Huge thanks to Holly Conner for her great curation last week while I was playing at Essence Festival in Canberra.
Tonight we’ve got mutant pop and folk, mutant bass, mutant classical and ambient… and beautiful slippages between genres.
Cerys Hafana – Angel [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
There’s not much new music in the world being sung in Welsh. An exponent of the Welsh triple harp, Cerys Hafana has now released three albums of adventurous songs with their instrument, sung in Welsh. Not one seemingly to ever sit still, they also released a remarkable album of solo piano works, Difrisg, earlier this year, but now Angel has found its place on the reliably great Glitterbeat label, giving Hafana a much broader audience. If there’s a distinct folk backbone to their songs, and hints at classical composition, Hafana is no traditionalist, preparing the harp with blu-tak to dampen the sound, and creating compositions that draw on minimalism, jazz and avant-garde harmonies and structures (on the album Hafana is joined by double bass, alto sax and drums on some tracks), and other nearby folk traditions. These are evocative songs, sung beautifully in a language quite alien to most of us, with uncommon arrangements.
Aphir – Messengers [Aphir Bandcamp]
Well, it’s been a minute since Becki Whitton released an Aphir album of her experimental electronic pop songs. She’s been building a practice of semi-improvised “choral drone” works with live vocal looping and processing, and it’s great – there’s a choral drone remix of this new single in fact. But there’s a new Aphir pop album coming in the new year! The first single sounds like it might be one of those choral pieces, a simple prayer-like melody… until it gets wild, industrial beats and shrieking synths. Rad rad rad.
Snakeskin – Ready [Ruptured/Beacon Sound/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, Beirut indie band Postcards released their fourth (or is it fifth?) album via key Lebanese label Ruptured. Postcards singer Julia Sabra and their longtime producer Fadi Tabbal have just come through with their third album We live in sand, co-released by Ruptured with Portland’s Beacon Sound. The album is unavoidably influenced by the troubles of Lebanon and the horrors of the genocide being conducted by Israel. It’s mournful and sometimes angry, the product of two exceptionally strong music-makers. When I saw them live in London in May, both musicians had tables entirely covered in electronic equipment, noisemakers and effects, Sabra singing while processing her voice (given the setup, it was nearly impossible to tell who was making any particular noises other than that). This album might not seem as experimental as that performance implied, but it’s hard-hitting and there’s nothing else quite like it.
Sijya – Safe [One Little Independent Records/Bandcamp]
New Delhi visual designer and audiovisual artist Sijya released her debut EP Young Hate on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records in 2022. Beautifully minimalist electronic pop songs, with glitching textures and slow-moving beats that harkened back to trip-hop, it’s one of my favourite debuts of recent years. So it’s great seeing her signed to One Little Independent Records for her follow-up. It’s another collection of six songs, leaning ambient until they don’t – see the distortion that wells up with the vocals on “Rust”. “Safe” is a musical sequel to “Another Thing”, one of the highlights of her debut, processional beats and minimalist-yet-emotive vocals. A talent to watch.
feeo – Win! [AD93/Bandcamp]
So sometime last year The Wire published a lovely story about how experimental vocalist and producer Theodora Laird and bassist/improviser Caius Williams got together – as a couple, as well as a duo, putting together a wonderful exploratory album together. Now we get to hear Laird under her guise as feeo, with a solo album on AD93. Goodness is adorned with a beautiful overexposed black & white photo of a crowd, presumably an audience at a gig, with the stage off to the left shining a bright light on the people. Some are transfixed, some are looking the other way, and one woman stares right into the camera. This strange mix of solitude and connection, of light and dark, is what powers this album too. It’s mostly just Theodora Laird solo, but Caius Williams contributes different instruments on a few tracks, Theo Guttenplan plays drums on one track, and her Dad, actor Trevor Laird, reads his own poetry (I think) on Days pts 1 & 2. Those two tracks are a case in point: Trevor Laird’s voice is nearly buried under droning and then pulsing sub-bass, until he finally appears half-way through part 2. It’s a small vignette, odd in the British way, made sinister by its surrounds. But then the majority of songs are similarly subdued, nearly-there things, with minimal avant-garde electronics accompanying Laird’s beautifully subtle, exquisitely controlled voice. From their distinctly weird parts, Laird constructs post-r’n’b songs of quiet power. Even when accompanied by Williams’ guitars, Laird inserts nebulous synth drones. These songs constantly undermine themselves, but they’re too good to stay under. My goodness.
IFS meets AGF – Limits [outlines]
Well, so far it seems like Polish duo IFS will only “meet” all-caps artists (I know, this is soon to change). Following their second brilliant collab with Japanese rapper MA, here they are with the poemproducer herself, AGF, who’s right at home with the duo’s IDM-influenced bass-ambient. There’s very little in the way of experimental footwork, the outlines label’s bread-and-butter; rather these are spooky, playful, avant-garde soundscapes, using beats sparingly, a perfect foil to Antye Greie-Ripatti’s equally sparing, equally oblique storytelling. The album’s title, East-West Logistics, might sound like European transport solutions, but it actually has something to say about making this sort of music in Eastern Bloc countries, places where little of the so-called “Western world”‘s cultural production reached behind the Iron Curtain until the 1990s. This is deep stuff, sonic excavation through the rubble of time, so put on your headlamp and let’s go!
Sluta Leta – First Order [Cheap Records/Bandcamp]
The background of Sluta Leta has always had the feel of a tall story. It’s hard to believe that their earliest releases (here’s a 1998 EP) were by a group of unknown Swedes, shepherded into production by Ramon Bauer and Andi Pieper of early Mego label-affiliated glitch pioneers General Magic (whose 1997 album Frantz is one of my favourites of the early glitch shit). They were often joined by fellow Viennese electro-head Gerhard Potuznik, and as well as Mego were associated with another experimental Viennese label, Cheap Records. General Magic have re-formed recently, putting out some cheeky and odd records, so why not bring back Sluta Leta? In fact Sluta Leta released an album 5 years ago via farmersmanual (also fellow glitch etc etc), and now Cheap Records have revived themselves for Sluta Leta’s Drift Dekoder album. While General Magic’s music would be constructed around weird noises and broken samples, Sluta Leta has always been more about the funk – electro-funk – and cheesy hip-hop stylings; fun but still weird, right? Case in point, from way back in 1995. This album does nothing to change that image, to be honest, and it’s cool, sure. I did really enjoy the spoken word here, which is actually a reading of a forum comment by Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the ubiquitous Linux operating system, giving a comprehensive dressing-down to some right-wing, er, “moron of the first order”.
Human Error Club & Kenny Segal – Night Time ft. E L U C I D [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp/Bandcamp]
Brooklyn hip-hop label Backwoodz Studioz, run by billy woods, has long supported producer-led albums as much as rappers. This is a bit different, though. Here LA legend Kenny Segal, who’s made two stunning albums with billy woods and recently a brilliant one with K-the-I???, has teamed up with the very unusual jazz trio Human Error Club, also from LA, for the strangest house party. A drummer & two keyboardists, Human Error Club already bring a kind of hip-hop sensibility to their music with electro keys, MPC beats as well as drumkit, floating Rhodes and funky electric piano… And here their studio jams are cut up in Segal’s inimitable style, preserving the live feel, un-quantized, full of very human errors (they’re not errors, don’t put in the post that I said errors). And yr Backwoodz crew are here in force, on a third of the tracks anyway – K-the-I???, Quelle Chris & Cavalier, Moor Mother & billy woods, and woods’ Armand Hammer partner E L U C I D, who rides the acid funk with lackadaisical ease.
Ship Sket – Mimikyu [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Josh Griffiths aka Ship Sket is newly arrived to the Planet µ label with a banger of an album summarising the Planet µ sound with references to contemporary bass music & pop through distortion and glitch. InitiatriX is out on October 31st, with a number of singles preceding it. Comprehensively mutated bass music, electro-acoustic manipulation… feels like this will be a helluva thing.
Blawan – WTF [XL Recordings/Bandcamp]
Blawan – Style Teef [XL Recordings/Bandcamp]
In the last few years, Jamie Roberts aka Blawan has released some of the most forward-thinking, fucked-up bass music around. From 2021’s Woke Up Right Handed, the bass rumbles and throbs, the beats syncopate and shuffle but hit haaaard. In 2023, Dismantled Into Juice went considerably left-field, with a couple of tracks featuring vocals from Monstera Black. And if last year’s BouQ veered back towards the dancefloor, it’s no less experimental for that. Notably in the meantime he also paired up with longtime collaborator Arthur Cayzer aka Pariah for two albums of industrial grindcore & noise rock (with hints of bass music) as Persher. This all now with the full-length album SickElixir, which is seriously messed-up bass music, sick to the core. Club music for messed-up times.
Tackle – Wisp [Steeplejack Records]
Naarm/Melbourne sound engineer Greg Steele studied sound production and then spent a few years in Berlin honing his talents at sound design as well as putting together his own style as music-maker under the name Tackle. Almost 10 years ago he moved back to Naarm and started his own business as Steele Audio, and he’s done sound design work for environmental and advocacy groups like Greenpeace, The Australian Greens, Seed Mob and many others. “Wisp” is super slow/fast stuff, head-noddin’ half-time skipping quickly into dancing amens skittering and flying off into dub-like echoes. The other two tracks take a more machine-funk approach, but still in that IDM/jungle-electro space. Verrry nice.
Klahrk – Tension [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Ben Clarke aka Klahrk has been doing the IDM/jungle/breakcore thing inna nu style for some time, and with a new EP on YUKU you’d expect nothing less than bass-heavy chaos. It’s not as messed-up as Blawan, but it’s absolutely powered by unstoppable kinetic energy, with chittering footwork hi-hats, jungle breaks and thumping bass syncopations rolling ever onwards. Excellent.
Ruby My Dear – J’adore le soleil [PRSPCT/PRSPCT Bandcamp/Ruby My Dear Bandcamp]
Ruby My Dear – Grosse Hyène [PRSPCT/PRSPCT Bandcamp/Ruby My Dear Bandcamp]
Julien Chastagnol named his breakcore/idm project Ruby My Dear after a Thelonious Monk tune, and Monk is one of the many jazz artists he’s sampled over the years, as well as scads of classical music. For his new album he’s gone to the beach for a jam… Confiture à la plage is classic Ruby My Dear, a demented confusion of joy and lightness, creeping horror and discombobulation. But really, it’s a delight, with sunset beach strums taking turns into 7/8 breakcore, and classic Satie turned into IDM – yes “gross hyène” (big hyena) is a pun on “Gnossienne“.
drumcorps – The Bogus [drumcorps Bandcamp]
drumcorps – Looking for Stars [drumcorps Bandcamp]
Sometime in the mid-2000s, US musician Aaron Spectre realised he could combine his love of hardcore (punk) with hardcore (jungle, breakcore), and thus was drumcorps born. His remix of DJ C’s “Conscience a Heng Dem” with Capleton was one of the hits of 2000s ragga jungle, and was caned on Utility Fog in the early days (it came out the year we began). These days, drumcorps is Aaron’s name for releasing anything, including ambient glitch and postrock-leaning stuff as well as jungle and the punk/breakcore mashup, but For Everything definitely cleaves to the original idea for the name, noisy blurts of anger at living through the “multicalypse”, riffs colliding with breaks, cyberpunk glitches asserting themselves, grounded in bass. Dance me to the end of the world.
Kendu Bari – Main [Who’s Susan/Bandcamp]
When Amsterdam-based drum’n’bass producer Sam Young switched to using Kendu Bari for his productions, it was part of widening his focus to all forms of bass music, something that also underpins his label Sann Odea. All four tracks on his new EP Drink For Your Machine are dominated by bass, combining dubstep’s throb with techno and breakbeat, and on this track jungle influences.
Gabriel Prokofiev, FAMES European Youth Orchestra, (ft. Etienne Abelin & Viviana-Zarah Baudis) – Green March (Nicholas Thayer remix) [Nonclassical/Bandcamp]
I’m not quite sure how, but I was in with the Nonclassical label since the very beginning, with founder Gabriel Prokofiev‘s String Quartet No. 1 performed by The Elysian Quartet, accompanied – as many releases following were – by remixes from across the experimental, dubstep & club spectrum. Prokofiev (who is the grandson of the great Russian neo-classicist & modernist Sergei Prokofiev) continued writing works for piano, chamber ensembles and orchestra, and incorporating electronics – I’ve played him quite a bit over the years. Now he’s back on Nonclassical with new album Dark Lights, which incorporates grime-influenced electronics into the playing of the FAMES European Youth Orchestra, conducted by Etienne Abelin with piano by Viviana-Zarah Baudis. As usual there are a few remixes too, including this one by Nicholas Thayer, a composer and producer himself, who’s made music for Sydney Dance Company and Queensland Ballet as well as working with Thijs de Vlieger aka Thys from Dutch drum’n’bass legends Noisia. Thayer keeps the composition pretty much intact, just upping the electronic aspects very nicely.
Bendik Giske – Slipping (aya been caught mix) [Smalltown Supersound/Bandcamp]
In 2023, Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske released a self-titled album produced by the remarkable minimalist electronic producer/composer Beatrice Dillon, which stripped away any spacial recording techniques for a sharp focus on the saxophone and the saxophonist’s body-in-movement. Now, two years later, comes an EP simply titled Remixed, with a rework by Dillon herself along with avant-garde producers like Carmen Villain, Wacław Zimpel, Hanne Lippard and Heiroglyphic Being – and UK shapeshifter aya, who here eschews jungle breaks or showy production trickery, instead forming a hypnotic mass of sax button clicks and cyclic delay patterns.
Katatonic Silentio – Tidal Reverie [A Walking Contradiction/Bandcamp]
Italian producer Mariachiara Troianiello works as Katatonic Silentio with strange abstractions of dance music that of late have sounded submerged, or bobbing on the surface, something embodied by her latest EP, Water Dubs, released by Swiss label A Walking Contradiction. Here, technoid, grimey and junglish forms are submerged into murky depths, but somehow retain enough substance to keep their grooves. That’s some aural magic.
JQ & Richard Pike – Tessera (Suns) [Salmon Universe/Bandcamp]
Joe Quirke (JQ) & Richard Pike (originally from Sydney, now London-based) run the experimental/ambient label Salmon Universe together and have played together for years as part of the ambient-jazz trio Forgiveness, but new album Tessera is their first duo recording together. These are granular dubscapes, sometimes ambient sound-design and sometimes verging into Basic Channel-style dub techno, as heard on this sort-of title track “Tessera (Suns)”. Deeeeeeep listening.
Broken Chip – Silent Sky [Broken Chip Bandcamp]
Martyn Palmer has plied his trade with ambient electronics & field recordings as Broken Chip for a decade and a half, at times (years ago) making sampler-driven beats as Option Command. On his self-released new album Small Piano, dusty recordings of a piano are looped and resampled on tape and digital, creating fragile spaces for contemplation. He’s recently had some higher-profile releases on Ian Hawgood’s Home Normal, and hopefully people around the world keep discovering his understated genius.
Rrawun Maymuru and Nick Wales – Nguy Gapu (Ocean Water) [unreleased]
For a long while now, Sydney composer, violist and electronic musician Nick Wales has had a working relationship with the wonderful Yolgnu songman from Northeast Arnhem Land, Rrawun Maymuru (lead singer of East Journey). This week the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra have been performing an innovative programme called Water Music that interleaves orchestral works by Nick, mostly with Rrawun singing, with movements from Handel’s Water Music. These compositions are mostly also water-related, including a piece called Harbour Light that you can find an alternate version of on Nick’s Bandcamp. They also performed an orchestral version of a piece co-written by Rrawun and Sophie Hutchings, from Sophie’s ARIA Award-winning album A World Outside. I finished tonight with a piece called “Nguy Gapu (Ocean Water)” which bookended the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra performances. It’s stirring, evocative music in its own niche.