Tonight it’s time for weird hip-hop, dark d’n’b trance-pop, mutant dancehall, Indonesian experimental folk, experimental Yolŋu, experimental indie, post-classical pop, krautrock-pop, mashups, junglism of all sorts, minimal drum’n’bass, minimal dub, sound-art, sound-art, sound-art… You know… It’s Utility Fog.. LISTEN AGAIN, to the art of sound… Stream on demand from fbi.radio, podcast here. doseone & Height Keech – Wont Work [doseone Bandcamp] doseone & Height Keech – Twisted (Featuring Brian Ennals) [doseone Bandcamp] Following his brilliant album All Portrait, No Chorus with Steel Tipped Dove earlier in 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 its sequel (Wood Teeth II, natch) takes the same position – once more it’s about the descent of the USA into fascism, and it’s as “scathing” as the copy says. Dose is putting out some of the best work of his career, and the madcap sound of Height Keech certainly doesn’t hinder him. Marcus Whale – Dark Room [Blue Void/Bandcamp] Out now, the latest album from Eora/Sydney luminary Marcus Whale, who’s been a fixture on this show since his early experimental work as Scissor Lock, when he was a mere teenager, and throughout the brilliant releases of his duo Collarbones and trio Black Vanilla (among many others). Nether is, by my count, his 5th solo album, the first being his incredible statement of intent 10 years ago, Inland Sea, and it follows 2024’s club-fuelled blissout Ecstasy with the comedown, albeit no less energetic. There’s those traces of trance’s lysergic dancefloor tranceformation, pummeling kicks and (as heard here) jungle-like drum programming, ultra-processed breaks and percussion, and of course Marcus’s voice multi-tracked and harmonised. Beautiful. Facta – SLoPE VIP (ft Warrior Queen & Killa P) [Wisdom Teeth/Bandcamp] UK bass producer & one half of the Wisdom Teeth label, Facta, put out a slab of UK post-dubstep bass styles, from funky house to breakbeat techno, on last year’s GULP. Now he’s re-tooled the breakbeat track “SLoPE” with vocals from two UK dancehall/grime legends, Warrior Queen & Killa P. Wicked! Naga Kirana – Lumba2 [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp] Amsterdam collective Naga Kirana make a super-fun form of Indonesian electronic folk-pop, with gamelan percussion instruments, drum machines & synths, and the voice Inda Duran ensuring it’s catchy as heck. Looking forward to more from them! Waakya – Fire Song [Hospital Hill courtesy of The Wire] First recorded listen to the new cross-cultural collaboration Waakya comes in the latest edition of Wire Magazine’s Wire Tapper. The band centres around Yolŋu songman Daniel Wilfred & yidaki (didgeridoo) virtuoso David Wilfred, who you may know from Hand to Earth. They’re joined by sound wizard & guitarist Matthew McGuigan of label/production house Hospital Hill, modular synth virtuoso Ben Carey (also of Sumn Conduit) and legendary experimental turntablist (and acclaimed cardiologist!) Martin Ng. That’s a recipe for something extraordinary, as you’ll hear from these first sounds. The way the Wilfreds’ traditional music melds with experimental textures is always magical, here emerging from varispeed record crackle, guitar harmonics and other unidentified sounds. Expect more soon. Kee Avil – delay [NNA Tapes/Bandcamp] So Montréal experimental musician Kee Avil, with a couple of albums under her belt on Constellation, has this year teamed up with NNA Tapes to release a progressive album over the whole year, called Vapor. There’s one track going up per month, and the latest is the saturated quasi-80s electro-pop of “delay”. Each track so far is excellent and weird. Marie Delprat – Dust in my veins [-OUS/Bandcamp] Swiss label -OUS has been consistently hitting goals for some years now, with glitched electronics, post-classical fusion weirdness and various unconventional takes on song-based music. All those things converge on the first single from classically-trained Marie Delprat‘s EP What remains after desire, a quietly creepy piece of drone-pop. Marina Herlop – Jaque [Marina Herlop Bandcamp] Keeping with post-classical fusion weirdness, we join Catalan composer, pianist, singer & producer Marina Herlop for her third album Dja Dja, her first to be self-released (distributed by Barcelona label Lapsus & !K7, so the gorgeous-looking vinyl & CDs should be readily available). First single “Jaque” has everything Herlop is known for: classical-sounding piano, layered ecstatic folk vocals, syncopated rhythms. Keep an eye out for this one! Vanishing Twin – Bring Me The Axe [Fire/Bandcamp] Currently a trio, Vanishing Twin have made experimental pop music now for 11 years. Singer Cathy Lucas moved to rural France a year or two ago, so making music with ubiquitous drummer Valentina Magaletti and bassist Susumu Mukai aka Zongamin (who together are V/Z) became primarily an asynchronous affair of swapping files remotely. The title Archives is a reference to file-sharing and collaging from disparate sources, rather than describing an album of rarities or best of – it’s all new material. The band has always taken indie pop into realms of the experimental, with strong krautrock & dub vibes, but these new tracks are particularly adventurous, sounding precisely like three musicians in different locations coming together for a chimera of folk, electronic pop, dub, glitched trip-hop and radiophonic post-classical abstraction. I’m pumped to hear the rest of this album. Heyes – carlos serone – “folder for heyes (unfinished tape beats)” [Heyes’ Edits] [R\ic/H Collective/Bandcamp] Heyes – Ang Watching ‘Pets on a Train’ on a Plane [R\ic/H Collective/Bandcamp] Lochie – aka Heyes – is quite close to this show, and has filled in for me earlier this year as well as having broadcast on other stations. As an artist, his output is quite varied, but one strand of his art is the transformation of pre-existing music as well as field recording. Lochie has formed the R\ic/H Collective with a group of like-minded musicians, writers & designers here in Eora, and first cab off the rank for the label arm is (here goes): rich; or, a mixtape of music about being “rich” and music not about being “rich”. The mixtape begins (and goes on) with a selection of Heyes Quickmixes of some familiar money-based pop songs, some mangled beyond recognition, some leaking their source material in odd ways, but slipped inside are some fellow travellers like carlos serone, whose lo-fi beats are edited by Heyes, and who also provided the liner notes. Intriguingly strange. Harrison Rae – Diss Track [Harrison Rae Bandcamp] From a notable Eora/Sydney gent now, Harrison Rae, who’s released electronic music as Beau Ambien and Henri O and is the convenor of Club Moss. His 2025 Mixtape is varied as a mixtape ought to be, from guitar tracks to murky electronics like “Diss Track”. Djrum – I Wander (IV) [Houndstooth/Bandcamp] Felix Manuel aka Djrum is one of the geniuses of the current age, adept at beats at any BPM, switching easily between techno, dubstep, jungle & beyond, but also inserting beautiful quasi-classical piano & cello passages, flutes with weird tunings, etc. Forthcoming EP I Wander is really one 15:44 track, but split into 6 parts reflecting its restless evolution throughout. I’m fortunate to have heard the whole thing already, and it’s as good as you’re expecting! Rydeen & SOVBLKPSSY – LESBIANISM [silkXS Bandcamp] Eora/Sydney duo Rydeen & SOVBLKPSSY follow up a 2-tracker from 2024 with their DONT TELL ANYONE EP, reflecting their influences across the bass & club spectrum, nodding at local sounds & history, thence building up from scratch a hardcore continuum of our own. In that vein, “LESBIANISM” is a Ry & Sov take on jungle, and a delight to hear. Plug – King Ring [De:tuned/Bandcamp] Once again Luke Vibert returns to his DAT archives to pull a full album’s worth of mid-’90s Plug material out for us to bathe in. When Vibert discovered jungle circa 1994, he was probably the one member of the IDM crew (Aphex Twin, µ-Ziq, Squarepusher et al) who really understood how it worked, as club music, in relation to hip-hop and ragga dancehall, and in terms of break juggling. I love those other guys, but Plug was the real shit. At the time, Vibert only released a series of EPs and the classic Drum’n’Bass for Papa album (you can find them all digitally at Bleep and elsewhere), apart from a smattering of compilation tracks. As well as wicked drum programming, they exhibited Vibert’s talent for perfectly-sourced samples and melodic basslines & lead parts, all of which counts just as much for his hip-hop productions and the acid the makes up most of his material lately. Part of this is his sense of humour, and the “Papa” of the album’s title is Vibert’s grandfather Frank Vibert, a keen amateur magician, and while the photos of Vibert in Orientalist magician getup seem to have dried up, the title Variety Magic keeps up the connection. It should be noted that the Plug style of jungle/drill’n’bass was specific to the technology Vibert was using at the time, and even the Amen Andrews stuff that came out in 2003 has a different feel because he wasn’t producing the tracks the same way. So both the 2012 album Back on Time (which does sport his granddad on the cover) and this new album are collections of tracks from the mid-to-late ’90s. It’s insane that an 11 track album of tunes this good was lurking on DATs somewhere for decades. Morwell – Trust (A.Fruit Remix) [Morwell Bandcamp] Max Morwell has for the last 7+ years been exploring the music of bass & breakbeats that soundtracked many a rave, and he recently worked on some
