Tonight it’s Part 2 of Utility Fog’s best of 2025, which encompasses all the music that’s not vocal-driven or beats-driven. So there’s contemporary jazz, abstract sound-art, glitch electronics, glitchy postrock, field recording, tape manipulation and more. There’s even voice at times.
Laura Jurd – Praying Mantis [New Soil/Bandcamp]
There has, I think, been more “jazz” on Utility Fog this year than in previous years – but there’s always been some, often in a faux genre of “post-jazz” that I’ve used to lump together glitchy hybrid-jazz with electronics. But in general jazz is a living genre that can’t help but draw from everything from punk & metal to electronica and folk. One of the jazz highlights this year was the new solo album from UK trumpeter Laura Jurd, who had stepped away from music to tend to her family, but returns here in astonishing form. Jurd’s Mercury-nominated band Dinosaur embodied the “fusion” aspect of whatever post-jazz wants to be, using synths along with a spiky rhythm section that funks out where necessary. On Jurd’s Rites & Revelations, the folk aspects (also present in Dinosaur) are often to the fore, and that’s all kinds of folk including Scottish and English, but also Eastern European and Western Asian to my ears. And as well as Jurd’s usual drummer Corrie Dick and contemporary UK jazz mainstay Ruth Goller on bass, the band features accordianist Martin Green and violinist/violist Ultan O’Brien. It’s an album unlike any other, drawing deeply on the past while pointing in new directions.
Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin – Panj [Drag City/Bandcamp]
Ghosted III is the third album from the trio of iconoclastic Australian experimental guitarist Oren Ambarchi with the Swedish rhythm section of the incredible Fire! – bassist Johan Berthling & drummer Andreas Werliin. It’s still driven by the wonderful cyclic basslines and rhythms of Berthling & Werliin, but on this album it opens up its scope from those patient cycles. It’s still deeply embedded in these artists’ oeuvres: the krautrockain period of Ambarchi’s that started with “Knots”, the centrepiece of 2012’s Audience of One, and similarly the hypnotic sound of Berthling & Werliin’s groundbreaking earlier band Tape (one album on Bandcamp) as well as the freer Fire! and Fire! Orchestra. Opener “Yek” (the titles are the numbers 1-6 in Persian) has chiming post-postpunk guitars over a skipping bassline and drums, and it’s followed by the starker “Do”, which could be a long-lost Tape track. But there’s still minimalist blues like “Panj”, on which Ambarchi’s guitar sounds like a droning organ. These musicians’ careers have intersected multiple times in their swerving trajectories. Long may they reign in this trio formation!
TL;DR – Cumulus (edit) [Earshift Music/Bandcamp]
Following his tenure as leader of the Australian Art Orchestra, Naarm trumpeter/composer/producer Peter Knight hasn’t stopped to rest. The wonderful Hand To Earth was formed as a project of the AAO but continues as its own thing. TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) is a new quartet with three younger musicians in the Naarm jazz scene. Brilliant bassist Helen Svoboda is here playing basslines but also showcasing her melodic bowed harmonics and her voice; guitarist Theo Carbo, like Peter Knight, contributes electronics as well as his instrument; and Peter’s son Quinn Knight brings 15 years of experience improvising with his dad to the fore. This is dreamy music, ambient-dub-jazz – and the internet-jokey name aside, the cloud titles are perfect for these floating, soulful pieces.
Alister Spence Trio – The Gathering [Alister Spence Bandcamp]
Alister Spence – Interior Signal [Room40/Bandcamp]
Sydney pianist Alister Spence is a key part of this city’s jazz and improv scene, and his trio with Lloyd Swanton of The Necks and drummer Toby Hall is a unique, evocative partnership (all three were also part of Sandy Evans & Tony Gorman’s legendary Clarion Fracture Zone). In Februrary this year, the trio released their latest album of melodic, energetic jazz, Gather. But Alister’s creativity takes him in all directions, and his Within Without album is perfectly conceived for the Room40 label. Here, his creative impulse swoops away from the piano, and often away from the keys altogether, diving inside the beloved, chiming, throbbing heart of the Fender Rhodes (an instrument Spence has very much made his own too, over decades of playing). Prepared piano is now a well-established way to draw new sounds from the piano, and highlight its inner workings; so here’s Alister Spence’s prepared Rhodes. His suite of effects is never far away, but mostly we’re hearing the insides of the instrument, tapping and buzzing and yes, chiming. It’s hard to make the Rhodes not beautiful, and its inherent warmth is not denied or countered even in the most abstract pieces here. Delicious.
Alexandra Spence – The Spring [Students of Decay/Bandcamp]
Staying in the experimental space, we join Alexandra Spence, a brilliant sound-artist who works with field recordings and found objects to tell a story about place and memory – and who happens to be the daughter of Alister Spence. Her last two albums (from 2022) arose from a fascination with oceans and waterways; the scope is wider here, from mountains to backyards, but the ecological and geological also interact here with the personal. As well as recordings of places and non-musical objects, Spence (a clarinettist) here uses sounds from Serge Modular synths and a custom-built lyre, and even the voice and instrumentation of French composer & musician Delphine Dora. Spence is a master at combining disparate sounds – when performing live she uses contact mics and found objects which meld with pre-recorded field recordings and other in-the-box sounds in a way that can only be described as alchemical.
Kate Carr – spring back and creak [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
OK but if we’re talking about field recordings and found sound and music, Kate Carr (originally from here but London-based for ages) is a master of the art, and tirelessly promoting others through her Flaming Pines label. Rubber Band Music is a particular sound experiment, using homemade devices of wood, metal and rubber bands. So we’ve got sproings and buzzes and wobbles, slowed down, filtered, rebuilt. Abstract yet physical.
Ipek Gorgun – Edgelord [Touch/Bandcamp]
Turkish composer/sound-artist/musician Ipek Gorgun released her last solo album Ecce Homo seven years ago. In the meantime she’s had works performed in prestigious venues, but has also been through multiple traumas – electrocution, cancer treatment, anaphylaxis… So her remarkable new album Earthbound is an act of defiance as well as an act of surrender. The darkness of these years is audible here, but so is an earthy sense of liveliness and humour. There is endless detail in each of these soundworks, but some do stand out, especially those incredible swooping glissandi in “Edgelord”.
dogs versus shadows – Ghost Artery Part 1 (radio edit) [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
Nottingham artist dogs versus shadows appears on Kate Carr’s brilliant label Flaming Pines with a kind of narrative about the River Trent, that winds through Nottingham and has been subjected to various forms of degradation through human activity. This highly polluted river has dangers lurking beneath its surface, and dogs versus shadows dredges these up with the use of “field recordings, tape loops, dying vocals from broken dictaphones and snatches of shortwave radio”. The two full tracks are a little under 15 minutes each, and each is an engrossing quasi-narrative of watery field recordings and seemingly unrelated sounds – chopped up snippets of speech, electronic pulsations and almost-rhythms. It’s fascinating and you’ll probably want to go back and listen again when it’s over.
António Feiteira – Ghost Hiss, Resonant Hip [Eastern Nurseries/Bandcamp]
Eastern Nurseries is one of a number of Portuguese labels that reliably turns up surprising new sounds from unfamiliar artists. So here’s a brilliant debut EP from Porto-based percussionist and sound-artist António Feiteira, titled Performing the Heimlich on an Ouroboros. I love the first track, played here: a contemplative, crackling glitchscape. The middle track “Synthesized Chronos Turned Organless Aion” retains some of the glitch textures, but foregrounds Feiteira’s drumming. A really great EP.
A little later in the year, Feiteira released a self-titled album with Francisco Pedro Oliveira as Amuleto Apotropaico, on another Portuguese label, Perf. Fascinating stuff, including an appearance from cellist Ricardo Jacinto, also recommended.
She’s Analog – danse macabre [Carton Records/Carton Bandcamp/Torto Editions/Bandcamp/She’s Analog Bandcamp]
The second album from Italian trio She’s Analog is a compelling mix of (post-)jazz, postrock, electroacoustic music and more, co-released by the great French label Carton Records and Italian Torto Editions. At times they can sound like a minimalist jazz piano trio, at other times like a motorik, minimalist postpunk band. It’s clearly put together from partly improvised elements, but there’s also careful composition here, drawing different moments from the album together, with electronic elements also pointing to the way this music was crafted in the studio. But there’s also a real melodic sense that draws you in for repeat listens, which it certainly received from me this year.
BirdWorld – Opposite Hinges (feat. Sara Övinge) [Dugnad rec/BirdWorld Bandcamp]
When I discovered BirdWorld in 2018, it was love at first sight – a cello and percussion duo? And yet so much more? Cellist Gregor Riddell and percussionist Adam Teixeira are both virtuosos at their chosen instruments, but in the mysterious albums of BirdWorld – their debut UNDA and now the follow-up NURTURE – you’ll find Teixeira playing kalimbas (thumb piano) and other tuned percussion, or synths, while Riddell adds guitars, piano, and even vocals. Field recordings and rhythmic jazz/almost-postrock coexist with an impeccable solo cello piece, throwing plucked and bowed notes around like a seasoned juggler, while at times guests join – like Swedish violinist Sara Övinge, who’s comfortable in classical or jazz contexts, and has a duo with Riddell called Tlön, who also released an album this year on legendary Norwegian label Jazzland. The gregarious nature of these recordings, and the willingness to go in unexpected directions mid-stride, reminds me of The Books or Lucky Dragons, groups who first turned me on to the possibility of just dispelling all preconceptions, and not making music for instant gratification or consumption. More power to them! Don’t let this one slip by.
Dorothy Carlos – My Buddy (Miss You In Ear World) [29 Speedway/Bandcamp]
NYC experimental label 29 Speedway here brings us an amazing little release from NYC/Chicago cellist & sound-artist Dorothy Carlos. These pieces – most around 3 minutes long but as short as 30 seconds and as long as 7 minutes – are described as “sound collages”. Her voice and her cello are caught up in glitching granulations, but it’s done so artfully that somehow the melody sneaks through the cracks. “Always” is cracked & collaged from chopped samples of non-verbal vocal tics and breaths. This is, of course, Utility Fog’s bread & butter, and I’m so glad to hear people (especially cellists!) doing this now.
Erik Friedlander – The Tree of Knowledge [Skipstone – Erik Friedlander Bandcamp]
New York cellist Erik Friedlander has been a stalwart of the Downtown scene for decades – playing with John Zorn, and with jazz and avant-garde ensembles of all sorts. He’s also a great bandleader and composer himself, and makes highly varied music as a solo musician – it’s easy for me to forget that he’s not just a brilliantly adept improvising cellist. I remember coming across an ambient electronic work of his in the early days of internet compilations, and in the COVID days he was putting a track up a month on his Bandcamp. So that brings us to Origami, a new album he released in October which made it to Australia in a box for me just in time for these best-of shows. For this album, Friedlander took the stems from his 2024 project Floating City, with his cello joined by Sara Serpa’s voice, Wendy Eisenberg’s guitar and Mark Helias’s bass, and completely deconstructed them. This is remixing as transformation, and the result are glitchy electro-acoustic pieces that hint at their jazz origins but fit beautifully with the sort of stuff Utility Fog usually loves.
The Cloud Maker – Selkie Shimmer [The Cloud Maker Bandcamp]
Finally the wonderful The Cloud Maker is out. The project involves an international cast of brilliant women, convened by clarinettist, improviser and experimental musician Aviva Endean. Endean is a member of the remarkable project Hand to Earth (see later tonight) with Yolgnu songman Daniel Wilfred, didgeridooist David Wilfred, trumpeter & sound-artist Peter Knight, and Korean-Australian vocalist Sunny Kim. When Kim and Endean took part in a residency in Banff (Canada), they met Te Kahureremoa Taumata, a practitioner of Taonga Pūoro (a word that describes a suite of Māori musical instruments). Their fruitful musical collaboration began with the Māori moth goddess Raukatauri, whose story is the origin story of one of those taonga pūoro, the cocoon-shaped flute called Putorino. In the Adelaide Hills, the group expanded to include percussionist/sound-artist Maria Moles and contemporary cellist Freya Schack-Arnott (who also plays a traditional Swedish multi-stringed instrument called the nyckelharpa which you can hear in her duo Runa Cara with Bonnie Stewart). So yes, it’s a project overflowing with talent & creativity. Each member contributes stories of goddesses from their own folkloric traditions, and The Cloud Maker‘s music is as varied as its members. Tonight’s piece continues our cello theme with Freya’s fluttering, scraping cello as the focus.
Lia Kohl – Train, Antwerp to Amsterdam [Dauw/Bandcamp]
Chicago cellist Lia Kohl is a frequent visitor to these playlists, making beautifully odd pieces with not just extended cello techniques but radios, synths and field recordings. Released on Belgian ambient/experimental mainstay Dauw, her 2025 album Various Small Whistles and a Song is ultra-conceptual even for Kohl, made up of sixteen 1-minute tracks, each collaging and cataloguing ordinary places and events, with additional field recordings from friends such as Macie Stewart, Patrick Shiroishi, claire rousay and others. It’s a delight.
Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart – Stone Piece I [International Anthem/Bandcamp]
Lia Kohl is a seasoned collaborator as well as a solo musician, and here we find her with two other brilliant Chicago-based string players: Whitney Johnson on viola and Macie Stewart on violin. All three women also sing. On BODY SOUND [STONE PIECE], released by Chicago (post-?)jazz label International Anthem, they perform two versions of “Stone Piece”, based around improvised melodies & drones. That’s lovely enough, but the key here is that each musician also feeds their sounds into a tape machine (one of five!) where they’re grainily pitched down and stretched out. It’s really worth watching this gorgeous transformation happen in realtime in this video.
Saba Alizadeh – Women of fire (feat. Sanam Maroufkhani) [30M Records/Bandcamp]
Iranian musician Saba Alizadeh is a master of the kamancheh, a Persian stringed instrument. But his works on Berlin label Karlrecords (Scattered Memories) and Hamburg-based 30M Records (2021’s I May Never See You Again) bring the music and his instrument into a contemporary setting, with stunning sound design – electronics, drones and at times beats. His new album Temple Of Hope carries an audacious theme in extremely dark times. He takes inspiration from the “Woman Life Freedom” movement, incorporating field recordings of crowds and historical radio broadcasts alongside his beautiful instrument, and these human elements are made both alien and more poignant through electronic processing, even alongside bursts of no-input mixer noise. Among his collaborators is the Amsterdam-based Iranian musician Sanam Maroufkhani, whose multilayered vocals are juxtaposed with stuttering digital percussion. The second track here features a moving kamancheh performance gradually swamped by a looped field recording of a protest about water shortages in the Iranian city of Susangerd, in an area now called “Dasht-e-Azadegan”, roughly translating as “Plain of the free”. Alizadeh has created a stunning album rooted in Persian music and recent history, asking us to find hope in times of horror.
Feronia Wennborg & Lucy Duncombe – Assembling Air [Warm Winters, Ltd./Bandcamp]
From Adam Badí Donoval‘s perfectly-curated Warm Winters, Ltd. comes an album of beautiful, uncanny vocal simulacra, working together in a strange kind of plainsong, hinting at Medieval music as recalled by malfunctioning robots. Feronia Wennborg & Lucy Duncombe both make exploratory sound-art: Wennborg is interested in the exchange involved with listening and “sounding”, and makes art from the digital transformation of the sound of people together; Duncombe’s work transforms her voice and others, glitching and reassembling the sound, pushing them into the surreal or irreal. Accordingly, this is a haunted album, in which the artificial voices never quite succeed in voicing complete melodies, instead looping and stuttering, pitched outside their intended registers, mournfully ironising the title, Joy, Oh I Missed You. The results are queasily beautiful.
Bernard Parmegiani – La Ville en Haut de la Colline II [Transversales Disques/Bandcamp]
You might think it strange that the iconoclastic French electro-acoustic/musique concrète composer Bernard Parmegiani is still releasing new music 12 years after his death, and you’d be right. But aside from the L’Œuvre Musicale en 12 CD boxset, and the updated COMPLETE WORKS released on his Bandcamp (both via Ina GRM), the Transversales Disques label has been mining his personal archives for works created for TV & film. This year Mémoire Magnétique, vol. 3 (1967-1971) was released, and there’s certainly some freaky shit on there. It’s always weird to work out that this pioneering work was going on at the same time that rock musicians were experimenting in the studio, and King Tubby & co were revolutionising the use of effects & mixing techniques. Nevertheless, the work going on in “the academy” was very fruitful and still echoes through today, and weird vignettes like those on these Mémoire Magnétique compilations can be as mind-boggling as the major works.
Machinefabriek – Verpulver [Champion Version/Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Rutger Zuydervelt’s music is increasingly being released under his own name rather than Machinefabriek, but he remains a stalwart on Utility Fog, whether for his works for dance, for TV and games, or sound-art works for their own sakes. The UK label Champion Version has released Machinefabriek before, and early this year put out a 7″ with two short tracks, under 3½ minutes, entitled “Verpulver” (pulverize) and “Pulver” (powder). Those words nicely describe the sound of granular synthesis, and both these tracks are fairly sparse pieces with percussive elements broken down among drones and distortion.
Lea Bertucci – In This Time [Cibachrome Editions]
It should be well-known and universally acknowledged now that Lea Bertucci is one of the best sound-artist/composers of the last decade and a half. Whether site-specific works exploring & exploiting – for instance – the resonance of a hollow bridge in Köln (2020’s Acoustic Shadows), myriad works live-processing her own saxophone and other instruments, or her work with reel-to-reel tape machines, she’s a master of her craft. Recent times have seen a number of incredible collaborations from Bertucci: in 2022, she operated tapes & electronics around Robbie Lee‘s baroque & medieval instruments on Winds Bells Falls, while on Murmurations, her tapes were as prominent, but she also brought various wind instruments and her voice to the table next to Ben Vida‘s synths & voice. And on her tectonic collaboration in 2023 with Brisbane’s own Lawrence English cello, viola and lap steel guitar emerge as well. Earlier this year Lawrence’s ROOM40 released an astounding work of Bertucci together with another masterful sound-artist, Olivia Block. So needless to say her new album The Oracle is a tour de force, engaging her many instruments, field recordings and, importantly, her own voice, all filtered through tape manipulation and digital processing (unless it’s all tape!) Only on the last track are percussionists from the Wesleyan University Taiko Ensemble enlisted for a booming – yet obscured – finale. Of course, it’s not just technially interesting or impressive (although it is those things) – it’s also music that will draw you in and move you, despite the vocals being twisted into non-textual shapes. I promised it would be high in my top albums of 2025, and here it is.
Giuseppe Ielasi – 11 (from an insistence on material vol. 2) [Senufo Editions Bandcamp]
In March this year, Italian sound-artist/producer/guitarist/etc Giuseppe Ielasi released an insistence on material vol. 1, and followed it up in September with an insistence on material vol. 2. Past series of Ielasi’s have involved mechanical machines butting their heads on paper hooked up to contact mics, or music made from run-out grooves of vinyl records, or blurry guitar loops – just about anything really, including minimal beats from strange sources. So “an insistence on material” could be an insistence on physical sound sources… or it could just be, you know, putting out material of some sort? On both volumes, these numbered tracks are vintage Ielasi – strangely cut, warbling tape (or vinyl?) loops, anonymous sputtering anti-rhythms… Wonderful.
Demdike Stare and Kristen Pilon – A Grave Fall (January) [DDS]
You rarely get the same thing twice with Demdike Stare, whose earlier works were haunted by strains of arcane English folk and psychedelia, but who have deep links to UK bass music as well. Their latest release, To Cut and Shoot is drawn from sound material created by US filmmaker & musician Kristen Pilon for an experimental film of the same name, chopping & screwing her piano, strings and voice into something broken & namelessly evocative, at times noisy and rhythmic in an almost clubby way, but mostly set adrift in warp and glitch. As might be obvious, this maps quite specifically on to Utility Fog’s central concerns, and, helpfully, it’s really really good.
Cherrystones x Demdike Stare – Where Evil Grows [DDS]
Available from Boomkat, who I’m pretty sure handle all of Demdike Stare‘s DDS imprint, here’s a pretty incredible piece of dark ambient, post-industrial, chopped & screwed bad-trip-hop… Cherrystones is a UK DJ & producer with a similar aesthetic to Demdike Stare – hauntological looting of the arcane past, and recontextualising into strange contexts. So from this collaboration we get crunchy, overdriven beats, vinyl-manipulated voices, tape-destroyed noise loops, all fed through dub delays. It’s supremely fucked-up and one of my favourite things I heard this year.
General Magic – Elfer [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
Andreas Pieper & Ramon Bauer were there at the very beginning of the MEGO label, which swiftly became the centre of the “glitch” movement of experimental sound coming out of Vienna and further around Europe – from which Christian Fennesz also arose. The two formed General Magic, and with Peter Rehberg aka Pita released some formative material that’s collected as Fridge Trax Plus, made out of the buzzes and throbs of an old fridge. More generally they were interested in mistakes and malfunctions – or at least things that sounded like that. Awkwardly cut (or rather, carefully cut) samples that stuttered and clicked due to sharp digital discontinuities, and a love of overdriven noise via digital clipping; this was the native experimental music of the digital era, exemplified on their debut album Frantz, a longtime favourite of mine. It’s no surprise that these days this is both the sound of retro-kitsch and also futuristic sound-art (just with much, much more sophisticated & readily available tools).
So anyway, as you may know, the label disbanded a few years later, and Rehberg restarted it as Editions Mego, run with great enthusiasm by the man basically on his own. And tragically, decades later and just a few years ago, Rehberg passed away. So the label and its offshoots are now run by various artists connected with Mego, releasing music that was already slated to come out, along with other related material. I hope this latest batch isn’t the end: There’s a new LP – technically one 45-minute track – out now from Peter Rehberg under his own name called Liminal States, a long evolving drone work. Annnnd there’s this! Bosko follows Nein Aber Ja from 2023 as a new renaissance of Pieper & Bauer’s General Magic, and it’s an incredibly strong work. No doubt fans of Hausu Mountain releases would immediately peg it as not quite from the current era, but there’s a jump-cut everything-piled-in-together thing going on that’s in common with Hausu, who I’m sure in turn are influenced by the Mego scene. So here we have harsh noise drones, chopped riffs, what must be an AI voice attempting to sing in one or two tracks, and speedy piano samples juxtaposed with crunching hardcore beats. Joyful noise, done as it should be.
Also notable: Pieper & Bauer’s (even more) cheeky alias Sluta Leta released Drift Dekoder later this year, weird electro-funk with help from frequent collaborator Gerhard Potuznik on a few tracks.
Nate Scheible – 02 [Nate Scheible Bandcamp]
It’s a sign of how overloaded I am (we all are) with new music that I was convinced I’d played experimental sound-artist Nate Scheible before, but it seems I never managed to fit something in. Criminal! Last year’s or valleys and is a phenomenal work that’s adjacent to noise, free jazz, electro-acoustic & musique concrète – stuff I’m increasingly lumping into “sound-art” because labels are reductive anyway. For all this abstraction, though, Scheible brings forth a lot of emotion, and none more so than on his latest album then, inaudibly. As he describes, he is usually reluctant to anchor his music to a narrative or non-musical events – something I closely identify with – but this recording is imprinted with the death of his mother. Various musicians play acoustic instruments, including John Dierker‘s bass clarinet on this track, and, touchingly, the fragmented voice of Scheible’s mother Kat.
NEUE DEUTSCHE KUNST – Keine Nichtmusik Drei [Cellule 75]
Hamburg musician Marc Richter is perhaps best known as Black To Comm, but has also appeared as Jehm Circs and Mouchoir Étanche (*ahem* “waterproof handkerchief”) and indeed under his given name. Under any of these aliases the music is hallucinatory, surreal collage work, taking in drone, krautrock, queasy soundtrack works and even something approaching woozy hip-hop at times. A number of Black To Comm albums have come out through Thrill Jockey, all brilliant (I cannot recommend Seven Horses For Seven Kings highly enough), but he is also spread around his own labels Dekorder and Cellule 75 – yeah, it’s a lot.
OK, so what do we have here? NEUE DEUTSCHE KUNST (“new German art”) seems primarily to have been an art project, producing exceedingly strange artworks of grotesque quasi-humans and brightly coloured objects, clearly generated through AI prompting that preserves this specific aesthetic. So releasing this album, Keine Nichtmusik, under the NEUE DEUTSCHE KUNST name suggests an extension of this artistic practice (the album title, a play on “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik“, means “No non-music”). The album is described as “Music for the films of the artists’ group Neue Deutsche Kunst” and you can see some of those filmworks on Vimeo. They’re short scenes cut together, with a strong aesthetic but the visible artefacts of AI generated video. So, the music? It’s vintage Black To Comm basically, bizarre collages of German song and avant-garde classical (yet Baroque feeling) composition – but the Bandcamp credits it as “Recorded by noone 2024-2025 / 100% Menschenfrei” (human-free). I’m not so sure – even if it was trained on Richter’s own work, the clarity of the sound, the voices and the audio effects feel to me like there’s a human’s work in there, albeit an impish human. Perhaps some AI-generated audio then collaged by Mr Richter? I’m intrigued.
Géraldine Eguiluz & Michel F Côté – Territoires perdus #2 [Ambiances Magnétiques/Bandcamp]
Fascinating faux-ethnomusicology, or self-ethnomusicology here from two prolific avant-garde francophone musicians. Géraldine Eguiluz is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist & researcher born in Mexico, brought up in Bogotá, Lisbon and Paris, and now based partly in Mexico and partly in Montréal. And Montréaler Michel F Côté as been associated with the Ambiances Magnétiques label since the 1980s and now runs another label, Sono Sordo. He’s a drummer & percussionist making various types of avant-jazz, strange lo-fi pop and variants of beautiful sound-art. This particular collaboration is named hORs TempS (out of time, or timeless), hinting at its provenance: Eguiluz uncovered cassette recordings she’d made in the early 1990s in Paris, which she re-sampled and collaged into new forms and then sent to Côté for him to respond to, and between them they deconstructed & reconstructed the music. The result is simultaneously genreless and pan-genre, an exoticised adaptation of found-sounds that are not anonymised ethnomusicological field recordings but rather the innocently all-encompassing music of a highly talented young artist. There are a few different threads throughout the recording, of which the “Territoires perdus” are tributes to resistence by indigenous communities.
Christophe Bailleau – Reaagall vst VIP hall owl [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.
Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, Hahn Rowe – Rhythmic Rhodes [Balmat/Bandcamp]
At the beginning of 2023, Stephen Vitiello – one of the foremost sound-artists of the past few decades – released a surprising EP/mini-album on his Bandcamp: a collaboration with Fugazi/Messthetics drummer Brendan Canty. Not, of course straight-edge punk or punk of any variety, it was a truly lovely piece of experimental post-rock, and I highly recommend giving it a listen. Then later that year came a 17-minute track titled “First“, released on the sadly now defunct Longform Editions, in which the duo were joined by widely-collaborative violinist & multi-instrumentalist Hahn Rowe. Well, a title like that is clearly leading somewhere, and now we have their Second release, out via the Balmat label run by Barcelona-based music critic Philip Sherburne and Lapsus‘ Albert Salinas. These are versatile musicians jamming out iteratively in various studios, with all the musicians playing multiple roles. There are atmospheric loops & textures, but the backbone is Canty’s muscular grooves, while melodies snake through from all three (as well as a couple of guest spots). It has the exploratory nature of early postrock and its antecedents, but crafted by three musicians with decades of experience behind them. A beauty.
Lawrence English + Stephen Vitiello – with Chris (Single Edit) [American Dreams Records/Bandcamp]
American Dreams Records, who brought us Lawrence English‘s astonishing collaboration with Lea Bertucci a couple of years ago, now bring us Lawrence’s third album with the abovementioned Stephen Vitiello – appropriately titled Trinity. That’s not just because it’s their third, but also because on each track the duo is completed by a third musician – on this one, it’s the master Chris Abrahams, pianist in The Necks of course, and much more. This is wonderfully ChrisAbrahamsian.
(The Necks, of course, put out a stunning 3CD album this year, Disquiet, but ultimately I wasn’t able to excerpt even the shortest track, at 26 minutes. You know it’s amazing, it’s The Necks.)
Hand To Earth – Ŋurru Wäŋa Part II [Room40/Bandcamp]
When members of the Australian Art Orchestra collaborated with Yolŋu songmen Daniel and David Wilfred on the extraordinary album Hand to Earth in 2021, it must have already been clear this was a really special project. With trumpeter Peter Knight (who was AAO’s Artistic Director at the time), clarinettist (among other wind instruments) Aviva Endean and Korean-Australian vocalist Sunny Kim, the Wilfreds weave songlines, yidaki (didgeridoo) and bilma (clapstick) around sensitive sonic experimentation, with all three other members processing their sounds. On this third Hand To Earth album, their second on Room40, label boss Lawrence English also contributes sounds, and Peter Knight’s son Quinn contributes percussion (acoustic and electronic) on our selection tonight, “Ŋurru Wäŋa Part II”. In an echo of the millennia-spanning songlines, the group bend time, sculpting the songs in an iterative process following the original voice, yidaki and bilma recordings. There’s so much depth to this music, an evocation of our environment and the varied cultural backgrounds that find their home on this continent.
Pierre Bastien & Michel Banabila – Closing Time: The Party Is Over [Pingipung/Bandcamp]
The first collaborative album between French mechanical instrument maker Pierre Bastien and fourth world electronic producer & composer Michel Banabila was a strange affair, lovely but perhaps a bit tentative. On their follow-up, Nuits Sans Nuit, it feels like they’ve found a singular voice together. Both musicians are multi-instrumentalists interested in taking traditional instruments into weird, uncanny places, and on tonight’s selection (which doesn’t close their album!), a very European chamber melody winds its way to our ears through an open doorway somewhere just out of view…
Rian Treanor & Cara Tolmie – Endless Not [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
When I went to the Planet µ 30th gig in London (and I apologise for constantly bringing it up), I got to see experimental electronic mastermind Rian Treanor performing some new material with experimental vocalist Cara Tolmie. It was really special, but it does help, I think, to be able to experience these works at home or on headphones. The album is very varied – from extended vocal techniques from Tolmie to spoken word and even singing(?), with Treanor slipping between post-rave deconstructions, glitched ambient and the more cerebral, academic or avant-garde, all of which connects and differentiates him from his father Mark Fell (Treanor absolutely has his own aesthetic and is extremely talented at whatever genres he sets his sights on). To my mind, the closing track, “Endless Not”, is a huge drawcard, with Treanor’s spooky synth pulses and Tolmie’s dispassionate listing of “Not” things. It’s hard not to be reminded of Big Hard Excellent Fish’s 1990 broadside “Imperfect List“.