Futurism Restated #81: Repetition and Rejection
30-year anniversaries from Autechre and Shudder to Think, plus Sarah Davachi, Jim O’Rourke, and more
This issue’s introduction ballooned into a meditation on two 30-year-old records that happen to be life-changing favorites of mine, so with no ado, let’s get into it. On tap this week:
chamber-drone composer Sarah Davachi’s expansive new offering
Jim O’Rourke’s mind-bending new Steamroom release
a trip back to Chain Reaction’s elysian fields with Civilistjävel!
a blissed-out Slowdive remix from… Grouper?!
news of an upcoming Lapsus event in Barcelona with Huerco S., Suzanne Ciani, Marina Herlop, Pye Corner Audio, Kode9, and more
…and so much more.
Autechre’s Anti EP turned 30 last week. The backstory is well known at this point: In 1993, in an effort to put the screws to the ballooning free-party scene, and with 1992’s Castlemorton event as the excuse, the British government drafted the Criminal Justice Bill, which—among scores of other measures restricting civil rights—criminalized unauthorized gatherings of 20 or more people playing music that “includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” It’s an astonishing piece of legislation, really, in its myopia and audacity and pure arrogance. Would unpermitted raves playing free jazz thus be spared the truncheon? Was this a green light for chamber music to become the music of youth revolt? And what, anyway, constituted “repetitive beats”? Watch out, Bo Diddley.
A passionate anti-CJB campaign developed in response, spawning protests and a 20,000-strong march. Autechre’s Anti, just one of a number of musical responses to the CJB, might be one of the most cerebral pieces of protest music ever recorded, and not only because it consists of three long, melancholy instrumental tracks that billow like clouds of dust.
The A side, featuring “Lost” and “Djarum,” reads: “Warning. These tracks contain repetitive beats. We advise you not to play these tracks iff the Criminal Justice Bill becomes law.” The B side’s “Flutter,” a 10-minute ambient jungle epic (or at least, the closest that Autechre have ever come to jungle), is even more ingenious: The duo programmed it specifically so that the rhythms switch up every bar, as attested by the text on the center sticker. “Caution. Although Flutter has been programmed in such a way that no bars contain identical beats, and can therefore be played under the proposed new law, we advise DJs to have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment.” Not two months later, the CJB was given royal assent, becoming law. No one stopped playing repetitive beats (though some were prosecuted for it), of course, but that’s not really the point; the bill had its intended effect of kneecapping the traveller and free-party movements. That the bill would help set a precedent for the present-day criminalization of drill and grime is a perfect illustration of the point that Autechre were making, albeit in profoundly understated fashion: The government had no business at all determining what kind of music should be acceptable under any circumstances.
There are days when I think Anti might be my favorite Autechre record—not even for its political import, but simply on a musical level. That’s an insane claim, of course, and in any case, I have trouble separating Anti from 1995’s Garbage, just because I taped both to the same side of a Maxell C100 cassette, so their seven tracks always form something like a complete album in my mind. But the doleful “Lost” (easily as good as anything on Amber) and the hard-charging “Flutter,” in any case, are god-tier Ae tracks—and, perhaps precisely because of the context of the release, far more floor-focused that most of Autechre’s output, in both tempo and intensity: reports from an alternate future where techno evolved very differently from how it ended up.
A publicist’s email last week alerted me to the fact that it was also the 30th anniversary of a very different record that also happens to fall in my pantheon of all-time favorites: Shudder to Think’s Pony Express Record. The backstory here is well known too, although not, perhaps, to readers who are electronic purists, or younger millennials or zoomers. Shudder to Think were a hardcore band affiliated for a time with Washington, D.C.’s iconic Dischord label. Even in their early years, they were hardly an orthodox hardcore band. Their early records, like 1988’s Curses, Spells, Voodoo, on Sammich, and 1990’s Ten-Spot, on Dischord, were a mix of proto-emo—in the Rites of Spring and Embrace definition of the term—with glam rock and hard rock; their debut wasn’t a million miles away from the gale-force whirl of Candy Apple Grey / Warehouse: Songs and Stories-era Hüsker Dü, maybe (a comparison that’s never occurred to me until this moment). They were fond of boldly ringing chords, tightly wound rhythms (drummer mike Russell was a powerhouse, a beast, plain and simple), and arrangements that could turn on a dime, Stuart Hill’s bass and Chris Matthews’ guitar locked in intricate pyrotechnic arrays. But their defining characteristic, by far, was Craig Wedren’s voice and presence, swooping from a low murmur to a shriek to a falsetto croon in the space of a snare crack. Even on Dischord, a label that had gone some distance to dismantle hardcore’s macho status quo with records like Rites of Spring’s self-titled LP, Wedren’s angelic sighs and soaring raptures stood out, announced themselves as something different—and even, within the context of what was accepted and expected of men in the scene, dangerous.
And then, in 1994, the unthinkable happened: Shudder to Think (now with Nathan Larson on guitar and Adam Wade on drums) got signed to Epic. (Of course, it wasn’t all that unthinkable, in the major-label gold rush after the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind, but still—for this band, in particular? Pretty unthinkable.) One might have assumed that their major-label debut would have been watered down, made safe for normies in Peoria, but nope, nope, nope: Pony Express Record is the weirdest fucking record Shudder to Think ever released, by a long shot—an ecstatic, practically orgiastic explosion of art-rock stubbornness, cock-rock virtuosity, post-hardcore slantedness (“Sweet Year Old” goes deep into the Slint pocket), first-wave emo heart-on-its-sleeveness, proper post-hardcore (“Chakka” could almost be a Helmet song, if it had been produced differently), and avant-torch songs, all overlaid by Wedren at his most unrestrained, his most playful, his most flamboyant. I use that term with some hesitation, because it’s so loaded (and in fact, I’ve never known what Wedren’s sexuality was or is or might be)—but Wedren played, with gusto, with the expectations of male (punk) rock singers in the 1980s and 1990s. Wherever the players fall on the spectrum, their music is gloriously queer. Where others barked, he crooned; where they shouted, he swooned. He also simply had a great voice capable of an unusually wide and wild range of emotional expression—playful, coquettish, anxious, idyllic, contemplative, swaggering, psychedelic, harried, deranged, saucy, insistent… and those are just the terms I free-associated in listening to the first two songs on Pony Express Record. He can be unabashedly operatic. When was the last time you heard honest-to-goodness vibrato on a Dischord-adjacent record?
I haven’t even talked about the lyrics, which trade hardcore’s shout-along anthems for something approaching avant-garde poetry. Consider this, the nominal chorus of the album’s opener, “Hip Liquor”:
Party of mouths, a finger fan courtship
The case of her bones are softer than loose meat
A day on the belt, so surely I'll get thin
Wanna watch?
(It goes without saying that when Wedren asks, “Wanna watch?” he vocal fries it in the most seductive bedroom voice possible.) Or try “X-French Tee Shirt,” the album’s plodding, dissonant single, bestowed with the strangest earworm I’ve ever heard. Its chorus—loosely speaking—loops these lines ad infinitum, growing from a tremulous falsetto into a voice that sounds like a tractor beam capable of sucking up everything in its path:
Hold back the road that goes
So that the others may do
That you let me in just to pour me down
Their mouths
…a strange, elliptical loop that goes snaking its way to the horizon and beyond, an ouroboros to swallow us all.
For what it’s worth Pony Express Record isn’t my favorite Shudder to Think record; that honor goes to 1991’s Funeral at the Movies, their second and penultimate album on Dischord, which for me is where they really nailed the mixture of hardcore groove, proto-emo urgency, and idiosyncratic melody. A good portion of my 20th and 21st years on this planet was soundtracked by songs like “Chocolate” and “Lies About the Sky” and “Red House”; their strange twists and turns and self-flagellating ecstasy and sparkling melancholy were hugely formative in the way I processed emotion and accessed the inexpressible in those days. I’m far, far removed from the person I once was, but putting on Funeral at the Movies today, after a decade or more without even thinking about it, I can remember, viscerally, what it felt like to feel like in my twenties, and—a relief—it’s not all bad.
(I was lucky enough to catch them at a basement show in New Brunswick, New Jersey, sometime in between Ten-Spot and Funeral at the Movies, and for a long time, that was one of the highlights of my musical life up until that point. I’d kill to find the t-shirt I bought at the gig.)
But I love Pony Express Record for its audaciousness, for the simple fact of its existence. For a brief moment in the early 1990s, Shudder to Think slipped through the cracks and into the major-label system, somehow wrangling the budget and the permission to create one of the strangest and most intractable records of late 20th-century rock & roll.
Outwardly, Autechre’s Anti and Shudder to Think’s Pony Express Record have nothing in common; they represent two very different subcultures, two very different sides of 1994. Yet both are, in a sense, rejections of what you aren’t supposed to do. Both push back against what is permitted. Autechre defy the legal prohibition on “repetitive beats” while also challenging listeners expecting 4/4 regularity. Shudder to Think reject heteronormative machismo in hardcore punk, swapping knee-jerk anger for expansiveness.
I’m a straight cis man who loves repetitive beats, but I would not be the person I am today without these two records.
This issue is free for everyone to read, because I want the artists I feature to find as wide an audience as they can; the generous support of Futurism Restated’s paying subscribers makes that possible. Paid subs are just $5 a month or $50 a year (a 17% discount!) and get access to a pair of exclusive playlists and semi-regular Mixes Digest posts, along with full access to the archives—and my undying gratitude for your support.
Read on for this week’s recommendations.
Record of the Week
Civilistjävel!: Brödföda (FELT)
I’m a latecomer to the work of Sweden’s Civilistjävel!, aka Tomas Bodén; I have yet to hear his many self-released records from the end of the last decade, and I’m not fully up to speed on his work for Fergus Jones’ (aka Perko) FELT label. But Brödföda (bread food, per Google translate) is instantly appealing. Both “I” and “II” evoke the haziness of classic Chain Reaction releases—the former with a tougher, more insistent 90 BPM groove, the latter dissolving into grainy clouds that suggest Vainqueur remixing Loscil, or vice versa. The lonely, drifting “X” could be an outtake from Seefeel’s Succour or (Ch-vox). But there’s far more going on here than just homage. The melancholy “III” traces the merest hint of a melody in gestural tone clusters drawn atop a shadowy backdrop. “VI” slowly braids together soprano saxophone and glinting acid synths over a skeletal, slow-motion churn. “IX” accompanies a leaden dirge—just funereal drum beat and mournful drones—with sparse vocalizations from Laila Sakini. The standout might be “IV,” featuring a show-stopping performance from Beirut’s Mayssa Jallad (whose great album Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels I featured in FR#44). Her soft, contemplative, patient singing is the perfect fit for Bodén’s unhurried clouds of synth and delay, lending a welcome bit of warmth to the chilly remove of his soundscaping. The whole album is a phenomenal piece of work, and the sign of a talent so great that I’m shocked Bodén isn’t better known yet.
Albums
Jim O’Rourke: The Chords Are Already Made for You (Steamroom)
It feels like a professional failure to admit this, but I find Jim O’Rourke’s Steamroom releases exceptionally difficult to write about (not that I haven’t tried!). Any longform abstract electronic piece will, by its nature, test one’s interpretive powers: How to pay attention to the twists and turns, the shapeshifting contours and timbres, and render those in such a way that makes sense of them, compellingly, for a reader? (O’Rourke himself has said, “I like longform music that isn’t necessarily about structure. It’s just a long period of something happening.”) A simple play by play won’t tell you much, even in a piece like there, where there are so very many somethings happening—even though you might not notice it at first. Steamroom 62 is one of the most dynamic Steamrooms I can recall hearing. Deceptively so, perhaps. It begins with pastel clouds of tone rolling like a tray full of colored marbles—unusually consonant, harmonic sounds for his work—before slipping sideways into choppier waters. White noise roils with the regularity of factory machines; there’s a sound like cables being stretched against thundering timpani, slamming doors, and then a sudden and surprising sunrise chord, a blindsiding explosion of bliss. The piece evolves like dream logic, morphing from scene to scene: Now we’re standing in the middle of a traffic jam, horns and sirens blaring from every direction; now we’re in a haunted clearing, the light pink on the horizon; now, for a mercifully brief moment, we’re in Hell. I don’t know how he does it, honestly—how he moves some smoothly from points A to Z, with so many shifts in tone and mood that nonetheless feel completely fluid, intuitive. As usual, he seems to be tracing shapes in the air. Within seconds of the piece finishing, I would struggle to tell you what it sounded like. But while it’s happening—while that long period of something happening is happening—that happening seems as real as the walls and the furniture and the rumbling floorboards.
Sarah Davachi: The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir (Late Music)
Sarah Davachi has been steadily working her chosen seam of electroacoustic drone music for so long—it’s been more than a decade now since her debut, The Untuning of the Sky—that it’s easy to take her for granted. That the Los Angeles-based composer doesn’t enjoy the profile of some of her peers might also have to do with the fact that her music is unusually subtle. Davachi’s 10- and 15- and 20-minute runtimes require patience, and her slowly evolving arrangements reward the attentive ear. Her new album—a “supplement of sorts,” as she puts it, to 2021’s Antiphonals and 2022’s Two Sisters—is characteristically meditative and slow moving. It’s also smartly sequenced, shifting with every track between different orchestration. The regal opening “Prologo,” for solo pipe organ, gives way to “Possente Spirto,” for viola, trombone, and Davachi’s Mellotron, synthesizer, and tape delay—a richly timbral piece emphasizing clean lines, elegant curves, and sharp edges. She returns to the solo pipe organ, this time summoning a much breathier sound, on “The Crier’s Choir” which grows and glows; “Trio for a Ground” retreats to buzzing pipe-organ pedal tones before blossoming into luminous chamber choir and steelier string duo, a careful interplay of contrasting timbres. The most surprising pieces might be “Res Sub Rosa,” for wind quintet (bass flute, bass clarinets, trombones), and “Constants,” for electric organ, Mellotron, and tape delay: Softly undulating tangles of complex overtones, they feel like snapshots of the same bare room created at different times of day. (Don’t miss Zen Sounds’ great interview with Davachi.)
Theodor Kentros: Trystero (Moloton)
Stockholm’s Theodor Kentros co-runs the XKatedral label alongside Maria w Horn, Mats Erlandsson and Kali Malone, among others; he’s released a handful of live releases, collaborations, and comp tracks, and plays in the drone duo Sänkt and the garage/punk groups Kerosene Kream and Caligulas Mamma, but Trystero is billed as his debut solo full-length. It’s a beautiful piece of ambient drone. The distorted churn of the opening “Caveat Emptor” has me thinking of blown-out grouper or even Flying Saucer Attack; “Μαύρη άμμος” begins with shimmery, microtonal organ flux and gradually swells into scuzzier, more Tim Hecker-like shapes before calming back down. Other pieces demonstrate an affinity with his colleague Kali Malone’s massing pipe-organ frequencies, but there’s a slippage here—frequencies sliding and diving in woozy glissando sweeps—that sets it apart. The 15-minute “Approximately fifteen.five minutes surrounding f & c” is the album’s hypnotic pinnacle, but its biggest surprise might be the title track, a bare-bones piece for electric guitar that reminds me, happily, of the late Dean Roberts’ work in Thela.
Various: UltraBody (29 Speedway)
A sticker spotted in a photo of the merch table at a recent event co-organized by 29 Speedway, a New York multimedia collective: “Scrolling Kills,” rendered in the distinctive style—black text on a white square, bordered by black—of cigarette package warnings. The design is apparently by New York artist and designer Kurt Woerpel, but the ethos behind the sticker feels germane to 29 Speedway, given that their latest release, a compilation called UltraBody, is based upon critically rethinking the passive way we interact with technology. “What differentiates our individual discretion from the will imposed upon us by software?” they ask in a text accompanying the release. Decrying “decades of rampant, unregulated and ill-considered technological leaps,” they consider artistic possibilities that are “influenced by excessive access to computational tools and assistance, but not utterly controlled” by them.
Without knowing more about how the compilation’s contributors composed their music, it’s difficult to say exactly how their respective pieces engage the theme. But you can certainly hear all of them grappling with that amorphous practice we call “sound design,” smearing electronic signals into more or less abstracted forms, sometimes buttressed by churning bursts of rhythm (pent & Dylan Kerr’s “Incoherences,” Flora Yin-Wong’s “Oath”), sometimes droning and vaporous (Jake Muir’s perfectly titled “Mirage,” qwqwqwqwa’s eerie “shadow”). Spectral voices occasionally appear, suggesting ghosts in the machine—or humans smothered by code. James Hoff’s “A… …Cha…. A… I feel like a ghost Uh” pairs Hollywood sentimentalism with the sounds of a voice cloning tool struggling to articulate a GPS data stream. Not everything is so abstract; Nexcyia & mu tate offer an approximation of ambient dub techno in the gently pulsing “Sans Titre,” and James K’s closing “Sketch 4” is a stunning piece of vaguely Grouper-esque (or even Flying Saucer Attack-like) folk strumming and hushed vocals that seem to be flying backward in time. Digitally mediated fantasies of prelapsarian idyll don’t get much better.
Golden Donna: Compulsive Living (self-released)
Golden Donna’s Joel Shanahan is prolific, but it can be hard to keep track of his output; a lot of is cassette-only, or live recordings, or, recently, reissued remasters. (The same goes for his Auscultation project, whose excellent 2020 album III I reviewed for Pitchfork back in those strange early days of the pandemic.) But Compulsive Living, while self-released, feels like his first proper album in several years. Rooted in his hardware-centric live shows, Golden Donna’s music has never wanted for energy, but this is both more muscular and more streamlined than I remember him sounding, driven by powerful drum programming and carefully sculpted chords. It’s all about the forward motion here. “A Violet Glow Spilling Through the Door” starts out sounding almost like old Metro Area before clapping on layers of Detroit-inspired chords, almost like pieces of armor; the breakbeat- and acid-fueled “Compulsive Living” is a headlong tumble that sharpens its chords to a fine point. What makes Shanahan’s work so magical, yet is so hard to explain, is its almost narrative sense of flow—you really get the sense that all those layers, all those riffs and motifs and sounds and ideas, are working in concert to take you somewhere, to lead you not just to a climax but to an actual epiphany; in track after track, there’s the powerful implication of things being worked out, hashed out, fought for.
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: A Bell that Never Stops Ringing (Farbvision)
This is a very special one. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has recorded 11 untitled tracks ranging between 30 seconds and five minutes apiece, each of which is accompanied by a photograph by Paul McDevitt. They make for a provocative blend. Cantu-Ledesma explores the outer fringes of his work, eschewing “music” in favor of field-recorded collages, overdriven bursts of pulse, and textures so digitally abraded it’s impossible to discern what they started out as. McDevitt’s photographs are similarly abstract and similarly textural. A white curtain billows out of the open window on an aluminum- and glass-clad highrise, looking like the body of some sickly octopus. A crow caught in flight skims the top of a wire fence, the patterning of its feathers rhyming visually with the wires and, behind them, the paving stones. Many of the images concentrate on textiles: striped sandbags that look like a mountain of pillows, a floral tablecloth pinned beneath granite slabs. Images and sounds alike are ambiguous but also pregnant with the anticipation of meaning, suggesting stories and situations that lurk just outside the frame. (Farbvision / Anost / Boomkat / Soundohm / Juno )
EPs and Singles
Ø: Fermionit | Kulmamommentti (Sähkö)
It’s hard to fathom that Mika Vainio has been gone for seven years already. Apparently, he had a new album nearly finished when he died, in 2017; his girlfriend, Rikke Lundgreen, has been going through his archives, preparing the album for release. For whatever reason, she believed that two tracks shouldn’t be included on the album, and thus Sähkö has given them a standalone release. “Fermionit” is classic Vainio: It begins with a hissing sound, as stark as wind scraping against snow, and slowly builds into a gravelly, slow-motion pulse. It might be made of nothing more than the sound of pure electricity. Halfway through its seven-minute run, though, something happens: A warm, unusually richly colored tone runs across the frozen steppes of his music. Its undulating proportions suggest the slowing and speeding of tape music; I’m reminded a little of the psychedelic timbres of Roland Kayn.
On the B-side, Jimi Tenor and Timo Kaukolampi (of Op:l Bastards and, incidentally, Motiivi:Tuntematon, whose 2005 track “1939” is an all-time fave of mine, and possibly the straight-up evillest club track I’ve ever heard) offer alternate edits of “Kulmamomentti.” Whatever it sounds like in its original version, both versions are, again, prime Vainio. Tenor’s edit is a desolate expanse of bleeps and blackness, Kaukolampi’s a drier, duskier landscape of white-noise scrapes and molten bell tones. For Vanio fans, both are essential.
Slowdive: kisses - sky ii (Grouper Remix)
Slowdive’s “kisses” is the most guileless sort of dream-pop manna. Grouper—who as far as I can remember, practically never turns up in the remixer’s seat—doesn’t do much to it besides washing it out in fathomless reverb, but that’s enough for me. Honestly, it’s kind of nice to hear Grouper put her hand, and her signature, to something so sweet. (Also; it’s been three years since Grouper’s last album; new music when?!) (No Bandcamp, alas, but would-be downloaders can find the mp3 in the iTunes Store, which is better than nothing.)
Lapsus News
I don’t often promote Lapsus Radio—the Spanish-language radio show I broadcast weekly alongside my co-host Albert Salinas, aka Lapsus Records head Wooky—here on the newsletter, but I’m going to make an exception today. Next Saturday, September 28, Lapsus—the multimedia platform comprising the record label, booking agency, radio show, and festival and event series that kicked the whole thing off—is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a 10-hour event at Barcelona’s Paral.lel 62. If you happen to be in town, it’s going to be a great one. The lineup is stellar: Suzanne Ciani, Marina Herlop, Huerco S., Kode9, Pye Corner Audio, Claraguilar, Ylia B2B Phran, Lucient B2B Nahoomie, Wooky, and myself. I’ll be kicking things off at 10pm with a set that I anticipate will hover around 80-100 BPM, and we’ll build from there. It’s going to be a fun one. Tickets are on sale now on DICE.
That’s all for this week—thanks for reading!
I would love to hear your thoughts about Nala's Sinephro latest (especially if you didn't like the album!)
That Lapsus party is going to be quite something. And Slowdive have some great remixes to their name. I mean.... come on..... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smyX4XEeyUc