Playlist 11.08.24

Utility Fog

A lot of moody music tonight, some different types of “jazz”, music from Norway, Japan, the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Canada and of course Australia.

LISTEN AGAIN, it’s a mood. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

ØKSE – Amager feat. billy woods [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
ØKSE – Amar Økse [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
Starting tonight with a record that literally came out today. It’s odd to find essentially a free jazz record on billy woods‘ great underground hip-hop label Backwoodz Studioz, but here you have it. ØKSE are a Norwegian-American quartet, as far as I can see, featuring the great Norwegian saxophonist Mette Rasmussen and Norwegian bassist Petter Eldh whose Koma Saxo we heard earlier this year. Eldh plays synths and sampler as well as holding down some wicked bass, and Haitian composer, percussionist & turntablist Val Jeanty adds scratches and other sounds (she’s credited as “sound chemist”), while NYC-based Setter Harris pounds out live free-jazz breakbeats. So it’s pretty out-there stuff already, and the rhythm section is heavy and nimble. On their self-titled debut record, half the album (four tracks) has guest appearances from NYC hip-hop vocalists, including both billy woods and his Armand Hammer other half ELUCID. The word “alchemical” may be overplayed in music writing, but there’s definitely some kind of magical transmutation going on here – from this afternoon’s listen this is shaping up to be a 2024 highlight already!

Coppé – My Funny Valentine (Sonny-Boy Anderson & GIZAT Rework)* [Mango + Sweetrice Records/Bit-Phalanx Music]
Coppé – Fever [Mango + Sweetrice Records/Bit-Phalanx Music]
Coppé – Cry Me A River (DJ Kensei Remix) [Mango + Sweetrice Records/Bit-Phalanx Music]
A few weeks ago I previewed the new album from Japanese chanteuse and experimental electronic pop veteran Coppé, someone who’s worked with the likes of Plaid, Atom, Terminal11, Georgia’s Nikakoi and many others. Aside from IDM & experimental electronica, she is well-versed in jazz and classical music, and in 2022 decided to do a “pure jazz” album – albeit still with an interesting sound. *​(​Un​-​)​tweaked featured mostly covers of jazz standards, with one or two originals, and of course the “un-” implies *( -​)​tweaked, which is now here in the form of a remix album. It’s all great, with some admirably radical reworkings. Having selected the first track, I then went searching and discovered that Sonny-Boy Anderson is none other than the son of The Designers Republic founder Ian Anderson, whose cartoonish, typeface-obsessed designs defined Warp Records, Pop Will Eat Itself and more from the beginning of the ’90s. Sonny’s drum’n’bassy rework of Coppé’s “My Funny Valentine” cover is a collaboration with young UK artist GIZAT. And then we have a brilliant deconstruction of her “Cry Me A River” by DJ Kensei.

MAREWREW – Etukuma Kara (M.RUX Remix) [Pingipung Records/Bandcamp]
Staying in Japan, but heading north, we find MAREWREW, an a capella quartet of women keeping alive the musical tradition of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido and other northern islands of Japan. The Ainu’s culture has long been suppressed, and the “Ukouk” singing here is incredible: repetitive canon structures (rounds) in which the singers move the reptitions slightly out of phase – live! MAREWREW’s original album Ukouk. Round Singing Voices of the Ainu 2012-2024 was released earlier this year by Pingipung Records, and I plan to dive in soon, but in keeping with the musicians’ desire to keep this tradition alive, the label have commissioned a series of remix EPs. From Ukouk Remixes Pt. 1, today we heard the lovely melodic techno of Berlin’s M.RUX.

WaqWaq Kingdom – Hado [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp]
To me, WaqWaq Kingdom‘s new album is their best yet. The duo of Kiki Hitomi (who’s worked with The Bug in early King Midas Sound, Goh Nakada aka Gorgonn in Dokkebi Q and many others) and Shigeru Ishihara (aka DJ Scotch Egg aka Scotch Rolex, who has indeed also worked with Goh Nakada) are both known for heavy bass projects, but with WaqWaq Kingdom they’ve brought an unhinged psychedelic approach to reggae influences along with Japanese traditional musical styles and dance styles from all over. On Mind Onsen, there’s a slight reduction in manicness (slight!) and a re-affirmation of BASS, especially on the second track, “Hado”.

b0t23 + inoperative system – Simplo (Roel Funcken Remix) [From Roel’s Bandcamp subscription/original here]
I subscribe to the Bandcamp of Roel Funcken, which includes the music he & his brother Don made as Funckarma. Since the late ’90s they flew the flag of IDM high, incorporating dubstep and bass music and ever-increasing technological advances. Roel’s output has slowed of late, but every month we still get something exclusive – there’s a huge amount in the archive! This month is a remix of US artist b0t23 + Spain’s inoperative system, a track from their recent Reticle EP reworked in Funcken’s trademark glitchy, low-slung funk.

samwho – St Elmo’s Fire [Intercept Records/Bandcamp]
Staying in the Netherlands, young Rotterdam artist samwho has made a name for himself DJing in his hometown (a place with a long fabled history in techno and rave music). His new EP is Gaea’s Good Grace for Dutch label Intercept Records, two tracks of energetic percussive bass techno.

Modern Norman – The Frogs [Suitably Bizarre]
MastaGlow – We Wanna Roll [Suitably Bizarre]
Louis Hubris Nooz – Dunrobin Stobie [Suitably Bizarre]
Last week I played the first track I could find of “hit em”, the genre that sprung up out of a dream Drew Daniel related on Twitter a mere two weeks ago: it’s in 5/4 time at 212bpm with super crunched out sounds. Drew is one half of highly-beloved experimental electronic duo Matmos with his partner M.C. Schmidt, who played a hilarious, memorable and beautiful hour and a quarter show at Phoenix Central Park on Friday night. Sorry if you missed it. Also on Friday, Drew woke up to the bizarre fever-dream of not just some partial joke tracks on Twitter, but a whole compilation of hit em. Disposable Heroes of Hit Em was conceived by Adrien 75, who in a bizarre coincidence I met in 1999 at a Matmos gig in NYC shortly after he had a hand in one of my favourite IDM compilations ever. Adrien asked a few friends including Adelaide’s Tim Koch and NZ’s Michael Upton (the three have a project together called Takamu), and along with a couple of other friends they put the compilation together in a few days. It’s a lot of fun, only occasionally acceding to the breakcore/jungle temptation found elsewhere, while also covering melodic IDM, skittery ambient and frenetic Dave Brubeck sampling (I mean, of course). Tonight’s three tracks are from Adrien, Michael and Tim in that order, FWIW.

Mattr – Amaranthus [Mattr Bandcamp]
Out now also is a single new track from Birmingham IDM producer Mattr. Amaranthus follows the album Pheno released a few months ago, and it’s his lovely twinkly ambient-melodic synth work with a clattering drill’n’bass beat. Joyous.

Meat Beat Manifesto – Into The Sun Pts 1&2 [Yellow Machines]
Jack Dangers’ Meat Beat Manifesto was there at the beginning of jungle, arguably presaging UK hardcore and jungle with the 1990 breakbeat masterpiece “Radio Babylon“. “Into The Sun Pts 1&2” is Meat Beat Manifesto’s side of a split 12″ on London label Yellow Machines, who appropriately focus on hybrids of IDM, hardcore and jungle, and that’s very much what we get here, flitting through various styles of breakbeat accompanied by NASA samples I think. It’s a corker, if not quite as intense as MBM’s recent collaboration with Merzbow, Extinct.

Boris Hauf – hw26 om [Shameless Records/Bandcamp]
The one track I played tonight can only show a portion of what’s in store on German musician Boris Hauf‘s album CLARK3 – from the edges tongues grow. It’s the third in his CLARK series, the previous two of which came out on vinyl & digital and focused more on minimal techno and ambient sounds. The third continues Hauf’s meditations on humanity’s current state – digitally divided, heading towards climate collapse – and looks to a “futuristic interstellar co-existence”. The music here varies from glitchy post-industrial ambient to technoid experimentation and faster-paced IDM. Oh, and “CLARK3 is produced AI free”.

o’summer vacation – 宿痾(Shuku-a) [Alien Transistor/Bandcamp]
Although courtesy of The Notwist‘s Alien Transistor label, our next selection veers into noise punk with Japanese trio o’summer vacation. The riff-heavy sound is produced only with bass, drums and voice, the bass screaming and heavy with effects, and vocalist Ami slathering herself in delays. Brilliant.

Stick In The Wheel – A Thousand Pokes [From Here Records/Bandcamp]
Somehow segueing perfectly out of o’summer vacation are Stick In The Wheel, English folk duo of Nicola Kearey & Ian Carter who in the last more than a decade have revived raw, acoustic traditional folk (with various cohorts) and simultaneously taken folk into strange electronic climes (Ian Carter was a founding member of dubstep iconoclasts Various Production, and makes music solo as EAN). But you can also find them making distorted punk-folk like on the title track for their forthcoming album A Thousand Pokes, which takes a satirical look at the current age from their unique standpoint.

Clark – Green Breaking [Throttle Records/Bandcamp]
Also forthcoming is Chris Clark‘s expanded soundtrack to Naqqash Khalid‘s award-winning film In Camera – which incidentally I can’t wait to see. Clark’s abilities as a classical composer of great sensitivity are combined with his electronic production – seemingly on everything he does – so this comes highly anticipated.

The Smile – Don’t Get Me Started [XL Records/streaming links]
Thom Yorke & Jonny Greenwood’s “not-Radiohead” project The Smile, with jazz drummer Tom Skinner, already put an album out this year, but now they’re back with a moody electronic single, great enough on its own but further augmented by the trippy (as usual) music video created by Aphex Twin collaborator Weirdcore.

Robag Wruhme – CDV feat. Bruno Pronsato (Remix-Edit) [Kompakt/Bandcamp]
In the late ’90s and early ’00s, Gabor Schablitzki was one half, with Volker Kahl, of one of my favourite IDM groups, Beefcake. Their material is mostly out of print but you can hear their three albums on YouTube here, here and here – drill’n’bass and acid madness, post-Aphex melodies, glitchy processing and all. Then in the early part of the new millennium Schablitski started to find success as a techno DJ with Wighnomy Brothers and making remixes and original music both under that name and as Robag Wruhme. I was really not attuned to tech house or 4/4 techno at the time, so it wasn’t until years later that I realised the brilliance of this new phase… Now Robag Wruhme is a favourite, and he’s still a bit of a larrikin – weird things always happen somewhere in his tracks, but there’s also a lot of heart and melody. This track features Berlin-based Bruno Pronsato aka Steven Ford, purveyor of microhouse, minimal techno and also rather experimental sounds at times – in fact I think it’s Robag’s “Remix-Edit” of a live set of Pronsato at Club Der Visionäre .

Severin Black & Owen Pratt – I (Vulcanised Types) [Archaic Vaults]
Here’s some visceral industrial-noise with a direct connection to the physical world. Severin Black runs the Archaic Vaults label, whose releases are usually mastered by France-based sound-artist Owen Pratt. After an excellent untitled cassette a few years ago, their debut album is simply titled Duet. Many of the tracks are derived from field recordings and feedback – self-propelling “duets” such as one between bass amp feedback and an open snare drum, for instance. “I (Vulcanised Types)” may or may not feature hardened rubber, but it’s one on which the drones are set back a little, driven by primitive industrial rhythms. This is richly grimy music.

Lawrence English – ShellType [Room40/Bandcamp]
For his forthcoming EP ShellType, Room40 boss Lawrence English has been thinking about the blurring of our selves as we become dependent on, and augmented by, technology. This blurring is found in the four tracks too, where field recordings and human-created sounds are conflated into sculpted drone, whether the gamelan hiding somewhere in the winds on all four tracks or the drawn-out voices reverberating through the title track, while sub-bass looms like distant foghorns and mysterious sounds crackle at the edge of hearing. This is one to listen loud on your stereo late at night, or lying on the floor with headphones on: 25 minutes of immersion.

Erik K Skodvin – A dark escape [Miasmah Recordings/Bandcamp]
Erik K Skodvin – Prayer [Miasmah Recordings/Bandcamp]
Miasmah Recordings is the remarkable label created by Berlin-based Norwegian musician Erik K Skodvin, a home to certain types of dark experimental music that often fit the moniker “acoustic doom”. Skodvin is a cellist, guitarist and producer (often releasing music as Svarte Greiner), and is extremely adept at creating engrossing, troubling atmospheres from very minimal sources. The new digital EP Afterwar is music made for the docu-fiction film of the same name by Danish director Birgitte Stærmose, shot over 15 years to document the lives of four survivors of the Kosovo war. Skodvin’s music is moody and moving.

Mark Hjorthoy – A Heart Full Of Hollow Wounds [Unexplained Sounds Group]
Italian musician Raffaele Pezzella curates the Unexplained Sounds Group, a group of record labels covering industrial and experimental music from all over the world. One of their great achievements is the “Anthology of Experimental Music From…” series, which has covered experimental music from regions like Latin America and the Balkans as well as specific compilations from Iran, Lebanon, China, Indonesia, Finland and beyond. The latest is Anthology of Experimental Music from Canada, featuring mostly artists I’ve never heard of. Tonight we have one of the less abrasive offerings, a beautiful piece of pulsating synths, Fender Rhodes (I’m guessing), crackles and tape hiss from Vancouver-based Mark Hjorthoy.

Gregory Paul Mineeff – Advancement [whitelabelrecs/Bandcamp]
Wollongong composer Gregory Paul Mineeff‘s latest album is a slight departure from his usual ambient/post-classical piano & synths. Released on English label whitelabelrecs, the album adds quiet, minimal drum machines and nostalgic electric guitar throughout. A lovely closer for tonight.

Listen again — ~210MB