Utility Fog

09.02.25
Cover for Tutu Ta's Low Veil
Aired on 09.02.25, 9:00pm

A lot going on in the world at the moment, dizzying amounts of WTF and it can be pretty anxiety-causing. But humanity continues to create great art, so let me share with you some of the boundary-pushing music of note for this week.

Squid – Cro-Magnon Man [Warp/Bandcamp]
Squid – Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence) (feat. Clarissa Connelly) [Warp/Bandcamp]
Cowards is UK postpunk band Squid‘s latest album for Warp, and it finds them continuing the progression from 2023’s O Monolith of adding expansive arrangements and proggy structures to their songs. For an album that’s all about the evil that men do (to summarise), it’s relatively upbeat and not always angry. It’s nice hearing contributions from Clarissa Connelly, another recent Warp signing whose World of Work album last year was a revelation.

Edvard Graham Lewis – Last Scene [Upp/Bandcamp]
Edvard Graham Lewis – Key Weapon [Upp/Bandcamp]
Postpunk is also a genre closely associated with Edvard Graham Lewis, a founding member of Wire since 1976. Although Lewis’ work can be found in many contexts – as a songwriter, experimental sound-artist, and collaborator in many groups (see last year’s LEWISPYBEY with Mark Spybey, and 2021’s Elegiac with Blurt’s Ted Minton and Icarus’ Sam Britton), his solo releases are few and far between. In 2014, Editions Mego released experimental soundtrack/installation works on All Under and more song-oriented material on All Over (and it’s notable that his daughter, Klara Lewis has a number of brilliant releases on the same label). So 11 years after those albums, Alreet? is a laconic & energetic album of EGL songs, with many hidden depths. There are dense arrangements and angular sparseness, elusive Lewis lyrics and quotes from Shakespeare’s Tempest. It’s great.

they are gutting a body of water – beautysleep [tagabow Bandcamp]
they are gutting a body of water – glittering too [tagabow Bandcamp]
This isn’t technically a new album from Philly experimental shoegaze weirdos they are gutting a body of water (tagabow) – it was “released” on SoundCloud mid-last year and on streaming services, but they just stuck it up on Bandcamp this Friday. It’s standard tagabow fare, which means anything but standard music – My Bloody Valentine-style bent guitar noise battles with jungle beats, glitched breaks, chopped samples of all sorts. Dizzyingly weird, aggressively lo-fi, utterly superb.

Big Blood – No Rain Tonight [Big Blood Bandcamp]
Big Blood – In The Night Sky [Big Blood Bandcamp]
Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin – and sometimes their daughter Quinnisa – have been recording as Big Blood for almost 2 decades now, which is crazy. Both were also members of the legendary postrock/junk-folk/prog-punk troupe Cerberus Shoal, who I long adored, who reincarnated (sort of) as weird Americana band Fire on Fire with many of the same members. And then Colleen & Kinsella formed Big Blood, which has elements of folk, but it’s very psychedelic and electric – well, it’s anything they want it to be, really! Electric Voyeur is insanely cool because it’s the culmination of years of studying and making their own electronic instruments at home. There’s an instrumental version to foreground the electronics, but that’s more of a curiosity, as the vocals make these into songs, and the album is quite a trip! Big Blood at their best, IMHO.

Desideria – Meine Tarar [Desideria Dreams]
Sung in Guthnic, the almost-forgotten language of Gotland, the new single from Swedish singer Desideria is entirely produced by herself, with lovely glitchy beats & textures that recall Björk in the best way. I’m not sure it will turn up on her Bandcamp, but the WASP- 76-b EP from 2020 is pretty nice stuff too, with crunching beats and writhing vocals. This single is from her debut album Princess WWW which I believe is due out at the start of March, so I hope to play you more then!

Yasmine Hamdan – Hon هون [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
While I’ve featured quite a bit of Lebanese music on this show, it’s leaned towards the experimental. Yasmine Hamdan‘s career goes back to the late ’90s with indie/trip-hop band Soapkills, all three of whose independent albums have been re-released by Belgian powerhouse Crammed Discs, whose catalogue covers postpunk and experimental music as well as “world music” from all over the planet. Hamdan released two previous solo albums with Crammed, and new single “Hon هون” presages her third. Its titled means “Here”, and the lyrics, co-written with Palestinian poet Anais Alaili, were in fact written in the aftermath of the disastrous Beirut port explosion on August 4th, 2020, but resonate with the devastation left by Israel’s assault on Lebanon and both Gaza and the West Bank. It’s a beautiful song which begins soft and acoustic but blooms into a fuller and more electronic arrangement.

Ben Chatwin – The Beginning [Ben Chatwin Bandcamp]
Scotland-based composer Ben Chatwin used to be a notable figure in the drone world under the name Talvihorros. His work under his own name hasn’t been a huge change, as he always had an impressive range, but if you’re expecting the two 3½ pieces on new single The Beginning to be typical crescendoing drones then you’ll be surprised as rhythms (almost beats) drive the music forward, and vocals from Jen White lift the music further towards the end. Confusingly, the equally great “b-side” is titled “The End”, but it’s only the end of the beginning, as Ben has more new music on the way, hopefully at least as cathartic as these two pieces.

Christophe Bailleau – Reaagall vst VIP hall owl [Mahorka/Bandcamp]
Christophe Bailleau – Ethno barbecue (AI ghost) [Mahorka/Bandcamp]
Belgium-based French musician and sound-artist Christophe Bailleau is an inveterate collaborator – his Covid album Shooting Stars Can Last was credited to “Christophe Bailleau and Friends”, and was a superb, genre-crossing amalgam featuring artist from across the Francophone world. His latest album, Insight and Vision, on the other hand, is a much more solo affair, the third in a trilogy of albums that he says are about “creativity in the face of autistic disorders”. CHUVA ORBITAL : Armadillo Time and Vertical Moon Phase Charm both came out in 2023, and feature a similar range of guests to this new one, with some instrumentation and writing collaboration – and Criele Antennaa O’Farrell is credited with “motivation”, which I can attest to being a hugely valuable contribution. While Bailleau’s work goes back to techno productions in the 1990s, the music here is very modern-sounding, with weirdly glitched and sequenced General MIDI sound pallettes rubbing up against processed acoustic instruments, jump-cuts and shiny hyper-dissonance. Well worth looking into all three, whether you count yourself as neuro-divergent or not.

Joey – Spooky Emote [Elicit Records/Bandcamp]
Sam Link – Raster [Elicit Records/Bandcamp]
Here’s a great introduction to London label Elicit Records, covering bass music to techno, jungle, footwork, with an emphasis on the in-between stuff… Connected 02 starts with a great 1-2 punch from two US artists: Midwest US producer Sam Link (who you may know from a couple of brilliant YUKU releases) brings breakbeats and jazz syncopation, and Brooklyn producer Joey has a wonderful bass-heavy half-tempo groove with little flutters throughout.

Bokonon – Becoming The Locust [Rooms Inc/Bandcamp]
The aforementioned Sam Link has been released on Rooms Inc‘s 12″ series, each of which is named after a colour. The latest is Scarlet, with the usual mixture of bass and techno-related beats, all in evidence with the track from the Kurt Vonnegut-inspired Bokonon, with junglified techno and lovely electronics.

Tutu Ta – Low Veil High Ground [Tutu Ta Bandcamp]
Tutu Ta – Rootless [Tutu Ta Bandcamp]
Enigmatic UK dub experimentalist Tutu Ta names themself “Nomad the Shadow Dancer”. Previous releases have had the arcane, eerie feel of Demdike Stare’s early folk-dub mysteries, sometimes with an ersatz jazz tilt, and the latest EP Low Veil comes with no description. The tracks here connect more with post-dubstep/grime/jungle genre signifiers, complete with some low-key muffled vocals on one track. It’s so good I played 2/3 of it tonight.

F L V X X X – Over [Reveries/Bandcamp]
Rome-based label Reveries puts an Italian tilt on contemporary dance music – bass, percussive techno, jungle. They host club nights with international bass & techno luminaries, but by and large their releases are from Italian artists. Their first release of 2025 is Manière Dub, is joint EP from Reveries co-founder Her Nice Too and Rome-based duo F L V X X X. All four tracks (one from each artist, a collaboration and a remix) draw inspiration from dub soundsystems’ pervading influence on electronic music, from percussive techno to deconstructed dancehall. I loved the vocal samples and head-nodding swung 123-bpm riddim of F L V X X X’s opener “Over”, which Her Nice Too straightens out into an electro rave roller at the end of the EP.

Shugorei – Three Pathways (feat. Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 ) [4000 Records]
We’ve recently heard Meanjin/Brisbane duo Shugorei with a breakbeat-driven remix of Ghostwoods and a delirious piece of ’80s-’90s-style hyperpop. So of course their next single is a contemplative piece with guzheng master Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 . That’s not to say that it’s purely acoustic or ambient – Nozomi Omote’s percussion enters sparsely, while Thomas Green’s electronics introduce reversed reverbs and glitchy detail. It’s a gorgeous piece of cross-cultural folktronica, auguring greatness from their forthcoming album Memories of Magic—魔法の記憶—Mahō no Kioku.

Sara Persico – Brutal Threshold [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Berlin-based composer & sound-artist Sara Persico, originally from Napoli, released released a brilliant EP on Karlrecords in 2023, and I’ve been waiting for an album since then. In contrast to the fizzing distortion, thrumming bass and crunched beats sometimes in evidence on that EP, her debut album Sphaîra seems at first glance to be a sparser, more shapeless affair, but this would be inaccurate. The album is slower paced, focused on sound design, on sonic architecture: much of the material was recorded in a stunning space in the Lebanese city of Tripoli, part of a monumental, unfinished exhibition complex. The Experimental Theatre, shaped as a massive dome, was designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer to propagate sound around the space. So while there are plenty of electronics here, Persico also recorded her voice and the sounds of stones, pieces of metal, and even the outside world filtered into the dome. Somehow knowing this makes the album an even more electrifying listen. Released by the ever-reliable Subtext Recordings.

Matt McBane – Absence [Gradient Music]
The lovely synthesiser & piano sounds herein are just one facet of the work of Matt McBane, a violinist and composer as well as an electronic musician. Buoy, out on February 28th, is his first entirely solo album, and while it’s very much focused on synths, the acoustic instrumentation is combined in various lovely ways, like the limpid piano phrases glistening over the stuttering electronics on “Absence”, or the way McBane’s violin follows the synth arpeggios on “Arpeggiator” (it’s the kind of finger exercises I would have hated practicing as a kid – kudos!) Meanwhile, the last track (about half the album is streaming now on Bandcamp) matches a violin melody with vocals fed through fizzling electronics. Keep an eye out for the full album to drop.

Joona Toivanen Trio – Infinite Fields [We Jazz/Bandcamp]
Joona Toivanen Trio – Gravity [We Jazz/Bandcamp]
I’m so often blown away by the music that Finnish label We Jazz releases. Their catalogue is firmly in the jazz camp, but reaching out into the wilds of electronica, sound-art and other experimental musics. I’ve certainly known for a long time that the Swedish & Norwegian jazz scenes are special – check labels like Rune GrammofonHubro and others – and the Danish jazz scene is renowned, if seemingly more conventional. Here we have the Joona Toivanen Trio, originally all from Finland although now only drummer Olavi Louhivuori is there, with pianist Joona in Gothenburg, Sweden, and his brother Tapani in Copenhagen, Denmark. Having all grown up together, they have an instinctive rapport that comes through in their improvised music. But Gravity is particularly unusual & inspiring, made in a fairly random studio in the Finnish countryside, in a 2-day gap during touring. You can hear the effect of only having access to an upright piano – lots of lovely felt muting – along with old organs and synths, and what they describe as “tribal drums”. Sometimes constraints and unfamiliarity generate something remarkable, especially with seasoned improvisers, and the gorgeous sounds here are testament to that.

Alex Jasprizza – Wetland [Alex Jasprizza Bandcamp]
Finally, an artist not unfamiliar with jazz, but making a space all his own, is Eora/Sydney-based saxophonist Alex Jasprizza. I’ve played a few of his lovely pieces mixing improvised saxophone with field recordings of nature – sometimes performed in those spaces, sometimes overdubbed. His album Waterways is finally coming out in March, with opener “Wetland” bringing multiple sax lines with piano, synthesizers and the burbles of running water. His own take on ambient jazz, a real beauty.

More Episodes

Tracklist

Squid
Cro-Magnon Man
Squid
Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence) (feat. Clarissa Connelly)
Edvard Graham Lewis
Last Scene
Edvard Graham Lewis
Key Weapon
They Are Gutting A Body Of Water
beautysleep
They Are Gutting A Body Of Water
glittering too
Big Blood
No Rain Tonight
Big Blood
In The Night Sky
Desideria
Meine Tarar
Yasmine Hamdan
Hon هون
Ben Chatwin
The Beginning
Christophe Bailleau
Reaagall vst VIP hall owl
Christophe Bailleau
Ethno barbecue (AI ghost)
Joey
Spooky Emote
Sam Link
Raster
Bokonon
Becoming The Locust
Tutu Ta
Low Veil High Ground
Tutu Ta
Rootless
F L V X X X
Over
Shugorei
Australia
Three Pathways (feat. Mindy Meng Wang 王萌)
Sara Persico
Brutal Threshold
Matt McBane
Absence
Joona Toivanen Trio
Infinite Fields
Joona Toivanen Trio
Gravity
Alex Jasprizza
NSW
Wetland