Playlist 29.09.24

Utility Fog

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Alan Sparhawk – Heaven [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
Alan Sparhawk – Black Water [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
It’s almost 2 years now since the wonderful vocalist & drummer with Low, Mimi Parker, passed away from ovarian cancer. The core of Low was always Parker and her husband Alan Sparhawk, and the soul of the band was their otherworldly vocal harmonies. However immeasurable her loss was for all of us fans, it was achingly personal for Sparhawk, and naturally his first solo album White Roses, My God is imbued with grief. These songs came out of playing with their kids’ drum machine and synth setup, and Sparhawk made the interest choice of contrasting the couple’s vocal harmonies by harshly processing his voice with vocoder & auto-tune. This can make the songs a little difficult to warm to initially, but the consummate musicianship shines through – especially, I feel, on a track like “Heaven” which does develop into yearnful harmonies. Elsewhere, the beats gain an almost jungle-like denseness – but listen a few times and you’ll tune into the pure emotion.

Moin – Guess It’s Wrecked (feat. Olan Monk) [AD93/Bandcamp]
Here’s the first appearance of UK postpunk/breakbeat/electronic duo Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead aka Raime tonight, here with their trio Moin. Moin finds them officially joined with percussionist Valentina Magaletti, who contributed drums to many of the Raime releases. Previously, Moin has been a kind of ersatz postpunk thing, with jagged, minimalist guitar riffs and taut rhythms embellished with Raime’s characteristic sampled vocal jabs. For the forthcoming album You Never End, they’ve invited singers to guest on about half the tracks, drawing the music further into postpunk “band music”, although Olan Monk‘s singing still finds itself interrupted (or hyped?) by little vocal snatches.

Gazelle Twin – Two Worlds – Keeley Forsyth Mix [Invada Records/Bandcamp]
An unexpected single this week came from Elizabeth Bernholz aka Gazelle Twin, whose 2023 album Black Dog brought a more personal touch to her processed vocals and experimental electronics. The second remix from that album comes from the force of nature known as Keeley Forsyth, whose dramatic vocals and skeletal arrangements transform “Two Worlds” into a mysterious duet.

Nubya Garcia – Triumphance [Concord Jazz/Bandcamp]
Odyssey, the second album from London-based saxophonist Nubya Garcia, is garnering praise from all around, for good reason. The album features brilliant performances from the cream of young British jazz players, along with sumptuous arrangements for strings and collaborations with women from the jazz world (Esperanza Spalding) and soul (Georgia Anne Muldrow). There are joyous, catchy jazz pieces like the incredible piano-led single “The Seer”, but Garcia’s love of reggae also shines through on the last track, “Triumphance”, where the jazz chops fly over low-skanking dub bass and drums.

Ulrich Troyer – Latzfonser Kreuz feat. Mamadou Diabate & Hamidou Koita [4Bit Productions]
On his latest 7″ preceding the Transit Tribe album due later this year, Viennese glitch-dub artist Ulrich Troyer brings us a tune featuring, and co-written by, the legendary Mamadou Diabate on vocals and talking drum, along with Hamidou Koita on vocals and djembe. Both are originally from Burkina Faso and now based in Vienna, teaming up for what the three describe as “dubbed-out Nyahbinghi-style electro-beats”. It’s an inspired combination, showcasing the nimble percussion and sweet vocals of the two guests.

BANKERT – pick’em up eat’em up [BANKERT Bandcamp]
BANKERT – ~osc [BANKERT Bandcamp]
The artist/s behind BANKERT prefer to remain anonymous – in fact, hilariously, if you go to bankert.world and click “Info” and then click “hello, my name is”, you’ll get a different random name for the roles of “Music Producer”, “Web Developer” and “Graphic Artist” each time. Their music is a mixture of idm, glitched bass and deconstructed club across their now seven “ol” releases, so from ol06 we segue’d out of the previous dub tunes with some hip-hop-sampling post-dubstep, and then some more sparse glitchy beats’n’bass from ol07.

Isaka & TRYCE – Slang Overload [SFX/Bandcamp]
The second release in 2024 from Zoë Mc Pherson & Alessandra Leone‘s SFX label comes from Berlin-based Isaka, five years after her last. In keeping with the label’s interdisciplinary approach, this release has a website of its own in which the deconstructed bass music is integrated into a video game-like interface – it might have more features once more tracks are available.

Yally – Payday [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
Powell‘s Diagonal Records is celebrating 10 years of releases with a big 4 x 12″ compilation, but also some bonus bits like this – Yally is Raime‘s alias for more explicitly jungle and bass music – and Raime are also Moin in collaboration with Valentina Magaletti, as heard earlier. Here they’ve contributed a taut piece of minimalist jungle, and because warped vocal samples are their thing, there’s a dramatisation of, they claim, some early email exchanges they had with Powell.

Tim Reaper & Kloke – Wildstyle [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
Few could lay claim to being as central to the contemporary jungle revival than Tim Reaper (real name Ed Alloh), whose many collaborations on his Future Retro London and elsewhere have brought together many of the names in new jungle and originals too. Recently he’s had a very fruitful partnership with Naarm/Melbourne-based Kloke, so it’s rather lovely that it’s their duo that brings the first full jungle album to the legendary UK bass label Hyperdub. In Full Effect is full of rinse-outs and rattling subs, breakdowns and perfectly crafted breaks.

Djrum – Codex [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
If Tim Reaper is the patron saint of new jungle (and it’s fair to say that there are a few other contenders), then Felix Manuel aka Djrum is one of the most important names guiding jungle into the future, with an inimitable style that blends dubstep, house, techno and jungle with influences as broad as classical and jazz – but when he gets going, his slicing & dicing of beats is dazzling, as is his ability to somehow keep it focused on the dancefloor as well as the belly, heart and mind. It’s very nice to see him signed to Houndstooth for Meaning’s Edge, his first EP in 5 years, which will be out on November 22nd – with more on its way. This new music gains from his studies in ethnomusicology, specifically adorned on this release with various flutes from the Indian subcontinent, Japan and the Western Classical tradition.

Klara Lewis – Top [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
Around 10 years ago, Klara Lewis emerged as one of the most exciting young creators in the experimental electronic field, with the Msuic EP on fellow Swede Peder Mannerfelt’s label, and the Ett album on the legendary Editions Mego. This sums up her approach perfectly: the playful but uncompromising sonic destruction of Mego and the dancefloor perturbations of Peder Mannerfelt. Since then Lewis has collaborated with Mannerfelt, the great Simon Fisher Turner, Nik Colk Void and others, but tragically Peter Rehberg, Editions Mego’s founder and impish driving force, passed away suddenly in 2021. The artists involved with the label were keen to continue the label’s operations, although initially the aim was to get all the music slated for the label released. Lewis’ new album Thankful may have been in the queue in some form, but has turned out now as a rather touching tribute to the label head and artist. Indeed, there’s a track on there that’s a direct tribute to Rehberg’s infamous & beloved “Track 3” from the Get Out album, an 11 minute track that embodies his spirit, turning an orchestral Ennio Morricone loop into a harsh noise drone track. Elsewhere on the album there’s a sweet ukelele appearance which morphs in the last track into another hypnotic drone-noise etude, but there’s also the cheeky industrial beats on “Top”, a track that’s named for one of Rehberg’s favourite words. Lewis is intimately familiar with the aesthetics of MEGO since its late-’90s inception, and gently guides it into the fast & loose genre-dismissal of her generation with love & affection.

Uniform – Permanent Embrace (Nightmare City Mix) [Sacred Bones Records/Bandcamp]
I’ve played New York band Uniform before courtesy of their two electrifying collaborations with the body (here and here), in which Uniform’s hardcore punk-meets-industrial energy met the body’s black metal/doom expanding into experimental electronic and corrupted pop. Only a couple of months ago Uniform released their cathartic American Standard album, an impassioned howl in which singer Michael Berdan fights the internal and external pressures on his mental health as he suffers from bulimia nervosa. While the album is characterised by harsh vocals, heavy drums and guitars, there’s an electronic undercurrent that carries a lot of emotion too, so it’s pretty amazing to hear the synthwave backgrounds stripped of the industrial elements on Nightmare City. If this is ambient it’s very unsettling, and it’s a dramatic contrast to the album proper, but not just background stems for music nerds. You don’t need to be into industrial metal or punk to appreciate these pieces.

Robert Curgenven – AGEN_SIS [Cloudchamber Recordings/Cloudchamber Bandcamp/Robert Curgenven Bandcamp]
For many years, the work of Robert Curgenven – originally from Sydney, then based in Europe & Ireland – has revolved around two interests: environmental field recordings and the recontextualised, powerful sound of the pipe organ. I’m doing him a disservice here as there’ve been many other elements in his work, including repurposed turntables, guitars feeding back, piano and more. Still, it’s notable that his forthcoming album Agenesis builds on these fundamentals: there are field recordings from the contrasting locations of Katherine, NT and Akihabara, Japan, and there are Irish pipe organ recordings, and there is feedback from a no-input mixing desk, dubplates and acetates. But there’s also the imposing sub bass pressure from location recordings of bass played through a Funktion One soundsystem in Poland. This bass focus displaces Curgenven’s more academic-seeming longform sonic explorations into spaces more attuned to club deconstructions, while also gesturing at his early twin loves of grindcore and 20th century orchestral works. The documentarian nature of his field recording works and his site-specific pipe organ and dubplate recordings is repudiated here: “agenesis” describes a situation in which some element is absent. Thus the early tracks pair throbbing sub bass with discordant drones, while later field recordings flow over and under the bass and discords, only to be replaced with snarling electronics, and all that sturm und drang is felt in its absence in track 6’s organ drones. There’s a wealth of detail across all tracks, and the gradual contrasts draw the listener’s ear to different elements each time you listen.

Mark Templeton – Impossible/Bottle [Faitiche/Bandcamp]
I’ve played Canadian sound-artist Mark Templeton a fair bit over the years, and most recently only in June, when his detourned and decontextualised loops of religious meditation tapes appeared on enmossed. Two Verses marks his first release on Jan Jelinek’s Faitiche, a label that combines meticulous sound-manipulation with playfulness. For this release, Templeton asked Faitiche regular Andrew Pekler to select unreleased material from Templeton’s old hard drives, which were fashioned into bifurcated pieces in AB structure – one loping, looping work sliding into another, often contrasting audio environment. These unusual structures, which somehow emphasis asymmetry despite their dual nature, do capture that Mark Templeton mystery in which fuzzy, unstable tapes are manipulated in the digital realm and vice-versa – an aesthetic clearly in sympathy with Jelinek’s Faitiche. Disarmingly compelling.

Başak Günak – Canon Bee [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Başak Günak – Wings [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Turkish musician and sound-artist Başak Günak is best known for her electronic productions and collaborations under the alias Ah! Kosmos, but here branches out under her own name for the incredible Rewilding album on the impeccably curated Subtext Recordings. This is very much an electroacoustic work in which electronics interact with and manipulate sounds of instruments including the halldorophone, organ, piano and bass clarinet, as well as some vocals and site recordings of installations. In amongst this, Günak works in deconstructed Anatolian folk-song, and personal sounds (whispers and murmurs), developing her theme of (auto-)rewilding in various ways, not always as you’d expect: so the more grounded acoustic performances are set free via electronics, and her own installation work and compositions are transformed too. Music to get lost in.

Colin Riley, Gareth Davis and Rutger Zuydervelt – Of birds with songs of coiled light [Squeaky Kate Music]
Two artists quite familiar to Utility Fog are invited here to interpret a hybrid work by UK composer Colin Riley. Written as part composition and part improvisation, it’s more of a collaboration with the Dutch musicians Gareth Davis on bass clarinet and Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) on electronics. These two are longtime collaborators, so there’s an alchemy to the interactions between the acoustic instrument and the electronics, but it does find itself in a particular avant-garde space via Riley’s compositional input.

Malcolm Pardon – The End [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
The second album from Swedish musician Malcolm Pardon follows on conceptually and musically from his solo debut Hello Death from 2021, where he took inspiration from a health scare to look death in the face and respond with equal parts good humour and seriousness. Pardon was one half of Roll The Dice with Stockholm club/pop maverick Peder Mannerfelt, whose analogue synth-based sound took in acoustic piano refrains with motorik krautrock as much as they feinted towards dub or the outskirts of clubland. Pardon’s music on these two solo albums also brings piano in alongside his synthesizers, approaching “The Abyss” with more peace than foreboding. Just lovely stuff.

Mara – At Every Corner [Pure Space/Bandcamp]
A new full-length from Sydney sound-artist Mara Schwedtfeger is always welcome, and this one comes from the Home Listening series from Pure Space, the usually-club-focused label from ex-FBi DJ Andy Garvey. Mara’s practice brings in recordings from travels – field recordings and found sound, but also recordings of her own performances repurposed for these works. Her viola appears on some tracks, but the title track is based around audio from Seoul and other parts of South Korea, weaving in snippets of conversation, her own voice, traffic and twinkling electronics. The more closely you listen, the more rewarding this album is.

Tom Allum – Tension Expanded / The Break Collection [Tom Allum Bandcamp]
Western Australian sound-artist Tom Allum frequently works with field recordings and recordings of sound in particular spaces. He’s just released a single track, “Tension Expanded / The Break Collection“, which isn’t about drum breaks at all, but rather it’s a piece that’s been created in response to an exhibition from Luke Aleksandrow called The Break Collection: Sounds of the Tropics. The breakage here is ceramics that were broken in the tropical rainforest of far north Queensland. So Allum is still working with the sounds of nature along with the sounds of humanity, and interestingly the ambient track he’s created harkens back to the ambient techno of the early ’90s, even it’s not harnessing sampled drum breaks!

Alex Jasprizza – Throw It In [Alex Jasprizza Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney saxophonist Alex Jasprizza has been trickling tracks out here and there, always engaging music accompanied by the sounds of nature. “Throw It In” is the first single from his forthcoming Waterways, in which his saxophone is embedded in processed field recordings, and lovely prepared piano sneaks in halfway through. Keen to hear what else he has up his sleeve.

Seaworthy & Matt Rösner – Whispered Surfaces [12k/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, Sydney’s Cameron Webb aka Seaworthy and Perth’s Matt Rösner released a 22-minute track for Andrew Khedoori’s Longform Editions called Bundanon. These two expert ambient artists are longtime proponents of combining music and field recordings, and have previously collaborated on an album in 2021. Their follow-up, Deep Valley is again released on Taylor Deupree’s 12k, and like the eponymous track, it was recorded during a residency at Bundanon, the beautiful estate in the Shoalhaven that used to be the home of Arthur Boyd. The landscape that Boyd painted is deeply embedded in the tunes here, where any musical performances can take minutes to enter. In these pieces, the birds, insects, frogs, waterways and foliage are equally important as the guitar, piano and electronics. Truly lovely.

Dialect – Overgrown Song [RVNG Intl./Bandcamp]
Andrew PM Hunt, drummer in the phenomenal & bizarre hypnotic kraut/postrock band Ex-Easter Island Head, has made music as Dialect for at least 10 years, mostly released by RVNG Intl.. His new album Atlas of Green is an electroacoustic delight, reminiscent of the heyday of folktronica, with pitch-shifted acoustic guitars, synth pads and piano in the mix. It’s really reminiscent of certain Four Tet remixes circa 2003-4 and The Books’ first couple of albums, which coming from me is the highest of praise.

Mazza Vision – Monogram (excerpt) [Sub Rosa/Bandcamp]
Claude Pailliot and Gaëtan Collet were both members of Tone Rec, the eccentric experimental electronic/postrock band who released a few albums on the great Brussels-based Sub Rosa label in the 1990s. They then then took a left turn into a kind of electro-clash as DAT Politics, which I never enjoyed as much as Tone Rec, so it’s interesting to find the core pair with a new project called Mazza Vision, which turns back to weird noise-rock-tronica. That combination of glitch, krautrock and drone makes Ohm Spectrum a perfect match for a particular thread of Utility Fog music. Love love.

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