Pop, hip-hop & folk music turned inside-out this week, jungle & bass music mixed with live percussion, doomy dub, dubby jazz, glitchy everything. It's Utility Fog.
Aphir – Ctrl (feat. Max Lawrence) [Bird's Robe Records/Bandcamp]
Naarm's Becki Whitton is a busy mixing & mastering engineer these days, which is rad, as well as being the driving force behind the Wettest 100 celebration of left-field Australian music, and much more. As Aphir she's also queen of ambient vocal-processed improvised marathons, streamed on Twitch and Instagram, the sort of stuff showcased on her 2023 album The Halo Is Shapeless. But it's her songwriterly experimental electronic pop that brought her forth a bit over a decade ago, and let us rejoice, for to that she returns now with her much-awaited album Avarena – which I first heard last year, and which is finally seeing the light of day, including colourful vinyl editions, on October 9th. Here's the last (I think) single off that album, featuring Berlin-based Aussie Max Lawrence lending their vocals to a song that highlights all the Aphirness: wall of noise giving way to processed voice, rinse & repeat, ending with crunchy beat, distorted drone and an almost-choral vocal arrangement. Come join Becki in the clouds.
Sijya – Turbine [One Little Independent/Bandcamp]
How nice to have New Delhi's Sijya Gupta back with a new single. Following her 2022 debut, Young Hate, on Matthew Herbert's Accidental Records, Sijya signed to the fabled One Little Independent Records and released the Leather & Brass EP last year. Here her soft voice is swaddled in synth pads, a sparse electro-acoustic beat and rumbling bass.
Hana Stretton – Right Whale [Lima Limo Records/Inpartmaint/P.W. Elverum & Sun/brierfield flood press/Hana Stretton Bandcamp]
Hana Stretton – Salt [Lima Limo Records/Inpartmaint/P.W. Elverum & Sun/brierfield flood press/Hana Stretton Bandcamp]
Occasionally you encounter something so extraordinary, sui generis and simultaneously self-effacing that you have to step back for a moment and wonder if it really exists. Unfortunately due to scheduling issues it wasn't Australian musician Hana Stretton's beautiful first album that did this for me (I've now corrected this, and recommend you also check out Soon soon), but the wonders of its follow-up tiarn are not easily escaped once they snare you. One person who immediately recognized the genius of Hana Stretton was Phil Elverum of Microphones/Mount Eerie, who swiftly provided Soon a home on his label which otherwise is purely a home for his own eclectic outputs. As you can see from this track's credits above, Stretton's new album is co-released by a merry band of labels across Europe & UK, Japan, the US and Australia. Stretton is based in Victoria, and recorded this album predominantly in a cottage by the sea, using her surroundings as sound sources. So delicate folky songs, mostly with piano or acoustic guitar, surface from field recordings, or appear as field recordings, the air and movement of people in a room being essential to the compositions. Importantly, when they do surface, these are beautiful songs, so gentle that it takes a moment to realise you've been flattened by the gorgeous harmonies, which sometimes feature her local Forest Creek Folk Choir or additional string players, but mostly are entirely the work of Hana Stretton. A marvel.
Betty Hammerschlag – Hot Snow [Drowned By Locals/Bandcamp]
The lo-fi beauty of Betty Hammerschlag's forthcoming album Psycho Summer has been overshadowed by the revelation that Betty – purportedly a young Gen-Z woman – is in fact middle-aged gent Tilman Hornig. The internet seemed split between those insisting it had been obvious all along (different stand-ins hired for public events etc) and those who were most definitely fooled – including the label who released the rather on-the-nose fake girl (yep!) tape last year. Honestly, haven't we been through all this before multiple times, how men – middle-aged cis white men – using female names & identities is damaging? Protestation that it's all in good fun and it was "obviously" always an art project or whatever rings hollow frankly, so I won't be playing any more Betty Hammerschlag and it's a shame the generally great Jordanian label Drowned By Locals were in on the joke/ruse too.
Maarja Nuut – ma näen sind ikka veel [Maarja Nuut Bandcamp]
Anyway, in better news, Estonian violinist, singer & producer Maarja Nuut is back! This is a song that dates back to just before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Its pulsing bassline & glitchy sampled vocal bed hold host for a yearning vocal line but soon that too disappears into a fog of synth melodies, before returning for the final third of the song. So beautiful – I can only hope there's more newness to come.
Crimewave – Instrumentals (Kassie Krut Remix) [Fool's Gold Records/Bandcamp]
OK, you know I'm a fan of Manchester's indie-electronic artist Crimewave, and have been since his first EPs in 2023. After a little pause, he signed with Brooklyn indie dance label Fool's Gold Records, and the excellent Scenes album came out last year. Crimewaves' music is kind of like a remix already, blending aspects of bass & breakbeat music with bedroom beats, indie & shoegaze, but the EP Scenes (The Remixes) (forthcoming as of this show's broadcast) brings in 5 like-minded artists to give their takes. New Yorkers Kassie Krut would be a no-brainer, with their own mix of punchy postpunk and breakbeat, and their adaptation is a perfect melding of their aesthetic and Crimewave's.
BRACT & BAYANG (tha Bushranger) – BURN CITY LINKUP (Elina Junglizm) [BAYANG (Tha Bushranger) Bandcamp]
BRACT & BAYANG (tha Bushranger) – REDBRICKGOTHIK (Grasps Rework) [BAYANG (Tha Bushranger) Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney industrial/noise band BRACT renamed themselves after some heavy releases as Coward Punch, so when they collaborated with shapeshifting rapper BAYANG (tha Bushranger) on 2023's REDBRICKGOTHIK album, I initially didn't make the connection. BAYANG, aka Harry Baughan, has prior involvement in heavy music as part of the now-dormant Indigenous black metallers Dispossessed, and his flow finds ways into the sludgey, bludgeoning sound of BRACT, making it sound totally natural as an accompaniment of his rapping. Well, there was a remix album originally released in a very limited USB form, and now it's been unleashed on Bandcamp. Heaviness and less heaviness, total reworkings, and a good amount of junglism (everyone's fave Tim Reaper is on there!), with local heroes like Marcus Whale, California Girls, Katie Dey and more. Sydney breakcore/jungle producer Elina junglist brings fire, and another local hero, Grasps, amps up the industrial pressure.
Dev/Null – Space Rush [Hooversound]
Boston producer Pete Cassin started producing breakcore as Dev/Null in the early 2000s. As the jungle revival started gathering steam in the last decade or so, he's tamed the breakcore tendencies to some degree, successfully converting into a key artist in the hardcore/jungle scene. Drum Damage pairs him appropriately with Hooversound, a label that's always emphasised the hardcore techno origins of jungle music.
DNGDNGDNG & Prisma – Legamo [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Peru's DNGDNGDNG aka Dengue Dengue Dengue have brought the sounds of cumbia and other Central & South American dance forms to bass & club genres for some time. They've also collaborated with Argeninian producer Prisma a few times, with their latest, Abisal, now out via YUKU. Percussive bass music, very very nice.
HIIIT + 33EMYBW – The Disorientation of Dagobert [Maloca Records/Bandcamp]
HIIIT are a versatile ensemble, formerly known as Slagwerk Den Haag (I first heard them in Lunch Music, a brilliantly weird collaboration with Netherlands-based composer Yannis Kyriakides). Renaming themselves after many decades to indicate that they're no longer just a percussion ensemble, HIIIT have been producing a number of collaborations with an excellent selection of forward-thinking electronic artists. SIIIX, Vol.3 follows Vol.2 with Rrose, Uwalmassa, Zoë Mc Pherson, Ale Hop, 3Phaz and Grischa Lichtenberger, and Vol.1 before it with percussion hero Valentina Magaletti, Hihats in Trees, Azu Tiwaline, Julian Sartorius, upsammy and Krampfthaft. Once again here there's a mix of cutting-edge experimentalists and (only slightly) less-known names, with the great Chinese electronic producer 33EMYBW alongside Lemna, Jung An Tagen, Slikback, Konduku and Toumba. The 33EMYBW track is a dizzying 4 minutes of strange digital clangs and chattering post-footwork/post-jungle percussion programming. Incredible stuff, now spread across 3 volumes, get into it!
Mats Gustafsson and Kimmo Pohjonen – Magna [Trost/Bandcamp]
Mats Gustafsson and Kimmo Pohjonen – Ice Heaven [Trost/Bandcamp]
Two Nordic greats join forces here for the first time. Mats Gustafsson is a sax player with an enormous sound, blasting his way through swamp-garage-jazz-rock in The Thing (notable among other things for an extraordinary album with Neneh Cherry) and ritualistic free jazz with Fire! and its big band Fire! Orchestra. Meanwhile, Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen has taken his instrument to classical stages, while also extending it with contact mics, wiring and pedals. I first came across him in a collaboration with Kronos Quartet, and I'm aware of his folk & jazz sides, but certainly he's renowned within experimental music himself – yet, I never thought of these two crossing paths. What they've created on the amusingly-titled Two Balls Are Enough is not quite like what you'd expect from either on their own. Pohjonen uses his accordion to create almost glitch-rhythms at times, and breaths and hisses; Gustafsson brings the electronic noise-makers he's used for years now, as well as organ among other things, and of course his massive howling sax blasts. But there's a lot of delicate-sounding stuff here too, twisted echoes of the folk & jazz traditions the two musicians come from, and effects & extended techniques that allow some of the material to sound oddly like electronic music.
Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das – N95 (Remastered) [Bios Contrast Bandcamp]
Kolkata musician Nilotpal Das aka Bios Contrast is endlessly productive, whether it's extravagantly collaborative albums or singles being added to the big Singles & Remixes comp, and along the way he'll rework his own stuff in various ways – hence the N95 (EP), with variations on a very early Bios Contrast track which was already reworked for the Hiranyagarbha album in 2022. It's moody, slightly acid techno, made for disorienting late-night dancefloors.
Silvan Strauss – ORANGE GLOW [Kabul Fire Records/Bandcamp]
Here's another from the forthcoming album Sprinting from Hamburg-based drummer & producer Silvan Strauss (it was forthcoming when this was broadcast!). The album was borne out of his love for the frenetic rhythms of footwork, translating the drum machines into live drumkit. Various guests from the jazz, global and club music scenes appear on some tracks, but mostly it's his solo response to those beats, and it doesn't sound quite like anything else you've heard.
NPLGNN – Lullaby Dint 'O Scur (Battente I) [NPLGNN Bandcamp]
Naples-based beatmaker NPLGNN staked out his territory in bass music over the last 5 or so years, having begun over a decade ago making molto-distorto mutations in techno & breakbeats. But since at least his 2022 12" on Manchester's YOUTH, and 2 tracks on Hundebiss in 2023, there's been a driving dancehall pulse behind jittery snares and hi-hats owing as much to footwork as jungle – still with an industrial edge. Well, this year we're given the 5-track EP BABYLON INNA 'A CAPA MI further refining the post-apocalyptic soundsystem vibes. There's room for a little more subdued stuff than its raucous predecessors, at least until the jungle-tekno and gabba-influenced closing tracks. "Lullaby Dint 'O Scur (Battente I)" has a semitone synth motif that reminds me of These New Puritans' "We Want War" (which I now realise is in fact a sped-up dancehall rhythm). Nice!
Pugilist – Soefah [no longer available on Pugilist Bandcamp]
Following a recent soundsystem session at which his USB failed, Naarm-based Pugilist decided to put the bespoke tracks up on Bandcamp very briefly! They were only up for a week in early August, tracks with a classic dubstep sound, particularly the Loefah-punning "Soefah". Delicious.
JK FLESH – UNDERFOOT (PREHUMAN) [JK Flesh Bandcamp]
Heavy music legend Justin K Broadrick's influence runs deep across many music scenes, from the groundbreaking Side A of Napalm Death's iconoclastic debut album through the industrial metal/grindcore menace of Godflesh and the emotive shoegaze-metal of Jesu, wide-ranging electronic manifestations with Kevin Martin aka The Bug as Techno Animal, and many other projects. Sadly, following the forthcoming Godflesh album, he's calling it a day with that project because of abdominal surgery that limits his ability to do harsh vocals, but that's not going to slow his creativity. JK Flesh was a moniker given to him by Martin in the Techno Animal period, and has evolved into an outlet for Broadrick's industrial techno, but the first JK Flesh album, 2012's Posthuman found him messing with a kind of industrial dubstep. The label wanted it more Godfleshy, and asked him to add guitar riffs and harsh vocals, but now Broadrick has gifted us PREHUMAN. FLESHSTEP, in which we can hear the direction of the music before the metal elements were added. Still pretty intense!
BOOBS OF DOOM – N. WATERMELON UNDERGROUND ANXIETY [BOOBS OF DOOM Bandcamp]
BOOBS OF DOOM – B. SLOW LIFE GIGACHAD [BOOBS OF DOOM Bandcamp]
It's been a little while since Utility Fog Towers have been visited by BOOBS OF DOOM, and that's a shame. Their new emanation, //BOD034: SURVIVAL HORROR expresses something deeply true about the state of the world, and it does so with their usual mix of doom/industrial metal(ish), heavy dub, trip-hop, stoner and so on. Doom-laden, but also laden with heaps of humour, and the Bandcamp page goes into much detail informing us that the tracks are meant to be heard in random order, and the letters in front of the track titles are also random (albeit implying a completely different track order). Oh and the track titles are made up of three random words, although WATERMELON UNDERGROUND ANXIETY is certainly evocative of something. Honestly the variety on offer here is laudable, and quality, doominess and heavyweight bass make this compulsive listening (and it's Pay What You Can too!)
Arthur King – Playthings [AKP Recordings/Bandcamp]
So Arthur King, right, is not a dude. I guess that might be obvious from how it's "King Arthur" with the words swapped. Anyway, it's a band/ensemble/collective thing with an ever-changing membership, and also the AK part of AKP Recordings, an excellent experimental label. UMN (Fantastic Planet) is part of their Unknown Movie Night series, which is not actually live soundtracks to old movies – popular though that concept is – but rather improvised music that's "inspired by" the movie in question. And it's very evocative, the obvious jazz signifiers often mutated by dub effects & processing.
Karel Naessens – On Being [Karel Naessens Bandcamp]
Here's some nicely strange stuff from Belgian sound-artist Karel Naessens, described as concrète pop. This single from his forthcoming album Apocalypse of Intimacy sounds like a computer attempting to perform a classical recital in a snowstorm. It's oddly lonely music, appropriately for the album title, feinting at prettiness but mostly twisting away somewhere else before it gets too close.
Enneads – metanoia [Enneads Bandcamp]
It's probably not unusual for music on Utility Fog to be unlike anything else you've heard, but somehow Enneads still manage to embody this. The New York-based trio are billed as "doom jazz", and their resemblance to a jazz trio is doomed before it starts: yes, Phyllis Chen is a pianist, but her instrument is prepared & treated so it rarely sounds like a piano; Hamir Atwal is a brilliant drummer, switching between ambient washes, skittery jazz and rumbling otherness; and Zach Layton plays the 17-string electric bass. Wait, what? Yes, this instrument was apparently made for ZZ Top's bassist Elwood Francis, but here it's playing the part of guitar, bass, harp, and noisemaker. Their music does recall the more washed-out parts of the shoegaze-doom of Nadja, say, and it mostly avoids melody, with Chen opting instead for single-note interjections and abstract phrases. Get in the zone and you'll find your mind expanding.
Lawrence English – 大 [Room40/Bandcamp]
Lawrence English – Grey's Shadow [Room40/Bandcamp]
The latest solo album from Meanjin/Brisbane's Lawrence English is released on his own Room40 label, a regular on this show of course. Lawrence, as well as being a first class curator, is a field recordist and sound-artist extraordinaire. The Rest Is My Ghost is a meditation on the kind of weaponised nostalgia that much of our culture is based on, nostalgia which re-moulds the past into an irreal avatar, which – as he points out – then curtails our possible futures. So all the ghostly echoes on these tracks – many lent by fellow travellers like Chris Abrahams and Tony Buck of The Necks, Madeleine Cocolas, Senyawa's Rully Shabara, sax roarer Mats Gustafsson and many others – are so transformed that they're only identifiable if you put headphones on in a dark room and tune in to every details. Which I strongly recommend doing!
Qasim Naqvi w/ Wadada Leo Smith, Andrew Cyrille – Three Years Later [Red Hook Records/Bandcamp]
Kit Downes – Into the Woods – Three Weary Calls [Red Hook Records/Bandcamp]
Red Hook Records' Peace Anthems is an unusual album billed on Bandcamp as Various Artists, but not actually a compilation at all. The label – run by producer Sun Chung, associated with the ambient-jazz-classical ECM label – gathered together a global selection of musicians, most of whom orbit the jazz world in some way – to create music together in various sub-groupings. The album's title reflects its purpose, as a rejection of & lament for the multiple wars & genocides ongoing in the current moment, and all profits go to the International Red Cross. Qasim Naqvi, drummer & synthesist known for his minimalist jazz ensemble Dawn of Midi, here enlists renowned trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and drummer Andrew Cyrille to contemplate the last three years, which have encompassed untold death, destruction and pain, particularly in genocides in Gaza and Sudan. And UK pianist, organist & more Kit Downes contributes two beautifully lonesome pieces for sighing church organ.