We have experimental songs tonight, underground hip-hop & grime, and quite a lot of jungle & drum’n’bass mixed up with more experimental electronics & noise, sound-art meets contemporary classical, music for Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan and Congo, and more! LISTEN AGAIN to find the hope in the world; stream on demand at fbi.radio, podcast here. Aphir – Photokeratitis Brian Ennals & Blockhead – Let it Burn (like Usher) Basic Rhythm & NyNy – Vibez Basic Rhythm – No Future Sourdure – Le Pebre (feat. Lisà Langlois) Jesse Draxler – Traap Number 9 ft. Lord Spikeheart & Hybrid Intuition Artilect – Flames (Featuring Miss Ria) dgoHn – Waiting For Mantra, Decibella & Tim Reaper – Force 32 Shhau – Bedrock Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das – Iron Age Fantasies Bios Contrast, Nilotpal Das, Seraphim, Susu Laroche, BROOD – Escape KK NULL – Quantum Pulsation X_000005 Architectural – Psychedelic Dancefloor Visions Kirk Barley – Ecstatic dprk – Blutsuppe dprk – Aksak-Turm Lord Tusk – Opposites Attract Dawuna – Anything Helen Svoboda – If Helen Svoboda – Evening Hepuli (feat. Selma Savolainen) Kalia Vandever – Tough Play Mara – Air Leak feat. Benjamin Woods Seabuckthorn – Mumbo Jumbo Ben Shemie – I See You Too Bint Mbareh – one’s own third harmonic on a rusted sewage pipe Félicia Atkinson – Les Yeux IV Félicia Atkinson – Sans Visage V Listen again — ~210MB

Hip-hop, glitch, dub, bass, jungle, hardcore… rhythmic acoustic & electro-acoustic, drone-folk, experimental folk, sound-art, ambient techno… Here we are, let’s go. LISTEN AGAIN, you deserve it! Stream on demand @ fbi.radio, podcast here. doseone & Height Keech – Human Satan [doseone Bandcamp] Following his brilliant album All Portrait, No Chorus with Steel Tipped Dove earlier this 2025, veteran alt.hip-hop mouth doseone swung right back into the swing of things with an EP produced entirely by Baltimore beatmaker Height Keech. Wood Teeth was laser-focused on the current moment, and from the sound of the first single, its sequel (Wood Teeth II, natch) is too – once more it’s about the descent of the USA into fascism, and it’s as “scathing” as the copy says. Saul Williams – Conspiracy (feat. Moor Mother) [Big Dada/Bandcamp] The king of conscious rap, of experimental collaboration, the poetic philosopher of politics, Saul Williams is back with a new album this year, Leap Life. Out on August 28th on Big Dada no less, the Ninja Tune subsidiary that in 1998 released his mind-blowing debut EP Elohim (1972) (“Like kyah kyah kyah, sha klak-klak, get me the FUCK off this track!“). With that history, who could be more appropriate to guest on the new album’s first single than Moor Mother? “Death is a conspiracy”, folks. Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer – Speedrun – umru & username flip [10k/Bandcamp] Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer – Picture This – Black Noi$e flip [10k/Bandcamp] Not long after her lush little collaborative EP Clandestine with Loraine James last year, New York-based experimental hip-hop/r’n’b artist Anysia Kym released her Purity album with Tony Seltzer, whose recent production credits include underground luminaries like Princess Nokia, Eartheater, Pink Siifu and Dua Saleh. This week they’ve dropped Purity (Flips), which prepends the original album with 12 reworkings from well-known names like Loraine James (of course), Traxman and AceMo, and newer names too. I mean, who am I to say who’s well-known? Anyway, umru & username are super-online folks from what I can tell, presenting some nicely glitched-up sheets of synth, and who’s this bringing the jungle bumps a la PinkPantheress or Nia Archives? It’s only Black Noi$e, who we heard at the beginning of the year doing some insane “inversions” of Earth‘s sludgy debut Extra-Capsular Extraction (original collected here). The music has disappeared from Bandcamp, but you can find it at Boomkat, or streaming wherever. In any case, there’s a fair share of jungle and experimental sounds among the “flips” here. AVA RABIAT – Znak Zapytania [FUU/Bandcamp] Due on July 10th is the second album from Polish sound-artist, singer & composer AVA RABIAT. It’s also her second on Berlin-based label/platform/collective FUU, home also to artists like Ah! Kosmos aka Başak Günak, Büşra Kayıkçı and Hara Alonso, and it continues her interest in emotive, but highly technologically degraded songs, songs which mess with text in both Polish and English. The album’s titled Szał Wirtualnych Ciał, which translates as “Frenzy of Virtual Bodies”, a phrase that smears the physical and organic into the digital and artificial, and the music does so too. House of Skin – U Turn [Jeopardize/Bandcamp] Vienna-based musician Clemens Posch makes music as House of Skin, which is also the title of his new album released by Viennese label Jeopardize. I love that it’s got something of the heft and character of contemporary bass music and experimental electronic production, but also somehow references the postpunk era and 1980s electronic pop experimentation. Posch is fairly anonymous – his Instagram is private, even. Props to him really! Spitbender – Nothing Here But the Recordings [Perf/Bandcamp] Francisco Antão’s Spitbender is a confounding proposition. On Spin, the Porto-native released on Porto label Perf jumps right in with a skittery piece of ’90s slow-fast jungle, but the modulated drones in the background give a small indication of what’s to come: by the second track, we’ve got distorted riffs and looped rock drums, doom-dub style, while the third track is a kind of chaotic funk-metal. The jungle never quite returns, but the dub feel is a constant, channeled through trip-hop, hip-hop & live sampling. A fantastic oddity. WAAASS – Tight Joe [WAAASS Bandcamp] WAAASS – Dial 808 [WAAASS Bandcamp] WAAASSUP! I’m not sure, as I don’t speak French (very well), but Parisian (I think) duo WAAASS make bass, breakbeat & dancefloor-ready IDM using heaps of hardware, and it’s tweaked, highly rhythmic stuff that touches many genres without quite settling in any – jungle, dubstep, techno, trap… Some of the most creative, out-there bass music is coming out of France lately! Sebaas – too much of that [not on Sebaas Bandcamp] Much like when he didn’t drop his massive tune “No Plastic” last year, I’ve been sent newness from Amsterdam bass producer Sebaas and it’s not out on the announced date. So, lucky I played something tonight, hey? It’s meant to be a 2-track EP, a bit more of that, 2 tracks of pretty skittery-jittery stuff that’s almost-jungle kinda-techno, great stuff as usual. Slacker & georg-i – Brittle Forms [All Centre] Last year, George Harris aka georg-i put out a lovely EP of grime, d’n’b & trip-hop with vocalist Older Brother which caught a lot of ears. Now he’s collaborated with producer Sam Black aka Slacker for a piece that, like so much bass/club music these days, draws on jungle/drum’n’bass but at a slightly slower tempo and a slightly more 4/4 techno feel. It’s great stuff, and Endless Mow’s remix slows it right down to some kind of mutant trip-hop thing. nCamargo – Assertive Dub [AGN7 Audio] Brazilian drum’n’bass mainstay nCamargo started making d’n’b tunes at age 16, and has steadily honed his skills since then. He’s released a ton of tracks on his own nCounter label, but here appears on the reliably future-focused AGN7 Audio (pronounced “agent audio”) with one of their best EPs, and one of the better d’n’b EPs I’ve heard lately. There are incursions of jungle breaks, and a dark & tough vibe recalling Dom & Roland’s ’90s heyday (any era of Dom is great though). Highly recommend these four tracks. Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das – Phantom Pain (Metal Gear Solid Mix) [Bios Contrast Bandcamp] Kolkata’s Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das – actually one person – adds to his frankly ginormous output with a short, sharp piece of hardcore techno verging on breakcore. It’s now been folded into his ever-growing Singles & Remixes collection, now almost at 40 tracks. Nick Storring – Bryn [Beacon Sound/Bandcamp] Following January’s brilliant compilation Gaza Is The Moral Compass (and it still is), Portland, OR label Beacon Sound offer Flowers Not Bombs, once again with featuring artists associated with Montréal’s Constellation label such as cellist Rebecca Foon, Ben Shemie of SUUNS, as well as Lost Tribe Sound’s William Ryan Fritch, International Anthem & WeJazz-associated percussionist Booker Stardrum – plus Lebanese composer Youmna Saba, Palestinian sound-artist Bint Mbareh, Iranian composer & sound-artist Rouzbeh Shadpey and many more. Tonight, a week out from its release, we hear from Toronto cellist, composer, instrument-maker, music writer & promoter etc, Nick Storring. “Bryn” (named for Bryn Jones aka Muslimgauze) is made from found objects, pieces of metal, springs, Humbucker pickups as well as more familiar instruments. It’s of a piece with a very recent EP and his intense field recording work from last year, but also the more rhythmic direction he took on last year’s Brazil-influenced Mirante album. All profits of this compilation go to two very worthy on-the-ground organisations: Arab Group for the Protection of Nature and Palestinian Teacher Creativity Center. OTHER:M:OTHER – Resolution [Klanggalerie/Bandcamp] On the venerable Viennese experimental Klanggalerie, here’s some wonderful electro-acoustic improv from OTHER:M:OTHER, a trio made up of Judith Schwarz on extended drumset, Jul Dillier on prepared piano, and Arthur Fussy on modular synth. Piano preparations always enhance the percussive aspect of the instrument, as well as allowing for distortions of the sound, unexpected resonances and so on. So along with the conventional and less-conventional drumming, and shape-shifting electronics, it can be quite hard to unravel who’s doing what at certain points, which I love. While the music leans more towards acoustic than electro-, it clearly inhabits both worlds, in a way not un-reminiscent of other Viennese bands like Radian. Highly recommended. Lifted – The Ice Chewers (Opening Credits) [Outside Time/Bandcamp] Washington, DC isn’t the first place in America you’d think of for experimental music (hardcore punk, sure), but it adjoins Baltimore, home dare I remind you of Matmos, John Berndt and many others. Andrew Field-Pickering aka Dolo Percussion & Maxmillion Dunbar and Matt Papich aka Co La (also of Ecstatic Sunshine) have been on & off making music as Lifted for over 10 years, with various established contributors on guitar, synth and drums at times. Their latest album Movie again harkens back to the post-rock of the 1990s, when anything could happen, referencing film soundtracks (natch), tape & CD manipulation, glitch and jazz. The disoriented opening (credits) track also features More Eaze on guitars, including pedal steel, introducing a strange country twang that somehow twists the record in a new direction. Alev Lenz – Domestisizer (Drone version by Jas Shaw) [Alev Lenz Bandcamp] I loved German/Turkish singer/composer Alev Lenz‘s 4 in a Cycle of Thirds album from last year, which collects affecting songs written around different drone notes, going round a cycle of thirds harmonically. Despite the “drone” basis, the pieces had plenty of movement; now Simian Mobile Disco‘s Jas Shaw has reworked the whole album into “Drone versions” which still, to a degree, aren’t drone music as such, but pare down the music to something basic and primal – described by Shaw as “making a metal album, just surreptitiously”. Love it. Jo Mango – The Bed [Jo Mango Bandcamp] Jo Mango – The Windowpane [Jo Mango Bandcamp] Scottish songwriter, vocalist & multi-instrumentalist Jo Mango has in the last 2 decades co-written songs with Teenage Fanclub, toured with folk legend Vashti Bunyan and with David Byrne. Her new album The Lightswitch has two important collaborators: strings from the Elysian Collective (previously the Elysian Quartet) and production & string arrangements from Adem Ilhan, who was a member of UK post-rock Fridge with Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet. Mango & Ilhan’s arrangements ensure that something avant-garde is often happening around the edges of what may seem otherwise cozy – and the lyrics speak of the mercurial nature of love, broadly a metaphor for her relationship with music. It’s a beautiful, warm album. Alison Cotton – I Am! [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp] London-based viola player & singer Alison Cotton is one of those artists taking traditional folk music and warping it into something new & contemporary. She’s been playing viola in bands since the 1990s, but released her first solo album in 2018. Her fifth album, The Gods Laugh is also her first for global folk label Glitterbeat‘s more experimental sublabel tak:til. Here the strain of folk music that draws songs out of drones is taken to an extreme, with the drones at times behaving almost like Sunn O))) instrumentals, and the viola at times scraping away like John Cale’s on “Heroin”. The track I played tonight, “I Am!”, is a setting of a poem by the troubled Victorian-era poet John Clare, full of longing and pain, the viola caterwauling through the coda. Magic Tuber Stringband – Marker of a Drowning [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp] Magic Tuber Stringband – Woodpeckers [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp] Here’s a band taking an American version of folk into new territories. The central trio of Magic Tuber Stringband are talented folk musicians: Evan Morgan plays guitars, banjo and pump organ; Michael DeVito plays bass, banjo & fiddle, and Courtney Werner plays fiddle. So far, so straightforward. But Werner also contributes field recordings, alongside which Oliver Child-Lanning of North Carolina weird-folk group Weirs adds tape loops, and another folk musician, Jasper Lee, brings more field recordings. The Heavy Water of the album title refers to water rich in deuterium, a hydrogen isotope with a neutron as well as a proton. It’s denser and has different properties from normal H2O, and is used extensively in nuclear reactors. When heavy water runoff displaces standard water in an ecosystem, it’s toxic as it alters the way enzymes and other cellular processes work. This is on top of radioactive waste from such sites. The album concept came out of the research the band’s violinist Courtney Werner was conducting as part of her ecological studies at the Savannah River Site in rural South Carolina, which had been a US military site involved in nuclear weapons production. The situating of the band’s folk music in these devastated ecologies is audible in the way they use the field recordings, drones and tape manipulation. It makes for a work that, although entirely instrumental, is powerfully political, and disquietingly beautiful. Ai Yamamoto – Winter [Room40/Bandcamp] Naarm/Melbourne-based sound-artist Ai Yamamoto celebrates four seasons in 22 minutes on her new Seasons EP on Room40‘s Someone Good imprint. Each track features field recordings suitable for its season, with snow, wind, rain & fires featured among other sounds. Even working mostly with concrète sound, Yamamoto has a musician’s ear for constructing her works. Clay Teeth – Glazed [Bush Meditation/Bandcamp] Eora/Sydney musician Greg Stone is a longtime friend of the show, starting off in postrock/alt-hip-hop/indietronic band Underlapper, who were played endlessly in the mid-2000s to early 2010s. Sometime around the end of Underlapper, Greg & Matt from the band formed a trio with me called Haunts, which incidentally will be releasing our debut album later this year. But it’s been a long time for Greg to journey towards making music solo, and I’ve been excited by Clay Teeth ever since I heard the first demos. The thing is, the Clay Teeth demos – and at least one as-yet unreleased album – were all based around the tribal, minimalist drum’n’bass championed by the Samurai label, so this album is a weird introduction to the project! Weird, but truly gorgeous: The Fading Light pivots the techno element of that drum’n’bass stuff into ambient techno, and the darkness is softly illuminated. These 6 tracks captivated Eli Murray aka Gentleforce, and they suit his Bush Meditation label to a tee – they’re meditations on existence in the twilight. You need this. Jad Atoui – Reaching Heart [Ruptured/Bandcamp] Beirut-based producer/sound-artist Jad Atoui was one of the first artists I discovered on broadening my knowledge of the Lebanese experimental scene – I played his remix of Senyawa on the Ruptured/Annihaya back in 2021. Despite the electronic nature of his music, he spent considerable time embedded in the New York Downtown scene, learning about improv as well as creating installation works, many of which you can read about and view on his website. Nevertheless, I’ve played Atoui mostly in collaboration with others, so it’s nice that he has a new solo album, It Will Take Forever, coming out from Ruptured in mid-July. On first single “Reaching Heart” you can hear connections to noise and drone, but also echoes of club music’s sonics – rumbling sub bass, broken-down rhythms. It’s going to be a brilliant album. Listen again — ~217MB

Songs heavy & dark, glitchy & light, raps in English & Turkish, beats bassy & percussive, jazz upbeat & minimal… It’s Utility Fog! LISTEN AGAIN, you might have missed something the first time? Stream on demand from fbi.radio, podcast here. YHWH Nailgun – Burns [AD93/Bandcamp] YHWH Nailgun – Innocent Sigh [AD93/Bandcamp] The super-intense sound of YHWH Nailgun is hard to pin down – they get described as a band where each member is playing a different genre. There’s something of hardcore punk, some kind of prog tendencies, drumming that’s like live jungle, but hints of 80s new romantic somehow? So what do you do if you’ve got so many ideas? Distill them down into an 11-minute album apparently! Magazine presents 10 songs in 11 minutes, and while none is quite Napalm Death’s “You Suffer” (but why?), the title track is only 35 second long. And while one in particular sounds like it cuts off just as it’s beginning, others manage to make a complete statement in only 1:20. I’m not sure this release will change people’s minds in either direction, but for my money YHWH Nailgun are doing something genuinely interesting & new. Big|Brave – verdure [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp] Big|Brave – holding tongue [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp] Montréal’s Big|Brave haven’t ever really sat still in terms of musical genre, once being lumped in with metal, clearly owing much to the postrock of their hometown, and last year making an abstract, vocal-less album called OST (that preceded the movie that it may be a sountrack to). On the metal side, mind you, they made an incredible album with the body that somehow sounded most like… folk-rock? In any case, for the stunning in grief or hope, the vocals & instruments of Robin Wattie and Matt Ball, combined with the bass of MY DISCO‘s Liam Andrews and electronics of Machines With Magnets‘ Seth Manchester, have resulted in the heaviest work yet from the band, leaning deeply into controlled distortion. Wattie’s voice holds the grief as expressively as ever, while some of the hope may be expressed in the pulsating instrumental “holding tongue”. Proving once again that Big|Brave are one of the most vital bands currently in existence. Tujiko Noriko – Only on Love [Editions Mego/Bandcamp] Back in March I was fortunate to be invited to DJ at White Bay Power Station for a Liquid Architecture event headlined by the brilliant Japanese glitch/ambient-pop pioneer, Tujiko Noriko. Since 2001, Noriko has made fragile, experimental pop songs and ambient compositions that sit comfortably in the glitch world that was to a large extent originated by the Viennese label Mego who picked up her debut album. In the intervening 2½ decades, Noriko has made music with acoustic improvisers, beatmakers, sound-artists, and of course put out lots more of her own stuff, including more song-based music, soundtracks, more ambient-leaning works. While her latest full album for (Editions) Mego, 2013’s Crépuscule I & II was very much on the ambient soundtrackerly vibe, Noriko also released last year an incredible debut of a trio with Adrian Corker and George Barton that they’ve named CxBxT, whose album .After is songs & beats, if no less experimental for it. So PON, Noriko’s latest album and a long time coming, sits somewhere between those poles – ambient pop, I guess. Quite romantic, Japanesely twinkly, with strange mood-shifts & disembodied voices ensuring you don’t get too complacent. Mariam Wallentin & Vestnorsk Jazzensemble – Blanket Dance [Hubro/Bandcamp] 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 Berthling 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 an earlier collaboration with Wallentin reworking her older material. But new album Spring Flood, now released on key Norwegian label Hubro, is all new material, and it’s a bit of a wonder – of course it is, considering the calbire of the musicians and Wallentin’s genius at beautiful songwriting that sites well with contemporary & free jazz. With ideas originating from Wallentin’s stay on Basel, on the banks of the Rhine, which were then developed collaboratively with the ensemble, the arrangements go from abstract sound-environments to intimate jazz to rhythmic big band to heavy rock. Quite something! Laura Misch – Kairos [One Little Independent/Bandcamp] Annoyingly, London saxophonist, singer & sound-artist Laura Misch is often described as “Tom Misch‘s sister”, an artist of some fame who I’d only glancingly heard of. Maybe it’s helpful for some, but it seems particularly intrusive with female artists (then again, it’s also ironic as Tom Misch dropped out of public life for a while as he was troubled by his own fame). On Lithic, Laura Misch has created an album worthy of the elemental forces that inspired it – particularly water patiently eroding stone away to produce rock formations, caves, cliffs and pools. Misch took her saxophone and field recording equipment out to those places on the edge of land & sea and allowed the primal energies of the natural world to imprint themselves on her music. Pusating waves of synths, layers of saxophone and her cool, smooth voice combine into unusual songs that sometimes venture towards chill-out dancefloors, sometimes jazz that dissolves into field recordings. Beautiful. Love Is Yes – Motionless [Kit Records/Bandcamp] Dutch duo Love Is Yes make a kind of lo-fi indie pop music that’s sometimes so minimalist it’s barely there. Guitar, keyboards and voice might seemingly be the main building blocks, but stuttering glitches take over from melodies, and songs only deign to begin halfway through gentle collages of sound. Ghosts and More Ghosts is a disarmingly appropriate name for their second album, and disarming is an appropriate description for the music too. ear – Threads [A24 Music/Bandcamp] ear – F [A24 Music/Bandcamp] If Love Is Yes are nodding at the most minimal of the postrock-meets-indietronica of Utility Fog’s early years, the surprising sensation that is US duo ear can’t help but recall the halcyon days of weirdo laptop-folk & laptop indie-pop of The Books, Lucky Dragons and the like – Utility Fog’s bread-and-butter in those early-to-mid-oughts. Members Yaelle Avtan & Jonah Paz met studying fine arts at Bard College in New York – not surprising, as art school has given rise to many pioneering experimental musicians. Songs sound throwaway but burrow into your ears, break into breakcore or get stuck in glitches. So anyway, it’s no surprise that I’m into ear’s new album Rumspringa and last year’s The Most Dear and The Future; what’s more puzzling is why so many young people are now (although the new one is released by A24 Music, music arm of the indie film studio). Is it… cool to be weird? (Yes) Alif Hilal – Reality (Lyra’s Dhikr al-Qayyum Rework) [7K/Bandcamp] The artist previously known as Lyra Pramuk is now going by Alif Hilal, a name reflecting of her new faith in Islam. Her work has always had a devotional aspect, rooted in voice, with electronically-mediated chorals and, on last year’s Hymnal (see?), beautiful string arrangements cut up & processed along with the vocals. Just as Hilal is announcing her new name, she releases Hymnal (Resung), a selection of remixes featuring the brilliant Djrum, Verraco, Laurel Halo & John Tejada and more. But her own remix also pulls last year’s songs into a territory at once more abstract and more rhythmic than the originals. A great collection all in all. Wu-Lu & POiSON ANNA – West Window [Warp Records/Wu-Lu Bandcamp/POiSON ANNA Bandcamp] Wu-Lu‘s 2022 album Loggerhead was one of the more notable debuts on Warp Records in recent years, combining UK hip-hop with indie rock/punk and detours via breakcore and dub. Now on Bakerz Dozen (a short album that’s definitely not 13 tracks long), Wu-Lu teams up with a similarly genre-agnostic artist, POiSON ANNA, for a tour through unpredictability. And yes, again there’ll be jungle beats morphed into rock guitars, r’n’b & trip-hop side-by-side with noise. Recommended. Jesse Draxler – Ctrl Alt Del ft. HOLLY & Ho99o9 [RIP ID] LA-based visual artist, filmmaker & musician Jesse Draxler has released the first single from his upcoming album/project Tongue of Angels, featuring hip-hop/punk/metal duo Ho99o9 and beatmaker HOLLY. It sounds a lot like Ho99o9 (pronounced “horror”), which is a very good thing. I’m not clear on what Draxler’s contribution musically is, but you can see him painting to the track on the video here. X.A.Cute – Paradox feat. Ethnique Punch [X.A.Cute Bandcamp] German electronic trio X.A.Cute make experimental hip-hop with samplers, synths and turntables, collaborating widely with rappers & other musicians. Their latest EP Paradox features two tracks with Turkish rapper Ethnique Punch, who we’ve heard quite a lot with Istanbul producer Grup Ses, including a whole album together in 2019 and an appearance last year as well. His hard-hitting vocals adorn two tracks driven by drum machines and percussion, each of which is given a remix and a dub as well. Carl Gari – Disco Lights feat. Sensational [Molten Moods/Bandcamp] Carl Gari – Wünschelrute [Molten Moods/Bandcamp] Most of us know German band Carl Gari from their incredibly strong albums made with Egyptian singer/trumpeter/poet/composer Abdullah Miniawy, on AD93 and Amphibian Records. Between those two releases, the band & singer released a live album on Molten Moods, and it’s to that label that Carl Gari now return for their self-titled album. There’s a lot of moody bass music here, filtered through jungle, krautrocky techno and more, with some excellent vocal collaborations including the great UK singer/rapper/musician Coby Sey, Munich singer/producer Polygonia, hip-hop experimentalist Will Brooks of dälek, and experimental rap pioneer Sensational. Rotgland – Skux (ft. Cherry Rype) [Rotgland Bandcamp] Once upon a time, a man called Andrew Maxam had a popular show on fbi.radio called Liquid Electric, and he also made electronic music under the name Loopsnake. These days he is living in Dubai, and found himself wanting to rewind to his earliest days of music production, when he’d been making dubstep & related bass genres; thus was Rotgland born, and the first two tracks are available now. “Skux”‘s bass snarls and jittery beats are enhanced by a sample from Eora/Sydney alt-pop singer Cherry Rype. Low End Activist – Ultramarine [XCPT/Bandcamp] UK bass music shapeshifter, social history chronicler, and boss of Sneaker Sound System, BRUK and other labels, Low End Activist here appears on the very on-point Italian bass label XCPT with JH Versions. The neon-soaked jazz samples smeared through the productions give a clue to who JH is here, although you couldn’t clearly identify specific Jon Hassell tracks (maybe a superfan could). This is vintage LEA: sparse reworkings of tropes from jungle, drum’n’bass & other bass genres, eschewing “jazzy jungle” for a darker Photek vibe. Rutger Zuydervelt – Not Good Enough [Gusstaff Records/Machinefabriek Bandcamp] Dutch sound-artist Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek has by now made a number of soundtracks for the Netherlands-based Iranian coreographer Roshanak Morrowatian. Alphabets of the Flesh is an EP, released on 10″ vinyl via Polish label Gusstaff Records. The percussion-led last track is a particular highlight, but there’s beautiful electro-acoustic sound manipulation throughout. Rosa Brunello – Line Unbroken [Domanda Music/Bandcamp] Speaking of percussion, the new album from Italian bassist Rosa Brunello, We Are Surging Waters, mixes jazz with a love of SWANA musics and quite a lot of electronics. I love how “Line Unbroken” begins with Brunello’s bass, but immediately the horns say “Hi!” and then it’s all about the percussion. And at the 3 minute mark dub echoes briefly swamp the horns and the percussions switches to full drumkit. There’s lots more fun to found throughout the album. Alexander Noice – Third Corso [Orenda Records/Bandcamp] Here’s an electro-acoustic tour de force from LA-based composer & guitarist Alexander Noice, which takes in jazz. art rock & contemporary composition, but all very electronically-mediated. Noice’s guitar, keyboards & piano and voice, joined by saxophones on a number of tracks, pulse & flicker through exuberant ostinati – mechanised arpeggios and scales – while sometimes drum machines hammer along with them, and garbled vocal samples interject. In amongst all the programming are sweeping melodic interludes, but even there the sampler’s voice is strong, chopping and re-triggering sounds, and thumping 808 bass & scintillating keyboards are never far away. A joyous wonderland. Berndt / Schmidt – The Sound of Glink [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp] Drew Daniel, one half of Matmos, is quite prolific outside of the beloved duo, with a varied solo career as The Soft Pink Truth as well as various collaborations. It’s less common to hear solo or other non-Matmos music from Drew’s partner Martin M.C. Schmidt, so the new album Cloud Machines, which finds Schmidt working with Baltimore experimental mainstay John Berndt, should make us sit up and listen. The humour and weirdness of Matmos is very much present, but its exploratory sound takes in Krautrock studio experimentation, postpunk out-rock and any other leftfield musical non-traditions. Driftwood – Restless Earth [Room40/Bandcamp] Naarm/Melbourne clarinettist Aviva Endean and guitarist Nick Ashwood formed Driftwood around a pair of reed organs microtonally tuned in just intonation, with Ashwood’s guitar tuned to match the very otherworldly tones. On their second album Maps, electronics subtly emphasise bass frequencies and process the organ drones while Endean’s clarinet soars over them. Ashwood’s guitar itself sounds deeply (beautifully) odd, in its unfamiliar tuning, and the repeating figures create a hallucinatory, blurred effect. Eerily beauitful. Microfiche – Cascades [Earshift Music/Bandcamp] One of Eora/Sydney’s best jazz bands, Microfiche, have released now their third album With Time. 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. It’s a really special album, showcasing each musician’s talents as well as their hard-earned skill improvising & composing as a group. “Cascades” is a great example – written by bassist Alduca with the group, it slowly seeps out of mysterious electronic tones, with a melody played unison on all wind instruments, somehow remaining tentative, until Manojlovic’s aleatoric piano scatters notes hither & thither, and kick & snare start a halting beat. It becomes clear that the bass isn’t absent, but rather is providing those spectral tones, slowly emerging into shuddering substantiality. Superb. Clay Teeth – How Can I Help U? [Bush Meditation/Bandcamp] Eora/Sydney musician Greg Stone is a longtime friend of the show, starting off in postrock/alt-hip-hop/indietronic band Underlapper, who were played endlessly in the mid-2000s to early 2010s. Sometime around the end of Underlapper, Greg & Matt from the band formed a trio with me called Haunts, which incidentally will be releasing our debut album later this year. But it’s been a long time for Greg to journey towards making music solo, and I’ve been excited by Clay Teeth ever since I heard the first demos. The thing is, the Clay Teeth demos – and at least one as-yet unreleased album – were all based around the tribal, minimalist drum’n’bass championed by the Samurai label, so this album is a weird introduction to the project! Weird, but truly gorgeous: The Fading Light pivots the techno element of that drum’n’bass stuff into ambient techno, and the darkness is softly illuminated. These 6 tracks, which captivated Eli Murray aka Gentleforce, suit his Bush Meditation label to a tee – they’re meditations on existence in the twilight. You need this. Listen again — ~220MB

From experimental dub to spoken word with electronics, processed percussion, dub techno mutations and more… LISTEN AGAIN for a good time. Stream on demand from fbi.radio, podcast here. Lee “Scratch” Perry & Mouse on Mars – Spatialee [Domino/Bandcamp] Lee “Scratch” Perry & Mouse on Mars – Yayaya [Domino/Bandcamp] Any collaboration with dub originator Lee “Scratch” Perry is going to come with a story – and especially one that happened very shortly before he passed away. When it’s the legendary German electronic duo Mouse on Mars, that goes double – and story there is, which you can read at this album’s own dedicated website. MoM have always skated the boundary between cerebrally exploratory and crowd-pleasingly accessible, and they’ve swum from bloopy electronica to postrock, punk to techno. On Spatial, No Problem. they’ve comfortably found a place that incorporates the sounds and signifiers of roots reggae and dub with their own electronic tendencies. There are great horn arrangements, dub effects, and a lot of Scratchian vocals, both general chatter and songs. By all accounts, Perry brought objects, sounds and lots of ideas to the sessions, and it does sound like a collaboration and not just Perry’s distinctive voice slapped on to the band’s tracks. Honestly, it’s the most engaging thing I’ve heard from Mouse on Mars in ages, and while there have been at least four releases I’ve heard claiming to be Lee Perry’s last recordings, if this is the one, it’s a perfectly zany and delightful way to sign off! Sandy Chamoun – Wa و [Ruptured/Bandcamp] Sandy Chamoun – Shahed شاهد [Ruptured/Bandcamp] Beirut’s Sandy Chamoun is a founding member of the great Lebanese supergroup SANAM, whose second album Sametou Sawtan سمعت صوتاً was released on Montréal’s Constellation Records last year to great acclaim, and the experimental trio Ghadr. In both groups, Chamoun often uses lyrics from Arabic poets and folk songs, but on her new album Sawt El Doumouh صوت الدموع (The Sound of Tears), her own lyrics write of the experience of living during the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (neither of which have in any sense ended – don’t turn your eyes away). Despite the sound of tears, Chamoun’s album imagines ways to find light & hope, and you can hear that in the way her voice rises over heavy percussion and electronics. Beautiful. Jungstötter – Tag 10 [Unguarded/Unguarded Bandcamp/Jungstötter Bandcamp] Jungstötter – Elastic (Avenue) [Unguarded/Unguarded Bandcamp/Jungstötter Bandcamp] Fabian Altstötter’s solo project Jungstötter began with 2019’s Love Is, but I only came across him with the incredible One Star album in 2023. Alstötter’s vocal delivery recalls the likes of David Sylvian and Scott Walker, richly sung and emotive, with production that can also be seen to call back to those artists’ dedication to experimention. A lot of this new album is very sparse, but there is electronic processing undercutting the organic sounds, there are field recordings floating through, and some angular sounds on guitar and electronics. It’s quite beautiful, as is his earlier work, very much worth following up. BAG – ‘Oumuamua [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp] BAG – Floor Phlegm Hue [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp] UK’s Phantom Limb is a very gregarious label (among other things), supporting experimental music of all colours. London duo (or is it trio?) BAG combine the hallucinatory spoken word of Canadian artist/poet Jody DeSchutter and the swooping, grinding electronics of Daniel Allison, joined by “auxiliary member” Angèle David-Guillou (French composer and longtime member of the much-missed Piano Magic) on various instruments. The drums of Iggor Cavalera (ex-Sepultura drummer and one half of PETBRICK) feature all over the record, which was produced by his wife, the multi-talented Laima Leyton. Frequently intense & unpredictable, this album’s a real trip. BAG join a strange cohort of spoken word-driven bands of late, such as Dry Cleaning and Egg Meat, doing extremely odd things with the use of non-melodic voice, or not usually melodic. I’m not sure there’s anything in common between groups like these either, except that they don’t have much in common with much else out there. A good way to be. Naná Rizinni – The Right Side of the Escalator [Naná Rizinni Bandcamp] Naná Rizinni – Under the Quiet [Naná Rizinni Bandcamp] São Paulo drummer & composer Naná Rizinni bases herself in London now, and has released a number of solo albums and collaborations. Her new album Epiblast was written & co-produced with saxophonist Mark Cake, whose multitracked horns are all over the record. Despite Rizinni’s Brazilian origins & jazz training, her brilliant & very versatile drumming is often led into experimental electronics and synths, approaching almost postrock, minimalist composition and more. Don’t miss it! Medium + SIMM + Flowdan – Simple Stuff (Submerged VIP) [Ohm Resistance] US label Ohm Resistance, run by Kurt Gluck aka Submerged, has released heaps of heavy drum’n’bass, breakcore, dub(step), industrial-tinged beats of all sorts, for well over 2 decades. Some 18 years ago, they released a 12″ drum’n’bass compilation called Disciples of the Unreal, and for no reason other than that they can, they’ve now released a sequel, Disciples of the Unreal II, which happens to be twice as long. This is very much the heavier end of the drum’n’bass spectrum, with plenty of bass weight and rhythmic interplay, but how can you go past Big Flowdan‘s flow on a collaboration with Ukrainian d’n’bers Medium & Italian heavy dub don SIMM aka Eraldo Bernocchi, here as Kurt Gluck’s own Submerged VIP. Not-so simple stuff! Margenrot – Annushka [Rosa 15/Bandcamp] Moscow-based Armenian musician Lusia Kazaryan-Topchyan is Margenrot, whose earlier solo releases sat in a kind of illbient, industrial dub & ’80s electronic space. On her new album Antuni she draws from the music of her Armenian roots, combining choral & liturgical samples, field recordings, and fractured breakbeats. From glitched beats to glitched orchestras, the album even finds room for an unexpected song of sorts, as it explores the nature of home & identity (“Antuni” means “homeless” in Armenian). Beautifully done. FRIEND LESS – Transcend (James Plotkin remix) [Jon Mueller Bandcamp] US drummer & percussionist Jon Mueller has a broad remit, having worked with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon in Volcano Choir, made postrock with Chris Rosenau in Pele and Collections of Colonies of Bees, and collaborated with countless experimental musicians including Aaron Turner of ISIS, SUMAC etc. A few weeks ago he launched a new project called FRIEND LESS with the EP Energy Rippers, the two tracks of which smash out powerful breakbeats from overdriven drums. But FRIEND LESS isn’t friendless, and its second release is a pair of remixes on Logic of Relics. Mueller invited Ken Brown (aka Bundy K Brown of Tortoise, sometimes known as the Cheech Wizard etc) and James Plotkin (of Khanate, O.L.D and countless others) to add their treatments to the two tracks. Both are awesome, but Brown’s is almost 17 minutes long, so we heard PLotkin’s 9 minutes, which sounds as close to his incredible Atomsmasher/Phantomsmasher as he’s gotten in 2+ decades. Cinna Peyghamy – Zur زور [Other People/Bandcamp] Cinna Peyghamy – Glass Teeth 94 [Other People/Bandcamp] I first discovered Iranian-French percussionist Cinna Peyghamy through his two appearances on Azu Tiwaline‘s Magnetic Service EP on Livity Sound. Peyghamy has never been to Iran, but was fascinated in Persian music, and specifically the tombak – a goblet drum central to Persian music. As a sound designer & producer (and programmer), he was immediately interested in how to connected the very physical sound of the instrument with modular synthesis and processing. Now Nicolas Jaar’s Other People has released Peyghamy’s most fully-realised take on this music, straightforwardly titled Music For Tombak & Synth. And the excitement of listening to this music comes from the way Peyghamy makes his nimble drumming on this very expressive instrument interact with dub effects and programmed synths. The amount of wonderful, forward-thinking music being made these days by musicians with roots in West Asia and North Africa is an antidote to the appropriation, orientalism and even well-meaning ethnomusicology of western music’s interactions with cultures beyond its borders. Forest Drive West – Node [Delsin/Bandcamp] Across releases on RuptureLDN, Livity Sound, Ilian Tape and more, Joe Baker aka Forest Drive West has shown himself equal to the specifics of jungle, drum’n’bass and techno – but more to the point, in the decade or so since he began, he’s found ways to set drum’n’bass & techno in conversation with each other. And yeah, lots of people are doing this in different ways, but Baker just knows deeply the nod & sway, the flutter and leech and bubble of dub techno vs d’n’b vs jungle, and when he melds them together, they’re just one thing – all things all at once. It’s like a magic trick, but you know… for the dancefloor. Or your headphones. K Wata – Radio Embrace [Short Span/Bandcamp] OK, but then what of K Wata? Unlike the more jittery dub techno of the likes of Paperclip Minimiser or Hoavi, where IDM or hints at jungle flitter around, K Wata’s take is pitch-perfect for the Vladislav Delay or Pole crew. That’s not to say this is a throwback at all, though – it’s informed by current bass music in subtle ways, and the sound design is next level. There’s so much detail to be heard here, whether in the spatial dubbiness or the glitchy samples. Oh – and tonight’s selection, “Radio Embrace”, does insert syncopations and skittery delays which hint handily at something drum’n’bassy going on in the next room. Leverton Fox – Sounding Balloons at the Kármán Line [Not Applicable/Bandcamp] There’s nothing approaching jungle or dub techno on the latest album from Leverton Fox, but one third of the group – Isambard Khroustaliov aka Sam Britton – is half of the beloved Icarus, whose first two albums are little-known gems of mid-’90s Photek-style d’n’b. (Icarus’ other half, Ollie Bown, lives in Sydney and is a member of my still-active band Tangents). Leverton Fox is a long-running project with London jazz & improv mainstay Alex Bonney on trumpet & electronics and the highly talented Tim Giles on drums & electronics. Leverton Fox doesn’t sound much like jazz either, most of the time, but listen & you’ll find yourself lost in a parallel dimension where the musical rules are subtly out of whack, and probably the rules of physics too. New album Eternal Gong Bath of the Sunbed Mind, apart from being an outrageous pun (is it a pun if it barely makes sense?), is as surreal as its title, or its track titles (all of which start with “S” for some reason). But somehow, the outer realms of krautrock, British free improv and pioneering electronic music meet like galaxies colliding, and it comes to make some kind of internal sense. It’s a trip! Anthony Lyons – Murmuration [Anthony Lyons Bandcamp] Anthony Lyons – Sacred Signals [Anthony Lyons Bandcamp] Naarm/Melbourne musician & sound-artist Anthony Lyons has a project with cellist Emily Williams called Au Revoir Hands whose last release was in 2021. Something more from the duo would be great, but meanwhile it’s a huge pleasure to hear the sounds of his Buchla Music Easel, modular synths, field recordings and more on his new album Signals. On a number of tracks, Lyons takes sound recordings and bio-electrical signals from various locations and folds them into his compositions; elsewhere he evokes nature through layers of flickering synths. The results are enchanting and immersive. Martyna Basta – Weeping Willow [7K/Bandcamp] Martyna Basta – 2674 (feat. Rainy Miller) [7K/Bandcamp] In 2021, I was glad to discover Kraków-based sound-artist Martyna Basta via her stunning album Making Eye Contact With Solitude, released on Adam Badí Donoval‘s Warm Winters Ltd. label. Her equally wonderful second album Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering came out early in 2023, again released by Warm Winters, Ltd., while Belgian label STROOM.tv released the Diaries Beneath Fragile Glass EP later that year. Through all these, Basta creates patient music built from found sounds, vocal snippets and layers, guitar loops, zither, violin and more. Now her undeniable talent has seen her picked up by 7K, the classical (but also experimental/abstract) arm of multifaceted German independent music company !K7. Winged In Collapse has all the fragile beauty of her earlier works, but shot through with a new kind of pop tendency. Importantly, Basta’s incredibly creative approach to sound design is not lost in the translation, with sheets of pitch-shifted granular detritus giving way to delicate vocals worthy of a soccer Committee song, or shuddering pink noise underscoring the spoken word of Rainy Miller and more. There’s no way this won’t be high on many Best of 2026 lists. Helen Svoboda – Veins (feat. Selma Savolainen) [Room40/Bandcamp] Naarm-based Finnish-Australian double bassist is an artist who truly defies categorisation, as you may have noted if you’ve been listening to this show for a while. Adept as a jazz double-bassist, she has also developed many extended techniques on her instrument, and is a master at the melodic use of stopped harmonics (heard in last year’s debut from the TL;DR quartet and 2024’s Anatomical Heart collaboration). Svoboda’s last solo album, 2023’s The Odd River, is a collection of assorted songs, on which Svoboda is joined by many brilliant Australian jazz players, but the music covers folk and classical – and in fact the album is one part of a film work Svoboda made with Angus Kirby (I’m not sure there’s any way to watch it online though). This year brings the follow-up, Headwater, released by the great Room40, showcasing songs & compositions mostly created from Svoboda’s double bass & voice, and co-produced by Tilman Robinson, whose electronics also wrap around many of the works. There are a few collaborators, and notably the voice of acclaimed Finnish singer Selma Savolainen can be found throughout. What I’ve heard so far is gorgeous – it promises to be a remarkable album. Also very notable is that Helen is performing on stage as an integral part of Sydney Theatre Company’s An Iliad, technical a single-hander performed by David Wenham, but with Svoboda and her double bass permanently on-stage, soundtracking and interacting with the work. It seems unreasonable to me that the publicity and credits focus solely on Wenham (a brilliant actor) and the adapters of Homer’s epic, Lisa Peterson & Denis O’Hare, visionaries though they are: the piece could not exist without Helen Svoboda’s presence and creativity. You can see her talking about her warm-up routine and some of her double bass extended techniques on STC’s Instagram though. (Oh, er, tragically it’s sold out till the end of its season though – sorry!) Listen again — ~222MB

It’s a strange old world we live in, so let’s have some strange new music shall we? Foetus – The World Is Broken Murex – Massacre memotone – Laimèti Pavyksta (feat. Ugnė Uma and Typesun) memotone – Round The Bend (feat. guest) whait – Communion Lesley Mok – berserk Gloorp – Jeggings Gareth Psaltis – Closer On Water Droplets Spitbender – Global Overgroove Synkro & Tom Jarmey – Midnight The Selva – OBSIDIANA The Selva – SUSSURRO Aaron Martin – Capture Aaron Martin – Carnival Microfiche – I Sat In One Place Until It Became Many Cyparissus – Cimmerian Cyparissus – Amplexus Driftwood – The Sky Wide Open Magda Mayas – Embodied Olivier Alary – Movement III Listen again — ~214MB

OK so, like, there’s this thing called music, right? I’m not sure what it is, so I’m spending 2hrs per week on the radio trying to work it out. Help me, please. LISTEN AGAIN, if you dare. Stream on demand @ fbi.radio, podcast here. 1000 Rabbits – White Horse 1000 Rabbits – Rubik’s Cube Marcus Whale – Extra Life Travis Cook – Fingertips like fairydust Egg Meat – What a Performance Egg Meat – Elegy BAG – Moth Ball Holland Andrews x Methods Body – Speechless Loraine James – Habits and Patterns ft. Tirzah Loraine James – A Long Distance Call Antoine Ferris – La nèu ft. Louie Z Antoine Ferris – Cataplasme Ester – Bad news Pugilist – Corporate Consultant Gets Fed Through Wood Chipper dj vadim ft motion man – terrorist jungle 98 booty Heavee – Mainframe Arcane – Aguila Polska – Art feat. Dan Samsa Boards of Canada – Prophecy At 1420 MHz Frudha – One Pointedness O’Flynn – Sekete (ft. Swordman Kitala) Vladislav Delay Quintet – thirteen Vladislav Delay Quintet – nineteen Dog Plug – Dakkerha دكّرها Lachlan R. Dale – Pyrrhus (feat. Mitch Clews & Chris Allison) Lawrence English – Sodium Vapour Halo (alone) Listen again — ~215MB

Lovely songs and weiiird songs, vocal manipulation, lots of variants of jungle/drum’n’bass/IDM, processed guitars, prepared piano, avant-garde flute. LISTEN AGAIN to the avant-garde of the avant-garde. Stream on demand from fbi.radio, podcast here. Jesca Hoop – Playground Jesca Hoop – Signal To Noise Helen Svoboda – Void Of Space Buffalo Daughter – Harm No More sandscape – nisa neon light ELUCID & Sebb Bash – First Light (feat. MATTIE) Seefeel – AM Flares plunderphonics – tooBillies – naked origin vocals Stephen Vitiello and Edwin Torres – Easy with tle Dogs Versus Shadows & Nicholas Langley – Slapdash And Bouldered Dogs Versus Shadows & Nicholas Langley – One Magic Camera gi – stemmed gi – spel Steve Flato x Yapping Portal x datewithdeath x Carl Kruger – Drum Machine Fell Into The Bath (Again) Low End Activist – Indigo HLZ – Oracles dan le sac – Monark Bass Mantra – Unit 4-5 Ah! Kosmos & Hainbach – Shelter Lasus – Street Lasus – Undo Alister Spence – Rain Phase Alister Spence – Searchlight Juli Deák – Brisk Juli Deák – Contact Listen again — ~219MB

Jungle turning up in the darndest places tonight, as is… saxophone? Jazz stretched to its limits, and electronica during wartime… LISTEN AGAIN in the darndest places – stream on demand from fbi.radio, podcast here. Butthole Surfers – Imbuya [Sunset Blvd] Never thought I’d be playing Butthole Surfers on Utility Fog. Not that they weren’t an impeccably experimental punk/noise band in their earlier days. Not that Gibby Haines didn’t do the greatest impromptu guest spot ever on Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod“. Not that “Pepper” isn’t a classic ’90s alt.rock/trip-hop crossover hit. But still, they haven’t been active for a long while, so it’s altogether a surprise that they’ve decided to release their “long lost” follow-up to Electric Larryland, the album that featured “Pepper”. For various reasons – label shenanigans etc – it wasn’t released in the form they wanted, with some songs reworked on the eventual next album Weird Revolution. Fans have known about The Last Astronaut, and heard leaked copies for decades, but now we’re getting it proper-like, and whaddayaknow, the second song they give us is alt rock/industrial punk with amen breaks, because jungle will never die. The break gets pretty nicely tweaked in the middle 8, while the guitar chugs along like a sped-up track from that Ministry album. Picastro – Fell The Family Tree [We Are Busy Bodies/Bandcamp] Liz Hysen’s band Picastro has been going for a very long time – since 1998 – with a changeable lineup that’s usually left-of-centre, featuring viola or cello (Hysen herself plays violin), with various luminaries of the Toronto scene involved, including Owen Pallett and Nick Storring. Hysen’s songs are often dark & creepy, often uncomfortably intimate, and the strings may be used atonally as often as they’re beautiful. It’s true to say that while every Picastro song sounds like Picastro, every Picastro album is different, and their forthcoming Double On Time may be more electronic, based on this lovely – and yes, creepy – first single “Fell The Family Tree”. Notable for us here at Utility Fog, the album is co-produced by Tim Condon of Fresh Snow, whose debut as Mirrored Silver Sea was a UFog fave in 2008, and who moved from Melbourne to Toronto not long after it was released. It’s great to hear his many contributions here alongside Liz Hysen’s singular vision. Carl Gari – Swim feat. Polygonia [Molten Moods/Bandcamp] Most of us know German band Carl Gari from their incredibly strong albums made with Egyptian singer/trumpeter/poet/composer Abdullah Miniawy, on AD93 and Amphibian Records. Between those two releases, the band & singer released a live album on Molten Moods, and it’s to that label that Carl Gari now return for their self-titled album, forthcoming in June. This choppy beats of the second single are joined by multi-tracked vocals from Munich-based Polygonia, herself a producer of bass & other dancefloor music. james K – On God (Roza Terenzi Remix) [AD93/Bandcamp] Following her vaporwave-trip-hop album Friend from last year, james K now reaches out for some heavy-duty Friends to remix the album. Roza Terenzi is Katie Campbell, originally from Perth, then Melbourne, now Europe, also one third of trip-hop band trickpony. She takes the jangly indie song “On God” and dubs it out with vocal delays and chunkier beats – one of the best remixes of the set. Lyra Pramuk – Ending (Djrum Endless Rework) [7K/Bandcamp] The remix has in a sense always been at the heart of the work of operatically & classically-trained composer & producer Lyra Pramuk, whether it’s sampling and processing her own voice, or commissioning huge remix compilations as on 2021’s Delta. Last year she started her own label pop.soil, but simultaneously joined 7K (!K7‘s classical/ambient imprint that they’re back-referencing as 7Klassik), releasing the beautiful Hymnal in June. In June this year comes Hymnal (Resung), in which her voice and the strings of Sonar Quartett are remixed by seven of her colleagues – and who better than the classical-tuned beatmaster Djrum as the first to be released? dgoHn – I Couldn’t Remember So I Made Something Up [Planet µ/Bandcamp] Here are two tastes that sure go well together – the first release by drumfunk genius dgoHn (aka John Cunnane) on Planet µ! All signs point to Tessares being vintage dgoHn, with the melodic focus of label boss µ-Ziq – and dgoHn did have an album with Macc on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label (digital available here), so IDM isn’t exactly foreign to his style of drum’n’bass. I’m certain this will be a joy. SPECIAL REQUEST – Uncanny Valley (gyrofield remix) [Timedance/Bandcamp] When techno/tech house mainstay Paul Woolford unveiled his Special Request alter ego in 2012 with a series of 12″s and remixes, it was revolutionary not just for Woolford but for the nascent jungle revival, representing a new take on the ’90s jungle revolution, and pre-empting the still-current jungle revival by at least a couple of years (well it depends how you count it – Sully’s Blue double EP was 2014, despite the Bandcamp date). As you know, Woolford has used Special Request for all music of the hardcore continuum by now, but for Batu’s Timedance he’s dropped a piece of hardcoreish drum’n’bass. It’s backed by two remixes: Metrist‘s bass heavy slow-fast take and gyrofield‘s more abstracted weird-jungle. Weird dancefloors unite! los pulpitos – ii ii ii [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp] los pulpitos – Archipelago [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp] Since the early ’80s Belgian label Crammed Discs has been the home for postpunk and world music of all sorts as well as quite a lot of electronica. Techno & electronica producer Dirk Leyers here teams up with Felipe Salmon of Peruvian duo Dengue Dengue Dengue under the name los pulpitos (the little octopuses). Their debut EP Octopean Union from last year was a lovely piece of underwater electronica, combining techno & acid vibes with friendly drum’n’bass/jungle and those South & Central American percussive forms that Dengue Dengue Dengue nurtured. The new album Tentacletek is similarly-formed and both are absolutely lovely, just the right combo of dreamy & danceable. Appleblim – Thunderstorm [Sneaker Social Club/Bandcamp] Laurie Osborne as Appleblim was a key figure in the outward dissemination of dubstep with the Skull Disco label he ran with Sam Shackleton, twisting dubstep’s template to include technoid rhythms. Since then both artists’ oeuvres have turned sideways into other realms, but Appleblim’s always cleaved closer to the dancefloor. Here he’s joined with Sneaker Social Club for a third time, with melodic, hardware-driven rave tracks that float somewhere between drum’n’bass, 2-step, dubstep, weightless and some kind of acidic disco. Always brilliant. Rob Smith – Revolve (feat Tony Wrafter) [RSD Bandcamp] Here’s an unusual project for Rob Smith of Bristol trip-hop originals Smith & Mighty and junglists More Rockers. As RSD, Smith has also made forays into dubstep, indeed since early in the genre’s nascence, as well as dub more broadly. The makers of the underground film Urtobēn – Vienna’s illegal Artforms (more about graffiti and parkour activities than music itself) clearly felt RSD’s urban music styles suited the film’s aesthetic, and now he’s released the soundtrack on his Bandcamp, with tracks from many of his projects and a few fellow travellers. The previously-unreleased (I think!) jungle track I played tonight features trumpeter Tony Wrafter, a longtime Smith & Mighty fellow traveller, who’s also worked a lot with the On-U Sound stable. Ital Tek – Kill Switch [Planet µ/Bandcamp] I first played Alan Myson’s music as Ital Tek in 2007, pretty early in the dubstep’s expansion out from East London. He’d made a bit of breakcore/IDM before this, but his dubstep was quickly picked up by Mike Paradinas’ Planet µ, with all four tracks on the Blood Line EP certified bangers. He moved into a more purple phase, and via various other styles – some more ambient, some more industrial – we arrive at Mind Abandon. Here Myson is taking a bit more of a hardware approach, and again is mixing ambient with some more post-industrial expression, not exactly IDM or dubstep but not entirely separate either – especially the track I played tonight goes from punishing industrial bass into cyberpunk ambient synthesis. I’ve found for years now that Ital Tek albums don’t initially grab me, then I come back to them after a bit and I’m like What? This is fucking great. And yeah, this is great. An underrated talent, honestly. Jensen Interceptor – Flux Entrance [Peder Mannerfelt Produktion] Sydney-born producer Jensen Interceptor now finds himself based in Stockholm, so it makes sense that his last couple of EPs have been released by Pedder Mannerfelt‘s Produktion. Synthetic Seduction is definitely “future bass”, aimed squarely at the dancefloor; straightforward enough, but melodic and super bouncy. Rodja – Ajam (Version) [XCPT/Bandcamp] Pietro De Ruggieri is a producer from Mantera in Italy, releasing music as Rodja, which suggests a particularly Aussie pronunciation of “Rodger”, but presumably isn’t. De Ruggieri has spent some time in Tehran, and some of the music on his new album Third Force was produced there. It’s a phenomenal set of dub techno and other dubby bass music, with slippery production but emphatic beats, beautifully textured. Recommended. Paperclip Minimiser – TT A1 [Blank Mind/Bandcamp] Speaking of pitch-perfect updated dub techno, John Howes’ Paperclip Minimiser has the goods. This is far more ascetic than Rodja, a sound that will be familiar if you checked out Howes’ second album on Peak Oil a few weeks ago. Brilliant. Ptastvo – Bowls With Souls [I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free/Bandcamp] Ukrainian label I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free (based, with its progenitors, in Berlin since Russia’s war) here brings an album from Volodymyr Ponikarovskyi aka Ptastvo, who uses found sounds along with electronics and musical instruments to evoke the feeling of imbalance and the heightened emotions of living in wartime. It’s impressively varied music, and even at its most electro-acoustic (e.g. the literal metal bowls sampled on “Bowls With Souls”) it retains a connection to dance music, or at least music with beats. Quite an epic journey, one to listen to on a nighttime drive perhaps – or lie back and listen on headphones wherever you are. Bobby Ingham – Easy Mush [Sneaker Social Club/Bandcamp] Bobby Ingham – I Feel So Good I Swear I Could Fly [Sneaker Social Club/Bandcamp] On Angel of the North, released on Low End Activist‘s Sneaker Social Club, Leeds-born interdisciplinary artist Bobby Ingham echoes the label boss’s excavation of his Oxford council estate origins, featuring Ingham’s grandmother and Ingham’s own spoken word, with spookily discordant synths and fragmented rhythms tracing a skeleton of UK bass music, from grime to r’n’b-laced trip-hop. Berndt / Schmidt – Gecko Lazzaro [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp] Drew Daniel, one half of Matmos, is quite prolific outside of the beloved duo, with a varied solo career as The Soft Pink Truth as well as various collaborations. It’s less common to hear solo or other non-Matmos music from Drew’s partner Martin M.C. Schmidt, so the new album Cloud Machines, which finds Schmidt working with Baltimore experimental mainstay John Berndt, should make us sit up and listen. The humour and weirdness of Matmos is very much present, but its exploratory sound – from the first couple of singles – takes in Krautrock studio experimentation, postpunk out-rock and any other leftfield musical non-traditions. Harrington, Jaffe, Shiroishi – FRACTAL HASH [AKP Recordings/Bandcamp] Via LA label AKP Recordings, Making Colors is the second improvised wonder from three talented musicians who work comfortably across genres. Dave Harrington may be best known for his collaboration with Nicolas Jaar, Darkside, Max Jaffe for the art rock/avant-pop of JOBS and drumming in Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones, and Patrick Shiroishi for his solo saxophone & sound-art as well as hardcore punks The Armed, contemporary music ensemble Wild Up and much more. This spontaneous music can sound like postrock at one time, then free jazz or psychedelic noise, or ambient, all filtered through electronic processing. Rad. Adam Schatz – A Voice Screaming All Aboard (feat. Carmen Quill) [Jealous Butcher Records/Bandcamp] Speaking of jazzers in smudged genres, Adam Schatz is a saxophonist and keyboard player who’s played with prominent indie artists like Japanese Breakfast, This Is The Kit and many others, and his Civil Engineering Vol. 1 is an enjoyable selection of melodic jazz made even better with the double bass of Carmen Quill on most tracks, and Dawn of Midi drummer Qasim Naqvi on a couple too. Purelink & Rainy Miller – Barrons Hotel (I, To, Thee.) [Fixed Abode] Arriving with no fanfare or explanation is this 2-tracker from Manchester producer/singer/iconoclast Rainy Miller, on his Fixed Abode imprint, collaborating with US electronica trio Purelink. Gorgeous smeared electronics with Rainy Miller’s typically morose, yet cutting, work. Listen again — ~222MB

We got songs of all sorts tonight and non-songs for most sorts too. Take your pick! LISTEN AGAIN – you can stream on demand @ fbi.radio or podcast here. Abigail Snail – Good Grief [Romac Puncture Repairs] 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. Jungstötter – Overturn [Unguarded/Bandcamp] 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. Massive Attack x Tom Waits – Boots on the Ground [PIAS Records/Bandcamp] 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. Loraine James – Flatline ft. Miho Hatori [Hyperdub/Bandcamp] 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. Naavikaran & Simo Soo – For You Page (FYP) [Naavikaran Bandcamp] 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. deafkids – REFLEXO [Neurot Recordings/Bandcamp] 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. james K – Doom Bikini (Hesaitix Remix) [AD93/Bandcamp] 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 – Bang Bang (Nziria remix) [SFX/Bandcamp] 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. ARTISOMA – Boraq [YUKU/Bandcamp] 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. OD Bongo – crystallinoron [Carton Records/Bandcamp] 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! Haydn Douet Lukies – Amolador [Colectivo Casa Amarela/Bandcamp] 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. Tristan Arp – Forking Paths [Kapsela/Bandcamp] 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. Yunzero – Cool Skunk [Yunzero Bandcamp] 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. Hora Lunga – Hearing through the Wall ft. Junge Eko [Hora Lunga Bandcamp] 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. Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin – ⊐ [greyfade/Bandcamp] 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. Jonas Cambien – Tre – RADIO EDIT [Sonic Transmissions Records/Bandcamp] 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. Microfiche – Number 7 [Earshift Music/Bandcamp] 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! Mariam Wallentin & Vestnorsk Jazzensemble – Basel [Hubro] 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. Claire Dickson – Waterfeel [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp] 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. Freda D’Souza – unravel (when ya comin back?) [Freda D’Souza Bandcamp] 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. Listen again — ~214MB

While the new world struggles to be born, people all round this dying old world cannot help but keep making music. Too many, frankly. Please stop. Anyway, I cannot help but keep playing you all this incredible music, postpunkindustrialdubjunglegamelanglitchjazzfolkclassical, as those in the know call it *taps nose* LISTEN AGAIN to the music of the spheres. Stream on demand from fbi.radio, podcast here. Laeter – Isolate [Laeter Bandcamp] Laeter – Leibowitz [Laeter Bandcamp] Liam Bosecke is based on Kaurna country, in Adelaide, and he’s founded a creative community called Empty Frames that aims to raise mental health awareness. His latest album as Laeter is released via that platform, but is of course available on Bandcamp (and in a handsome CD edition!) Blanket Doubt is a wonderful thing that kind of answers the question, “What if indietronica except slow-moving industrial dub?” Intense distorted drum machines and synthetic screeches underscore almost-spoken vocals, or shudder and crash under New Order-esque synth melodies. Pure perverted pleasure. Damos Room – All Shall Go [Long Gone/Bandcamp] Damos Room – Gullet (Dirty Protest) [Long Gone/Bandcamp] Last time I played Damos Room on the show was a mere month ago. I wrote at the time: I’m not sure who Damos is or what’s in their Room, but signs point to it being three guys: Luke Miles, Nicholas Elson & Huw Oleskar. I’ve just found out (because they told me, nothing underhand) that Huw Oleskar is also known as Elijah Minnelli, responsible for some of the most interesting and lovely dub-folk hybrids in recent times, ostensibly under the auspices of Breadminster County Council. As for Damos Room, you can find a series of fantastic, weirdly-shaped releases on their Bandcamp, including a mixtape of two bizarre 40-minute radio pieces, some quasi-singles of abstracted dub/spoken-word/electronics, and the experimental electronics of their collaboration with rapper LYAM, which I played on this show a few years back. So, a month ago I played something from Walk With The Militia, a vaguely-album-shaped item that wasn’t actually their new album – rather it’s a mixtape, entirely in keeping with the mystery what all this is about. It collects – I said – a whole lot of weird shit, but it’s all dub-based experimental electronics, with Minnelli’s distinctive spoken word & low-key singing, odd radio interludes and noise bits and so on. It’s really fantastic. So how about All Shall Go, their new album which is really released now? Well, it’s just as murky, weird-shaped and all as the prior mixtape and earlier works. And as with earlier works, there are also some head-nodding beats and bass, and tracks where Oleskar’s voice chants and sings in nearly melodic fashion. Don’t expect pop, dancehall or grime here, but do expect music that’s evocative, challenging, ancient and modern. Do go deep, but don’t miss that mixtape, or 2020’s Commencement either. Carl Gari – Pick’n’Peel [Molten Moods/Bandcamp] Most of us know German band Carl Gari from their incredibly strong albums made with Egyptian singer/trumpeter/poet/composer Abdullah Miniawy, on AD93 and Amphibian Records. Between those two releases, the band & singer released a live album on Molten Moods, and it’s that label that Carl Gari return to now for their self-titled album, forthcoming in June. This is the first single (by the time of writing I’ve heard the second), and it’s just what the doctor ordered – dark, insistent minimal drum’n’bass if it was produced by Depeche Mode circa Songs of Faith and Devotion, a very specific reference that probably only makes sense to me 🖤 Fez The Kid & BRUK – Original Secret [RuptureLDN/Bandcamp] Two young junglists from Bristol tearin’ it up on this new EP, their first for the iconic jungle-revival label RuptureLDN. These guys really know their jungle originals and are making the kind of tracks that wouldn’t have been out of place in an East London club circa ’93. Both Fez The Kid & BRUK have a number of EPs to their names, but have also worked together for a while, and DJ back2back as well. Turn up yr subs and feel the bass pressure while the snares go renegade. Rrrrrrrince out! A.Fruit – I Left You [YUKU/Bandcamp] A.Fruit – Choice [YUKU/Bandcamp] Anna Derlemenko aka A.Fruit is a Ukrainian music producer, born in Moscow, but her family relocated to Spain after Russia’s war on Ukraine. She co-runs the Distorted Barcelona club and does a lot of music production training & tips on her Patreon – in fact, the first track I played tonight is the subject of a full track breakdown there, and she’s shared the full Ableton project. Her productions are consistently adventurous, mixing up genres and manipulating sounds while remaining dancefloor friendly, and that’s certainly the case on her new EP Choice for the one & only YUKU. She’s an artist I’ll never not recommend. upsammy & Valentina Magaletti – Superimposed [PAN/Bandcamp] upsammy & Valentina Magaletti – It Comes To An End [PAN/Bandcamp] Dutch producer & DJ upsammy (who visited Sydney recently for Soft Centre) has previously worked the built & natural environment into her music: Germ in a Population of Buildings in 2023 created a whole environment of hallucinatory fauna and automata, repurposing IDM in a similar-but-different way to Eora’s own gi. Valentina Magaletti is one of the most versatile drummer/percussionists working at the moment, found in the postpunk-electronica band Moin, but also remaking kuduro & batida with Afro-Portuguese producer Nídia, a kind of postpunk dub with electronic producer Al Wootton, and plenty of other avant-garde stuff. upsammy & Magaletti’s collaborative album Seismo (yes, it means “earthquake”) came out of a commission from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for which they sampled the sounds of the museum itself, using its spaces as percussive surfaces, and much of the joy of the album comes from the blurring of live drums and other acoustic rhythms with electronic programming and manipulation. Around & amongst the percussion are snippets of voice (a callback Mageletti’s work with Raime and Moin, albeit applied very differently), strange fragmentary samples of guitar & bass, piano notes stretched thin, slow melodic synths. Mostly delicate, mostly the opposite of an earthquake, these are musical giants striding across our world while imps dance in their footprints. It’s a wonderful album. Hoavi – Song of the Forgotten [Peak Oil] Hoavi – Colossus [Peak Oil] And speaking of imps dancing, Russian producer Hoavi is one of the exemplars of music that sounds like skittering insects and tumbling waterfalls, drawing jungle-ish IDM into dub technoid waters. His second album for Peak Oil, Architectonics, takes those aspects into newer territories, with a bank of samples of percussive sounds from around his house, and inspiration taken from Indonesian gamelan and minimalist composition. For all this though, it’s vintage Hoavi – rhythmically complex, deep sound design. Genius. Foote/Dickow – Underwater Welder [Geographic North/Bandcamp] Peak Oil is run by two Bria/ons – Brion Brionson is the “o” guy, and the other is Brian Foote, who’s been kranky‘s media guy forever as well as running various labels (including Peak Oil just above here!) and playing in various bands. Brian’s also a connoisseur of IDM, electronica & rave in all its variations (solo as Leech), and here he teams up with Paul Dickow, best known as Strategy, maker of much dubwise, ambient & technoid musics and himself co-founder of the Community Library label. High Cube is their first outing together as a duo, and you can feel their shared musical heritage in its bones. Skittering IDM glitchbeats hover above a dub techno skeleton, and there’s a jazzy sensibility to the keyboards. Charming. Richard Pike – III. “August” [Salmon Universe/Bandcamp] Sydney’s Richard Pike, alum of PVT, is now based in London. He can be found in various ensembles, including with Joe Quirke, with whom he co-runs the Salmon Universe label, and under his own name has been making ambient-techno-hybrid-orchestral soundtracks for TV. Outside of that, he’s released solo music under the alias DEEP LEARNING on Oxtail Recordings, based around subtly rhythmic glitchy loops, but now returns to his own name for album that mixes late-night piano and glitchy dub-techno. It’s not surprising to discover that the creation of this music was directly triggered by the death of Ryuichi Sakamoto, but the music takes darker paths than the Japanese master. The full album’s out later in May, and the last single brings in something of the jungle-meets-dub techno we’ve heard a lot of tonight. Laurence Pike – Guardians of Memory [Balmat/Bandcamp] It’s lovely to find Laurence Pike – brother to Richard above – coming out on Philip Sherburne & Albert Salinas‘ Balmat label in late May. Pike was drummer in Pivot/PVT and Triosk, and the hallucinatory melding of live jazz and micro-sampled loops has remained central to his DNA since the start. There’s a trickery at the heart of Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet, hinted at with “possible”: while there are guests on these tracks, it’s never a jazz quintet, and still predominantly Laurence solo. The “utopias” denote an idea of freedom which Pike is reaching for, in continuity with his last album The Undreamt-of Centre – that people are not atomised individuals but exist interdependently with their environment. And for all that this is a solo album, Pike begins the album with a substantial, sumptuous feature from Eora/Sydney pianist Novak Manojlovic. Utopian indeed. David Norland – E-Car Soul reNYX [Denovali] English composer David Norland, who lives between LA & London, is best known as a soundtrack writer for film and stage, as well as a composer of electronic and experimental choral music. He has an album coming via Denovali called La Source, which is not a soundtrack, but incorporates choral music into its beat-driven electronic framework. Strangely, I didn’t hear the single “E-Car Soul” as choral, but the “reNYX” by UK vocal/electronic collective NYX reworks it into their image, with vocal harmonies and rearranged electronics. Carl Stone & Asuna – Ulna As Ancestor [Room40/Bandcamp] A pioneer of live laptop music, Carl Stone has been at it since the 1980s, and has had a renaissance since Unseen Worlds released a series of his early music on triple LP sets. Stone has for a long time lived between LA and Japan, and on this new CD he’s collaborating with Japanese artist Asuna Arashi, whose toy instruments are sampled and processed by Stone and then handed by to Arashi for her to rework and… send back to Stone. With all these layers of processing, it’s not often easy to make out the original toy instruments, but it’s pretty immersive, experimental but friendly. In keeping with a lot of Stone’s own work, the titles are all anagrams of “Carl Stone Asuma”, all of which are unreasonably good (“A Nacreous Slant”? “Nascent Arousal”!) Loom & Thread – Spheres [Macro/Bandcamp] A few years ago, German jazz trio Loom & Thread released their debut album Island Grammar on macro rec. Pianist Tom Schneider is known as “frontman” of the live techno act KUF, playing as lead instrument the sampler. On Loom & Thread’s debut, Schneider at least played piano primarily, albeit sampled and processed live, as were the double bass of Tobi Fröhlich and the drums of Daniel Klein. For their follow-up Bandcamp, Schneider is well and truly a sampler-player (although yes, piano’s in there too), triggering & manipulating samples of two saxophonists and two vibraphone players (one of whom is drummer Daniel Klein). The samples’ use can range from chaotic scatter to undulant layers, around which is constructed a form of contemporary jazz. It’s weirder than their first album, but just as enjoyable. You can see them playing some of this live here, with Fröhlich also alternating between double bass & sampler. Christian Wallumrød Ensemble – Not new to [Aspen Edities/Bandcamp] It’s seems like yesterday – well OK, it was only last week – when I was talking about the richness of the Norwegian (and generally, Nordic) music scene(s), highlighting among others the stunning new solo album from saxophonist, singer, composer etc Espen Reinertsen. Reinertsen’s album was released on SusannaSonata, run by the artist known as Susanna or Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, who is also Susanna Wallumrød. She’s the youngest of a family of musicians – as well as their cousin, jazz pianist David Wallumrød, her brother Fredrik Wallumrød is a drummer of mainly rock & pop, and the oldest of the lot is pianist Christian Wallumrød (born in 1971 – Susanna was born in 1979), a renowned jazz pianist & keyboard player, whose eponymous Ensemble have released a series of albums on ECM Records. Christian & Fredrik also release music made of drum machines & synths as Brutter (also here) – glitchy, arhythmic synthetic grooves. Anyway, last week I remarked on the uncanny beauty of Reinertsen’s album, and there’s something similarly bewitching, gorgeous but slightly wrong about the music on the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble’s latest album Non Sonett, released by Belgian post-folk/jazz label Aspen Edities. The label specialises in acoustic experimental music by and large, but does slip sideways into electronics at times, and so does this latest album, where minimalist jazz compositions sidle up to Norwegian folk and haunted electronics, while remaining utterly restrained throughout. You may think this would sound cold & difficult, but it’s not: it’s engrossing and delightful, like Penguin Cafe Orchestra recording Talk Talk’s last albums, Keith Jarrett jamming Sunn O))), Henry Purcell discovering free jazz. If you only listen to one Norwegian jazz/folk record this week, make it this one (but don’t stop there). tokesmo – 02.02 [tokesmo Bamdcamp] tokesmo – 01 [tokesmo Bandcamp] Andrea B of doom/psych/metal trio Morkobot is tokesmo, a project in which he combines field recordings and found sounds with electronics. Two EPs launch the project; on tksm 01 it’s more sound-art and noise than rhythms, while tksm 02 transforms found sounds into percussive instruments for its IDM-meets-industrial beats. Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart – paper folding | disappearing [International Anthem/Bandcamp] Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart – laundry | blood [International Anthem/Bandcamp] Last year I played a track from a trio of Chicago-based women who were all string players and singers – in fact, I loved it so much I played it in Part 2 of my Best of 2025. Whitney Johnson on viola, Lia Kohl on cello and Macie Stewart on violin don’t just all sing – they all operate various tape machines, into which they feed their sounds and alchemically transmute their playing & singing into dusty loops. You can see this gorgeous transformation happening in real time in this video. Last year’s “stone | piece” was one partially improvised composition that’s part of the BODY SOUND album now released by Chicago (post-?)jazz institution International Anthem. There’s a surprising variety of sound here – string drones melting into tape hiss are part of it, but so are plucked prepared cello, loops glitched through manipulated recording heads, deconstructed folk melodies and quasi-classical accompaniments to angelic singing, squalling loops played at triple-time and roaring bass as the cello is pitched down multiple octaves. An extraordinary album like no other. Hara Alonso – A Second is a Choir (feat. Lia Kohl) [FUU/Bandcamp] Lia Kohl also turns up as one guest on the brilliant new EP Music of Many Nows from Stockholm-based Spanish sound-artist Hara Alonso. Here, Alonso combines accidental and casual recordings of life going by, combined with recordings of a nearby choir, a found piano and a couple of guests, and makes beautifully cracked vignettes, much deeper musically than this method would suggest. Honestly this couldn’t be more Utility Fog, and I love it so much. Daniel O’Toole – Breathing Colour [Cascade Rumble Records] Naarm-based artist & musician Daniel O’Toole was based here in Eora until a few years back, and was responsible for a lot of well-loved street art under the name Ears. Accompanying that were a few albums of funky instrumental hip-hop as Captain Earwax, but these days Daniel is emphasising the more abstract, gallery-friendly side of his art – gorgeous colour gradients and textures that you can sample here – and musically he’s making incredible custom-built instruments alongside his own strings, keyboard playing, percussion etc: check out the particle plate and the particle drum. Hand-made gestural instruments like this are at the core of O’Toole’s new album Outer Magnolia, but equally there’s a lot of acoustic sounds here – folktronica but not like your Daddy made it. Euan Alexander Millar-McMeeken – Nothing Moves In Me [Sleep In The Fire Records] London-based Scottish musician Euan Alexander Millar-McMeeken has recorded a lot of solo ambient music as glacis, and led indie/folk band The Kays Lavelle for many years. He has a substantial number of collaborative projects, many of them duos, all of them wonderful: Graveyard Tapes with Matthew Collings and Civic Hall with Craig Tattersall, Bird Battles with Jesse Narens and now Yoal with Satomimagae. In 2024, Euan released his first album under his full name, All The Weather Of The Human Heart, a deeply moving work that’s a meditation on loss, in which the central vocals & piano are cracked & smudged through digital & analogue means. Similar approaches to sound design are found on the solo follow-up Framed Insects – fragile songs and tape hiss interrupted by distorted beats or glitched into strange structures. Just gorgeous. Listen again — ~217MB

Songforms of conventional and highly unconventional sorts tonight, taking in folk traditions from around the world, jazz, the outer limits of metal and more, plus strange twistings of clubforms, impressionist composition of the early 20th century, field recordings and more… LISTEN AGAIN, unconventionally. Stream on demand from fbi.radio, podcast right here. Wendy Eisenberg – Take A Number [Joyful Noise/Bandcamp] Wendy Eisenberg – Curious Bird [Joyful Noise/Bandcamp] We’ve heard from brilliant guitarist, sometime banjoist, songwriter, improviser & composer Wendy Eisenberg in many contexts in the last couple of years: there’s the amazing postpunk/art-rock trio Editrix, Bill Orcutt’s Guitar Quartet, their avant-garde songwriting collaboration with Caroline Davis, and most recently their appearance on their now-partner Mari More Eaze Rubio’s brilliant solo album sentence structure in the country. But the highlight for me remains Eisenberg’s breathtaking final track, “In The Pines”, from their 2024 album Viewfinder. So for all their jazz guitar chops and restless experimentation, I’m already primed to love Eisenberg’s most pure songwriting on this album. There’s definitely a statement in self-titling a mid-career album, and Wendy Eisenberg presents as a straightforward album of songwriterly storytelling, deeply grounded in their newfound love with Mari Rubio. There’s definitely more than a little country in these songs, as well as folk-revivalist styles from Britain, Appalachia etc, but whatever genre, Wendy’s particular melodic sensibility comes through. Supporting this, however, are the utterly essential, sumptuous string arrangements from Mari Rubio, who also co-produced the album with Eisenberg and added pedal steel and synths. With longtime bandmates Trevor Dunn on bass (known for Mr Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3, many John Zorn-related lineups etc) and Ryan Sawyer on drums (of too many collaborations including a time in At The Drive-In and long-ago UFog faves Stars Like Fleas), there’s a homely feel to these songs, songs which contemplate identity, life’s trajectory, past trauma and coming into a hard-won happiness. Margareth Kammerer – Gift [Ftarri/Bandcamp] Margareth Kammerer – Amor [Ftarri/Bandcamp] Weirdly, when I did my DJ set for Art After Hours/Liquid Architecture/Sydney Biennale in March (stream it here) I decided to play a track by Berlin-based Italian singer & composer Margareth Kammerer, and only a day or two later I discovered that she’d just released a new album, The Garden. I’ve been a fan of hers since, I would say, the mid 2000s, when she released the extraordinary album To Be an Animal of Real Flesh, full of odd, experimental songs. Following a few years later came two wonderful, mysterious albums with The Magic I.D., a quartet with Christof Kurzmann on electronics and vocals next to her own guitar & vocals, and the two clarinettists, Kai Fagaschinski & Michael Thieke, who also play bewitching, alien music as The International Nothing. So it’s reasonable to say she’s been deconstructing and re-examining songform for some decades by now. Released by Japanese label Ftarri (also a tiny experimental music venue & store in Tokyo), The Garden is of a piece with her earlier albums – the last of which came out a mere 12 years ago… Her oddly beautiful songs are supported by many important fellow travellers including our own Chris Abrahams of The Necks etc, double-bassist/electronicist Werner Dafeldecker, experimental musician Valerio Tricoli and experimental cellist Bo Wiget. I remain in awe. Espen Reinertsen – Til noens dype muskelvev [SusannaSonata/Bandcamp] Espen Reinertsen – Skal jeg følge deg til havet [SusannaSonata/Bandcamp] What astonishing beauty to stumble upon without warning! Espen Reinertsen is a name I’ve known for a while, as his saxophone and woodwinds – or his mixing skills – are credited on many a Norwegian release, including those from Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Erik Honoré, Kim Myhr, Jenny Hval and Christian Wallumrød Ensemble. But these are his own songs, with sparse live drums and drum machines, sparse keyboards and gorgeous woodwind & trumpet arrangements which frequently shift into unexpected voicings and harmonies. You’ll hear a lot of Radiohead here – albeit more jazz-informed – but it’s also one of those rare cases when the post-rock-as-in-Talk-Talk tag is completely justified. Reinertsen’s melodies are simple until they spin off into some harmonically distant galaxy, and his layers of woodwinds are delicately emotive, merging invisibly with synthesizers just as Erik Nylander’s acoustic drums somehow have the precision of drum machines and also the sparkle of jazz drums. What a blessing. Marianna Sangita Angeletaki Røe & Trondheim Jazz Orchestra – Kori [Puritone/Bandcamp] So, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra are a collective with a varying lineup of Norwegian improvising musicians, who enlist different musicians to collaborate with them, with reliably extraordinary results. On this album, they work with Greek-Norwegian singer & composer Marianna Sangita Angeletaki Røe, who has titled the album ΣΠΙΤΙ (SPITI), which is Greek for “Home”. Marianna Sangita explores her own search for belonging, caught between two very different places, and she sings in four different languages: Norwegian, Greek, English, and Sámi, the latter being a people indigenous to the Sápmi region across northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and part of Russia. The music, too, draws from many different traditions, with Greece’s proximity to the area Europeans call the “Middle East” evident in its traditional musical forms, and the combined vocals of Sangita, Ina Sagstuen and Sissel Vera Pettersen (and other musicians at times) evoking Eastern European musics as much as Nordic. The musicianship is uniformly brilliant, the songs sparkling, moving, joyful. Highly recommended. Mayssa Jallad – Taamir (Bahriyyeh) [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp] A few years back, Beirut label Ruptured put out an amazing album by Lebanese singer/songwriter and researcher Mayssa Jallad called Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels. In touching experimental songs, Jallad chronicled the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, in which Christian Nationalists and pro-Palestinian leftists fought a violent battle amongst the high-rise hotels in Beirut, leading to the Green Line dividing the city, a rift that lasted for 15 years. Since then the album has been remixed in spectral dub fashion by Civilistjävel!, and in 2024 Mayssa created a stunning piece about a Palestinian woman displaced from her village in the Nakba. That single was created out of an instrumental track by Tunefork Studios & Ruptured Records’ Fadi Tabbal, and her new song “Taamir (Bahriyyeh)” is a musical collaboration with Tabbal, featuring drums from Postcards & SANAM‘s Pascal Semerdjian. Jallad is an urban researcher as well as a musician, and urban history is the basis of all these works. This song is about the Taamir social housing project, built in the wake of a destructive earthquake in 1956. By the time the project started, the Ain el Helwe refugee camp had already existed for 8 years, and the juxtaposition of Palestinian refugees, unfortunates who lost their homes in the earthquake, and those more fortunate, is explored by Jallad in this moving, experimental piece, with rumbling, clattering drones and field recordings surrounding Jallad’s voice. Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Frédéric D. Oberland – Squeal Of Swine خنخنة خنازير [Constellation/Bandcamp] Montreal’s storied Constellation label here brings together a Canadian and French artist for their first duo work. Radwan Ghazi Moumneh has been deeply involved in the Montreal postrock & experimental music in Quebec for over 2 decades, and he’s the co-owner of the mighty Hotel2Tango, originally a performance & artists’ space co-run by members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and A Silver Mt. Zion, but his main musical outlet has been Jerusalem In My Heart, begun as an audiovisual project with Erin Weisgerber, with Moumneh’s stunning melismatic vocals fed through granular processing to create a contemporary Arabic music ahead of its time in the mid-2010s. Frédéric D. Oberland is a key figure in Paris’s psych & avant-rock scenes, although he also began making films on Super8 & video. Among many bands & collaborations, he leads the incredible Oiseaux-Tempête, a collective whose music draws on psych, krautrock, postpunk and electronic music, with many collaborators and a deep connection to SWANA artists. Moumneh & Oberland had worked together via Oiseaux-Tempête and other projects, but had long intended to collaborate as a duo. Some works were started at Hotel2Tango in 2023, but as Moumneh puts it, since the genocide began he’d experienced sever writer’s block, so he took himself off to Paris in 2024 to complete the work. Four of the seven tracks do feature Moumneh’s voice, but here it’s Oberland taking more of a driver’s seat. Nevertheless, as well as Moumneh’s pain-filled voice Moumneh plays both buzuk and rababa, and there’s daf in the mix along with lots of electronic drones, drum machines and Oberland’s sax and clarineau. This is immersive music of great emotion. Maryam Saleh – Nedaa نداء [Simsara Records/Bandcamp] I first heard Egyptian singer Maryam Saleh as part of the magnificent trio release Lekhfa back in 2017. There, Saleh’s voice combined with the voice and instruments of Palestinian-Egyptian musician Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and the production wizardry and music of Maurice Louca – a masterpiece of Arabic indie music. As far as I can see, her new album, coming some 9 years later, is her first since that collaboration. Produced by Maurice Louca, it also features multiple instruments and creative mentoring from Paris-based Palestinian musician Kamilya Jubran, who founded the organisation Zamkara in Paris to support artistic projects. After three years of development, the result is Syrr سِرّ, the Arabic word for secret, which also happens to be the name Saleh gave her daughter. The album is imprinted by heavy events in Saleh’s life, particularly post-natal depression and divorce. Released by Sarah El Miniawy‘s Simsara Records, this is a creative take on Arabic music, leaning into trip-hop at times, into acoustic instrumentation at other times, carried by Saleh’s beautifully expressive voice and the confident hands of Jubran and Louca, and the impeccable musicianship of the other instrumentalists who join them. But one of the highlights is “Nafas نفَس”, in which Saleh is accompanied solely by Jubran’s oud and exquisitely-harmonised vocal shadows from the two of them. All in all, not to be missed! Taroug – Sirocco [Denovali/Bandcamp] On his second album with Denovali Records, Chott, Düsseldorf-based Tunisian musician Taroug (aka Tarek Zarroug) presents a highly varied mixture of styles. When Zarroug wants to make beat-based bass music, he hits all the right production notes with a healthy dose of north African percussion, while elsewhere there’s dreamy postrock with vocals by the artist himself. Honestly it’s uncanny how the album flits between genres, displaying Zarroug’s ancestry here, slipping into UK bass there or indie guitar music elsewhere. A really impressive album. Wraz. – Twist [Deep Dark & Dangerous/Bandcamp] Rites, the second full album from Montreal dubstep master Wraz., is released through Deep Dark & Dangerous, the label run by New Zealand’s longstanding dubstep duo Truth. As usual, heavyweight dubstep gear, sci-fi aesthetics, surprising melodies… Battery Operated – Stutter [YUKU/Bandcamp] Battery Operated – Casting Shadows [YUKU/Bandcamp] It should be obvious by now that YUKU delivers the goods, but here they are again with something insanely great. The artist behind Battery Operated is also known as PS95, an outlet for mangled jungle breaks that draws our attention to the fact that the Playstation was launched in 1995, the heyday of jungle. On the other hand, Battery Operated has thus far been an alias for deliciously lo-fi tape loops – see their Instagram for videos of their beautifully-modded cassettes & players. But the debut Battery Operated album for YUKU, TYPE I, combines these two strands in stunning fashion. From what I can tell, PS95 & the recording artist Battery Operated are the same person, but the tape loop “art” projects are done with his brother. So this ain’t dance music, not primarily, but nor is it dreamy loop-jelly. Breaks surface from tape hiss, tape loop experiments are layered & sequenced into melodies and sonic narratives, often sounding like a half-analogue/half-digital current-day version of IDM. Wonderful. Thugwidow – IT DIDN’T NEED EXPLAINING [Thugwidow Bandcamp] Thugwidow – pristine heart [Thugwidow Bandcamp] Jungle may be having a renaissance right now, with no end in sight, but Welsh producer Alex Lowther-Harris was on the jungle train way before most. The first Thugwidow releases were around 2017, and for a few years he was fiercly prolific, released mostly on cassette and digital, with a couple of CDs and some vinyl further down the track. His lo-fi early work gave way to slicker production chops as time went on, and the creative firehose slowed by around 2021-22. So it was a joyful shock to see something new appear on his bandcamp, only… it’s a swan song? Yes, SWUN SUNGZ does do what its title suggests, but it also shows that this prolific artist had more up his sleeve – it’s just that the pleasure had drained from it, he was feeling stuck… So here’s *ahem* 121 tracks, going for almost 11½ hours, and there’s a lot of quality material here, including a bunch of collaborations, and productions ranging from hardcore jungle-techno to advanced rhythm science. It’s a helluva way to go out! Note also that not only is all the money likely going to the British bird & wildlife charity RSPB, but he says most of his earnings from the project were always given away to charity. CRZKNY – 009 [Virgin Babylon Records] Japanese experimental electronic producer CRZKNY (which I’ve just learned stands for “CRAZY KENNY”) has brushed shoulders with experimental genre-mashing legend (and seminal UFog artist) World’s End Girlfriend before, on WEG productions and on his label Virgin Babylon, but this is a bit of a special release – a bit like Thugwidow’s above, this is a massive collection of unreleased tunes, here all just numbered as they’re pieces that CRZKNY has played at the Nagoya club GOODWEATHER. CZRKNY put this collection together to help support the club’s founder Eri Ishii after she suffered both an aortic dissection and a cerebral thrombosis, leaving her in a coma for some weeks. She is now on a long road of rehabilitation, and CRZKNY wants to give back to a person who built this perfect live space for his music. Lots of great techno, including glitchy shit and tasty breakbeats, for a good cause. deafkids – CICATRIZES [Neurot Recordings/Bandcamp] 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. Lint – Balsam of Peru [Lint Bandcamp] OK so, you know, like Scattered Order? A band who I have referred to in the past as “Sydney postpunk/post-industrial/experimental electronic legends”. Mitch Jones is a founding member of said legendary band, active since the early ’80s or possibly slightly earlier, post-etc as described above. Drusilla Johnson aka Dru Jones has been a member of said legendary band at times, and has contributed some brilliant artwork in various phases of their existence. She’s also Mitch’s wife, and they live now in Mt Victoria, in the Blue Mountains on Dharug and Gundungurra country, and at times they release music together as Lint. It’s instinctual, artistic, splashes of colour washed over detailed line drawings… It’s the sound of Air in the taps, but it’s also the sound of over four decades building and trashing and rebuilding a musical language, and you can hear it in every dialogue sample and every wonky beat and the occasional guitar noise solo. It’s so lovely to have a seemingly endless font of new music from these folks in many changing combinations. Roman Rofalski – Ondine (radio edit 1) [Puddle Label/Bandcamp] Last time we heard from German pianist Roman Rofalski – only a few weeks ago – he was deconstructing his piano… again, following his wonderful Fractal from 2024, which shredded piano and prepared piano into constellations of granular sound and rhythm. Ravel Reimagined does just what it tells you – but to be clear, Rofalski does it really well. Over four tracks, Rofalski excerpts four celebrated piano works by the beloved impressionist composer and deconstructs them – and it’s notable that these are live performances, with Rofalski playing grand piano and simultaneously sampling himself, then reworking phrases into loops & glitchy constructions, overlaying them with synths and even beats at times. Maurice Ravel was famously prickly, was not fond of the borrowed artistic term of “impressionism” being used for his music (nor was his elder, Debussy), and was underappreciated in his time. He’s also one of my favourite composers, who I believe advanced composition in directions hitherto unimagined. Rofalski’s extrapolations push Ravel far beyond his imaginings, and it’s quite likely he would be horrified to hear what’s been done to his pieces – but now we’re imagining a composer unmoored by over a century from his origins; these prickly pieces require decades of context to situate them here and now. The virtuosic pianism outlining harmonies full of augmented and diminished intervals, whole-tone scales, melodies woven through corruscating hemidemisemiquavers (hear the original here) are thrown immediately into digital reverberation and gradual distortion until they’re glitched and chopped, then crash into long-ringing tones, a fragmented sample bleating around Ravel’s melody as the piece comes to a close. Bravo. OD – Arrival [Driftworks/Bandcamp] Alex O’Donovan is a recording & mixing engineer, but as OD he makes his own music. On Svalr, O’Donovan documents time spent in Svalbard, an island archipelago in the Arctic which is also home to Norway’s Global Seed Vault (the subject of another beautiful sound work by Ecker & Meulyzer). This album is part of a new project called SITE, co-curated by Audiobulb and Driftworks. O’Donovan took extensive field recordings of the diversity of natural sounds (including glaciers!) as well as the built environment, and found commonalities in all these sounds that formed the basis of his compositions. Remote as it is, Svalbard is inevitably encroached upon by anthrogenic climate change, and as the EP goes on, the sounds of water & ice & animals are swept up in almost industrial impulses, and glitched beat constructions. OD’s Svalr makes compelling music around its highly engaging field recordings. Sandscape – half closed eyes [Octopoda Records/Bored of Works/Bandcamp] Sudanese-Scottish “ethereal grunger” Eliza Shaddad and screen composer Daniel Sonabend team up as Sandscape on the forthcoming album Phenomenology, and first single “half closed eyes” is like hearing a dusty 7″ record playing in a different room of your house – a beguiling piece of ambient-dub-jazz with both artists’ vocals, soft but saturated piano, and muffled drumming from Liam Hutton. Unexpected harmonisations flow over the looping music, but not long after it fades away like a dream – “half closed eyes” indeed. The album promises noise-laden trip-hop, muffled jazz and an exploration of the mixed Arab/British/Jewish heritage between the members… Keen to hear more. Stine Janvin / Morten Joh – Leaving home – O Verden, Hav Da Gode Nat! (feat. Lucy Railton) [Futura Resistenza/Bandcamp] Stine Janvin / Morten Joh – Before the burial site – Jeg Raader Eder Alle [Futura Resistenza/Bandcamp] Returning now to Norway, we finish with beautiful strangeness from Norwegians Stine Janvin and Morten Joh, adapting funeral procession music (“Liksongen” = corpse songs) from Ryfylke, Norway. Janvin’s voice forms the basis of these works, but the ceremonial music is rendered alien through extensive electronic processing and additional electronics, and occasional vibraphone from Joh. Two guests, both with innovative approaches to their instruments, contribute further: Berlin-based Australian guitarist Jules Reidy and British cellist Lucy Railton. But one of the most magical moments must be when Janvin’s voice is shadowed by its electronic twin in warbling harmony. On the second last track, the alien elements mostly give way to the acoustic sounds of voice and vibraphone, although the album concludes with stentorian synths playing J.S. Bach. Not for the faint of heart, but rewarding listening. Listen again — ~208MB

Quite a journey today, through genres, countries & continents, emotions and BPMs. This is how we do it in the house of Utility Fog. LISTEN AGAIN & travel with me. Stream on demand at fbi.radio, podcast here. Snakeskin – Lost Today [Tunefork Studios/Bandcamp] The Bunny Tylers – Let There Be Light [Tunefork Studios/Bandcamp] Akram Hajj – Day 2 [Tunefork Studios/Bandcamp] SANAM – Aykathani Malakon (SAFA remix) [Tunefork Studios/Bandcamp] While the US & Israel’s misdirected, pointless, intensely damaging war on Iran continues, Israel has taken the opportunity to advance into southern Lebanon – very much not for the first time, but driven by the far right’s power in government and the impunity of the IDF & settlers’ accelerating ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, this is now becoming a territorial takeover. “Greater Israel” was once just a gross fantasy of the worst elements of the Zionist right, but now they’re grabbing their chance to enact it in reality. Under the pretext of disarming Hezbollah, Israel is flattening areas of Lebanon including neighbourhoods in Beirut, and as a result there are more than 1 million displaced people in Lebanon. Over. One. Million. Beirut, as you may have noted from these playlists over the last few years, has an unreasonably rich experimental music scene, and Tunefork Studios has been a hub for musicians ranging from postpunk & shoegaze bands to noise, chaotic industrial rock and electronica. The studio was founded by the ever-present producer Fadi Tabbal, who’s also one half of Snakeskin with Julia Sabra and one half of The Bunny Tylers with Charbel Haber, and associated musicians manage (Sabra) & work there. In December 2024, Tunefork released a big compilation of amazing Lebanese music called Land 01 – A Compilation for the Displaced in Lebanon, materially supporting people with living spaces & more. The current situation has severely deepened this humanitarian crisis, and fortunately Tunefork had not one but TWO compilations of music by Lebanese musicians ready to go. Like 01, all tracks are exclusive to the compilations, totalling 58 new tracks. If you don’t already have the first, you can purchase all three at once for a discount, but however you choose, you’ll know that you’re helping raise money for Beit Aam, a community space in Beirut that’s providing housing and food for displaced people. The tracklists are extremely varied, from a touching piece by Snakeskin to the post-industrial lurch of The Bunny Tylers, the swirling noise of Akram Hajj and an unreleased remix of Beirut supergroup SANAM (now signed to Constellation) by London-based sound-artist and researcher Mhamad SAFA, and so much more. dälek – By the Time We Arrive in El Salvador [Ipecac Recordings/Bandcamp] Last year, Will Brooks, also known as MC Dälek of the eponymous noise-hop outfit dälek, collaborated with the legendary postpunk/art-rock drummer/composer/singer Charles Hayward, a project dubbed HAYWARDxDÄLEK. It was one of those things which seems completely out of leftfield, but works surprisingly well. It was also charmingly odd that it was released on renowned metal label Relapse Records, but Relapse has of late also supported Kevin Martin & JK Broadrick’s Techno Animal remasters and their newer project Zonal… And more to the point, dälek in their first incarnation (with producer Alap Momin aka The Oktopus) and their 2016 reformation (now with longtime fellow traveller Mike Mare aka Destructo Swarmbots) have always been metal-adjacent, their boom-baps and Brooks’ conscious, politically-informed raps generally supported with shoegaze-noise-drone that references the Bomb Squad’s innovations with Public Enemy but also the washed-out intensity of My Bloody Valentine. New album Brilliance of a Fallen Moon follows their other recent albums on Mike Patton’s Ipecac Recordings with claustrophobic environments, noise textures and social commentary. “By the Time We Arrive in El Salvador” flips Public Enemy’s masterpiece “By The Time I Get To Arizona“, itself a riff on Jimmy Webb’s “By The Time I Get Phoenix“, to reference the appalling deportation by the Trump regime of mostly Venezuelans – many American citizens – to the notorious high-security CECOT prison in El Salvador. Brooks’ lyrics poetically circle his subject matter, often buried in the mix, part of the cyberpunkish malaise. james K – N’Balmed (JASSS Purple Remix) [AD93/Bandcamp] Following her vaporwave-trip-hop album Friend from last year, james K now reaches out for some heavy-duty Friends to remix the album. Spanish producer JASSS, whose Eager Buyers album last year featured james K on one of its best tracks, takes “N’Balmed” into something equally ’90s-influenced but on a more head-noddin’ electro-pop tip. There’s a plethora of interesting artists involved here, and I look forward to further offerings. Antoine Ferris – shame’s coming ft. natacha kanga [Carton Records/Bandcamp] I have the honour of having “discovered” French bassist Antoine Ferris before he was cool – where cool = released by the might Carton Records (that’s really cool!) A friend alerted me to the soundtrack to this beautiful black & white video which, as I described it 3 years ago, captures something of the joy of early Fennesz & Mego glitch-works for me, but it’s entirely made from electric bass – stuttery edits and pitch-shifts, and occasional outbursts of skronky distortion. That track, “Hount Orbe”, has been included on Ferris’ debut solo album [KAAARST], fitting in very well with the even noisier processed sounds, industrial-seeming beats and shocks of occasional beauty here. I’m looking forward to playing you more from this album, but the first single somehow drags the abstract bass destruction into hip-hop territory, made only more sinister by the guest rapping from Natacha Kanga. ŽIVA – Hesitation [ŽIVA Bandcamp] Croatian singer/producer Lucija Ivsic moved to Naarm/Melbourne a couple of years ago, leaving her postpunk band Punčke and started her solo project ŽIVA, an outlet for industrial-tinged experimental electronic pop, to which she brings a Slavic darkness and lots of energy. Her second album ŽIIVA (which is easy to misread if you forget it’s album “II”) exorcises mental health demons on underground dancefloors. There’s nothing quite like it around at the moment. Esther – Critical [YUKU/Bandcamp] On the Leese and Chewlie Invite 002 EP, Prague label YUKU brings us another selection of experimental bass productions by women, selected by Belgium’s Leslie Deboeur (Leese) and Swiss producer Julie Häller (Chewlie). Toulouse DJ Esther brings a techno thump with deep subs and jittery rhythms around the edges. Ruby My Dear – Iterations [Analogical Force] Named for a Thelonious Monk tune, Julien Chastagnol’s Ruby My Dear has always brought classical compositions and jazz melodies to his super-intricate breakcore & idm productions. While you may not find specific instances of jazz or classical here, there’s a melodic nature to whatever the producer does, as well as blasts of intense break-choppery. Like Antoine Ferris and Esther, Chastagnol hails from the Toulouse region, and when not DJing or beatmaking, since 2000 he’s run the family winery, Mas Levigné. ZULI – Half Empty [irsh/Bandcamp] ZULI – 44 [irsh/Bandcamp] Cairo master ZULI is back on the irsh label that he founded with Rama in pandemic times. Naming the release The Screaming Abdabs gives more than a hint at the nervous energy found within, which takes another sharp turn into industrial strength saturation while bringing back something of the high-tech beats that made ZULI stand out when he debuted 10 years ago. Basslines boom, drums crunch and screetch, and even the domestic samples that make up “44” clatter in fury, punctuated by stomach-rattling subs. Unconventional dancefloors rejoice! Marco Simioni – Dot With Illumination (Delta Division Remix) [Detroit Underground/Bandcamp] London-based Italian producer Marco Simioni returns to Detroit Underground with JOMO, an extended remix album (23 tracks!) of reworks of his 2023 album FOMO. “Joy Of Missing Out”? Here Simionio steps back from the production booth, handing his acid & breakbeat-fuelled IDM tunes to a bunch of friends from around the world. The rave deconstructions and ambient electronics here mirror the album’s range, with blurting acid and melodic post-trance rubbing up against drum’n’bass and jungle mutations like Delta Division‘s remix. Dro Carey & Pinz – Hellish Plasma [Braincamp rec./Bandcamp] Eora/Sydney electro/experimental mastermind Dro Carey returned after 4 years with the VT2 EP last year, and has now droppped a big album, Denim Iron, via his Braincamp rec., which releases his productions in various incarnations, including the disco-house and techno of Tuff Sherm, the twisted avant-gardism of PMM and the dance compositions he’s made under his own name. But Dro Carey is what Eugene Ward is best known as, and the album starts off with tuff drum machines and dense synths, and mostly stays there except a few more spacious tracks. The collab with Eora DJ Andy Lowe aka Pinz – heralding a full collaborative release later this year – is apocalyptic basslines, syncopated beats and sinister vocal snippets. Korsain – +55 [Infernal Sounds/Bandcamp] On the +55 EP Brazillian beatmaker Korsain drops three tracks on Stoke-on-Trent dubstep/140bpm label Infernal Sounds. +55 is Brazil’s calling code, emphasising the influence of Korsain’s home on these tunes, and while guest MC Rakjay is based in the UK, he slips invisibly between Spanish and English. Only the third track approximates dubstep, but the standout title track takes the tempo and sparse-not-sparse attitude of early dubstep with percussion reduced to pounding kicks and rimshots, occasional toms and slices of voice, while the bassline drives ever-forward. Paperclip Minimiser – II A1 [Peak Oil/Bandcamp] A programmer of sophisticated music software as Cong Burn (also the name of his longstanding experimental record label), John Howes has for years made organic-feeling techno & electronica under his surname, but Paperclip Minimiser is his home for minimalist dub techno and dub-tinged IDM. Frankly all stunning stuff, as should be expected from Brian Foote’s Peak Oil. Commodo – Deep Harbour ft. Alfa Mist [Black Acre/Bandcamp] A few years ago, dubstep don Commodo hit upon a combo of postpunk guitar+bass with the spare beats and head-noddin’ vibe of dubstep & grime (see Deft 1s & the releases following it), following the equally subtle & vibey TV crime soundtrack-meets-dubstep of 2020’s Loan Shark and Stakeout. So it’s nice to see him back on Black Acre with more jazz-fusion vibes, here assisted by the brilliant Alfa Mist on super slinky electric piano. You can catch the keyboardist (without Commodo) at Sydney Opera House for Vivid Live in May! Meanwhile Anz provides two excellent breakbeat remixes – it’s been a few years since we’ve heard from her, and hopefully this heralds very good things on the way! Nicolas Remondino – boku ga (feat. Adele Altro) [OOH-sounds/Bandcamp] Nicolas Remondino – hìeratico [OOH-sounds/Bandcamp] Italian percussionist Nicolas Remondino has featured on these playlists many times, whether solo as LAMIEE. or part of the duo ŌTONN with Andrea Silvia Giordano, with the new music group Dròlo Ensemble, the postrock/jazz of McCorman – or indeed under his own name. For a while it seemed like every release sounded different – drones, leftfield songwriting, extreme electronics or free jazz; but that previous solo album Ocra Rossa established a practice around prepared drums, on that release the sole sound source. On his extraordinary new album Hìeratico the scrapes and scatters and sussurations of those percussion instruments become one instrument among many, but remain at the centre of the work. Around them, Remondino weaves his own keyboards and processed samples along with many guests, including the inimitable percussionist, pianist & vocalist Limpe Fuchs, instrument-maker, mad scientist & trumpeter Pierre Bastien, sound-artist, guitarist & maker of beautiful scratchy noises Giuseppe Ielasi and more – including the lovely vocals of Adele Altro on one of the tracks tonight. KINACT – Cercle de Tambour Kinact [Nyege Nyege Tapes/Bandcamp] KINACT – Cercle de Tambour Kinact avec Manza et Ikembe [Nyege Nyege Tapes/Bandcamp] Nyege Nyege Tapes has long supported weird electronic music from the African continent, not just Uganda where they’re based, and here we’re presented with the wild, entirely sui generis sound of KINACT, which is really a conglomerate of street artists from the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo: KINACT = Kinshasa in Action. The members dress up in colourful, outlandish costumes, often made from artfully-repurposed rubbish, but they also make music from percussion instruments and lots of distortion – much like Konono No.1 did a generation earlier. Founding member Eddy Ekete brought a group of KINACT members to Nyege’s studios in Kampala where they spent a two-month residency creating the incredible sounds you can here now. Congolese drumming patterns mix with synths, pummelled sheet metal, power drills, motorcycle engines and more – it’s Einstürzende Neubauten remade from the ground up in DRC, realised in Uganda… But it’s just as magical when the percussion itself gets to shine – especially when the wooden xylophone called Manza and the thumb piano known as Ikembe. Unmissable. FRANTX – BARBIECUE [Carton Records/Bandcamp] Andrea Giordano, Kalle Moberg, Jo David Meyer Lysne – D’antorn a lor [Black Truffle Records/Bandcamp] Two releases here show the breadth of the work of Oslo-based Italian musician & singer Andrea Giordano, mentioned above as an early collaborator with Nicolas Remondino in their electro-acoustic duo ŌTONN and the contemporary classical/jazz Dròlo Ensemble. And while I say she is Oslo-based, Giordano is also leader of the Paris-based “glit-noise” band FRANTX. As far as I know, in FRANTX she is lead singer, also playing melodica and all sorts of electronics (in other groups she plays winds and various keyboard-based instruments including accordion). I intrepret “glit” as “glitch”, but it could also refer to glitter, and the group has a glittery queer punk attitude, tackling the politics of making music in the current context, expressing themselves through electro-acoustic experimentalism, punk noise (or noisy punk) and a weird instrumental lineup (guitar & drums added to Giordano’s melodica and Fanny Meteier‘s tuba). The album’s out on May 22, titled IDUTYU (“I Didn’t Understand That You Didn’t Understand”). Meanwhile, at the far opposite end of Giordano’s practice is her album Radis, released on Oren Ambarchi‘s Black Truffle Records. The album takes Giordano back to her hometown of Cuneo in Piedmont, setting 20th century poetry written in Piedmontese, a language at the edge of disappearing (in fact, some of her lyrics with FRANTX are also in Piedmontese). These are touching, beautifully vulnerable, minimalist songs on which Giordano mostly plays the organetto – an Italian miniature button accordion – and is joined by accordionist Kalle Moberg and guitarist Jo David Meyer Lysne, both of whom use extended techniques to extract emotion in a sideways manner. The detailed mix by Jim O’Rourke helps bring out every squeak and scrape. Zela Margossian Quintet – Repentance [Ropeadope/Bandcamp] Staying acoustic, we visit the Sydney-based Armenian pianist Zela Margossian, whose Quintet are releasing their third album Remedy on the storied American folk/roots/jazz label Ropeadope. Like her US-based compatriot Tigran Hamasyan, Margossian combines virtuosic jazz piano with the gorgeous harmonies and complex rhythms of traditional Armenian music, almost unparalleled in its ability to pull the heartstrings. There are three singles so far released, all of which demonstrate how epic and engrossing this album will be. Caroline Davis – She Know She Is Water [Ropeadope/Bandcamp] At the beginning of March, I was fortunate enough to be able to premiere two tracks from the incredible solo album Fallows from Brooklyn-based saxophonist Caroline Davis. A renowned jazz saxophonist and composer, Davis has played in and led ensembles with notable US jazz musicians such as Tyshawn Sorey, Dawn of Midi’s Qasim Naqvi and turntablist Val Jeanty – and in 2024 she made a gorgeous duo album with Wendy Eisenberg, avant-jazz-pop that could only come from these two distinctively talented musicians (there’s a follow-up coming sometime!) All that said, Fallows is a very different beast, made entirely solo during an artists’ residency in Ucross, Wyoming, where she was able to work on saxophone looping techniques and the sound processing and synthesis available on Critter and Guitari’s Organelle. The result is that anything can happen here, from expressive multi-tracked saxophone harmonisations to tumbling glitchy beats, loops queasily shifting speeds and field recordings populated with local fauna. On “She Know She Is Water”, Davis samples the voice of Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Buddhist monk and peace activist who she was fortunate to meet during her studies. Sampled keyboards and machine rhythms clatter and glitch, splashing around the samples of Hạnh’s voice. A unique and very special album. Penelope Trappes – Thou Art Mortal (Julia Holter Rework) [One Little Independent/Bandcamp] After not one but TWO albums from Brighton-based Aussie singer/sound-artist Penelope Trappes last year – A Requiem was followed by Æternum – Penelope now enlists a pretty incredible group of her peers – mostly women – for OPVS NOVUM – A Requiem Reworked. The release features the likes of Saint Etienne, Klara Lewis, Flora Yin-Wong and more. On the first single, Julia Holter leans deep into the minimalism of the original, with lone string parts and vocals echoing in darkness, embedded into reverb tails of bells and white noise. Listen again — ~220MB

World is fukt. Music, not surprisingly, reflects that. But there’s joy and dancing and energy to be found here as well as anger and only a bit of sorrow. Dance a new world into being! LISTEN AGAIN and enjoy something whyoncha. Stream on demand from fbi.radio or podcast here. Oh and by the way, I DJed on Friday night (March 20th) at White Bay Power Station for Art After Dark / Sydney Bienalle, curated by Liquid Architecture. Mara Schwerdtfeger did a beautiful set, and we were graced by a performance from Tujiko Noriko as headliner. I recorded my first set, which opened the evening, a pretty wide-ranging mix that I’m sure you’ll like if you’re a follower of this show! raven · "Omphalo Centric Mixture", live @ White Bay Power Station for Liquid Architecture   Youniss – TakeThat ft. Pink Siifu [VIERNULVIER/Bandcamp] Youniss – Gits Worse ft. Petite Noir [VIERNULVIER/Bandcamp] Sometimes it’s good to become acquainted with the underground & cutting edge in odd corners of the world. I was lucky to perform at the brilliant dunk!festival last year with my band Black Aleph, a festival in Europe’s best-kept secret, the lovely northern-Belgium city of Ghent. Specifically, the festival occurs in a few theatres and venues around an arts centre / platform / community called VIERNULVIER (404), which itself has a phenomenally-curated boutique record label. It’s from this connection that I discovered Antwerp-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, singer & taxi driver Youniss Ahamad. In a fair world, Youniss would be as big as other genre-crossing punk/indie/hip-hop acts, or at least would have the critical recognition he deserves. In this dizzying world of non-stop (bad) news and constant interconnectedness (unless you’re under Iran’s internet blackout or myriad other less-advantaged or more-oppressed populaces), it’s hard for anything to cut through, but I wish that Good Effort! would do so. It’s loosely themed around gentrification, which as it always does is pushing the multicultural residents of the area of Antwerp where Youniss lives out of their homes and community centres. But it’s full of great songwriting, switching between post-punk, jazz and hip-hop on a dime. Youniss plays most of the instruments as well as singing & rapping, but he does also invite some top tier guests, including Belgian clarinettist Dienne, Congolese/South African singer Petite Noir, and underground rappers like Quelle Chris and Pink Siifu. Do yourself a favour and stick this in your ears asap. Kim Gordon – No Hands [Matador/Bandcamp] OK, we all know by now that Kim Gordon is the coolest, releasing now a series of albums (PLAY ME is her third since 2019) in collaboration with Justin Raisen, a producer comfortable in the pop world as well as the more leftfield. Gordon’s delivery has always been more drawled than sung, and her fragile voice somehow suits these simple, bass heavy grooves to a tee. I don’t have much more to say: her social commentary is compact because she knows the words to say. Her style is both now and then, because she’s always been the Kool Thing after all. BAYANG (tha Bushranger) & Kuya Neil – Copy + Paste [CONTENT.NET.AU/Bandcamp] BAYANG (tha Bushranger) & Kuya Neil – Luzon Bleeding Heart (ft. Sevy) [CONTENT.NET.AU/Bandcamp] You know this will be the shit, with Eora’s BAYANG mixing together his love of punk/metal with underground hip-hop, and Naarm’s Kuya Neil as usual throwing plenty of experimental club sounds from all over – bits of jungle, uk bass, baile funk, anything. Another CONTENT.NET.AU affiliate, Sevy, lends a verse to “Luzon Beating Heart”. Grasps_ – Dream On [Grasps_ Bandcamp/Nina Protocol] Christian Grasps_ might be known for his ambient & beat-based electronic productions, including credits with the likes of BAYANG (tha Bushranger), but you might also find him playing piano & singing, or on this new single, playing guitar and singing. There’s a nice bit of a surge in the middle that hints at mayhem that never quite arrives, but that’s by design. A touching little piece. Travis Cook – unfinished symphony [Travis Cook Bandcamp] It’s Travis Cook, on Kaurna land, still bringing a track per week to Bandcamp. Most of them are fragments, as unfinished as this one, but also fun, good production. Laces – Doormen [NLV Records/Bandcamp] Naarm musician Laces is touring UK & Europe with Ninjarachi, and has released his Oekno I EP to accompany them, released by Nina Las Vega’s NLV Records (also home to Ninjarachi). Laces shares with Ninjarachi meticulous electronic production, but this is far more abstract. It was presented to me as “ambient”, but that’s only half the story – there’s beautiful sound design, but also glitchy beats and glitched vox. world’s end girlfriend & samayuzame – Sweet Suicide (Syndrome) [Virgin Babylon Records] So, vocals aren’t usually a prominent part of the music of World’s End Girlfriend, the Japanese master of genre-mashing since the early ’00s. Not that they’re not present, but usually they’re serving the music, whether it’s bizarre electro-acoustic glitch, IDM, breakcore or more like psych-rock/postrock/breakbeat hybrids. Honestly World’s End Girlfriend has been one of Utility Fog’s biggest inspirations since the start, and his now long-lived label Virgin Babylon Records is consistently awesome whether it’s idoru-breakcore, glitch-punk or spoken word. Now, on the 3-track Helix of Frequency, Phenomenon of Love and Void EP he presents three songs with three guest vocalists. This is J-pop WEG style, glitchy, still somehow three genres in one track, and all very lovely. Uriel’s Bath – Beautiful Hats [Hobbies Galore /Bandcamp] The 1990s are big at the moment, and much though jungle is my #1 love, there’s something heartwarming about the kind of ambient techno that developed around the start of the decade, and hearing it echoed nowadays is a weird trip. The self-titled EP by Naarm duo Uriel’s Bath is just such a trip, made by Julia McFarlane and Thomas Kernot, a slightly abstracted continuation of the trip-hop-exotica of 2024’s Whoopee as J.MacFarlane’s Reality Guest (released in the UK by Glasgow indie label Night School). Melodic, electronic, mostly ambient with occasional beats. Sweet as. The Leaf Library – The Reader’s Lamp [Fika Recordings/Bandcamp] Listeners to this show will be aware of The Leaf Library, the London band/collective who make melodic, hypnotic dream-pop/space-rock, with side projects in all sorts of twistings of sound-art, electronica, noise, and folk. Their new album After The Rain, Strange Seeds is released by Fika Recordings, who released one such side project – the strange chamber folk of Mirrored Daughters – last year. While The Leaf Library’s last release was last year’s remix album Flowers at the Border (released on their own excellent label Objects Forever), this new album eschews studio trickery by and large, and is made up of more song-like structures than may be expected. There are also sumptuous strings on a number of tracks, including this one. Some of the best krautrock-indiepop you’ll find at the moment. Xylitol – Bowed Clusters (with The Leaf Library) [Planet µ/Bandcamp] Xylitol – Sudwestwind [Planet µ/Bandcamp] Catherine Backhouse debuted on Planet µ under her Xylitol alias in 2024 with the frantic drill’n’bass of Anemones, very much in the vein of the Planet µ output from the ’00s, as much as the jungle and hardcore she was immersed in in her youth. As DJ Bunnyhausen she was resident DJ at a krautrock club night called Kosmische, and is also a specialist in electronic music & pop from the former Yugoslavia. Her follow-up album Blumenfantasie ups the ante with more sophisticated beats (still manic, don’t stress!) and influences from Sarajevo-born synthmeister Miaux as well as early industrial and yes, krautrock. And Planet µ feels like the perfect home for it – I hear a lot of label boss Mike Paradinas’ µ-Ziq in these tunes, no doubt because Mike was listening to a similar assortment of electronic pioneers as much as his own music directly influencing Backhouse. Oh, and the abovementioned krautrock-influenced space-rockers The Leaf Library feature here – the brilliant “Bowed Clusters” is actually a remix of them which Matt from The Leaf Library gave me a listen to last year, and I’ve been wanting to play it to you ever since. I expected it to be on their Flowers at the Border remix album, but it’s awesome to hear it among the other genre-melted junglisms here. Rutger Zuydervelt – Gas [Machinefabriek Bandcamp] I’ve also been waiting to play something from the pair of releases just out from Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek). A lot of Rutger’s music, particularly released under his own name, is created for dance, theatre and sometimes TV work. His latest is a wonderful thing called Bodies of Water (music for a performance by Iván Pérez / Dance Theatre Heidelberg). The water theme is a great creative catalyst, especially as the work itself deals with the three main states of H2O – solid (ice), liquid (water) and gas (steam, but also water in suspension in air). As well as the soundtrack, there’s an outtakes EP Fog/Drops that highlights water as a power of nature – two 20-minute pieces that mix drone & sound-art with pulsating rhythm. Forces of nature also propel the music on the main album, with thundering sub-bass, sheets of white noise and, well, the drum machines and acidic synth that drive “Gas”. Out of an extremely prolific career of high quality, Rutger is doing some of his best work right now, and I highly recommend this duo of releases whether you need a starting point or a place to catch up. hoyah חיה – talmuds (feat. Derya Yıldırım) [BRUK/Bandcamp] hoyah חיה – sol [BRUK/Bandcamp] Berlin-based musician Shmuel Hatchwell makes dope lo-fi hip-hop as Ehye אֶהְיֶה, and debuted his hoyah incarnation with the disorienting glitched sax samples of Set + Setting on Low End Activist’s BRUK label in 2024. Last year he released the 2-track single 808s n Trance Gates along with a website that interrogated the political circumstances in which he – an observant Jew who happens to be openly anti-Zionist in a time of genocide – found his original choice of artwork censored because it appropriated antisemitic imagery from the early-20th century. In the intervening time, not only has Germany’s suppression of speech about Palestine gotten worse, we in Australia – as well as activists in the UK, France, the US and elsewhere – have experienced an escalation in the suppression of speech critical of Israel, even when coming from Jews like Hatchwell or myself. Last year’s single appears on hoyah’s remarkable new album Can I Get A Chayah?, its flickering samples of Eastern European and Middle Eastern Jewish musics standing as a template for Hatchwell’s deep reimagining of Jewish music, religious practice and oft-warped history throughout the album. Here, the structures of hip-hop, UK club music and experimental electronic production are the conduit for the wide range of diasporic Jewish music fed into the stuttering shutters of Hatchwell’s sampler. The voice of the late David Berman of Silver Jews appears on the second track, a poignant mantra of doubt repeating “Adonai, I don’t know, I don’t know, Adonai” (“Adonai” roughly means “Lord”). Turkish singer Derya Yıldırım meanwhile reminds us of the long traditions of Jewish practice in the SWANA region. Works like this are an important part of imagining and bringing into being a strong panoply of Jewish identities that reject the fascistic, ahistorical tether to an apartheid, genocidal state that’s pushed by Israel and its erstwhile allies across the world. datewithdeath – (aar) [Poverty Electronics] While Travis D Johnson‘s music as datewithdeath has not come to an end, his Poverty Electronics label has closed up shop with two releases at the beginning of this year: the excellent remix/collaboration collection Culotte Sine and datewithdeath’s Apple Tree Brightness, a shining collection of glitchy electro-acoustics, abrasive drones and messed-up beats. Following a debilitating illness, Johnson – writer & folklorist as well as composer, improviser & producer – is concentrating on his boutique publishing house Frolic Press, which happens to come with an accompanying musical outlet, Frolic Press Recordings. Follow there for new noise & beauty, and like me you can catch up on Poverty Electronics on Bandcamp. Skee Mask – Greensleeve Attack [Skee Mask/SCNTST Bandcamp] The alphabetical compilations of unreleased Skee Mask music on the German producer’s Bandcamp have reached F – that’s almost 6 hours of music of 6 albums of 11 tracks each. While obviously unmastered, the music here often rivals the material often released on Ilian Tape, and offers an enjoyable, illuminating look into the musical practice of one of the most versatile producers of the last decade, across warbling ambient, IDM-tinged techno and soft-focus jungle. Rob Clouth – Gummy Clusters [Mesh/Bandcamp] No artist could be more suited to Max Cooper‘s Mesh label than Rob Clouth, so synchronised with Cooper’s are Clouth’s musical aesthetics and interests in the intersection between science and music (the two collaborated on an EP last year). Clouth’s second EP on Mesh for 2026 is Cicada – the sometimes deafening chittering sound of these insects is familiar to anyone living in Australia, but the cicada shimmer in the title track is quickly overtaken by 4/4 kicks. “Gummy Clusters”, on the other hand, is yummy syncopation and chopped vocal samples. Untold – It’s Not My Fault but It Is My Problem [Hemlock Recordings/Bandcamp] Jack Dunning founded Hemlock Recordings in 2008, following his debut 12″ on Hessle Audio as Untold. From the start his approach to dubstep was married with the 4/4 kicks of tech-house and the fidgetiness of electro; I appreciated it more than liked it, but Dunning has a keen musical sensibility and Untold never stayed still. So it’s nice to find him returning to his own label with HEK036 (catalogue number as title hey), out on April 10th. “It’s Not My Fault but It Is My Problem” wants to thump in 4/4 but trips over itself, syncopating into dancehall patterns while the synths snarl in cyberpunk. Just the kind of odd stuff you’d expect from Untold. Whisker Floater – Overshoe 3 [Whisker Floater Bandcamp] Scattered Order – Daisy and Lucy [Red Raw Bandcamp] Nick Shimmin for many years hosted experimental music performances at The People’s Republic of Camperdown, and a year or two ago moved the republic to a converted church in Earlwood dubbed The Red House. The venue itself, beautifully setup with impeccable sound provided by Matt McGuigan, has run into licensing problems (which they are working on!), but many performances there have been recorded, giving one a kind of a chance at re-living the experience (and hearing some unique music). Sydney postpunk/post-industrial/experimental electronic legends Scattered Order performed there at least a couple of times, including a memorable tribute to founding member Michael Tee, who sadly passed away in 2024. Co-founder Mitch Jones and longtime fellow traveller Shane Fahey (a continuing member of SO since their 2009 reformation) made Continue in 2025, using material from Tee, and when they came to launch it at the Red House, they invited Sydney experimental mainstay Matthew Syres to join on treated guitar. That performance is documented on SO CONTINUES at the Red House. Fahey also collaborates with Mitch Jones’ wife Drusilla Johnson-Jones, a wonderful visual and musical artist who was also a member of SO for many years, under the cheeky name Whisker Floater, making complex, internally-interactive, beautifully weird electronic music. more eaze – sentence structure in the country [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp] When Mari Maurice Rubio first came up on my radar as more eaze, she was making luscious, glitchy electronic music on a compilation from Lillerne Tapes. Her 2018 album Conveyance took a similar approach – samples of classical & other music smeared & glitched into abstracted brushes of audio-painting. But Rubio is a great violinist and a brilliant string arranger, a great improviser and a great producer – for example, she co-produced the new album of her partner, the genius Wendy Eisenberg, and her string arrangements help make Eisenberg’s songs even more gorgeous. But a few weeks before Eisenberg’s album is released, Rubio’s own latest solo album is out on Thrill Jockey, which by the way is the perfect home for it. In their different ways, both albums are homages to what the two have found as a couple, although their duo whait is going to give us more of a picture of what they can do when neither is leading (Sydney’s Andrew Khedoori is giving them a place to explore this as part of his Residence label/project). So sentence structure in the country is a very more eaze kind of thing, and when Eisenberg appears (on electric guitar here on the title track), it’s in service to that vision – as with the other guests, including Alice Gerlach aka alice does computer music. What a “more eaze kind of thing” is is everything all at once – folk & country-infused acoustic arrangements, harsh glitch-edits, vocoded vocals, lilting melodies. It makes as much and as little sense as the words “sentence structure in the country” do, and that’s great – who needs music to make sense? Not me. Jessica Roch – Par [Across The Horizon/Bandcamp] US label Northern Spy has for a few years now run an interesting program called Across The Horizon, co-founded with musician & podcaster Bob Holmes (SUSS, Ambient Country Podcast). Each year when the series is running, 8 musicians curate a wedge of new music, each of them commissioning 2 other artists along with themselves. So each release features three new tracks, which fit broadly into merged genres such as Holmes’ “ambient country”, as well as perhaps ambient classical, ambient folk, ambient jazz… Each new drop is initially subscriber-only, so the latest now-public selection was curated by LA musician & artist Cynthia Bernard aka marine eyes. Alongside her own work is the underwater exotica of Lauren Helene Green and a piece from London musician Jessica Roch, whose track initially sounds like a familiar kind of piano-ambient (albeit beginning in reverse), but almost immediately the simple piano refrain blossoms outward with electronic filligree, and multi-tracked violins hint at expanded harmonisations. In between phrases, the piano glitches and stutters, and warps with tape delay. The piece’s juxtaposition of hesitancy and romanticism, acoustic instruments and electronics, instinctively expresses the jostle of emotions as-yet unprocessed in the hours after Roche’s father’s funeral. It’s deeply touching. Listen again — ~216MB

Electro-acoustic sound-manipulation rubs shoulders with extended techniques on acoustic instruments, while influences from ’80s industrial, ’70s krautrock, ’00s folktronica and ’90s dub techno can be found alongside indie rock, breakbeat, and good ol’ classic freeform noise. It’s Sunday. It’s Utility Fog. LISTEN AGAIN to good ol’ classic freeform ‘fog. Stream on demand at fbi.radio, podcast here. Bibi Club – A Different Light [Secret City Records/Bandcamp] Bibi Club – Le Styx [Secret City Records/Bandcamp] The Montréal duo of Adèle Trottier-Rivard and Nicolas Basque are Bibi Club, a name which presumably makes more sense to French speakers, but their songs are split fairly evenly between French & English. Their quirky indie pop, part jangly guitars and part electronic, owes something to the British-French band Stereolab (who they covered last year), as well as Francophone indie music that often gets tagged with “chanson”, the French word for “song”. From their lovely third album Amaro, I started tonight with a driving piece of postpunk that clearly shows their debt to Blonde Redhead, which segues into an instrumental that loops part of the krautrocky groove and introduces hovering drones and sampled operatic voices. This might just be the emotional avant-garde indie rock you’ve been looking for. The Notwist – The Turning [Morr Music/Bandcamp] In 2001, German band The Notwist, having begun as hardcore punks and transitioned through emo to some kind of indie rock, released their breakthrough album Neon Golden – a significant date only in that a couple of years later was when I started Utility Fog on the newly-official FBi Radio. Arguably with their 1998 album Shrink, The Notwist were well on the way to their hybrid genre that we perhaps briefly called “indietronica”, with influences from IDM, drum’n’bass and techno as well as krautrock combined with indie rock. Meanwhile, Thomas Morr founded his Morr Music label in 1999, which quickly became a home to a similar clade of indie/IDM, shoegaze-tronic bands – many of which involved members of The Notwist, particularly brothers Micha and Markus Acher. It wasn’t actually until 2020 that The Notwist themselves signed to Morr Music, but it’s always seemed their spiritual home. The band’s new album News from Planet Zombie is perhaps their most “rock” album for some time, intentionally splitting from their studio-mediated workflows by bringing the whole band together to write & perform these songs in person. 10 years ago Superheroes, Ghostvillains + Stuff documented The Notwist’s live setup at the time, with modular synths & other electronics prominent alongside the (kraut)rock instruments; here the electronics are less prominent but clearly an integral part of whatever The Notwist does; but it’s the undeniable, distinctive songwriting that can’t help but shine through. Daniel Jumpertz – I Would Never Do That To You [Feral Media/Bandcamp] In the early days of Utility Fog/FBi, Danny Jumpertz was a strong supporter of Utility Fog, and the indietronica, folktronica and postrock sides of the playlists were reflected in the sorts of music he released on his Feral Media label. For a while now the in-the-family indie rock band Clairaudience has been his main musical outlet, but he’s now begun releasing a cache of solo songs, I believe once a month, starting with the stirring “Everything Is Lost” and now followed by the pretty krautrocky “I Would Never Do That To You“. From Jumpertz’ time in NYC, producer Abe Seiferth contributes “wig-out Moog mayhem”, which you’ll recognize as soon as you listen to the song! Looking forward to more in coming months. Praed – Assarab السراب [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp/Annihaya Records/Bandcamp] Now 20 years old, Praed is the combination of two Lebanese musicians, clarinettist/composer/more Paed Conca (part-Switzerland-based) and bassist/sound-artist/more Raed Yassin (part Berlin-based). The music – sometimes billed as “PRAED Orchestra” with friends from the MENA/SWANA region and Europe – draws from Egyptian street music (Shaabi, now mutating into Mahraganat) and the traditional Sufi spiritual/trance music Mulid, both in their ways based around hypnotic, repetitive beats. It’s always psychedelic, swirling, extremely rhythmic, a free jazz of Lebanese & Egyptian music. While new album Al Wahem الوهم is back in duo formation, they are still joined by many talented Beirut musicians (the album was recorded at Tunefork Studios in Beirut). As always this music is full of joy and yearning, and neverending forward motion. Simo Cell & Abdullah Miniawy – Living Emojis [Dekmantel/Bandcamp] Simo Cell & Abdullah Miniawy – Easing The Hearts [Dekmantel/Bandcamp] In 2020, French beatmaker Simo Cell and Egyptian singer, poet, trumpeter, composer & more Abdullah Miniawy teamed up for a frankly game-changing mini-album, Kill Me Or Negotiate. Simo’s music is equal parts UK bass, US bass and French club, transforming the Arabic vocals and jazz-trained trumpet of Miniawy, who had collaborated extensively with the post-dubstep kraut-tronic band Carl Gari (not to mention his own laptop experiments, no longer available online). The pair are not afraid to abstract Miniawy’s lyrics into cut-up samples, nor are they afraid to let him fly with gorgeous melodicism. Their second outing together is the brilliant album Dying Is The Internet, whose title couldn’t be more apposite really – it feels like it’s bringing the world down with it, and while you probably couldn’t blame Netanyahu on the internet, surely Trumpianism is as much a product of what the internet’s become as, well, all the other shit. There’s real humanity in these tracks, as well as futuristic technology; high drama and low grooves. If the internet’s dying, let this be the future. Damos Room – Molars [Limbo Tapes/Bandcamp] I’m not sure who Damos is or what’s in their Room, but signs point to it being three guys: Luke Miles, Nicholas Elson & Huw Oleskar. I’ve just found out (because they told me, nothing underhand) that Huw Oleskar is also known as Elijah Minnelli, responsible for some of the most interesting and lovely dub-folk hybrids in recent times, ostensibly under the auspices of Breadminster County Council. As for Damos Room, you can find a series of fantastic, weirdly-shaped releases on their Bandcamp, including a mixtape of two bizarre 40-minute radio pieces, some quasi-singles of abstracted dub/spoken-word/electronics, and the experimental electronics of their collaboration with rapper LYAM, which I played on this show a few years back. The band finally have an album coming, and Walk With The Militia… is not that album. It’s a mixtape, entirely in keeping with the mystery what all this is about. It collects a whole lot of weird shit, but it’s all dub-based experimental electronics, with Minnelli’s distinctive spoken word & low-key singing, odd radio interludes and noise bits and so on. It’s really fantastic. No doubt All Shall Go, the real album, will be well worth bending your ear to when it comes out in only a few weeks! New Age Doom featuring H.R. – We’re All the Same [We Are Busy Bodies/Bandcamp] Having previously collaborated with Lee “Scratch” Perry, Canadian collective New Age Doom know a thing or two about combining freeform psychdedelic noise with dub. Their latest collaborator H.R. co-founded Bad Brains, some of the earliest hardcore punks who combined rasta philosophy and reggae with their punk music. It appears that for all the peace-and-love preaching, H.R.’s fundamentalist religious outlook inherits the homophobia rampant in Rastafarianism, but that’s not apparent in these songs, thankfully. This is swirling dub with some excellent electric violin from Alina Petrova. DJ Sprinter – Floaterr [unreleased] Oslo’s DJ Sprinter has popped up in the last year and a bit as an absolutey top-tier producer of bass-heavy breakbeat. You can find a whole lot on his Bandcamp, but the other day he invited followers to message him on Instagram for some unreleased cuts, so I did, and I’ve brought you one tonight. Just as great as the plethora of stuff he’s already put out there, irresistible grooves. Rotate – Hot Glue [YUKU/Bandcamp] UK producer Rotate is also known as RWB, making dubsteppy, garagey cuts galore. Not sure what warrants being a Rotate track rather than RWB, but the more serious, full releases, especially for other labels, seem to be under Rotate. This is still absolutely bass music, wobbly and spacey, with just enough of that experimental edge to be very comfortable in the YUKU yuniverse. Teerath Majumder – Dust [Infrequent Seams/Bandcamp] Bangladeshi artist Teerath Majumder, based in Chicago, creates interdisciplinary art & music that explores the interaction between audience and artist/composer through technology, as well as producing music & sound-design in collaboration with other artists, directors & musicians. His new album Dust To Dust, however, is an entirely solo work, from the music & production to mastering & artwork. Here there are flittery synths, Bangladeshi samples at times, and when there are beats they skitter and thump. This album may have come from Majumder’s contemplation of death, but it’s teeming with life. MATA – Adolf Hippy [CÆR (Chiærichetti Æditori Recordings)/Bandcamp] MATA – Compro Oro Et Laboro [CÆR (Chiærichetti Æditori Recordings)/Bandcamp] Where did this even come from? Well… Italy. Italy is where the trio named MATA come from, making industrial/noise/glitch which could almost look like a typical rock band – guitar/vocals, bass, drums – if you ignore the electronics through everything. This is the kind of music where anything can happen, often grating, often strangely catchy? The label CÆR is the musical arm of Chiærichetti Æditori Recordings who also publish an underground comix anthology called LEGIONE, and I look forward to reading some when the package finally reaches Australia. Noémi Büchi – dislocated bodies (feat. Anushka Chkheidze) [-OUS/Bandcamp] With last year’s excellent Liquid Bones EP, Swiss/French composer Noémi Büchi shifted from dense electronic orchestrations to a somewhat lighter touch, with rhythm more to the forefront. Her new album Exuvie is body music made of deceptively simple parts that are bent and shuffled into unexpected shapes. It’s great, not least on this track, a collaboration with Georgian composer & producer Anushka Chkheidze. Roman Rofalski – Monday [Oscillations/Bandcamp] German musician Roman Rofalski is a classically-trained pianist and a jazz musician, releasing recordings of contemporary composers as well as jazz piano trios. He’s also interested in extending these forms into electronic realms, and we’ve heard him on this show as one half of electro-acoustic duo Saving Kaiser. In 2024, we heard him deconstructing his piano on the album Fractal, released by London-based Oscillations Music. He’s now followed that up with Awaiting PM, combining the inside & out of a new grand piano with distorted Akai MPC 2000 beats. There’s a sense of tension and expectation to these tracks, which were recorded while awaiting the birth of his son. It’s excellent stuff, and I’m glad to note that he’s got another release coming hot on its heels, which you’ll hear here in a couple of weeks. Autistici & datewithdeath – Grusch’s Biologics [Audiobulb/Bandcamp] Sheffield-based sound-artist David Newman has run the Audiobulb label since the netlabel days of the early 2000s, and for a similar length of time he’s made exploratory sounds as Autistici of a similar aesthetic to the label – post-IDM beats, glitchy sound processing, an electro-acoustic approach to found sounds, field recordings and instrumentation. Artistic collaboration has been a big part of what Newman’s done as Autistici and Volume Objects – the 2010 remix album Resonating Wires was a favourite release back then, but even his “solo” releases have often featured guests. Last year, two of three “familiarity” EPs came out from Autistici on Audiobulb – Familiarity Folded and Familiarity Enfolded, both of which featured simpatico either artists remixing Autistici or working with him, creating meticulous sound-art, sometimes with beats, usually mixing acoustic sounds with electronic approaches. Those two releases have limited CD editions; the third, out now, is Familiarity Unfolded, which can be found on vinyl as well. One of the best collaborations is with St. Augustine, Florida musician & writer Travis Johnson, who worked for many years under the alias datewithdeath, as well as running the Poverty Electronics label. Following an illness, datewithdeath has been retired – although not without clearing the cupboards with some stunning collections, including the collaboration/remix album Culotte Sine and the posthumous (so to speak) album Apple Tree Brightness. Johnson can now be found prioritising writing with Frolic Press, but there’s still a musical arm – Frolic Press Recordings that will feature his & others’ work – forthcoming is a novella from Aidan Baker of Nadja, with an accompanying solo album out for pre-order now. In any case, the glitchy & detailed “Grusch’s Biologics” is one of my favourite tracks from Autistici’s trio of releases. Bruce Russell – The Letter [Marhaug Forlag/Bandcamp] Lasse Marhaug – Turntable Oil Blues [Marhaug Forlag/Bandcamp] This one’s a huuuge deal in the noise world, or at least to me it is. Bruce Russell is a member of New Zealand’s iconic experimental rock trio The Dead C, a highly influential band across indie, shoegaze and noise. Lasse Marhaug is a giant of the noise scene, and also a producer of many surprising Norwegian & other artists including Korean jazz/experimental cellist Okkyung Lee, Jenny Hval and Kelly Lee Owens. As befits the noise scene, both are very intuitive workers with sound, and that’s where part of the joy of this release comes from. It’s actually their second collaboration, but Re-Make Re-Model came out of the idea of remixing each other, and thus is released as a 2CD set, each credited to the artist who completed the work (the remixer). It also comes in a beautiful open-spine hardcover book published by Marhaug (whose Marhaug Forlag also publishes the Personal Best magazine of noise music – the 2011 first issue of which included a feature on Bruce Russell), with photos & essays by both musicians about their relationship and their musical practice, and fascinating, detailed descriptions of how each track was made. Thus: Bruce Russell’s “The Letter” is based on Marhaug’s 2005 work Carnival of Souls, which is a soundtrack to a short film called The Letter. Russell chopped out tasty bits of the original, which he re-pitched, pushed the right & left channels out of sync & further tampered with. The results are deeply sinister. On Marhaug’s “Turntable Oil Blues”, he’s messing with Russell’s “Nigerian Delta Oil Well Blues”, a short track from his 21st Century Field Hollers And Prison Songs LP. The funny thing is, the ascending & descending slides aren’t a turntable slowing down & speeding up – they’re in Russell’s track. This is as directly a remix as it is a destruction of the original work, progressively distorting the original (played at the wrong speed) over a number of run-throughs. Ultimately noise is doing whatever the fuck you want with sound, and finding some artistry in it, and these two are past masters of the art of noise. Nabelóse – Niriides [Trost/Bandcamp] Pianist Ingrid Schmoliner and French horn player Elena Kakaliagou have played together for about a decade, making music that sits somewhere between contemporary composition and free jazz. Both also contribute voice to their Nabelóse project, including layers of spoken work, and – with prepared piano and horn that produces breathy wind as often as warm, slow melodies – their third album HAAR is a thing of mysterious beauty. Their previous albums – 2017’s Nabelóse and 2022’s OMOKENTRO – feature more singing that draws from their respective folk musics (Schmoliner is also a yodeler), but share this album’s patience and sonic exploration. Rosenau & Sanborn – Harm [Psychic Hotline/Bandcamp] Chris Rosenau of Collections of Colonies of Bees and Volcano Choir, and Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso have been friends for a long time, and made their first EP under their surnames back in 2019. The sequel (what Americans would call a “sophomore” effort) shares with the first a love of folky guitar, studio electronics and incidental found-sound. To me this is bliss, as it recalls the laptop folk of The Books and other airy, homespun folktronica of the early ’00s. Absolutely a little gem, do not miss. Booker Stardrum – Inside Sounds [WeJazz/Bandcamp] New York percussionist & composer Booker Stardrum is a member of Los Angeles (post-)jazz supergroup SML, and music runs in his family – his surname is adopted from the names of his parents, both avant-garde musicians themselves: flautist Stefani Starin and microtonal composer & instrument maker Dean Drummond. So Close-up On The Outside might be expected to be an avant-garde release, and in some ways it is, but in a very friendly, warm manner. Many friends from SML and the broader scene appear as guests on these compositions, but they flit in & out around careful edits; the main focus is on pitched and un-pitched wooden percussion, and glinting loops. There’s a low-key, positive outlook to the album which is uncommon and welcome. Richard Pike – I. “What Happened” [Salmon Universe/Bandcamp] Sydney’s Richard Pike, alum of PVT, is now based in London. He can be found in various ensembles, including with Joe Quirke, with whom he co-runs the Salmon Universe label, and under his own name has been making ambient-techno-hybrid-orchestral soundtracks for TV. Outside of that, he’s released solo music under the alias DEEP LEARNING on Oxtail Recordings, based around subtly rhythmic glitchy loops, but now returns to his own name for album that mixes late-night piano and glitchy dub-techno. It’s not surprising to discover that the creation of this music was directly triggered by the death of Ryuichi Sakamoto, but the music takes darker paths than the Japanese master. The full album’s out later in May, but the singles so far are rich & murky. Listen again — ~224MB

Experimental songs, experimental strings in almost-psych rock, acoustic & electronic settings, contemporary composition, avant-jazz, experimental electronics heading into footwork and jungle hybrids, weird bass music, experimental techno and noise… and hey, probably more! LISTEN AGAIN & fuck war. Stream on demand @ fbi.radio, podcast here. Tanya Tagaq – Razorblades Tanya Tagaq – Ikualajut Fabels – Akron TOUT BLEU – Technosapiens tangent mek – immutable traveler Bushra El-Turk, Dudok Quartet – Three Tributes: Portrait II Nima Aghiani – Live excerpt from eavesdrop festival, 2024 Taupe – Interlude (Stride) Taupe – allcapsallbold tigran hamasyan – Prelude for all seekers Flying Lotus – Brobobasher Flying Lotus – Big Mama Annebel – Yavegard Rivs & Matt Scratch feat. Mandidextrous – Friday Night Jensen Interceptor – Four4 Diva Loop Duffy x Tecta – False Teachings Rainforest – Boycott Only Now x Jaijiu – Rebel Cry OD Bongo – monsieur fils Nats – BLKDRM Yellow Swans – The Lab Simiskina (Adrian Myhr & Jonas Cambien) – Pitfall Oker – Equinoctial Tide (Radio Edit) Asteroid Ekosystem – Open To Claire Edwardes & Gemma Peacocke – I Promise Not to Poison You xoxo II. Hemlock Jasmine Guffond – Approaching Chaos Listen again — ~220MB

An experimental focus tonight, with a lot of contemporary jazz that slides into electronic experimentalism, contemporary classical and almost-pop songwriting. There are a few beats of the very leftfield sort, and some abstractly beautiful sound-art. I’m premiering two tracks from saxophonist & sound-artist Caroline Davis from her incredible album Fallows, which is out on Ropeadope on March 27th. LISTEN AGAIN & you might blow your mind. Stream on demand @ fbi.radio, podcast here. Kee Avil – un Marianna Sangita Angeletaki Røe & Trondheim Jazz Orchestra – Trouble Karoline Wallace – Klokkestein David/David – sedem Taroug – Najet Azimuth Compass – Anti-social Climbers vic bang – Curva POD & Edward Richards – Temporal Loop Transcendance GLOK/Timothy Clerkin – Nothing Ever Reprise (Xylitol Remix) Nondi_ – Rejection Lily Nondi_ – Leaded Pipe Nondi_ – Leather Guitar Ben Vince – Sentient Kinetics Caroline Davis – Flower Sway Caroline Davis – Mars Loom & Thread – Spheres Caterina Barbieri & Bendik Giske – Intuition, Nimbus Machinefabriek – Stemcassette Machinefabriek – Cirkel 2 Amuleto – Fumo Ogni Cosa, Vento Che Ha Fame Toninato & Thiessen – Hot blood flow Helena – Hera Elisabeth Klinck & Nils Vermeulen – Cocoon Listen again — ~204MB

Tension between live performance and studio editing, acoustic music & electronic, folk styles and modern tonight – all very Utility Fog, just how we love it. LISTEN AGAIN to soak in the vibes. Stream on demand from fbi.radio, podcast right here. Momoko Gill – When Palestine Is Free Momoko Gill – Test A Small Area Tanya Tagaq – Fuck War Simo Cell & Abdullah Miniawy – Pixelated Dro Carey – Tawny Track Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das – prjct16 [140.61 D#m] FUCK!LACRÈME – Welcome To My Crib Pugilist – waveform 19 Red Sky – Today’s Lament Geode – Heron yunis – Kutla Fox & Chimpo – Mash Work Gooooose – Relay Placid Angles – We Cry With You Arthur Clees – IDA_23 Arthur Clees – Oh, What a Mess We’ve Done Puscha – (In)a(de)quatic Puscha – Sycophantasm Charles Amirkhanian – II – In Praise Of The Venerable Piano Roll Charles Amirkhanian – V – Hopper Popper Rosenau & Sanborn – Walrus Bushranger – Under a Blue Moon Runa Cara – Little Girl Runa Cara – Freja Gudine Claire Edwardes & Missy Mazzoli – Orizzonte Passepartout Duo – From Trondheim Listen again — ~225MB

How’s it garn? Here’s some music for yas. elsas – FINALISE U elsas – NIÑO Noni-Mouse ft. Hemanti Devi – Aa Bhave Nikolaus Graf × Laiz × Krantinaari ft. Taiji – Huduka Ho James Massiah & DJ GAWAD – All Out Buttress O’Kneel – Fascists Whisker Floater – Undercoat4 Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Frédéric D. Oberland – Squeal Of Swine – خنخنة خنازير Praed – Al Hathayan الهذيان Arketek – Rotten Soldier Allis – 無 – 〇 Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das – prjct14 [87.50 Am] flywheel – Troppo enduser – Waiting (Decay Mix) enduser – Where I Found You (Album Mix) Morwell – Into Pieces (Jan 2026, unreleased) Morwell – Willie Williams – Come Make We Rally (Morwell remix) Ambu Bambu – Laugh It Off J.Sparrow – Lust Parajekt – Parajekt Parajekt – Mani e Pane Elizabeth Davis – Wo Sind Sie Geblieben Elizabeth Davis – Long Time Passes Joachim Nordwall + Aaron Turner – The Bath Vox Errata – Between Worlds Listen again — ~223MB

I’ve been away for two weeks in Japan (it was amazing, needless to say). Huge thanks to Holly Conner (ilex) and Lachlan Stevens (Heyes) for brilliant shows on those two Sundays. Tonight I’m excited about the selections available – intense experimental electronic rock, protest rap, free jazz-tronic poetry, glitch-folk, sound-art, jungle & idm, post-techno post-bass(?), and acoustic instruments distorted, processed, and played live. LISTEN AGAIN at fbi.radio or podcast right here. Mandy, Indiana – Sevastopol [Sacred Bones/Bandcamp] Mandy, Indiana – I’ll Ask Her [Sacred Bones/Bandcamp] The debut album from Manchester’s Mandy, Indiana, i’ve seen a way, crashed into the contemporary musical zeitgeist with an abrasiveness that equalled their appeal. Valentine Caulfield sings mainly in French – or speaks and shouts – about systemic injustice, about toxic masculinity, about the genocide in Gaza… and the electrifying, sometimes brutal rhythms and bursts of noise & sampled sonic detritus rarely coalesce into anything melodic (making it all the more impactful when they do). The result is by and large disorienting in the best way. On the last track Caulfield swaps to English to best hammer home her message – more stark than ever with the latest Epstein files release. It’s a story about one of the boys, he’s your mate you know? And yeah you’ve heard some rumours, but “you know how they run their mouths, these fucking bitches / and anyway, you stand by your boys, ’cause they’re your boys / and that’s just how it is”. “They’re all fucking crazy, man” is the relentless excuse, and Caulfield doesn’t let up, all the way to the crushing end: “Yeah, your friend’s a fucking rapist but they’re all fucking crazy, man”. Bleakly necessary. B Dolan – How I(CE) Could Just Kill A Man [B Dolan Bandcamp] Too many truth bombs here too. This song is a great interpolation/cover of Cypress Hill, but it’s also just fucking good. I know music’s just music, but I do believe we need more protest music, more than ever. Art is inspiration, art is community, art is what keeps people going. Buy this song and the money goes to AMOR, “Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistence”. And yeah, that’s the USA, Australia’s a different story, right? Well yeah, we’re different, but our racist post-truthers are on the rise just like Farage’s fuckwits in the UK, and frankly politics alone isn’t going to save us. Resist, however you can. The more brutal the state, the more mutual aid will be / needed – proceeds are for the legal fund… Tell ’em “this is something no strongman can ban”. Fuck ICE, free the people, free the land. The Odes – You Owned It [Not Applicable/Bandcamp] Déjeuner Sous L’Herbe, the title of the new album by the duo of postpunk saxophonist & poet Ted Milton and experimental electronic producer Sam Britton, is a flip of the (in)famous Édouard Manet painting “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe” – you know the one, with a naked woman sitting at a picnic with two clothed men. While Manet pictured his subjects lunching on the grass, Milton suggests that we take our lunch under the grass (and the artwork hilariously turns the painting on its head, with text circling its four edges). Manet’s painting was made to scandalise; Milton may not be scandalous, but his poetry – generally barked more than sung through the history of his still-going post-punk art-rock band Blurt – is acerbic, humorous, down-to-earth and erudite. His poetry and artistic life considerably predates punk, let alone post-punk (a movement, mind you, that started approximately 3 seconds after punk), and his words reach back through the literary canon and non-canon as much as they do into normal & abnormal life. Look, I’m not great at writing about words, so let it be mentioned that the second disc of this upside-down naked lunch features Milton reading 32 poems that make up his poetry collection Anti Climb Paint. They’re all very short – it zips by in less than 15 minutes and it’s highly engaging. The first disc, however, continues Milton’s collaboration with Sam Britton, who I’ve known for more than a couple of decades as one half of Icarus, an English duo who started out making wicked Photek-like drum’n’bass and moved gradually into a musique concrète-informed folktronica without ever losing the d’n’b/jungle pulse; Icarus’ other half is Eora/Sydney-resident Ollie Bown, an esteemed academic and member of Tangents with yr humble narrator (me). Sam – who often goes by Isambard Khroustaliov – has worked & researched in the hallowed halls of IRCAM and STEIM and also works with many jazz & improvising musicians, and by now his collaborations with Ted Milton go back a decade and a half at least. So needless to say it’s a highly enjoyable, if avant-garde, listen. Bara & Isa – 2×2 (Verschrin Tulip Mix) [Warm Winters Ltd./Bandcamp] The latest release from London/Vienna duo Bara & Isa follows their album (ii) from 2024, also released on the wonderful Bratislava label Warm Winters Ltd.. It’s that kind of gently experimental music that’s pieced together from acoustic improvisations on odd instruments and with hesitant voices, mediated through electronic collage. A little reminiscent of Lucky Dragons, which is high praise. Concrete Husband – As the Sun Falls [NNA Tapes/Bandcamp] Concrete Husband – Procession of the New Sun [NNA Tapes/Bandcamp] Via NNA Tapes, who specialise in experimental-yet-accessible music, the gentle violence of Concrete Husband is somewhere between electronically-rendered contemporary composition, soundtrack music and experimental ambient. Laden with mystery. Toni Geitani – Ruwaydan Ruwaydan [Toni Geitani Bandcamp] Toni Geitani – Wasla [Toni Geitani Bandcamp] Originally trained in filmmaking, Lebanese musician Toni Geitani has since gained a Masters in live electronics in Amsterdam, where he is based now. His Masters thesis is titled “Sampling as a Political Medium”, which sounds fascinating. In his music, he melds Arabic vocals with classical instrumentation and experimental electronic production. Across 17 tracks on his new album Wahj, we hear his voice and electronics, along with processed performances on strings, oboe and bass, and some guest vocalists. It’s a stunning album. “Wahj” (وهج) means “radiance”, and Geitani invites us to look through the collapse we see everywhere, and seek that light. Glasser – Vine (Melati ESP Remix) [One Little Independent/Bandcamp] It’s been 2½ years since NYC producer Glasser‘s last album, crux, was released. A year or so later, Sept 2024, 7 tracks were added to make Crux Deluxe, and now, because you can never have enough rhymes, we get 6 remixes under the title crux redux. Cameron Mesirow’s music has always been a kind of pop-IDM, not too far from Björk or Braids, but there are some very dancefloor-friendly mixes here, including Peder Mannerfelt solo and with Pär Grindvik as Aasthma, and the IDM-loving DJ Python. But the brilliant Indonesian producer Melati ESP takes the angelic-voiced “Vine” into very jittery, drum’n’bassy waters on her remix, a definite highlight. Xylitol – Falling [Planet µ/Bandcamp] Catherine Backhouse debuted on Planet µ under her Xylitol alias in 2024 with the frantic drill’n’bass of Anemones, very much in the vein of the Planet µ output from the ’00s, as much as the jungle and hardcore she was immersed in in her youth. As DJ Bunnyhausen she was resident DJ at a krautrock club night called Kosmische, and is also a specialist in electronic music & pop from the former Yugoslavia. Her follow-up album Blumenfantasie is on its way from the µ-sters on March 20th, and ups the ante with more sophisticated beats (still manic, don’t stress!) and influences from Sarajevo-born synthmeister Miaux as well as early industrial and yes, krautrock. I’m also glad to see her remix of (-slash collaboration with) beloved friends of the show, space-rockers The Leaf Library, on the tracklisting. No question this’ll be a 2026 highlight! Suburban Architecture – Rising (Kloke Remix) [Suburban Architecture Bandcamp] UK DJs Chris Read and James Curry formed Suburban Architecture as a love letter to drum’n’bass & jungle, and have made forays across multiple subgenres of ’90s-styles since 2019. There are also many exciting remix 12″s from jungle & d’n’b originators that you can find on their Bandcamp, but in November they dropped two New Town Dub 12″s with newer jungle producers, the first featuring Tim Reaper & Drumskull, and the second pairing Repertoire boss Law with Naarm’s own Kloke. Bouncing bassline and stop-start breaks for a good time. dgoHn – 4.37445 Yards [Subtle Audio/Bandcamp] OK, and here’s the whole of this new jungle/drumfunk/drum’n’bass compilation from Limerick, Ireland label Subtle Audio! The label put out a series of great 2 or 3CD compilations in the mid-’00s with early drumfunk and jungle-inclined drum’n’bass – at the time it felt like the best source of really great beat production around. Many years later, here’s another 3CD set: Our Atmosphere has 2CDs of original tracks and a few a few previously released by Subtle Audio in a broadly “atmospheric” jungle, drumfunk and drum’n’bass vein. There’s a huge list of great producers, plus a DJ mix from label head Code on the 3rd disc. CDs have been out since December, but the digital version (without the DJ mix) is now also out. Kloke contributed one of many highlights, but here’s one from drumfunk/experimental d’n’b stalwart dgoHn (pronounced “John”). Super excellent comp all told. Bruce – It Ain’t Over Till… [Poorly Knit/Bandcamp] Bristol’s Bruce inaugurated his Poorly Knit label exactly 12 months ago, and his fourth release is the eight-track EP Four More Then Four. That’s four new tracks from Bruce and four remixes of earlier tracks from four like-minded producers in the bass/techno realm. And oh! That falsetto voice at the start of the first track! So, so great. It reminds me a little of Lakker’s work with singer Eileen Carpio on “Milch“, although it’s very much its own thing. Shackleton – Contagious Illusion [AD 93/Bandcamp] On the great, eclectic AD 93, here’s one of the greats from when early dubstep melded with dub techno, Sam Shackleton. His solo releases and collaborations have brought him into kraut-folk, arcane ambient, dubtronic kraut-pop and other half-made-up genres, while the UK dancefloor has never quite disappeared from view. Still, Euphoria Bound is the closest his solo work has gotten to the dancefloor in a while; very nicely dub-tinged technoid constructions. Pharoah Chromium – IA JEBEL SARFIT 2 [Discrepant/Bandcamp] German-Palestinian musician Ghazi Barakat engages with the Palestinian cause as Pharoah Chromium, creating collages of sampled voices, percussion, flutes and an electronic wind instrument. He makes extensive use of voices from Chants Révolutionnaires D’Oman, the children’s voices in the earlier tracks adding an extra poignancy given the continuing genocide. Nicolas Van Belle – Veel en alleen [Klankhaven Records/Bandcamp] Nicolas Van Belle – Allenig waren we [Klankhaven Records/Bandcamp] Here’s something special. Back in 2023 I discovered a wonderful Belgian acoustic trio called Erem with their album Aare, and later that year the quartet Suura with their Stuve album. This was music sitting somewhere between the folk-jazz of Bill Frisell or Tin Hat, 20th century chamber music and something stranger and more experimental, including distorting drones and abstract sound-art. In common between those acts is the guitar and sometimes bouzouki and tzouras of Brussels-based musician Nicolas Van Belle. Van Belle has now released an incredible solo album, Einde Were, through Klankhaven Records. His acoustic instruments may start off in beautiful resonant spaces, but they’re frequently caught up in digital processing or shoegaze-influenced disortion, or they float up from cavernous drones, while Van Belle’s spoken words or wordless singing may appear at times. It’s an emotional journey, with sections of scintillating peace offsetting the foreboding and even anger found elsewhere. Find yourself some time to listen to this on headphones with your eyes closed. Taroug – 1995 [Denovali/Bandcamp] The music of Düsseldorf-based Tunisian musician Taroug (Tarek Zarroug) is a highly varied mixture of bass music with North African percussion, and dreamy indietronic postrock like this beauty. There’s a sense of melancholic nostalgia to this track which is quite moving. Look out for more soon. Fabels – Luister [Fabels Bandcamp] Sydney’s Fabels merge the psychedelic, minimal postpunk of singer/bass guitarist/keyboard player Hiske Weijers and the shoegaze & indie roots of guitarist & drum programmer Ben Aylward (notably leader of legendary Aussie shoegaze band Swirl in the ’90s). Weijers’ vocals and songwriting (and her Dutch background) give the band a distinctly 1980s European feel that hits differently from younger bands also influenced by the postpunks & new romantics, ’80s electronic pop, and ’90s shoegaze. Weijers also painted the beautiful eye on the album cover, staring admonishingly at us. Lueenas – Diana [Barkhausen Records/Bandcamp] Danish double bassist & singer Ida Duelund and violinist/violist & singer Maria Jagd formed their duo Lueenas in 2019, making music with a lot more doom and heaviness than a string duo might imply. Duelund, who studied for a time in Melbourne a while back, released a gorgeous, hella weird solo album a year ago, but it’s a pleasure to have the abstract, filmic music of the duo back with their second album-proper, Tender Anger. The “filmic” aspect explains my “-proper” caveat there, because they’ve released a number of soundtracks and recordings of installation works, which are just as attractive and mystery-laden as their self-titled album from 2022 and this new one. Second-last track “Diana” begins with lone plucked violin and operatic vocals, but swells into distorted gothic doom before ebbing back. This is not background music! Give it your attention, please. Emily Wittbrodt – Lied [Futura Resistenza/Bandcamp] Emily Wittbrodt – Coda [Futura Resistenza/Bandcamp] Cologne-based cellist Emily Wittbrodt works in free jazz as much as classical, playing in various bands and lending her cello to friends’ releases such as Claire Rousay’s incredible 2024 album Sentiment. Also in 2024, leftfield German label Anna Ott released the second album from her Ludwig Wittbrodt duo with experimental producer/drummer Edis Ludwig, while a year earlier they released Wittbrodt’s first, unique, solo album Make You Stay, a suite of songs and instrumentals performed by an unusual lineup featuring herself as singer-cellist-composer with three other singer-musicians on organ, drums and electric guitar. On Wearing Words, this time released through Dutch/Belgian experimental label Futura Resistenza, Wittbrodt crafts another collection of hard-to-pin-down songs, with operatically-trained Sandro Hähnel on vocal duties accompanied by Wiitbrodt’s cello and keyboards, and musicians playing drums, accordion, clarinets and bass. A mere catalogue of instruments doesn’t convey much, though: these avant-garde compositions might evoke Sufjan Stevens or Judee Sill, Monteverdi through a contemporary lens, or some kind of stentorian drone. At the album’s centre, Wittbrodt, Hähnel & co wrap us in yearning melody in a gorgeous song simply entitled “Lied” (German for “song”), while the album’s Coda is a considerably more experimental and abrasive affair. Kourosh Kanani and Matt Davies – Lay Laye – feat. Amena [Kourosh Kanani Bandcamp] Iranian-Irish singer-songwriter & composer Kourosh Kanani draws not only from his father’s Persian background but also from his study of Carnatic rhythms from southern India, as well as jazz and the exquisite harmonies of Armenian folk music. He’s been working with drummer extraordinaire Matt Davies (who we often hear with Church Andrews), and together they’ve recently recorded a Kurdish lullaby with singer Amena. The beautiful harmonies are carried by a rhythm that keeps the baby’s carer on their toes, adding a semiquaver every four bars, a 6+6+6+7 rhythm that sways just a little off-centre each time. Gorgeous. Max Ridley, Eleanor Elektra and Nat Mugavero – How Can I Explain? [577 Records/Bandcamp] Brooklyn label 577 Records was co-founded by Italian drummer Federico Ughi and NY saxophonist/flautist/etc Daniel Carter about 25 years ago, supporting musicians from well-established to up-and-coming. Playing, Praying documents a cross-generational meeting, in which 89-year old drummer Nat Mugavero improvises with bassist Max Ridley and guitar & vocal improviser Eleanor Elektra. Hearing Elektra’s free vocals on some of the contemplative pieces here is extraordinary, but all three musicians instinctively home in on a shared sense of presence, truly composing together. The album preserves the spaces between the musical pieces, as well as a touching moment in which Mugavero speaks about how much this act of musical intimacy means to him. Listen again — ~216MB

Mid-January, we’re very much on the way with 2026’s new music, but I’ve got a few 2025 catch-ups in here too. I’ll be away in Japan the next two weeks, and Holly Conner on the 25th and Lachlan Stevens on the 1st of Feb will be your excellent hosts. LISTEN AGAIN & feel the feels. Stream on demand from fbi.radio, podcast here. Puma Blue – Hush [Play It Again Sam/Bandcamp] Jacob Allen has been making music as Puma Blue since about 2014. He has a jazz background but is making a kind of Radiohead-like pop music influenced by trip-hop, dub techno, and even jungle. On this, the third single from the forthcoming album Croak Dream, it’s pure trip-hop, and great for it. Pebble Seven – Strangers [42far/Bandcamp] Czech musician Daša Bulíková started making music as just DASA, but has now become Pebble Seven, under which name she’s signed to new Slovakian label 42far, run by Adam Badí Donoval of Warm Winters Ltd. The vibe here is certainly more pop than the beautiful experimental fare on his other label, but nor is it a straightforward indie-pop song. Keen to hear more from Bulíková, and from Adam’s new label. Alev Lenz – Domestisizer (on F) [Alev Lenz Bandcamp] Alev Lenz – Mother Tongue (on B) [Alev Lenz Bandcamp] Turkish-German composer, songwriter, singer & producer Alev Lenz has composed works for theatre, for the contemporary music choir Roomful of Teeth and famously composed the song “Fall Into Me” for the Netflix series Black Mirror. That lovely piece was based around a C-drone, which inspired this new album of hers, 4 in a Cycle of Thirds, which traverses the 12 semitones of the western scale with a song that hovers around each note. Sometimes the drone/pedal note is obvious, sometimes the harmonies seem too nimble to be based around the one note – but they all are. Regardless, these are great songs with some pretty sharp lyrics and very sharp performances, which draw from Lenz’s musical experience in the classical & jazz worlds as well as experimental music & songwriting. Kee Avil – itch [NNA Tapes/Bandcamp] Via the excellent NNA Tapes, here’s a new single track from Montréal experimental musician Kee Avil, who’s released two great albums on Constellation a few years ago. New song “itch” came directly after releasing Spine in 2024, but it’s a more conventional approach initially: a creaky home-recorded piano and fragile vocal. But true to her experimental practice, by halfway through the piano & vocals are joined by half-buried beats and granular distortions. Lovely. Mi3raj معراج – Medley ميدلى [Ruptured/Bandcamp] Here’s the first of two new releases on Beirut’s Ruptured Records for 2026. Abdelrahman Shaat and Mohamed Tarek Moussa, who make up Mi3raj معراج, are from Cairo. This is a beautiful album that mirrors Toni Geitani‘s Wahj in some ways – Moussa’s Arabic lyrics which he speaks, sings, multi-tracks and sometimes growls, are accompanied by electronics, live and processed instruments and beats from Shaat. Wonderful stuff. Dééfait – Molokh ∞ [Ici d’ailleurs/Bandcamp] Paris band Dééfait have been gigging around the French capital city for a couple of years, and bring their debut self-titled EP now via venerable French label Ici d’ailleurs. This is intense psych/krautrock that doesn’t let up, with Mexican-born vocalist Riki Lara singing, chanting, shouting in Spanish, French and English at times. It can be pretty thrilling. Zu – Pleroma [House of Mythology/Bandcamp] One of Italy’s longest-lived experimental rock outfits, Zu are uncategorizable almost by definition, made up of saxophone, bass/guitar and drums – but also because they are committed collaborators, sporting releases with the likes of American avant-gardist Eugene Chadbourne, Norwegian sax mangler Mats Gustafsson, Japanese shapeshifting producer Nobukazu Takemura and terrifying punk/noise singer, journalist, MMA fighter etc Eugene Robinson. Oh, and of course powerhouse Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida. Oh, and Mike Patton. On their latest album, Ferrum Sidereum, Zu offer a riff-heavy form of hardcore that’s dripping with synths, guitars that sound like tremolo orchestral strings, sax that sounds like heavy guitars… The album’s produced by multiple-Grammy winner Marc Urselli, who has a close working relationship with John Zorn, as well as artists like Laurie Anderson and many others – and it sounds just slick enough but still heavy and raucous enough too. Zone Null – There will be poems (condensed) [Ruptured/Bandcamp] Berlin-based duo Zone Null is made up of Burkhard Beins and Lebanese experimental musician Tony Elieh, both known for playing electric bass and electronics. On their album Phase I from Beirut’s Ruptured Records, the pair also wield electronics, processing their instruments into glitchy, granular loops and crunchy textures, as well as raucous punk noise. Richard Francis – Phase effect on wet road [Room40/Bandcamp] Aotearoa/New Zealand sound-artist Richard Francis draws from the same well as Zone Null’s crunched, crackling loops for his Room40 debut, Combinations 4. These lo-fi, evolving soundpieces are often strangely beguiling, showing a keen ear for turning seemingly simple ingredients into something special. No wonder then that the first 3 Combinations were released on celebrated London/Antwerp label Entr’acte (RIP), Jason Lescalleet‘s Glistening Examples and Giuseppe Ielasi‘s Senufo Editions. Really recommend sinking into this. Damian Valles – Pt.4 [BLWBCK/Bandcamp] OK, so now over to Ottawa sound-art/dronester Damian Valles, who I was very pleased to find last year returning to abstract(ed) sound with the Assemblage EP. He filled the time in between with some excellent minimal techno/IDM stuff as Nats (there’s a whole album too). I really recommend Damian’s back catalogue, much of which you can find on his own Bandcamp, but new album Sundowning can be found via BLWBCK, a non-profit based in Toulouse, France. The broad spectrum of “drone” music, which used to be a classification I used a fair bit for music I played on this show, has always accommodated music that did a lot more than sustain notes through long crescendos… and I’m not sure it makes sense to refer to this music as “drone” now anyway, but Damian Valles has a way of incorporating looping, loping rhythms, mysterious processed acoustic sounds, industrial ominousness etc into his works such that there’s always something really interesting going on, both in the foreground and around the edges. That said, the piece I played tonight it straight-up sonic attack, crushing, glitching, splintering. It’s also full of weird sonic illusions – sounds that seem immense suddenly captured under a close-up acoustic sound. Just so great. Pita – 4 [Editions Mego/Bandcamp] Much like Fennesz‘ immortal Hotel Paral.lel, every time Peter Pita Rehberg’s Get Out receives a remaster/re-release I think “Come on, that’s already been re-hashed”, and then I remember it’s been… a while. Rehberg tragically and unexpectedly passed away in 2021, but the label he co-founded and then solely ran in its own reincarnation as Editions Mego continues on via the many artists it long supported, and for the vinyl lovers, it’ll be a joy to have Rehberg’s gem of a digital noise album now available again (for the record, the CD was reissued/expanded in 2008 – that’s quite a while!). Connoisseurs (including myself) adore track 3, with its looping, ever-more-distorted Ennio Morricone sample, but the rest is as intense and at times beautiful in its own way. Couldn’t come more highly recommended round these parts. Luís Fernandes + Pierce Warnecke – Culatra II (excerpt) [Room40/Bandcamp] Portuguese musician Luís Fernandes has created beautiful avant-garde electro-acoustic works for Room40 before. Here he’s teamed up with another Room40 alum, Pierce Warnecke, creating two long pieces from close-up field recordings from the fishing island of Culatra, off the coast of Portugal. Considering the setting, with ocean filling most of the horizon, the processed sounds edited together in these pieces sound surprisingly industrial. Travis Cook – 9am [Travis Cook Bandcamp] Yes, Adelaide’s Travis Cook continues to release one track a week. That means this one’s a few weeks behind by the time I’m writing this. Very ominous for 9am, which… sounds about right. Atte Elias Kantonen – EEEE [OOH-Sounds/Bandcamp] Atte Elias Kantonen – Aluhart [OOH-Sounds/Bandcamp] Cyan Music, from Finnish sound-artist Atte Elias Kantonen, channels the colouring of its title and album cover by being equal parts overwhelming and peaceful. But let’s be honest: that cyan-on-cyan lettering on the cover is pretty dizzying, and so it goes with this music, at least in parts: stuttery sample-choppage, faux bowed instruments, wobbling quasi-vocaloids. Recorded at EMS in Stockholm, each track is a vignette based around one single synth source (or thereabouts), and along with the destabilising wonkiness there’s no small amount of melodic emotiveness wrung from these synthetic sounds. Leif – Yes No [AD93/Bandcamp] If you’re familiar with Leif‘s Igam-Ogam EP on Livity Sound, you might, like me, be expecting something more aimed at the dancefloor – dubby house/techno vibes? They’re kinda there on his excellent Collide album for AD93, but wrapped in warm electric guitar and synth loops, with rhythms coming from pulsating lo-fi patterns more than drum machines & breaks. Sometimes it feels like you’re listening to shoegazey, trip-hoppy postrock, and that’s a lovely thing indeed. Joanna – Gardeners World – ddwy Remix [New Feelings/Bandcamp] So at the end of the 1980s, a bunch of musicians from a town somewhere between Liverpool & Manchester started a band, and called themselves Joanna. Typical, four blokes using a female name for their band, but we’ll let that slide – it was the ’80s OK? (meh) Anyway, they recorded an album(-ish) and while Madchester bloomed around them, they never got it released. So last year, Hello Flower possibly took the world record for the longest-delayed release ever – about 36 years… Well, I love me some baggy, jangly Britpop, but we’re hearing about them here because there’s now a couple of lovely remixes out, which take advantage of the ’90s love with some trip-hoppy, breaky ambient house vibes. Welsh duo ddwy are Naomi & Ronan, and everything about their remix screams early 1990s to me, in the best way. Note also that Naarm DJ Andras (also one half of ambient-indie-folk duo Wilson Tanner) pulls Joanna’s original apart and delicately applies dubby effects. Very nice, both sides. DJ Punx – Gas [YUKU/Bandcamp] Hotto Potto is the first release on YUKU from Milan-based producer & graphic designer Simone Quartucci, also known as Simo404 – and now DJ Punx. He’s released zine-albums with music influenced by footwork as well as Asian and African percussion, and collaborated a lot with other artists & musicians. This EP fits the outer limits of the YUKU mould very nicely – twisted bass music drawing on squiggly acid electro harkening back to glitchy IDM. ugne&maria – a tidal pull [Hands In The Dark/Bandcamp] ugne&maria – slip [Hands In The Dark/Bandcamp] Back in 2023 we heard a beautiful album from Lithuanian musician Maria Rasa Kudaba as emer, called Sea Salt, and not long after, her duo with Ugné Vyliaudaité as ugne&maria released their debut full-length, HEALING, on Belgian label Futura Resistenza. The duo are both Lithuanian, but are based in Brussels, and their equally beguiling follow-up Zotasphere is brought to us courtesy of much-respected French label Hands In The Dark. Their music harkens back to ’90s ambient beats, infused in dub and hazy samples, with Vyliaudaité’s violin used texturally as much as melodically. Music for underwater dancefloors and lethargic raves. False Aralia – Borgesian Term 04 [False Aralia Bandcamp] Most people are referring to False Aralia as a label, with each release named as if it’s a new artist, but from Zero Key through to Borgesian Term, each release is primarily the work of Izaak Schlossman (credited as IS) with various vocal contributions, often from Anya Prisk (the two have more of a pop project together called Loveshadow). 12″s are shepherded into the world via Peak Oil, two at a time, each a very subtle take on postpunk minimalism, trip-hop and proto-house – but it’s more ethereal than any of thoes genre signifiers might imply. On Borgesian Term, Schlossman enlists DJML aka Daniel John Myers Letson on drum kit, but for most of the EP the sounds still have that melted-tape warble. Like Raime played on a Walkman with dying batteries. Erdfisch – Honig [tier.debut/Bandcamp] Jan Matiz aka Marius Mathiszik and Henning Rohschürmann have played in projects together since meeting about 15 years ago while studying music in the Netherlands. Mathiszik bases himself in Athens, Greece, where he runs his tier.debut label, while Rohschürmann is based in north-western Germany. Both play guitar, drums and various electronics, creating loops and textures and rhythms that marry jazz with lo-fi noise, glitchy ambient with glitchy proto-beats. You’re never sure whether you’re listening to jazz fusion or postrock or electronica, old-school or futuristic. Whatever, it’s really great. Listen again — ~224MB