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
