New music: Squarepusher, Dan Deacon & Phase Fatale

The rotted wasteland of January surrounds us, and not even our finest waterproof knickers can insulate us from the cold sludge of a British winter.

What you need is some new music to bring some soft candlelight to your endless darkness. Here are three January 2020 releases worth your attention.

Squarepusher – Be Up A Hello (Warp Records)

In recent years, Squarepusher has,in the parlance of modern slang, "gone off on one". His Shobaleader One project turned him into a kind of bezerker Cylon. He jammed with Japanese robots and produced an ambient soundtrack with Olivia Colman, which sounds like the kind of nonsense I'd make up, but it's true.

This was all brilliant, but now ole Squiggleplops is back to more familiar territory with a studio album that follows up 2015's Damogen Furies. He's moved away from the extreme digitalism of his recent work, and has instead opted to use a bunch of old gear. I wonder how old. Maybe we're talking lutes and harpsichords and the jangle of jester bells.

Actually, I've had Be Up A Hello on repeat for a few weeks now. I would give you my opinion, but my lips are contractually sealed. For now.

Dan Deacon – Mystic Familiar (Domino Records) 

Speaking of following up 2015 albums, it's nice to see the return of Dan Deacon, eccentric knob-twiddler and Sigur Ros collaborator. A long time ago, I boldly - and prematurely - declared that Dan Deacon had the best album of the year. In that blog post, I bang on about his similarity to Animal Collective, and that's a comparison that I suspect will hold up on Mystic Familiar.

With this album, he seems to be obsessed with "familiars" which are magical creatures that follow you around. That could include rats or cats or badgers or five-legged elephants or hedgehogs made of toenails or a panda reading a Thomas Pynchon novel.

If Dan Deacon was a season, he'd be summer, or maybe a late spring that feels like a summer. Which leads me on to...

Phase Fatale – Scanning Backwards (Ostgut Ton)

Never mind all that summer nonsense. Scanning Backwards is beyond the four seasons: this is post-nuclear fallout when the skies shimmer with unearthly light. This second album of pumping Berghain techno from Berlin's Phase Fatale will please those of you that want aerobic techno shuddering with mantle-deep bass rhythms.

He's promised "brain-penetrating instrumentation", which means when you tear the cellophane off the vinyl, a bassoon leaps onto your face and jabs your forehead with a whisk.

Here are bits of two of the above albums. Happy listening.





Further Fats: Ultra-funkulent new band from Squarepusher (2010)

This Bonobo / Kiasmos video is definitely better than "weird and trippy"

I've not had much time to post this month, so have some hold music.

It's a Bonobo remix of Blurred by Kiasmos. I've woofed on about Kiasmos before: you can read about the original release of Blurred here. And Bonobo did a good video a while back which I called "weird and trippy" because I was short of words that day.

This Blurred video came out a couple of months ago, and sets the rousing remix to a Faroese love story. The directors Arni & Kinski did a load of stuff with Sigur Ros, including Hoppipolla, so you know the vibe before you even put a donk on that play button. You'll want to hit repeat - it's wonderful.

The gimp's guide to mind music

Who'd have guessed gimp masks were the key to unleashing the most phantasmagoric music humankind has ever set ears on?

No, I'm not talking about a startling new direction for Sigur Ros.

A lunatic called Mick in a place called London has attached electrodes to his bonce to create his own symphonies using simply the power of his deranged mind.

The device doesn't work a third of the time. This is possibly more to do with his skewed brain than the equipment he is using.

Nevertheless, here he is in a BBC video thinking up a sequence of notes whilst staring at the most distracting screensaver known to humanity.

There is a plus side. People who are less abled can make music, and this could open great new avenues for music therapy.

But for every plus, there has to be a minus. That can be found in the last line of the BBC news article, about a new video game using the gimp headset:

"It enables players to vanquish villains through thoughts and emotions."

If I had that ability, there'd be carnage. More carnage, even, than Mr Tran's trip to a toy store.

Mick from London, you are my new hero.

Merzbow makes crap an art form (that's meant to be a compliment, by the way)

Merzbow used to construct art from rubbish before he pioneered Japanese noise music.

If you don't know, Japanese Noise Music is Japanese, it just sounds like noise, and some people think it's music. I'm not sure where the name comes from.

Anyhoo, now Merzbow makes art from the unwanted noises we often cast away: static, radio fuzz, analogue glitches and machine hums. Still art from rubbish, then.

It's a sound that has served him well: he has a discography that's as long as your arm, but only if you're some long-armed freak who's spent too much time on the rack in your Uncle Cranford's secret torture chamber.

The latest ambient addition to that discography is an album called Higanbana, which literally translated means "you told me this was like Sigur Ros, I want my money back." If you're the sort of oddbod who hears music in the urgent clatter of a train or enjoys scratched muzak CDs stuttering over the speakers in Poundland, then you need this album. If, on the other hand, that sort of thing sounds like an audio atrocity, I'll never be able to persuade you that this extreme, experimental, harsh landscape is actually quite a nice place to visit.

Onto other things. Brighton's Square Records is the new home for iTAL tEK, and thank bigbeat for that because the eponymous title track from his new Deep Pools EP is my track of the week. If I did a track of the week. Which I don't.

A slow moving, spacious take on dub techno, with wheezing synths and heroin-flattened echoes of William Orbit's Water From A Vine Leaf, this record drips with the sort of hope lacking from his darker material previously offered on parent label Planet µ.

Like spacious? Klimek's Dedications is brooding and filmic, which make sense with titles like For Stephen Speilberg And Azza El Hassan. This mile-wide ambience is more suited to the plains of America than its home in Germany, and will appeal to fans of Deaf Center. (You can download a Klimek video by clicking here.)

And finally, a bit less minimal and slightly the worse for it is Vessel's Pictureland 01. It's lovely to have a chill-out album that doesn't have a picture of bloody Ibiza on the cover, but I don't think this release will change the fact that Vessel will eventually kick the bucket and his epitaph will be "'im off the Pet Shop Boys' Back To Mine complilation".

It's a fine way to remembered, but not as fine as making art out of a binful of crap.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: ENO GUITAR, REVIEWS MASSONIX

Ironic really, that I chose to see Heima nowhere near my real actual home

What kind of twittering moron throws himself on the mercies of the New Year's Day public transport system to see a film in a different county that he could bloody well see up the road from his house?

Still, I don't regret trekking for hours from Manchester to Bradford to see Sigur Ros' masterpiece Heima.

This smouldering film, infused with the ashen Icelandic landscape that no doubt inspired Richard Long, is slow moving, contemplative and beautiful. As the film glides to a close, you think you've seen a "nice" documentary. Then they let rip with Popplagið in all its boldness and intensity. It will leave your ears ringing.

It's definitely one for the big screen. If you fancy schmoozing over to the Cornerhouse in Manchester later this month to see Heima (and you're not a random internet stalker hell bent on stealing my trousers), then give me a shout.

My trip to Bradford had a brace of nice side effects. I sat near a man who, if he wasn't the real thing, was an accomplished Pete Doherty impressionist. Then out of the blue, I flirted outrageously with the bloke who drove my railway replacement coach:

EXT. BUS STOP - LATE EVENING

DRIVER stands in the doorway of his stationery coach chatting and laughing with a colleague

ME: Are you East Didsbury?

DRIVER: No, I'm a driver.

ME: Well, you look like East Didsbury. You know... classy.

DRIVER remains overly formal for the rest of the journey, although he still let me on without a ticket...

DEEPER FRIED FAT: KNOBS COCKS

Brian Eno's garter, a lack of gurning mentalism, and Kraftwerk transvestites

A decade of pushing buttons for Bjork, including shaping sound on the stunning Dancer In The Dark, has not done Valgeir Sigurdsson (pictured) any harm.

Quite the opposite. He has stepped from behind the knobs to produce Ekvílibríum, his debut album on his own Bedroom Community label.

His LP starts with feet on safe glitchy chill-out land, but he eventually hoists himself up onto Brian Eno's garter and catapults high into heavenly string-laden non-anthems, especially on the spacious Equilibrium Is Restored.

Sigurdsson can't tell eerie from airy, so some of this album lacks the intended atmosphere, but it works if you like Bjork and Sigur Ros' more ethereal moods.

And while we're on an Icelandic tip, I'll get round to reviewing múm's Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy when I can be bothered to get out of my curry-stained threadbare armchair. I bet they can't beat Finally We Are No-One.

High on a cloud somewhere, just above Eno's flying garter, is a surprisingly chilled out Mu-Ziq and his new record Duntisbourne Abbots Soulmate Devastation Technique.

He has locked away his gabba-gabba-hardcore-wherez-me-light-stick breakcore of previous offerings in favour of a sound that made me as sick as my cat (see past post) within three tracks.

The album's suffocated in detuned Boards-style melodies, which creates a see-saw effect right where your dinner's settling. Each track induces a sense of nostalgia, but only it sounded just like the last one.

Bring back the gurning mentalism, please Mr Ziq, because you're making us, er, siq.

It seems a little late to be reviewing Simian Mobile Disco's Attack Decay Sustain Release, but I need to up the tempo somehow. And it damn well should get the blood pumping thanks to more than a slight nod towards the jacking acid of Daft Punk and the energetic nerdiness of !!!.

I shudder at the thought of being A. N. Anonymous 4-pill clubber sweating over Mixmag on the bus going to my office job in the morning, so I avoid this kind of obvious house music party fodder.

However, it is simply addictive.

Plugged into the mains and with more quirky savvy than Kraftwerk transvestites, Simian's album of hurricane-force dance funkers deserves to have sex with every festive celebration's mp3 player this Christmas.