Thanks so much to Amy Li for her fascinating selections last week while I was in Naarm with Zoe Jungist of FBi’s own Variable Depth Audit DJing at the incredible Absorbed IV!
That means I’ve got two weeks of new music to somehow summarise into 2 hours of radio, so we’re jam-packed.
Postcards – Dust Bunnies [Ruptured/Bandcamp]
We’ve heard a lot of brilliant experimental music from Lebanon in recent years, a lot (although by no means all) of it courtesy of the Beirut-based Ruptured label (now partly run out of Montréal). Among the highest of highlights are the songs of Julia Sabra, both with Fadi Tabbal as Snakeskin, and solo. But Sabra’s first band was Postcards, an indie rock/shoegaze band that’s among Beirut’s longest-lived, going back to 2012. So we’re fortunate to have an actual new album from the band, produced though it was (as always, by Fadi Tabbal) under the very dark cloud of Israel’s regional aggression. The first single is an impassioned scream of everything that’s gone wrong with Lebanon. Keep an eye out for more, or just go pre-order it already!
Spoil – Flash Break [Molten Moods/Bandcamp]
It seems to have been about a year between this one’s announcement and its release – when I got the release email in my inbox I briefly had no idea what it was. What it is, though, is very very good. Rosa Anschütz is an artist as well as a musician, and formed Spoil with Till Funke and Jonas Yamer, both members of Carl Gari, the bass-heavy electronic/krautrock band who collaborate deeply with Abdullah Miniawy. Yamer also runs the eclectic label Molten Moods, who’ve released this debut EP by the trio entitled Fucking Maniac. It sits somewhere on the current spectrum of postpunk melded with trip-hop, with Anschütz’s tightly emotive vocals sung or spoken over rumbling bass, dub-echoing drums or squalling guitars, organ drones or skittering hi-hats. Each track is different, but it’s a strong, distinctive sound. I hope the trio’s an ongoing prospect.
Mücha – You Make Me Go Under [Frequency Domain/Bandcamp]
In 2021 I discovered the music of DJ, sound-artist and musician Amanda Butterworth aka Mücha via her album Fall, made up of a hard-to-pin-down combination of clicky dub techno, jungle and at times her own vocals. Across a couple of follow-up albums she maintained this aesthetic, where everything is smudged, even when full of glitchy detail. Her latest release is a two-track single, Skin / You Make Me Go Under, both exercises in abstraction as much as they’re songs. The latter has dreamy vocals and close-edited breakbeats punctuated by bass drops. The two excellent originals are accompanied by heavy-duty remixes: Surgeon’s floaty trip-hop-inflected techno and Datassette’s ’90s-style skittery d’n’b.
Etyen & Salwa Jaradat – Ya Tali’een [Thawra Records/Bandcamp]
Beirut-based producer Etyen and Palestinian singer Salwa Jaradat released their first EP together in 2022, and now follow it up with the Qoumi EP, adapting Palestinian folk songs and a tradition of using coded language to resist censorship and oppression. The songs shine through with Jaradat’s strong vocals, and Etyen retains the songs’ essence while adapting them to the era of bass music and electronic sound design. Recommended.
Npcede – Tabula Rasa [Chapter Music/Bandcamp]
Getting even more industrial now is Naarm/Melbourne’s Npcede, who claim that in a perfect world, they wouldn’t need to exist. So… luckily this world is very fucking imperfect. This is industrial hip-hop, with intense bass drive and crashing noise accompanying a menacing rap. While you’re here, you might want to watch the dystopian video for first single “Spleen”…
Flaaryr – YOU CAN’T KILL ME IN A WAY THAT MATTERS (A LEDA VALLADARES) [post-dreifing/Bandcamp]
Argentinian guitarist & producer Diego Manatrizio is based between Barcelona & Reykjavic, the latter explaining how he’s ended up on exploratory Icelandic label/collective post-dreifing. His project Flaaryr is all about noise guitar, but here the instrument – sometimes absolutely howling with distortion – is embedded in clattering percussion, a little too fast and wayward to suit the dancefloor. At its noisiest, this short release is thrilling, and at its most electronic it’s almost blissful, but liable to turn at any moment.
clipping. – Change the Channel [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
clipping. – Ask What Happened [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
A new clipping. album is always an event. Daveed Diggs may be very busy with his acting career, but he’s a serious rapper and lyricist and clearly dedicated to this very weird band. Weird because the two musicians who complete the trio are both noise artists, William Hutson tending to the more cerebral, and Jonathan Snipes also well-known for his irreverant hardcore/rave shenanigans with Captain Ahab back in the day. clipping.’s music absolutely works as hip-hop, and Diggs is a masterful rapper; but they also draw on avant-garde contemporary composition, glitch, noise and – absolutely – jungle & rave. This all goes to show that a concept album on cyberpunk suits them just as well as their two horrorcore tributes, and their space opera before – all masterpieces.
Dead Channel Sky is named for the first sentence of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, an ur-text of cyberpunk: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” – which in 1984 of course meant a staticky grey, later on could mean blue, and now probably just prompts confused looks from the post-Gen Z generation. I haven’t listened closely enough to the lyrics yet, but it seems less of a through-narrative than Splendor & Misery, but as a series of snapshots it depicts the way that we are careening head-on into a not-unfamiliar form of the grimy, ultra-capitalist dystopias depicted in cyberpunk since the mid-1980s. That the music mixes jungle and industrial, while glitches and other sonic manipulation echo the various discarded technologies that inspired the genre, goes to show that clipping. are the band to do this right.
Zoë Mc Pherson – Salted and Sweet [SFX/Bandcamp]
Zoë Mc Pherson – Farewell [SFX/Bandcamp]
All the deconstructed club tics that became popular in the last few years are themselves an expression of cyberpunk a couple of generations on. Are the jungle beats inspired by video game music or by the ’90s originals? Does it matter? Zoë Mc Pherson is particularly adept at sonic manipulation in the club/bass music context, and their ongoing partnership with audiovisual artist Alessandra Leone ensures that the visual side is equally contemporary & futuristic. Mc Pherson’s vocals appear more on Upside Down than ever before, and on an album that seeks a sense of connection and hope in accelerating times, it’s perhaps not surprising that it’s less “deconstructed” than before as well. Still, there are ambient sound design interludes, and field recordings in amongst the trance synths and rave/jungle beats.
TRAKA – Shoot the Legs [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Serbia & Montenegro duo TRAKA have been a central act in the stable of Prague label YUKU for a while, and have just dropped their latest full-length, Aptid. And it’s very much YUKU music – bass-driven, mixing up dubstep & garage, grime, footwork and jungle, although the collaborators this time are other bass artists rather than any MCs. Polished production from a talented pair.
Nuphlo – Sarangi [Machinist Music/Bandcamp]
Here, though, is some real drum’n’bass. Although even Nuphlo, a UK producer released here on Canadian producer John Rolodex’s Machinist Music, is mixing up the standard rhythms of d’n’b, emphasising different beats of the bar, with fidgety sub-divisions. On the Draa EP, the artist is looking to his South Asian heritage, and it’s nice to hear that sneak through too, among the bass and breaks. South Asia has a long association with British dance music, particularly jungle & drum’n’bass but even going back to the early 1980s, and it fits very well with this modern approach too.
Noneless – Apocalypse [Noneless Bandcamp]
Late in 2023, I was stunned to hear a brilliant breakcore album with classical overtones from a local artist, released on the rather exclusive anybody universe label run by Japanese IDM/breakcore artist Laxenanchaos. Noneless had previously been known as elfaether, but their return with A Vow of Silence debuted this new alias. Originally from Eora/Sydney, they’re currently based in Oxford, UK, whence they have gifted us this new EP, Delicate Sin, mixing mournful piano samples and their violin with intensely mashed breakcore beats. Just like the doctor ordered. (It’s me. I’m the doctor. I order you to listen to this.)
Whatever the Weather – 11°C (Intermittent Rain) [Ghostly International/Bandcamp]
The wonderful Loraine James shot to fame when she signed to Hyperdub for 2019’s For You and I, a distinctive take on IDM, jazz memories, grime and other bass musics. And of course she’s followed that with two other brilliant albums, but in 2022 she also released a lovely album on Ghostly International under the name Whatever the Weather. It was billed as “ambient”, but had plenty of skittery beats even so. Somehow the follow-up, although it’s also anything but beatless, does sound a little more ambient to me. As with the previous, it’s based around temperatures, and there’s a kind of genius to the way the tracks do feel freezing, rainy or heavy with heat. There are also lovely snippets of spoken word and field recordings. Proof, if we need it, of an artist who continues to get better & better – from a running start.
T. Gowdy – Anonymous V [Constellation/Bandcamp]
T. Gowdy – Flit [Constellation/Bandcamp]
Joni Void – Joni Sadler Forever [Constellation/Bandcamp]
I wrote this a few weeks ago, adapted here:
Montréal’s Constellation Records is of course famous as the home of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, A/Thee Silver Mt. Zion and a host of other legendary Canadian postrock bands, and their spiritual home the Hotel2Tango is a 24-track analogue studio – so for many years I felt sure that the label’s aesthetic was incompatible with the digital realm of cut-ups and glitches. That said, Do Make Say Think were incorporating digital edits and weird studio shit fairly early on. In any case, in the last decade the label has signed the likes of minimal glitch-techno producer Automatisme, and a few years ago we received the flickering ambience of T. Gowdy and the gorgeously obtuse cut-up haunted trip-hop of Joni Void. Both have just released beautiful new albums. T. Gowdy’s flickery micro-edits here underpin wordless vocals reaching back to Medieval choral music, while at times the rhythms approach the beats of glitchy minimal electronica. Joni Void again presents a ghostly version of trip-hop or electro-acoustic indie, but the lovely “Joni Sadler Forever” features another Joni, a beloved drummer in the Montréal scene as member of Lungbutter and other bands, and also Director of Communications at Constellation from 2017, who tragically passed away of a brain aneurysm in 2021. Having her drumming memorialised on this beautiful slow burner of a track is truly special.
Bird Battles – Bird Battles [Sleep In The Fire]
Here’s “Bird Battles”, one of two tracks on the debut release Bird Battles, from new duo Bird Battles. Hopefully there will be a lot more than these two tracks though. Bird Battles features the voice and other sounds of London-based Scottish musician Euan Millar-McMeeken, better known as glacis and also one half of Graveyard Tapes with Matthew Collings and of Civic Hall with Craig Tattersall. Here he’s working with visual and sound-artist Jesse Narens, whose love of birds is all over his visual art and audio work. “Moth River” is a lovely piece of indie songwriting with a very sparing drum machine, but I do love to hear Euan in noisier mode, and the title track’s distorted drone really hits the spot.
Scattered Order – Daisy and Lucy [Scattered Order Bandcamp]
Whenever I play Scattered Order I end up characterising them as venerable stalwarts of the Sydney experimental music scene, starting off sometime in the late ’80s, and still making gripping music today. That’s all true, but I always kind of thought they’d be here forever. But tragically, last year founding member Michael Tee passed away after a long illness. So the poignantly named Continue is a tribute to Michael, created by founder Mitch Jones and Shane Fahey, a longtime fellow traveller and member of the group at various junctures. They’ve used drones Michael had alreadsy recorded, but no doubt the creative process was different. Mitch sings in his exploratory fashion, the sounds are sometimes discordant, and there’s a pervading sense of melancholy. Long may they continue.
Vile Karimi, Haizea Huegun – </body> [Colectivo Casa Amarela/Bandcamp]
Portugal’s Colectivo Casa Amarela reliably introduce unusual music of unpredictable genre. Here classically-trained composer and musician Haizea Huegun joins with experimental musician Vile Karimi to create something neither artist would have made on their own. Unsettling ambience, glitched keyboards and field recordings grapple with the more discordant and more consonant tendencies of the two artists.
Passepartout Duo – From Taipei [Officially announced later this week!]
Internationalist musicians & inventors Passepartout Duo have just arrived in Australia, and are currently in residence in Parramatta, here in Eora/Sydney. I jumped the gun playing this track, but it’s from a project they’ve announced called Pieces from Places, which will see a new track added each month for a year, created on location as part of their continuing travels. While the music is really lovely, it’s best experienced on video, where you can see the traditional and invented instruments the two are playing. So keep an eye on their socials and their Bandcamp. They are also playing in Sydney at The Vanguard on April 8th, opening for another UFog favourite, Mary Ocher.
Grand River – Tuning the Wind (excerpt) [Umor Rex/Bandcamp]
Following a beautiful, experimental album on Editions Mego in 2023, Berlin-based Dutch-Italian sound designer & composer Aimée Portioli now surfaces on Mexican label Umor Rex with Tuning the Wind. Like the previous album, the electronic music here is constructed with a composer’s ear for structure and timbre. It’s one long work – 36 minutes – so I’ve excerpted a section where one musical idea is moving into another. You can hear samples of maybe a car engine (or maybe just howling wind?), and wind that has literally been “tuned”, sculpted so that you can’t tell what’s a field recording and what’s a real instrument. You might think a conceptual work that’s over half an hour is challenging, but you’ll find yourself tuning in and unaware that time’s passed. It’s pretty wonderful.
Alex Jasprizza – Tides [Alex Jasprizza]
Another musician deeply embedding their work with field recordings is saxophonist Alex Jasprizza, based on Eora land, and connecting with the Waterways around us. He’s posted a clip of how he recorded the water sounds for this track – Tides – on an Instagram post here. Alex responds to these recordings with great sensitivity, making the water part of the music and vice versa, as the saxophone and, in this case, upright piano swirl and gurgle.
Kate Carr – spring back and creak [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
OK but if we’re talking about field recordings and found sound and music, Kate Carr (originally from here but London-based for ages) is a master of the art, and tirelessly promoting others through her Flaming Pines label. Rubber Band Music is a particular sound experiment, using homemade devices of wood, metal and rubber bands. So we’ve got sproings and buzzes and wobbles, slowed down, filtered, rebuilt. Abstract yet physical.
Dorothy Carlos – My Buddy (Miss You In Ear World) [29 Speedway/Bandcamp]
Dorothy Carlos – Always – My Ideal Is Windy [29 Speedway/Bandcamp]
NYC experimental label 29 Speedway here brings us an amazing little release from NYC/Chicago cellist & sound-artist Dorothy Carlos. These pieces – most around 3 minutes long but as short as 30 seconds and as long as 7 minutes – are described as “sound collages”. Her voice and her cello are caught up in glitching granulations, but it’s done so artfully that somehow the melody sneaks through the cracks. “Always” is cracked & collaged from chopped samples of non-verbal vocal tics and breaths. This is, of course, Utility Fog’s bread & butter, whether it was The Books or Lucky Dragons back in the day, and I’m so glad to hear people (especially cellists!) doing this now.
Judith Hamann – seventeen fabrics of measure [Shelter Press/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based cellist Judith Hamann is originally from Naarm/Melbourne, and specialises in contemporary & experimental music. I’m especially fond of Music for Cello and Humming, both as a concept and a work. Her new solo release Aunes finds her perfectly suited to Félicia Atkinson’s Shelter Press. The album refuses to stay in one place, although each track is peaceful in its own way, from detuned organs and field recordings, definitely some humming and other soft vocals, to incredible, static cello tones. It’s for the cello that I played “seventeen fabrics of measure”, although there are electronic and other elements in there too. The end of the LP gives 16 minutes to a slow, patient duet of hummed vocals and cello, although I think both voice and instrument are double-tracked too. It’s an exercise in perfect poise. Remarkable.