Anyway, I cannot help but keep playing you all this incredible music, postpunkindustrialdubjunglegamelanglitchjazzfolkclassical, as those in the know call it *taps nose*

Laeter – Leibowitz [Laeter Bandcamp]

Liam Bosecke is based on Kaurna country, in Adelaide, and he’s founded a creative community called Empty Frames that aims to raise mental health awareness. His latest album as Laeter is released via that platform, but is of course available on Bandcamp (and in a handsome CD edition!) Blanket Doubt is a wonderful thing that kind of answers the question, “What if indietronica except slow-moving industrial dub?” Intense distorted drum machines and synthetic screeches underscore almost-spoken vocals, or shudder and crash under New Order-esque synth melodies. Pure perverted pleasure.

Damos Room – Gullet (Dirty Protest) [Long Gone/Bandcamp]

Last time I played Damos Room on the show was a mere month ago. I wrote at the time: I’m not sure who Damos is or what’s in their Room, but signs point to it being three guys: Luke Miles, Nicholas Elson & Huw Oleskar. I’ve just found out (because they told me, nothing underhand) that Huw Oleskar is also known as Elijah Minnelli, responsible for some of the most interesting and lovely dub-folk hybrids in recent times, ostensibly under the auspices of Breadminster County Council. As for Damos Room, you can find a series of fantastic, weirdly-shaped releases on their Bandcamp, including a mixtape of two bizarre 40-minute radio pieces, some quasi-singles of abstracted dub/spoken-word/electronics, and the experimental electronics of their collaboration with rapper LYAM, which I played on this show a few years back. So, a month ago I played something from Walk With The Militia, a vaguely-album-shaped item that wasn’t actually their new album – rather it’s a mixtape, entirely in keeping with the mystery what all this is about. It collects – I said – a whole lot of weird shit, but it’s all dub-based experimental electronics, with Minnelli’s distinctive spoken word & low-key singing, odd radio interludes and noise bits and so on. It’s really fantastic. So how about All Shall Go, their new album which is really released now? Well, it’s just as murky, weird-shaped and all as the prior mixtape and earlier works. And as with earlier works, there are also some head-nodding beats and bass, and tracks where Oleskar’s voice chants and sings in nearly melodic fashion. Don’t expect pop, dancehall or grime here, but do expect music that’s evocative, challenging, ancient and modern. Do go deep, but don’t miss that mixtape, or 2020’s Commencement either.

Most of us know German band Carl Gari from their incredibly strong albums made with Egyptian singer/trumpeter/poet/composer Abdullah Miniawy, on AD93 and Amphibian Records. Between those two releases, the band & singer released a live album on Molten Moods, and it’s that label that Carl Gari return to now for their self-titled album, forthcoming in June. This is the first single (by the time of writing I’ve heard the second), and it’s just what the doctor ordered – dark, insistent minimal drum’n’bass if it was produced by Depeche Mode circa Songs of Faith and Devotion, a very specific reference that probably only makes sense to me 🖤

Two young junglists from Bristol tearin’ it up on this new EP, their first for the iconic jungle-revival label RuptureLDN. These guys really know their jungle originals and are making the kind of tracks that wouldn’t have been out of place in an East London club circa ’93. Both Fez The Kid & BRUK have a number of EPs to their names, but have also worked together for a while, and DJ back2back as well. Turn up yr subs and feel the bass pressure while the snares go renegade. Rrrrrrrince out!

A.Fruit – Choice [YUKU/Bandcamp]

Anna Derlemenko aka A.Fruit is a Ukrainian music producer, born in Moscow, but her family relocated to Spain after Russia’s war on Ukraine. She co-runs the Distorted Barcelona club and does a lot of music production training & tips on her Patreon – in fact, the first track I played tonight is the subject of a full track breakdown there, and she’s shared the full Ableton project. Her productions are consistently adventurous, mixing up genres and manipulating sounds while remaining dancefloor friendly, and that’s certainly the case on her new EP Choice for the one & only YUKU. She’s an artist I’ll never not recommend.

upsammy & Valentina Magaletti – It Comes To An End [PAN/Bandcamp]

Dutch producer & DJ upsammy (who visited Sydney recently for Soft Centre) has previously worked the built & natural environment into her music: Germ in a Population of Buildings in 2023 created a whole environment of hallucinatory fauna and automata, repurposing IDM in a similar-but-different way to Eora’s own gi. Valentina Magaletti is one of the most versatile drummer/percussionists working at the moment, found in the postpunk-electronica band Moin, but also remaking kuduro & batida with Afro-Portuguese producer Nídia, a kind of postpunk dub with electronic producer Al Wootton, and plenty of other avant-garde stuff. upsammy & Magaletti’s collaborative album Seismo (yes, it means “earthquake”) came out of a commission from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for which they sampled the sounds of the museum itself, using its spaces as percussive surfaces, and much of the joy of the album comes from the blurring of live drums and other acoustic rhythms with electronic programming and manipulation. Around & amongst the percussion are snippets of voice (a callback Mageletti’s work with Raime and Moin, albeit applied very differently), strange fragmentary samples of guitar & bass, piano notes stretched thin, slow melodic synths. Mostly delicate, mostly the opposite of an earthquake, these are musical giants striding across our world while imps dance in their footprints. It’s a wonderful album.

Hoavi – Colossus [Peak Oil]

And speaking of imps dancing, Russian producer Hoavi is one of the exemplars of music that sounds like skittering insects and tumbling waterfalls, drawing jungle-ish IDM into dub technoid waters. His second album for Peak Oil, Architectonics, takes those aspects into newer territories, with a bank of samples of percussive sounds from around his house, and inspiration taken from Indonesian gamelan and minimalist composition. For all this though, it’s vintage Hoavi – rhythmically complex, deep sound design. Genius.

Peak Oil is run by two Bria/ons – Brion Brionson is the “o” guy, and the other is Brian Foote, who’s been kranky‘s media guy forever as well as running various labels (including Peak Oil just above here!) and playing in various bands. Brian’s also a connoisseur of IDM, electronica & rave in all its variations (solo as Leech), and here he teams up with Paul Dickow, best known as Strategy, maker of much dubwise, ambient & technoid musics and himself co-founder of the Community Library label. High Cube is their first outing together as a duo, and you can feel their shared musical heritage in its bones. Skittering IDM glitchbeats hover above a dub techno skeleton, and there’s a jazzy sensibility to the keyboards. Charming.

Sydney’s Richard Pike, alum of PVT, is now based in London. He can be found in various ensembles, including with Joe Quirke, with whom he co-runs the Salmon Universe label, and under his own name has been making ambient-techno-hybrid-orchestral soundtracks for TV. Outside of that, he’s released solo music under the alias DEEP LEARNING on Oxtail Recordings, based around subtly rhythmic glitchy loops, but now returns to his own name for album that mixes late-night piano and glitchy dub-techno. It’s not surprising to discover that the creation of this music was directly triggered by the death of Ryuichi Sakamoto, but the music takes darker paths than the Japanese master. The full album’s out later in May, and the last single brings in something of the jungle-meets-dub techno we’ve heard a lot of tonight.

It’s lovely to find Laurence Pike – brother to Richard above – coming out on Philip Sherburne & Albert Salinas‘ Balmat label in late May. Pike was drummer in Pivot/PVT and Triosk, and the hallucinatory melding of live jazz and micro-sampled loops has remained central to his DNA since the start. There’s a trickery at the heart of Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet, hinted at with “possible”: while there are guests on these tracks, it’s never a jazz quintet, and still predominantly Laurence solo. The “utopias” denote an idea of freedom which Pike is reaching for, in continuity with his last album The Undreamt-of Centre – that people are not atomised individuals but exist interdependently with their environment. And for all that this is a solo album, Pike begins the album with a substantial, sumptuous feature from Eora/Sydney pianist Novak Manojlovic. Utopian indeed.

English composer David Norland, who lives between LA & London, is best known as a soundtrack writer for film and stage, as well as a composer of electronic and experimental choral music. He has an album coming via Denovali called La Source, which is not a soundtrack, but incorporates choral music into its beat-driven electronic framework. Strangely, I didn’t hear the single “E-Car Soul” as choral, but the “reNYX” by UK vocal/electronic collective NYX reworks it into their image, with vocal harmonies and rearranged electronics.

A pioneer of live laptop music, Carl Stone has been at it since the 1980s, and has had a renaissance since Unseen Worlds released a series of his early music on triple LP sets. Stone has for a long time lived between LA and Japan, and on this new CD he’s collaborating with Japanese artist Asuna Arashi, whose toy instruments are sampled and processed by Stone and then handed by to Arashi for her to rework and… send back to Stone. With all these layers of processing, it’s not often easy to make out the original toy instruments, but it’s pretty immersive, experimental but friendly. In keeping with a lot of Stone’s own work, the titles are all anagrams of “Carl Stone Asuma”, all of which are unreasonably good (“A Nacreous Slant”? “Nascent Arousal”!)

A few years ago, German jazz trio Loom & Thread released their debut album Island Grammar on macro rec. Pianist Tom Schneider is known as “frontman” of the live techno act KUF, playing as lead instrument the sampler. On Loom & Thread’s debut, Schneider at least played piano primarily, albeit sampled and processed live, as were the double bass of Tobi Fröhlich and the drums of Daniel Klein. For their follow-up Bandcamp, Schneider is well and truly a sampler-player (although yes, piano’s in there too), triggering & manipulating samples of two saxophonists and two vibraphone players (one of whom is drummer Daniel Klein). The samples’ use can range from chaotic scatter to undulant layers, around which is constructed a form of contemporary jazz. It’s weirder than their first album, but just as enjoyable. You can see them playing some of this live here, with Fröhlich also alternating between double bass & sampler.

It’s seems like yesterday – well OK, it was only last week – when I was talking about the richness of the Norwegian (and generally, Nordic) music scene(s), highlighting among others the stunning new solo album from saxophonist, singer, composer etc Espen Reinertsen. Reinertsen’s album was released on SusannaSonata, run by the artist known as Susanna or Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, who is also Susanna Wallumrød. She’s the youngest of a family of musicians – as well as their cousin, jazz pianist David Wallumrød, her brother Fredrik Wallumrød is a drummer of mainly rock & pop, and the oldest of the lot is pianist Christian Wallumrød (born in 1971 – Susanna was born in 1979), a renowned jazz pianist & keyboard player, whose eponymous Ensemble have released a series of albums on ECM Records. Christian & Fredrik also release music made of drum machines & synths as Brutter (also here) – glitchy, arhythmic synthetic grooves. Anyway, last week I remarked on the uncanny beauty of Reinertsen’s album, and there’s something similarly bewitching, gorgeous but slightly wrong about the music on the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble’s latest album Non Sonett, released by Belgian post-folk/jazz label Aspen Edities. The label specialises in acoustic experimental music by and large, but does slip sideways into electronics at times, and so does this latest album, where minimalist jazz compositions sidle up to Norwegian folk and haunted electronics, while remaining utterly restrained throughout. You may think this would sound cold & difficult, but it’s not: it’s engrossing and delightful, like Penguin Cafe Orchestra recording Talk Talk’s last albums, Keith Jarrett jamming Sunn O))), Henry Purcell discovering free jazz. If you only listen to one Norwegian jazz/folk record this week, make it this one (but don’t stop there).

tokesmo – 01 [tokesmo Bandcamp]

Andrea B of doom/psych/metal trio Morkobot is tokesmo, a project in which he combines field recordings and found sounds with electronics. Two EPs launch the project; on tksm 01 it’s more sound-art and noise than rhythms, while tksm 02 transforms found sounds into percussive instruments for its IDM-meets-industrial beats.

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart – laundry | blood [International Anthem/Bandcamp]

Last year I played a track from a trio of Chicago-based women who were all string players and singers – in fact, I loved it so much I played it in Part 2 of my Best of 2025. Whitney Johnson on viola, Lia Kohl on cello and Macie Stewart on violin don’t just all sing – they all operate various tape machines, into which they feed their sounds and alchemically transmute their playing & singing into dusty loops. You can see this gorgeous transformation happening in real time in this video. Last year’s “stone | piece” was one partially improvised composition that’s part of the BODY SOUND album now released by Chicago (post-?)jazz institution International Anthem. There’s a surprising variety of sound here – string drones melting into tape hiss are part of it, but so are plucked prepared cello, loops glitched through manipulated recording heads, deconstructed folk melodies and quasi-classical accompaniments to angelic singing, squalling loops played at triple-time and roaring bass as the cello is pitched down multiple octaves. An extraordinary album like no other.

Lia Kohl also turns up as one guest on the brilliant new EP Music of Many Nows from Stockholm-based Spanish sound-artist Hara Alonso. Here, Alonso combines accidental and casual recordings of life going by, combined with recordings of a nearby choir, a found piano and a couple of guests, and makes beautifully cracked vignettes, much deeper musically than this method would suggest. Honestly this couldn’t be more Utility Fog, and I love it so much.

Naarm-based artist & musician Daniel O’Toole was based here in Eora until a few years back, and was responsible for a lot of well-loved street art under the name Ears. Accompanying that were a few albums of funky instrumental hip-hop as Captain Earwax, but these days Daniel is emphasising the more abstract, gallery-friendly side of his art – gorgeous colour gradients and textures that you can sample here – and musically he’s making incredible custom-built instruments alongside his own strings, keyboard playing, percussion etc: check out the particle plate and the particle drum. Hand-made gestural instruments like this are at the core of O’Toole’s new album Outer Magnolia, but equally there’s a lot of acoustic sounds here – folktronica but not like your Daddy made it.

London-based Scottish musician Euan Alexander Millar-McMeeken has recorded a lot of solo ambient music as glacis, and led indie/folk band The Kays Lavelle for many years. He has a substantial number of collaborative projects, many of them duos, all of them wonderful: Graveyard Tapes with Matthew Collings and Civic Hall with Craig Tattersall, Bird Battles with Jesse Narens and now Yoal with Satomimagae. In 2024, Euan released his first album under his full name, All The Weather Of The Human Heart, a deeply moving work that’s a meditation on loss, in which the central vocals & piano are cracked & smudged through digital & analogue means. Similar approaches to sound design are found on the solo follow-up Framed Insects – fragile songs and tape hiss interrupted by distorted beats or glitched into strange structures. Just gorgeous.