Tonight it's time for weird hip-hop, dark d'n'b trance-pop, mutant dancehall, Indonesian experimental folk, experimental Yolŋu, experimental indie, post-classical pop, krautrock-pop, mashups, junglism of all sorts, minimal drum'n'bass, minimal dub, sound-art, sound-art, sound-art… You know… It's Utility Fog..
doseone & Height Keech – Wont Work [doseone Bandcamp]
doseone & Height Keech – Twisted (Featuring Brian Ennals) [doseone Bandcamp]
Following his brilliant album All Portrait, No Chorus with Steel Tipped Dove earlier in 2025, veteran alt.hip-hop mouth doseone swung right back into the swing of things with an EP produced entirely by Baltimore beatmaker Height Keech. Wood Teeth was laser-focused on the current moment, and its sequel (Wood Teeth II, natch) takes the same position – once more it's about the descent of the USA into fascism, and it's as "scathing" as the copy says. Dose is putting out some of the best work of his career, and the madcap sound of Height Keech certainly doesn't hinder him.
Marcus Whale – Dark Room [Blue Void/Bandcamp]
Out now, the latest album from Eora/Sydney luminary Marcus Whale, who's been a fixture on this show since his early experimental work as Scissor Lock, when he was a mere teenager, and throughout the brilliant releases of his duo Collarbones and trio Black Vanilla (among many others). Nether is, by my count, his 5th solo album, the first being his incredible statement of intent 10 years ago, Inland Sea, and it follows 2024's club-fuelled blissout Ecstasy with the comedown, albeit no less energetic. There's those traces of trance's lysergic dancefloor tranceformation, pummeling kicks and (as heard here) jungle-like drum programming, ultra-processed breaks and percussion, and of course Marcus's voice multi-tracked and harmonised. Beautiful.
Facta – SLoPE VIP (ft Warrior Queen & Killa P) [Wisdom Teeth/Bandcamp]
UK bass producer & one half of the Wisdom Teeth label, Facta, put out a slab of UK post-dubstep bass styles, from funky house to breakbeat techno, on last year's GULP. Now he's re-tooled the breakbeat track "SLoPE" with vocals from two UK dancehall/grime legends, Warrior Queen & Killa P. Wicked!
Naga Kirana – Lumba2 [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
Amsterdam collective Naga Kirana make a super-fun form of Indonesian electronic folk-pop, with gamelan percussion instruments, drum machines & synths, and the voice Inda Duran ensuring it's catchy as heck. Looking forward to more from them!
Waakya – Fire Song [Hospital Hill courtesy of The Wire]
First recorded listen to the new cross-cultural collaboration Waakya comes in the latest edition of Wire Magazine's Wire Tapper. The band centres around Yolŋu songman Daniel Wilfred & yidaki (didgeridoo) virtuoso David Wilfred, who you may know from Hand to Earth. They're joined by sound wizard & guitarist Matthew McGuigan of label/production house Hospital Hill, modular synth virtuoso Ben Carey (also of Sumn Conduit) and legendary experimental turntablist (and acclaimed cardiologist!) Martin Ng. That's a recipe for something extraordinary, as you'll hear from these first sounds. The way the Wilfreds' traditional music melds with experimental textures is always magical, here emerging from varispeed record crackle, guitar harmonics and other unidentified sounds. Expect more soon.
Kee Avil – delay [NNA Tapes/Bandcamp]
So Montréal experimental musician Kee Avil, with a couple of albums under her belt on Constellation, has this year teamed up with NNA Tapes to release a progressive album over the whole year, called Vapor. There's one track going up per month, and the latest is the saturated quasi-80s electro-pop of "delay". Each track so far is excellent and weird.
Marie Delprat – Dust in my veins [-OUS/Bandcamp]
Swiss label -OUS has been consistently hitting goals for some years now, with glitched electronics, post-classical fusion weirdness and various unconventional takes on song-based music. All those things converge on the first single from classically-trained Marie Delprat's EP What remains after desire, a quietly creepy piece of drone-pop.
Marina Herlop – Jaque [Marina Herlop Bandcamp]
Keeping with post-classical fusion weirdness, we join Catalan composer, pianist, singer & producer Marina Herlop for her third album Dja Dja, her first to be self-released (distributed by Barcelona label Lapsus & !K7, so the gorgeous-looking vinyl & CDs should be readily available). First single "Jaque" has everything Herlop is known for: classical-sounding piano, layered ecstatic folk vocals, syncopated rhythms. Keep an eye out for this one!
Vanishing Twin – Bring Me The Axe [Fire/Bandcamp]
Currently a trio, Vanishing Twin have made experimental pop music now for 11 years. Singer Cathy Lucas moved to rural France a year or two ago, so making music with ubiquitous drummer Valentina Magaletti and bassist Susumu Mukai aka Zongamin (who together are V/Z) became primarily an asynchronous affair of swapping files remotely. The title Archives is a reference to file-sharing and collaging from disparate sources, rather than describing an album of rarities or best of – it's all new material. The band has always taken indie pop into realms of the experimental, with strong krautrock & dub vibes, but these new tracks are particularly adventurous, sounding precisely like three musicians in different locations coming together for a chimera of folk, electronic pop, dub, glitched trip-hop and radiophonic post-classical abstraction. I'm pumped to hear the rest of this album.
Heyes – carlos serone – "folder for heyes (unfinished tape beats)" [Heyes' Edits] [R\ic/H Collective/Bandcamp]
Heyes – Ang Watching 'Pets on a Train' on a Plane [R\ic/H Collective/Bandcamp]
Lochie – aka Heyes – is quite close to this show, and has filled in for me earlier this year as well as having broadcast on other stations. As an artist, his output is quite varied, but one strand of his art is the transformation of pre-existing music as well as field recording. Lochie has formed the R\ic/H Collective with a group of like-minded musicians, writers & designers here in Eora, and first cab off the rank for the label arm is (here goes): rich; or, a mixtape of music about being "rich" and music not about being "rich". The mixtape begins (and goes on) with a selection of Heyes Quickmixes of some familiar money-based pop songs, some mangled beyond recognition, some leaking their source material in odd ways, but slipped inside are some fellow travellers like carlos serone, whose lo-fi beats are edited by Heyes, and who also provided the liner notes. Intriguingly strange.
Harrison Rae – Diss Track [Harrison Rae Bandcamp]
From a notable Eora/Sydney gent now, Harrison Rae, who's released electronic music as Beau Ambien and Henri O and is the convenor of Club Moss. His 2025 Mixtape is varied as a mixtape ought to be, from guitar tracks to murky electronics like "Diss Track".
Djrum – I Wander (IV) [Houndstooth/Bandcamp]
Felix Manuel aka Djrum is one of the geniuses of the current age, adept at beats at any BPM, switching easily between techno, dubstep, jungle & beyond, but also inserting beautiful quasi-classical piano & cello passages, flutes with weird tunings, etc. Forthcoming EP I Wander is really one 15:44 track, but split into 6 parts reflecting its restless evolution throughout. I'm fortunate to have heard the whole thing already, and it's as good as you're expecting!
Rydeen & SOVBLKPSSY – LESBIANISM [silkXS Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney duo Rydeen & SOVBLKPSSY follow up a 2-tracker from 2024 with their DONT TELL ANYONE EP, reflecting their influences across the bass & club spectrum, nodding at local sounds & history, thence building up from scratch a hardcore continuum of our own. In that vein, "LESBIANISM" is a Ry & Sov take on jungle, and a delight to hear.
Plug – King Ring [De:tuned/Bandcamp]
Once again Luke Vibert returns to his DAT archives to pull a full album's worth of mid-'90s Plug material out for us to bathe in. When Vibert discovered jungle circa 1994, he was probably the one member of the IDM crew (Aphex Twin, µ-Ziq, Squarepusher et al) who really understood how it worked, as club music, in relation to hip-hop and ragga dancehall, and in terms of break juggling. I love those other guys, but Plug was the real shit. At the time, Vibert only released a series of EPs and the classic Drum'n'Bass for Papa album (you can find them all digitally at Bleep and elsewhere), apart from a smattering of compilation tracks. As well as wicked drum programming, they exhibited Vibert's talent for perfectly-sourced samples and melodic basslines & lead parts, all of which counts just as much for his hip-hop productions and the acid the makes up most of his material lately. Part of this is his sense of humour, and the "Papa" of the album's title is Vibert's grandfather Frank Vibert, a keen amateur magician, and while the photos of Vibert in Orientalist magician getup seem to have dried up, the title Variety Magic keeps up the connection. It should be noted that the Plug style of jungle/drill'n'bass was specific to the technology Vibert was using at the time, and even the Amen Andrews stuff that came out in 2003 has a different feel because he wasn't producing the tracks the same way. So both the 2012 album Back on Time (which does sport his granddad on the cover) and this new album are collections of tracks from the mid-to-late '90s. It's insane that an 11 track album of tunes this good was lurking on DATs somewhere for decades.
Morwell – Trust (A.Fruit Remix) [Morwell Bandcamp]
Max Morwell has for the last 7+ years been exploring the music of bass & breakbeats that soundtracked many a rave, and he recently worked on some 160bpm tracks – incidentally the fairly standard BPM for jungle before it got more frenetic and morphed into drum'n'bass (a huge simplification). I heard Morwell's originals a little while back and they're excellent, but each track has been paired with an equally inspiring remixer. DJ Earl brings the Chicago connection – jungle vs footwork is a long-mined but no less fertile vein – while jungle/bass/IDM is represented by two women at the top of the board right now: Catherine Backhouse aka Xylitol, whose interest in pre-separation Yugoslavian electronica intersected with Morwell's own Croatian heritage, and the ever-brilliant Spain-based Ukrainian producer A.Fruit. That makes Trust an epic release, and you'd be crazy to let it slip by.
rush2theUnknown – Palenque (return to paradise) [Awkwardly Social/Bandcamp]
A couple of excellent releases in 2024 introduced the New Zealand/Japan duo rush2theUnknown to the world, drawing on their background in NZ's drum'n'bass & jungle scene, melded with the ancient future of vaporwave (well, to my ears anyway). Ancient / Future finds the duo in familiar territory, and it's a joy.
Pugilist – Rune [Samurai Music/Bandcamp]
Hearing Naarm-based jungle/d'n'b head Pugilist on Samurai Music (again!) is a slight surprise until you realise that he's as comfortable making clattering jungle as laser-focused drum'n'bass, bone-shuddering dubstep or who knows what else. So it feels like on Triads he's nailed the latter-day tribal/minimalist d'n'b sound of Samurai, while still keeping the beat-juggling joys there. Much though I enjoy me some stripped-down Samurai hypno-beats, Pugilist's got the skillz and intent to take it to another level.
Topdown Dialectic – False LP A – 14 [False Aralia Bandcamp]
With a longstanding connection with Brian Foote & Brion Brionson's Peak Oil, the now slightly-less-mysterious US producer Topdown Dialectic returns after a 5 year gap with an album on False Aralia (also shepherded by Brian Foote), confirming it for those who didn't know as the work of Izaak Schlossman, each of whose False Aralia releases blurred the definitions of artist vs album title vs… project? But it's all of a piece with Topdown Dialect – that is, exploring various intersections of dub & bass with ambient, minimalism, glitch… the beats nod at micro-house, dub techno, but also percolated r'n'b. Where K Wata & others have recently found tracings of jungle in dub techno's glitched edges, Schlossman's works have lived in those liminal spaces, rummaging the low-tide wracks of the Basic Channel. The 16 tracks on the False LP, each cut to precisely 5 minutes, refuse to settle into any specific vein, moving from barely-there ambient dub to deeply rhythmic dub-funk that's somehow entirely free of beats, desaturated exotica and deconstructed soul. It's the washed-out future glimpsed behind the pulsating light of a near-death experience.
The Bug & Dis Fig – Vanishing (Numbness Dub) [Pressure]
Kevin Martin's main project, The Bug, is back with a new singles series called Ladybug, in which one track is reworked in various ways – dubs, remixes, dubs of remixes etc. For "Vanishing", Martin invites back his previous collaborator Dis Fig aka Felicia Chen, who has a new album of her own coming soon on Thrill Jockey which will knock the pants of you. This is a great, ethereal track, with a chugging bass and sparse rock beat under Chen's trip-hoppy vocal. The original of the track is then treated to a "Vanished Dub", with fragments of the vocal echoing through reverbed white noise, and then follows a "Numb Mix", which is incredibly washed out, with the beat pared down to a kick and a wisp of a hi-hat – but the vocal remains intact. That version then gets a "Numb Dub", which is beautifully dubbed out, like dub techno with a stomping martial kick. But the final "Numbness Dub" is the most tricked out with its dub delays – reminiscent of Martin's minimalist trip-hoppy work with King Midas Sound crossed with the industrial dub of his Machines collection.
Klara Lewis – Ta Min Hand [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
5 years after the premature death of founder Peter Rehberg, the great Editions Mego label continues on, and Klara Lewis – who began her career with Mego in 2014 with the brilliant Ett, is releasing her next album Opening on the label in September. Lewis's music can be an abstracted take on dance music forms, or abstracted mangling of acoustic sources, or rich, glitchy drone works. The first track, and first single, from Opening takes what sounds like loungey jazz and destroys it, pushing it into stuttered, clipped distortion, reversing it and so on. This is emblematic of Lewis's approach to sound, somehow strongly emotive despite the abstraction.
Violeta García & Hora Lunga – la ola or i miss u [-OUS/Bandcamp]
The first album from the duo of Argentinian cellist Violeta García & Swiss musician Hora Lunga, I'll wait for you in the car park, was a highlight of 2025. Due in September, its sequel 4ever is a continuation of the debut's approach, in which the cello may sometimes take the foreground with melodic gestures or mini-orchestrations, but it can also be one distorted sound-source alongside heavy subs transplanted from the club, glitched samples, half-heard voices. On this first single, García's cello plays a familiar heartstring-pulling role, but the track is slowly overtaken with distortion in a way not dissimilar to Klara Lewis's techniques. Absolutely a highly anticipated album.
Brady Cohan – Convincing [Brady Cohan Bandcamp]
LA composer & guitarist Brady Cohan's music is mostly heard on TV & in film, but Everything That Matters is music from the heart, arising from the revelation that the things that really mattered were there with him & his family. Still, this music is cinematic in scope, taking his guitar through spectral drones and surging bass, and back home again.
Marla Hlady & Christof Migone – It Takes Two [Crónica/Bandcamp]
On And On And Off is the second collaboration between Canadian sound-artists Marla Hlady & Christof Migone released on the great Portuguese label Crónica. These two both combine the fine arts, conceptual arts, with sound-art: their previous duo album Swan Song takes its name from the swan necks of decommissioned beer stills, which formed part of a kinetic sculpture and also generated many of the sounds in their work. Along with the swan necks were the voices of the brewery staff, amplified through the sculpture. On And On And Off also collaborates with a choir of sorts – 12 people who were given 12 prompts, which asked them to record parts of their daily commute, and also describe them in particular ways (see the list of prompts here). Once again these recordings formed the starting matter for the album's works. Listening to the murky sounds of "It Takes Two", timestretched loops move in & out of phase, unidentifiable but suggestive of motion. There are short noise pieces, cut-up vocal syllables and an almost shoegazey rumbling ambient piece to finish.
NEA Ensemble – CAMEDRIO [NEA Editions]
Inside a farmhouse in the Murgia Materana national park, 5 hours' drive south-east of Rome, a group of experimental musicians have formed the NEA Cultural Association, a collective aimed at promoting the creation of multidisciplinary cultural works in the intersection of electro-acoustic, experimental music, visual arts and popular traditions – outside of the urban centres they're usually found in. You can read their manifesto here. ORIZZONTALE is the first release from their NEA Editions label, documenting an improvised performance from 12 musicians & artists, combining acoustic & electric instruments, live synths and electronics. Among the members is Andrea Taeggi, whose solo work I've featured under his own name and earlier as Gondwana on the great Opal Tapes, who also released his amazing duo Lumisokea. Unsurprisingly the music here leans more on live expression than intricate post-production, but the restraint of the musicians and the live processing make these pieces quite striking.
Borguefül – La jeune fille bleue [Carton Records/Pagans/Bandcamp]
French double bassist Mélanie Loisel released her debut album as Borguefül, Horst, in 2022 on Carton Records. Her follow-up, Vêtue, is again based around her double bass, enhanced with physical preparations, looping and processing, and forming a percussive base for her vocals. The first single begins with bowed notes and harmonics accompanying Loisel's voice, but by 2 minutes in you notice a low rumbling, a bass drone with digital detritus, which takes over and then stays under the short, otherwise a capella vocal phrases. It's beautifully unexpected.