Utility Fog

Monday, 29th of May, 2023

Experimental sounds from the orbits of noise, free improv and spectral classical rub up against song-based experiments, beat-based floor-fillers and more...

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ugne&maria - healing [Futura Resistenza]
ugne&maria - zinc [Futura Resistenza]
A couple of months ago we heard Brussels-based Lithuanian musician Marija Rasa as emer with a stunning tape of underwater electronica on Lillerne Tapes. With compatriot Ugnė Vyliaudaitė she has a longstanding duo called ugne&maria which extends the dubby freeform beats & textures of emer with Ugnė's violin, along with an affable approach to field recordings & other samples which are woven into the music. The violin is mostly used to make scratchy noises and effects, adding to the pleasingly disorienting nature of the pieces on healing, their EP released in a couple of days on Belgian label Futura Resistenza.

Clark - Sus Dog (feat. Anika) [Throttle Records]
English musician Chris Clark has had an adventurous career, starting as a kind of enfant terrible of IDM with a series of albums on the Warp label that exhibited reams of talent but less originality - until the recently-remastered Body Riddle dropped in 2006 with its organically crunchy sounds which seemed to coax electronic music into the physical world, and onto the forest floor. Excursions into techno and other dancefloors followed, and then a detour into electronically-augmented classical stylings for soundtrack work, into which I'd include the gorgeous standalone climate change "soundtrack" Playground In A Lake from 2021. What this career précis does not do is prepare us for Sus Dog, Clark's latest left-hand turn: his first album of songs, mostly sung by himself. It's "executive produced" by Thom Yorke (whatever that means), and experimental songwriter Anika makes an appearance; despite appearances from clattering live drums, Thom Yorke's bass guitar and the ever-brilliant Rakhi Singh's violin, these songs are very much of a piece with Clark's own work, from plangent piano to crunching beats - and his own voice. I was originally reticent, but won over by the indubitable talent of our Chris.

Ky - Dragons [Constellation/Bandcamp]
The first Constellation release in today's show came out a couple of weeks ago. Ky Brooks has been part of the Montréal scene for some years, making noise-punk with Lungbutter and previously freeform experimental stuff with Nag. Here they brancho ut solo with Power Is The Pharmacy, albeit with various locals including Nag members on additional instruments. Big|Brave's Mathieu Ball contributes some guitar, and helped catalyse the project before lockdown, experimenting with tape loops accompanying Brooks' vocals, leading to the spoken & sung approach here, a much less harsh use of their voice than previously. Then, just as lockdown was ending, Lungbutter drummer Joni Sadler had a brain aneurysm and died at the age of 36. This tragic death haunts the album. While Brooks' compositions and vocals reach into moving and melodic territory, often they inhabit the poetic-robotic zone of Laurie Anderson's works, while the music spans '80s synthpop to imposing industrial and noise-rock.

Aya Metwalli & Calamita - Kadni El Hawa [Zehra]
Currently based in Beirut, here Egyptian avant-pop singer Aya Metwalli teams up with Lebanese experimental trio Calamita, made up of bassist Tony Elieh and guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui (both deeply involved with the Lebanese experimental scene, and both playing in Egyptian-Lebanese-Turkish supergroup of free music, Karkhana), joined here by Malek Rizkallah, drummer in Tony Elieh's legendary rock band Scrambled Eggs. A central inspiration for the music here is the music of Oum Kalthoum, a towering figure in Egyptian music. From this base, however, the musicians extrapolate into free jazz, psychedelic improv and punk rock, drawing from the same wells as groups like Fire! Orchestra - high praise from these quarters!

Wolf Eyes - Plus Warning [Disciples/Bandcamp]
Wolf Eyes - Engaged Withdrawal [Disciples/Bandcamp]
On the psychedelic tip, Wolf Eyes at one point decided to push back against the noise tag, claiming a new genre called trip metal. I haven't heard that bandied about lately, and personally I think noise is a broad church and Wolf Eyes can comfortably be claimed as central to it. Following the collaborative collection Difficult Messages from January, central duo Nate Young and Twitter memester John Olson bring us Dreams In Splattered Lines, via uncategorizable UK label Disciples. This is pure Wolf Eyes circa 2020s - disconcerting loops, creaking clarinet, electronic noisemaking devices, Nate Young's distorted, unhinged vocals. And yeah, it's not really noise but it's not really anything else, OK?

ourobonic plague - rumination [LMNL]
ourobonic plague - ENCOUNTER (confrontation) [LMNL]
Perhaps Melbourne enigma Ourobonic Plague is noise, or psychedelic electronic, dark ambient...? Of late, drum'n'bass or breakcore tendencies have been surfacing, and so it is on ENCOUNTER, the EP now out through Sheffield's LMNL Records. Each of the four tracks uses common elements in different genres, including half-time beats (with breaks chopped into little bits), drone, abstract sound and some kind of jungle. Dark and freaky.

RSD - 457 (Lion Syndicate mix) [RSD/Rob Smith Bandcamp]
RSD - Train To Shanghai (Rob's mix) [RSD/Rob Smith Bandcamp]
Near the start of the year, Bristol bass music originator Rob Smith, one half (or one third) of trip-hop pioneers Smith & Mighty and one half also of jungle duo More Rockers, released two volumes of Jungle Archive Collections on his Bandcamp. Finally full versions of dubplates found on various DJ mixes were available digitally, as well as unheard tunes, alt mixes and more - all beautifully remastered. What an embarrassment of riches! But wait, as they say, there's more! This Friday, with no warning, we've been gifted the Jungle Archive Collection 3, including additional More Rockers material and other Rob Smith/RSD jungle and drum'n'bass productions from the '90s into the early 2000s. Here we hear a nice reggae/jungle hybrid, and a Chinese-ish piece with a mad walking bassline.

Seba - Love Cycle [LekeAerosoul]
Inertia - Serenity [LekeAerosoul]
Keeping it jungle, here are some tracks from all-star jungle/drum'n'bass compilation The Aerosoul Album, which is a fundraiser for Leke Aerosoul, founder of the Aerosoul brand and Junglist Movement, a man much beloved of the UK jungle and hip-hop scenes. Leke lives with sickle cell anaemia, and after a fall at a gig last year developed bone cancer which resulted in him losing a leg. Unfortunately the cancer has spread further - there's an update on his GoFundMe. This compilation has brought together a pretty staggering selection of jungle & d'n'b originals including Paradox as Alaska, Nookie, DJ Trax, Equinox, ASC, Harmony of Deep Jungle, Double O of RuptureLDN, John B, Deep Blue from 2 Bad Mice, and the list goes on. Swedish producer and frequent Paradox collaborator Seba appears here, and then there's a lovely piece from Inertia, which happens to be an early alias of Gerald Simpson aka A Guy Called Gerald. Come for the good cause, stay for the brilliant tunage.

Wordcolour - Volta [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
Of recent UK DJ producers mixing jungle with other dancefloor forms as well as impeccable sound design, contemporary jazz and classical, Djrum immediately comes to mind - but he's been joined in the last couple of years by another young Londoner, Wordcolour. His album The trees were buzzing, and the grass. was among the very best of 2022, and he's now back on Houndstooth with the first of a promised series of Ratios EPs. The "b-side" of the digital release is a blissful house track just on the club side of ambient techno, but "Volta" is experimental junglism with shiny vocal stabs and jazzy chords over a 6/4 jungle groove that eventually switches to what the label copy describes as 4-to-the-floor but I would class as 3/2. Regular kicks anyway, but grouped in 3s folks! A nice switchover anyway from an artist brimming with creativity.

Flower Storm - This is my court [Flower Storm Bandcamp]
Disapora Iranians Sepehr (NYC) and Kasra Vaseghi (London) team up for Flower Storm, a new project recontextualising the sounds of their culture with the club styles they love. Together they created a huge sound library with traditional Persian percussion and string instruments, sampled vocals and more. Their debut EP simply entitled Yek ("one" in Farsi) builds variations on techno and drum'n'bass using these traditional percussion sounds, full of Farsi film samples, deriving its titles from classic Persian mythology and contemporary Iranian works. The track here leads us out of the jungle section of tonight's show in fine style.

Batu - For Spirits [A Long Strange Dream]
Head of the Timedance label and a Bristol bass/techno mainstay Batu released his remarkable Opal album last year, which took many turns into sound-worlds well away from the dancefloor, and typically enough didn't move as expected when beats were involved. He's now inaugurated new imprint A Long Strange Dream with the EP For Spirits, home I believe for more spontaneously-formed works but still wandering far and wide. The title track is a piece of bassy, break-heavy techno sure to get the room moving.

Wide Color - Practice Ceramics [Oxtail Recordings]
Wide Color - Building Bullocks [Oxtail Recordings]
Delaware's Dave Doyen has released scads of music as Vales and Sound Out Light as well as numerous bands and collaborations, exploring the outer reaches of electronic music. His first full length for Oxtail Recordings, the cassette label originally from the US and now based with label boss Mike Nigro in Sydney, is also his first under a new alias, Wide Color. There are industrial, burbling and juddering slabs of murky sound here, and there are shiny ambient pieces, with a slight brittleness which means they can crack and crumble at any minute into digital shards not unlike the more ambient sound-art of Wordcolour (not to be confused with...) There's a thrilling sense that anything could happen, and "anything" does happen on the last track, where we find a monolithic cover of one of NEU!'s more gentle numbers, Seeland. Energising stuff.

Joni Void - Present Day Montage [Constellation/Bandcamp]
Joni Void - Negative Loop [Constellation/Bandcamp]
On their third album for Constellation Records, Everyday Is The Song, Jean Cousin aka Joni Void moves the furthest away yet from anything resembling songs. This "tape vortex" centres on warped loops and hazey field recordings made on a Walkman Cousin purchased in 2020 and lost 2 years later. The samples they'd captured before its loss are collaged alongside their typical glitchy, granular constructions and elusive musical elements to create a strange, dislocated document of life in Montréal, featuring transient ghosts of many figures from the scene. While it's less filled with angst, the reduced emotional intensity seems to have made this work less immediately accessible, with samples and field recordings deliberately out of key and unresolving. But this is an unapologetic extension of the Joni Void aesthetic, and worthy of multiple listens to decode it.

Aphir - La Maison-dieu [Art As Catharsis/Bandcamp]
Aphir - toxic stoicism [Art As Catharsis/Bandcamp]
Sydney's Art As Catharsis have brought The Halo Is Shapeless - the new album from Melbourne-based Becki Whitton aka Aphir - to the world with a limited edition vinyl version as well as digital, a fitting endorsement of an album that documents her marathon livestreamed vocal improv sessions - 9 hours, 10 hours, even up to 12 hours straight of electronically processed wordless vocals. Whitton's work here is influenced by post-cyberpunk video games as much as it is by half-remembered choral music. Created in the period after Melbourne's marathon lockdowns and before a series of life-changing events in 2022, the music is always melodic and emotive, and is pleasingly willing to foreground the technology at times - like the pulsating rhythms on "La Maison-dieu". Whitton's work in sound engineering, production and mastering is garnering accolades, but this work shows us a musician challenging her skills and creativity through endurance, to impressive effect.

Machinefabriek with Monika Bugajny - VI (after Stravinsky) [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Machinefabriek with Monika Bugajny - VII (after Debussy) [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Finally tonight, the latest Machinefabriek comes out on July 1st, and we have a couple of world premieres here. Rutger Zuydervelt first met Polish clarinettist Monika Bugajny via another clarinettist, his friend and collaborator Gareth Davis, via whom Bugajny joined Machinefabriek's big "+" collection released in February this year. From that one short track came this whole album. Here Bugajny has supplied interpretations of clarinet works by mostly 20th century composers (the only exception is Johannes Brahms), which Rutger then cut up, processed and rebuilt into eight vignettes. The clarinet's tone lends itself beautifully to this treatment, and even though the composers credited here are not really recognizable, Bugajny's playing shines through. The album, Recytle, can be preordered now on CD or digital, including a bundle with another recent Machinefabriek collaboration, Wisps, his latest work with Dutch violist Anne Bakker.

Listen again — ~204MB

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