Futurism Restated #69: Receipts, Resorts, Ruralia
New music from Skee Mask, Burial & Kode9, G.S. Schray, and more
When I read the other day that Bronski Beat’s Age of Consent was celebrating its 40th anniversary, it made me feel old, but the news also felt quite timely. Not long ago, when I was rummaging through boxes stacked in the storage unit of my mom’s senior residence, I came across a 39-year-old HMV receipt for £2.99 dated July 22, 1985, and I knew instantly what it was for: Bronski Beat’s Age of Consent, which I purchased on a trip to London with my family when I was 14.
I don’t really remember why I bought the tape. I was probably a fan of “Smalltown Boy,” which would have been in regular rotation on MTV at the time. My parents didn’t let me watch much MTV, but I guzzled as much of it as I could, straining for contact with anything that felt different or dangerous or daring—the so-called Alternative Nation was still a few years away—and I suppose that “Smalltown Boy,” with its skeletal synths and unabashed portrayal of psychic pain, must have struck a chord.
What’s funny, though, is that I’m not even sure I clocked that Jimmy Somerville and his bandmates were gay—at least, not until buying the cassette. In 1984, there weren’t many open depictions of gay culture in the mainstream, not that a relatively sheltered straight kid from the Oregon suburbs would have been exposed to. With the opening “Why?,” of course, I would have figured it out—“Contempt in your eyes/As I turn to kiss his lips/Broken I lie/All my feelings denied/Blood on your fist,” the kind of vividly plainspoken couplet that could have made the foundations of a hardcore song, but that Bronski Beat instead turned into a slinkily seductive hi-NRG earworm.
What I remember most about buying the cassette, though, was its fold-out J-card. The title was a reference to the fact that Parliament had lowered the age of consent for heterosexual sex to 16, yet the age of consent for gay men remained 21. Inside the J-cards was a list of “European laws regarding minimum age for lawful homosexual relationships between men.” Legal at 21 in Bulgaria, England & Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. Legal at 18 in Finland, Germany, Iceland, Sweden, the GDR (!). Legal at 15 in the comparatively enlightened Poland, Denmark, and France. “Completely illegal for males” in Cyprus, Ireland, Romania, and the USSR (no great surprise there). Spain might have had the most antiquated approach, defining homosexuality as being punishable as a case of “public scandal.”
This might sound ignorant today, but at 14, I’d never really considered the way that LGBTQ+ people (an acronym I wouldn’t have even recognized then) were discriminated against. But The Age of Consent laid it out in no uncertain terms, and it stuck with me. It didn’t hurt, of course, that the album is a masterpiece, and not only for “Smalltown Boy,” a song that hasn’t lost an iota of its emotional punch. (Just the other day, it came on in the car as I was foisting an ’80s playlist on my daughter, and she instantly perked up her ears, suddenly captivated in a way that she hadn’t been while Bruce Springsteen and even Madonna were playing.)
In a 2018 essay, Paul Flynn wrote about the moment that DJ Ian Levine first played the test pressing of “Smalltown Boy” at London gay club Heaven: “It might have been in that very moment that the journey of Smalltown Boy becoming a kind of national anthem for Gay Britain, its many friends and allies began. From the striking opening keyboard figure to the imploring refrain of ‘Cry, boy, cry’ it has become a conduit to the male emotional facility. The song has endured with astonishing resonance. It lives online in the hundreds of Youtube covers, by suburban kids dreaming of city escape, far from all gay.” And part of that enduring resonance is the role that the album played in normalizing gay culture for impressionable straight kids like me, even if we weren’t its intended audience.
I’m not sure why I squirreled away that receipt all those years ago; I suspect it had more to do with my visit to HMV, which must have felt monumental at the time (even though, ironically, I don’t remember the store at all). But I’m glad to have that accidental reminder of a record that, quietly but decisively, made a lasting impression.
This week’s roundup is a little bit all over the place. We’ve got:
a surprise-released new album from Skee Mask, blending exhilarating rhythms with some of his most atmospheric textures yet
a summer porch-hang future classic from Akron’s G.S. Schray (Aqueduct Ensemble, Lemon Quartet)
a—can I say it?—sort of predictable new Burial single (sorry!) backed by a bonkers Kode9 footwork-into-jungle jam
post-punk/ambient/dancehall fusions from Solpara, on Nicolás Jaar’s Other People label
a Panorama Bar-ready ode to banishing cell phones from the dancefloor from Kompakt
…and much more!
Today’s issue is free for all to read, thanks to the generous support of Futurism Restated’s paying subscribers, who are privy to 29 hours of exclusive playlists and the ongoing Mixes Digests, a new roundup of which is coming very soon—and, next week (I hope!), a special roundup of the best releases of 2024 (so far!).
Record of the Week
Skee Mask: Resort (Ilian Tape)
And then, just like that, Skee Mask was back. With his characteristic lack of warning, some six months after dropping C, his third outtakes collection, and not three months since the LP-length EP ISS010 (which I wrote about back in March), Bryan Müller returned last week with his fourth album for Ilian Tape. Unlike that relentlessly floor-focused record, Resort is very much an album, framed in sumptuous ambient scene-setters, and privileging lushness over muscle. The balance is subtle: I suspect that a lot of it came down to the mixing phase, deciding to lean a little harder on the pads than the percussion or leads. Müller’s drums are as energetic as ever, whether it’s the effervescent IDM of “Reminiscrmx” or the lithe 808 snap of “Daytime Gamer,” but at every turn, they play second fiddle to thick, viscous swirls of synth and rounded swells of bass. “Waldmeister” is suffused in goo, the drums reduced to the faintest pulse; “Daytime Gamer” starts off crisp but gradually sinks from aquamarine clarity to the muffled, silted depths, like an electro version of Gavin Bryars’ Sinking of the Titanic. The breaks-heavy “Schneiders Paradox” and rushing “Hölzl Was a Dancer” could both hold the attention of an adventurous dancefloor, but as a whole, Resort feels like it’s been made with headphones in mind, with even the punchiest tracks dissolving into ruminative stillness or overwhelmed (like the great “7AM at the Rodeo”) by their melancholy air. The more I listen to Resort the more I’m fascinated by its path-less-traveled qualities: Virtually every track here sounds like it wants to be a storming club tune, yet at some point in the process, Müller said, “No, we’re gonna tone things down.” I’m happy to follow his low-key lead.
Albums
G.S. Schray: Whispered Something Good (Last Resort)
Akron’s Gabe Schray and his groups Lemon Quartet and Aqueduct Ensemble are master craftsmen of a style I like to call “porch-sitting ambient”—the music I want to hear on a summer day, chilling on the patio with friends or family or simply alone, when the sun is low in the sky and an evening breeze is coming up, a chilled glass of wine in my hand. (Consider it an ambient spin on what NPR’s Lars Gotrich calls “roséwave.”) In fact, my wife and I just finished covering the pergola in our backyard with rolls of wicker, and scored some secondhand patio sofas from the Spanish equivalent of Craigslist, so Schray’s fifth solo album—his fourth for London’s Last Resort label, which has put out much of this crew’s music—is right on time. Not unlike the Christian Naujoks EP I review further down, Whispered Something Good is so dreamily lulling that I have trouble even parsing its details. Virtually every song is built from the same stuff—clean-toned electric guitars playing tastefully jazzy chords; slow-moving electric basslines; the occasional dash of trumpet or cello; oodles of empty space. It’s the kind of sound that typically invokes comparisons to Talk Talk or ECM, and while it may not exactly sound like either, it holds a similar reverence for stillness, for nuance, for calm repose shadowed by melancholy. And while the palette hasn’t changed much, Whispered Something Good sounds even more liquid, more atmospheric, than 2021’s wonderful The Changing Account; it feels simultaneously more distilled and more mysterious. I’ve largely given up buying vinyl, but I made an exception for this one. Now I just need to move the turntable from my office to the patio.
Tim Koh & Sun An: Salt and Sugar Look the Same (Music From Memory)
I had somehow missed this new one from the stalwart ambient label Music From Memory until reading Jesse Dorris’ great review for Pitchfork. This beguiling, sketch-like record apparently took place as a long-distance conversation between Tim Koh, a native Los Angeleno transplanted to Berlin (and now Amsterdam), and longtime member of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, and the Los Angeles-based Sun An. As epistolary collaborations go, theirs is no obvious back-and-forth; rather than collaging together discrete elements, they’ve superimposed their parts in a smudgy, pastel blur. Acoustic guitars, murmured voices, abstract electronics, jagged samples—they all pile up together, smeared beneath bit-crushing effects that generate a bright harmonic whine. There are plenty of antecedents for this sort of thing—Gastr del Sol, Oval, SchneiderTM, the Morr Music catalog—but the elusiveness of Koh & An’s collaboration feels unique; while hardly formless, it seems to unravel as it’s playing, making it difficult to discern exactly what you’ve heard with any certainty.
Ex-Easter Island Head: Norther (Rocket)
The north wind has a special power. On the island, we call it the tramuntana—the “across the mountains,” the wind that sweeps down from above, cold and brisk and violent. Tramuntana days are always unsettling, intense, but also bracing, invigorating, as though the chaos engine were charging its batteries. Norther is named after the same force, as it’s perceived in the UK. Ex-Easter Island Head—talk about a windswept name–make good on the their fascination with the elements on the opening “Weather,” constructed around the sounds of a homemade Aeolian harp, and fleshed out with motor-driven devices spinning against guitar strings. Placing the guitar at the center of its practice, the long-running Liverpool ensemble (which Dialect’s Andrew P.M. Hunt recently joined as a regular member) drifts freely across the album, moving from the quasi-ambient tones of the opener to the Reichian pulses of the title track, the shimmer and hiccup of “Magnetic Language” (shades of “O Superman”!), and the granular explosion of the closing “Lodestone.” My favorite track: “Easter,” which spins microtonal bell hits into a skeletal, intricately syncopated techno jam.
Solpara: Melancholy Sabotage (Other People)
Solpara’s second album for Nicolás Jaar’s Other People label takes a number of familiar influences—Sandwell District, DJ Python, Autechre—and makes something unexpectedly coherent out of them. The New York-based, Lebanese-American producer recorded the album during the doldrums of the early pandemic, and a corresponding sense of gloom permeates the music, particularly in the post-punky singing of “Time to Hold Better” (one of the few vocal tracks here) and the muted, minor-key synths. But unlike a lot of self-consciously gloomy music (particularly given the title, Melancholy Sabotage), Solpara’s album never feels claustrophobic. The drums, like the lithe dancehall pattern on “Time to Hold Better” and the surly electro of “Measures,” move with spring-loaded verve, and his synths have the black-light glow of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92—just check the resonant acid sparkle of “Breaking Points,” a highlight.
Richie Culver: Hostile Environments (no label)
I don’t really know much about the Hull-born multidisciplinary artist Richie Culver, aka Quiet Husband, and I’m not conversant enough in the nuances of British regionalism to speak to the Northern English cultural motifs that Boomkat discusses in their blurb of the album, but the unremitting bleakness of Hostile Environments speaks for itself. It’s a heavy, claustrophobic affair marked by smeared loops of synths and beaten-down electronics, with Culver’s own downcast drawl smoldering at the heart of it. “Dust” sounds like a copy of Seefeel’s Succour that’s been stripped and sold for scrap; “Slow Car” inverts Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” of all things, into a fatalistic meditation on dead-end towns and lives stuck in inescapable ruts. “Find a job that you like,” he mutters on the closing “Changed my style 4 u,” as though through clenched teeth, as droning electronics fizz and throb around him. “You won’t have to deal with a day’s work. That’s what you told me. That’s what you said.” The rest is unintelligible, but the sense of betrayal—the suggestion that even art, when it’s attached to a paycheck may ultimately be a soul-crushing grind—is painfully, dispiritingly apparent. (Purchase on Boomkat)
Nikolaienko: Meta (Muscut)
Muscut label boss Nikolaienko made Meta with just two devices: a metallophone—that is, a mallet instrument with metal bars—and a four-track tape recorder. The results are shimmery and woozy—the stuff of arctic halos, heat mirages, gleaming discs slicing sideways through the sky. “Meta V” sounds like a children’s lullaby that’s sprung a leak; “Meta III” is a busted strip of metal twisting in the wind. Best of all is the closing “Meta I,” a slow-motion explosion of the stereo field into dripping rainbows.
Bahía Mansa: Ruralia (Florina Cassettes)
Chile’s Bahía Mansa celebrates the power of opting out on Ruralia, an album of delicately shimmering ambient music inspired by rural life: “The album embodies quietness, contemplation, and inner discovery amidst the natural world,” he writes, “encouraging deep thought and self-knowledge to live a simple life as a form of resistance.” The palette is similar to that of Nikolaienko’s album, with chiming synths bathed in soft-focus shimmer; instead of restless forward motion, Ruralia offers the pleasure of groundedness, place, plenitude.
EPs & Singles
Burial / Kode9: Phoneglow / Eyes Go Blank (Hyperdub)
I’m probably in the minority here, but this new Burial single does nothing for me. It’s squarely in upbeat mode—2-step groove, chirpy R&B hook (“there’s something ’bout the way you love me”), FM chimes, trance-gate synths, Eurodance counterpoints—and, like he’s been doing for a while, it cycles through several brief post-scripts separated by crackly silence, giving the nine-minute track the feel of a DJ set in miniature. I know lots of people whose opinions I respect love Burial when he sounds like this, so maybe it’s just me. But I feel like we’ve heard him do the same thing so many times now. Kode9, on the other hand—his “Eyes Go Blank” is bonkers! The track’s footwork churn isn’t exactly new territory for him, but I’ve still never heard him do anything quite like it. It starts off with a queasy ascending triplet figure over chopped-up kicks and snares, accompanied by an eerie, robotic vocal hook; the stereo field gradually fills in with more sounds, more details, more information, as bright, bristly tones mimic the incessant barrage of smartphone notifications. Then, a third of the way through, a stonking squarewave bass shoulders its way into the melee, and the whole thing flips into a tough drum & bass roller. But even once it hits cruising speed, it never quite settles in; switching up beats every four or eight bars, it’s a restless, almost desperate track, like a starving predator on the prowl.
Christian Naujoks: Nocturne (Dial)
Christian Naujoks subtly reinvents himself with nearly every release. His 2009 debut, Untitled, gathered varying approaches to chamber minimalism (and a plaintive acoustic cover of New Order’s “Leave Me Alone”); he explored similar territory on 2012’s True Life / In Flames before delivering a gorgeous set of Durutti Column-inspired instrumentals on 2019’s Wave. (I reviewed it for Pitchfork at the time.) Soft Mouth Data Service, created to accompany a 2022 gallery exhibition, took in ML Buch-like synthscapes, ambient rave laments, an unlikely “Running Up that Hill” cover, and a tongue-in-cheek song about institutional critique called “Self-Castration in Ur Sleep.” (I’ll take the chamber minimalism, thanks.) With this three-track EP, he’s back to the melancholy vibes of True Life / In Flames and the expressive guitar playing of Wave, filtered through a drifting ambient sensibility. It’s a lazy summer afternoon of a record that goes down so easily, it’s difficult to recall in detail once it’s stopped playing. That’s no criticism—to the contrary, it’s completely spell-binding. And while the mood may be uniformly tranquil, there’s plenty of variation here: the bluesy guitar licks and rich piano chords of “Nocturne,” bobbing like buoys in a calm bay; the dubbed-out layers of guitar in the three-minute “Resort,” which reminds me of the Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd’s The Moon and the Melodies (even if it doesn’t really sound like it); and, finally, the shapeshifting drones of the 10-minute “Deviation,” with its dappled overlay of piano, vibraphone, and a snaky, unbroken guitar line. My only complaint is that at 19 minutes long, the EP leaves me pining for more, particularly with the long, still nights of summer in the countryside stretching ahead of me; I desperately hope more music in this vein is on the way.
Davis Galvin: Compnea (self-released)
You never know what you’re going to get with a Davis Galvin release: chaotic footwork, ambient field recordings, hyper-digital contemporary club, Livity-style high-precision steppers. Compnea, the Pittsburgh producer’s first new material in eight months, is totally different yet again: three long-ass tracks falling somewhere between the muscular chug of a certain strain of ’90s prog and the trippy linearity of golden-era Villalobos. The former influence is subtle, maybe, but I hear it in the big, bashy 909 snares and wriggly bass of “Manumitura,” a 10-minute epic of elegantly swung grooves and Luomo-esque swirl. The latter influence is at the heart of “Acquitura” and “Acquiturus,” a pair of 11-minute tracks (both versions of the same theme) in which a tuned tom riff slides slowly up and down in pitch, like the prow of a boat in big swells, over a rock-steady drum groove fleshed out with dubby filigree and ghostly voices. It’s been a long, long time since I danced past sunrise, but “Acquitura” and “Acquiturus” perfectly sum up that blearily blissed-out vibe.
Pearson Sound: “Hornet” (Pearson Sound)
The first time I noticed Pearson Sound’s sense of humor was on “Earwig,” a slow-motion track in the tradition of early Plastikman whose quasi-acid bassline bobs and weaves like a drunken bumblebee, making no effort to hide its almost slapstick side. (In case you doubt my reading, just check the surreal video that Leila Ziu created for the track.) “Hornet” isn’t quite as bumptious as “Earwig,” but—as the title suggests—its riff has a similarly insectoid sensibility that’s a little bit sinister, a little bit absurd. And the repeated vinyl-scratch kapow effects play up the underlying air of giddy hijinks.
Wata Igarashi: Collision / Wanderlust (WIP)
Tokyo producer Wata Igarashi’s new two-tracker is fast and intense. “Collision” gives off a heavy “Mouth to Mouth” vibe, particularly thanks to its queasy, up-and-down gliding arp, but my favorite here is the B-side’s “Wanderlust,” which unspools Philip Glass-ish organ sequences over a fleet, trancey groove. It feels like flying.
Shy One: Gyallis Spiral / TNTC (Numbers)
This new two-tracker from London producer Shy One comes with a crucial endorsement: I was listening to the promo for the first time when my wife poked her head into my office and asked, with perhaps the faintest hint of surprise, “What’s that? Sounds good.” It’s not that she and I have diametrically opposed tastes, but I tend to lean toward the weird and moody, whereas she remains faithful to a certain golden-age perspective of techno. “Gyallis Spiral,” with its burly acid squelch and unvarnished machines, hews decidedly toward the classic, while its slightly pastel pads and dubbed-out air of ambivalence keep things emotionally off kilter—the best of both worlds, in other words. “TNTC” is quicker and a little more playful, but it shares the same machinic palette, making for a fine complement to the A-side.
Orlando Voorn: No Cellphones EP (Kompakt)
“Security, please,” booms a stern voice over a pounding techno beat at the beginning of “No Cellphones,” by Dutch-American producer Orlando Voorn. “Throw everybody out the club with a cellphone in his hand. We don’t do no cellphones at the club.” At first it struck me as gimmicky, a novelty track designed to inspire knowing cheers (from clubbers hastily pocketing their cellphones, or perhaps simply raising them in the air). But the beat is too good to dismiss, and the dry humor with which Voorn intones the voiceover keeps it tongue in cheek. In any case, there’s a long tradition of club tracks giving voice to the discourse around clubbing—think of Abe Duque’s “What Happened,” or Green Velvet’s “La La Land”—that Voorn’s wry diatribe fits right into. And seriously, the beat is so good that if Voorn tells me to put my phone away, I’m going to listen. The rest of the EP is great too—“Raise the Bar” is a tweaky analog beast driven by a fucked-up acid ostinato and an answering synth riff that feels like insects under the skin, while “Tech IQ” and “Swingtech” offer contrasting takes on a big, beefy, chord-heavy piano-house stormer.
Balmat News
As I’m guessing you know, I have a record label! It’s called Balmat, and it’s focused on ambient and ambient-adjacent releases. We have some new ones, and if you like the music I write about, I bet you’d like the music I put out on the label.
Panoram: Great Times (Balmat)
Every time I listen to this record, I hear something new. It might be the oddest record we’ve put out so far; certainly the one that most makes me wish I still smoked weed. I wish I could tell you the extremely recognizable cartoon sample that we regretfully asked the artist to swap out, out of fear of getting sued out of existence.
Bartosz Kruczyński: Dreams & Whispers (Balmat)
This one, from Poland’s Earth Trax, is out this Friday, and it could not be dreamier (or, I suppose, whisperer?). Placid arps, sotto voce pulses, music for moonlight swims and solstice sunsets.
Recommended Watching & Reading
The Week in Sound on Aphex Twin
Marc Weidenbaum wrote the book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II—literally—so of course he’s the guy to go to with any questions about Warp’s upcoming 4xLP reissue of the album. (Though I did write a perfect-10 Sunday Review of the thing too, which I’m quite proud of.) In his The Week in Sound newsletter, Marc identifies the “new,” previously unreleased tracks being added to the reissue, and he also helpfully points to the source material for one of the two songs—which appears to be simply a bit of classical music that’s been reversed. Always cheeky, that RDJ.
As a proud/lucky owner of the original 3xLP (brown vinyl, currently starting at 190€ on Discogs, not that I’d probably sell it), I don’t think I’ll pony up for the reissue—but I guess it depends on how many glasses of wine I’ve had next time I stumble upon the preorder page.
Douglas Rushkoff on Love and Magick
I haven’t been following Douglas Rushkoff’s newsletter closely, but I found myself quite moved by this recent piece on finding spiritual solace in community, creativity, and counterculture.
Marissa Lorusso on Seeing Ghosts
As regular readers of Futurism Restated will know, I’ve been grappling with thoughts of aging and selfhood as I’ve been helping my mom in this new phase of her life, so Marissa Lorusso’s musings on hometown nostalgia struck a chord for me.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-145873390
Ben Cardew on Remixes
What happened to all the remixes? For the Guardian, Ben Cardew ponders the decline of the underground-to-mainstream (and vice versa) pipeline. Had he filed a little later, he might have mentioned Olof Dreijer’s remix of Björk and Rosalía’s “Oral,” which Ben declared the song of the summer after we heard it twice in the span of about two hours at Sónar last week.
Is Noise Canceling Bad for Us?
In his new health newsletter, HEAVIES, Chris Gayomeli ponders the possible ill effects of active noise cancellation. I’ve never experienced a problem with it, and I’m a little leery of the researcher who claims it’s “rewiring” our neural pathways. The main risk I’ve seen: Getting flattened by a speeding car while I’m walking my dog on windy rural road—“aware” mode is a potential lifesafer.
That’s it for this week—thanks for reading!
It's interesting, isn't it? Us critics, we always want artists to 'evolve' and 'reinvent themselves' all the time, but I feel a part of the general music listening public mainly wants Burial to go back to his Untrue sound. Which he hasn't exactly done with this one, but with its rolling drums, it's closer to his early beats than the dark ambient of some of his mid- to late 2010s work.
That being said, the new tune doesn't do much for me either. I love dark ambient Burial.
Skee Mask's Reminiscrmx seem like a variation of Link's Arcadian Do you agree Philip ?