acoustic recordings at one moment, fully-orchestrated jazz or neo-classical, then switch into electronic processing. Their 2020 release with Moor Mother, DIAL UP, is also genius, and slowly new solo work is forming. This track, which is featured in the soundtrack to the movie Nanny, perfectly encapsulates YATTA's skilful melding of musicianship and technology.

NERVE - Akimbo [Heavy Machinery Records/Bandcamp]
After multiple single-track outings, Naarm's Joshua Wells aka NERVE has finally dropped his EP Meridian Blaze via the ever-industrious Heavy Machinery Records. Four tracks representing Wells' dedication to tough industrial beats and textures, which reference drum'n'bass, techno, electro and more, often in ways that distort mainstream notions of genre. In short, vital stuff.

More Rockers - The First Time Remix (ft Joanna Law) [RSD Bandcamp]
Statik Sound System - Revolutionary Pilot (Rob Smith Remix) [RSD Bandcamp]
RSD - Let's Go [RSD Bandcamp]
Rob Smith has been active in the Bristol music scene since the 1980s. One main outlet was the groundbreaking duo (sometime trio) Smith & Mighty, who helped forge the Bristol sound of hip-hop, r'n'b and dub-reggae soundsystem culture that also birthed Massive Attack. In the '90s Smith was also highly active with More Rockers, a DJ & production duo with Paul D (also much involved with Smith & Mighty) who released many incredible early jungle 12"s and dubplates which have found themselves in countless DJ mixes over the years, and were collected in various ways on mix CDs, but unsurprisingly as incomplete versions. So it's something of a miracle (or rather a gift) to find Smith loosing TWO massive compilations of his jungle productions on us on Bandcamp this week - grab Jungle Archive Collection 1 first, get the 50% off code for Jungle Archive Collection 2 and you're set. Everything's basically credited as RSD - i.e. "Rob Smith Dubs", under which Smith continues to release dub, dubstep, jungle and whatever else he likes - but it's possible to piece together the probable original credits from the relative timeframe of a lot. "More Rockers" tracks were always just Smith or Paul D (not co-productions), so many of these would be More Rockers by any other name. There are TWO great versions of Joanna Law's a capella of the folk song "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" (memorably used also in jungle context on Coldcut's Journeys By DJ), and also a remix of Bristol crew Statik Sound System, who featured the now-Sydney-based trumpet player & electronic music researcher Roger Mills. All in all this is an important missing link from UK dancefloor history, and just a whole lot of absolute bangers.

Polinski - Distant Friend, I Love You! [Data Airlines/Bandcamp]
Regular listeners will know the significance of Sheffield postrock/breakcore/idm outfit 65daysofstatic to this here radio show. After a couple of years of solid (amazing) creative activity, the band are on sabbatical, but it's wonderful that Paul Wolinski has resurrected his solo alter-ego Polinski for highly idm-ish melodic skitteriness, with this single heralding an album coming soon on Data Airlines. We await lovingly from the distance.

DJ FLP - Ritual [DJ FLP Bandcamp]
And speaking of album previews, here's one from Michigan's DJ FLP, deftly combining the skitteriness of footwork with the break-manipulation of jungle. Always a producer worth watching.

Dancefloor Classics - Working With [Rajaton/Bandcamp]
Vladislav Delay - Wallfacer [Rajaton/Bandcamp]
And finally, Sasu Ripatti is starting the year as he means to go on, with TWO EP series on his new imprint Rajaton. Dancefloor Classics is jittery chopped-up club music in the style of his Ripatti alias (in fact, the promo I received was credited to Ripatti, but Bandcamp credits Dancefloor Classics with the EP titled Dancefloor Classics Vol 1), while Hide Behind The Silence uses the familiar Vladislav Delay name, and positions itself in the classic Delay soundworld, glitch-ambient-dub. Vinyl collectors will love the 10" form factor (it really is a lovely in-between size) and Delay fans (glitch fans, deconstructed dancefloor fans) should get a lot out of this material. Let's see what comes in the respective volumes 2!

Listen again — ~198MB

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