Arabic trip-hop? Nordic jazz-inflected indie pop? Minimal drum’n’bass? Bees?
Whatever you’re looking for, we’ve got it.
LISTEN AGAIN, with a vengeance! Stream on demand from fbi.radio, podcast here!
Yasmine Hamdan – Vows سبع صنايع [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
Yasmine Hamdan – Daya3 ضياع [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
While I’ve featured quite a bit of Lebanese music on this show, it’s leaned towards the experimental. Yasmine Hamdan‘s career goes back to the late ’90s with indie/trip-hop band Soapkills, all three of whose independent albums have been re-released by Belgian powerhouse Crammed Discs, whose catalogue covers postpunk and experimental music as well as “world music” from all over the planet. Hamdan released two previous solo albums with Crammed, and after a few singles (of which I’ve played a couple), her third album
I remember, I forget is out now. It’s no surprise that this is album deeply affected by what’s happened to Beirut and Lebanon over the last few years, including the horrific port explosion in 2020, the intensifying of its economic collapse as well as continuing incursions by Israel. It’s actually a bittersweet album as Hamdan, who is based in Paris, has great affection for her birthplace of Beirut. It’s a beautiful, compulsively listenable collection of songs that easily fuses Arabic pop and trip-hop.
Snakeskin – Blindsided [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. This album, too, 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.
Majken – Mister Kristus [sing a song fighter]
Swedish singer-songwriter Majken grew up in a Pentecostal household where music was ever-present. And while she now believes that “politicized religion is the most dangerous thing in the world”, those musical roots are still heard in the blissful harmonies in her songs – her new album is called
Korus after all. Religion is directly addressed in this song, of course. The record, released on October 24th, is mostly performed by herself, on guitar, piano, synths and samples, and a harp recorded in a Malmö concert hall. The contradictions between choral arrangements and Majken’s non-belief, between gentle indie-folk and electronics, bring a tension to the work which enhances the beauty of Majken’s voice and songwriting.
Mikoo – Ties [Sofa Music/Bandcamp]
Mikoo – Blues [Sofa Music/Bandcamp]
Norway’s Sofa Music is a consistent home to music that’s off the beaten path – jazz, sure, but not only, or hybridised with contemporary classical, folk and electronics. Mikoo is a case in point, a band led by their drummer Michaela Antalova, a Slovakian musician based in Oslo. The music is mostly written by Antalova, in collaboration with the band, a highly talented collection of musicians on keyboards, guitars & zither, bass and vocals. Singer Ina Sagstuen does often write her own vocal melodies, and mostly the lyrics, which on their gorgeous new album
It Floats mostly revolve around concepts of inheritance, including inherited trauma as well as traditions behaviours. These are dark songs in intimate chamber setting, with the percussion never far from prominence. It could easily pass you by – you may not hear about it anywhere else – and I really recommend giving it a listen when you have some quiet time.
The Leaf Library – The Long Dead King (Mücha remix) [Objects Forever]
When, as mentioned above, I saw Snakeskin playing in London, they were actually supporting spacerock/indietronic band The Leaf Library – two UFog faves on one night! When chatting with Matt from the band, he let me know they had a remix album on its way, and here it is:
Flowers at the Border, released on their own label Objects Forever. The full album’s out on October 24th (and as I’m writing this late, it’s already happened!), with reworkings of past TLL songs by various fellow travellers, pretty much in keeping with the band’s gregarious approach which takes in spacerock/krautrock and electronic influences. Here’s some lovely looping electro from London’s Amanda Butterworth aka Mücha, whose interest in yoga and the philosophy of body-in-the-world influences her deep electronic productions.
Crimewave – Semaphore [Fool’s Gold Records/Bandcamp (single)/Bandcamp (album)]
Manchester’s Crimewave makes a pretty unique mixture of UK bass & experimental electronic styles with shoegazey indie guitar music. He now finds himself of New York label Fool’s Gold Records with new single “Semaphore“. His second new single, this was a pretty sure indicator of an album on its way, and now
Scenes has been announced! This track leans more on the electronic side, with ethereal voices and a twitchy, loping beat.
Bomb A Lil Joy – Unpaid Attorney [Translation Loss/Bandcam]
OK so, right out of leftfield comes this… Just nonchalantly dropping a new band name, Bomb A Lil Joy is actually a kind of weird heavy music supergroup. Christian McKenna, on whose Translation Loss label this album will be released, released a few albums as End Christian/Xtian and with various psychedelic rock bands, and while Translation Loss Records are mostly a metal zone, his C Trip A is a weird hip-hop project with rapper Anthony Adams, and Pynuka is electronic pop/trip-hop with singer Anda Szilagyi and the great, versatile Justin K Broadrick. Here McKenna is working with the legendary vocalist Eugene S Robinson of terrifying experimental rock band Oxbow. Robinson’s presence brings a poetic, chaotic and sinister note to these pieces, aided by frellow travellers like JK Broadrick, Kevin Hufnagel and others. Very interested to hear the rest of this!
BAYANG (tha Bushranger) & Nerdie – Ridgy [CONTENT.NET.AU/Bandcamp]
Korean Australian producer/sound-artist Angus Alec Minhyuk Jin does incredible sound design for TV commercials, films and more, but as Nerdie his roots are in hip-hop. BAYANG (tha Bushranger), mind you, has roots in death metal, but on their collaborative album
WAR WITH CHINA the pair address Australia’s cultural alienation, as they put it, riffing into punk as much as hip-hop. Good stuff.
Will Glaser – Bees [Not Applicable/Bandcamp]
London-based drummer Will Glaser is very busy in the London jazz & experimental scene, appearing on records or live with the likes of Yazz Ahmed, Kit Downs, Sly and the Family Drone, Ruth Goller, James Allsopp, Alex Bonney and more. Prior to this release, the only solo works Glaser has released are the all-drums
Some Drum Sounds and the mostly-drums
Some Drum & Other Sounds (both of which are excellent mind you). However, on October 24th comes his first major solo work as auteur, the name of which is hard to even fit into a sentence:
Music Of The Terrazoku: Ethnographic Recordings From An Imagined Future is about as sci-fi as you can get, imagining a musical artefact from sometime in the late 21st century, after the oncoming climate collapse. Glaser’s drums/percussion and electronics are accompanied here by brilliant musicians including Ruth Goller, Agathe Max, Tara Cunningham, James Allsopp and Alex Bonney (I’m mostly listing people whose work I know). The album claims influences as wide as Harry Partch, Tom Waits, the aforementioned Justin K Broadrick among others, and there’s no dearth of electronics there too (appropriately for the avant-garde Not Applicable label, co-run by both members of Icarus among others). It’s super weird and great – the titular Bees of this track most certainly make an appearance!
Wottakku – Moonlanding [Ornament170]
Russian drum’n’bass producer Hoji has made some substantial releases via Berlin-based Samurai Music, home of a tribal, minimalist form of drum’n’bass. He’s recently started his own label Ornament170, which seems to be on a similar tip, and very well-curated thus far. It’s not at all clear who Wottakku is – there’s some suggestion this isn’t their first release, but I can’t find any info… It is, in any case, four tracks of super dark, super stripped down d’n’b beats with outbursts of intensely-chopped jungle breaks. Pretty special.
Rutger Zuydervelt – Fragment 16 [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Rutger Zuydervelt – Fragment 40 [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
When I first started playing Machinefabriek on this show, I’d discovered his longform drone works and then his remarkable sound-art, pieces of electro-acoustic music put together in mysterious ways… It was music that immediately stood apart. Over many years Rutger Zuydervelt has honed his craft, working with talented musicians, improvisers, classical musicians and more – but recently he’s also become interested in working
in the box, so to speak, on purely electronic music. He’s also over some years been involved with soundtrack writing for theatre and dance, as well as TV, and now has been creating musical cues for the VPRO (Dutch public broadcaster) show Frontlinie, 30-minute in-depth journalistic pieces by acclaimed journalist Bram Vermeulen. Zuydervelt goes into a bit more detail about his process in this Substack post, but it’s almost all created with MIDI instruments in Logic Pro. Clearly the alliterative possibilities were too much to resist, so he’s now dropped a selection of cues as
Fifty Favorite Frontlinie Fragments – short pieces evocative enough to stand without the visuals. There’s a wide variety of stuff here – it’s like a library music collection, except all selections that already had a home.
The Dwarfs of East Agouza – Goldfish Molasses [Constellation/Bandcamp]
One of the weirdest permutations in the Egyptian underground, The Dwarfs of East Agouza are three central players: Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls, aka Alvarius B, co-founder of Sublime Frequencies etc etc; Maurice Louca of Lefkha and many incredible solo releases and other collaborations, and Sam Shalabi of Shalabi Effect, Land of Kush and so much more. Shalabi has a long association with Constellation Records, and has been based in Montréal for slabs of his life – but
Sasquatch Landslide is the trio’s first album for the label. As one might expect, it’s completely bizarre stuff, no two tracks are the same and much of the material is abrasively abstract. “Goldfish Molasses” is perhaps no less chaotic, but the molasses it’s played through slow it right down into a murky sludge.
Bernard Parmegiani – Sadiquement Votre III [Transversales Disques/Bandcamp]
It’s crazy that 12 years after his death, there’s still new music coming out from pioneering French musique concrète/acousmatic composer Bernard Parmegiani. Mind you, it’s also crazy looking at his career, knowing he started off splicing tape in the late 1960s, and was making computer-based works until his death in 2013. The Transversales Disques label has released two
Mémoire Magnétique compilations of little-heard or unheard material made for film, TV, radio and theatre. As these are typically short cues and the like, there’s an opportunity to hear wonderfully strange audio experiments, and
Mémoire Magnétique, vol. 3 compiles material from 1967-1971, so it’s pretty trippy stuff. I’m always interested in the rhythmic stuff, which is nothing like techno or IDM but has strange parallels.
Saint Abdullah – The Wound Where The Light Enters [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp]
UK’s Phantom Limb label have revived their Imaginal Soundtracking series to commission 5 filmscores for the same 3-minute short film by Iranian director Somayeh. The film, titled
The Wound Is Where The Light Enters (view it in full on Vimeo), is an unsettling view of a relationship, with only whispered words and a small amount of foley sound. The five artists invited to make soundtracks are all Iranian: Saint Abdullah are brothers now based between Tehran and London. I’ve played their collaborations with Eomac extensively, and before that their earlier works that melded hypnotic dub with the sounds of Shia Islam, field recordings from Islam, TV broadcasts etc. The duo here focus on the movement between the male & female actors, creating a dizzying piece of prepared piano & clarinet, shuddering noise, strummed guitar, and violin and vocal samples (I think). It’s very filmic.
Ivar Grydeland – Virkning av lysets brytning [Sofa Music/Bandcamp]
Norwegian guitarist Ivar Grydeland is a member of two quite different, important bands: the post-jazz/post-folk/post-rock of Huntsville and the avant-garde improv ensemble Dans les arbres. Both have been released on the wonderful Hubro label, on which Grydeland has a couple of solo albums, but his latest lands on the equally rad Sofa Music. Here we find Grydeland twisting his guitar into new shapes – sometimes it’s the pure drones of the sort that Oren Ambarchi became famous for in the ’00s; elsewhere subtly-detuned chords flicker rhythmically through glitched gates, abstract in a way that only makes it more beautiful. In the middle of the first track, Michaela Antalová of Mikoo contributes a loping beat; the rest is pure, shimmering, processed electric guitar. Super special.
Alister Spence – Interior Signal [Room40/Bandcamp]
Alister Spence – Breath Formation [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). But Alister’s creativity takes him in all directions, and his forthcoming album
Within Without 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.
Balmorhea – I Thought I Wanted to Meet You [Deutsche Grammophon]
A few years ago the US folk/postrock duo Balmorhea surprised the Utility Fog team (that’s me) with an album on the venerable German classical label Deutsche Grammophon. This is partly due to DG getting on the post/neo-classical bandwagon (admittedly their ReComposed series of remixed symphonic works goes back to at least 2005), but it’s also less surprising when you remember that Balmorhea have incorporated classical instruments and styles from very early on. Their albums for DG have been rather pared back, and quite bewitching at their best.
The Trap is a movie soundtrack, so it has classical and ambient gestures, and it’s for-purpose music, but it’s as touching as their other work. Here’s floating piano & organ, muttering clarinets(?) and background distortions, eventually fading into gorgeous close-mic’d felted piano.
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, are now gearing up to release Lawrence’s third album with the great sound-artist 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.
soccer Committee – Little Sorrow [Morc Records/Bandcamp/soccer Committee Bandcamp]
I have been a dedicated fan of Dutch singer-songwriter Mariska Baars for many years, via Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek – both working with him under her own name, and then in equally mysterious projects such as Piiptsjilling and FEAN with the Kleefstra brothers and others. Where Jan Kleefstra performs his poetry in Frisian, Baars sings either wordlessly or in English. Her work, as soccer Committee and in other groups, is characterised by an exquisite restraint, whereby if you’re listening you can’t help but be drawn into the patiently unfolding melodies and subtle but essential textures. Even without Machinefabriek’s sensitive deconstructions around the edges of their collaborative work, Baars seems to dismantle and rebuild the fabric of her songs so that they are as attenuated as possible while still holding together. In 2023 she released ❤️ /Lamb, her most confident and fully-realised album yet, and only 2 years later, she’s back on Morc Records with eye, which is equally gorgeous and tenuous.
I do want to point you to where I discovered Mariska Baars, with Machinefabriek on their incredible album
Drawn, which birthed the
Redrawn compilation of remixes and covers – an album I return to frequently.
Paul Jebanasam – be earth now [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
FBi Radio alum (back when he was part of the Garage Pressure crew) Paul Jebanasam, originally from Sri Lanka, has since based himself in Bristol, where he co-founded Subtext Recordings with James Ginzburg (who now runs the label on his own). It was from the start “post-dubstep”, but still focused on bass weight, and Jebanasam’s earliest recordings combined a contemporary classical ambition with that bass heritage, much like Roly Porter‘s solo work post-Vex’d. You can find some of Paul’s dubstep work with Farj (also of Garage Pressure) here. Still based in Bristol, Jebanasam continues to create ambient work with galactic scope and sub-bass. His new album
mātr, out on December 2nd, explores the duality of geological and human time frames, its title meaning “mother” in Sanskrit but also inevitably referencing “matter”. Adjusting our thinking towards geological timelines may help humanity out of its most destructive tendencies… we wish…
The Form Group – Defence Loop/NATO Dream Slip [Wayside & Woodland Recordings/Bandcamp]
Matt Ashton from aforementioned UFog faves The Leaf Library makes ambient/experimental music as The Form Group that’s some distance away from The Leaf Library’s spacerock and krautrock excursions, if in keeping with their penchant for experimentation. His
Provincial Echo is coming on epic45‘s Wayside & Woodland Recordings. First previews suggest Fennesz’s arid glitchscapes as well as the cold ambient of Biosphere and even Sunn O))). This is evocative ambient music of substantial scope.
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 & 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 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!
