Playlist 14.07.24

Utility Fog

Layers of abstraction, mutations of punk, warpings of beats, rebuilings of improv, détournements of ambient...

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Chris Corsano - I Don't Have Missions [Drag City/Bandcamp]
Since the early '00s, American drummer Chris Corsano has been a key member of the free improv world, bleeding over into areas of noise, avant-rock and contemporary jazz. He's been part of countless lineups, in particular with saxophonist Paul Flaherty, and at times with the great C Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core. His solo albums are few & far between, so this one spurred interest. It's burdened with the title The Key (Became the Important Thing [and Then Just Faded Away​]​), which is in itself an indicator of something, if only you can unravel what - although it reminds me of the even more cumbersome poetry-titles that Keiji Haino gives his works. And this is very much in the psych-rock vein. Incendiary drumming of all sorts, along with chugging and soloing guitars and bass, and the resonating polyrhythms of his string drum. All in all, Corsano makes a proper racket, and it's properly transcendent.

Show Me The Body - It Burns [Corpus/Bandcamp]
With their 2017 mixtape Corpus I, New York hardcore punks Show Me The Body showed early on that they were interested in mixing up the hardcore genre with whatever else fits their vision of community, direct action and solidarity, including appearances from the likes of Eartheater, Moor Mother, Dreamcrusher and many more, veering into hip-hop, industrial, noise and experimental electronica. Frontman Julian Pratt generally uses banjo rather than guitar as the lead instrument, bassist Harlan Steed picks up baritone guitar, and in new single "It Burns" there's a throbbing bass synth underpinning the action. It's hard to avoid callbacks to '90s style metal & punk crossover, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If Corpus II is anywhere near as good as its predecessor, I'll be very happy!

GUTTR - Stress [May be at his Bandcamp at some point?]
I was sent this nice piece of glitchy grime recently and it was meant to be out now, but I can't find a trace of it online, so... exclusive? Really nice late-night murky bass music from the Bristol area.

Von D - Arcane 17 [Deep Medi Musik]
More forthcoming bass, here from French dubstep maestro Von D. The THL EP is three slices of dubstep mostly using triplets - 6/8 dubstep. At 140BPM it's not swung as such but the triplets drive things really nicely and give a bit of ambiguity about how to divide up the bars.

Cocktail Party Effect - So Disco (feat. Mo Van Zandt) [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Cocktail Party Effect - Reset [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based South Londoner Charlie Baldwin, who releases music as Cocktail Party Effect, isn't fond of blurbing his own music, and fair enough - often beats are just nice beats, and Baldwin's background in sound design makes for lush listening. His second release on YUKU for 2024 is Gulper Eel Ballons, a 10-track album taking in ambient sound-design and all forms of bass music from dubstep & grime to techno & almost-d'n'b, integrating the complexity & weirdness of IDM. There are a couple of vocal tracks too, although Mo Van Zandt's voice is mostly part of the textures no "So Disco". Super stuff whatever words describe it.

Sote - AFRCNRNGSSPXCASPIAN [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
Sote - ADTVESSPXLUT [Diagonal Records/Bandcamp]
Surely by now Ata "Sote" Ebtekar needs no introduction. Since the early '00s he has made uncompromising, complex electronic music, starting with 2002's stunning Electric Deaf EP on Warp Records. I bring this up because his latest release, Sound System Persepolis (his second on Powell's Diagonal Records) references hardcore techno in its rather twisted ways. Ebtekar said goodbye almost immediately to the breakcore/junglism of his very first few EPs. He's really pioneered the integration of electronics with Persian classical and Iranian instrumentation, and he's developed some amazing methods for sound processing in the meantime. But Sound System Persepolis, despite referencing the ancient Persian city, doesn't feature any West/Central Asian instrumentation, and as far as I can tell it uses Western tuning. The rhythmic programming recalls the untethered approaches of Mark Fell and Rian Treanor, Vladislav Delay and perhaps even Russell Haswell, but with Sote's distinctive sliding tones. It's a kind of return to the Hardcore Sounds From Tehran mixtape but with everything Ata's learned about audio alchemy in the meantime. Insane and brilliant.

Dom & Roland - Stormy Waters [Individual]
Dominic Angas aka Dom & Roland (Roland is the sampler of course) has been one of my favourite drum'n'bass artists since the '90s, but I've always thought of him as primarily d'n'b - techstep beats, done with incredible finesse and accompanied by brilliant synth lines, sound design and basslines. So it's a nice surprise to find the beats on his new Stormfront EP (initiating his own Individual label) brings flittering, careening beat programming in between the 2-step hits. All four tracks here are gold.

ASC - waveform 12 [waveforms/Bandcamp]
Kloke - waveform 9 [waveforms/Bandcamp]
waveforms is the label setup last year by ASC (beloved drum'n'bass & grey area techno producer who returned to jungle a couple of years ago) and Presha, boss of the groundbreaking Samurai label, releasing 10"s focused on early jungle-style production. So here from the latest pair of releases we have a typical epic tune from ASC and technically brilliant stuff as always from Naarm/Melbourne-based Kloke.

Doc Sleep - Lemon Zest [Dark Entries/Bandcamp]
DJ and producer Melissa Marisuten aka Doc Sleep is co-founder of experimental techno & ambient label Jacktone Records, and she's also one half of Beats Unlimited. Her own music spans house & electro as well as IDM and more broadly ambient stuff. "Lemon Zest" is an infectious piece of electro-techno with a wicked syncopated bassline.

Tawdry Otter - Foreign Assets [Adrien75 Bandcamp]
By now we've heard Adrien75's IDM-focused Tawdry Otter a fair bit on this show. Adrien used to be part of the group of the IDM collective Carpet Bomb (mainly 3 people in various combinations) doing complex break-mashing and programming that I was obsessed with in the late '90s. For a while now the Adrien75 moniker has been more for ambient guitar stuff I think, hence Tawdry Otter, which conversely has often been made on the mobile software Koala Sampler. Not sure if that's the case here, but there are some truly funky electro & breakbeat vibes on the latest release, Streamline.

SML - Rubber Tree Dance [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
SML - Switchboard Operations [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
International Anthem feels like the ideal label to release this album by LA-based quintet SML/Small Medium Large. The five musicians are jazz-trained, busy members of multiple music scenes, and their self-titled(-ish) album began with a live performance at the now-sadly-defunct LA venue ETA. The recordings of those improvisations (just stereo mind you, not multi-tracked) were then edited, chopped up, restructured a la Makaya McCraven - or indeed Teo Maceo's work on Miles Davis' In A Silent Way, always a reference for this kind of studio deconstruction. The band features Australian bassist Anna Butterss (long based in LA, and performing not only in countless jazz ensembles but also on tour with the likes of Andrew Bird), along with similarly-connected cross-genre musicians, and the music veers from jazz to Afrobeat, psych to experimental electronic, Jon Hassell-style harmonising effects and more. You don't need to be any kind of jazz-head to appreciate the joyful invention here.

Lia Kohl - Car Alarm, Turn Signal (feat. Ka Baird) [Moon Glyph/Bandcamp]
Chicago cellist and sound-artist Lia Kohl has built up a gorgeous catalogue of odd, inquisitive and considered sound works over a very short period of time, with releases on Skeletons' Shinkoyo, Longform Editions and American Dreams. Her new album Normal Sounds is coming at the end of August from the adventurous Portland (Oregon) tape/vinyl label Moon Glyph, and the album title is a nice description of Kohl's practice (as are the track titles). As well as field recordings and the sounds of "normal" human activity, Kohl likes to incorporate the randomness of a radio scrolling through frequencies and settling on whatever happens to be on the airwaves. And of course there's her cello, which along with electronics can slip into the mix and transform everything. On this first single, Kohl has also invited Ka Baird to add layered flute and little keyboard drones, adding an avant-garde new-age sensibility. Without noticing, we're left with slowly-more-sparse cello plucks and slow layered bowing and then... the sound of a pedestrian crossing brings us back to the "normal sounds" (with some faint found-sound saxophone soloing from someone's car radio). Just so good.

Stranded Horse - Le feu qui nous rend las [Heartists for Palestine]
Mayssa Jallad & Fadi Tabbal - Ad-Douar [Heartists for Palestine]
Fadi Tabbal - (keep thumping) [Fadi Tabbal Bandcamp]
Back in the early 2000s, French musician Yann Tambour started releasing music under the name Encre - music tailor-made for Utility Fog with its postrock & indie-chanson tendencies mixed with digital editing. Most of that music is still available from French label Clapping Music, but then around 2007 Tambour's focus changed (back) to guitar-based indie/chanson/folk under the name Thee, Stranded Horse, and then just Stranded Horse. And thus he has continued, with Stranded Horse the band frequently featuring Malian kora player Ballaké Sissoko and more recently Boubacar Cissokho. I'd lost track, but listening back, the last couple of Stranded Horse albums are fantastic. So it was really nice to hear a piece of heartfelt folk music from Tambour on a new compilation, Counting the strips of light, the second put together by the Paris-based Heartists for Palestine. The beneficiary for both of their compilations is Palestinian Medical Relief Society, and the musical focus is mostly indie singer-songwriter but with some interesting/inspiring inclusions - John Parish, who has worked consistently with PJ Harvey and others; Kate Stables of This Is The Kit doing a lovely Ben Folds cover; Adrian Crowley; and Aidan Baker of Nadja with Frédéric D. Oberland of Oiseaux Tempête and Saåad; and more! Lebanese singer Mayssa Jallad, who put out one of the best albums of last year, works again with Fadi Tabbal (co-founder with Ziad Nawfal of Ruptured Records) on an incredible piece of experimental song. It turns out their piece is a Frankensteinian creation in which Jallad added vocals to a piece of Tabbal's from his recent album I recognize you from my sketches. Jallad's lyric (the title means "Vertigo" in Arabic) follows a woman suffering from loss and displacement, inspired by the work of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and photojournalist Belal Khaled in Gaza recently. Meanwhile, Tabbal's album happens to be a lovely, made of processed guitars, synths and tape, so I played a track from the album proper too.

Ola Szmidt - Making My Own Dice [Ola Szmidt Bandcamp]
I discovered UK-based musician Ola Szmidt through her EP3, released on Accidental Records a couple of years ago. Lately she's been putting up single tracks here and there, and "Making My Own Dice" is a great example of her craft - melodic vocals looped and chopped up, and, eventually, glitchy programmed beats. Healing music for trying times.

Andrea De Witt - APR 5 [Undogmatisch/Bandcamp]
Andrea De Witt - PIANOCHROM 2M [Undogmatisch/Bandcamp]
Italian musician Andrea De Witt has been in & around various music scenes for decades, in rock bands, techno acts and experimental electronic projects. But his new self-titled album for the excellently-named Berlin label Undogmatisch is in fact his debut album. It's a great collection of glitchy sound-edits, stumbling beats, rumbling bass and shimmering textures. I've always been partial to glitched-up piano, so the two PIANOCHROM tracks are highlights, but the seemingly anonymous track titles belie an album of real humanity inside its minimalist soundworks.

Dahk-Kloud - Through The Night Quiet [Streaming in various places e.g. here]
Eora/Sydney-based musician Dahk-Kloud makes music aptly described by the title of his debut album Piano Tapes & Synthesiser. For a debut release it's impressive: late-night music with restrained piano and modular synths, with the magic of tape processing warping and bending inside and around the compositions. The album will be launched at Annandale Creative Arts Centre on Friday the 9th of August, for those in the area - tix here.

Matthew Bourne - the mirror and its fragments [Leaf/Bandcamp]
Following his second album of minimalist electro-acoustic work with Nightports earlier this year, English pianist & composer Matthew Bourne is back with a very solo album, this is not for you. (full stop included). These are quiet, expressive compositions for piano, on some tracks joined by his own cello playing - even more minimalist. This album demands listening in a place of calm & quiet, and if you make the space for it, you'll find yourself deeply moved.

Listen again — ~200MB