Utility Fog

Sunday, 19th of November, 2023

Underground hip-hop royalty; remixed noise-rock and jungle-grime; a breakcore legend making rhythmic proto-techno on modular synths; dubstep-jungle and industrial-jungle hybrids; percussion-electronics mind-melds; bass-heavy noise-beats; deconstructed cello, deconstructed piano, deconstructed indie, deconstructed industrial acoustic cabaret, very deconstructed American Primitive guitar; and indie-postrock-dub-techno.
All of this, for you. Tonight.

Also, HUGE thanks to Mara Schwerdtfeger for her excellent curation last week while I was down with Covid!

LISTEN AGAIN, you know the drill: stream on demand at FBi's website, or podcast right here.

Blockhead - The Cella Dwellas Knew ft. Quelle Chris [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
New York beatmaker Tony Simon aka Blockhead has a long history of solo albums, and has released a bunch on that once home of instrumental hip-hop Ninja Tune, as well as billy woods' Backwoodz Studioz. There are no instrumentals at all on The Aux, his latest for Backwoodz, and the guest list is enough to leave the most casual underground hip-hop fan salivating, with woods and his duo Armand Hammer, Danny Brown, Open Mike Eagle, AKAI SOLO, ShrapKnel and many others appearing, as well as his frequent collaborator Aesop Rock. Quelle Chris's feature is a stand-out though, with his customary drawl rhyming "lost" with "source"/"sauce", and Blockhead's funky sampled jazz choir and skittering boom-bap beats. Check the cool animated video just released with the album.

Aesop Rock - Black Snow (feat. Nikki Jean) [Rhymesayers/Bandcamp]
Blockhead used to be Aesop Rock's main production partner, going way back to at least 2000's Float, although in 1999, Appleseed was already mostly self-produced, with just one Blockhead number. Aes's last album saw the two get back together - Garbology is officially credited to both - but Integrated Tech Solutions is more of a follow-up to the last self-produced opus Spirit World Field Guide. Like that album, ITS is a sardonically parodic concept album, and once again Aes's production is the perfect foil for his nimble dictionary-in-a-sentence raps. For years now Aes has commented on his anxiety & depression, and his tendency to keep to himself. On "Black Snow", the album closer, he imagines himself prepping for a climate doomsday augured by the snow turning black: "Precipitation should be clear or not at all, but..." Nikki Jean's sweet bridge is just as chilling when you listen closely, and the change-up for the last verse is a genius of perky beats and dark-as-fuck lyrics. "Aes get the dark cloud active" as depression takes hold, and "See you in the morn, the forecast ain't right". A helluva finish to another brilliant album.

Mandy, Indiana - Sheared (Pinking Shears reworked by clipping.) [Fire Talk/Bandcamp]
Just a couple of weeks ago we heard Mandy, Indiana remixing Water From Your Eyes, and now it's time for one of the best tracks from the incredible 2023 album I've seen a way to get the remix treatment - and who better to rework this Manchester noise-rock group than noise-hop greats clipping.? Valentine Caulfield's French vocals and the song's angular punk-funk survive the cut, with Daveed Diggs adding new lyrics and Jonathan Snipes & William Hudson pushing the song a little further towards the dancefloor.

ROOO - swing (Jennifer Walton remix) [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Czechia-based label YUKU continues to be at the forefront of whatever era we're in, here with London-based twisted hyperpop sensation ROOO, who released two tracks on the label last year. On ROOO Remixed, three female/non-binary artists reshape those songs, with Jennifer Walton speeding up "swing" into the finest drill'n'bass splatterpop.

Special Request (feat. Novelist) - Sliver (Tim Reaper Remix) [Gudu Records/Bandcamp]
Paul Woolford was very much on the front foot with the jungle revival, releasing the influential Soul Music ten years ago, just when the drum'n'bass scene was veering back towards jittery funkiness via madcap grime collabs like Sam Binga & Redders' "AYO", but ahead of Sully's Blue. The Special Request alias proved so popular that it's usurped Woolford's own name for much of what he does now - notable given that he'd been a pretty big name in tech house for a good decade or more before. For Peggy Gou's Gudu Records he recently created mad grime/house hybrid "Sliver" with grime MC Novelist, which is now given two very different treatments on the remix 12". KETTAMA keeps things 4/4, while jungle's greatest evangelist Tim Reaper swaps in breaks'n'basslines and rave stabs, just the way it should be.

Keith Fullerton Whitman - STV 2-2-1.2-2-2 [KFW Bandcamp]
In the mid-1990s, Keith Fullerton Whitman was THE MAN if you were looking for amen break dissection and proto-breakcore. Under the name Hrvatski, often known as Våt online, he initially uploaded a lot of his experiments onto mp3.com as 128k files, yeesh! Of course in the years since he ventured into Max/MSP-processed guitar "Playthroughs", krautrock-inspired multitracked one-man bands, and then he became the patron saint of modular synthesis. Much of the Hrvatski stuff can be found on his Bandcamp, and Keith is by all accounts not interested in the intricate editing work that was required to construct all that crazy shit. He'd rather do the intricate work of wiring up modular synth components - but somehow in the last few years since he decamped back to NYC after some years in Melbourne with his Australian wife, he found himself visiting Brooklyn dance clubs, and techno's energy found its way into his Eurorack sets. Some of that material is now available on Acid Causality (H) ("Hi-Fi" recordings, largely in-studio) and Acid Causality (L) ("Lo-Fi" self-bootlegs of live performances). It's exhilarating stuff, full of energy and madness. Happily, Keith has resumed his hardware builds after a period of selling off gear for food (so he claims - and modular gear is $$$), so who knows what sonic wizardry we have in store next...

T5UMUT5UMU - T5 06 [T5UMUT5UMU Bandcamp]
Japan's T5UMUT5UMU melds jungle, grime and breakbeat with contemporary percussive techno sounds that have found him released on Ugandan experimental powerhouse Hakuna Kulala. His latest track T5 06 wrong-foots the listener with a rhythm that turns out to repeat every third quaver once the heavyweight bassline enters. It's not so far-fetched to call it dubstep (as it's labelled on SoundCloud), but whatever it is, it's immense and supremely energetic.

Pugilist - Be Humble [Modern Hypnosis/Bandcamp]
Back on Naarm/Melbourne's Modern Hypnosis is Melbourne's own Pugilist, with some lovely dubstep/jungle hybrids. "Be Humble" samples Lee "Scratch" Perry with The Upsetters' Blackboard Jungle, a sample I first heard in The Orb's Outlands... Classic dub biz.

Sense Fracture - Type Lax (ABADIR remix) [Haunter Records/Bandcamp]
Milan based co-founder of Haunter Records, Francesco Birsa Alessandri, steps out with his first album as Sense Fracture. Landscape of Thorns was in fact released in full this week, but the previous week saw a preview in the Land Entranced EP, two album tracks and two remixes. Sense Fracture's productions take in everything Alessandri's into, seemingly, from bass music and deconstructed club to vintage industrial and black metal. Deena Abdelwahed and Rami ABADIR are inspired choices for remixers, and ABADIR puts a moody junglist spin here on "Type Lax".

Cinna Peyghamy - Khak Shah [Zabte Sote]
Percussionist and electronic musician Cinna Peyghamy is known for a few collaborations with French-Tunisian dub techno producer Azu Tiwaline. Born in France to Iranian parents, Peyghamy took up the tombak, a Persian goblet drum, around the same time he started working with modular synths. The juxtaposition of the physicality of the ancient percussion instrument and the manufactured, programmed synth modules struck Peyghamu as a representation of his own existence, trying to find his place within his Iranian heritage despite never having been to Iran. His brilliant EP The Skin In Between is released by Ata Ebtekar's Zabte Sote, a label dedicated to Iranian musicians both from Iran and in the Persian diaspora. It has a clear percussive drive, around which the electronics build colour and melody. A really interesting project that I'd love to see live sometime!

Eugene Carchesio + Adam Betts - A [Room40/Bandcamp]
Eugene Carchesio + Adam Betts - G [Room40/Bandcamp]
Famed Brisbane visual artist Eugene Carchesio has a substantial repertoire of musical work released by Room40, including a series of Circle Music works based around rhythmic, minimalist electronic music. When he sent a recent set of material to Room40's Lawrence English, he happened to mention that he'd be interested in drums being added, and Lawrence had just been reminded of English drummer Adam Betts, who's worked with the likes of Goldie and Squarepusher. Circle Drum Music is a real mind-meld of a collection. The single-letter-titled tracks range from half a minute to 2½ minutes, with most sitting around one minute, each exploring lovely textures and rhythms, circling around similar musical gestures, some leaning into dub, others tumbling delicately. As with many of the selections tonight, the acoustic and electronic soundworlds here complement each other beautifully.

emptyset - cinder [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas formed emptyset in 2005, originally as an outlet for minimal techno - and that's how I discovered them in 2009 when their self-titled album was released on Multiverse, the label Ginzburg co-founded with Pinch and James Fiddian in Bristol, preceding his impeccably-curated Subtext Recordings. That debut album's pristine distillation of techno captivated me at the time - in fact it was probably a gateway drug for me to accept the pleasures of the 4/4. The album's thoughtful sound design and use of highly controlled noise contains the seeds of what was to come, as Ginzburg and Purgas spelunked further & further into cavernous noise experiments. The 6 tracks on their short new release ash show that rhythm is still central to the project, albeit sputtering and crumbling in ways that wrongfoot any attempt to dance. Rhythm aside, emptyset are explorers of noise - and particularly bass - in spaces, whether real or digitally modeled, making for music that's truly, deeply resonant.

The Haxan Cloak - N/Y [Archaic Devices/Bandcamp]
It's been ten long years since Bobby Krlic released music as The Haxan Cloak. He's kept busy in the meantime, having moved from Wakefield in Yorkshire to Los Angeles, where he's created a string of award-winning and celebrated soundtracks. As The Haxan Cloak, Krlic was at the forefront of the melding of doom and noise into bass and experimental electronic music - including his iconoclastic production work on the body's I Shall Die Here, kickstarting their own continuing incorporation of electronic production techniques. Krlic is reissuing the two Haxan Cloak albums on his new Archaic Devices label, and he's given us one single new track, "N/Y". I'm not sure there's any of his cello playing here, but to my ears this is very much The Haxan Cloak, maybe a little shinier, Krlic showing the deconstructed club kids how it's done.

David Bird - Cyberlathe [Oxtail Recordings/Bandcamp]
David Bird - Tessera Suture [Oxtail Recordings/Bandcamp]
This stunning new album from the now Sydney-based Oxtail Recordings sees NYC/Chicago composer David Bird deconstruct and reimagine the cello in ways never before imagined. Inspired, we're told, by the (gut-wrenching) sound of a cello falling to the floor and snapping its neck, Bird set out to recreate the physicality of the instrument itself through software modelling. There are no real cello recordings here, yet in amongst the frenetic layering, smudged melodies and glitches, it's impossible not to hear vibrating strings, resonating (and sometimes splintering) wood, catgut and rosin. The techniques of modern composition and electro-acoustic production combine to create a set of uncanny solo cello études twisted through folded dimensions. I'm sure that as a cellist I'm particularly attuned to these resonances, but I'm also sure that anyone interested in sound-art, glitch or contemporary music will be highly rewarded listening to Wire Hums.

Eve Egoyan & Mauricio Pauly - Braid [No Hay Discos/Bandcamp]
Oh but we're not finished with transformative contemporary music, not by a long shot! Hopeful Monster is the first recording of the duo of Armenian-Canadian pianist Eve Egoyan and Vancouver-based Costa Rican/British composer & electronic musician Mauricio Pauly, who first improvised together in 2018. That first meeting was followed by a long period swapping files remotely, but on this album the two came together in person to once again create music spontaneously. The shared musical language is remarkable, considering they'd only played together once four years prior to this recording. On Hopeful Monster, Egoyan plays acoustic piano, but also acoustically modelled piano; alongside this Pauly is live sampling and processing Egoyan's sounds, and adding additional sounds from drum samples and a "dekeyed chromaharp" (presumably like a fretless autoharp?) So we may think we're listening to modern composition or free jazz, until the uncanny elements enter: piano notes slide in pitch, or seem stretched into legato lines. This is slippery music, uncategorisable in the best way.

Will Gardner - Levodopa [Castles In Space/Bandcamp]
Will Gardner - The Urge To Leave [Castles In Space/Bandcamp]
Remains is the debut album from English composer/producer Will Gardner, released through electronic label Castles In Space. Prior to this release, Gardner has been heard mainly from his contributions to other people's work - string arrangements for alt-J and Daughter, orchestrations and other contributions to film music, etc. Gardner's classical training and varied experience puts him in a slightly different position from some of the popular post-classical/ambient artists who have gravitated to classical from other genres - not to diss anyone, mind you, but there's a depth to music composed by someone steeped in centuries of musical history. Still, Remains isn't a classical album really. There are rich, bubbling drones, barely-discernible spoken samples, electronic processing and yes, a smattering of piano. The beauty of this album came as a means of processing and memorialising his experience caring for his father through late-stage Parkinson's dementia. His father's diaries contributed cadences to the music, rhythms and melodic shapes from which the text itself was then erased. The melancholy is palpable, but it's somehow comforting to sink into. Recommended.

Kee Avil - I too, Bury (claire rousay Remix) [Constellation/Bandcamp]
The debut album from Montréal musician Vicky Mettler aka Kee Avil was a standout from 2022, if nothing else for its bewildering nature: often weirdly amelodic, with programmed beats mixed with rickety piano or accordion, and yet still a collection of songs that draw you in. Ahead of a new album in 2024, Constellation are releasing a set of four remixes, all inspired choices. Here, claire rousay embeds the touching "I too, Bury" in waves of drone, found-sound and seeming digressions, in a way increasing the defocused nature of Kee Avil's song, but when the original piano and vocal lines appear, the setting somehow emphasises their emotiveness. Uncanny creative resonance.

DAAU - Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung - Cinema [Sub Rosa/Bandcamp/DAAU Bandcamp]
DAAU - Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung - Graceful [Sub Rosa/Bandcamp/DAAU Bandcamp]
This is a really nice surprise. I discovered Belgian shapeshifters DAAU (short for Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung, or "the anarchist evening entertainment") in the late '90s, by accident in a European CD store, noting that they were a kind of cross between a classical chamber group and an indie band. In 2000 they appeared on my radar again contributing an incredible remake of The The's song ShrunkenMan (you can listen here, switching between chamber classical, jazz and almost industrial rock - there are also interpretations by Foetus and John Parrish, each as different from each other as they are from the original). It took me a while to collect DAAU's catalogue, which ranges from acoustic classical, folk and jazz (the original lineup was violin, cello, clarinet and accordion) to electronic, indie/hip-hop hybrids and more. Releases are so few and far between now that one keeps thinking they're gone for good, but while the lineup has changed frequently, here they are again, in a collaboration with Rudy Trouvé, an original member of another legendary Belgian band, dEUS. Musik f​ü​r Animierten Tonspurfilm is, well, "music for animated soundtrack film", or rather music for a series of animated films by Trouvé. The writing process was a back-and-forth between acoustic/analogue and electronic, originating with tape recordings of accordion, double bass, clarinet and percussion, which were passed to Trouvé who sampled, edited and chopped them up into loop-based collages. These were then overdubbed by the band using electronic instruments: from double bass to bass guitar, accordion to synths etc. The music retains a kind of cabaret vibe of twisted jazz and classical, filtered through krautrock and electronic aesthetics. In some ways DAAU have always been an alternate-universe version of Utility Fog's aural obsessions, a strange bridge between my "other" musical side of rock string quartet, gypsy/klezmer and 20th century classical which only surfaces occasionally within these playlists. Here, more than ever, DAAU have found their way right into the core of what this show of mine's all about. I don't like to make this all about me, but maybe this will explain why this release is really special to me. (Now to convince Guy-Marc and Fred of Sub Rosa to put it out on CD!)

Daniel Bachman - Happy Hearts That Feel No Pain [Three Lobed Recordings/Bandcamp]
Daniel Bachman - All Their Sadness Turned To Gladness [Three Lobed Recordings/Bandcamp]
Daniel Bachman - Now The Roses Come Again [Three Lobed Recordings/Bandcamp]
"American Primitive", the fingerstyle guitar technique pioneered by John Fahey in the 1950s, was from the outset a way of playing folk and country blues but transforming it in experimental ways. The incredible Imaginational Anthem series released by Tompkins Square charts the style from its earliest days to the futuristic present, and our man Daniel Bachman has indeed appeared there. This is all to say that When The Roses Come Again, Bachman's remarkable new album, is perhaps not as radical as it may appear, despite the lovely fingerstyle guitar being sent through all manner of processing, turning into distorted noise, crackling drones, or fizzling glitches. The album is really one long work split into separate tracks (and the track titles are the lyrics of the Carter Family song from which the album takes its title). It's stretched-out and deconstructed, but it's still American Primitive in all its freeform gregariousness, and it's a beautiful listen from start to finish.

D.C Cross - Brumby Revisited [Darren Cross Bandcamp]
Sydney's own Darren Cross made the journey from indie rock larrikinism with Gerling to folk songwriting and thence to the lovely expansive instrumental guitar music as D.C Cross. He's no pale imitator either - he knows how to make his guitar sing and thrum, and his D.C Cross albums do also wander off into ambient interludes and field recordings, in fine American Primitive form. Wizrad, his latest album, is as good a place as any to start!

Great Panoptique Winter - You Were There [sound in silence/Bandcamp]
Another wonderful surprise, this. Back in 2014 a collaborative album called Wildness came out from a trio calling themselves Great Panoptique Winter. It was the work of Great Earthquake aka Melbourne drummer Noah Symons, Adelaide's Panoptique Electrical aka Jason Sweeney, and The Declining Winter aka Richard Adams of West Yorkshire, once of indie/tronic/postrock legends Hood. The music had been finished years earlier, but finally Greek label sound in silence stepped in to release it. And now, almost a decade since, Sweeney and Adams have gotten back together as Great Panoptique Winter, apparently sans Symons but retaining the "Great". It's just as lovely, with Sweeney and Adams' sympatico styles of postrock and electronic-tinged indie combining beautifully. Let us give thanks.

The Declining Winter - Fortune Lies [The Declining Winter Bandcamp]
Jason Sweeney has been busily releasing singles from an upcoming album, and I'll no doubt feature another soon. But The Declining Winter also has something new out, a two track single with a new mix of a track off his excellent album from earlier this year, and an exclusive b-side which builds out of a murky 4/4 beat into a melancholy song before fading away again. In Hood, Richard tended to stay in the background behind his ever-talented brother Chris, but his solo work as The Declining Winter just gets better & better.

Listen again — ~210MB

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