Playlist 24.09.23

Utility Fog

Music both popular and unpopular tonight. There’s not enough unpopular music on the radio, but this is an imbalance that Utility Fog has always attempted to correct.

LISTEN AGAIN and experience transcendence (again). Podcast right here, stream on demand on the FBi website.

Popular Music – Sad Songs [Popular Music Bandcamp]
Back in August, I played the first single from Popular Music, the new duo of Zac Pennington from Parenthetical Girls with Australian cellist & composer Prudence Rees-Lee. Having spent many years in the LA area, they are based in Naarm/Melbourne now – if you’re lucky enough to live there, you can see them launch their new album on October 26th. Because they’re already so search engine-unfriendly, they’ve called the album Minor Works, and while they are perhaps mainly in minor keys, these songs should not be downplayed. These are theatrical pop songs with arch humour, pop references galore, and an air of melancholy. Lovely.

ZÖJ – Hangman [Parenthèses/Bandcamp]
Another duo based in Naarm/Melbourne are Iranian born kamancheh player & singer Gelareh Pour, and drummer Brian O’Dwyer, working together as ZÖJ. Their album FIL O FENJOON is coming out in November through Belgian/West Australian label Parenthèses, but this single, featuring Pour’s emotive, impassioned playing and singing, was released especially to commemorate the anniversary last Saturday of the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini. It was her murder at the hands of the Iranian regime’s morality police that sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

Eartheater – Heels over Head [Chemical X/Mad Decent/Bandcamp]
Eartheater – Face in the Moon [Chemical X/Mad Decent/Bandcamp]
The last album proper from Alexandra Drewchin aka Eartheater was 2020’s Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, in which electronic beats were by and large abandoned in favour of classical orchestrations and acoustic instrumentation. For Powders, her first released through Chemical X/Mad Decent, Drewchin is melding those acoustic folk influences with glitchy beats’n’bass and some of the current trip-hop zeitgeist, for a collection that may have the most pop appeal of anything she’s done – not that she’s any less barmy and uncompromising than before, with heels over head and wearing whatever she damn well pleases. Oh – and there’s a cover of System of a Down’s “Chop Suey” which is great, although it just made me want to listen to the original again.

HAAi – ZiGGY (DJ-Kicks) [!K7 Records/Bandcamp]
Teneil Throssell, originally from Karratha, WA, has been DJing as HAAi since 2016, with her profile only rising ever since then. She’s been invited to do a mix for the prestigious DJ Kicks series on German electronic mainstays !K7 Records, and as is traditional, contributes an exclusive original. Hints of breakbeats give way to a big ravey 4/4 techno piece, melodic and uplifting.

Richie Culver – Alive in the Living Room (Pessimist Remix) [Drowned By Locals/Bandcamp]
Here’s some techno that’s frankly not intended to be uplifting. We last heard from Richie Culver round here back in April with an album of remixes of his 2022 album I was born by the sea. The original album featured Culver’s spoken storytelling with avant-garde electronics, taken to the max by the remix artists. Culver’s new album proper is a rather imposing near-half-hour piece called Alive in the lving room, released by the ever-excellent Jordanian label Drowned By Locals, a relentless piece of throbbing, evolving 4/4 beats that evokes the unsettling experience of sleep paralysis. There’s an accompanying poem by Culver, contained in a leather hardcover hymnbook (very limited edition!), but the piece itself is intentionally lacking vocals. However, on the remixes, the vocals surface in two very different settings. bod [包家巷] bathes their piece in shuddering, glitching layers of distorted fug, while Pessimist crafts his characteristic d’n’b-inflected dark techno.

Rutger Zuydervelt – Part 4 – Point of No Return [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Among other delights, the Objects & Sounds label’s Seasonal Diary III: Curious Enchantment compilation offered up a piece from Rutger Zuydervelt, better known as Machinefabriek, that was credited as a “Kaleiding Outtake”. It’s an offcut from the music he composed for a performance titled Kaleiding by Lily&Janick, who combine dance and acrobatics in their work. There’s a lot of movement in Zuydervelt’s pieces, whether through chiming pitched percussion, more sinister bass surges, or lovely interlocking motorik grooves. There’s an organic, acoustic feel to the sounds, whether digitally modelled or sampled, that convey a warm humanity even when programmed into complex patterns. One of the most enjoyable Machinefabriek works of late.

Loraine James – Prelude of Tired of Me [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Loraine James – Gentle Confrontation [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
As I said last week, this is Loraine James‘ third album for Hyperdub, although there’ve been a couple of other things in between. Gentle Confrontation is a lovely name, and James’ love of IDM is all over the album, as well as r’n’b & pop, bass music and more. Although there are many great guest vocalists featured too, it’s always particularly nice hearing her own gentle voice on a few tracks too. This does feel like her best work yet, but that’s a big thing to say given how brilliant even her pre-Hyberdub material was!

Soda Plains – Meet Me at Escados [Yegorka/Bandcamp]
Hong Kong musician Soda Plains, based now in Berlin after some time in London, here releases a single track on Berlin label Yegorka. It’s experimental bass music along the lines of his Living With Elvis EP from last year, also very fun stuff.

Pl4net Dust – Bunny Hat [[re]sources]
Paris producer Pl4net Dust seems to comfortably switch between dance genres, but on the Freefall EP for the Paris bass label [re]sources, we get two tracks of fantastically syncopated jungle. I’d love to hear more of this.

Mukqs – Truck-Kun [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
Mukqs – Etheric Double [Hausu Mountain/Bandcamp]
Max Allison named his musical self Mukqs, which explains a lot. It’s his name but spelled like the fabled Aphex Twin album, and Allison’s music is a continuation of the off-kilter humour and dense programming of the first generation IDM producers of yore. Stonewasher is released on Hausu Mountain, the label Allison runs with Doug Kaplan (the pair were also 2/3 of Good Willsmith with Natalie Chami aka TALsounds). The Hausu Mountain aesthetic is one of pixellated post-computer game imagery and bizarre juxtaposition – and so it is with the music of Mukqs: relentlessly chopped, scrambled and pitch-shifted samples, information overload overloaded. Somehow it all lands just on this side of coherent – or maybe that’s just me.

Brutter – Dance un-dance [Brutter Bandcamp]
Brutter – Twin Outta [Brutter Bandcamp]
Christian and Fredrik Wallumrød come from a very prominent family in Norwegian jazz & experimental music. Their sister Susanna, best known by her first name, is an influential and loved avant-garde singer-songwriter, and they are also cousins of pianist David Wallumrød. I’ve heard plenty of Christian’s music on labels like Hubro, and Fredrik as part of the phenomenal Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. Anyway, none of this really prepares one for Brutter (unsurprisingly the Norwegian word for “brother”). Here both brothers play drum machines and various electronics, alongside live drums, loving the glitch and with industrial and dub influences to the fore. It’s awesome, and it’s not a million miles away from the next artists…

Radian – Stak [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Radian – Jet [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Radian – Cold Suns [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Austrian experimental trio Radian have been around even longer than Utility Fog, maintaining a remarkable consistency across 2½ decades. Martins Brandlmayr and Siewert, on drums and guitars respectively, both also contribute electronics, and both are known for their connections with the Viennese glitch and experimental scenes (Siewert a long time ago replaced Stefan Németh, also central to that musical world). They’re joined by John Norman on bass, so the band technically has a guitar/bass/drums lineup, and it’s no surprise that they’ve been connected with Chicago’s Thrill Jockey for much of their existence. They play a European form of Chicago-style postrock, with jazzy, muscular drumming next to glitchy rhythmic cut-ups, guitars coexisting with sweeping machine drones, real instrumental performances underpinning electronic abstraction. New album Distorted Rooms – coming 7 years after their last – leans towards their more abstract side, but snaps you back into focus with surprising guitar riffing or krautrocky acoustic drums. It’s always a pleasure to be reminded how quietly influential this long-lived group have been (on me at least!)

Zoltan Fecso – Feast Terrain [Oxtail Recordings/Bandcamp]
Bringing the glitches home, Naarm/Melbourne experimental ambient musician Zoltan Fecso has a new album out on Oxtail Recordings. Other Air is a little different from the earlier works I’ve heard of Zoltan’s, often built from ingenious real-time sampling & manipulation of guitar sounds. Here we have field recordings, synths and chittering textures inspired by a month-long stay on Yuin Land in southern New South Wales. This is beautiful stuff, made for deep listening on headphones.

Emily Wittbrodt – Interlude [Ana Ott/Bandcamp]
Emily Wittbrodt – Foolish [Ana Ott/Bandcamp]
Via glitchy textures we segue into the genre-repudiating music of Emily Wittbrodt, from her new album Make You Stay, released by the equally unpigeonholeable label Ana Ott. The album is a cycle of eight pieces, alternating between “recitatives” and “arias”, adapting these baroque & early classical forms for a contemporary band. Wittbrodt plays freely with the forms – the recitatives are songs, each sung by a different member of the four-piece band, while the arias are in fact instrumentals, distilling and reinterpreting some aspect of the preceding song. The band itself is just as unconventional, with Wittbrodt on cello, Annie Bloch on chest organ and electric organ, Jan Philipp on drums and Wolfgang Pérez on electric guitar and electronics. Thus we have music that shifts between quite classical sounding arrangements, indiepop songs, burbling, glitching electronics and free jazz. It’s charmingly strange and strangely engaging music.

Bob Holroyd – February [Bob Holroyd Bandcamp]
English producer & composer Bob Holroyd happily spans genres and styles too. He’s probably best known for the rave-era polyrhythmic anthem African Drug, which appeared in various influential DJ mixes including Coldcut’s Journey By DJ and was much later remixed into blissful percussive/ambient techno by Four Tet, and even later again by himself. In 2021 Holroyd released a series of two-track singles through Real World X, including the uneasily layered Mangled Pianos. “February” is a standalone track originally called “Machine Lullaby”, which neatly describes the combination of pensive piano chords and processed samples.

Hessien – We Are Fond Of Them [sound in silence]
Our last track moves yet further into ambience, with textured field recordings underlying chiming guitar loops. This is Hessien, the duo of UK artist Tim Martin aka Maps & Diagrams and Queenbeyan musician Charles Sage aka y0t0, also co-founder of guitar-noise project The Rothko Chapel. Hessien combines looped jangles of guitar with electronic processing, which might sound like Fennesz or countless others, but really doesn’t. These pieces spool out slowly and patiently and catch you unawares, evoking landscapes you can get lost in.

Listen again — ~207MB