There's quite a lean towards ambient sounds tonight - not all peaceful, mind. There's some shattering noise and many glitchy loops and sound-beds. But there's also hip-hop, skittering IDM, stripped-down grime, and re-imagined acoustic folk.
Dealers of God - Thundercloudz [Dealers of God Bandcamp]
But... what does it all mean? I admit I'm not the most attentive to lyrics when I'm listening to music, but when Naarm/Melbourne hip-hop group/cartel/gang Dealers of God sent me their forthcoming album Flesh Bill Clinton Humanoid Skeleton, and after I'd signed the necessary NDAs and read the heavily-redacted FBi file, I was still almost entirely in the dark about whatever sinister truths of the Deep State had been uncovered here. All other questions aside, the band genuinely have collaborated with Roger Eno, Brian's pianist brother. All other identities are hidden (although I'm sure I've heard Johnathan Citizen's name before). The music is equally hard to pin down - sudden punk onslaught, extended ambient crunk passages etc. "Thundercloudz", previewed exclusively for you tonight, is more straightforwardly hip-hop than much of the rest, and also quite melodic. The blissful piano & synth loop takes me back to early '90s Oz indie electronic bands like Single Gun Theory somehow...
B Dolan - "Turn A Mill" (Unnatural Entities Remix) [B Dolan Bandcamp]
It's been a long time since the last album proper from poet & underground hip-hop activist B Dolan. Emergency spinal surgery 4 years ago derailed his life and healing from that is central to the album he put out earlier this year, The Wound Is Not The Body. Dolan has also run a Discord server for a while, where among other things, fans can submit remixes, and out of that community comes this really nice remix of "Turn A Mill" with a heavy bass beat from Digital Monster & Mr. Bombcamp who together are Unnatural Entities.
Herbert - Fallen (feat Momoko Gill) [Accidental Records/Bandcamp]
Back in the mid-1990s, some of the earliest releases from Matthew Herbert under his Herbert moniker were the Parts EPs, 1-5 (digital reissues can be found on Herbert's Bandcamp). In 2014, the series returned with Part Six, followed by Part Seven, and then Part Eight in 2015. So it's about time for Part 9! These releases are avenues for Herbert's jazzy r'n'b-inflected deep house, always a delight. On the first single from Part 9, vocals come from singer/songwriter/drummer Momoko Gill.
SHATR Collective - Salim [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
From the always forward-thinking Beirut/Montréal label Ruptured Records comes a challenging, moving album of poetry and modular synthesis from SHATR Collective, with music by Sarah Huneidi and voices/poetry from Theresa Sahyoun (mostly in English) and Nadine Makarem (in Arabic). These pieces are visceral responses to the genocide in Gaza, indeed referencing the killing of Palestinian poets - Sahyoun's "Salim" is about Salim Al Naffar. The emotion in the spoken words is palpable, and along with the stark electronics it can be difficult listening - as it probably should be. 100% of proceeds go to ULYP (Unite Lebanon Youth Project) Gaza Student Emergency Fund.
ENDON - Time Does Not Heal [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
In "Salim", Theresa Sahyoun speaks of how the numb, desperate feeling during this ongoing genocide is not - precisely - grief. The new album Fall of Spring from Japanese noise band ENDON grapples directly with grief, coming 4 years after the death of Etsuo Nagura, brother of vocalist Taichi Nagura. After the departure of drummer Shin Yokota as well, the remaining three members decided to continue without replacing those members, and Fall of Spring is - well... in some ways it could be described as less aggressive, but still noise and harshness is the dominant mode of the four tracks; it's just cut through with a little more beauty, and in service of anguish. The 6-minute "Time Does Not Heal" is the album's emotional and musical centrepiece, with torturous noise doused in massive, rumbling bass, tumbling synth-percussion and buried melodies, mostly subsuming Nagura's pained howls.
Dal:um - Cracking [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
Hamburg-based label Glitterbeat has put out three remarkable albums from South Korean musician Park Jiha, and in 2021 released the first album from the duo Dal:um, made up of Ha Suyean on the gayageum and Hwang Hyeyoung ongeomungo, two Korean stringed instruments. Their follow-up, Coexistence, is coming out soon, with second single "Cracking" finding the duo at their most rhythmic and percussive.
Chloe Kim 김예지 - Bonus Track I: Bass Dance [People Sound]
Chloe Kim 김예지 - Movement I: When We Foresee [People Sound]
After embarking on her 100 Hours project, in which she performed drums for 10 hours straight on 10 consecutive days, Sydney-based Korean musician Chloe Kim 김예지 was looking for something different, and her love of double bass led her to the idea of multiple double basses playing together. Initially she'd conceived of a double bass quartet, and the music was premiered in that configuration with Helen Svoboda, Harry Birch, Oscar Neyland, and Paddy Fitzgerald as the double bassists in question. But the final recorded form grew into Music For Six Double Bassists, with two Sydney double bassists added: Sydney jazz stalwart Jonathan Zwartz and Jacques Emery, whose label People Sound released the album. These are compositions in the jazz style, leaving room for improvisation for the musicians - the credits on Bandcamp list the soloists on each track, except Movement I - but even here, the piece begins with a chaos of plucked rhythm & melody and low drones. Just before the minute mark, the whole ensemble coalesces on a righteous bassline, with individuals adding rhythmic ornamentation around it. The album is full of body-pulling basslines the equal of Johan Berthling's work in Fire! and elsewhere - high praise! - while also capitalising on the instrument's expressiveness, including Helen Svoboda's patented floating stopped harmonics. There's also a secret pleasure in hearing all those slaps of finger and string on the instruments' fingerboards. Glorious.
Holy Tongue meets Shackleton - Ancient Model [AD93/Bandcamp]
Originally the duo of powerhouse drummer Valentina Magaletti and UK bass music producer Al Wootton, Holy Tongue last year added Magaletti's Vanishing Twin bandmate Susumu Mukai on bass, and together they forge a path through arcane postpunk dub. Add to that trio the music & production of Sam Shackleton and you basically get a different angle on the same influences - Shackleton first became famous for his dubstep & post-dubstep productions on Skull Disco with Laurie Osborn aka Appleblim (see below), but for years has created bizarre & idiosyncratic post-psych-folk-techno(?) on his "label" Woe To The Septic Heart! - an aesthetic that gels with the new-old nature of many of Valentina Magaletti's collaborations. Suffice to say, The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now is even better than the sum of these parts.
gi - knots [Absorb]
The follow-up to her late-2023 EP Orange Chorus Blonde Reveal continues the utterly original quasi-organic, textural IDM created by Eora/Sydney artist gi aka Gigi De Lacy. I hesitate to say "jungle" as any sampled drum breaks are ground into fine dust, but there are skittery drum'n'bass and footwork influences here, as if performed by an ensemble of cicadas and marsupial mice gathered round a faulty transistor radio. I can pretty much guarantee you've never heard anything quite like this, in the best possible way.
KASHIWA Daisuke - Green [Virgin Babylon]
Only a couple of months after his latest album Ice mixed up his classical, postrock, glitch and IDM influences, KASHIWA Daisuke is back on Virgin Babylon Records with a single track of glitched, nervous micro-beats, foghorn bass tones and piano chords, a track that Ryuichi Sakamoto would've been proud of. Lovely.
Trinity Carbon - Lost Everything [forthcoming self-released EP]
Low End Activist - Self Destruction [forthcoming on Sneaker Sound System]
Well, I did mention Laurie Osborn above. The man known as Appleblim has had a low-key collab with Jamie Russell (aka "Patrick Conway" aka Low End Activist) called Trinity Carbon. They have a couple of EPs under their belt going back as far as 2018, and an album from 2021, but they will shortly launch a series of self-released 12"s of skeletal grime/dubstep, distilled to its essence and in keeping with the minimalist approach Appleblim employed from the start with Skull Disco. Low End Activist also has another album coming, this time on his own Sneaker Sound System, which is also on a highly minimalist tip with ambient bass and deconstructed hardcore. Municipal Dreams evokes his younger years growing up in the Blackford Leys estate, learning first-hand the effects of inequality on working class lives.
Brian Gibson - Melting Menace [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Lightning Bolt bassist Brian Gibson has for some time been involved with video games, currently Puddle with Mike Mandell. Thrasher is Gibson's second video game soundtrack to be released on Thrill Jockey, a distillation into 12 tracks of the generative music heard in the game. It's made up of old-school synth patterns and driving beats, and while it doesn't have the noise-punk thrash of Lightning Bolt, it's got a lot of energy and tense apprehension.
Hidden Orchestra - Broken (Edit) [Hidden Orchestra Bandcamp]
Joe Acheson's Hidden Orchestra has worked recently on video game soundtracking too, but in 2023 released a wonderful album of his imaginary orchestra's typical sounds: live trip-hop/jungle beats, strings, bubbling clarinet and other acoustic instruments invisibly edited by Acheson. "Broken" is a new EP taking the album track and rebuilding a couple of versions as well as providing instrumental sources including some of the foley sounds that went into the original. As usual the music is sumptuous and timeless.
Khrystyna Kirik - Phantoms Of Perception [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
The third in Flaming Pines' Ukrainian compilations, curated by Igor Yalivec, is out in October, titled Resistance. As usual it features experimental musicians from Ukraine, with earnings passed on to the musicians and to charitable causes in the country that is still resisting Russia's invasion. Tonight's preview track is from sound-artist Khrystyna Kirik, a slow surge made up of electronics and detailed sounds from self-made instruments, objects and possibly voice and double bass.
Meemo Comma - The Poet [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Lara Rix-Martin aka Meemo Comma continues their inexorable musical growth, having mastered deconstructed and reconstructed rave and IDM over their last few releases. Decimation of I 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. The album's title refers to the "ego-death" experienced by the story's protagonists. While the album promises a variety of musical styles, the first single "The Poet" is a minimalist classical piece for clarinets.
Laura Cannell - See the Moon and the Stars [Brawl Records]
Laura Cannell - Everything is Hidden in You [Brawl Records]
The latest album from the indefatigable British multi-instrumentalist Laura Cannell interrupts her year-long "Lore" series (latest is MAMMOTHLORE and there will be an August one alongside this album, no interruption!). On The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined, Cannell applies her historically-informed part-improvised, part-composed chops to the music and life of 12th-century composer, scholar and nun Hildegard von Bingen. On bass recorders and a 12-string knee harp, both at times played through a delay pedal, Cannell's always-atemporal music creates a bridge to one of the few female creators and scholars whose works have, in some form, survived to the present. Inspiring as well as inspired, the music here is more Cannell than von Bingen, but a fitting tribute.
Ex-Easter Island Head - Magnetic Language [Rocket Recordings/Bandcamp]
Although there's no hint on Bandcamp and I don't think it was announced originally, Rocket Recordings have released a limited CD version of UK quartet Ex-Easter Island Head's Norther - which is great as it gives me an excuse to play an album I criminally missed when it came out earlier this year. The band are a quartet now thanks to longtime collaborator & sound engineer Andrew PM Hunt, whose Dialect project has an album coming on RVNG Intl. Each track takes a different approach to sound, with the band's experimental guitar techniques never far away. Throughout, there are gorgeous scintillations of guitar harmonics, weird pitch slides, guitar strings played as percussion... as well as bass and drums, an aeolian harp (played by the wind), and on this track, sampled syllables of their own voices replayed through guitar pickups and rebuilt into a perfect encapsulation of post-folk-rock-tronica. Gorgeous.
Andrew Tuttle & Michael Chapman - Five and Twenty Days For Lunch [Basin Rock/Bandcamp]
I'll repeat some of what I wrote from this album's last single here:
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 just this coming week and features the original recordings on a second disc. On this second single, Andrew's fingerpicked banjo is slowly subsumed under evocative, drawn-out and reversed guitar tones.
Michael Scott Dawson - Mono Lake (feat. K. Freund) [We Are Busy Bodies/Bandcamp]
K. Freund - How, On Earth [Last Resort/Bandcamp]
Trouble Books - Aggregate [Lejsovka & Freund Bandcamp]
K. Freund - Buzzy on Accelerants [Last Resort/Bandcamp]
Coming out on September 6th from Toronto label We Are Busy Bodies is an album from Canadian sound-artist/producer Michael Scott Dawson called The Tinnitus Chorus. It's an album of "wide-eyed" collaborations, pitting his field recordings, tape loops and instrumentation against the contributions from mostly-fellow Canadian friends. One such friend is fellow experimentalist K. Freund, who I know from two stunning albums of composition & glitchwork by himself and Linda Lejsovka as Lejsovka & Freund, and their trio Trouble Books with Talons''s Mike Tolan. Freund's piece with Dawson has the characteristic white noise fuzz and stuttering glitch found on many K. Freund works, set in a kind of drone-folk Americana context. I discovered that Freund only just released a new solo album, Hunter on the Wing, in March this year, from which we heard two pieces of some kind of glitch-jazz made from rough loops, tenor sax, piano and other sonic detritus. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you check out the two Lejsovka & Freund albums Mold on Canvas and Fatal Strategies, but while you're there, the subtle indietronica of Trouble Books' Balance is absolutely lovely too.