Utility Fog teeters on the cusp between acoustic and electronic, organic and digital. Constantly changing and rearranging, this aural cloud of nanotech consumes genres and spits them out in new forms. Peter Hollo curates each episode around a narrative of genre-plasticity, deep-diving into artist histories, side projects and influences. Challenging sounds are contextualised within musical movements, surprising connections are uncovered, unfairly overlooked works are revisited. Come on a journey through music in all its ugly beauty.
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And LISTEN AGAIN to tonight’s show too, stream on demand from FBi or podcast here.
Fennesz – Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) [Editions Mego/Moikai/Bandcamp]
The headline music news for this week is surely that of the death of Brian Wilson, as notified by his family. I’m not the hugest Beach Boys fan, but I do believe “God Only Knows” is one of the greatest pop songs ever written, and I don’t need any convincing that Brian Wilson was a genius. I was fortunate to get to play with him in Sydney when he toured his album That Lucky Old Sun in 2008, and he seemed like a quiet man dealing with mental illness but still deeply committed to his music. I wasn’t sure how or whether to commemorate his passing until I remembered Fennesz’ crackling, luminous “cover” of a Beach Boys song on the flipside of his “Paint It Black” cover on the 7″ single (later released on CD on Jim O’Rourke’s boutique Moikai label) Fennesz Plays. So, some shimmering glitch guitar to begin tonight’s proceedings.
Teether & Kuya Neil – SCRATCH THE FLEA POINT (FT NERDIE) [Chapter Music/Bandcamp]
Working out what to play out of 6 weeks’ new releases is a challenge, but there’s been a suite of great underground hip-hop that’s come out since the start of May. Following their landmark mixtape STRESSOR from 2023, Naarm rapper Teether & producer Kuya Neil have now released their debut album proper, YEARN IV (which I’ve just realised is a pun). I’m never sure why some releases are dubbed mixtapes, because all the elements were there 2 years ago – Teether’s laconic flow and Kuya Neil’s rave/bass-influenced beats. Teether did release his remarkable 5th solo album, It Must Be Strange to Not Have Lived last year, but there’s definitely a spark of genius between the two together.
I’d like to add that Guy Blackman & Ben O’Connor have released scads of great music across countless genres with Chapter Music over 3 decades, and it’s sad news that the label is kinda-sorta closing down (for new releases at least!), but also totally understandable.
Aesop Rock – Checkers [Rhymesayers Entertainment/Bandcamp]
There’s none more genius than Aesop Rock in the hip-hop world, with vocabulary to spare, and quite honestly the most comforting tone of voice. Going back a few albums now, Aes has been producing all his beats himself, and they’re just so good. Whether the subject matter’s a climate apocalypse or the horrors of late-stage capitalism or the horrors of getting older, Aes has elliptical lyrics delivered with perfect flow.
Isaiah Hull – A IS FOR AFRICA [Young/Bandcamp]
Released through the Young label, who put out the great John Glacier album earlier this year, is the new single from “standup tragedian” Isaiah Hull. John Glacier’s executive producer Kwes Darko (fka Blue Daisy) also produces this track, giving the necessary impact to support the manic energy from Hull in his alphabetic statement of intent. “A IS FOR AFRICA” is an alphabet for our times.
billy woods – All These Worlds Are Yours (feat. E L U C I D, DJ Haram & Shabaka Hutchings) [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
Aside from Aesop Rock, the most notable hip-hop release of the year so far must be Golliwog, the intense new album from billy woods. The sinister imagery of the deeply racist ragdoll character that gives the album its name is a pointer to what’s inside. It’s a kind of take on horrorcore from a Black perspective, and as usual it’s got brilliantly murky production with weird interludes and great guests on beats, instruments and verses, sparsely but smartly used.
MA.MOYO – Libation [Accidental Meetings/Bandcamp]
One of the strange higlights of last year was the debut album Jump Ship, Sit Lean, Be Still, Stand Tall from Portico Quartet’s Duncan Bellamy and Marseille/London-based, Zimbabwe-born author, poet and sound-artist Belina Zhawi. Zhawi’s solo alter-ego MA.MOYO has now released her solo EP Viva Voce Vol. 1 in collaboration with Danish producer Nova Varnrable. As you might expect, it’s centred around Zhawi’s voice, whether contributing layered drones, spoken word or melodies, accompanied often by nothing more than cut-up field recordings. Interludes feature found-sound conversations with CJ Calderwood’s sax like a busker caught soloing to themself in a tunnel. This is very avant-garde, but also entirely engaging.
Anysia Kym & Loraine James – tension [10K/Bandcamp]
Here the very versatile London producer Loraine James, best known for her IDM-influenced dance music, extends on some of the more pop/r’n’b elements of her solo work with a short EP in collaboration with NYC vocalist, drummer and beat-maker Anysia Kym. These hazy, hazy songs are really short vignettes in glitchy style – the shortest’s under a minute, and only one tops 3 minutes – which bears the hallmarks of both artists in every bar. Clandestine indeed.
Rainy Miller – Mud in my Mouth. (Predetermined Definitions) [Supernature/Bandcamp] Rainy Miller – Chrome, Hallowed be. [Supernature/Bandcamp]
A clear highlight of the first half of 2025, Joseph, What Have You Done? is the brilliant new album from Rainy Miller, collaborator with the likes of Blackhaine, Space Afrika and Richie Culver. Like these collaborators, Miller’s art focuses on the drab oppressiveness of life in England’s north, and the sociopolitical realities – which Miller or his protagonist does his best to resist – of class and culture. It’s done through the lens of broken-down drill, grime and jungle as well as desolate ambient. That all these elements pull together into something devastating and beautiful is a huge achievement. On this album Miller has overcome any Predetermined Definitions and more than realised his potential.
Patrick Watson – Peter and the Wolf [Secret City Records/Bandcamp]
Formed in 2006 to release Patrick Watson‘s gorgeous breakout album Close to Paradise, Montréal’s Secret City Records has gone on to form a small but perfectly formed roster that includes or has included the likes of SUUNS, Owen Pallett and Braids – melodic chamber pop & rock with a big of an edge. And Watson himself is still going strong, as heard in this first single for his upcoming album uh oh. “Peter and the Wolf” doesn’t quote from Sergei Prokofiev’s symphony-with-spoken-word, but does reference it in the text. In the tale, Peter is a resourceful young boy who ignores his grandfather’s warnings and captures a wolf outside his house. Watson’s song is a dreamlike tale of distant bass, and the approach of something that could be a car or train’s headlights, or could be a lover catching the protagonist’s eye. The music is based around a softly-slapped piano’s syncopated chords, a song that’s got all of Watson’s folk-jazz indiepop, but it does also feature deep sub-bass pings at the top of each verse and subtle wub-wubs at other times. It’s typical Watson, using plenty of experimental techniques but hiding them behind a strong pop sensibility and great musicianship.
Brian Campeau – These Waves [Art As Catharsis/Bandcamp]
What is this? Who is Jo Dellin and what are the Bone Spurs? Well, the album cover suggests that Naarm-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer Brian Campeau has gone country – and there is some country music on here, but there are also other kinds of folk and indie rock that Brian incorporates into his sneakily experimental, frequently beautiful style of music-making. And yodelling. There will be yodelling, but “These Waves” happened to come out the same week as Patrick Watson’s song above, is in the same key (except it’s major not minor), and Brian has handily left his voice counting in each section. It’s also got enveloping delays swelling through the song like, well, waves. If you go back reallly far in these playlists, you’ll find I’ve been a fan since his debut double CD Two Faces came out in 2006, and the lusciousness and cheekiness remains to this day.
These New Puritans – A Season In Hell [Domino Records/Bandcamp]
On every album, These New Puritans have remade themselves to a degree. Their debut was angular postpunk, but by the time its sequel came along – with its ever-stunning single “We Want War” – brothers George and Jack Barnett had already found their impossibly-inflated ambition, and seemingly achieved it with ease. Hidden‘s release included a limited edition as a scorebook, the pretentiousness of which is negated by the fact that the orchestral & choral arrangements that accompany the industrial, catchy songwriting are absolutely spot on. It’s Benjamin Britten meets Tears for Fears, and it’s perfect. So of course they followed that a few years later with an album that’s come the closest (since close collaborator Graham Sutton’s Bark Psychosis) to the revered austere beauty of Talk Talk’s last two albums. The releases since then have admittedly not been as revolutionary, but they have certainly sustained their quality, and this year’s Crooked Wing shows no sign of a downturn. It’s lovely to sink back into These New Puritans.
Pyramids – Pretty Pigs [The Flenser/Bandcamp]
You could be forgiven for not knowing about Texas band Pyramids, because their albums are so few & far between – but they have some hugely significant releases in their archive, including the incredible self-titled debut from 2008, combining black metal and shoegaze with electronics and accompanied by a remix album featuring the likes of Jesu, Loveliescrushing, James Plotkin and Birchville Cat Motel. In 2009 was the monumental collaboration with Nadja, also featuring Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins among others, with a bewitching vocal from Chris Simpson in the middle of the dark postrock/noise of “Another War“. Following some other brilliant collaborations, in 2015 they released A Northern Meadow on Profound Lore, which extended all these elements – looking back, I described it as “melodic, like a beautiful aria emerging from an active volcano in hell…?” And yet that album also surfaced more “pop” elements than ever before. Now, nearly a decade later, The Flenser have picked up their return, Pythagoras, which somehow shoehorns the shoegaze-metal into a baffling amalgam with reggaeton and neoperro, enlisting Buenos Aires singer Emy Smith along the way. It’s their strangest move yet, and I’m still not clear on whether it works or not. But maybe that’s a meaningless question – you like it, or you don’t, right?
Crystal Sting – HD Umbrella [POW Recordings/Bandcamp]
But hey, blissed-out neoperrogaze is pushing us towards the/a dancefloor, so here’s a piece of super-compressed hyperpopped hi-nrg dance music. Almost jungle, almost a song but sung by an artificial intelligence that’s trying its best. It’s kind of joyful and summery, which is the opposite of whatever it is in Sydney right now.
Ahm – Careful [Ahm Bandcamp]
Naarm-based Andrew Huhtanen McEwan is a composer & sound engineer who doesn’t release his own music often enough, so it’s a blessing to have an unexpected full album from him. Futurist emphasises his love of intricate jungle breaks, endlessly tweaked over tight basslines and sweeping pads. Couldn’t have asked for more, honestly.
Overcast – Wolfe [IR77/Bandcamp] Mark Newlands is a key person in Australia’s hardcore scene, as founder of the highly influential Bloody Fist label and one third of Nasenbluten, and he’s also an accomplished turntablist as Mark N. It’s been yonks since he’s released anything under his jungle/hardcore alias Overcast, so here’s one side of his new 12″ on IR77 / Iridium. Eagle-eared listeners will note that the classical sample is from Arvo Pärt’s Fratres.
Ancestral Voices – Annwn [Samurai Music/Bandcamp]
Liam Blackburn made bass music for years as Indigo, and with Joe McBride aka Synkro formed the precision-tooled experimental bass machine Akkord. Ancestral Voices was his project to move away from typical drum’n’bass/dubstep forms into ambient and percussive music influenced by ancient Celtic culture. One of my favourite Indigo EPs, Storm came out on Samurai Music some 12 years ago, so it’s nice having Ancestral Voices back on the label with Nemeton, his most drum’n’bass-coded release in a long time. It’s still epic and deep and not always focused on the beats. The beats are often percussion-oriented rather than breakbeat-oriented, and it won’t all work on the dancefloor, but in fact it’s kind of thrilling hearing music so cinematic and different that’s nevertheless deeply informed by drum’n’bass.
Slikback – Taped [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Nairobi’s finest, Slikback, is now based on Poland and has signed to Planet µ – a very suitable home, it seems to me. Because of this I was fortunate to see him performing his mutant bass beats live at something like 4:30am at the Planet µ 30th party in London (the day I arrived!) at the start of May. Obviously this is going to be brilliant, and characteristically won’t stick to any particular style. It’s deconstructed club but it’s still for the club. Hanging out for July 11th.
Nick Wales – Dark Paradise [Nick Wales Bandcamp]
I’ve known Nick Wales since – I’m pretty sure – we were teenagers: since I was a cellist and he was a viola player in various youth orchestras in the 1990s. An era from before time itself existed. Somehow we both formed “bands” with our stringed instruments around the same time too, but moved in somewhat different directions. Nick studied composition at Sydney Uni and has made a career out of writing music for Sydney Dance Company and others, as well as various other projects including co-producing my mate Sophie Hutchings‘ ARIA Award-winning album A World Outside and producing an incredible single with Yolŋu songman Rrawun Maymuru last year. Lux Tenebris is a new album of music Nick originally made for Sydney Dance Company and choreographer Rafael Bonachela in 2016. It’s rich with classical instrumentation as well as thunderous sub bass and glitchy electronics – brilliant work.
Content Provider – Overdrive [Bokeh Versions/Dali de Saint Paul Bandcamp/Drowned By Locals] Dali de Saint Paul is a key part of the Bristol experimental music scene and beyond, and a name that’s passed through these playlists quite frequently of late – a great example being her bewitching vocals on “Habibi“, the opening track of UKAEA‘s incredible Birds Catching Fire in the Sky, which has turned up in a number of my DJ mixes since it came out (and before). Now, as Content Provider, we find de Saint Paul stepping behind the mixing desk for an album of her own productions – only occasionally featuring her own voice, and sporting quite a few feature spots for other vocalists in Bristol’s linked Bokeh Versions & Avon Terror Corps scenes, with additional connections from the excellent Jordanian label Drowned By Locals, co-releasing the label with Bokeh. The tracks are all over the place in the best possible way, from grime to noise, post-industrial to vaporwave, with a ragga/dub vein throughout. When talking about being the producer here, she states. “I like the idea of being the woman who is making men sing, (when for so long, they have been making me do the singing).” Brilliant!
The Bug – Buried Dub [Relapse Records/Bandcamp]
When Kevin Martin aka The Bug put out his series of five Machine EPs from late 2023 into 2024, they were rough & ready scuzzy dub/dubstep tools for testing the intensity of his Pressure soundsystem. But a riddim’s always in search of a deejay, so he’s enlisted Logan and Magugu to flip them into vocal tunes. Thus “Buried (Your Life Is Short)” becomes “Bury Dem (ft. Logan)” and “Drop (Machine Sex)” is “Deep in a Mud (ft. Magugu)”… But then Martin can’t help but re-dub these, so we get “Buried Dub”. It’s considerably different from the original “Buried”, and you can hear fragments of Logan’s voice echoing through the machines.
MOAB – Drool [Knekelhuis/Bandcamp]
Coming from Montréal via Dutch label Knekelhuis is the improv quintet MOAB, whose album Laws Ov Nature is a strange amalgam of not-quite-jazz improv, krautrock, hip-hop and dub. It’s the realm of slow dubby beats and reverbs, electronic textures, and at times electric bass and what sounds like acoustic instruments being fed into the loops.
TL;DR – Cumulus (edit) [Earshift Music/Bandcamp]
Following his tenure as leader of the Australian Art Orchestra, Naarm trumpeter/composer/producer Peter Knight hasn’t stopped to rest. The wonderful Hand To Earth was formed as a project of the AAO but continues as its own thing. TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) is a new quartet with three younger musicians in the Naarm jazz scene. Brilliant bassist Helen Svoboda is here playing basslines but also showcasing her melodic bowed harmonics and her voice; guitarist Theo Carbo, like Peter Knight, contributes electronics as well as his instrument; and Peter’s son Quinn Knight brings 15 years of experience improvising with his dad to the fore. This is dreamy music, ambient-dub-jazz – and the internet-jokey name aside, the cloud titles are perfect for these floating, soulful pieces.
Maurice Louca – Trembler II ترمبلر [Simsara/Bandcamp]
Egyptian musician Maurice Louca is a bit of a polymath. The earliest recordings I’ve heard are experimental electronic, and he’s lent production to many artists, but he’s also a member of psych rock/free jazz group The Dwarfs of East Agouza, and Egyptian/Lebanese/Turkish experimental rock/jazz supergroup Karkhana among others. And Louca’s solo music has moved into similar territory, losing most of the electronic elements in the last couple of albums. Barĩy (Fera) برٌِي is his latest, an album full of dancing rhythms, grounded in acoustic instruments. These are trance-like, experimental pieces with Arabic music at their core.
While you’re here, I have to point you to the stunning Arabic indietronica album Lekhfa الإخفاء Louca made in 2017 with Egyptian singer Maryam Saleh and Palestinian singer & multi-instrumentalist Tamer Abu Ghazaleh.
Pierre Bastien & Michel Banabila – Closing Time: The Party Is Over [Pingipung/Bandcamp]
The first collaborative album between French mechanical instrument maker Pierre Bastien and fourth world electronic producer & composer Michel Banabila was a strange affair, lovely but perhaps a bit tentative. On their follow-up, Nuits Sans Nuit, it feels like they’ve found a singular voice together. Both musicians are multi-instrumentalists interested in taking traditional instruments into weird, uncanny places, and on tonight’s closer (which doesn’t close their album!), a very European chamber melody winds its way to our ears through an open doorway somewhere just out of view…
Because I’m away, this has been taking me forever, so apologies for the wait – here it is now!
You can LISTEN AGAIN via stream on demand on the FBi website, or podcast here. While you’re there, LISTEN BACK also to the shows from my excellent colleagues.
SUMAC & Moor Mother – Scene 1 [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp] SUMAC & Moor Mother – Hard Truth [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Last year, alongside their remarkable, heavy-as-fuck album was released, sludgey hardcore supergroup released an EP called with two remixes: recent Wire Magazine cover star, Pulitzer Prize-winner , and the brilliant avant-garde hip-hop/free jazz genius . And what a combo the latter was! SUMAC leader Aaron Turner was singer & guitarist with two of my favourite post-metal bands, and (the latter not in past tense), but SUMAC feels like his purest vision, engineered with precision along with the rhythm section of Baptists drummer Nick Yacyshyn and bassist Brian Cook of hardcore legends Botch and post-metal legends Russian Circles. Turner also ran the greatest metal/experimental label in the world, , and now has a smaller – impeccably curated – operation with his wife called . After the incendiary impact of that Moor Mother remix, it still came as a surprise to discover that this full album collab was just around the corner. is one large work split into tracks, with as much (disquieting) quiet as crashing noise. And who but Moor Mother could compete with Aaron Turner’s roar? Poetic and deeply political, scathing about colonialism and capitalism, it’s incredibly powerful.
Playlist 16.02.25
dimanche 16 février 2025 • Durée 02:00:03
Let me take you on a trip1… from lo-fi hip-hop to mutant jungle, dub techno to generative IDM, mushed free jazz to mutant harps and other acoustic instruments… It’s just another week in the Utility Fog office. (there is no office)
1Credit: Depeche Mode
LISTEN AGAIN, or don’t, but then don’t come crying to me. fbi.radio provides the stream on demand, here we have the podcast.
John Glacier – Home [Young/Bandcamp] John Glacier – Don’t Cover Me [Young/Bandcamp]
Following an early album in 2021 called SHILOH: Lost For Words, London rapper/singer John Glacier restarted her career last year with two brilliant EPS on Young, Like A Ribbon and Duppy Gun. Along with Angel’s Trumpet, the three titles represent the three sections of her new album, although at least on digital the tracks don’t quite match up. In any case, we’re talking lo-fi hip-hop with low-key vocals, in the Tirzah/Coby Sey mould, albeit I think a different hip-hop tradition. Executive producer – and producer of many of the tracks – is Kwes Darko, who used to be , with his own particular take on UK r’n’b as well as post-dubstep stylings, but here John Glacier’s own style of post-punk aesthetics really emphasises how quietly innovative and fresh this is.
Playlist 09.02.25
dimanche 9 février 2025 • Durée 02:00:00
A lot going on in the world at the moment, dizzying amounts of WTF and it can be pretty anxiety-causing. But humanity continues to create great art, so let me share with you some of the boundary-pushing music of note for this week.
LISTEN AGAIN for that special fix. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.
Squid – Cro-Magnon Man [Warp/Bandcamp] Squid – Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence) (feat. Clarissa Connelly) [Warp/Bandcamp] Cowards is UK postpunk band Squid‘s latest album for Warp, and it finds them continuing the progression from 2023’s O Monolith of adding expansive arrangements and proggy structures to their songs. For an album that’s all about the evil that men do (to summarise), it’s relatively upbeat and not always angry. It’s nice hearing contributions from Clarissa Connelly, another recent Warp signing whose World of Work album last year was a revelation.
Edvard Graham Lewis – Last Scene [Upp/Bandcamp]
– Key Weapon [/]
Postpunk is also a genre closely associated with , a founding member of since 1976. Although Lewis’ work can be found in many contexts – as a songwriter, experimental sound-artist, and collaborator in many groups (see last year’s with Mark Spybey, and 2021’s with Blurt’s Ted Minton and Icarus’ Sam Britton), his solo releases are few and far between. In 2014, released experimental soundtrack/installation works on and more song-oriented material on (and it’s notable that his daughter, has a number of brilliant releases on the same label). So 11 years after those albums, is a laconic & energetic album of EGL songs, with many hidden depths. There are dense arrangements and angular sparseness, elusive Lewis lyrics and quotes from Shakespeare’s Tempest. It’s great.
Playlist 02.02.25
dimanche 2 février 2025 • Durée 02:00:00
One month into 2025… watching a country being dismantled is quite a horror story, so let’s stay away from the news if we can, and listen to experimental music!
LISTEN AGAIN via fbi.radio or our podcast here – it might keep the wolves at bay.
Infinity Broke – Abject Object [Forthcoming at Infinity Broke Bandcamp and on Love As Fiction Records]
Jamie Hutchings fronted Bluebottle Kiss from the mid-’90s till the mid-’00s, making abrasive but emotive indie rock with a substantial following. In 2014 he and BBK drummer Jared Harrison formed Infinity Broke with Jamie’s brother Scott Hutchings on second drumkit & percussion, and Reuben Wills on bass (Reuben is the husband of Jamie’s sister, ARIA-award-winning pianist Sophie Hutchings). When I played the debut album I noted the “excellent long rock jams”, with the double drums and bass holding things down while Jamie’s penchant for free jazz avantgardism only emphasises the krautrock feel for me. This first single from their forthcoming album This Masthead has all those elements present and correct, with a helluva vocal performance too.
Mogwai – God Gets You Back [Rock Action Records/Temporary Residence Ltd./Bandcamp] Mogwai – Hi Chaos (Demo) [//]
I don’t play so much postrock on Utility Fog anymore. represent one strand of the genre, such as it is – one that’s the most dominant, with mostly-instrumental LOUD-soft-LOUD rock – but I used to love that “post-rock” could refer to Tortoise or Mice Parade, even if Simon Reynolds’ original coining referred to Bark Psychosis’ Talk Talk-inspired sound. In any case, Mogwai roll on, ever on, decades hence, and is mostly “core Mogwai”: soaring guitar melodies, epic crescendos, all that. I’m really glad I grabbed the limited edition double CD, as the demo versions on the bonus disc are quite different from the final productions, and they sound great. Always nice to see some of the inner workings of a band’s creativity.
Playlist 26.01.25
dimanche 26 janvier 2025 • Durée 02:00:00
Today is the day when so-called Australia is meant to celebrate its founding as a British colony. It’s a day of sadness and contemplation for indigenous Australians, and should be for all of us. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
I’m starting with the beats tonight, as I have quite a bit of sound-art and experimental song coming up later.
LISTEN AGAIN to get on top of it all. Stream on demand at fbi.radio, podcast here.
Insignio – Everytime (A.Fruit remix) [Yanked Beats/Bandcamp] A.Fruit – Midnight Coffee [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Afonso Silva is Insignio, one of the people behind Portuguese label Yanked Beats. He also makes drum’n’bass as Crawler, but the music under Insignio is a bit less balls-out distorto-bass stuff. Anyway, Barcelona bass producer Anna Fruit, aka A.Fruit, recently mentioned that she had a remix on this single, and it’s very excellent as you can hear. She also has a new EP out on YUKU called Somnambulism, which shows off her various sides of bass, footwork, jungle and ambient, all expertly produced.
DJ Don’t Sleep – No Shut []
– Reaktor II []
Pablo Miranda, from Seville, started off making speedcore, breakcore and the like, but primarily he releases music now under the name , taken from a key poet from the Dada movement (it was a pseudonym of hers too – her real name was ). There’s a certain playful aspect to the music of Celine Arnauld, which can range from to to . Late last year, Arnauld released the , in which he is in dialogue with his younger self, using “ensembles” he created in Native Instruments’ Reaktor software from 2005-2011. “Reaktor II” is a nice piece of glitchy bass-techno. But earlier in 2024 Miranda unleashed another alias, , under which he released the first album on UK hardcore/jungle/bass label Stolen Groove, . There’s jungle & d’n’b with a hardcore techno (pre-jungle) twist on some tracks, with ambient interludes. Quality.
Playlist 20.04.25
dimanche 20 avril 2025 • Durée 02:00:00
Singles & tracks from forthcoming albums and new releases from hip-hop to doom, postrock to experimental electronic, breakbeat to techno, post-classical to post-jazz.
LISTEN AGAIN, stick it in your pipe and smoke it. You can stream it on demand on fbi.radio, or podcast here.
The Asthmatix – 10,000 FACES [MXD APE] The Asthmatix – Mum Beez Tax Zombie Jackets [MXD APE]
Eora/Sydney trio The Asthmatix have been around for quite some time now, but with members based outside the country, it’s seemingly taken a long time to get their debut album Abacus Earthling out the door. Violinist Daniel Weltlinger is based in Berlin, playing with the best gypsy and klezmer musicians in Europe, while DJ/producer Micke Morphingaz was based in Sweden for a while. Keyboardist Daniel Pliner plays latin jazz, contemporary jazz, live experimental electronic and more. As The Asthmatix, the three are dedicated to having a fun time mixing traditional Jewish music with classic hip-hop beats and sampling, and I’m glad they’ve got this album out. You can buy it as a Digital Video Keyring.
Divide and Dissolve – Loneliness [/]
– Disintegrate [/]
Somewhere around recording their last album, ‘s drummer Sylvie Nehill left the band, leaving it as the solo project of Takiaya Reed. In no way has her vision changed, but sometimes lets Reed’s klezmer/gypsy-like saxophone melodies stretch into entire songs, without losing any of the heavy doom riffage – and she even sings on one track. Reed’s is a project fundamentally opposed to colonialism and white supremacy, and couldn’t be more relevant to the world today.
Playlist 13.04.25
dimanche 13 avril 2025 • Durée 02:00:00
Strange conglomerations of fluttery acoustic sounds, skittery electronic beats, seemingly-clashing cultural milieus…
LISTEN AGAIN if you dare! Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.
Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals – A City Drowning. God’s Black Tears. ft. The Lil Black Oxen Émile Joseph Weeks, Nicolas Ratany [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp]
Tariq Ravelomanana is not your usual hip-hop producer. A longtime fan of experimental music, he blends any and all styles into his Infinity Knives project. This combined with Brian Ennals‘ unbridled political & personal raps makes for an unconstrained body of work akin to clipping., even if the artistic connection is tenuous. However, the stunning vocals from the male gospel choir “The Lil Black Oxen” on their new album’s title(ish) track does put my mind to “Long Way Away“. But Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals’ ambitions here are different, both musically and lyrically, taking in acoustic guitars and metal riffs, anti-colonial politics and mental health. And it’s an album worthy of its ambition – dive in!
SUMAC & Moor Mother – Scene 4 [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Last year, alongside their remarkable, heavy-as-fuck album was released, sludgey hardcore supergroup released an EP called with two remixes: recent Wire Magazine cover star, Pulitzer Prize-winner , and the brilliant avant-garde hip-hop/free jazz genius . And what a combo the latter was! SUMAC leader Aaron Turner was singer & guitarist with two of my favourite post-metal bands, and (the latter not in past tense), but SUMAC feels like his purest vision, engineered with precision along with the rhythm section of Baptists drummer Nick Yacyshyn and bassist Brian Cook of hardcore legends Botch and post-metal legends Russian Circles. Turner also ran the greatest metal/experimental label in the world, , and now has a smaller – impeccably curated – operation with his wife called . After the incendiary impact of that Moor Mother remix, it still came as a surprise to discover that this full album collab was just around the corner. is one large work split into tracks, with as much (disquieting) quiet as crashing noise. And who but Moor Mother could compete with Aaron Turner’s roar?
Playlist 06.04.25
dimanche 6 avril 2025 • Durée 02:00:00
Everything’s off-kilter this week. It’s not just the deranged tarrif-spewing orange menace… it’s also the music? But… in a good way? Yeah.
LISTEN AGAIN if you’re off-kilter too. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.
Infinity Broke – Snowdome of Dreams [Love As Fiction Records/Bandcamp] Infinity Broke – Scum Valley ’86 [Love As Fiction Records/Bandcamp]
Jamie Hutchings fronted Bluebottle Kiss from the mid-’90s till the mid-’00s, making abrasive but emotive indie rock with a substantial following. In 2014 he and BBK drummer Jared Harrison formed Infinity Broke with Jamie’s brother Scott Hutchings on second drumkit & percussion, and Reuben Wills on bass (Reuben is the husband of Jamie’s sister, ARIA-award-winning pianist Sophie Hutchings). When I played the debut album I noted the “excellent long rock jams”, with the double drums and bass holding things down while Jamie’s penchant for free jazz avantgardism only emphasises the krautrock feel for me. That’s still absolutely my feeling – with all of the passion in Jamie’s singing and the abrasiveness of his guitar, but held down by the low-slung bass and the double percussion. Rad!
The Ex – Beat Beat Drums [The Ex Bandcamp]
– Wheel []
It’s exhilarating to have a new album from Dutch anarcho-punks . Their history goes back to 1979, although only guitarist Terrie Hessels is still with them. We’ve heard , their original vocalist, a lot on this show, appearing with and recently on that incredible album that came out in February; in 2009 he was replaced by Arnold de Boer of . Meanwhile, (not the DJ) has played guitar with the band since 1990 – he’s one of the people behind the essential avant-garde label . And Katherina Bornefeld joined on drums in 1984 and has been with them ever since. De Boer manages a handy resemblance to GW Sok in delivery, but it’s always nice to hear Bornefeld singing on one or two tracks. I could write pages and pages on The Ex – “anarcho-punk” refers to their politics and way of living in those early days, but the politics, while still present, is not perhaps the main focus. They dived heavily into improv in the 1990s (if not earlier), and worked extensively with Ethopian saxophonist in the last decade or so of his life. In the 1990s they made two incredible albums with pioneering New York cellist : and . Seriously, give them a listen.
Playlist 30.03.25
dimanche 30 mars 2025 • Durée 02:00:00
Lots of speedy beats tonight, whether underpinning grime vocals, post-classical synths, postpunk agitprop or… you name it. Plus contemplative guitars & strings, shoegaze and indie-jazz-pop.
LISTEN AGAIN to capture all the details. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.
Postcards – I Stand Corrected [Ruptured/Bandcamp]
We’ve heard a lot of brilliant experimental music from Lebanon in recent years, a lot (although by no means all) of it courtesy of the Beirut-based Ruptured label (now partly run out of Montréal). Among the highest of highlights are the songs of Julia Sabra, both with Fadi Tabbal as Snakeskin, and solo. But Sabra’s first band was Postcards, an indie rock/shoegaze band that’s among Beirut’s longest-lived, going back to 2012. So we’re fortunate to have an actual new album from the band, produced though it was (as always, by Fadi Tabbal) under the very dark cloud of Israel’s regional aggression. As the opening song recites: “Destroy, rebuild, you know the drill / Destroy rebuild, repeat and kill”.
Snapped Ankles – Dancing In Transit [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
In the words of novelist Alice Walker, quoted by UK postpunk ravers Snapped Ankles, “hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof”. And their , named from the quote, is perhaps their most dance-oriented – riffing on single-oscillator “log” synths, dancing away the madness of the modern times (in case, in 7/8, making Venetian Snares proud).
Violeta García & Hora Lunga – i think i just died a lil bit [-OUS/Bandcamp] Violeta García & Hora Lunga – There’s Still Fun Stuff To Do [-OUS/Bandcamp]
Out from Swiss label -OUS is the debut duo album of Argentinian cellist Violeta García & Swiss musician Hora Lunga, I’ll wait for you in the car park. Their shared background in composition, improvisation and sonic experimentation led to this transformative music, in which clattering rhythms and distorted noise drones can come from the cello, electronics or field recordings. The album & track titles suggest a prosaic, distanced affect which is probably intentional, and the production does aim to undermine the performances – but if you’re here then you’re probably like me in loving deconstructed sounds, so this should be right up your alley.
Civilistjävel! x Mayssa Jallad – Holiday Inn (January to March) (Version) [Six of Swords/Ruptured/Six of Swords Bandcamp/Ruptured Bandcamp]
A couple of years ago, Beirut label Ruptured put out an amazing album by Lebanese singer/songwriter and researcher Mayssa Jallad called Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels. In touching experimental songs, Jallad chronicled the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, in which Christian Nationalists and pro-Palestinian leftists fought a violent battle amongst the high-rise hotels in Beirut, leading to the Green Line dividing the city, a rift that lasted for 15 years. The stunning album was picked up by burgeoning Bristol label Six of Swords, and given a co-released vinyl edition later in the year. Now the two labels are co-releasing a radical reworking of the material by Swedish producer Civilistjävel! (aka Tomas Bodén), into spectral pieces of dub techno and withered ambient. While the first single is out now, you can hear another collaboration between the artists on Civilistjävel!’s album Brödföda from last year.
Joy Moughanni – The Voice I’ve Yet To Understand [Ruptured/Bandcamp] Ruptured also released two new albums on Friday. From Joy Moughanni, a sound engineer involved in Tunefork Studios in Beirut, comes a beautiful album of granular & taoe processed piano recordings made between 1975 & 1985 by Georges Tarazi, along with archival radio recordings which bring the music into conversation with Lebanon’s many upheavals, and adds layers of emotion to the historical audio. A Separation From Habit might be more deeply wrenching if you understand Arabic and know the last 50 years of Lebanese history, but it packs a punch regardless.
Claudia Khachan & Ziad Moukarzel – Gone beginnings [Ruptured/Bandcamp] Claudia Khachan & Ziad Moukarzel – Spitfire 67 [Ruptured/Bandcamp]
The second Ruptured release this week is from Beirut artists Claudia Khachan and Ziad Moukarzel. It mostly came together when Moukarzel (part of the Beirut Synth Center) was travelling while Khachan remained in Lebanon, so Khachan’s vocals float untethered over a morass of Moukarzel’s electronics (as well as Khachan’s guitar & organ). And while the glitchy textures share an aesthetic with Joy Moughann’s release, partway through the last track a jittery drum break coughs into motion as if we’ve suddenly found ourselves at a rave… and then it peters out again.
Both these releases are strangely hypnotic, and handily demonstrate why I’m such a fan of the Ruptured label.
Raf Reza – Cry Of The Baul [Telephone Explosion/Bandcamp]
Toronto-based producer Raf Reza has released his debut full-length album Ekbar, which showcases his Bangladeshi heritage mixed in with music influenced by soundsystem culture – dub through to jungle. South Asian musicians have been central to bass music scenes in the UK, so it’s nice seeing a Canadian artist picking up on this too. Reza wanders through various bass music styles, but the dub aesthetic is never far away.
Moa Pillar – Ballroom [ПИР/Bandcamp]
Once Moscow-based, Fedor Pereverzev aka Moa Pillar now lives in London – for reasons that should be obvious (“FUCK THE WAR” reads the description on the Bandcamp of his label ПИР / Peer). His music is a mix of spacious ambient and high-intensity club sounds. There’s a somewhat anxious sense of motion, as Pereverzev’s constant movement – movement away, if not towards a known destination – took him to a small space in East London.
Eter Dex – deadn ess nouns [Hundebiss Records/Bandcamp]
Somehow Italian label Hundebiss Records has a knack for finding unusual music with a strange relationship to club styles. This includes artists from across the Mediterranean in Egypt, like Abdullah Miniawy and Assyouti, but has also included Hype Williams and Aaron Dilloway in the past. Eter Dex (or sometimes Eternal Index) is a fellow Italian making strange translations of percussive techno. On the opening track “deadn ess nouns” the beats cycle around pitch-shifted, processed words from Australian poet & experimental musician Amanda Stewart (co-founder of groundbreaking sound-art/poetry/free improv group Machine For Making Sense). I think it may be this piece, although it’s rendered (more) unintelligible.
Skee Mask – LCC Rotation [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
The Munich producer known as Skee Mask has a distinct style of sound production that’s his own whether he’s making techno, downtempo beats or jungle-influenced tunes. His releases, usually on the also Munich-based Ilian Tape, can be relied upon for airy production, acid squiggles, ambient interludes and funky beats of all sorts, and his breakbeat technique is first class, as heard on this track from his new EP Stressmanagement.
Djrum – Let Me [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
Felix Manuel aka Djrum is also a reliable producer, although what he can be relied upon for is surprise: constantly changing things up, from jazzy/classical piano, cello and wind instruments to techno, jungle, dancehall, dubstep and anything in between. While Under Tangled Silence represents a kind of renewal for Manuel (not least because the first version of the album was lost in a hard drive crash), it’s really got all the elements established on his early 12″s and previous brilliant album Portrait With Firewood. With Djrum “more of the same” is the highest of praise – and nothing is ever quite the same with him.
Lila Tirando a Violeta – Retumba en tu Piel [Unguarded/Bandcamp]
The latest album from Uruguayan producer Lila Tirando a Violeta comes via Berlin label Unguarded. Apparently Dream of Snakes comes from a recurring dream of Lila’s, literally about snakes, somehow mixed in with her experiences moving from the Netherlands to Ireland, which despite the subject matter was strangely comforting. I’m not sure if the same can be said of the album, which continues the producer’s work in post-industrial, post-IDM bass music, mashing up Latin rhythms with the breakbeats and drum machines, with irruptions of vocals within synthscapes and sample collages. It’s the futuristic music of the present.
Andrey Kiritchenko – Movement II [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
It’s lovely to hear so much new music from Ukrainian electronic icon Andrey Kiritchenko at the moment, who’s worked across IDM, glitch and forms of experimental electronic pop for over 20 years (around as long as Utility Fog’s been on-air in fact!) In contrast with the dancefloor-aimed breakbeats & bass on the Rust Trust EP coming from POLAAR in June, Ultra Marshes is a project tailor-made for Flaming Pines, the label run by Aussie ex-pat out of London, where Kiritchenko is also currently based. Its four movements and prologue are a celebration of the Hackney Marshes, a piece of public parkland in east London, so even though it’s resolutely electronic music, it’s deep connected to a sense of place – and it warmly pays tribute to a place that welcomes people of all stripes. The pulsating electronics and shifting harmonies are gorgeously enveloping and I could listen to them for hours.
Anysia Kym & Loraine James – shy (interlude) [10K/Bandcamp]
Here the very versatile London producer Loraine James, best known for her IDM-influenced dance music, extends on some of the more pop/r’n’b elements of her solo work with a short EP in collaboration with NYC vocalist, drummer and beat-maker Anysia Kym. These hazy, hazy songs are really short vignettes in glitchy style – the shortest’s under a minute, and only one tops 3 minutes – which bears the hallmarks of both artists in every bar. Clandestine indeed.
Nazar – War Game [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
When Nazar first burst upon the electronic music scene, his music was reflective of the violent reality of his home country Andorra over 27 years of government repression and civil war, “weaponising” the sounds of conflict within the music he dubbed “rough kuduro”. On his second album Guerrilla he directly addressed the conflict through his family’s experience, including his father who was a Rebel General. Five years later comes Demilitarize, both the name and the delay imply the intervening events, in which Nazar was significantly weakened from a bout of Covid that allowed latent tuberculosis to overcome his body. The previous violence here is lost in a haze, with dreamy vocals hidden in undefined textures, the beats also often nearly lost. It’s an audacious change, beautifully done.
Jerome Blazé – Living Room (with Zion Garcia) [Jerome Blazé Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney musician Jerome Blazé is engaged with music across multiple dimensions: as a producer, live keyboardist, songwriter and academic. Last year’s Living Room album was a home-recorded album combining influences from soul, neo-classical and dance music. The album put collaboration up-front, with instrumental and vocal collaborators from across the Sydney music scene as well as songwriting collaborations and a fully-credited list of sampled artists (and birds!) taking in local friends and international influences like BADBADNOTGOOD, Punch Brothers, Al Green and more. The album’s being given a vinyl deluxe edition this year, expanded through reworkings of each track (which he seems to be doing in reverse order) that open up his music to deeper collaborations. So here’s an adaptation of the title track featuring the versatile Zion Garcia.
Passepartout Duo – From Belgrade [Passepartout Duo Bandcamp]
The peripatetic pair of musician/inventors Passepartout Duo have been based in Sydney for the past few months (Parramatta to be precise), and are releasing a 12-track, year-long album called Pieces From Places with each track showcasing one location of their ever-continuing global residencies. “From Belgrade” comes across almost like Tortoise-style postrock, with its shuffling 12/8 groove and sparing amounts of slowly-drawn-out melody.
Stefan Goldmann – Builders [Macro/Bandcamp]
Berlin’s Stefan Goldmann co-founded the excellent Macro label, and is well-known for his techno productions and his association with Berghain and its Panorama Bar, although meanwhile his electronic productions have gotten ever-more experimental, stretching into unorthodox harmonic systems and exotic mathematical rhythm science. His Dad Friedrich Goldmann was a renowned composer & conductor, and Goldmann also has a thread of mostly-beatless avant-garde live performances – site-specific works, the latest of which was made for Istanbul’s Borusan Müzik Evi. This music was sparked from Goldmann’s fellowship at Tarabya Cultural Academy in Istanbul, and flows through a variety of evolving textures, including the pulsating synth blurts of “Builders”.
Ava Rabiat – The End [FUU/Bandcamp] FUU is a label/collective of visual & audio artists in Berlin including Ah! Kosmos, Büşra Kayıkçı & Hara Alonso – three women who’ve featured on this show relatively recently. To them is now added Ava Rabiat, who sings and speak-sings in her native Polish. On Elektro Erotyk she creates mysterious, minimalist, glitchy post-cabaret numbers, distorted and stretched though they may be.
Siavash Amini – Stilla [Room40/Bandcamp]
Coming on July 11th is a new album from brilliant Iranian sound-artist Siavash Amini, returning once more to Meanjin/Brisbane’s Room40. On Caligo he’s in dialogue with some old, mysterious piano recordings from Iran – Amini doesn’t give us much more info about these recordings, but they’re fed into some pretty intense processing. At times the piano source is obvious, at other times it’s distorted and twisted into new, anguished forms. There’s an emotional depth to Amini’s work which makes it compulsive/compulsory listening.
Gregory Paul Mineeff – Acceptance [Cosmic Leaf/Bandcamp]
On his latest album, Exhumed, Wollongong-based artist Gregory Paul Mineeff uses his substantial sound & composition skills towards an ambient music with some anxious emotions around the edges – at least until “Acceptance”, which closes the album and this show with some comforting felted piano.
R. Rebeiro – PE_3 [R. Rebeiro Bandcamp]
Rohan Rebeiro is drummer in much-loved & respected Naarm/Melbourne postpunk/postrock outfit My Disco, and has a longstanding electronic/industrial techno project as R. Rebeiro – at least I think it’s been around a bit for live performances, and last year birthed the album Unrendered Language, which I need to catch up on stat! Meanwhile, the Public Eye EP brings us four raw beats made for club performances around Naarm, somewhere between techno, dub and drum’n’bass.
Dacamera – Dalian Image [Pinecone Moonshine/Bandcamp]
From a split with the excellent London drum’n’bass & drumfunk producer Opius, Houston producer Dacamera brings jazz inflections and drum’n’bass darkness to his nimble beats, suitably complex and drum-oriented for Nic TVG’s Pinecone Moonshine label. Both producers are at the top of their game, so it’s an essential release IMHO.
Wraz & Motus – Spliff [Wraz Bandcamp]
I know Montréal producer Wraz primarily as a dubstep producer, and Motus, who appears here with vocal contributions, is also associated with dubstep. But on Wagwan/Spliff, Wraz is applying his snarling bass weight to something more like drum’n’bass. Of course the dub pressure is very much there – spliff, anyone?
Noneless – Delicate Sin [Noneless Bandcamp]
The North Sydney/Kuringgai artist now known as Noneless previously released some pretty crazy breakcorey hybrid music as elfaether, and a couple of years ago returned to music production with their amazing album A Vow of Silence, released on ☯ anybody universe ☯, the label run by Japanese IDM/breakcore latter-day legend Laxenanchaos. Now they have a new EP in the works, Delicate Sin, the title track to which is now out. It’s that combination of classical influences and splintered jungle breaks that sit together just so.
Paul Frick x TigJez x Chache – 90 Cents Dub feat. Matthias Engler [forthcoming from Paul Frick Bandcamp]
German electro-acoustic trio Brandt Brauer Frick tend to make minimal techno, cut through with acoustic instruments drawing from classical and jazz. Individually, Daniel Brandt has made a name for himself with film work and post-classical work, but Paul Frick‘s most attention-grabbing move a few years ago was joining Tangerine Dream, admittedly in a lineup that no longer contains any of the original krautrock/kosmische trailblazers. He releases collaborative singles occasionally, and there’s one coming out on March 7th called “90 Cents”, with vocals from TigJez and “viola percussion” from Charlotte Oelschlegel (credited as Chache). It’s melancholy but upbeat, and the dub pushes things further into the abstract but rhythmic, with additional percussion from Matthias Engler.
Matthew Ryals – etude no. 30 (take 2) [3OP/Bandcamp] Matthew Ryals – etude no. 26 (take 7) [3OP/Bandcamp]
I first came across Brookyln’s Matthew Ryals when he released the brilliant free-jazz-tronica of Voltage Scores on the by-then Eora/Sydney-based Oxtail Recordings. Then in 2023 he began an undertaking that is now coming to its close: three EPs, each in three versions, consisting of generative works for modular synths, where the tracklist is the same on each volume, but they feature different takes. Like the first two volumes, the works on Generative Etudes Vol. 3.0 manage to extract some real emotional heft in amongst the burbling, chittering electronics. This is particularly notable on “etude no. 10 (take 8)”, but unfortunately at almost 9 minutes I wasn’t able to fit it in – so you’ll just have to go listen for yourself. This time round, the three EPs will also be available on one CD, which I would absolutely partake of if the postage from the US wasn’t twice the cost of the album itself.
Ai Yamamoto & Dan West – Gossamer [Audible Artefacts/Ai Yamamoto Bandcamp]
I generally think of the work of Naarm/Melbourne’s Ai Yamamoto as ambient, music made from field recordings or sounds about the house, with delicate electronics. Here she’s teamed up with Dan West, who is also a sound-artist but can also be found making beats of all sorts of varieties – and thus Microdoses, their first collaborative album, is one part delicate electro-acoustic sounds, and one part glitchy IDM beats. There are field recordings here, sometimes morphing into microbeats, and there are acoustic instruments comfortably cohabiting with synths. It’s a lovely album, from which I was pleased to play a preview tonight.
Benjamin Fulwood – Speedboat [Room40/Bandcamp]
A lockdown highlight for me was Ai Yamamoto’s Pan de Sonic – Iso released on Lawrence English’s Room40, in which she made an album out of the sounds of her home during Melbourne’s painfully long lockdown (including the purring of her cat). So that’s a nice segue into Benjamin Fulwood‘s new album The Stars Are Very Far Away From All Of This, released this week on Room40. The original recordings here are Fulwood’s saxophone and clarinet, recorded in late nights after office work in Tokyo – but after a bicycle accident, he was unable to play and turned to electronics to transform these unbridled improvisations into something new – densely layered reed instruments, sometimes gradually transformed into electronic noises. Even the free jazz drumming of Lav Kovač on “Speedboat” has to struggle to rise above the maelstrom, to thrilling effect.
Sarah Pagé & Patrick Graham – Tempest [Envision Records/Bandcamp] Sarah Pagé & Patrick Graham – Burning [Envision Records/Bandcamp]
I’m very grateful to my mate Luke de Zilva, fellow FBi broadcaster with Surfacing, for introducing me to this remarkable album from two Canadian musicians: harpist Sarah Pagé & percussionist Patrick Graham. Under Pagé’s hands the harp takes on many unexpected qualities, although it’s supplemented with bass koto and sarangi (the latter a bowed south Asian string instrument). In addition to familiar percussion, Graham plays waterphone, hamon and – perhaps most obscurely – the electro-acoustic nano garden. All these sound sources are all very well, but the music – whether composed or improvised – is performed with great sensitivity, and the many electronic touches add to the elusive yet evocative nature of the album.
The title Littoral States refers to regions of bodies of water between the deepest depths and the very edge – the shifting shallows, where objects may be submerged or revealed, and nothing is static. None of this really conveys how lovely this partnership is though, so if you enjoyed the lengthy excerpts tonight, put your headphones on, close your eyes and immerse yourself.
Scott Gordon – Tilts I [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
A new release on Powell’s Diagonal Records is always going to be… not what you expect. And so it is with Metals from Scott Gordon aka SDGORDON aka Hiax, who sometime back was making uk garage-adjacent stuff as Loops Haunt. Haunted is what this album is, its two sides representing two different approaches to Gordon’s use of metals as sound sources. And yet, nothing here sounds like Einstürzende Neubauten – nothing is aggressive, in fact for a lot of the time it is not rhythmic at all. Gordon’s scrap metal bars resonate as they’re struck by little motorised hammers. In the first half (And Away I-III) this generates lovely numinous drones; in the second (Tilts I-IIII) the motors speed up and spit flickering rhythms, accompanied I think by some electronics. It’s hard to balance the desire to know more about how this is generated with the pure enjoyment of listening. I don’t think you need to know the sound source to enjoy this as abstract experimental music.
Nour Sokhon and Stefan Christoff – Every moment [Forthcoming on Ruptured Music]
I’ve been very lucky recently to be able to bring you previews of new music coming out on Beirut/Montréal label Ruptured Music. Here is a beautiful duo from Berlin-based Lebanese sound-artist & researcher Nour Sokhon and Montréal broadcaster, activist and musician Stefan Christoff. Christoff’s contemplative improvised piano lines are embedded in – and sometimes overwhelmed by – field recordings from Lebanon & Germany, and electronic noises. The album, titled Beyond All Borderlines, extends out of Sokhon’s broader ongoing research/performance project “And Who Are We Now?”. Through specific sounds and field recordings, it asks the listener to confront the questions “Why are you here?” and “Where are you from?”, questions which carry painful and sometimes sinister undercurrents for displaced people. But the piano always centres these works with a sense of humanism. A world without borders is a vision completely at odds with the inward-turned, outwardly aggressive fascism shouldering its way into our current age, and I for one am on board.
From the Mouth of the Sun – The Last Shepherd [Forthcoming on FTMOTS Bandcamp] From the Mouth of the Sun – He Left Alone [Forthcoming on FTMOTS Bandcamp]
Both Aaron Martin and Dag Rosenqvist are notable music creators, making their own forms of minimalist folk, drone and experimental music (for many years, Dag was at the forefront of drone’s crossover with postrock as Jasper TX). Togther they have worked as From the Mouth of the Sun since 2012’s brilliant Woven Tide, with Martin’s melancholy cello and other acoustic instruments combined with guitar noise and electronic textures. And from the start their music was used in film, TV and in stage works. Tonight I’m able to bring you a couple of previews from the wonderful new FTMOTS album In Wind or Dust, released in a couple of weeks. This is an album adaptation of music the pair wrote for the dance work In Wind or Dust created by choreographer duo Danae & Dionysios of the Small Axe dance company, inspired by the life of Kawa Niangji, a Tibetan environmental activist and poet who died at age 26, drowned while attempting to dismantly an illegal fishing net in Qinghai Lake. FTMOTS’s music is at times delicate and intimate, at times monumental and distant. It feels like the perfect conduit for this story.
Stein Urheim – Speilstemt [Hubro/Bandcamp]
A couple of weeks ago I played a new song from Norwegian trio Building Instrument, a weird kind of electric folk featuring singer Mari Kvien Brunvoll. Brunvoll is a longtime collaborator with guitarist Stein Urheim, whose latest solo album Speilstillevariasjoner (literally “Mirror-style variations”) finds him playing multiple stringed instruments as well as various analogue & digital electronics, field recordings and percussion. On top of this is the distinctive live sampler performance of Ikue Mori, Sam Gendel on saxophone & electronics, Hans Kjorstad on violin and Siv Øyunn Kjenstad on drums and voice, resulting in yet another set of music that could somehow only come out of Norway (or perhaps Sweden), equal parts folk, jazz and avant-garde electronics. The Hubro label is the natural home for such hybrids, an ever-overflowing font of Norwegian creativity. Long may they prosper.
The Cloud Maker – The Godly River [The Cloud Maker Bandcamp]
I decided to slip in one more preview of the wonderful The Cloud Maker, a new project involving an international cast of brilliant women, convened by clarinettist, improviser and experimental musician Aviva Endean. Endean is a member of the remarkable project Hand to Earth with Yolgnu songman Daniel Wilfred, didgeridooist David Wilfred, trumpeter & sound-artist Peter Knight, and Korean-Australian vocalist Sunny Kim. Kim and Endean were involved in a residency in Banff (Canada), where they met Te Kahureremoa Taumata, a practitioner of Taonga Pūoro (a word that describes a suite of Māori musical instruments). Their fruitful musical collaboration began with the Māori moth goddess Raukatauri, whose story is the origin story of one of those taonga pūoro, the cocoon-shaped flute called Putorino. In the Adelaide Hills, the group expanded to include contemporary cellist Freya Schack-Arnott (who also plays a traditional Swedish multi-stringed instrument called the nyckelharpa which you can hear in her duo Runa Cara with Bonnie Stewart), and percussionist/sound-artist Maria Moles. So yes, it’s a project overflowing with talent & creativity. Each member contributes stories of goddesses from their own folkloric traditions, and The Cloud Maker‘s music is as varied as its members. “The Godly River” centres around pulsating chords and textural percussion, with a stunning vocal performance from Te Kahureremoa Taumata. Watch the beautiful video now.
Open to the Sea – Shallows of the Black Sea [Matteo Uggeri Bandcamp] Matteo Uggeri – …for God [Matteo Uggeri Bandcamp] Matteo Uggeri – Observing, Waiting for… [Matteo Uggeri Bandcamp]
And to finish tonight, we head to Italy, where we join Milan’s Matteo Uggeri and his many collaborative projects. The most prominent, and now quite long-lived, is with Venetian sound-artist Enrico Coniglio, which began with an album credited to the two called Open to the Sea, and which became the name of the project (it’s a “process”, not a band!), with the addition of multi-instrumentalist Saverio Rosi. Open to the Sea is itself a melting pot of regular guests such as cellist Andrea Serrapiglio and trumpeter Alessandro Sesana, along with various vocalists who float in & out of tracks which, much like the sea, ebb and flow. This isn’t drone, and it’s not quite postrock, nor folktronica. Even though it’s very much electronically constructed, it’s very organic-feeling music – even though the musicians’ contributions are generally asynchronous, and the final combinations built up by Uggeri along with the other musicians. In the 8 years since its founding, the project has released perhaps 5 albums (it depends how you count them), but they’ve also amassed a miscellany of other material, whether on limited-run 3″ CDs, or as bonus digital material from the very limited “puzzle” editions of their albums. Thus they have now collected all this semi-released material on the 2CD collection Watering Paper Flowers and Snakes, which ends up as a wonderful collection of evocative, hard-to-pin-down music that’s anything but a collection of second-rate off-cuts.
But when listening to this, I had to jump back to a release from last year, a rare solo album from Uggeri himself called Growth. You’ll see from the track titles that it deals with some very personal themes – relationships with the world and with family, fatherhood… The music is, surprisingly, performed live on each track. It’s not live instrumentation though – these are performances of short snippets of piano recordings (or even little orchestral & operatic samples) that are snipped & looped into undulating quasi-drones, and fed through degenerative effects and dub-techno-like delays and reverbs. Think William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas, Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alva Noto. It’s not quite any of those things, although they’re all in its DNA, and it captures the same beauty in dissolution. Highly recommended.
they are gutting a body of water – beautysleep [tagabow Bandcamp] they are gutting a body of water – glittering too [tagabow Bandcamp]
This isn’t technically a new album from Philly experimental shoegaze weirdos they are gutting a body of water (tagabow) – it was “released” on SoundCloud mid-last year and on streaming services, but they just stuck it up on Bandcamp this Friday. It’s standard tagabow fare, which means anything but standard music – My Bloody Valentine-style bent guitar noise battles with jungle beats, glitched breaks, chopped samples of all sorts. Dizzyingly weird, aggressively lo-fi, utterly superb.
Big Blood – No Rain Tonight [Big Blood Bandcamp] Big Blood – In The Night Sky [Big Blood Bandcamp]
Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin – and sometimes their daughter Quinnisa – have been recording as Big Blood for almost 2 decades now, which is crazy. Both were also members of the legendary postrock/junk-folk/prog-punk troupe Cerberus Shoal, who I long adored, who reincarnated (sort of) as weird Americana band Fire on Fire with many of the same members. And then Colleen & Kinsella formed Big Blood, which has elements of folk, but it’s very psychedelic and electric – well, it’s anything they want it to be, really! Electric Voyeur is insanely cool because it’s the culmination of years of studying and making their own electronic instruments at home. There’s an instrumental version to foreground the electronics, but that’s more of a curiosity, as the vocals make these into songs, and the album is quite a trip! Big Blood at their best, IMHO.
Desideria – Meine Tarar [Desideria Dreams]
Sung in Guthnic, the almost-forgotten language of Gotland, the new single from Swedish singer Desideria is entirely produced by herself, with lovely glitchy beats & textures that recall Björk in the best way. I’m not sure it will turn up on her Bandcamp, but the WASP- 76-b EP from 2020 is pretty nice stuff too, with crunching beats and writhing vocals. This single is from her debut album Princess WWW which I believe is due out at the start of March, so I hope to play you more then!
Yasmine Hamdan – Hon هون [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
While I’ve featured quite a bit of Lebanese music on this show, it’s leaned towards the experimental. Yasmine Hamdan‘s career goes back to the late ’90s with indie/trip-hop band Soapkills, all three of whose independent albums have been re-released by Belgian powerhouse Crammed Discs, whose catalogue covers postpunk and experimental music as well as “world music” from all over the planet. Hamdan released two previous solo albums with Crammed, and new single “Hon هون” presages her third. Its titled means “Here”, and the lyrics, co-written with Palestinian poet Anais Alaili, were in fact written in the aftermath of the disastrous Beirut port explosion on August 4th, 2020, but resonate with the devastation left by Israel’s assault on Lebanon and both Gaza and the West Bank. It’s a beautiful song which begins soft and acoustic but blooms into a fuller and more electronic arrangement.
Ben Chatwin – The Beginning [Ben Chatwin Bandcamp]
Scotland-based composer Ben Chatwin used to be a notable figure in the drone world under the name Talvihorros. His work under his own name hasn’t been a huge change, as he always had an impressive range, but if you’re expecting the two 3½ pieces on new single The Beginning to be typical crescendoing drones then you’ll be surprised as rhythms (almost beats) drive the music forward, and vocals from Jen White lift the music further towards the end. Confusingly, the equally great “b-side” is titled “The End”, but it’s only the end of the beginning, as Ben has more new music on the way, hopefully at least as cathartic as these two pieces.
Christophe Bailleau – Reaagall vst VIP hall owl [Mahorka/Bandcamp] Christophe Bailleau – Ethno barbecue (AI ghost) [Mahorka/Bandcamp]
Belgium-based French musician and sound-artist Christophe Bailleau is an inveterate collaborator – his Covid album Shooting Stars Can Last was credited to “Christophe Bailleau and Friends”, and was a superb, genre-crossing amalgam featuring artist from across the Francophone world. His latest album, Insight and Vision, on the other hand, is a much more solo affair, the third in a trilogy of albums that he says are about “creativity in the face of autistic disorders”. CHUVA ORBITAL : Armadillo Time and Vertical Moon Phase Charm both came out in 2023, and feature a similar range of guests to this new one, with some instrumentation and writing collaboration – and Criele Antennaa O’Farrell is credited with “motivation”, which I can attest to being a hugely valuable contribution. While Bailleau’s work goes back to techno productions in the 1990s, the music here is very modern-sounding, with weirdly glitched and sequenced General MIDI sound pallettes rubbing up against processed acoustic instruments, jump-cuts and shiny hyper-dissonance. Well worth looking into all three, whether you count yourself as neuro-divergent or not.
Joey – Spooky Emote [Elicit Records/Bandcamp] Sam Link – Raster [Elicit Records/Bandcamp]
Here’s a great introduction to London label Elicit Records, covering bass music to techno, jungle, footwork, with an emphasis on the in-between stuff… Connected 02 starts with a great 1-2 punch from two US artists: Midwest US producer Sam Link (who you may know from a couple of brilliant YUKU releases) brings breakbeats and jazz syncopation, and Brooklyn producer Joey has a wonderful bass-heavy half-tempo groove with little flutters throughout.
Bokonon – Becoming The Locust [Rooms Inc/Bandcamp]
The aforementioned Sam Link has been released on Rooms Inc‘s 12″ series, each of which is named after a colour. The latest is Scarlet, with the usual mixture of bass and techno-related beats, all in evidence with the track from the Kurt Vonnegut-inspired Bokonon, with junglified techno and lovely electronics.
Tutu Ta – Low Veil High Ground [Tutu Ta Bandcamp] Tutu Ta – Rootless [Tutu Ta Bandcamp]
Enigmatic UK dub experimentalist Tutu Ta names themself “Nomad the Shadow Dancer”. Previous releases have had the arcane, eerie feel of Demdike Stare’s early folk-dub mysteries, sometimes with an ersatz jazz tilt, and the latest EP Low Veil comes with no description. The tracks here connect more with post-dubstep/grime/jungle genre signifiers, complete with some low-key muffled vocals on one track. It’s so good I played 2/3 of it tonight.
F L V X X X – Over [Reveries/Bandcamp]
Rome-based label Reveries puts an Italian tilt on contemporary dance music – bass, percussive techno, jungle. They host club nights with international bass & techno luminaries, but by and large their releases are from Italian artists. Their first release of 2025 is Manière Dub, is joint EP from Reveries co-founder Her Nice Too and Rome-based duo F L V X X X. All four tracks (one from each artist, a collaboration and a remix) draw inspiration from dub soundsystems’ pervading influence on electronic music, from percussive techno to deconstructed dancehall. I loved the vocal samples and head-nodding swung 123-bpm riddim of F L V X X X’s opener “Over”, which Her Nice Too straightens out into an electro rave roller at the end of the EP.
Shugorei – Three Pathways (feat. Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 ) [4000 Records]
We’ve recently heard Meanjin/Brisbane duo Shugorei with a breakbeat-driven remix of Ghostwoods and a delirious piece of ’80s-’90s-style hyperpop. So of course their next single is a contemplative piece with guzheng master Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 . That’s not to say that it’s purely acoustic or ambient – Nozomi Omote’s percussion enters sparsely, while Thomas Green’s electronics introduce reversed reverbs and glitchy detail. It’s a gorgeous piece of cross-cultural folktronica, auguring greatness from their forthcoming album Memories of Magic—魔法の記憶—Mahō no Kioku.
Sara Persico – Brutal Threshold [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based composer & sound-artist Sara Persico, originally from Napoli, released released a brilliant EP on Karlrecords in 2023, and I’ve been waiting for an album since then. In contrast to the fizzing distortion, thrumming bass and crunched beats sometimes in evidence on that EP, her debut album Sphaîra seems at first glance to be a sparser, more shapeless affair, but this would be inaccurate. The album is slower paced, focused on sound design, on sonic architecture: much of the material was recorded in a stunning space in the Lebanese city of Tripoli, part of a monumental, unfinished exhibition complex. The Experimental Theatre, shaped as a massive dome, was designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer to propagate sound around the space. So while there are plenty of electronics here, Persico also recorded her voice and the sounds of stones, pieces of metal, and even the outside world filtered into the dome. Somehow knowing this makes the album an even more electrifying listen. Released by the ever-reliable Subtext Recordings.
Matt McBane – Absence [Gradient Music]
The lovely synthesiser & piano sounds herein are just one facet of the work of Matt McBane, a violinist and composer as well as an electronic musician. Buoy, out on February 28th, is his first entirely solo album, and while it’s very much focused on synths, the acoustic instrumentation is combined in various lovely ways, like the limpid piano phrases glistening over the stuttering electronics on “Absence”, or the way McBane’s violin follows the synth arpeggios on “Arpeggiator” (it’s the kind of finger exercises I would have hated practicing as a kid – kudos!) Meanwhile, the last track (about half the album is streaming now on Bandcamp) matches a violin melody with vocals fed through fizzling electronics. Keep an eye out for the full album to drop.
Joona Toivanen Trio – Infinite Fields [We Jazz/Bandcamp] Joona Toivanen Trio – Gravity [We Jazz/Bandcamp]
I’m so often blown away by the music that Finnish label We Jazz releases. Their catalogue is firmly in the jazz camp, but reaching out into the wilds of electronica, sound-art and other experimental musics. I’ve certainly known for a long time that the Swedish & Norwegian jazz scenes are special – check labels like Rune Grammofon, Hubro and others – and the Danish jazz scene is renowned, if seemingly more conventional. Here we have the Joona Toivanen Trio, originally all from Finland although now only drummer Olavi Louhivuori is there, with pianist Joona in Gothenburg, Sweden, and his brother Tapani in Copenhagen, Denmark. Having all grown up together, they have an instinctive rapport that comes through in their improvised music. But Gravity is particularly unusual & inspiring, made in a fairly random studio in the Finnish countryside, in a 2-day gap during touring. You can hear the effect of only having access to an upright piano – lots of lovely felt muting – along with old organs and synths, and what they describe as “tribal drums”. Sometimes constraints and unfamiliarity generate something remarkable, especially with seasoned improvisers, and the gorgeous sounds here are testament to that.
Alex Jasprizza – Wetland [Alex Jasprizza Bandcamp]
Finally, an artist not unfamiliar with jazz, but making a space all his own, is Eora/Sydney-based saxophonist Alex Jasprizza. I’ve played a few of his lovely pieces mixing improvised saxophone with field recordings of nature – sometimes performed in those spaces, sometimes overdubbed. His album Waterways is finally coming out in March, with opener “Wetland” bringing multiple sax lines with piano, synthesizers and the burbles of running water. His own take on ambient jazz, a real beauty.
Building Instrument – Saunte [Hubro/Bandcamp]
Norwegian trio Building Instrument have been around for a little over a decade now, but are perhaps not very well-known outside of Norway, excepting those who follow the great, genre-crossing Hubro label. Mari Kvien Brunvoll sings and plays electronics/live sampler – she is also known for her duo with Stein Urheim. Åsmund Weltzien plays keyboards of various sorts, and Øyvind Hegg-Lunde drums. But despite the predominance of electronics, the band has a strong folk/jazz sense, and on this new single (taken from an album to be released in March), I’d go so far as to say it’s folktronica – lots of glitching keyboard lines and stuttery beats, and Mari Kvien Brunvoll’s pixie-ish vocals. Can’t wait to hear more.
General Magic – Elfer [Editions Mego/Bandcamp] General Magic – Tyrell [Editions Mego/Bandcamp] General Magic – Datna Éclat [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
Andreas Pieper & Ramon Bauer were there at the very beginning of the MEGO label, which swiftly became the centre of the “glitch” movement of experimental sound coming out of Vienna and further around Europe – from which Christian Fennesz also arose. The two formed General Magic, and with Peter Rehberg aka Pita released some formative material that’s collected as Fridge Trax Plus, made out of the buzzes and throbs of an old fridge. More generally they were interested in mistakes and malfunctions – or at least things that sounded like that. Awkwardly cut (or rather, carefully cut) samples that stuttered and clicked due to sharp digital discontinuities, and a love of overdriven noise via digital clipping; this was the native experimental music of the digital era, and I played one track from their debut album Frantz, a longtime favourite of mine. It’s no surprise that these days this is both the sound of retro-kitsch and also futuristic sound-art (just with much, much more sophisticated & readily available tools).
So anyway, as you may know, the label disbanded a few years later, and Rehberg restarted it as Editions Mego, run with great enthusiasm by the man basically on his own. And tragically, decades later and just a few years ago, Rehberg passed away. So the label and its offshoots are now run by various artists connected with Mego, releasing music that was already slated to come out, along with other related material. I hope this latest batch isn’t the end: There’s a new LP – technically one 45-minute track – out now from Peter Rehberg under his own name called Liminal States, a long evolving drone work. Annnnd there’s this! Bosko follows Nein Aber Ja from 2023 as a new renaissance of Pieper & Bauer’s General Magic, and it’s an incredibly strong work. No doubt fans of Hausu Mountain releases would immediately peg it as not quite from the same era, but there’s a jump-cut everything-piled-in-together thing going on that’s in common with Hausu, who I’m sure in turn are influenced by the Mego scene. So here we have harsh noise drones, chopped riffs, what must be an AI voice attempting to sing in one or two tracks, and speedy piano samples juxtaposed with crunching hardcore beats. Joyful noise, done as it should be.
Ester – Sermon [Khnum Crew] Ester – Dour [200+]
From Adelaide, on the stolen land of the Kaurna, comes the classical/breakcore-melding sound of Ester – previously known as Bleakcore, unleashing an updated sound under this new moniker. With Ester, he’s combining the gabber-speed breakcore madness with a mixture of high-quality string & piano samples and some live violin. It might initially seem like random splattercore, but particularly on the beautiful “Dour” (from the To Bask in the Absense of Silence release with Eora’s 200+) you can hear how the beats are in conversation with the piano melody. This is goooooood.
s8jfou – Your Silence [Satellite Era]
Chicago label Satellite Era has released the last in their Distant Arrays series, Volume 08, compiling four tracks of experimental bass music from around the world. 50% of revenue will go to California Community Foundation (CCF) to aid people affected by the LA wildfires. Tonight I played a brilliant piece of glitch-hop/jungle from French producer s8jfou, who has a full album coming out soon – if this is an outtake, the album will be pretty special.
Sophie Gordon – Gate [Sophie Gordon Bandcamp]
Here’s someone who would be familiar to FBi’s audience and friends. Sophie Gordon has broadcast in many slots on the grid, including the indescribable Robbie’s Modern Life. But here she’s producing some alluring beats that start in a hypnotic dubby trip-hop/techno vibe and about 2/3 of the way through slip into double-time jungle. It’s pretty dreamy, ambient beatz cooked to perfection.
Atoloi – Contaminazioni Riddim [Amphibian Records] INN – Phantom Wave [Amphibian Records/Bandcamp]
Last year, Prague-based label Amphibian Records released a brilliant album by Carl Gari & Abdullah Miniawy, their third release together combining dub & bass music with Miniawy’s Arabic vocals and trumpet. They’re back now with a big compilation called Transmission for Lebanon which, while highlighting the genocide in Palestine, focuses on supporting the Lebanese people subject to Israel’s aggression. 100% of proceeds will go to organisations on the ground in Lebanon, including the Beirut Synth Center. There are artists from all around the world here, including from Czechia, but tonight I played Milanese artist Atoloi who I believe often works in noise & sound-art, but here brings an amalgam of dancehall, hard dance and jungle; and Taiwanese artist INN, who contributes a piece that’s part fast techno, part half-time drum’n’bass.
Sectra – Entry Point ft. Trisicloplox [Tectonic Recordings/Bandcamp] Sectra – Glass Clutch [Tectonic Recordings/Bandcamp]
This week Denver producer Sectra releases his new album Through The Static on legendary Bristolian dubstep label Tectonic Recordings. He describes the album as being a metal record that follows the formula of dance music, which is a pretty good explanation. The first single featured the great Dis Fig, hot off her collaboration last year with experimental metal band the body. The album is full of crackling static and bass beats, as well as some beatless tracks. There are some dubsteppy sounds here, but also pulsating techno with shuddering bass like “Entry Point”, featuring fellow Denverian Trisicloplox.
Architectural – Eternity Land [Turbo Recordings/Bandcamp]
Better known as Reeko, Spain’s Juan Rico has made thumping minimal techno for many years, and in the last few years branched out into drum’n’bass and 170BPM beats, mainly for Samurai Music. His long-established Architectural alias turned up a couple of years back on R&S Records, and here brings four varied tracks, including this one which is unusually euphoric for a generally very dark producer.
pucemoment – Bugaku [Parenthèses Records/Bandcamp]
Nico Devos and Pénélope Michel are known in one incarnation as the “ghost opera” band Cercueil, making perhaps a kind of French electroclash. However, their forthcoming album Sans Soleil is different enough to warrant a new name, hence pucemoment (although I’m also seeing it spelled as Puce Moment). This is moody and dramatic music, based around the pair’s recordings from Tenri, of the ancient Japanese music known as Gagaku. The acoustic instrumentation is reconstructed along with electronics and Michel’s voice. This kind of music is bread & butter for the Brussels-based Parenthèses Records, a label which began life in Boorloo/Perth, and has a particular interest in traditional music coaxed into new forms. I’ll play more from this album closer to its March 21 release date.
MMMD – Soley Kouche [Antifrost/Bandcamp]
Greek band MMMD used to be known as Mohammad, making monolithic bass drones with double bass and electronics. These elements are still present, but more recently they’ve taken to something more akin to coldwave or synthwave… There’s an album coming I believe, and meanwhile I’ll keep an eye on these singles as they appear.
dogs versus shadows – Ghost Artery Part 1 (radio edit) [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
Nottingham artist dogs versus shadows appears on Kate Carr’s brilliant label Flaming Pines with a kind of narrative about the River Trent, that winds through Nottingham and has been subjected to various forms of degradation through human activity. This highly polluted river has dangers lurking beneath its surface, and dogs versus shadows dredges these up with the use of “field recordings, tape loops, dying vocals from broken dictaphones and snatches of shortwave radio”. The two full tracks are a little under 15 minutes each, and each is an engrossing quasi-narrative of watery field recordings and seemingly unrelated sounds – chopped up snippets of speech, electronic pulsations and almost-rhythms. It’s fascinating and you’ll probably want to go back and listen again when it’s over.
Hara Alonso – Veins (Veils) [forthcoming on her Bandcamp]
“Veins (Veils)” is the first single from touch•me•not, the forthcoming new album from Stockholm-based, Spanish-born pianist and sound-artist Hara Alonso. It doesn’t seem to be out in the world yet, so enjoy it here, and I really recommend spending some time on her Bandcamp. She knows her muted-piano post-classical technique, but happily confounds it with found sounds and studio trickery. Wonderful stuff.
Adam Coney & Richard Pike – A Corner Of Light [Trestle Records/Bandcamp]
UK guitarist Adam Coney released a gorgeous album, Ashwin & Above, on Trestle Records in 2023. Richard Pike is an Aussie living in London, well known for Pivot/PVT, now making film & TV music, as well as ambient stuff as D E E P L E A R N I N G and co-running the experimental label Salmon Universe. During lockdown, Pike began filming some contemplative pieces sitting at the piano, and when Coney discovered them, he decided to overdub his own pensive guitar on one piece. That’s actually here as the first track on their album Driftingland – and these pieces do drift, very pleasingly. The rest of the material was recorded together in regular duo sessions, and the works here show the artists’ simpatico sensibilities. Although it’s mostly acoustic, there are sections where Coney gently adds electric guitar, allowing for some subtle effects – phasing or slow pulsing volume modulation.
Lawrence English – ETHKIBVIII [Room40/Bandcamp]
Brisbane’s Lawrence English is a key figure in Australian experimental music, known as much for his curation of big international events for the likes of Dark Mofo and Carriageworks as he is for his gently influential label Room40, and his keen ears when mastering other artists’ work. But of course he makes his own music, often based around field recordings, and frequently in collaboration. Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds handily combines some of these threads, as it’s made out of carefully selected extracts from sound-works commissioned by Jonathan Wilson for the Art Gallery of NSW – during the two VOLUME festivals and perhaps at other times. So Lawrence has gathered a tremendous list of artist who’ve contributed here – check the Bandcamp page for the full list, but including claire rousay as well as Jim O’Rourke, Amby Downs and JW Paton, and quite prominently, the piano of Chris Abrahams. Although it’s split into 8 parts, a work like this is really one continuous exercise in slow evolution, so it felt right to join in right near the end, and let English, Abrahams and co play us out.
Leese x Nathalie Froehlich – Holy [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Back to YUKU, who must be one of the most-played labels on this show of late. Here they’ve handed control to Brussels-based DJ & producer Leese (Leslie Deboeur) and Swiss DJ & producer Chewlie (Julia Häller), whose “Invite” series collects club-focused bass music by female producers & artists. Here Leese teams up with Swiss rapper Nathalie Froehlich with a hard-hitting bass track.
Opius – Pizazz [Subtle Audio/Bandcamp]
Vinnie J. Smith’s output as Opius goes back to a series of drum’n’bass 12″s in 2004-2005, but he’s picked up steam a lot in the last 5 or 6 years, more on a drumfunk tip – his In Session on Inperspective last year is wicked, as is the more dark d’n’b-styled EP+remixes The Calling, released in 2023 on Polish label Offish Productions. Meanwhile, Irish label Subtle Audio has been around for a whopping 20 years itself, and they released two multiple CD collections (Subtle Audio Vol II and Vol III) that turned me on to a lot of great drumfunk/jungle in 2010 and 2014 respectively. They’re now back in the compilations game with SUBTLE001COMP :: Rhythmic Idyllic, a 10-track selection of contemporary jungle & drumfunk with 4 tracks also released as a vinyl EP. Opius’ “Pizazz” appears on both – it’s a brilliant piece of jazzy drumfunk, mostly in a half-time swing.
Djrum – A Tune For Us [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
One of the greatest rhythm scientists of recent years is Felix Manuel aka Djrum. But the beats have always been tempered with lush orchestrations of electronics, samples and instrumental performances. “A Tune For Us” is his first release of 2025 and features cello from Zosia Jagodzinska, who also played on his spectacular 2018 album Portrait With Firewood. Gorgeous Djrum-style neo-classical that slides into very unusual beat patterns in the second half.
tunng – Snails [Full Time Hobby/Bandcamp] tunng – Drifting Memory Station [Full Time Hobby/Bandcamp]
Look, you know the story. OK, maybe you don’t. In 2004 I was lucky enough to go to Sónar in Barcelona with a press pass courtesy of Cyclic Defrost. Among the memories and goodies I brought back was a promo CD of some sort that featured an incredible track on it, which happened to be the first single by Tunng, “Tale From Black”. I found shortly after that this was released on a lathe-cut 7″ by the excellent little indie label Static Caravan. I was obsessed, and played this and its b-side, and then the second single, to death. And this is where I get confused, because 2025 is the 20th anniversary of their debut album Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs, but Geoff from Static Caravan kindly sent me the album early, so I was playing tracks off it from October 2024. “Folktronica” was a genre name already bandied about for the likes of Four Tet, Manitoba (pre-Caribou) and Minotaur Shock, all of whom used acoustic guitar and other acoustic samples in a cut-up, glitchy hip-hop fashion. This was a different version, songs with an arcane, pagan British folk feel courtesy of singer Sam Genders, and glitchy production from Mike Lindsay which referenced club sounds but never leaned too much on beats. I’m still super fond of that album and its follow-up, but Genders left after the third album and I didn’t warm so much to the following couple of albums. Then after a 5-year break, Genders was back with the band for Songs You Make At Night in 2018, and 2020’s concept album Tunng Presents…DEAD CLUB. It’s been four years, but here’s Love You All Over Again, an album that’s unabashedly nostalgic, looking back 20 years to that debut. So yes, it’s folky and glitchy, and it’s pretty easy-going stuff, but sweet & catchy and unique as ever. I rather like the downtempo instrumental “Drifting Memory Station” too, its title a nice evocation of nostalgia.
Nick Storring – Roxa I (radio edit) [We Are Busy Bodies/Bandcamp]
Everyone knows I collect experimental cellists (not to embalm them and put them on my shelf – preferably just their CDs). Toronto musician & composer Nick Storring is someone I’ve followed for over 10 years – here’s me in 2013 discovering his 2011 album Rife – and I was pretty stunned by the lush orchestrations (performed by Storring on a cornucopia of instruments, some homemade) on his 2020 album My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell and 2021’s Newfoundout. Now this March, We Are Busy Bodies are releasing Mirante, which is ostensibly Storring’s homage to Brazil – and I do think I can feel some kind of Braziliana in this first single, as it becomes more dense & rhythmic. Like those predecessors (and some earlier works), this album features a host of musical instruments and non-musical objects all performed by Storring, meticulously built into opulent orchestrations. There are field recordings from Brazil woven into later tracks on this album too – it’ll be something very special.
Sam Amidon – I’m On My Journey Home [River Lea Recordings/Bandcamp]
I discovered US folk avantgardist Sam Amidon via the minimalist composer & producer Nico Muhly, who used Amidon’s voice and banjo on the third section of his album Mothertongue in 2008. Amidon’s first solo album actually came out the previous year on the same label, Valgeir Sigurðsson’s Bedroom Community. Amidon combined a deep knowledge of American folk music traditions with an interest in contemporary music & production, but the key I feel is his raw, emotive voice, and his proficiency on violin, banjo and guitar. Over the years, Sam Amidon’s music has varied from fairly direct folk – both interpretations of traditional songs and his own pieces – and fusions of folk with free jazz, contemporary classical and electronic music. His new album Salt River, released on Rough Trade sub-label River Lea Recordings, leans away from experimentation by and large, and is a rewarding, dreamy listen.
The Cloud Maker – Shaman Dance [The Cloud Maker Bandcamp]
Here’s a preview of a wonderful new project involving an international cast of brilliant women, convened by clarinettist, improviser and experimental musician Aviva Endean. Endean is a member of the remarkable project Hand to Earth with Yolgnu songman Daniel Wilfred, didgeridooist David Wilfred, trumpeter & sound-artist Peter Knight, and Korean-Australian vocalist Sunny Kim. Kim and Endean were involved in a residency in Banff (Canada), where they met Te Kahureremoa Taumata, a practitioner of Taonga Pūoro (a word that describes a suite of Māori musical instruments). Their fruitful musical collaboration began with the Māori moth goddess Raukatauri, whose story is the origin story of one of those taonga pūoro, the cocoon-shaped flute called Putorino. In the Adelaide Hills, the group expanded to include contemporary cellist Freya Schack-Arnott (who also plays a traditional Swedish multi-stringed instrument called the nyckelharpa which you can hear in her duo Runa Cara with Bonnie Stewart), and percussionist/sound-artist Maria Moles. So yes, it’s a project overflowing with talent & creativity. Each member contributes stories of goddesses from their own folkloric traditions, and The Cloud Maker‘s music is as varied as its members. “Shaman Dance” will have a video released in a few weeks, and is a perfect example, with Māori flutes, unbridled vocals and energetic percussion.
Penelope Trappes – Red Dove [One Little Independent/Bandcamp]
In April, London-based Aussie musician Penelope Trappes will release A Requiem, her first album on the One Little Independent label. We’ve heard two singles already, and here’s the third – just as dark and stark as the previous ones. The Red Dove of the title was held in the hands of a boy at the end of a particularly apocalyptic dream of Penelope’s, and she has channelled this imagery into a reflection on our society’s general numbness to violence and toxicity. Couldn’t be more apposite for the current moment really. There’s the cello scraping, cavernous bass and Penelope’s voice. This will be a powerful album.
Ida Duelund – Læmira [Initiated Records/Bandcamp] Ida Duelund – Misi Miamo [Initiated Records/Bandcamp]
I’ve been looking forward to Sibo, the debut album from Danish double bassist & singer Ida Duelund, for a while. Duelund is one half of the experimental string duo Lueenas with violinist Maria Jagd, and spent some time studying in Naarm before finding her way back to Copenhagen. This album is a strange, uncanny concoction that’s ambient double bass whalesongs one moment, then exquisite chamber jazz, then heavy electronics… Duelund’s incompletely-white-painted face on the cover is an indicator of the humour and weirdness within, but the wrenching beauty may catch you unawares.
Reuben Ingall – Stung [Reuben Ingall Bandcamp]
Canberra’s Reuben Ingall may be known for making drone works out of a microwave heating up a pie (well, maybe he’s not, but he performed it a lot, and it was… delicious), but he’s a disarmingly lovely songwriter, and his matter-of-fact vocals with guitar sent through custom glitch patches never fail to grab me from the inside. An unfairly talented man who’s happy enough lurking in the background. At the very end of last year he released a little EP called SONG SONGS, which is actually an EP never released in 2014, and completed, re-mixed, or just released now. It’s so good.
Nickolas Mohanna – Night Horses [AKP Recordings/Bandcamp (forthcoming)]
Here’s a special thing just for you – the first single from Nickolas Mohanna‘s album Speaker Rotations, which is out via AKP Recordings on March 7th. NY-based composer & musician Mohanna continues here with his practice of the last few years building cyclical structures of krautrock rhythms and riffs that shift, at intervals, into new shapes. As I commented on his excellent 2023 album Double Pendulum, the joy is often in these transitions, which recontextualise the more static passages around them – which can make it hard to play representative excerpts, but in “Night Horses” you’ll hear the motorik snap and pop of guitar harmonics and controlled feedback, and as it cuts off you’ll hear it start to mutate somewhere else.
Mitchell Keaney – Snowbird Pass [Eastern Nurseries/Bandcamp] Mitchell Keaney – Northern Butte [Eastern Nurseries/Bandcamp]
Portuguese experimental label Eastern Nurseries (actually co-run out of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) has a strong track record of uncovering unusual, strangely gripping music, and this is one of their strongest in a while, from Arizonan sound-artist Mitchell Keaney (now based in Berlin). The music is inspired by the striking environment of Arizona, from the deserts to the towns, and bewilderingly shifts from literal field recordings (at times with music being played in the background) to deep, abstract walls of sound. It’s incredibly engaging and evocative work.
dprk – Mountain Garden at Eki-Kita 駅北の山庭 [Studio Fabrik/Bandcamp]
I’m glad that this Eora/Sydney experimental group are continuing to make their uncategorizable noise/psych/kraut primitivist stuff. dprk is made up of Richard Fielding (Loop Orchestra, early Severed Heads), Nick Dan (of noise obscurists xNoBBQx) and Juke Wyat (also recently of Loop Orchestra). Their second album dragonfly mountain トンボ山 documents a tour of Japan, and sees them inviting drummer/saxophonist Yusuke Akai into the fold. It’s not really following any trends, nor is it imitating any past genres either – free music, with its own logic. Cool.
Final Fantasy – A [Final Fantasy Bandcamp]
La Fielding & Sydney Jarrett recently formed Final Fantasy as a “melodic noise” duo, using violin and synths with amps and effects. Swansong is a long, freeform jam performed at Lazy Thinking in Dulwich Hill (Sydney’s inner west). It’s been a long time since Owen Pallett was calling himself Final Fantasy, so the name’s up for grabs! This reminds me nicely of Yellow Swans, which is a very good thing.
Kate Carr and Matt Atkins – Chloroplast [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
Finally for tonight, on Kate Carr‘s own Flaming Pines label is a duo with fellow sound-artist Matt Atkins imagining what it might sound like inside our cells, where proteins fold & unfold, metabolic processes occur, cells divide and duplicate through mitosis and meiosis… Organelles is the result, using Carr’s and Atkins’ practices of amplifying common objects and sequencing recorded sounds. The pieces teem with off-kilter micro-rhythms and nano-melodies, floating in ever-moving stasis.
Quade – See Unit [AD 93/Bandcamp]
There’s a special strain of English indie music that’s deeply attached to a sense of place, and the *ahem* Cycle of Days & Seasons – the wonderful Hood being a prime example, and their descendents such as epic45. Quade don’t quite approach this in the same way as Hood, but I do feel there’s a kinship there. Quade meld postpunk rawness with more lyrical, melodic tendencies in the vocals and from the violin. If anything, on “See Unit” the predecessor is the proto-postrock of Bark Psychosis, and that’s a great achievement.
Ināra Quartet – A Blue Room [Warm Winters, Ltd./Bandcamp]
The gorgeous sounds on the four tracks of Ināra Quartet‘s debut release feel comfortably, beautifully Swedish to me, probably because I was brought up on the jazz/folk/postrock of Tape. For their part, as much as Ināra Quartet draw from Swedish & Scandinavian folk traditions and jazz, they are also influenced by the harmonies and rhythms of traditional Bulgarian music, minimalist composers, Sufi poets and more. Nevertheless, the jazz-trained percussion of Mischa Grind help place the music along a certain seam of postrock that goes through Tape back to Tortoise, along with two Agnas brothers – Mauritz on double bass & cello, and Kasper on guitar – and Johan Graden on synths and harmonium. A couple of years ago Graden made an incredible album with minimalist composer Ellen Arkbro called I get along without you very well, understated jazz songs with Arkbro singing and Graden on piano & keyboards, with gorgeous arrangements for mostly bass instruments. The sensitivity from that work bleeds over into the pieces here. I’m very excited to find out what’s next.
Matmos – Changing States [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
If you’re one of the lucky few who got to see Matmos performing at Phoenix Central Park in August last year, you would have seen the pair duo sampling not just from destroyed Bread records but from metallic objects of all kinds – cymbals, ball bearings, pots & pans (as I recall). I’m lucky to have seen Matmos quite a lot, and from as far back as 1999 (when I saw them twice, in Edinburgh and then in New York), their performances have always been based around live sampling and a good quantity of humour. But both Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt are also deeply thoughtful individuals and excellent musicians, and that performance was bewitching as much as it was hilarious. They are also a couple, and they celebrated their 25th anniversary with the Plastic Anniversary. In 2025, that would make them 31, but it’s not a stretch to imagine that Metallic Life Review was conceived and created around their 30th anniversary. Like the plastics of that earlier album, this one is built around the sounds of metallic objects, extending into the pedal steel of the sadly recently-departed Susan Alcorn, among other guests. They are well aware of the genre connotations of “metal”, as much as they are of the accuracy-or-not of their music as musique concrète, found-sound or field recordings, but something I always note with pleasure is that they can’t but help express their musical roots in ’90s experimental electronica – as much as the proto-folktronica, postrock and Americana found on the beloved 1999 EP The West and 2003 album The Civil War. When you’ve been together for 30 years, as life partners and creative partners, certain themes would tend to repeat while others would be turned away. So raise a stainless steel tumbler to one of music’s greatest couples, and go and “pre-save” or pre-order Metallic Life Review.
even – The Shades [Electroménager/Bandcamp]
French label Electroménager announce the upcoming self-titled debut from experimental duo even, made up of Greek mutant bass music explorer Jay Glass Dubs and France-based harpist Sissi Rada (real name Sissi Makropoulou). And yup, this first single has it all – a postpunk sensibility with exploding dub echoes and rolling harp-eggios. Just great.
A.Fruit – I’m so Bored [A.Fruit Bandcamp]
I’m convinced Anna A.Fruit is one of the most exciting newer talents in bass/club music at the moment. Her fusion of footwork, jungle and other bass music is coupled with first class sound design and lots of experimental touches. I’m so Bored is 160bpm footwork-jungle and a little bit of a hyperpop twist.
Lila Tirando a Violeta – Rest & Relaxation [Unguarded/Bandcamp]
Uruguayan producer Lila Tirando a Violeta is masterful at bass, breaks and percussive beats – and she’s very much in the “deconstructed club” camp. Having based herself in the Netherlands for a while, she relocated to Ireland where she fell in love with the countryside there – and no doubt found comparisons with her original homeland. There are many collaborations as usual, including Irish experimental producer Lighght, but I seem to have gravitated to her solo pieces, full of beats & breaks thrown around with glee, fragments of vocals and manipulated field recordings.
Gesture – Free Lunch [YUKU/Bandcamp] Rizio – Nexus [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Czech label YUKU pumps out releases at a rate of knots – generally more than one a week – and they’re often showcasing pretty new talent doing creative & experimental stuff with all sorts of bass music. Following a call-out to listeners to submit their own music, YUKU this week released not one, but TWO compilations of “Fresh Faces” – here’s Part I and Part II. To my ears, the first is the stronger, but there’s valuable stuff on both. Tonight, from Part I we heard London’s Gesture with 130bpm bass & junglism, and from Part II, Finland’s Rizio with a medium-paced percussive techno roller.
Ryoji Ikeda – data.matrix (Crosstalk Edit) [No longer available]
Late last year Brazilian producer Crosstalk put up on his Bandcamp an album of edits, mostly of pop stuff. But a couple of weeks ago, a blink-and-you-missed edit appeared of a Ryoji Ikeda track from his 2005 album dataplex. The original has the typical Ryoji Ikeda tics that you’ll recognize from his audiovisual installations and albums – high-pitched beeps, clicky beats that are utterly austere while somehow preserving some of their roots in jungle and IDM. Crosstalk slows it down to the 140bpm range, complete with wub-wub bass and uk garage beats – and the orchestral sample Ikeda so artfully deploys in the middle. But either someone from Ikeda’s team or elsewhere asked him to take it down, or Crosstalk decided to, so. You can hear it here until… well, ssh!
Bokonon – Cavern [Hypercell/Bandcamp]
After a lovely bit of junglified techno on Rooms Inc, the Vonnegut-inspired Bokonon has released the Writhe on his own Hypercell Records. It’s four slabs of techno in various styles, from acid to percussive bass techno with wasps… But “Driven By Wasps” is almost 11 minutes long, and I do like the water droplets and dub chords of “Cavern”.
Rust – Kharif [Thawra Records/Bandcamp]
Based in Prague, Lebanese-Syrian duo Rust create what they call “electro-tarab”, blending contemporary electronic dance music with traditional Arab music. Petra Hawi sings in Lebanese, and for this project, Rust collaborated with Lebanese poet Jana Salloum; Hany Manja is an electronic producer and also performs on oud, one of the traditional instruments that accompanies the voice in tarab music. I love the mad glitching synth loops in “Kharif”, but Rust succeed also in retaining their music’s traditional roots through the noise and thunder.
Simon Henocq – CONCOURSE A [Carton Records/Bandcamp]
French record label Carton Records gregariously supports artists across just about all genres, and many of their releases have the genre-free je ne sais quoi of Simon Henocq‘s We Use Cookies. Henocq is a sound-artist, producer and self-taught musician who also convenes French collective COAX, a gathering-together of musicians of all genres along with dancers, visual artists and more. I would loosely define Henocq’s album as noise, but it coalesces into a kind of industrial techno often. At other times you’ll get a fizzling, crackling tone that slowly grows into a snarling miasma. Quite exhilarating.
Ursula Sereghy – Wet and Innocent [Mondoj/Bandcamp] Ursula Sereghy – Magic User [Mondoj/Bandcamp]
Following her excellent debut OK Box in 2021, Czech musician Ursula Sereghy has released her follow-up, Cordial, on the Polish label Mondoj. It’s not exactly IDM, it’s not pop enough for hyperpop, it’s not club enough to even be deconstructed club… and it strays quite far from ambient, in my opinion. The sampled droplets of vocals create uncanny melodies over glitched shuffles and fragmented General MIDI chamber orchestrations. Odd music for odd times.
Tlön – Huxley [Jazzland/Bandcamp]
By now I’ve well and truly emphasised my love of English/Norwegian duo BirdWorld, a genreless exploration of percussion, cello, found sounds and more. BirdWorld’s very recent album Nurture featured a guest appearance from Norwegian violinist Sara Övinge, and thus I found out about her duo Tlön with BirdWorld’s cellist Gregor Riddell. And, perhaps not coincidentally, mere weeks after Nurture, Tlön’s debut album Reality has arrived! It’s released via Norwegian label Jazzland, a label whose name is perhaps misleading even though “jazz” is broadly at its core. And Tlön, like BirdWorld, draws on its members’ classical backgrounds and their talents as improvisers and composers, as well as following BirdWorld in their concrète approach to sound. While Bokonon above is named from Kurt Vonnegut, Tlön of course take their name from Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius“, one of his reality-warping, inter/intra-textual wonders – and thus the music here twists and turns in surreal ways, so you thought you were listening to classical cadences but your attention strayed for a minute and now it’s heaving electronic drone? The musicianship is first class, and the surreal mix of found-sound, spoken word and warm strings often uncovers real beauty.
Drank – Min [Trost/Bandcamp]
Austrian label Trost is the home of noise-leaning free jazz bods like sax manglers Peter Brötzmann and Mats Gustafsson, but also for instance Christof Kurzmann, who flits easily between glitch, indietronica and avant-garde spheres – and indeed they’re also the label that released the two Keiji Haino + Sumac albums, a somewhat different beast from Sumac’s Moor Mother collab we started the show with. But past avant-gardism, Trost releases can seemingly go anywhere, and the two releases here are a case in point. Drank is the duo of two key members of Austria’s improv/experimental scene: Ingrid Schmoliner on prepared piano and Alexander Kranabetter on trumpet & electronics. Each of the four tracks on their debut album Breath in Definition is a constellation of sound. Schmoliner draws an amazing array of sounds from her piano preparations, very conscious of the psycho-acoustic effects of dense walls of sound, while Kranabetter’s electronics mutate his trumpet into unrecognizable forms. Although I love the second track – so much so that I played its entire 11 minutes and 35 seconds – the last 2 tracks are notable for renowned percussionist & electronic experimentalist Lukas Koenig‘s marimba & electronics, followed by Anja Plaschg aka Soap&Skin‘s breathy vocals on the last track.
Paul Wallfisch & Dana Schechter – Wolfram Lotz Watches a Western Spy Movie and Decides to go Shopping for a Lowrider [Trost/Bandcamp]
Meanwhile, The Heart of a Whale is a very different thing. It’s a meeting of two musicians’ quite different styles – the crumbling cabaret of Little Annie collaborator Paul Wallfisch and the growling guitar noise of Dana Schechter (Swans member and the force behind the “cinematic noise” band/solo act Insect Ark). Still, there are deep connections here – both musicians are interested in soundtrack & multi-mode performance. And indeed the Weimar cabaret style is deeply ingrained in the work of no lesser industrial/noise don than Blixa Bargeld. The Heart of a Whale is a soundtrack of sorts, for a performance by the Vienna Volkstheater of the exploratory, satirical work “Die Politiker” by contemporary German poet & playwright Wolfram Lotz. In keeping with the experimental but incisive work they’re soundtracking, Wallfisch & Schechter roam far with their music, inserting slabs of distortion in amongst the Tom Waitsian pump organ, piano et al. I feel like if any of these references resonate with you, you’re in for a treat!
Luke Abbott, Lotte Betts-Dean, Jack Wylie – Endless Joy [Salmon Universe/Bandcamp]
With our own Laurence Pike, UK keyboardist Luke Abbott and saxophonist Jack Wylie make up the psychedelic electronic jazz group Szun Waves. In late May comes a new project from Abbott and Wylie, joined by Melbourne-born mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean. Endless Joy will be released on Salmon Universe, the label Laurence’s brother Richard Pike runs out of London with Joe “JQ” Quirke. As the album’s title track and first single shows, Betts-Dean is by no means singing in full-throttle operatic mode, layering her voice through electronic processing, with prepared piano and further electronics from the other two members. As you’ll hear when the full album comes out, no single track captures the whole of this album. It’ll be launched in London when I’m playing up the road at Portals Festival – actually the following day, so I’m hoping to go along, but I won’t be on-air again until a few weeks later, so stick this in your wishlist or whatever!
Katarina Gryvul – ZOVSIM NISKIL’KY [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
There’s classical music and folk mixed up in the avant-garde electronics and vocals of Ukrainian composer Katarina Gryvul‘s new album. SPOMYN is released on the great Subtext Recordings, fitting in with the likes of Pyur or even Sara Persico. Gryvul multi-tracks her vocals for that full Balkan-like women’s choir effect, albeit with constantly evolving effects on the vocals and bursts of electronic noise. The result is a melancholy, but also at times degraded and sinister sound.
Kuunatic – Disembodied Ternion [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp] Wheels of Ömon, the second album from Japanese all-female psych rock trio Kuunatic, continues from where their first left off. Stentorian riffs and group vocals, and then echoes of traditional Japanese music…. Drummer Yuko Araki is a brilliant musician across many genres & instruments – she released a stunning noise/industrial album on Room40 in 2023. Bassist Shoko Yoshida previously made beautiful acid folk in the fragile DIY Japanese tradition while keyboardist Fumie Kikuchi is also a vinyl DJ. Just calling this acid rock is highly misleading – there’s so much to sink your teeth into, I think maybe even moreso on this second album.
Maurice Louca – El Taalab الثعلب [Simsara Records/Bandcamp]
Egyptian musician Maurice Louca is a bit of a polymath. The earliest recordings I’ve heard are experimental electronic, and he’s lent production to many artists, but he’s also a member of psych rock/free jazz group The Dwarfs of East Agouza, and Egyptian/Lebanese/Turkish experimental rock/jazz supergroup Karkhana among others. And Louca’s solo music has moved into similar territory, losing most of the electronic elements in the last couple of albums. On May 30th comes Barĩy (Fera) برٌِي, an album full of dancing rhythms, albeit acoustic. On the first single, violins and double bass chase synths and percussion around with chiming electric guitar somewhere in the mix, the repetitive folky phrases only opening up into beautiful diminished harmonies and lyrical melody just before the 3 minute mark.
While you’re here, I have to point you to the stunning Arabic indietronica album Lekhfa الإخفاء Louca made in 2017 with Egyptian singer Maryam Saleh and Palestinian singer & multi-instrumentalist Tamer Abu Ghazaleh.
Violeta García & Hora Lunga – i think i just died a lil bit [-OUS/Bandcamp]
On the 25th of April, Swiss label -OUS is releasing the debut duo album of Argentinian cellist Violeta García & Swiss musician Hora Lunga. Their shared background in composition, improvisation and sonic experimentation led to this transformative music, in which clattering rhythms and distorted noise drones can come from the cello, electronics or field recordings. I’m still digging into this, and finding more at every turn.
Laurent Pernice – ProvidenZad (ft. Alain Damasio) [Le label beige] Laurent Pernice – Il y a les ombres (ft. Héloïse Brézillon) [Le label beige]
“There are shadows” is the new album from Laurent Pernice – Il y a les ombres in the original French – and as much as it’s about the darkness of shadows, it’s about the shadowy future that lies ahead. Pernice draws on his background in sample-based industrial music in the 1980s, incorporating many live instruments and many guests (his mate Jacques Barbéri plays “genetically modified sax”). But the future history aspect is enhanced on more than half the tracks with guest vocalists reading their own poetic works, including author Alain Damasio (well-known in the francophone world), Black Sifichi, experimental pop producer Judith Juillerat, and young poet, performer and sci-fi writer Héloïse Brézillon. It’s sumptuous and rich music, as is typical of Pernice – recommended even you don’t know any French.
Julien Mier – Scrap (ft. Daisuke Tanabe) [Lapsus/Bandcamp]
Sydney-based electronic producer Julien Mier – also known as Santpoort – has a new album under his own name coming out from the excellent Barcelona label Lapsus. Gradually sees Mier reflecting on not just being Dutch in Australia, but having a French background as well – I’m always jealously admiring of multi-lingual people! – and the album is structured around those three backgrounds. The first single features Japanese producer Daisuke Tanabe, whose own love of jungle breakbeats and sound design is echoed across this new work of Mier’s. It’s gonna be a doozy!
Briain – Only When You Look At It [Art-E-Fax/Bandcamp]
Barry O’Brien works as a sound engineer at Berlin clubs Ohm and Tresor, so you’d think he’d be making thudding techno, but his album Cognitive Dissonance leans more towards acid, electro, breakbeat and IDM. Released on breaks-centred Berlin label Art-E-Fax, it’s the kind of br(i)aindance that would’ve haunted the Rephlex label way back when, and wouldn’t be out of place on CPU Records. Always lovely to hear this kind of melodic electronica.
Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das – supermatr1x [Bios Contrast Bandcamp]
The current issue of The Wire has an interview with Kolkata-based electronic producer Nilotpal Das, who is variously named as Bios Contrast, under his own name, as DJ Nilo… and frequently as “Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das“. He makes super-complex beats with dense sound design, which he’s dubbed brahmancore. The album SSAC42 is on its way, and “supermatr1x“, which popped up on his Bandcamp at the end of last year, is slated to appear on it.
Flower B – Big shitty life [Big Science/Bandcamp]
Lyon-based DJ & producer Flower B has just released his debut album on Lyon label Big Science, entitled Locked In. The French underground electronic music scene has always been strong, with a love of hardcore and breakcore as much as UK & US bass music (not to ignore the big club stuff which revolves around house, electro & disco music I guess). On this release, Flower B is definitely making heavy bass music with equal influences from industrial techno and ghetto house.
Hmr – Chronos [Straight Up Breakbeat/Bandcamp]
OK well here’s some proper drum’n’bass, from Finland’s Straight Up Breakbeat, and Hmr is a Finnish producer featured on the label’s Zero Five EP. All four tracks are well-produced jungle & d’n’b tracks. Hmr’s “Chronos” is decidedly Photek-like in its precision minimalism.
Hedchef – Inertia of the Real [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Out via Prague powerhouse YUKU is new EP Only Time Will Tell from Naarm/Melbourne’s Hedchef. Hedchef expresses his impatience with the ’90s/’00s sounds that are around at the moment, and I can see where he’s coming from, despite loving the way jungle, trip-hop and even folktronica are reincorporated into modern bass music & experimental approaches. In any case, on this EP we do hear precision rhythms in alien forms, held down by a solid low-end. Highly suited to their home on YUKU.
Obelisk – fakemink – LV Sandals (Obelisk remix) [Obelisk Bandcamp]
A couple of weeks back, FBi’s own Ryan O’Rourke – presenter of Mithril late on Thursday nights – released a couple of sneaky edits on his Bandcamp. The original LV Sandals, by EsDeeKid, fakemink & Rico Ace goes hard enough, but Obelisk beefs it up into industrial proportions.
Clay Teeth – Chapel Fire [Natural Sciences]
I’ve known Greg Stone since quite early days in FBi’s history, as lead singer of Sydney indietronic/postrockers Underlapper, and – full disclosure – our trio Haunts will finally be releasing something in the coming months. But a little while back, Greg was inspired by the tribal drum’n’bass championed by Samurai Music to try his hand at producing dark d’n’b himself, and he quickly became highly adept at it. This track is released on Manchester label Natural Science‘s eclectic, noisy compilation Flesh Renewed, but it will also feature on the upcoming album. Contra to what I’ve just said, this is more like techno than d’n’b.
Mitch Elliott – No Dream [Garden Seat/Bandcamp]
Originally from Newcastle, Mitch Elliott is now based in Eora/Sydney, where he makes noise music and experimental sounds. His latest release is out on Naarm’s Garden Seat, and was recorded live in Indonesia last year. It’s music that’s based around feedback and distortion, so no surprise that the recordings themselves are beset with “foul distortions”, as described by Elliott. But there’s a purity to distortion which can itself be penetrating, although soon enough the echoing bass tones in “No Dream” are ridden over with a squalling feedback melody.
Kettel – Conrector [Kettel Bandcamp]
The music of Dutch musician Reimer Eising comes from a different direction – since the early ’00s Kettel‘s always been an IDM & ambient project, with some neo-classical elements a few years in. But tonight’s track makes use of pulsating echoes that, well, echo Mitch Elliott’s. It’s one of the darker tracks on Kettel’s new album Dubio. Like his 2013 album ibb & obb, this is a video game soundtrack, for a game that combines puzzle solving with parkour. Never less than melodic, Kettel’s music here has a lush, nostalgic feel that eschews the precision of programmed music, and is more human for it.
Will Parker – Devine Blink [Difficult Art And Music/Bandcamp] Red Lake, Black Mine, the new album by UK composer & audio-visual artist Will Parker, might initially sound like minimal glitch, but it was born out of walks around the post-industrial landscape of inland Cornwall, land that’s been transformed by mining, and poisoned by its toxic outlets. The work exists as an album – digital and on CD – and a performed version, but also an art book that doubles as graphic scores. The combination of concrète sounds, electronics and digital editing is quite ingenious and the mix is incredibly spacious. It’s a visceral listen.
Theresa Wong – Light in the Grotto [ROOM40/Bandcamp]
I’ve known of American cellist Theresa Wong for a long while, as a collaborator with Carla Kihlstedt (including a duo album on Tzadik), a collaborator with minimalist composer/instrument maker Ellen Fullman, and more. Her new album for ROOM40, Journey to the Cave of Guanyin, is a beautiful collection of pieces for solo cello – sometimes just the single instrument, sometimes multi-tracked – that are created to evoke a sense of peace and mental focus. Guanyin is a Chinese deity embodying infinite compassion, and these pieces are prayer-like in their minimalist repetition. The cello is down-tuned substantially from the typical A 440, and – when the instrument isn’t producing fluttery almost-percussive ricochets – the harmonies are in just intonation, which tunes the intervals to the harmonic series based on a particular fundamental, so that chords other than the tonic sound eerily “out of tune” to our ears, accustomed to equal temperament. Wong has put a lot of thought into these pieces, using technique honed over many years of composing, improvising and studying. The result is something bewitching and strange.
Matthias Kaiser & Reinhold Friedl – lamento [Tonkunst Manufactur/Bandcamp]
Acoustic instruments are fractured and transformed on the album ololuge from two German experimental musicians, violinist Matthias Kaiser and pianist Reinhold Friedl. Friedl directs the new music ensemble zeitkratzer, known for interpretations of early Kraftwerk, and work with Terre Thaemlitz, Keiji Haino and power electronics terrorists Whitehouse – generally all done acoustically. “Ololuge” is a word from ancient Greek meaning “ululation” – wailing, trilling… There are similar words in many languages. So from this concept, Kaiser and Friedl draw out unconventional sounds from both instruments, with prepared piano and harmonics, glissandi and extended techniques on the violin. Despite the distinct avant-garde nature of the work, the music is highly expressive – suitably for the subject matter – and “lamento” is a particularly emotive piece.
Pierre Bastien & Michel Banabila – Le Système Déraille [Pingipung/Bandcamp]
The first collaborative album between French mechanical instrument maker Pierre Bastien and fourth world electronic producer & composer Michel Banabila was a strange affair, lovely but perhaps a bit tentative. On their follow-up, Nuits Sans Nuit, it feels like they’ve found a singular voice together. First single “Le Système Déraille” has unconventionally-tuned ocarinas(?), muted trumpet, what sounds like a vinyl runout groove, and electronically stretched piano chords. The little melodies could be mechanically produced, but sound gradually more like they’re electronically sequenced. Looking forward to hearing the rest!
Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson – Bone Bells [Pyroclastic Records/Bandcamp]
Two incredibly accomplished improvisers and performers of contemporary jazz and contemporary classical music getting together is quite something, and these two women are easily at the top of their game, Sylvie Courvoisier on piano and Mary Halvorson on electric guitar. For some reason electric guitar and acoustic piano seem like an ill-fitting combination to me, but Courvoisier & Halvorson prove it to be as natural as anything. This is their third collaboration, so I blame myself for not discovering the duo earlier. Courvoisier has played with many of those in the “Downtown NY” jazz scene, including her husband, also-legendary jazz violinist and John Zorn mainstay Mark Feldman, and his frequent partner-in-strings (and hero to me), cellist Erik Friedlander. Halvorson, a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, is known as an innovator, technically explosive and incredibly sensitive, and has a characteristic way with the whammy bar – except remarkably it’s not: the pitch-bending effects are from swivelling the delay time (using an expression pedal) on a Line 6 DL4 delay unit! So, suffice to say this was always going to be mind-bending, beautiful and riotous – as it indeed is. Even if you’re not a jazz aficionado, you should give this a go.
Alex Zethson & Johan Jutterström – If I (Tålamod) [thanatosis/Bandcamp]
Stockholm musicians Alex Zethson (piano) & Johan Jutterström (saxophone) have known each other since they were teens. Now Zethson runs the Thanatosis label, releasing jazz and free improv and sometimes drone/noise, and also collaborates widely. Zethson & Jutterström’s duo album If I Could / If I is a mixture of cleverly-chosen covers and beautiful originals by Jutterström. A few weeks ago I played their cover of John Lurie’s “It could have been very very beautiful” – and, in fact, it was! And they cover “It couldn’t happen here” from the Pet Shop Boys’ brilliant second album, in lovely wistful fashion. But Jutterström’s original compositions really are gorgeous, and the playing of the two musicians is exquisitely restrained (I try not to use “exquisite” too often, so please take it as the chef’s kiss that it needs to be).
Oh No Noh – Dog Years [TELESKOP/Bandcamp] Oh No Noh – Orb [TELESKOP/Bandcamp]
Love hearing some music that, stylistically, takes me back to the early days of postrock and folktronica (I know these were not the same early days). Leipzig’s Markus Rom is Oh No Noh, playing a multitude of instruments and electronics, putting it together in post-production to make head-nodding guitar-driven instrumental rock, folktronic near-pop, and more abstract sound-arty collage. Across the album he’s worked with the likes of KMRU, The Notwist‘s Andi Haberl, and the album is adorned with artwork from legendary cartoonist Anna Haifisch. Amazingly, a lot of this was performed by musical robots Rom has programmed – see a live performance here.
Giuseppe Ielasi – 01 [Senufo Editions/Bandcamp] Giuseppe Ielasi – 11 [Senufo Editions/Bandcamp]
All that iconic Italian sound-artist/producer/guitarist/etc Giuseppe Ielasi says about his latest release an insistence on material vol. 1 is “new series // first volume // march 2025 // thanks for listening”. Which, fine. Past series of Ielasi’s have involved mechanical machines butting their heads paper hooked up to contact mics, or music made from run-out grooves of vinyl records, or blurry guitar loops – just about anything really, including minimal beats (from strange sources). So “an insistence on material” could be an insistence on physical sound sources… or it could just be, you know, putting out material of some sort? These numbered tracks are vintage Ielasi – strangely cut, warbling tape (or vinyl?) loops, anonymous sputtering anti-rhythms… Wonderful.
BirdWorld – Opposite Hinges (feat. Sara Övinge) [Dugnad rec/BirdWorld Bandcamp] BirdWorld – Let Sleeping Babies Lie [Dugnad rec/BirdWorld Bandcamp]
When I discovered BirdWorld in 2018, it was love at first sight – a cello and percussion duo? And yet so much more? Cellist Gregor Riddell and percussionist Adam Teixeira are both virtuosos at their chosen instruments, but in the mysterious albums of BirdWorld – their debut UNDA and now the follow-up NURTURE – you’ll find Teixeira playing kalimbas (thumb piano) and other tuned percussion, or synths, while Riddell adds guitars, piano, and even vocals at times. Field recordings and rhythmic jazz/almost-postrock coexist with an impeccable solo cello piece, throwing plucked and bowed notes around like a seasoned juggler, while at times guests join – like Swedish violinist Sara Övinge, who’s comfortable in classical or jazz contexts, and has a duo with Riddell called Tlön, with an album on the way on legendary Norwegian label Jazzland. The gregarious nature of these recordings, and the willingness to go in unexpected directions mid-stride, reminds me of The Books or Lucky Dragons, groups who first turned me on to the possibility of just dispelling all preconceptions, and not making music for instant gratification or consumption. More power to them! Don’t let this one slip by.
Morgan Szymanski and Tommy Perman – Harmonic Rain [Blackford Hill/Bandcamp]
Paradoxically, one of the most “ambient” tracks of the night is leading us into the beats? Guitarist Morgan Szymanski and artist Tommy Perman are childhood friends, who released their first album together in 2022, and “Harmonic Rain” is the first track from their follow-up, Songs for the Mist Forest. The roots of the album – and of this track – come from a soundtrack that the two worked on for a documentary (you can see a trailer here) about the ongoing ecocide from overdevelopment of the beautiful Valle de Bravo in Mexico. You can see more of the forest in the beautiful video for this track, made by Szymanski’s friend Juan Pablo Ortíz. But what about the music? Szymanski’s guitar does indeed play dancing harmonics as well as little melodies, while Perman builds beats which may partially be sampled from guitar taps. Around the edges are drawn-out scraping/bell-like tones; it’s a very effective evocation of a misty forest.
Carrier – Slow Punctures [Carrier Bandcamp]
For a couple of years now, Guy Brewer has been releasing a unique strain of bass music as Carrier. This follows his influential minimalist techno as Shifted, but seems to look back at his early work with drum’n’bass trio Commix (now the solo work of George Levings). But rather than the more rigid rhythms of either d’n’b or techno, Carrier explodes everything into its constituent elements, especially on his latest EP Tender Spirits. Here, Brewer’s skittery rhythms float untethered inside dub techno textures, and even when the syncopated sub-bass thumps through the stunning “Slow Punctures”, the rest of the rhythms seem only loosely moored to that fundament. The third & last track takes this to its logical conclusion – the white noise hi-hats flutter to an unrecognisable beat, frequently fizzling out, while the bass tones struggle under the murk, never quite getting going. It’s Stygian dub, a properly haunted dancehall, the club’s deconstruction finally complete.
Ziyiz – Plastic Sentiments [Plasma Sources/Bandcamp] J-Shadow – X-38 [Plasma Sources/Bandcamp]
“Worldwide artistic collective” Plasma Sources covers a wide ground of electronic music, from electro, grime & downtempo to techno to drum’n’bass & jungle. Their first compilation Multi-Source showcases experimental takes from across this range, with an insane piece of jungle – almost breakcore – closing the album from J-Shadow. And the mysterious Ziyiz, archaeologist of the future, unearths some strangely degraded bass music (see their Instagram for visual artefacts).
Kid Spatula – Spitalfield [Third Kind Records/Bandcamp] Mike Paradinas, boss of the one of the most on-the-money labels in the world, Planet µ, has released music- as µ-Ziq for well over 3 decades, and in that time countless people have missed the fact that µ = the Greek letter µ, so the name is a pun… Too often I’ve found him categorized under U for u-Ziq. He’s kept at it (even though the internet presences now tend to spell it out – thus planet.mu as the label URL), but there have always been other aliases. Tusken Raiders clearly covers a murky kind of industrial techno, Jake Slazenger is a kind of woozy, sleazy funk, but Kid Spatula is harder to define. Is it µ-Ziq but staying away from obvious dancefloor styles? Well, a lot of µ-Ziq does that, and there’s plenty of drum’n’bass on, e.g. 2004’s Meast. So I’m just going to count us lucky to have another Mike Paradinas album. Joozy is released by the boutique Brighton label Third Kind Records (locals for Paradinas, over in Hove), and takes a lot from the melodic, slightly twisted jungle he’s put out in the last few years, but equally isn’t that far from 1977, released a couple of years back on Balmat. Much though I’m a jungle head, I was always an IDM head too, and it’s lovely hearing the woozy synths and crunchy beats here. More! More!
Pépe – Grane Drum [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Spanish producer Pépe has been everywhere lately. His 2023 album Reclaim, released on Lapsus, found him branching out into bass music, jungle and IDM, from his previous house & techno productions, and also saw him reaching into the future for his inspiration. Now on YUKU comes his Slow Cancellation of the Future, very pertinently named from a phrase from Italian Marxist philosopher Franco Berardi, as channelled by the late philosopher & hauntologist Mark Fisher. For this EP, Pépe is consciously adopting and adapting the “hardcore continuum“, as Simon Reynolds dubbed the UK bass musics that came out of hardcore techno in the late ’80s & early ’90s – jungle, drum’n’bass, 2-step/UK garage, grime, dubstep and so on. By looking to the dismal future with clear eyes on the ever-distracting present, Pépe has developed his own compelling deconstruction of club music. It’s a trip!
Raf Reza – Mirror Of Love [Telephone Explosion/Bandcamp]
Toronto-based producer Raf Reza announces his debut full-length album Ekbar with the first single “Mirror Of Love”, which showcases his Bangladeshi heritage mixed in with music influenced by soundsystem culture – dub through to jungle. South Asian musicians have been central to bass music scenes in the UK, so it’s nice seeing a Canadian artist picking up on this too.
Polonius – The Pauper [Souk Records/Bandcamp] Discrepant sub-label Souk Records is where they put the experimental beats, and there’s an emphasis on MENA artists, from the great Palestinian beat-maker Muqata’a to Turkey’s Grup Ses. You Didn’t Hear It From Me an album of delightfully odd bass music from Egyptian-French producer Seif Gaber aka Polonius. There are suggestions of jungle, dub and other bass music, but couched in a hallucinatory framework.
Hair & Treasure – In The Coin of Disaster [Discrepant/Bandcamp]
Meanwhile, Discrepant boss Gonçalo F Cardoso has also released a new album from his project Hair & Treasure, a duo with Alex Jones augmented with some other weird musicians. Disc Rot is also weird beats or otherwise weird sonic emanations, drawing on noise, sound-art and technoid quasi-beats. It’s an appropriate title!
Dangerous Creatures – CTHULU feat. Dan Peter Parker [Weaponize Records/Bandcamp]
Billed as an “open universe collective”, Dangerous Creatures is nevertheless primarily the project of producer Mimski and UK rapper King Kashmere. Mimski brings ultimate heaviness to her beats, at times channelling The Bug or clipping., but there’s always a jaunty hip-hop bounce. Guests abound in this apocalyptic celebration/warning, from the US and the UK, but the core of it is King Kashmere’s lyricism. “Welcome to the future” indeed.
Jeremy Young – Whirld, Pt. II [Halocine Trance/Bandcamp] Jeremy Young – Moray [Halocine Trance/Bandcamp]
Montréal sound-artist Jeremy Young is part of the much-loved electro-acoustic/post-classical trio Sontag Shogun, among other projects; he also initiated the brilliant oscillator-based trio Associated Sine Tone Services with Nicolas Bernier and Machinefabriek last year. His solo work is always beautifully engrossing and highly individual. His new album Cablcar is built from “magnetic tape and analogue oscillators”, but there’s way more than that might suggest – Young himself plays piano, guitar, contact mic’d objects and: “‘the’ radio, grief, lightning, self-doubt, & bourbon”… and there are some guest voices here & there. But those analogue electronic tones and those lovely warping tape effects are central to the music, even when he somehow structures it into some kind of bass beats on “Moray”. Young is a brilliant (analogue) sample digger and curator of sound, who happens to also be a great musician. Cablcar is highly recommended.
Lonnie Holley – I Looked Over My Shoulder ft. Billy Woods [Jagjaguwar/Bandcamp]
For most of his creative life, Lonnie Holley was known as a creator of powerful sculptural assemblages and other visual & physical art. His untrained musical creations began, I believe, in about 2006, and his first studio recordings were released on Dust-to-Digital in 2012. Just Before Music and 2013’s Keeping a Record of It were deeply weird and very effective works of what was being called “outsider art”, a term which probably should never have existed. In any case, Holley is highly adept at storytelling, and his performances as well as his recordings are always entirely improvised – I saw a stunning performance of his at AGNSW’s Volume in 2023, with Mourning [A] BLKstar. His 2023 album Oh Me Oh My invited many guests to join him, including Michael Stipe, Moor Mother and Bon Iver, and both it and new album Tonky are creatively and sympathetically produced by Jacknife Lee. This time round there’s an even more wide ranging list of collabs, including the crown prince of underground hip-hop Billy Woods as well as Saul Williams, and from other spheres, experimental harpist Mary Lattimore and wonderful folk singer/songwriter Jesca Hoop. Holley’s improvised stories/songs are as powerful as ever, chronicling a world that’s not so much gone wrong as always been wrong. This is the guy, after all, who viscerally Woke Up In A Fucked-Up America – stunningly predicting Trump’s return on the wave of non-specific “anti-woke” hatred… Stone cold genius.
Penelope Trappes – Sleep [One Little Independent/Bandcamp]
We’ve been waiting since last November for this album to finally drop! A Requiem is the first album on One Little Independent for the Brighton-based Australian musician Penelope Trappes. I’ve played a bunch of singles, ranging from drone works with scratchy cello to choral fragments and deep bass booms. It’s songwriting turned inside-out, and it’s an album worth listening through from start to finish, a ceremony eulogising parts of herself that she’d long suppressed. Tonight I’ve revisited that first single, a horror story of the legend of the “sleep hag”, viscerally dramatised in its video.
Hüma Utku – Comfort Of The Shadows [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
I started following Turkish electronic producer Hüma Utku on Karlrecords in 2018. A true statement of intent, she was already there combining dense, sometimes rhythmic electronics with traditional Arabic instruments and samples from the region. She gained the attention of Editions Mego while Peter Rehberg was still alive, releasing The Psychologist in 2022 (it was ready earlier but delayed by Rehberg’s tragic death in 2021). Now comes Dracones, named for the Latin phrase “hic sunt dracones” – here be dragons. It’s very much about the fear of the unknown in tremulous times, more relevant day by day, with emotions only heightened by the fact that Utku was recording this while pregnant. I should note that this music rewards careful headphone listening, where you will realise that these electronic-sounding drones and pulses contain acoustic & electric instruments including – as well as cello, guitar & vocals – an electromagnetic instrument called the Lyraei which you need to read about!
Hara Alonso – Millions of other Suns [FUU/label Bandcamp/artist Bandcamp]
Very pleased to finish tonight with the engrossing sounds of Stockholm-based Spanish pianist & sound-artist Hara Alonso. It seems like each release of hers inhabits a different sound-world, from the most piano-based neo-classicism to electro-acoustic works, and by that measure touch•me•not is both her most electronic work and also her most composed work, featuring an ensemble of percussion, double bass and voice around her piano & electronics. The sonic realisation was aided by FUU label’s Başak Günak aka Ah! Kosmos, creating an otherworldly sensory halo.
Use Knife – Demain Sera Mieux [VIERNULVIER/Bandcamp]
Following last year’s remix EP Peace Carnival, Belgian-Iraqi trio Use Knife have released their second album État Coupable. With the heavy electronics of Belgian musicians Kwinten Mordijck and Stef Heeren and the vocals and percussion of Saif Al-Qaissy, this is urgent music of the moment. Here they’re telling us that “tomorrow will be better”, but to be clear: only if we make it thus. Oh, and this is in 10/8 I guess – two groups of 5, bouncy!
Eartheater & Shygirl – Dolphin [Chemical X/Eartheater Bandcamp]
Unexpected team-up? Here’s Alexandra Drewchin aka Eartheater bringing UK queen of bass/rap/club, Shygirl, on two of her tracks. Suitably, there’s a UK tilt to the production, with PinkPantheress-esque jungle beats pushing “Dolphin” along through the waves…
OHYUNG – 5 strings {lake} ft. J. Fisher [NNA Tapes/Bandcamp] OHYUNG – crush [NNA Tapes/Bandcamp]
Lia Ouyang Rusli is a film composer whose 2022 album imagine naked! was a collection of beautiful minimalist ambient tracks, but her new album as OHYUNG takes a very different tack. You Are Always On My Mind combines glitch & post-rave beats with often-processed vocals (and a guest rap from J. Fisher), and it’s a kind of conversation between her trans self and her pre-transition self, powered by a collection of generic string samples found in online sample packs.
aya – Time at the Bar [Hyperdub/Bandcamp] aya – droplets [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
No longer requiring “fka LOFT”, aya brings us her second album on Hyperdub, but it’s still as full of angst as im hole was, just in different ways. Here, aya is concerned with addiction, as it often is, indelibly twisted around trauma. The themes are carried by her always sardonic vocal delivery (this time round there are no other guests, except James Ginzburg of emptyset/Subtext Recordings helped out with the mixing), and to be clear, the music can be really claustrophobic and discomfiting. Or it can be cathartic. It’s also funny that aya tends to keep the more straight drum’n’bass or other dancefloor styles off her full albums – which makes sense as they’re more conceptual affairs, imagined as a full-length work, and showcasing her incredible talent & skills. Prettttty damn impressive.
Kalabash – Major ft. Jelani Blackman (Radio Edit) [Tropopause Records/Bandcamp]
UK singer and rapper Jelani Blackman brings out the grime in this new track from London-based collective Kalabash, who are slowly gearing up to release their Decompression Tapes Vol. 1 later this year. At 4:10, this “radio edit” feels fully formed, so I’m curious what the full length track will sound like. Blackman’s lyrical prowess is on show here, over a high-paced beat and production that seems to draw from all over. Also noting that their 2-track single from earlier in March showcases two other sides: “Decompress” is tough jungle-techno with a cinematic interlude, while “Concrete” is a tense 4/4 number.
Rivet – Patitur Butcher [Editions Mego/Bandcamp] Rivet – Sacrosanct [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
Swedish producer Mika Hallbäck is perhaps best-known for his industrial techno as Grovskopa, drawing from the likes of Surgeon & Regis but mixing in a love of contemporary classical and experimental music. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he arrived on Editions Mego in 2020 with On Feather and Wire. While Hallbäck’s production had widened in scope since his adoption of the Rivet name in 2011, On Feather and Wire allowed him to diverge entirely from the techno template at times, verging into mutated pop and beatless (not rhythmless) synth excursions. Now Peck Glamour, his second album following the tragic and traumatic death of Editions Mego’s Peter Rehberg, expands in further experimental directions, whether it’s weird polyrhythms or percussive bass-adjacent music with disembodied sampled vowels(?) It’d be a shame if this was relegated to the category of experimental oddity, as it’s fun, creative and always engaging.
JANKA – Ale To Ty Dzwonisz Dub [outlines]
The two members of JANKA are longtime members of Poland’s electronic music scene; Daniel Szlajnda made DJ mixes as Daniel Drumz from the mid-’00s, and his own beats later on; Piotr Kaliński is better known as jazzy electronic producer Hatti Vatti, as well as being half of cinematic post-classical/bass duo Nanook of the North. As JANKA, it’s all about the dubs; last year they released three longform ambient glitch-dubs on YUKU with Japanese experimental artist CRZKNY. Earlier this year they contributed an excellent dub to the incredible remix album for REIFSMA on Polish post-footwork label outlines, and now they’ve got an album on outlines sublabel guides. “But You’re The One Calling” is the translation of tonight’s selection, where bubbly dub techno meets footwork with an almost jungle/d’n’b energy.
Gloorp – Angggry [JOLT Music/Bandcamp]
Forthcoming on New York’s JOLT Music is the second (and perhaps final?) album from Philadelphia’s Garrett Burke aka Gloorp. Burke is a purveyor of finely crafted breakbeats and gloopy electonic textures, which feel to me like they have a direct heritage from US electronic labels like Schematic or Tigerbeat6. What’s really notable about this jungle-adjacent new track and the album it comes off (deftly titled Gloorp ‘Em Up is that there’s very little sequencing involved – it’s played live on sampler or acoustic instruments. Keen to hear how the rest of the album shakes out.
RAVL – Smart Fella [[re]sources/Bandcamp] [re]sources is one of the best bass labels coming out of France at the moment, and on the occasion of their 10th birthday they’ve released their fourth compilation, Club Hexagon IV. There’s influences from footwork, uk garage, grime and jungle, and the particular high-speed beats here from Marseille’s RAVL fit with a new kind of jungle-footwork-techno hybrid that’s being expressed in different ways around the globe at the moment. Excellent.
Insignio – Thinking About It [Yanked Beats/Bandcamp] Insignio & LowfatiK – Roses Somewhere [Yanked Beats/Bandcamp]
Case in point re jungle-hybrids, Afonso Silva as Insignio, one third of Portuguese label Yanked Beats, whose new album Lost keen is jungle/d’n’b with a marked footwork influence that doesn’t always rely on breakbeats. I played the remix of single “Everytime” by Barcelona’s A.Fruit recently, and here tonight we also heard a collab with another member of the Yanked Beats collective, LowfatiK.
Pugilist & Tamen – ESS [Samurai Music/Bandcamp]
How about some proper jungle? Well actually… Naarm/Melbourne’s Pugilist & Tamen are well familiar with jungle breaks and other forms of bass music, and here debut together on Berlin’s Samurai Music, pioneers of a more tribal, stripped-down form of drum’n’bass but also digging into the nu-jungle sphere. Finding themselves on Samurai, Pugilist & Tamen have crafted a somewhat more minimalist, moody version of their jungle rinse-outs, albeit still fuelled by clattering breaks. Exhilarating.
Harry The Nightgown – Bell Boy [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
A band that call themselves Harry The Nightgown are just gonna be an art pop kind of affair, right? For their debut album the LA band were engineer/producer Spencer Hartling aka tp Dutchkiss and sound engineer/singer/guitarist/etc Sami Perez, but they are now joined by Luke Macdonald, who tours with one of Perez’ bands, Cherry Glazerr. There’s no way of telling who played or programmed what, but the first single from Ugh (an album with a title for the times if ever there was one) is complex & melodic, segueing comfortably out of our jungle segment, with a sped-up funk bassline and lopsided maybe-sample, skittering into groovy synth chords that could come from an early James Blake track. It’s glitchy, catchy and super-cool.
goat – Quest [Latency/Bandcamp]
Referred to as goat (jp) to differentiate from the Swedish psych rock behemoth, this goat are experts are precise rhythmic patterning. Boomkat described them as “math rock”, which I find misleading because there’s precious little postpunk angularity with goat – and especially so on Without References / Cindy Van Acker, a highly percussive album created for Belgian choreographer Cindy Van Acker and released on the exclusive, unpigeonholeable French label Latency. It’s maximinimalist stuff, and the band is intensely tight in all their cross-rhythmic glory.
Ah! Kosmos & Hainbach – Shelter [FUU]
Turkish electronic producer Başak Günak aka Ah! Kosmos first teamed up with fellow Berlin resident and fellow electronic production nerd Stefan Goetsch aka Hainbach for Blast of Sirens in 2023. Their second album is on the way, and from the singles so far, no track will be the same. “Shelter” is powered by skittering percussive sounds that sound like they could be deconstructed footwork in a different context, with bright synth melodies floating on top. There is something comforting about this music, despite the tumbling beats and the lovely low-end surges that grow through the second half.
Homeward – A Cloud On A Dream [Styles Upon Styles]
New Yorker Philip Tortoroli co-runs Styles Upon Styles, which is a record label and also a radio show. On his own label he’s just released the mini-album Odes under the name Homeward. Styles Upon Styles is unsurprisingly very eclectic, with a close interest in UK bass music among other things, but Odes harkens back to the trip-hop of the ’90s (rather than New York’s brief Illbient scene). It’s a nostalgic sound, all the moreso for “A Cloud On A Dream”, which Tortoroli describes as “an ode to love in the rear view”.
Jerome Blazé – Over Salzburg [Jerome Blazé Bandcamp] Jerome Blazé – Rosella Blessing (with Beryl, Hannah McKittrick and Kathleen Frances) [Jerome Blazé Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney musician Jerome Blazé is engaged with music across multiple dimensions: as a producer, live keyboardist, songwriter and academic. Last year’s Living Room album was a home-recorded album combining influences from soul, neo-classical and dance music. The album put collaboration up-front, with instrumental and vocal collaborators from across the Sydney music scene as well as songwriting collaborations and a fully-credited list of sampled artists (and birds!) taking in local friends and international influences like BADBADNOTGOOD, Punch Brothers, Al Green and more. The album’s being given a vinyl deluxe edition this year, expanded through reworkings of each track (which he seems to be doing in reverse order) that open up his music to deeper collaborations. Here, the bright “Rosella Blessing” – originally driven by interlocking piano and drums with bird samples and a simple vocal refrain – is up-ended. It begins with the closing piano, to which verses by folk duo Beryl, Naarm/Melbourne singer/songwriter/broadcaster Hannah McKittrick and Bristol singer/songwriter Kathleen Frances are added, bringing a lush wistfulness and expanding on the theme of birds and blessings. It’s a very special piece of music that gains depth if you know the original.
Daniel Bachman – Tight tangles of being intersecting in every direction [Daniel Bachman Bandcamp]
In the last few years, “American primitive” folk guitarist Daniel Bachman has been deconstructing his traditional acoustic music using digital technology, as a response to climate change and as an exploration of his musical heritage. His latest album, self-released, is Moving Through Light, and it’s perhaps the most abstracted yet. Other than some drum machines, everything is collaged and adapted from his own guitar playing, but it walks through noise and glitch to make it home – here and there – to fingerstyle guitar picking. It can be challenging music, but it rewards deep listening.
Aidan Baker – Drowning Not Waving [Gizeh Records/Bandcamp] BOW & Aidan Baker – DE 1 [Cruel Nature Records/Aidan Baker Collaborations]
There are many facets to Aidan Baker‘s art. The Berlin-based Canadian guitarist may be best known for his doomgaze band Nadja with his wife Leah Buckareff, but he’s been making minimalist, ambient, experimental music since before that band existed, and collaboration has always sat at the core of his work. Still, a solo Aidan Baker record can be a gripping listen too, especially his patient slowcore songs, so I can highly recommend & You Still Fall In for this vein of music. Amp buzzes, guitar gestures, dull thumps. Lovely. One of Aidan’s recent collaborative projects documents two performances with Belgian contemporary/experimental string quintet BOW. Their aesthetic is finely matched with Aidan Baker’s, to the extent that you can’t always tell what are string drones and what are guitar loops. But there’s a remarkable amount of beauty captured in these recordings, worth tuning into on a quiet night.
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