Playlist 24.09.23

Music both popular and unpopular tonight. There's not enough unpopular music on the radio, but this is an imbalance that Utility Fog has always attempted to correct. LISTEN AGAIN and experience transcendence (again). Podcast right here, stream on demand on the FBi website. Popular Music - Sad Songs [Popular Music Bandcamp]<br /> Back in August, I played the first single from Popular Music, the new duo of Zac Pennington from Parenthetical Girls with Australian cellist & composer Prudence Rees-Lee. Having spent many years in the LA area, they are based in Naarm/Melbourne now - if you're lucky enough to live there, you can see them launch their new album on October 26th. Because they're already so search engine-unfriendly, they've called the album Minor Works, and while they are perhaps mainly in minor keys, these songs should not be downplayed. These are theatrical pop songs with arch humour, pop references galore, and an air of melancholy. Lovely. ZÖJ - Hangman [Parenthèses/Bandcamp]<br /> Another duo based in Naarm/Melbourne are Iranian born kamancheh player & singer Gelareh Pour, and drummer Brian O’Dwyer, working together as ZÖJ. Their album FIL O FENJOON is coming out in November through Belgian/West Australian label Parenthèses, but this single, featuring Pour's emotive, impassioned playing and singing, was released especially to commemorate the anniversary last Saturday of the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini. It was her murder at the hands of the Iranian regime's morality police that sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Eartheater - Heels over Head [Chemical X/Mad Decent/Bandcamp]<br /> Eartheater - Face in the Moon [Chemical X/Mad Decent/Bandcamp]<br /> The last album proper from Alexandra Drewchin aka Eartheater was 2020's Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, in which electronic beats were by and large abandoned in favour of classical orchestrations and acoustic instrumentation. For Powders, her first released through Chemical X/Mad Decent, Drewchin is melding those acoustic folk influences with glitchy beats'n'bass and some of the current trip-hop zeitgeist, for a collection that may have the most pop appeal of anything she's done - not that she's any less barmy and uncompromising than before, with heels over head and wearing whatever she damn well pleases. Oh - and there's a cover of System of a Down's "