Singles & tracks from forthcoming albums and new releases from hip-hop to doom, postrock to experimental electronic, breakbeat to techno, post-classical to post-jazz.
The Asthmatix – 10,000 FACES [MXD APE]
The Asthmatix – Mum Beez Tax Zombie Jackets [MXD APE]
Eora/Sydney trio The Asthmatix have been around for quite some time now, but with members based outside the country, it’s seemingly taken a long time to get their debut album Abacus Earthling out the door. Violinist Daniel Weltlinger is based in Berlin, playing with the best gypsy and klezmer musicians in Europe, while DJ/producer Micke Morphingaz was based in Sweden for a while. Keyboardist Daniel Pliner plays latin jazz, contemporary jazz, live experimental electronic and more. As The Asthmatix, the three are dedicated to having a fun time mixing traditional Jewish music with classic hip-hop beats and sampling, and I’m glad they’ve got this album out. You can buy it as a Digital Video Keyring.
Divide and Dissolve – Loneliness [Bella Union/Bandcamp]
Divide and Dissolve – Disintegrate [Bella Union/Bandcamp]
Somewhere around recording their last album, Divide and Dissolve‘s drummer Sylvie Nehill left the band, leaving it as the solo project of Takiaya Reed. In no way has her vision changed, but Insatiable sometimes lets Reed’s klezmer/gypsy-like saxophone melodies stretch into entire songs, without losing any of the heavy doom riffage – and she even sings on one track. Reed’s is a project fundamentally opposed to colonialism and white supremacy, and couldn’t be more relevant to the world today.
Quade – See Unit [AD 93/Bandcamp]
There’s a special strain of English indie music that’s deeply attached to a sense of place, and the *ahem* Cycle of Days & Seasons – the wonderful Hood being a prime example, and their descendents such as epic45. Quade don’t quite approach this in the same way as Hood, but I do feel there’s a kinship there. Quade meld postpunk rawness with more lyrical, melodic tendencies in the vocals and from the violin. If anything, on “See Unit” the predecessor is the proto-postrock of Bark Psychosis, and that’s a great achievement.
Ināra Quartet – A Blue Room [Warm Winters, Ltd./Bandcamp]
The gorgeous sounds on the four tracks of Ināra Quartet‘s debut release feel comfortably, beautifully Swedish to me, probably because I was brought up on the jazz/folk/postrock of Tape. For their part, as much as Ināra Quartet draw from Swedish & Scandinavian folk traditions and jazz, they are also influenced by the harmonies and rhythms of traditional Bulgarian music, minimalist composers, Sufi poets and more. Nevertheless, the jazz-trained percussion of Mischa Grind help place the music along a certain seam of postrock that goes through Tape back to Tortoise, along with two Agnas brothers – Mauritz on double bass & cello, and Kasper on guitar – and Johan Graden on synths and harmonium. A couple of years ago Graden made an incredible album with minimalist composer Ellen Arkbro called I get along without you very well, understated jazz songs with Arkbro singing and Graden on piano & keyboards, with gorgeous arrangements for mostly bass instruments. The sensitivity from that work bleeds over into the pieces here. I’m very excited to find out what’s next.
Matmos – Changing States [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
If you’re one of the lucky few who got to see Matmos performing at Phoenix Central Park in August last year, you would have seen the pair duo sampling not just from destroyed Bread records but from metallic objects of all kinds – cymbals, ball bearings, pots & pans (as I recall). I’m lucky to have seen Matmos quite a lot, and from as far back as 1999 (when I saw them twice, in Edinburgh and then in New York), their performances have always been based around live sampling and a good quantity of humour. But both Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt are also deeply thoughtful individuals and excellent musicians, and that performance was bewitching as much as it was hilarious. They are also a couple, and they celebrated their 25th anniversary with the Plastic Anniversary. In 2025, that would make them 31, but it’s not a stretch to imagine that Metallic Life Review was conceived and created around their 30th anniversary. Like the plastics of that earlier album, this one is built around the sounds of metallic objects, extending into the pedal steel of the sadly recently-departed Susan Alcorn, among other guests. They are well aware of the genre connotations of “metal”, as much as they are of the accuracy-or-not of their music as musique concrète, found-sound or field recordings, but something I always note with pleasure is that they can’t but help express their musical roots in ’90s experimental electronica – as much as the proto-folktronica, postrock and Americana found on the beloved 1999 EP The West and 2003 album The Civil War. When you’ve been together for 30 years, as life partners and creative partners, certain themes would tend to repeat while others would be turned away. So raise a stainless steel tumbler to one of music’s greatest couples, and go and “pre-save” or pre-order Metallic Life Review.
even – The Shades [Electroménager/Bandcamp]
French label Electroménager announce the upcoming self-titled debut from experimental duo even, made up of Greek mutant bass music explorer Jay Glass Dubs and France-based harpist Sissi Rada (real name Sissi Makropoulou). And yup, this first single has it all – a postpunk sensibility with exploding dub echoes and rolling harp-eggios. Just great.
A.Fruit – I’m so Bored [A.Fruit Bandcamp]
I’m convinced Anna A.Fruit is one of the most exciting newer talents in bass/club music at the moment. Her fusion of footwork, jungle and other bass music is coupled with first class sound design and lots of experimental touches. I’m so Bored is 160bpm footwork-jungle and a little bit of a hyperpop twist.
Lila Tirando a Violeta – Rest & Relaxation [Unguarded/Bandcamp]
Uruguayan producer Lila Tirando a Violeta is masterful at bass, breaks and percussive beats – and she’s very much in the “deconstructed club” camp. Having based herself in the Netherlands for a while, she relocated to Ireland where she fell in love with the countryside there – and no doubt found comparisons with her original homeland. There are many collaborations as usual, including Irish experimental producer Lighght, but I seem to have gravitated to her solo pieces, full of beats & breaks thrown around with glee, fragments of vocals and manipulated field recordings.
Gesture – Free Lunch [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Rizio – Nexus [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Czech label YUKU pumps out releases at a rate of knots – generally more than one a week – and they’re often showcasing pretty new talent doing creative & experimental stuff with all sorts of bass music. Following a call-out to listeners to submit their own music, YUKU this week released not one, but TWO compilations of “Fresh Faces” – here’s Part I and Part II. To my ears, the first is the stronger, but there’s valuable stuff on both. Tonight, from Part I we heard London’s Gesture with 130bpm bass & junglism, and from Part II, Finland’s Rizio with a medium-paced percussive techno roller.
Ryoji Ikeda – data.matrix (Crosstalk Edit) [No longer available]
Late last year Brazilian producer Crosstalk put up on his Bandcamp an album of edits, mostly of pop stuff. But a couple of weeks ago, a blink-and-you-missed edit appeared of a Ryoji Ikeda track from his 2005 album dataplex. The original has the typical Ryoji Ikeda tics that you’ll recognize from his audiovisual installations and albums – high-pitched beeps, clicky beats that are utterly austere while somehow preserving some of their roots in jungle and IDM. Crosstalk slows it down to the 140bpm range, complete with wub-wub bass and uk garage beats – and the orchestral sample Ikeda so artfully deploys in the middle. But either someone from Ikeda’s team or elsewhere asked him to take it down, or Crosstalk decided to, so. You can hear it here until… well, ssh!
Bokonon – Cavern [Hypercell/Bandcamp]
After a lovely bit of junglified techno on Rooms Inc, the Vonnegut-inspired Bokonon has released the Writhe on his own Hypercell Records. It’s four slabs of techno in various styles, from acid to percussive bass techno with wasps… But “Driven By Wasps” is almost 11 minutes long, and I do like the water droplets and dub chords of “Cavern”.
Rust – Kharif [Thawra Records/Bandcamp]
Based in Prague, Lebanese-Syrian duo Rust create what they call “electro-tarab”, blending contemporary electronic dance music with traditional Arab music. Petra Hawi sings in Lebanese, and for this project, Rust collaborated with Lebanese poet Jana Salloum; Hany Manja is an electronic producer and also performs on oud, one of the traditional instruments that accompanies the voice in tarab music. I love the mad glitching synth loops in “Kharif”, but Rust succeed also in retaining their music’s traditional roots through the noise and thunder.
Simon Henocq – CONCOURSE A [Carton Records/Bandcamp]
French record label Carton Records gregariously supports artists across just about all genres, and many of their releases have the genre-free je ne sais quoi of Simon Henocq‘s We Use Cookies. Henocq is a sound-artist, producer and self-taught musician who also convenes French collective COAX, a gathering-together of musicians of all genres along with dancers, visual artists and more. I would loosely define Henocq’s album as noise, but it coalesces into a kind of industrial techno often. At other times you’ll get a fizzling, crackling tone that slowly grows into a snarling miasma. Quite exhilarating.
Ursula Sereghy – Wet and Innocent [Mondoj/Bandcamp]
Ursula Sereghy – Magic User [Mondoj/Bandcamp]
Following her excellent debut OK Box in 2021, Czech musician Ursula Sereghy has released her follow-up, Cordial, on the Polish label Mondoj. It’s not exactly IDM, it’s not pop enough for hyperpop, it’s not club enough to even be deconstructed club… and it strays quite far from ambient, in my opinion. The sampled droplets of vocals create uncanny melodies over glitched shuffles and fragmented General MIDI chamber orchestrations. Odd music for odd times.
Tlön – Huxley [Jazzland/Bandcamp]
By now I’ve well and truly emphasised my love of English/Norwegian duo BirdWorld, a genreless exploration of percussion, cello, found sounds and more. BirdWorld’s very recent album Nurture featured a guest appearance from Norwegian violinist Sara Övinge, and thus I found out about her duo Tlön with BirdWorld’s cellist Gregor Riddell. And, perhaps not coincidentally, mere weeks after Nurture, Tlön’s debut album Reality has arrived! It’s released via Norwegian label Jazzland, a label whose name is perhaps misleading even though “jazz” is broadly at its core. And Tlön, like BirdWorld, draws on its members’ classical backgrounds and their talents as improvisers and composers, as well as following BirdWorld in their concrète approach to sound. While Bokonon above is named from Kurt Vonnegut, Tlön of course take their name from Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius“, one of his reality-warping, inter/intra-textual wonders – and thus the music here twists and turns in surreal ways, so you thought you were listening to classical cadences but your attention strayed for a minute and now it’s heaving electronic drone? The musicianship is first class, and the surreal mix of found-sound, spoken word and warm strings often uncovers real beauty.
Drank – Min [Trost/Bandcamp]
Austrian label Trost is the home of noise-leaning free jazz bods like sax manglers Peter Brötzmann and Mats Gustafsson, but also for instance Christof Kurzmann, who flits easily between glitch, indietronica and avant-garde spheres – and indeed they’re also the label that released the two Keiji Haino + Sumac albums, a somewhat different beast from Sumac’s Moor Mother collab we started the show with. But past avant-gardism, Trost releases can seemingly go anywhere, and the two releases here are a case in point.
Drank is the duo of two key members of Austria’s improv/experimental scene: Ingrid Schmoliner on prepared piano and Alexander Kranabetter on trumpet & electronics. Each of the four tracks on their debut album Breath in Definition is a constellation of sound. Schmoliner draws an amazing array of sounds from her piano preparations, very conscious of the psycho-acoustic effects of dense walls of sound, while Kranabetter’s electronics mutate his trumpet into unrecognizable forms. Although I love the second track – so much so that I played its entire 11 minutes and 35 seconds – the last 2 tracks are notable for renowned percussionist & electronic experimentalist Lukas Koenig‘s marimba & electronics, followed by Anja Plaschg aka Soap&Skin‘s breathy vocals on the last track.
Paul Wallfisch & Dana Schechter – Wolfram Lotz Watches a Western Spy Movie and Decides to go Shopping for a Lowrider [Trost/Bandcamp]
Meanwhile, The Heart of a Whale is a very different thing. It’s a meeting of two musicians’ quite different styles – the crumbling cabaret of Little Annie collaborator Paul Wallfisch and the growling guitar noise of Dana Schechter (Swans member and the force behind the “cinematic noise” band/solo act Insect Ark). Still, there are deep connections here – both musicians are interested in soundtrack & multi-mode performance. And indeed the Weimar cabaret style is deeply ingrained in the work of no lesser industrial/noise don than Blixa Bargeld. The Heart of a Whale is a soundtrack of sorts, for a performance by the Vienna Volkstheater of the exploratory, satirical work “Die Politiker” by contemporary German poet & playwright Wolfram Lotz. In keeping with the experimental but incisive work they’re soundtracking, Wallfisch & Schechter roam far with their music, inserting slabs of distortion in amongst the Tom Waitsian pump organ, piano et al. I feel like if any of these references resonate with you, you’re in for a treat!
Luke Abbott, Lotte Betts-Dean, Jack Wylie – Endless Joy [Salmon Universe/Bandcamp]
With our own Laurence Pike, UK keyboardist Luke Abbott and saxophonist Jack Wylie make up the psychedelic electronic jazz group Szun Waves. In late May comes a new project from Abbott and Wylie, joined by Melbourne-born mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean. Endless Joy will be released on Salmon Universe, the label Laurence’s brother Richard Pike runs out of London with Joe “JQ” Quirke. As the album’s title track and first single shows, Betts-Dean is by no means singing in full-throttle operatic mode, layering her voice through electronic processing, with prepared piano and further electronics from the other two members. As you’ll hear when the full album comes out, no single track captures the whole of this album. It’ll be launched in London when I’m playing up the road at Portals Festival – actually the following day, so I’m hoping to go along, but I won’t be on-air again until a few weeks later, so stick this in your wishlist or whatever!