Playlist 06.10.24

Utility Fog

Covering ground from Iranian-American beats to English shoegaze-loop-pop, IDM, nu-skool-jungle, bass-heavy noise and noisy bass music, Middle Eastern-influenced electronic psych rock, the ever-cheeky Aphex Twin’s ambient masterpiece orchestrated, postrock and sound-art. And that’s just a taster!

LISTEN AGAIN for the full flavour profile. Stream on demand @ FBi, podcast here.

Maral – retrofit (feat. YATTA) [PTP/Bandcamp]
Maral – big hands reggaeton [PTP/Bandcamp]
Patience (​ص​ب​ر​) is the new collection from LA-based musician Maral, a varied mix of tracks from throughout her musical life, going back as far as 2013, often referencing her Iranian heritage. I discovered Maral circa her 2020 album Push, but her significance was solidified with her incredible remix of original anarcho-punks Crass the following year – so it’s notable that among the tracks here are her forays into punk, albeit filtered through the beat-making lens. And that’s a Crass sample in the last track, “big hands reggaeton”. Rather than her usual home of Leaving Records, Patience (​ص​ب​ر​) is released on Geng’s ever-relevant activist label PTP, and on our opening track tonight, Maral is joined by another PTP artist, the multi-talented Sierra Leonean-American YATTA, whose multi-layered vocals add an extra aura of disorientation to the proceedings.

Elsa Hewitt – White Mirror [Elsa Hewitt Bandcamp]
British producer Elsa Hewitt inhabits an idiosyncratic space that blurs songwriting with ambient soundscapes, guitars and vocals with electronics. Her new album Dominant Heartstrings, due in January 2025, leans mostly away from “songs”, using the voice and guitars texturally. The first single “Equinox” features a lovely b-side, “Poiselle”, which brings in a more rhythmic elements in the second half. “White Mirror” is the b-side of “Good To U”, the second single, which will be out soon. At its midpoint Hewitt starts cutting the loops rhythmically, and brings in some folktronic beats as well under her warm vocal layers.

Ammonite – When You Don’t (Salamanda Remix) [Ransom Note Records/Bandcamp]
Ammonite – What If I Knew Me (Dot Never Remix) [Ransom Note Records/Bandcamp]
Also from the UK is singer Amy Spencer, whose Ammonite alias produced an excellent album, Blueprints, earlier this year on Ransom Note Records. Spencer samples her voice, repitching it to create uncanny vocal synth pads, and builds almost-songs out of repeated fragments of lyrics. That original album is truly lovely, and it’s now birthed a remix album, Blueprints Revisited. Appearing here are David Holmes, Midori Hirano and Franz Kirmann of Piano Interrupted, as well as the two I played tonight. Korean electronic duo Salamanda (aka Uman Therma and Yetsuby) turn “When You Don’t” in an electro-trip-hop number, while eclectic indie/electronic London band Dot Never take an ambient passage from “What If I Knew Me” and scatter drill’n’bassy beats all over.

Mattr – Dicentra [Mattr Bandcamp]
London-based producer Mattr has been creating smoothly melodic IDM tunes for a while now, and “Dicentra” is another single he’s snuck out on Bandcamp, with skittering jungle-ish beats supported by low pads and twinkling melodies.

Arcologies – Silent Lights [Lightless Recordings]
Finnish drum’n’bass legend Fanu does a lot of mixing for electronic musicians, as well as online training and mentoring. As such, he’s reactivated his Lightless Recordings label to release a compilation of up-and-coming drum’n’bass, jungle and breakbeat artists. Breakbeat Brigade covers plenty of ground, and highlights some great talent. Here we have Chicago drum’n’bass & jungle artist Arcologies with some dark & atmospheric jungle.

Leon Mar – Acellular [Subviral/Bandcamp]
In 1997, one of the greatest drum’n’bass albums was released – the self-titled album from Arcon 2, which took the template of techstep, which was just beginning to take over the drum’n’bass world, but built dazzling complexity into the beats, among swooping basslines and atonal pads. Arcon 2 was the drum’n’bass alias for Leon Mar (real name the inverted Noel Ram), who had worked with Future Sound of London in their studio (FSOL released one 12″ from him under the name Oil). So anyway, at his Subviral Bandcamp you can find the Arcon 2 album and various 12″s remastered, along with some collections of d’n’b/jungle productions – but here we have an entirely new jungle tune, released as “Leon Mar”! “Acellular” is fierce and relentless, just what we needed.

RXM Reality – See All [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
RXM Reality – Sway So Yel [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
RXM Reality – Sammy [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year Mike Meegan released an album as When 2 on Blorpus Editions, featuring deliciously disorienting Carl Stone-influenced glitch-rhythms. Meegan is best known as RXM Reality, and his latest album for Hausu Mountain (which is co-run by Blorpus boss Max Allison) is out now. No. 1 in the World covers the ground RXM Reality has previously paved – breakcore/drill’n’bass beats to the max, feints at metal, references to vaporwave or new age whatever… but more, more MORE! Clocking in at just over an hour, the album’s 24 tracks cover 58-second indie vignettes (“Sway So Yel” played tonight), screamo metal, plenty of breakcore and assorted uncategorizableness. It’s honestly really, really good.

the body – Removal [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
There’s always been a strange synergy between the energy of extreme metal/hardcore punk and breakcore, as well as doom metal and dub; but nobody embodies that better than the body, each of whose albums takes them in another path through the beauty of extremeness, and for the last 10 years, the melding/welding of technology into the core of what they do. The Crying Out of Things, released on November 8th, will be their second album of 2024, with their Orchards of a Futile Heaven collab with Dis Fig released in February this year and garnering them the cover of The Wire just last month. Once again this new album is enriched by the Machines With Magnets wielded by Seth Manchester, and you can hear that in the rolling collapse of “Removal”, where huge crashes, distorted drum machines and descending basslines are what accompany Chip King’s distorted wailing, until eventually some mid-frequency beats come in along with churning industrial noise. Never less than brilliant.

Deaf Squad feat. Flowdan – Collateral Damage [Deaf Squad Bandcamp]
The Bug – ‘Deep in a Mud’ ft Magugu [Relapse Records/Bandcamp]
Deaf Squad x Nah Eeto – Nikushuku [Deaf Squad Bandcamp]
Via The Wire Tapper 66 that came with the current November issue of the magazine, here’s new London duo Deaf Squad, who combine crushing dubstep/dub beats heavily indebted to The Bug with guitar noise and textures claiming Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails as their forerunners. On their debut EP Black And Red they’ve enlised two frequent collaborators with The Bug, Flowdan and Warrior Queen, along with singer/producer Thryn and UK-based Kenyan singer/MC Nah Eeto. These songs take pleasing left-hand turns, so while the Flowdan feature suits his grime creds and many Bug collabs, the second half slides into a kind of shoegazey haze with guitar melody and swathes of enveloping distortion. With Nah Eeto there’s a Tricky-like trip-hop vibe of the dirtiest kind, with post-dubstep beats and jackhammer drum fills. Very fine.

mHz – Copper (Matmos) [Room40/Bandcamp]
New Zealand-based Iranian sound-artist Mo H. Zareei calls himself mHz (milliHertz) – how could you resist with those initials? His debut release was 2019’s Form, formed around pure electronic tones – a set of clicking and shuffling and strobing tracks a la raster-noton and Ryoji Ikeda. Another strand of his work, however, deals in electroacoustic work and the expression of electronic programming through physical media. His new album on Room40, Material Prosody, is based around his sound sculpture called the Material Sequencer, which features an 8-step sequencer that controls a solenoid that whacks itself against a sold block that’s attached to the circuit board. It exists in limited editions with five different materials: aluminium, copper, wood, steel and brass – but for this album an additional concrete edition exists, which was used by mHz to create his piece. The other five materials were handed out to Nicolas Bernier, Loscil, Matmos, Zimoun and Alba Triana, with as wide a range of tracks as you’d expect, from Triana’s literal documentation of simple clicking-on-wood to highly processed numbers. Of course Matmos are old favourites of Utility Fog, and dab hands at using physical objects in their work, so their work with the Copper edition as entertaining as ever.

FOUDRE! – Visions from Zūrūtetsu [NAHAL Recordings/Bandcamp]
The first self-titled album from French postrock/krautrock/psych band Oiseaux-Tempête in 2013 was a revelation. I suspect I found it after the brilliant 2014 remix album, but I was a firm fan from there on. In the interim I discovered many other projects of Frédéric D. Oberland, many of which I’ve played here. One of those is FOUDRE!, a trio of fellow travellers, based around modular & analogue synths, other keyboards, electronic and physical percussion, effects and vocals. Like Oiseaux-Tempête and related groups, the influence of the MENA region is strong in the music. Along with Oberland, the group features Paul Régimbeau aka Mondkopf, who’s been a member of Oisexau-Tempête at times, and Romain Barbot aka the prolific Saåad, who were present on that remix album back when. Voltæ (Chthulucene) might be the most exciting work from these collected artists for some time, driven by percussion and programmed beats, drenched in psychedelic synths and further energised by north-African and Middle Eastern melodies and samples. The full album’s out at the end of the month and I look forward to playing something else from it then.

Aphex Twin – rhubarb orc. 19.53 rev (unreversed) [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Biggest reissue of the week, if not the year, is the deluxe edition of Aphex Twin‘s staggeringly original, iconoclastic lysergic ambient album Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, affectionately known as SAW II since its obsessive analysis in the early days of the internet, released as it was in 1994. At the time the total tracks were just over the length that would fit on 2 CDs, so there were annoying differences between the tracks available on the UK CD and the US CD, differing again on the vinyl. So the Expanded Edition released for the album’s 30th anniversary is welcome in finally bringing the full set to 3CDs and 4LPs, in handsome box sets (I haven’t received mine yet!) The mystique of the music comes from its deliberately lo-fi nature, with synths artfully detuned, beats hovering under hiss and static, each track hovering in hazy repetition until its time is up. Remastered here, there’s some detail and fidelity improvements, without altering the nature of the sound. The story goes that Richard D James had been experimenting with – or at least experiencing – lucid dreaming, and the music here is his attempt to recreate those states. All RDJ/AFX stories need to be taken with a grain of salt, but there’s no doubt that the feel of this music is of altered mental states. Many people – me included – have found themselves waking from weirdly unsettling dreams after this music lulled us to sleep.
Anyway, one of the bonus tracks on the expanded edition is “rhubarb orc. 19.53 rev”. This needs a bit of unpacking: the original releases had no track titles, instead using a set of colour wheels with indistinct photos. One or more people in the IDM mailing lists in ’94 gave the tracks titles based on those little pictures, and Richard obviously ended up taking them as the default names, hence this orchestration of track #3 is “rhubarb”. Internet sleuths believe this was recorded by an orchestra in Poland during a rehearsal, but Rich can’t help his cheeky nature, so the version released is reversed. It’s uncanny and beautiful, but when unreversed (i.e. re-reversed), the way it tracks the original piece is in my opinion even more lovely – despite the rather unfriendly stereo mixing and tape distortion. It’s classic Aphex, however you look at it.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL [Constellation Records/Bandcamp]
From the very start, Godspeed You! Black Emperor (or Godspeed You Black Emperor! as it was originally styled) wore their politics on their sleeves: “The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel”, says the spoken voice at the beginning of “The Dead Flag Blues”. There have also been Jewish references early on – see the cover of the Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada EP. Many members of Godspeed, Silver Mt Zion and related acts are Jewish, including the members of experimental klezmer band Black Ox Orkestar, and they have long expressed their non- or anti-Zionist politics, whether implied or explicitly. Indeed, I recall when I interviewed Efrim in – hard to believe! – 2003, we discussed the difficulty in reconciling our Jewishness with the actions of Israel, and I remain thankful to them; the presence of Jewish voices of dissent has always been important for me in understanding my own identity.
So their latest album was always going to be a response to the last 12 months of grief and horror. “NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD” is particularly cutting, as the ever-increasing number of dead in Gaza now exceeds 40,000 and the invasion of Lebanon carries on with a mounting toll of innocent lives lost and destroyed. As ever, instrumental music can only express what’s already in our hearts, but the shortest track on the album, “BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL”, with its collapsing minor-key string loops is a touching work of mourning.

Ida Duelund – Misi Miamo [Probably available at Initiated Records/Ida Duelund Bandcamp soon]
In 2022 I discovered the Danish duo Lueenas, featuring Ida Duelund on double bass and Maria Jagd on violin. It turns out Duelund had spent some time studying in Melbourne, but is back in Copenhagen now. Her debut solo album Sibo will be out in January on Initiated Records. Duelund sings and plays bowed double basses and picked acoustic guitar, and is joined by Nils Gröndahl’s detuned violins and Liss Wessberg’s trombone, making for a sound that’s by turns murky and precise, lugubriously avant-garde but jazzy. The very lovely “Misi Miamo” is the first single from the album, and while it doesn’t seem to be on the artist or label Bandcamps yet, a freaky video has been released for the song.

Glen Rey. – tomorrow once the rain stops [.jpeg Artefacts/Bandcamp]
Eora’s Mitch J.G. Reynolds, fka Bluetung, releases his second pair of tracks under the Glen Rey. moniker (full stop included) for Naarm-based .jpeg Artefacts. Somewhere between low-key lo-fi indie songs and the more abstract guitar-manipulations of Bluetung, these unassuming pieces hold the promise of more beauty to come.

David Chesworth – Metals [David Chesworth Bandcamp]
Agéd though I am, Naarm/Melbourne musician David Chesworth hails from long before my time, debuting with the electronic experimentation of 50 Synthesizer Greats in 1979, and around the same time founding the idiosyncratic postpunk band Essendon Airport. With a large archive of older works on his Bandcamp, he’s able to slip out occasional new works like the two tracks that make up Sun Rocks and Metals. No information accompanies the release, which contains the 15-minute “Stone Chamber” and the 7-minute “Metals”… Interestingly, I just discovered that when I downloaded it, the tracks were “of rocks” and “of metals”, and the first was only 10 minutes. I’ve re-downloaded and the first track’s ominous drone is extended out and begins with a resonant gong tone as well as more emphasised bass. “Metals” is much busier, with rattles and clangs in amongst the horn-like tones which overlap dissonantly. In fact, electronic horns, flutes, organs and strings evoke modern composition as much as musique concrète or electroacoustic sound-art. What a nice surprise turning up unannounced on Bandcamp Friday!

Rafael Anton Irisarri – Red Moon Tide (ft. KMRU) [Black Knoll Editions/Rafael Anton Irisarri Bandcamp]
The roots of Rafael Anton Irisarri‘s new album Façadisms, due on Nov 8th, came in 2016 as the Trump presidency loomed: a diner in Milan intended to mean “The American Dream” was instead called “Il Mito Americano”, or “The American Myth”. Eight years later, as the façade presented by the American Myth is even closer to collapse, Irisarri here enlists Kenyan sound-artist KMRU to build unsettling drones from the wreckage.

Taylor Deupree – Looming Brittle [Nettwerk/Bandcamp]
With his quietly influential label 12k, with his mastering skills, and most importantly with his own music, Taylor Deupree has been an important name in ambient music and sound-art for the past 2+ decades. He recently signed to Canadian label Nettwerk, who in the ’80s and ’90s were known for industrial and electronic music, but who’ve branched out more broadly since the ’90s. So Deupree’s forthcoming Ash EP will come out through Nettwerk (it’s the second in fact, following last year’s Eev). The first single is gorgeous, full of sonic detail from field recordings, acoustic and electronic instrumentation.

Listen again — ~208MB