Playlist 21.07.24

Utility Fog

Tonight, from experimental electronic pop to free improv, live beats and programmed beats, modern classical and avant-garde, from all over the world.

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ROMÆO - Worlds [ROMÆO Bandcamp]
Starting with art-pop from here in Eora/Sydney, from young artist ROMÆO, who combines electronic experimentalism with a fine ear for pop songwriting. Her new song "Worlds" laments a world in which every person is isolated from every other - an acknowledges that her own world is not the whole world. The song moves from indie guitars to electronic pop replete with saxophone, and climaxes with hammering kick drums.

Snakeskin - Sunburst [Mais Um/Bandcamp]
Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal's first release together (titled Snakeskin) was released on Beirut/Montréal label Ruptured in 2022. It was a clear highlight of the year for me, continuing from the shoegaze/dreampop of Sabra's previous band Postcards, but with more electronic and experimental production from Tabbal. For their second album, they've adopted that album title as their name, and They Kept Our Photographs will be released on UK-based global music label Mais Um. The first single "Sunburst" is on the noiser end of shoegaze and I very much dig.

Bizhiki - Unbound [Jagjaguwar/Bandcamp]
Bizhiki - Gigawaabamin (Come Through) (feat. Justin Vernon) [Jagjaguwar/Bandcamp]
Moving to the US with Bizhiki, a new trio featuring Joe Rainey, whose album and 7" single made with Andrew Broder blew many minds in 2022. Here Rainey teams up with another powwow singer from the Ojibwe people, Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, the duo working with indiefolk musician S. Carey (Sean Carey), longtime member of Justin Vernon's Bon Iver and solo artist in his own right. The gentleness of that association tempers the sound compared to the forthright experimentalism of Rainey's work with Broder, although there are still beats and noise in there. Rainey and Bizhikiins Jennings both sing in the open-throated powwow style and play hand drums, which are often electronically processed (both drums and voices!) along with other electronics and instrumentation. There are also environmental and field recordings and even punk in the mix. This should be on many best-of lists.

Another Dancer - Overfriendly Dogs [Bruit Direct/Aguirre Records/Bandcamp]
Here's some scrappy DIY-indie from Belgian band Another Dancer, blithely throwing in influences from postpunk, '80s electro-pop, '90s indie and who knows what else. They claim to be outdated, but in fact this kind of joyful hodge-podge suits the current era to a tee. "Overfriendly Dogs" is the chaotic first single from their debut album I Try To Be Another Dancer.

Buffalo Daughter - ET (Densha) - AMBIENT KYOTO Mix [Anniversary Group/Bandcamp]
The world is incredibly fortunate that Buffalo Daughter not only exist at all, but are still making creative music 30 years after their inception. In the way of the best Japanese bands, they've always combined pop with heavy rock with electronica and hip-hop, and so they continue. Out this week is a set of two extended & warped mixes made for the AMBIENT KYOTO installation/exhibition thingy in 2023. The original tracks are on their 2021 album We Are The Times, and neither remix is ambient at all - rather they're deconstructed, in a modern take on the original 12" mix, adding unexpected elements. Basically, just so great.

Thom Yorke - The Big City [XL Recordings/Bandcamp]
You might have heard of Thom Yorke, lead singer of the very popular but very experimental Radiohead and of course more recently The Smile. Thom is embarking on a solo tour soon, and will play two shows in the Sydney Opera House Forecourt, but I'm very sorry if you're just hearing about it now, as they're both sold out. Anyway, out this month was the Confidenza OST, soundtracking the Italian thriller Confidenza aka Trust, directed by Daniele Luchetti. Yorke's music is as dramatic and dynamic as a soundtrack requires, with orchestrations by Hugh Brunt and a jazz ensemble including his Smile bandmate Tom Skinner. I chose a long track tonight that's got lovely glitchy samples & loops of Thom's voice among the orchestrations.

Opius - Empty feat. LUMENAATE [Inperspective Records/Bandcamp]
Vinnie Smith aka Opius is a longtime proponent of drumfunk, making often-jazz-influenced drum'n'bass out of intricately edited jazz breaks. Here we've got a storming track of plaintive string pads, those insane beats and the poetry of LUMENAATE.

X-Altera - Run [Bopside]
In the last few years, Tadd Mullinix, best known by his hip-hop project Dabrye, has started releasing jungle/drum'n'bass (with excursions into Detroit techno) as X-Altera. This is a return to these styles really, first heard in his collabs with Soundmurderer as SK-1 making ragga jungle in the early '00s. The Groundswell EP unleashes ravey, jungley tunes (oh yeah and one techno piece) that fit really well in the current milieu.

Tigran Hamasyan - The kingdom [naïve]
Tigran Hamasyan - Only the one who brought the Bird can make it sing [naïve]
I only discovered this weekend that there's a new album coming from Armenian jazz piano virtuoso Tigran Hamasyan. Previous albums showcased not just his playing, but his beautiful, complex compositions that draw a lot from the scale patterns and harmonies of Armenian folk music. Hamasyan has also worked with Serj Tankian of the Armenian-American nu metal band System of a Down - and at times the complex jazz time signatures on his releases can veer into math rock. In any case, after many albums released on Nonesuch, Hamasyan has joined eclectic French imprint naïve for his forthcoming album The Bird of a Thousand Voices, which is in fact a multimedia project reworking an old Armenian legend (Hazaran Blbul) into a stage play, films, installations, the album and also an online video game featuring music from the album and the stunning artwork of Khoren Matevosyan. Over 24 tracks, the album covers a lot of ground (I'm lucky to have a preview), and I played two of the singles so far: the hyperkinetic track "The kingdom" that echoes the jungle influence on video game soundtracks, and the latest, "Only the one who brought the Bird can make it sing", with live drumming, bewitching vocal melodies, and math rock excursions. No doubt I'll play more when it's released in late September.

Spectral Gates - hulk park [forthcoming on Spectral Gates Bandcamp]
Spectral Gates - loops_6b_ext_23 [forthcoming on Spectral Gates Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney duo Spectral Gates play a live take on electronic music, with post/math-rock elements. Steve Allison plays furious drum patterns and Daniel Arena plays guitar as well as synths and electronic processing from both. As you can hear from these preview tracks, it's euphoric electronic rock that flows nicely from Tigran Hamasyan's fusions. New album warning is out this coming week, and is being launched at Lazy Thinking, a small bar/record store/performance space on New Canterbury Rd.

Laurent Pernice, Jacques Barbéri, Dominique Beven - le silence la nuit [Psychofon/Bandcamp]
Laurent Pernice, Jacques Barbéri, Dominique Beven - les petits canards [Psychofon/Bandcamp]
Nine Tales of the Winds is a fascinating album that extends work that Laurent Pernice and Dominique Beven have done before. Pernice, coming out of the French industrial scene in the late 1980s, is mainly responsible for electronics, with live processing as well as looped samples and rhythms underpinning a lot of the music - and he also contributes accordion and bullroarer. Beven plays wind instruments from all over the world: Sardinian laudennas, East Asian hulusi, French cromorne, the Lao khaen... and on this album they're joined by French writer Jacques Barbéri, who adds the Tibetan rhadong, a "genetically modified saxophone" which is left unexplained(!) and clarinet. With all these instruments, the album nevertheless resists any hints of bland or appropriative "world music" or exotica. Rather it sounds like some kind of ancient ritual compositions, aided by ancient alien technology. Although Dead Can Dance provide something of a precursor, the closest contemporary comparison I can think of is the work of two fellow Frenchmen, François Robin & Mathias Delplanque, on their 2022 album L'ombre de la bête. Mysterious liminal music is Utility Fog's bread & butter, and this album is a feast.

KK Null x Joel Gilardini - chthonic ephemerals [GIVE/TAKE/Bandcamp]
KK Null x Joel Gilardini - adrifting [GIVE/TAKE/Bandcamp]
Japanese musician Kazuyuki Kishino has been a key part of the noise/industrial and experimental electronic music world since the 1980s, with legendary hardcore band Zeni Geva, Absolut Null Punkt, and under the name KK Null. He's also a constant collaborator with other musicians, whether famous experimentalists like John Zorn, Fred Frith, Jim O'Rourke, Mick Harris of Scorn, James Plotkin and others, or lesser-known Japanese and international musicians. Psychic Drones 3 is his third collaboration with Zurich-based guitarist and sound designer Joel Gilardini. These albums tone down the maximalist tendencies of Kishino, limiting the harsh noise and glitch-rhythms, without retreating to the spectral ambient of, say, Aurora with Plotkin. There are grinding, churning and pulsating drones, crackles of distortion and glitch, digital detritus. It's rich, lush, and only sometimes noisy listening, highly recommended.

Moose Terrific - Cast Iron Curtains [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Montréal-based duo Moose Terrific are made up of the prolific, influential Egyptian-Canadian Sam Shalabi (of Shalabi Effect, Land of Kush, Dwarfs of East Agouza with Maurice Louca and others) and Tamara Filyavich. Their second album after 2018's The Drinks, Nude Beginnings is released by the part-Montréal-based Lebanese label Ruptured Records, and features both musicians on miscellaneous electronics, blending in, as they say, "Ukrainian, Jewish, Arabic and Canadian musical elements, as per the artists' cultural backgrounds, life and musical experiences". All this said, these are mostly low-key electronic vignettes, emphasising fun and hopefulness over rage and sorrow.

Ulrich Troyer - BRENNERAUTOBAHN feat. Taka Noda [4bit Productions/Bandcamp]
Ulrich Troyer - MOMENTS I [4bit Productions/Bandcamp]
I first came across Ulrich Troyer via a little 3" CD he released through Mego back in 2000 (an expanded edition came out in 2020). His music continues to reflect the glitchy, granular, digital soundworld of that label in its earlier years, but with a love of dub also coming through. This year he's released a series of 7"s, starting with the sparse glitched guitar sounds of MOMENTS. The third 7" is AUTOSTRADA DEL BRENNERO, also the second single from his forthcoming Transit Tribe album. The A side is the Italian Autostrada Del Brennero (an important international trucking route), with a melody from dub flautist Diggory Kenrick, and on the flip, we cross the border into Austria where it becomes the Brennerautobahn, with the very dub-appropriate melodica from Taka Noda aka Mystica Tribe.

Associated Sine Tone Services - 000900 [Flag Day Recordings/Bandcamp]
Associated Sine Tone Services - 000200 [Flag Day Recordings/Bandcamp]
Montréal sound-artist Jeremy Young awoke from a dream one night in which he was on a darkened stage with Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek and fellow Montréaler Nicolas Bernier, all dressed in lab coats, performing with sine wave oscillators. He immediately prepared a set of oscillator loops and sent it to the other two, who were game to turn this dream into reality. Despite the name Associated Sine Tone Services, and the library music-esque cover art, the music is neither academic nor anodyne, the three participants preferring to lean into melody and even rhythm at times. The sine wave oscillators are particularly effective when detuned, so there are some gorgeously woozy and eerie passages. There's a strange beauty here, from three sensitive sculptors of sound.

Dialect - Late Fragment [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.. The first morsel from his new album Atlas of Green (out on Sept 20th) is an electroacoustic delight, reminiscent of the heyday of folktronica, with pitch-shifted acoustic guitars, synth pads and piano in the mix. Keen to hear the rest!

Frances Cameron - Dreamer's Waltz [Frances Cameron Bandcamp/other links]
Hailing from Tasmania, Frances Cameron is a classically-trained pianist with her take on the modern/post-/neo-classical style. She's releasing tracks from her forthcoming Piano for Dreamers album one-by-one. "Dreamer's Waltz" starts simply, with a right-hand melody in a major key, but a little way in, the harmonisations take unexpected turns. It's quite touching.

Marmalsana - Transiro I [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Finally, we have a second release from Ruptured Records this week, from a new trio calling themselves Marmalsana. German drummer Burkhard Beins has been part of Polwechsel for 20 years, and among others has worked with our own Chris Abrahams. Joining him are Lebanese photographer and musician Tony Elieh on acoustic bass guitar and the great Egyptian multi-instrumentalist & producer Maurice Louca on microtonal acoustic guitar! All three are based in Berlin, and have chosen for this collaboration to work only with acoustic instruments. Their self-titled album is two cassette sides of free improv and extended instrumental techniques, although Beins is instrumental in Berlin's Echtzeitmusik ("real-time music") movement that seeks to differentiate a newer generation of musicians' work from prior imaginings of improvised music, free jazz, new music etc. In Marmalsana the other two musicians' Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds - and choice of instrumentation - produce a singularly idiomatic music worth attending to.

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