Playlist 20.10.24

Utility Fog

Your weekly mix of experimental electronics, weird fusions, twisted acoustics and more.

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Third Eye – Terminal 283 [Regular Records]
This week brought the sad news that legendary Australian musician Ollie Olsen has passed away, after suffering for some years with an advancing neurological disease called multiple system atrophy. Olsen’s musical journey began with the Melbourne punk scene in the ’70s, starting with the Young Charlatans, which he formed with Rowland S Howard before he was in The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, Jeffrey Wegener before his long association with Ed Kuepper through The Saints, Laughing Clowns and Ed solo (he was also briefly in The Birthday Party), and Janine Hall before she too played with The Saints. After this, Olsen’s band Whirlywirld pioneered the use of synths and electronics in postpunk, again with many people who continued on to other important Australian acts. Further down the line there was the amazing, abrasive industrial Orchestra of Skin and Bone, and some of the songs from that project were remade when Ollie and various associates formed Max Q with Michael Hutchence (the two had met when Olsen scored the film Dogs In Space, Richard Lowenstein’s film set in Melbourne’s postpunk scene in the late ’70s). The track I played tonight is from Olsen’s first album as Third Eye, which made a huge impression on me in 1991 with its psychedelic, ravey electronics. It’s a kind of bridge from Olsen’s postpunk and new age synth pop into his psy-trance, techno and ambient stuff for which he became quite legendary, especially his work as Shaolin Wooden Men and the Psy-Harmonics label. You can find some of Olsen’s trancey techno and ambient stuff on Bandcamp.

Viiaan – How To Heal (Dub Version) [SUMAC/Bandcamp]
Released on the SUMAC label run by DJ Plead, T. Morimoto and Jon Watts, is an excellent EP of percussive techno with hints of jungle and plenty of dub from New York-based producer Viiaan. There’s a great Cassius Select remix, but Viiaan’s own dubs are also excellent and I’m keen to check out some of her other stuff.

Barking – Our Vices [XCPT/Bandcamp]
Barking – Savigny [XCPT/Bandcamp]
Naarm/Melbourne musician Gareth Psaltis was one half of the postpunk/industrial/techno duo phile, who released one self-titled EP in 2017. His first EP as Barking, Prone, came out the following year, with a mix of industrial harshness and techno precision which continues today. Gareth has been based in Berlin for a while, and his latest album Asylum is released on Italian label XCPT, featuring crunching beats and dark & deadly hardware synths.

Harrison Rae – I Burnt the Butter Again [Midheaven/Bandcamp]
Here’s a rare new EP from Sydney experimentalist Harrison Rae, sometimes known as Beau Ambien or Henri O. R. Asar, and also founder of the Club Moss label, releasing the likes of mara and Bluetung (now Glen Rey.). Harrison’s music runs the gamut from ambient to jungle, and on this EP there’s ambient keyboard odysseys, and there’s some kind of shoegazey trip-hop and there’s crunching beats (the much-sampled break from Led Zep’s “When The Levee Breaks” gets a workout) – all demanding repeated listens.

ZULI – Bathyal [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
xin – On Stone [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
James Ginzburg formed Subtext Recordings in 2004, at the time with Rob Ellis aka Pinch, and after a period of dormancy the label got going properly in about 2011 with an album from Ginzburg’s minimalist techno/noise duo emptyset and a solo album from Roly Porter, who’d previously been one half of industrial dubstep pioneers Vex’d. But because of that early beginning, Subtext are now celebrating their 20th anniversary with a compilation alongside a fiction anthology of the same name, Cybernetics, or Ghosts? The name is taken from an Italo Calvino lecture/essay called “Cybernetics and Ghosts” in which he imagines a future where writing has been solved computationally: what, in that future, is the role of the author? This is particularly prescient in the present moment, and I’m looking forward to the stories, taken from a global group of contributors, which I imagine will offer a new take on cyberpunk. The compilation covers the wide spread of Subtext’s interests, including the electroacoustic sound-art of Başak Günak, the abstract field recording processing of Rắn Cạp Đuôi, African sound-artists KMRU & Aho Ssan and more. Tonight we heard some melodic electronica from Cairo’s ZULI, and the jittery dub techno of xin.

Etch – Clockwork Romance [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
Munich techno label Ilian Tape keep surprising me with the stuff they release, which is silly because they’ve released drum’n’bass from the likes of Forest Drive West and DJ Mantra, and longtime artists like Skee Mask and Andrea often veer into drum’n’bass and other bass music influences. So here we’ve got Brighton bass music explorer Etch, with four tracks and none of them the same. I was pleased that the last track is something like jungle, lovely breakbeaty stuff.

Low End Activist – Self Destruction [Sneaker Social Club/Bandcamp]
Low End Activist – Hope III (Interlude) [Sneaker Social Club/Bandcamp]
Jamie Russell appears on these airwaves quite a lot, courtesy of various of his projects, plus his various labels including the brilliant Sneaker Social Club, BRUK, and indeed Hypercolour. I always tend to point at the Cellular Housekeeping album he released under the Patrick Conway moniker, but his Low End Activist project always brings the goods. It’s all about that “low end”, sub-bass, but it’s also always been an “activist” project, evoking not just his rave roots but also the UK’s class divide. Municipal Dreams is his second album of the year after Airdrop, and this one’s chronicling what it was like growing up in the Blackbird Leys council estate outside of Oxford. This is LEA in weightless mode, which means ambient interludes pulsing with bass pressure, and grime/garage/jungle-influenced beats wafting in & out. Of course it’s very, very good.

Christopher Chaplin – Nineveh [Fabrique Records/Bandcamp]
British composer Christopher Chaplin‘s music works contemporary classical into experimental, post-industrial and krautrock-influenced spaces. His latest EP Door 1 Door 2 explores how myths are part of collective memory, featuring a few guest vocalists. On this track, the bass singer is Tassos Apostolou, but the classical elements that his voice hooks into are interrupted and subsumed under almost industrial, glitchy electronics. Just what we like here at UFog Towers.

Giridhar Udupa – Chakra – The Wheel (Edit) [7K!/Bandcamp]
Surprisingly coming out on 7K!, the classical/ambient part of the multiplicitous !K7 empire, is the album from Ghatam expert Giridhar Udupa, entitled My Name Is Giridhar Udupa – as indeed it is! The Ghatam is a fascinating instrument, basically a clay pot that’s played as a percussion instrument. As you can hear from the vocal rhythms in this track, it seems to produce as much range as the tabla, but this is from the South Indian Carnatic musical tradition. On this album, Udupa has centred the Ghatam, but he’s also recruited Sam Shackleton to bring electronic interventions which subtly support his instrument – so subtly you don’t realise they’re there… until you do. I’m looking forward to the rest of this.

Julián Mayorga – El dia en que el Tolima se hundio hasta el fondo del mar [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
“The day Tolima sank to the bottom of the sea” is how this song’s title translates from Spanish, in which Julián Mayorga is rather gleefully imagining his hometown under the waves. Mayorga takes Colombian cumbia into the future, or some kind of future anyway, with bizarre samples and creative guitar playing. Another album to look forward to soon, and thanks to Glitterbeat for unceasingly bringing weird music from around the world.

Black Pus – So Deep [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
A couple of months back I played something from Brian Gibson, bassist from Lightning Bolt. The other half, Brian Chippendale, is an incendiary drummer, so of course his solo work as Black Pus is driven by relentless rhythm as much as anything else – but the anything else is distorted riffage and even-more-distorted vocals. “So Deep” is comparatively slower, with downwards-sliding basslines and chaotically-sliding guitar noise, but mostly drums that are mostly neverending drum fills, and those nearly incomprehensible vocals.

Chat Pile – Camcorder [The Flenser/Bandcamp]
While Lightning Bolt might be considered metal/punk/noise as pure fun, Oklahoma’s Chat Pile represent the equal and opposite side, sludge/doom/hardcore with its politics up front and centre, whether deconstructing masculinity or – always – raging at this world created by rampant capitalism. There’s a sense of loss, almost – but not quite – of hopelessness to a lot of this, but also, yes, rage. I love this song, but “Masc” must win best video of the year.

Jabu – Oceanside Spider House [do you have peace?]
Jabu – Sea Mills ft. Birthmark & Lorenzo Prati [do you have peace?]
I have at times struggled with Jabu, despite their connection to the post-dubstep Bristol scene as all three have been part of Young Echo in various forms. Thankfully A Soft and Gatherable Star, released on their do you have peace? label, draws me in from the start. A collection of melancholy songs co-written by the three members – Jasmine Butt, Alex Rendall & Amos Childs – and with a title taken from a poem by Childs’ father, the album flows like a dubbed-out Cocteau Twins, strongly postpunk, but swept up in an ambient wave. It’s a strong aesthetic, but it seems to hang together more solidly than the earlier Jabu works. Mad props.

Mariam The Believer – Highest Peak [Repeat Until Death/Bandcamp]
I’ve been a signed-up Mariam Wallentin fan since her work with husband Andreas Werliin as Wildbirds & Peacedrums, and even moreso since her incredible vocal contributions to the Fire! Orchestra albums. But in her solo work as Mariam The Believer, the free jazz and other experimental elements are used in service of pop songs, beautifully crafted by Wallentin and collaborators from the Swedish experimental scene and further afield. Her third album Breathing Techniques draws from kundalini practices, and calls on some of music’s most creative women as influences: Alice Coltrane, Meredith Monk, Stina Nordenstam, Sheila Chandra and Gal Costa are all namechecked in the album’s promo materials, and only a musician and singer as accomplished as Wallentin could carry that off. When reading up on this album I noted that among the great musicians performing here is Swedish pianist Johan Graden, whose astonishing album with Ellen Arkbro from 2022, I get along without you very well, is close to my heart. There’s something of the fragile beauty of that album in the closing track of Marian The Believer’s album, “Highest Peak”.

Midget! – Qui parle ombre [Objet Disque/Bandcamp]
French duo Midget! approach chanson & pop from unusual angles on each of their albums. On Qui parle ombre they’ve somehow conjured a whole orchestra from Mocke’s plucked string instruments (guitars, bouzouki, saz) and Claire Vailler’s harmonium and keyboards, plus her choral vocal multitracks, joined only by flute and bassoon on some tracks. The title track is murky and dramatic. The descending and climbing lines of Vailler’s vocal melody are intensely reminiscent of something for me, but I can’t identify what. Maybe it’s just a bewitching piece of post-classical drone-pop.

Oliver Coates – Apparition (feat. Malibu) [RVNG Intl./Bandcamp]
Oliver Coates – Radiocello [RVNG Intl./Bandcamp]
The latest album from British cellist-composer-producer Oliver Coates, Throb, shiver, arrow of time, is also strangely murky. There are fewer beats than on some of his solo albums, instead finding his cello fed through granular processing on most tracks. It’s some distance from his acclaimed soundtrack to the beloved 2022 album Aftersun, but evokes smudged, uncertain memory in its abstracted fashion. Frequent Coates collaborators only emphasise the murkiness – the spoken/murmured words of French ambient artist Malibu and the tentative choir of the mysterious Chrysanthemum Bear (who’s only appeared alongside Coates, at least under this name). “Please be normal”, begs one of the track titles, but Oliver Coates will never be normal – fortunately for us!

SO SNER – Bus Train Bus [TAL/Bandcamp]
SO SNER – Meteor [TAL/Bandcamp]
Viennese bass clarinetist Susanna Gartmayer and Stefan Schneider aka Mapstation together form SO SNER, a project that marries Gartmayer’s bass clarinet with Schneider’s electronics and percussion. On their second album, The Well, Gartmayer might weave melodies in between reedy drones and tumbling, wandering beats, or the clarinet might squeal and punch its way over burbling electronics. The album walks a tightrope between avant-garde composition, free improvisation and krautrocky electronic music. It’s got a very European sound, and I love it.

Listen again — ~214MB