Some beautiful experimental song, and hyper beats, but lots of sound-art tonight.
Snakeskin - Homecoming [Mais Um/Bandcamp/Ruptured/Bandcamp]
Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal (Snakeskin) - Signs [Ruptured/Bandcamp]
Snakeskin - Waiting [Mais Um/Bandcamp/Ruptured/Bandcamp]
The situation in Lebanon - indeed Beirut - right now is horrifying, as Israel extends its devastation, seemingly unchecked, into the heart of its neighbour. Of course this is by far not the first time Israel has invaded Lebanon, but it does seem like the deadliest, treating towns, neighbourhoods, buildings with the same disregard for civilian lives as they are doing in Gaza. So for Beirut natives Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal, releasing an album right now must be truly disorienting and bittersweet. The two are in fact on tour in Europe right now, but they are also supporting a fundraiser via Tabbal's Tunefork Studios along with Beirut Synthesizer Centre to help displaced families in Lebanon.
In any case, Snakeskin's second album They Kept Our Photographs is co-released by the wonderful Beirut/Montréal label Ruptured and the London-based Mais Um. Their debut was one of my favourite albums of 2022, its title now naming the duo. Both albums combine the vocals of Sabra - who is also lead singer of Beirut dreampop/shoegaze band Postcards - with guitars and other instruments performed by both, radically processed and produced by Tabbal. Guitar chords stutter and loop, drums are cut up, while at other times Sabra's voice floats in uneasily sparse soundscapes. This is deeply emotive music - not surprisingly, as the writing for the album began on October 6th, so it's been indelibly stained by the genocide in Gaza. Cannot recommend this work highly enough.
Oranssi Pazuzu - Muuntautuja [Nuclear Blast/Bandcamp]
Oranssi Pazuzu - Hautatuuli [Nuclear Blast/Bandcamp]
It's good to finally play this brilliant Finnish heavy metal band on the show. Oranssi Pazuzu started off as ostensibly black metal, but each album has been an evolution, with synths becoming more prevalent early on, psychedelic influences and synth-ambient often taking over altogether. On Muuntautuja the band takes on an even more electronic approach, with sub-bass kicks driving the title track, and a loping trip-hop beat on "Hautatuuli". The band namecheck Death Grips and Portishead as well as Boredoms, whose heavy punk beginnings morphed into electronic and percussive experimentalism. And yes, you can hear something of the hammering beats of Portishead's aptly-named "Machine Gun" for sure. I can't tell you what any of this is about, but as music qua music, love it!
Stick In The Wheel - Steals The Thief [Stick In The Wheel Bandcamp]
From the beginning, the artful yet raw English folk revivalism of Stick In The Wheel refused any singular approaches to folk music's living nature vs its deep historical roots. Nowhere is that characterised better than the warbling autotune on Nicola Kearey's voice, accompanied by rich piano accordion, violin and percussion on their much-loved early tune "Follow Them True". Kearey and partner Ian Carter were responsible for the era-defining "Hater" from dubstep collective Various Production, as well as some eerie and arcane folk missives on Various's early 7"s (check "Foller", for instance, sung by Kearey, and its flipside "Home", sung by Rachel Davies, who was in SITW early on) - so technology and dance music have always been intertwined with the band, but A Thousand Pokes is their most acoustic, back-to-basics album in a while, with pointed commentary on the state of the world right now... So it's appropriate that the autotune effect makes itself known again here, on the first and last tracks of this album. "Steals The Thief" is a bewitching piece with droning guitars under the folk percussion and gentle guitar jangle, and the way the autotune slightly flattens Kearey's vocal affect only makes it more touching.
Setting - Night Divers [Cardinals At The Window]
There's a lot going on in the world. There always is, but we are very much, very solidly in a time of climate crisis, and part of that is a much greater frequency of extreme weather events. One of those hit Western North Carolina (the western bit of the US state of North Carolina, right?), which has been hit with major flooding. We're very familiar with such stuff in Australia. Anyway, NC musician Libby Rodenbough, David Walker, and music journalist Grayson Haver Currin have compiled a truly gigantic compilation to raise money for local charities - it's 136 tracks, over 10 hours of music, which really nobody has time to listen to, but you just have to scan through and find artists you know & love, and while you're there, try out some others - noting that it's ALL exclusive unreleased recordings. You might be interested in Helado Negro, Animal Collective's Geologist & D.S., Daniel Bachman, Laraaji, Danny Paul Grody, Lonnie Holley, Jenks Miller of Horseback, Mary Lattimore, Bill Orcutt, Six Organs of Admittance... but there's so many. Alongside these, I was glad to discover Setting, a trio featuring exploratory folk guitarist/banjo player Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly aka Mind Over Mirrors & drummer Joe Westerlund of Megafaun. This is minimalist, repetitive, kosmische music that blends banjo and harmonium with electronics, tapes, and live drums. Their contribution here is great.
KMRU - MR0 [OFNOT/KMRU Bandcamp]
Nyokabi Kariũki - Item no. ______ [OFNOT/KMRU Bandcamp]
In 2022, Kenyan sound-artist Joseph Kamaru aka KMRU released the album Temporary Stored, which found him in dialogue with audio found in the Sound Archive of Royal Museum of Central Africa, based in Belgium. As well as actual objects (and people) stolen from Africa, Western countries have taken sounds and music and treated them as copyrighted property. So in creating these gorgeous sound works, KMRU has performed a kind of act of "repatriation". Those tracks are now re-released on a 2LP set by OFNOT, augmented by further reworkings by other African sound-artists. Temporary Stored II is a remarkable, thought-provoking work, and each artist takes a personal approach. Kenyan sound-artist Nyokabi Kariũki emphasises the way the recordings are decontextualised as mere numbered library records, while slowly weaving in haunting synth chords.
Anna Butterss - Seeing You [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
Adelaide-born bass player Anna Butterss has been based in LA for a while now, and is in great demand, not just in jazz - I saw them playing bass with Andrew Bird on his recent tour here. But Butterss is a brilliant jazz player, who recently appeared on International Anthem as part of the jazz/post-whatever supergroup Small Medium Large. So it's great to see their new solo album Mighty Vertebrate also coming out on International Anthem, a great adventurous label for forward-thinking jazz that can cross over into electronic, krautrock influences and more. The core of Butterss' compositions here is jazz, but there are pieces based around a drum machine beat, blurred samples, bass as melodic instrument... And Butterss plays both electric and upright bass. There's plenty here for people who maybe don't primarily listen to jazz - I highly recommend giving it a go.
TP Dutchkiss - Song for Ugne [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
Spencer Hartling is an engineer and producer based in LA, among other things the co-author with Matt Baldwin of the zine Show Invisibles, or How to Make a Tape Loop. His love of tape loops and effects shines and warbles throughout his forthcoming solo album high functioning, as do glitchy digital effects, and various guests. On second single "Song for Ugne" James Riotto adds a plethora of instruments including keyboards, bass and beats. Equal parts emotional and textural, it bodes well for the rest of the album.
Meemo Comma - The Gift [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
It's wonderful seeing the progressive growth as an artist of Lara Rix-Martin aka Meemo Comma, having mastered deconstructed and reconstructed rave and IDM over their last few releases, now turning to quasi-soundtrack work with Decimation of I. The album is structured after the philosophical science fiction novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, famously adapted for film by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker. Both works explore a world transformed by alien visitors who are never seen, and the album's title refers to the "ego-death" experienced by the story's protagonists. Rix-Martin explores a wide range of influences through the album, with clarinets and flutes providing 20th-century classical touchpoints, while pieces like "The Gift" strongly reference the likes of Vangelis or Tomita, albeit with some rare beats entering in the second half. A concept album thought it may be, Decimation of I would work beautifully as a real soundtrack, and someone needs to take Rix-Martin up on this asap.
Ran Slavin - Dawn Fourteen [Ran Slavin Bandcamp]
Tel Aviv-based Ran Slavin is known for his creative film work as well as experimental audio works that have been released by Crónica among others. Following Oolong: Ambient Works, released by Mille-Plateaux earlier this year, New Dawns takes a different approach to "ambient", combining instrumentation like upright bass with electronic production techniques and lopsided beats. It's a surreal evocation of a futuristic alternate reality.
Shinra Knives - Some of Y'all Don't [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Three tracks of heavy crunching (or not!) electronics from St. Louis artist Shinra Knives - although actually each track hits different. The first is glitched-up snarling drums and bass, interrupted by distorted choirs(?), and the last is pretty ambient new-age synth melodies, but in between is a hip-hop sampling piece of breakcore-dubstep hybrid. So much variation on a three-track EP is to be admired, and YUKU deserves thanks for supporting another creative artist at the intersection of experimentation and the dancefloor.
DJ Die & Addison Groove - Gunsmok£ [Gutterfunk]
Bristol Reprazent! The relatively small UK city of Bristol has played an outsized role in UK soundsystem culture since the '80s - famously with Massive Attack and Portishead, but before that with Massive Attack precursors The Wild Bunch, and the always underappreciated Smith & Mighty. On the other hand Roni Size and his Reprazent crew were instrumental in the rise of jungle and then drum'n'bass, outside of London itself, and their success earned them the Mercury Prize in 1997, arguably when it still mattered. Roni Size himself was certainly a talented producer, but I'd argue that Krust and DJ Die were the greater beatmakers. Die now helms the GutterFunk label, promoting great bass music from Bristol and beyond. On this new track he joins with a fellow Bristolian of the following generation, Addison Groove, who came up out of the dubstep scene (under the name Headhunter) around 2006 and is no stranger to d'n'b collabs. In fact Die & Addison Groove have worked together since at least 2013, and this one's a fierce'n'filthy bit of jungle/drum'n'bass.
A.R. Kane - Baby Milk Snatcher (Tim Reaper Jungle remix) [A.R. Kane Bandcamp]
A.R. Kane - Baby Milk Snatcher (Sixty Nine LP version) [A.R. Kane Bandcamp]
East Londoners Rudy Tambala & Alex Ayuli's A.R. Kane are another of those influential but nearly-forgotten bands. Tambala had also been part of M|A|R|R|S, who had a hit with "Pump Up The Volume" in 1997, mixing scratching and sampling with house. Somehow A.R. Kane wound its way around scrappy noisy guitar stuff that presaged shoegaze by a good few years, as well as sample-based electronic pop, and later more ambient abstract stuff? Arcane indeed. The reformed band have just released Up Home Collected, which extends the proto-shoegaze EP from 1988 with original demos and some new remixes. Slowdive (who've released two of their best albums since reforming a few years ago) morph the original harshness into something much more shoegazey, but it's great hearing jungle's nicest DJ Tim Reaper spinning some samples from "Baby Milk Scratcher" into a kind of r'n'b-jungle dub. It's notable that one of the great d'n'b anthems, Boymerang's The River (VIP) is effectively a remix of A.R. Kane (Boymerang being Graham Sutton of postrock pioneers Bark Psychosis).
Haptic - Proscenium [LINE/Bandcamp]
Chicago experimental trio Haptic have for a couple of decades made a body of deceptively quiet music, which is often anything but: not drone but full of detail, often veering into noise, or hypnotic kraut/postrock, its three or more members using whatever means necessary to make their sounds. Adam Sonderberg, Joseph Clayton Mills and Steven Hess are frequent collaborators outside of Haptic, and Hess is also drummer in the brilliant black metal/drone/noise band Locrian, and also in kraut-glitch ensemble innode (among many others). Their latest appearance ("Haptic recording number sixteen") is on LINE, the boutique label run by arch-minimalist (and thoughtful curator) Richard Chartier. In contrast with the two 20-ish minute tracks that follow it, "Proscenium" is a brief 3 minutes of drawn-out horns shadowing a barely-audible warbling tape of a piano. The following two tracks, released on Nov 22nd, combine static drones and field recordings dominated by white noise, with thuds and whirrs happening so far in the background you're hardly sure they're there.
Harvestman - Herne's Oak [Neurot/Bandcamp]
Steve Von Till was/is a key member of Neurosis, a pivotal band in post-metal that started as hardcore punk but morphed into an expansive sound drawing from postrock, industrial, hardcore, doom and experimental music of all sorts. The band also had an alter ego called Tribes of Neurot that wasn't metal at all, allowing them to explore drone, sound-art, glitch, noise and more. Von Till has a solo output of widescreen, psychedelic folk music, but alongside this he has an alter ego, Harvestman, that's an instrumental project for abstracted psych-folk and much more. In 2024, via Neurosis's own fantastic label Neurot Recordings, Harvestman has been releasing a Triptych of records, each released on special full moons: the first came out with the Pink Moon on April 23rd, the second on the Buck Moon of July 21st, and the third will turn up on October 17th for the Hunter Moon. The albums use synths, loops, filters, delays, weird percussion and more, as well as guitar - and bass is paramount. On Part One, the legendary Al Cisneros of stoner metal bands Sleep and Om lends his dub weight, and on Part Two Cisneros contributed a dub remix. I recently played the dub from the shortly forthcoming Part Three by The Bug, and here's a mini-epic of ambient widescreen folk rock. This is a project concerned with ancient history and geological time, exploring humanity's connection with - and disconnection from - nature on a grand scale.
RUBBISH MUSIC - The Fatberg Which Weighed as Much as Three Elephants [Persistence of Sound/Bandcamp]
Kate Carr (proprietor of Flaming Pines, Aussie living in London) and Iain Chambers (who runs the Persistence of Sound label) came together last year as RUBBISH MUSIC on their first release, Upcycling, released on Kate's Flaming Pines. Their follow-up, appropriately enough, is this time on Iain's Persistence of Sound label. Flaming Pines is predominantly concerned with field recordings and site-specific music (although not exclusively), and Persistence of Sound began in 2021 with both field recording work (The London Sound Survey) and musique concrète (a wonderful Beatriz Ferreyra release). The Rubbish Music project works at this intersection: the first album was absolutely concrète music in the sense that all sounds are literally sampled from the rubbish generated by our societies and industries (see this remarkable video of the two performing live). The follow-up, Fatbergs, homes in on one particular product of our Age Of Waste, these "fatbergs" growing in our sewers from discarded wet wipes, nappies, fats and oils, accumulating into monstrous conglomerations that result in blockages and overflows. The music is accordingly lugubrious and at times subtly menacing, without losing sight of the innate humour of the situation: the track titles draw attention to how massive these things are, or how gross they are - slithering, huge and disgusting. Are we hearing dripping, squelching human waste, slithering around our ears? It at least feels enough like it to add another dimension to the project's social commentary.
BZDB - Dancesing [AD 93/Bandcamp]
AD 93, Nic Tasker's label previously known as Whities, continues to bring the goods far beyond the leftfield dance music that was their core material. Here's the first released material from BZDB, a collaboration between London/Marseilles-based poet Belinda Zhawi aka MA.MOYO and multidisciplinary artist Duncan Bellamy, best known as a founding member of jazz/classical/electronic crossover band Portico Quartet. The first single from their elliptically titled album Jump Ship, Sit Lean, Be Still, Stand Tall is "Dancesing", which demonstrates their "sonic poetry" tag. A minimalist piano ostinato, slow string lines, field recordings and layers of vocal drones underpinn the hypnotic spoken word of Zhawi, only for the strings to burst into strident chords in the song's last minute.
Passepartout Duo - Viols and Violas, in Mus. [Passepartout Duo Bandcamp]
Itinerant experimentalists Passepartout Duo also bring us strings and piano on the first single from their fourth album Argot. Here the live acoustic instruments emulate the unconventional intervals and rhythmic subdivisions of a generatively-produced synth melody, dancing around each other over some pensive long notes. It's charmingly unbalancing.
Ava Rasti - I Remember [130701/Bandcamp]
I first heard the work of Tehran-based composer & producer Ava Rasti via her album Ginestra, released last year on Kate Carr's Flaming Pines label. That work deconstructed the music of the classical "canon" into murky drones, waves of distortion and clouds of glitch. Rasti's new album The River will be released on Fat Cat's post-classical/experimental imprint 130701, and like last year's album was initiated during a residency at Fabrica in Treviso, Italy. The two tracks available so far are less violent in their treatments of classical source material: on "Wound" slow string lines are smudged and overlaid, while on "I Remember", a muted, reversed piano loop stretches under a sparse piano refrain while glitched, pitch-shifted echoes float around, eventually complicating the harmonies with hints of discords. Rasti very effectively evokes her theme: how memory can be both preserved and hidden in locations, how violence can be obscured and transformed over time. I look forward to hearing the rest of this album.