Playlist 15.09.24

Utility Fog

A mixed bag tonight, from experimental indie-jazz to krautrock, post-industrial to electroacoustic, percussive beats to ambient beatscapes, doom dub to d’n’b to noise metal to electroacoustic sound-art to jazz-folk and back to experimental indie.

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Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder [American Dreams Records/Bandcamp]
Wendy Eisenberg – In the Pines [American Dreams Records/Bandcamp]
Starting with the avant-garde songwriting and contemporary jazz of Wendy Eisenberg, a talented and unique guitarist working in the jazz & improv worlds, with solo albums of aleatoric improv and extended techniques a la Derek Bailey, but also songwriterly albums of spiky, lo-fi songs the closest comparison to which I can find is London-based American musician Ashley Paul. Eisenberg’s latest album Viewfinder is released by the impeccable American Dreams Records, and is one of the songwriterly albums, but brings in more musicians so Eisenberg can expand their arrangements with bass, drums, horns, piano and electronics on various tracks – and some of those tracks are very long! The middle pair of tracks are 22 minutes and 12 minutes long, ranging from fully composed to improv sections. The album arose from Eisenberg’s experience with laser eye surgery, the disorientation that comes with seeing the world with new clarity, and the questions that remain about the ways that seeing imposes the see-er’s assumptions upon the visual world. Hence “Viewfinder”, the title track of which appears as a sparse 4-minute work for voice and solo trumpet (“Viewfinder (Intro)”), and then a 4 minutes of grinding distorted guitar interleaved with that avant-garde trumpet, percussion and bass, with Eisenberg’s vocal melodies not quite sitting in key with the rest. But the best is saved for last, after all this chaos… For over two minutes, “In the Pines” begins with the soft, warm plucked double bass of Tyrone Allen II, before falling into a slow waltz-time jazz-blues, with Eisenberg’s two-note guitar chords, and Booker Stardrum’s brushed snare all that accompanies Eisenberg’s heart-pulling vocal melody. And then the second verse adds Andrew Links’ piano, a gorgeous moment that opens the song up while keeping the Andante tempo and the general sparseness. And then on into a completely restrained trombone solo from Zekereyya el-Magharbel. “In the Pines” is one of my songs of the year, and I’ve already listened to it half a dozen times. Pure poise and gentle bittersweetness. “God what a lonely / lonely point of view… Can you be / can you be / can you just be?”

Clark – Head Phone Hospital [Throttle Records]
Clark – Blood [Throttle Records]
Last year’s Sus Dog and Cave Dog from Clark found him singing for the first time. He’s now back with another soundtrack, In Camera, which expands on the cues he wrote for Naqqash Khalid‘s film of the same name. The IDM beats are toned down in favour of electronic arrangements that echo the classical orchestrations of some of his recent work, but it’s nice to hear his voice appearing – not only on the rather lovely cover of “Superstar“, a song originally popularised by The Carpenters, but also across the album, often used texturally like we heard on the two tracks here – reversed and twisted but still emotive in the way only voice can be.

Mazza Vision – Sun Riser [Sub Rosa/Bandcamp]
Claude Pailliot and Gaëtan Collet were both members of Tone Rec, the eccentric experimental electronic/postrock band who released a few albums on the great Brussels-based Sub Rosa label in the 1990s. They then then took a left turn into a kind of electro-clash as DAT Politics, which I never enjoyed as much as Tone Rec, so it’s interesting to find the core pair with a new project called Mazza Vision, which turns back to weird noise-rock-tronica. That combination of glitch, krautrock and drone results in slow burners like the first track here taken from their debut album Ohm Spectrum, the rest of which we’ll get to hear next week.

Lint – What’s wrong with that sentence [Lint Bandcamp]
Lint – Curb Cloud [Lint Bandcamp]
Mitch Jones is a founding member of Sydney industrial/electronic originators Scattered Order, and his wife Dru Jones has been involved either making brilliant art or with noisemaking too since the early ’80s. Despite this, it’s only for the last 5 years or so that the two have released music together in duo form, as Lint. Mitch solo is the little hand of the faithful, and Dru is Skipism. Together they weave the artistic, sample-collage of Dru’s iPad-mediated work with Mitch’s further sample deconstruction and strangely contemporary beats – but I feel like Mirror of your own hopes sees the duo finding its own character more than ever before, something quite freeform, almost sinister at times, but also quite humorous.

Martina Berther – Obertone [Kit Records/Bandcamp]
Martina Berther – Mini Gong [Kit Records/Bandcamp]
Martina Berther x Vic Bang – Arco [Kit Records/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, UK label Kit Records released a very idiosyncratic album from Swiss bass player Martina Berther. Bass Works: As I Venture Into is performed on Fender Jazzbass, but you can hardly hear that on many of the tracks, where the instrument is stretched into drones or compressed into chipmunk riffs, or played as percussion. I discovered this album through an EP of remixes by Argentinian sound-artist Vic Bang, who transposes “Bass Works” into Brass Woks, disassembling and rebuilding Berther’s sounds into two tracks of furious activity that’s as much IDM as it is electroacoustic or musique concrète.

Nídia & Valentina – Nasty [Latency/Bandcamp]
London-based percussion Valentina Magaletti seems to be everywhere these days, doing everything from postpunk dub to indiepop to experimental improv, and now she appears on French experimental label Latency collaborating with Afro-Portuguese dance producer Nídia Sukulbembe. Nídia’s club-tooled kuduro is already all about the rhythm, but here it’s tempered with Magaletti’s own drums as well as melodic percussion like marimba, while Magaletti also contributes melodies on flute and synth. Tom Halstead of the duo Raime, who collaborate with Magaletti as Moin, edited and mixed these contributions into their final shape. Estradas means “roads”, and the cover shows the burnout marks as Nídia and Valentina speed off into the distance, while we follow in their wake.

gi – Weir [world of knots]
Dina Rocaille – Seuvrage [world of knots]
A few weeks ago I played the incredible debut album from Eora/Sydney’s Gigi De Lacy, released on Naarm/Melbourne’s Absorb. But gi has been putting together her own label, and this coming week sees the first compilation from world of knots. Gi herself contributes a piece of her organic, busy IDM, and she’s gathered a troupe of like-minded producers from around the world. Tellingly, the album is “not intended as a collection of songs but as a singular listen”, with ambient pieces and more techno/d’n’b-influenced pieces all sharing a certain aesthetic of organic grime and musical abstraction. I’m not sure this genre has a name yet, but the artists here are at the forefront of it. As well as gi, I played Lyon-based Dina Rocaille‘s skittery beats which emphasis bass and bar-lines a little more than the label boss.

Harvestman – Clouds are Relatives (The Bug – ‘Amtrak Dub Mix’) [Neurot Recordings/Bandcamp]
The Bug – Floored(Point of impact) [Relapse Records/Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, Steve Von Till of post-metal heroes Neurosis – who are behind the essential Neurot Recordings – announced a Triptych of albums under his instrumental Harvestman alias. Harvestman is one expression of Von Till’s “rural psychedelia”, mixing folk traditions with the electronics of Neurosis’ alter egos Tribes of Neurot, and making concrete the links between the low-slung, slow-moving genres of doom and dub. Each of the three albums feature a long doom-folk-psych track that’s reprised in a dub version – and who better to provide the third dub than The Bug? Kevin Martin has roots going back decades in metal and punk, having booked some of the earliest Godflesh gigs and then partnered with Justin K Broadrick on a run of groundbreaking albums as Techno Animal. The pair still work together now, and in the wake of Relapse‘s reissues of two ’90s Techno Animal albums, the label has signed The Bug. The first release is Machine, an album-length collection of heavyweight tracks from the five Machine EPs that Martin released on his own Pressure label between late 2023 and earlier this year. These tracks were created to push his massive Pressure soundsystem to its limit (I’ve bathed in its sub bass glory a few years back in London), and I’m glad to see that all five EPs are available in a 2CD set alongside the 12-track vinyl release.

Braille – Dirt Fam (Maude Vôs Rude Remix) [Hotflush Recordings/Bandcamp]
Hotflush Recordings released the full Triple Transit album from Praveen Sharma aka Braille last month, preceded by a string of singles, and the album continues to give, with the first EP of Triple Transit Remixes out now. The album surfs garage and rave sounds and avoids the slower climes of dubstep, so LA experimentalist Maude Vôs dubs out the vocal stabs and dense production of “Dirt Fam” into a kind of dub techno/dubstep hybrid complete with wub-wub bass and sweeping synth clouds.

Mako – Direct Source [Metalheadz/Bandcamp]
One of the most-anticipated drum’n’bass albums of the year comes from Mako, who runs Bristol’s Utopia Music but also has a long connection with Metalheadz. Oeuvre Part 2 does indeed follow Mako’s 2020 album Oeuvre, also released by Metalheadz, and is full of high-energy d’n’b, looking back at the genre’s history while also nodding at more recent hybrids with footwork, other bass musics, and the resurgence of jungle. The constant rhythmic invention of “Direct Source” is jungle at its finest.

KK Null – Ghost Dub Awakening 02 [No Rent/Bandcamp]
Circling back towards metal & noise we join KK Null, whose highly influential band Zeni Geva combined noise rock with elements of prog, metal and hardcore. But Kazuyuki Kishino is just as well known as the extremely prolific KK Null, and has moved between guitar and electronic noisemakers, and has a unique style of dense digital sample destruction. Ghost Dub Awakening, released on Pennsylvania’s No Rent Records, throws breakbeats into his digital blender, resulting in something that sometimes has rhythms you could dance to without breaking too many bones.

The Body – End of Line [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Meanwhile, recent Wire Magazine cover stars The Body have made their own journey from blackened doom metal to something all their own, mixing metal with industrial, dub and just about anything else. The Crying Out of Things which is out in early November on Thrill Jockey, promises more glorious negativity, more mashing up of genres into a industrial metal stew with Chip King’s high-pitched screaming and all-consuming guitars, Lee Buford’s massive drums and various guests, all tied together with the electronics and ultra-saturated production of Seth Manchester. Gird your loins and save the date!

Ghost Phone (uncredited) – DARKNESS FINDS HOME WITH U [Ghost Phone]
It’s not entirely possible to identify the artists on Ghost Phone releases, even though the name is sometimes used for remixes – it’s an anonymous collective as far as I can tell, and GHOST PHONE 008 is named as V/A. It’s four tracks of various types of bass music from Bristol, r’n’b edits taking in weightless 160bpm, Jersey Club and footwork-laced jungle, before finishing up with wispy Bristolian post-dubstep on “DARKNESS FINDS HOME WITH U”.

Elio Martusciello / Ossatura – etèrico [Elio Martusciello Bandcamp]
Elio Martusciello / Ossatura – sottrazione immateriale [Elio Martusciello Bandcamp]
The new album from Italian sound-artist & composer Elio Martusciello, AKOUSMA-MOTHER – subtitled “umbilical cord” – serves as an autobiographical document, channel-jumping through an array of genres from electroacoustic improv to songform, experimental rock to grainy cut-up piano. It’s also a tribute to Martusciello’s late mother, describing the pre-natal world as “amniotic and acousmatic”: the term “acousmatic” was used by Pierre Schaeffer and others to describe music reproduced electronically with the original source obscured. Much of the material on the album is derived from his long-running trio Ossatura, with Luca Venitucci on piano/electric piano and electronics and Fabrizio Spera on drums, and on some tracks the full band is clearly heard, while elsewhere Martusciello obscures the sounds through processing and editing. As much as it’s a conceptual album about the cycle of life and our sensation of the world, there’s beauty here and humour too. Right in the middle of the album, the song “etèrico” appears, and the warm vocals from Martusciello have the demeanor of Tom Zé’s modernised samba, for all that it’s sung in Italian with deconstructed drums and wisps of guitar accompanying it. It’s really charming.

Build Buildings – Scattering Shreds of Wickerwork [laaps/Bandcamp]
Ben Tweel makes electroacoustic music as Build Buildings, processing acoustic instruments and household sounds – on the album Ecotone, released by laaps, he’s using the iPad app Samplr, which allows for processing audio using the iPad’s multitouch screen. The results are glitchy yet smooth, shifting layers of sound that are constantly moving but peaceful. On tonight’s track, “Scattering Shreds of Wickerwork”, the sounds of Tweel’s daughter Mia on clarinet are fed into the sampler.

Adrian Myhr Trio – Begynnelse [Øra Fonogram]
It’s always nice to include some purely acoustic music among the hybrid sounds, and there’s a wealth of this on the first album from Norwegian bassist Adrian Myhr‘s eponymous trio (out shortly on Norway’s Øra Fonogram). After 2 decades playing with ensembles in the Norwegian jazz scene, Myhr leads his trio through a different kind of hybrid music from our earlier electroacoustic works, melding folk with jazz and contemporary classical along with influences from Indian raga and Albanian vocal music. Myhr wields his bass as a melodic instrument as well as holding down basslines, while Rasmus Kjorstad brings his folk music experience on both violin and the Norwegian droned zither called the langeleik, and Jan Martin Gismervik switches between drums, a hanging vibraphone and harmonium. This chamber-folk-jazz is something of a speciality in Norwegian music, beautifully applied here: you can hear tight-knit string harmonies between harmonium, violin and double bass, with melody handed between the instruments, or folk violin sawing over rhythmic bass, or vibraphone chimes resonating over plucked bass and violin… Somewhere in here you can hear comparisons with Norwegian acts on the Hubro label, or Swiss musicians like Andreas Söderström or Tape, or the chamber-folk-jazz of Tin Hat Trio – all of which is to say, this is wonderful stuff worthy of seeking out.

My Brightest Diamond – I Saw a Glimpse [Western Vinyl/Bandcamp]
Shara Nova’s music as My Brightest Diamond has covered a lot of ground in the 18 years since her debut album Bring My Workhorse was released on Sufjan Stevens’ Asthmatic Kitty label. Like Sufjan himself, Nova applies classical rigour to indie rock, draws on electronic music and on her evangelical upbringing, and ends up with an incredibly rich body of work. I’m particularly fond of the album she made with New York contemporary classical ensemble yMusic, All Things Will Unwind. Her new album Fight The Real Terror is out now through Western Vinyl, and is some of her rawest music, forged in emotional times and inspired by the late, great Sinéad O’Connor. Nova’s demo versions of most of these songs ended up forming the basis of the album, with additional orchestrations and enhancements added on top, so it’s held down by grungy guitars, simple and direct. Of course with a musician and songwriter as talented as Shara Nova, a raw directness can be magical, not least on the closing track, which presents as a traditional folk song mourning today in hope for a better tomorrow, and right at the end the declamatory guitar swirls in a fug of distorted drones caught in a delay loop the decays for almost a minute before tailing off.

Listen again — ~204MB