Playlist 04.08.24

Utility Fog

Thanks to Giulio for filling in last week while I was away – excellent selections, and even some text about everything that was played
Tonight, we’ve got all the genres: hardcore punk, classical hyper-pop, nu-spiritual jazz, nu-folktronica, shoegazetronica, singer-sound-artist, feral ruralcore, computer music poetry, glitchnaturebeat, footwork-cumbia, experimental electronic, jungle, hit ’em, grime, minimal electronic, arcane dub, postrocktronica, free-improv-tronica, bass-vox-improv, and neo-post-classical.

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Show Me The Body – Shelter [CORPUS]
Not long after NYC hardcore punk trio Show Me The Body released their debut album Body War – itself a creative expansion of contemporary hardcore – they dropped their original Corpus I mixtape, which saw them hooking up with diverse artists from underground hip-hop and experimental electronica, with the likes of Moor Mother, Eartheater, Denzel Curry, Dreamcrusher and more. That was 2017, and there’ve been a couple of albums since then, and a world tour or two – and an excellent remix EP mind you – but they’re finally getting back to CORPUS with Corpus II EP I (the existence of which implies at least EP II). The credits are missing on Bandcamp (you can see them on the cover image though), but a bunch of rappers do feature. That said, the melted loops and raw power of “Shelter” are a winner for me.

Darian Donovan Thomas – Flirting [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp]
Darian Donovan Thomas – Flirting – Coda [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp]
Out now on New York-based classical crossover label New Amsterdam Records is an album from composer, violinist, producer and multimedia artist Darian Donovan Thomas. Among many credits, he’s found playing violin on Arooj Aftab‘s breakthrough album Vulture Prince. I believe A Room With Many Doors: Night is his debut solo album proper, mostly performed, sung and produced by himself. “Flirting” stands out as a piece of hyperpop with hyper beats and post-PC Music melody (and some cute phrasing) that glitches and dissolves into its Coda, where Phong Tran (also responsible for the album art) contributes sampling and abstraction with various software & hardware, while Thomas plays looped & pitch-shifted violins along with vocals and bells.

Sharada Shashidhar – Soft Echoes [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
LA-based singer, composer & producer Sharada Shashidhar released her debut EP Rahu on Leaving Records in 2020, in which jazz and r’n’b were treated through hip-hop and electronic production techniques. Four years later, she’s gearing up to release her debut album Soft Echoes, which sees Shashidhar take on the role of band leader, with an ensemble featuring LA-based Australian bassist Anna Butterss and other accomplished young players (saxophonist Devin Daniels has also released a couple of excellent beat tapes on Leaving Records as Kara-Do). Shashidhar’s compositions meld vocal techniques from Indian classical music with evocative and catchy spiritual jazz – and electronic production techniques. I for one can’t wait to hear the rest of the album.

Andrew Tuttle & Michael Chapman – Wholly Unrelated To Four Seasons [Basin Rock/Bandcamp]
British guitarist and singer-songwriter Michael Chapman worked across many genres up until he passed away in 2021 aged 80. His latter-day following was confirmed in the Tompkins Square-issued compilation Oh Michael, Look What You’ve Done: Friends Play Michael Chapman, featuring Lucinda Williams, Meg Baird and Thurston Moore among others. One Australian fan was Brisbane’s Andrew Tuttle, who’s made a career around electronically-mediated banjo and acoustic guitar-picking soundscapes. By luck, Chapman’s partner Andru had been enjoying Tuttle’s album on Basin Rock, Fleeting Adventure, in the years after Chapman’s passing, and so Andrew Tuttle has had the privilege of expanding on and reworking the unfinished final instrumental recordings of Chapman. The album Another Tide, Another Fish is out through Basin Rock at the end of the month and features the original recordings on a second disc. Andrew’s post-production has created something quite enchanting on the first single, “Wholly Unrelated To Four Seasons”, in which guitar tones are stretched and layered in a dreamy, underwater fashion.

Seefeel – Sky Hooks [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Back in 2010 & 2011, shoegaze/electronic pioneers Seefeel released a new EP & album after some 14 years’s absence. Now the core of Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock have put together a new album (albeit only 6 tracks), with the familiar sampled & looped vocals of Peacock pulsing through through dubwise electronics. They’ve always had a temporally displaced sound – constructed entirely through digital technology but somehow analogue, even organic sounding. It’s a pleasure to have something new, and we’ll hear the rest of Everything Squared later this month.

Simon Fisher Turner – The “Special Relationship” [Mute/Bandcamp]
Simon Fisher Turner – Purr [Mute/Bandcamp]
Simon Fisher Turner – She Lowers Her Arms [Mute/Bandcamp]
So finally the actual new album from Simon Fisher Turner is out. SFT has been many things in his career, from child actor and young pop idol to composer and sound-artist who’s worked with Derek Jarman and created some of the most alluring and boundary-pushing audio work in the last few decades. Instability of the Signal is a quietly alluring album, sprinkled with his humour and frequently pulling the heartstrings. It’s deconstructed pop, constructed from four “S”es: “Slivers” of samples from David Padbury’s Salford Electronics, “Strings” from the Elysian Collective (previously the Elysian Quartet), found “Sounds” and field recordings, and “Singing” primarily from SFT himself. Fisher Turner also incorporates ideas from filmmakers Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatic, and words from Harold Pinter, whose “Special Relationship” we heard tonight. It’s tied together with subtle gestures like the eerie drone that starts The “Special Relationship” and reasserts itself at the close of the following track “Purr”. The “Slivers” sometimes develop into rhythmic figures, the “Strings” often insert themselves with fragmented romantic chord patterns. It’s a gentle & unassuming tour-de-force of the sort that an accomplished, adventurous artist of 5 decades can create.

Udder J Russell – After Midsomer [Udder J Russell Bandcamp]
Johnny Russell aka Ronny Juzzle aka Then Dof, Other J Russell, Udder J Russell and more, was once upon a long ago one half of folktronic duo Clickits with John McCaffrey aka Part Timer. I’ve followed his work as best I could, and lately those Udder/Other aliases have been highly active on Bandcamp. For someone who doesn’t care to promote his work in any way, he’s putting quite a bit of work into some very creative music, not least the analog festival for rabbits EP, where we find ourselves at an organic dream-rave with wonky found-percussion, caveman feedback and balooning bass tones. It seems unfair that Johny Part Timer & I are the only people who’ve bought it as yet. Go on.

John Wall and Alex Rodgers – Herd Vectiv [John Wall Bandcamp]
British composer John Wall is an important figure in electronic music despite being self-trained. His work since the mid-’90s (when he was already in his 40s) has involved painstaking organisation of tiny samples into strange, disarming narratives. Since 1997’s Fractur he has pioneered a glitch aesthetic that incorporates his recordings of British improv musicians, avant-garde composers, heavy metal and pop, albeit rarely recognizable. Since 2006, Wall has been creating collaborative works with British spoken word artist Alex Rodgers, whose acerbic poetry and equally-acerbic delivery seem at first glance contradictory to the austerity of pure sound-art. But Wall’s compositions are both meticulous and full of energy – even anger – that’s expressed even in these abstract sound-structures that rarely coalesce into anything resembling beats and barlines. This is seemingly all present in their latest missive, “Herd Vectiv“, with clattering bodies of sound tumbling and syncopating in ways that suggest songwriting structures, and when Rodgers’ voice does appear, it’s vocoded and autotuned into some kind of song(?) – this is the Brechtian alienation that claire rousay employs too, invoking pathos from abstraction. Another contradiction – in effect flipping all of Wall’s divorced, un/anti-music into a kind of pop; or at least anti-pop.

Moss Kissing – 35mg to 75mg to 150mg [Colectivo Casa Amarela/Bandcamp]
Moss Kissing – Dont make plans [Colectivo Casa Amarela/Bandcamp]
Zackary Enright-Wells’ latest album Between Summer & Now (a fragmented diary of depression) also draws pathos from abstracted forms, here referencing club music from ambient un-structures, scuffed field recordings, granulated piano refrains, anti-song. It’s the kind of deeply engrossing, quietly revolutionary stuff that the Portuguese Colectivo Casa Amarela have been sneaking out for some years. Really, don’t miss this!

Joaquín Cornejo – Cuica [YUKU]
This track from Ecuadorian producer Joaquín Cornejo actually came out a year or so ago on YUKU, but it’s available right now, for free, as part of YUKU’s 4th Birthdizzle Compapoodle. These big label anniversary compilations only stay up for about a month, so grab it now for a great primer on one of the best experimental electronic labels around at the moment.

E-Saggila – Every Voice At Once [Northern Electronics/Bandcamp]
Rita Mikhael, Iraq-born producer & DJ based on Toronto, released her latest album Gamma Tag, earlier this year on Northern Electronics. I’m not sure why I only just got onto it, but probably because there’s a CD (yay) and it must’ve taken a while to find it in stock? THAT’S MY EXCUSE! Mikhael’s usual tendencies are here – industrial & noise undertones but on a firm footing of bass, techno and IDM, seriously great.

Comatone – Start Synthy (2008) [Feral Media]
Another month, another entry in the unreleased hard-drive-plundering C-TONE20 EP series from Comatone, aka Blue Mountains-based Greg Seiler. On EP4, it’s more acid squiggles and breakbeats galore, from across the 20+ years being covered. It’s streaming on Spotify and elsewhere… Really ought to be downloadable but for now it’s just a streamfest!

Kloke – Lost Technology [Unknown To The Unknown/Bandcamp]
Last week the venerable UK label Hyperdub, run by Kode9 and home to forward-thinking bass music of all sorts, announced their first ever jungle album, and it’s a co-production from two of the current jungle crop’s greatest: the UK’s most enthusiastic jungle proponent Tim Reaper and the Naarm/Melbourne-based Kloke. There’s a single out now, but in the meantime Kloke also released a whole album of sparkling space-jungle on Unknown To The Unknown, The Cosmik Connection Lost Tape. “Lost Technology” mixes intense beat-mashing with dreamy synth pads, and incidentally uses one of the same breaks that Reaper & Kloke use on In Full Effect‘s first single, “Alienation“. Brilliant stuff.

Alex Reed – Hit ‘Em Dreamgrl (Remastered) [Alex Reed Bandcamp]
On Monday – yes, still less than a week ago! – the one & only Drew Daniel aka The Soft Pink Truth, one half of Matmos, sent out this tweet:

had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called “hit em” that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds thank you dream girl

— DREW DANIEL (@DDDrewDaniel) July 29, 2024

Within hours the tweet had gone viral and people were making “hit em” tracks. One of the first I saw was by Alex Reed – an academic like Drew, and usually making postpunk, post-industrial and, well, other stuff. But his “Hit ‘Em Dreamgrl” – pushed out within a day but since remastered, remixed & b-sided – is as close to what I’d have imagined the genre to sound like, i.e. breakcore in 5/4. Hilarious and yet strangely compelling?

Kruz Leone – Ready & Live (Deft Remix) [Ninja Tune Production Music/Stream here]
A hefty piece of grime from Kruz Leone here gets remixed by London bass/dusbtep/jungle producer Deft, which is intriguingly released via Ninja Tune Production Music, a large library run by Ninja Tune of music specially selected for synch – that is, for licensing for film, TV, advertising etc. I wouldn’t immediately think of a hard-hitting grime/d’n’b hybrid like this being ideal for synch, but now I can hear it hitting in a hard transition in some urban TV action drama…

Tutu Ta – Could Be Monk [Tutu Ta Bandcamp]
London producer Lorenzo Geary has a few releases under his belt as Tutu Ta, all with a dub bent, but bent dub that ventures into homegrown techno or postpunk, with pitch-shifted vocals stumbling out of the mix, and a sense of indistinct druidic ritual around the whole thing.

Alva Noto – HYbr:ID Sync Inter [Noton]
A sharp slam of the brakes and we’re in a very different bass-land, the pristine electronics of Carsten Nicolai’s Alva Noto giving us the third of his HYbr:ID series of somewhat more beat-oriented albums. Sub bass plays an important role, and crisp, glitchy beats with synth tones as cold as the desert at night. Nicolai’s music is as purely electronic as it comes, but the beautiful CD package (a standard that was set early in the Raster-Noton/Alva Noto timeline) comes with gorgeously laid-out full-page diagrams describing each track – worth the slightly higher price of admission.

Memory Drawings – Some Vague Sense Of Belonging (Epic45 Remix) [sound in silence/Memory Drawings Bandcamp]
I’ve mentioned Memory Drawings a fair bit before, the trans-Atlantic, dulcimer-led postrock band that I’ve had the honour of contributing cello to for some years now. I played a track from the latest album Deathbed Requests when the album came out back in June, but I now have possession of the beautiful double-CD edition from Greek label sound in silence, sporting a second disc of remixes and tied up in a fabric envelope. Each Memory Drawings album has come with bonus remixes & reworks, and an excellent lineup of colleagues is found here (see the list on their Bandcamp). It’s pretty nice to hear my cello recontextualised in the hands of Northern English rural indietronica mob Epic45.

Kai Angermann, Frauke Berg, Axel Ganz, Anja Lautermann – HFM02 03 [Trestle Records/Bandcamp]
Ross Downes & co’s Trestle Records has been host to a number of interesting series since their inception, including the One Day Band sessions bringing musicians from around the world together for a day in a studio, and then during lockdown the From Isolation series of online collaborations. Their latest venture is a series called HFM, from Haus Für Musiker, a creative space just outside of Düsseldorf. The label took up residence for a week and convened sessions with local musicians. For the second EP, we have percussionist Kai Angermann (also on electronics), electro-acoustic musician Frauke Berg, electronic musician Axel Ganz and multi-instrumentalist Anja Lautermann, playing cello, flute and who knows what else. There are propulsive krautrocky numbers, drones and glitching sound-art, and fragmented spoken word at times – interesting listening and a good introduction to some Düsseldorf musicians!

Theodora Laird & Caius Williams – Dummy [Cherche Encore/Bandcamp]
Versatile singer Theodora Laird (who you may have heard as feeo on Loraine James’ breakthrough 2019 album For You and I) and experimental bassist Caius Williams got together after seeing each other play and talking to the same mutual friend – Williams asked whether Laird needed a bassist, and Laird asked whether Williams had a boyfriend! Which is very sweet and they are partners as well as a duo. Their debut together, Crosspiece, is released on Cherche Encore and showcases Williams on both resonant double bass and shuddering Fender bass guitar, and Laird channeling jazz, classical, trip-hop and singer-songwriterly vocal styles. Both musicians have incredible technique and also process their sounds liberally, but while this is improvisatory and experimental music it’s also enormously touching. Couldn’t recommend highly enough.

Alex Zethson – Terrella [Thanatosis/Bandcamp]
Also enormously touching is a new single track from Stockholm’s Alex Zethson on his Thanatosis label. Zethson is comfortable in jazz, noise, contemporary classical, postrock and more, and “Terrella” is a sweet little piano piece with a light-footed melody in the left hand and pulsing chords in the right. Soft and expressive.

Listen again — ~205MB