Abigail Snail – Attach Bayonets [Romac Puncture Repairs]

You can get an idea of the experimental roots background of London guitarist Stef Ketteringham, usually known as Stef Kett, from his 10-year-old Guitar Arrangements (2016) and its sequel More Guitar Arrangements from the following year – a loose, free jazz approach to bluesy guitar, the outer limits of American Primitive. It’s not that far from there to punk rock, but nor is it far from the swamp. Garage rock is more the touchstone with Abigail Snail though, when Kett, on vox, guitar & bass, teams up with the incredibly versatile drummer Will Glaser, who’s played with the likes of Sly & the Family Drone, Yazz Ahmad, Ruth Goller and many other luminaries of the London jazz scene, and released an incredible solo album last year. The music’s a kind of hysterical, broken-down form of garage rock, dragged into swampy blues-jazz with the addition of James Allsopp on tenor sax & bass clarinet, a fixture of London’s jazz & experimental scenes for the last 2 decades. The album bio describes them as “London spray band Abigail Snail”, and the raucous-yet-vulnerable music here could well suit this new genre (as you know, we at Utility Fog love ridiculous new genres). Anyway, stick this on your boombox and scare pedestrians as you cycle to work next week.

Fabian Altstötter founded his solo project Jungstötter some years after his postpunk band Sizarr went on hiatus. Solo, his music draws from the dramatic experimental songwriting of Scott Walker & David Sylvian – on 2023’s One Star, his rich vocals were offset by industrial rumblings and shifting electronics, muddled in pitch-shifted shadows of themselves, mashed beats interrupting the flow, horn and string arrangements that grow raucous. New album Sustained is now announced, and single “Overturn” is very pared down – just that voice, some percussion, sparse electric piano, field recordings of children’s voices and occasional single note hits from horns. Oh, and the scrabbling guitar at the end, all suggesting something creepy around the corner. No doubt this will be an excellent album.

The most unexpected release of the century? Given that Tom Waits‘ last solo album Bad As Me came out in 2011, we could have been forgiven for expecting that was the end, but Massive Attack (who have stuck to random singles with feature artists for the last decade) convinced him to create this anti-war anthem, clattering percussion straight out of Tom’s Bone Machine, piano straight out of many of 3D’s productions, and Tom’s barked vocals which could refer to ICE or US troops in Venezuela, Iran, or heck, Vietnam. It’s proper chilling stuff.

From her soon-forthcoming album Detached From The Rest OF You, Loraine James here works with Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto on absolute thriller of a song, the beats a Loraine glitch-bass special and Hatori’s vocals spoken and sung but always cut-up. This is her “pop” album lol… Well, it’s full of great singers and James herself sings on more than a few tracks, but it’s still super experimental.

On her new EP MYSTIQ DISCOTHEQ, Naarm-based rapper Naavikaran puts a South Asian spin on her EDM-influenced rap & pop, enlisting Simo Soo to help bring out the deconstructed club vibes. Across the EP, Naavikaran raps and sings in Tamil, Marathi, Hindi and English, covering life as a disabled, LGBTQI+ refugee. Impressive and entertaining.

Brazilian band deafkids may nominally be classed as “punk”, but hardcore punk mixes with industrial and noise in their sound, along with electronic music of all shapes. They released the incredible uncategorizable Metaprogramação on Neurosis‘ Neurot Recordings in 2019, and then when the pandemic hit, they put out a series of EPs that mixed Latin rhythmic complexity with guitar pedal and software experimentation, collected now on the album Ritos do Colapso. Except before that in 2020 came their collaboration DEAFBRICK with cross-continental noise-metal-industrial-electronic duo PETBRICK. So with various collabs and oddities in the interim, their forthcoming CICATRIZES DO FUTURO (Scars of the Future) is their first album proper since Metaprogramação. It looks to be more electronic, more intense, more angry than ever, a visceral reaction to the state of the world. Highly rhythmic and danceable, it shifts between hardcore punk, industrial, Latin American and club sounds with abandon. I can’t wait to hear the whole thing.

Following her vaporwave-trip-hop album Friend from last year, james K now reaches out for some heavy-duty Friends to remix the album. Hesaitix is the alias of James Whipple, better known as M.E.S.H, pioneer of “deconstructed club”. Here, though, he’s taking james K’s “Doom Bikini” and adding accelerated breakbeats in a lightweight jungle style. Very nice.

Zoë Mc Pherson – Ambient Snake (Yushh remix) [SFX/Bandcamp]

One of the leading lights of deconstructed club music (as we probably don’t call it anymore), Zoë Mc Pherson, releases the remix collection from last year’s Upside Down album, via their own SFX label. A great collection of various sorts of experimental bass music, including here some frenetic jungle/breakcore from Italian DJ & producer Nziria, and some ambient technoid lushness from Bristol’s Yushh, who will be playing here soon – at the Sydney Opera House, no less – for DUNJ’s Vivid Live event, also featuring Carrier and our own gi and Autogenesis.

Ravensburg, Germany-based producer Sarah Rendle ARTISOMA, debuting on YUKU with the Mobilya EP, exploring various configurations of UK bass and percussive techno. Quality production, as expected from anything on YUKU.

It’s almost inevitable that whatever is next released by French label Carton Records will be unlike whatever you’ve previously heard. Amédée de Murcia (aka Somaticae) on synths and Édouard Ribouillault aka C_C on drum machines, samplers & fx make up OD Bongo, whose second album Bongoville is technically co-released by Carton, zamzamrec, Prix Libre Record and basalte (whoever they are). This multiplicity of co-presentations is quite common in France it seems. Whoever you’re encountering it via, you’re in for a treat: hardware samplers, synths & drum machines produce a psychedelic cacophany of dance music styles, drawing in trap, juke and gqom with their bass-heavy techno – and a dub sensibility is ever-present. That’s got to hit the spot if you’re a Utility Fog listener!

Colectivo Casa Amarela are one of those Portuguese labels that you know will come through with the goods, even if you’re not sure what those goods will be. In the case of Old Dark Champagne, percussionist Haydn Douet Lukies uses his environment as his instruments – in this case the watery soundscape of Cacilhas, an industrial area in the estuary of Tagus River (Lisbon is built around that estuary), along with rusting chains, architectural surfaces and so on. But from these ingredients he makes music whose rhythms and sounds are linked to the beats of jungle, UK drill, industrial dub and other bass musics, as well as Arabic percussion and the Lisbon-centred, Afro-diasporic sounds of batida. It’s only an EP, and leaves us wanting more.

Objekt‘s label Kapsela continues to be essential, now releasing an EP, Re-Weave, from the brilliant percussive techno sound-artist Tristan Arp. Case in point, tonight’s track “Forking Paths” starts with blissful synth arpeggios, but a minute and a bit in, rolling snares and a light but prominent “tok” on the 2nd & 4th beats drop in, switching into a syncopated bassline, and these various parts undulate and shuffle through the course of the track. The title is a reference to Borges’ classic story “The Garden of Forking Paths”, but also to the EP’s dedication to weaving mycelial networks and labyrinths. Beautiful.

Naarm’s Jim Sellars makes some of the most weirdly crunchy, alternate-reality sample-based music of the last decade or so, under the name Yunzero. As the quote says on this new 2-tracker, “there’s something off”. If you wanted a summary of Utility Fog’s favourite kinds of music, “there’s something off” is a pretty good one, and it’s not a bad description of the jittery, rhythmic pieces on show here.

One album I loved from last year came from Argentinian cellist Violeta García working with the Swiss composer/producer Hora Lunga. The two musicians melded sound-art and noise with acoustic gestures, post-club sub-bass and glitched ambiences. Now Hora Lunga presents his New Age Music Vol. 2-3, which couches new agey soundscapes in post-modern irony (check the CD-R edition, which comes enclosed in repurposed pop album packaging). Deliberately awkward edits cultivate a sense of unease, only emphasised with guest vocals from the likes of Junge Eko aka Catia Lanfranchi, whispering over stop-start breaks. García appears with a vocal performance that pairs with industrial beats reminiscent of Atari Teenage Riot; meanwhile there’s angelic voice and distortion on “Doom Metal”, which is actually more like shoegaze, while Sam Portugal brings something more like black metal vocals to the dubbed-out “When I”. The double-album lurches from one genre to the next, never alighting on “new age” as such, but embodying the new, the post-, at all times.

With his greyfade label, NY composer, sound-artist & designer Joseph Branciforte presents music at the crossroads of contemporary classical, contemporary jazz and experimental electronic, especially where they meet in minimalism. This has led to some remarkable ideas, like the Folio edition of an acoustic reconstruction of Taylor Deupree‘s ambient-glitch classic Stil. Glitch, though, is a hallmark of the label, especially with Branciforte’s own works like the label’s debut release LP1 and its follow-up, which paired Branciforte with brilliant jazz singer Theo Bleckmann, with Branciforte on electronics and Fender Rhodes. That instrument brings us to this new collaboration, with Belgian Rhodes player Jozef Dumoulin. Both artists play their own Fender Rhodes, re-sampling and processing in realtime, and the music is (re)constructed from small fragments – but don’t think this is austere studio deconstruction; Joseph & Jozef are seasoned improvisers, and their intuitive connection is found throughout. In addition, a lot of the “editing” was done live in Branciforte’s realtime editing software. The album is released in a special deluxe edition with the whole 70 minute work on one CD, and an additional 4 CDs which contain the tracks spread out across them, to be re-sequenced or even layered if the listener wishes.

Rhythmic sounds here which hint at glitch-edits but are purely prepared piano, from Oslo-based Belgian pianist Jonas Cambien, whose Man Eating Tree is released by Norwegian label Sonic Transmissions Records. The release consists of four pieces, I believe part improvised and part composed, of rhythmic movement and minimalist gestures on prepared & unprepared piano and electric organ. Lovely stuff.

One of Eora/Sydney’s best jazz bands, Microfiche, have their third album With Time coming out on June 12th. The album marks 10 years together as a band, and bids farewell to pianist/keyboardist Novak Manojlovic – replaced live now by the brilliant guitarist Hilary Geddes, although Novak still plays on the album, along with clarinettist/violist Phillippa Murphy-Haste, bassist Max Alduca, trumpeter Nick Calligeros, saxophonist Sam Gill (recently awarded the 2025 Freedman Jazz Fellowship) and drummer Holly Conner (who you’ve heard filling in on this show on a number of occasions). All of them are interested in music across genre, all are composers and improvisers and producers one way or other. The first single from the album is composed by Novak, and it’s a beautifully restrained piece with subtle details, clusters of virtuosity inside small musical gestures. The whole album’s special, stay tuned for more!

Here’s a new single from an album that’s coming… sometime… from the great Norwegian label Hubro. Mariam Wallentin is one of the most extraordinary singers of our age – known for her postrock/pop/experimental duo Wildbirds & Peacedrums with her husband, drummer Andreas Werliin, and for her immense, emotive vocals with Fire! Orchestra, the Nordic free jazz big band centred around the Swedish trio Fire! formed by Werliin along with bassist Johan Berthlin and saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. Wallentin also has a solo project as Mariam The Believer which is perhaps more pop but still involves many experimental/jazz musicians. Here she is working with the Vestnorsk Jazzensemble, a jazz ensemble based in Bergen in the west of Norway, who commissioned a collaboration with Wallentin which reworks material from Mariam The Believer and even going back to Wildbirds & Peacedrums. However, “Basel” is a new song, a slow jazz groove with a pensive melody. Can’t wait to hear the rest.

New York’s New Amsterdam Records are notionally a classical label, who tend to put out contemporary classical-adjacent pop, indie and experimental music as much as full-blown orchestral/ensemble work such as Sarah Kirkland Snider‘s compositions. On her second NewAm album Balance, Berlin-based Claire Dickson writes beautiful, laid-back songs around patient synth & piano patterns, fluttering strings, twinkling harp… Even when Lesley Mok‘s drums and Zoh Amba‘s sax are in the picture, it’s the slow-paced ostinati that call the shots. Dreamy & lovely stuff.

Speaking of low-key… Freda D’Souza is a London-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist who you may have heard me bugging you about before – or not, because she is the exact opposite of prolific. Her Windowledge EP from 2023 is small but perfectly formed and “The Love Song of J Alfreda D’Souza” speaks to me both on the pun level and also just as a wondrous song & performance. Anyway, how lucky are we then that she’s just pushed out a tiny single, with the lovely “lullabye” as the lead but backed up with a blissful Björk cover! The glitched, twinkling electronics of Vespertine (still my favourite Björk era) are replaced by layers of her voice and strings.

Then again, if you like doom & post-metal, Freda’s band Wēven have just released their Wychelm EP, which is highly worth your time too.