Futurism Restated 101: Shards of Strange Things

New releases from Tim Hecker, Mabe Fratti, Jordan GCZ, and more

Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba is one of my favorite records. I discovered the 1988 album after the fact, but still quite a long time ago now, via its 1998 re-release on Jim O’Rourke’s Moikai label. (It’s striking to think, today, that just 10 years separate the two editions; at the time, it felt like an artifact from another century—which I guess in some sense it almost was.)

All these years later, it still sounds as mysterious as it did when I first heard it. What kind of music is it? What instruments did he use to make it? What sorts of influences was he working off? I’m no closer to having answers to any of those questions than I was 27 years ago.

Canavarro’s sketchlike electronic figures still sound like nothing else I know; they feel as much like small sculptures, handheld assemblages, as they do musical compositions. (For some reason, their textural sensibility always makes me think of dandelion tufts, or burrs in socks.)

I doubt that I could faithfully conjure in my mind the mental image of any of its pieces; I can recall it only in the most abstract terms. And when I do listen to it, it sounds nothing like I remember it, except in the broadest strokes. It feels almost as though it has been changing, evolving, morphing, all these years. (Or maybe I just think that because the title makes me think of the word “flux”?) Perhaps it’s like that old adage about the river: You never dip your toe into the same Plux Quba twice.

Despite my fondness for the album, for whatever reason, I’ve never delved much further into the Portuguese scene of the 1980s that it came out of. (I did help edit the liner notes to Barcelona label Urpa i Musell’s 2018 reissue of Canavarro’s Mr. Wollogallu, a 1991 collaboration with Carlos Maria Trindade; I highly recommend it.) So I was excited to open an email from Lisbon’s Holuzam label last week and not only see a reference to Canavarro, but discover that the reissue in question was by a friend and colleague of his who shared his synthesizers and studied at the same electronic-music institute; in fact, the album—Tózé Ferreira’s Música de Baixa Fidelidade—came out the very same year, on the very same label.

Ferreira’s album is, sonically, a very different beast than Canavarro’s, but it’s wonderful and fascinating in its own ways. How wonderful to discover something that had been just lying there in plain sight, as it were, all these years!

I’ll admit: There are times that I have trouble maintaining my enthusiasm for new music. Some of those times, I may just be passing through a fallow spell, a period when I’m not aware of anything particularly exciting on the horizon. Fortunately, those spells are typically short-lived. Other times, it’s the times themselves that get to me. The Trump-Musk coup, and the complete failure of the Democrats or civil society to do anything about it, has me feeling pretty bleak right now, and that bleakness makes it hard to feel enthusiastic about music, particularly any music that feels like it’s just going through the motions, or repeating ideas I already know. I want to be knocked off my center of gravity, I want to be reminded that there are other ways of being, of doing, of thinking.

So thank goodness for Holuzam and Tózé Ferreira for snapping me out of my glumness, however briefly, and showing me not only that other worlds are possible, but that one of them has been part of our world for more than a quarter century. I just hadn’t been listening.

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Record of the Week

Jordan GCZ: Hope Isn’t a Four Letter Word (Quiet Details)

I love it when an artist I love shows an entirely different side of themselves. I’ve been following Jordan Czamanski’s work for years, first in the duo Juju & Jordash (and offshoots like Magic Mountain High, with Move D, and the Mulholland Free Clinic, with Move D and Jonah Sharp), and then in his solo work as Jordan GCZ, but I’ve never heard him sound quite like he does here. The bulk of his previous output might be classed as a fusion of ultra-deep house and far-leftfield techno with a heavy dose of psychedelic electronic improv. He took some tentative steps into more atmospheric zones on Lushlyfe and Lushlyfe II, but this is the most explicitly ambient release I can recall hearing from him. Though when I say “ambient,” I mean it in the broadest possible definition of the term—not mere pastel soundscaping, but the sorts of musical adventurism that distinguished synthesizer music in the ’80s and ’90s.

A deeply lyrical sensibility informs almost everything here: the lush pads and melodica lead of “New Path in the Brush,” the smeared Rhodes keys of “Patiently Waiting for the Crash,” the almost songlike chord progressions of “Don’t Be Sad, Life Is Sweet,” a ballad perpetually on the edge of dissolving into chaos. Even more diffuse, abstract pieces, like “Pleasantly Disappointed,” are lush and consonant, with a shimmery softness that reminds me of touchstones like Ken Ishii’s Innerelements. He doesn’t entirely abandon the drums; “You can do it!” is a punchy fugue for booming toms and quasi-acid squelch; “I Can Tell You a Thing or Two” is jazzy deep house (think Larry Heard) of the highest order. I like to think the latter title is a reference to Barton Fink, but even at its most tortured, there’s nothing sinister or cynical here. The world may be going to hell, Czamanski seems to suggest, but that can’t stop us from seeing beauty in the sunset.

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Albums

Tim Hecker: Shards (Kranky)

Tim Hecker’s latest album is the opposite of his more conceptual work, which has comprised the bulk of his output for many years now. Rather than presenting, say, a critical statement on ambient music, or a rapprochement between electronics and Japanese gagaku instruments, Shards simply collects his recent soundtrack work for film and television. There’s no elaborate frame and no implicit subtext. Still, something about the casualness of its presentation—there’s not even anything to identify which film or show a given piece was used in, nothing to contextualize the scene a particular song was created to accompany—actually works in its favor. What we get are seven songs (the whole album is only 31 minutes long) of Hecker at his most intuitive. These pieces undoubtedly served their visuals so well because they simply work: They’re emotive, evocative, and relatively simple in their presentation. “Heaven Will Come” opens the album with a soft cluster of close-harmonized synths, a knot attempting to come undone; “Morning (Piano Version),” among the simplest things I recall hearing from him, is an acoustic-piano moodsetter with what sounds almost like standup bass; “Monotone 3” places exploratory clarinet riffing in a nest of strange, microtonal harmonies, sounding almost like Julia Holter; “Icesynth” might be a tribute to Harold Budd. And so on, with just the right balance of consistency and variation. You can guess that any of these pieces measurably improved the scenes they were set to; they might just do the same for your day.

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Tózé Ferreira: Música de Baixa Fidelidade (Holuzam)

Lisbon’s great Holuzam label—headquartered out of the city’s excellent Flur record shop (an essential stop on any Lisbon visit) and kin to the Príncipe label—unearths a mind-bending album from deep in the Portuguese underground that I’d never heard of before. Tózé Ferreira’s Música de Baixa Fidelidade (Low-Fidelity Music) came out in 1988, the same year as Nuno Canavarro’s quietly earthshaking Plux Quba, but the links don’t end there. In fact, Ferreira and Canavarro were friends, and Ferreira gathered much of his initial knowledge of electronic instruments from working with Canavarro’s Korg MS 20, Korg Polysix, ARP Axxe, Roland SH-01, Ensoniq Mirage sampler, etc.; Ferreira also traveled to study at the Netherlands’ Institute of Sonology, two years after Canavarro’s own stint there. Two pieces on this album came from his sessions there: “More Adult Music” and “This Is Music, As It Was Expected,” both mind-bending electronic soundscapes accompanied by a surreal spoken-word performance from Rodney Waschka II, an American composer whose patient, slightly singsong intonation reminded Ferreira of Robert Ashley. He completed the album’s three remaining tracks in his home studio; they’re shimmery and tactile, abstract assembles of smeared digital frequencies and cut-up piano samples and plaintive melodies pooling amid a backdrop of soft confusion. It’s mind-bending stuff; the mind boggles that what is essentially a companion record to Canavarro’s Plux Quba has remained largely unknown outside Portugal for so long.

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Cousin: Wake the Town (Moonshoe)

I discovered Sydney’s Cousin a couple years ago, when my editor Jeremy Larson flagged his Mood Hut release HomeSoon to me, and I proceeded to buy up pretty much his entire Bandcamp catalog. Cousin’s music is less about a style than a sensibility: dusky, dubby, percussive, nodding to dub techno and deep house without laying all its chips on any one square. His new six-track mini-LP is among his best work yet, spinning a handful of his customary elements a number of different ways. The opening “Wake the Town” is dub as aquatic fantasia, an underwater forest of kelp and bubbles; “Lu’s Dub,” at the far end, sounds like Pole remixing Farben, or vice versa, scratchy yet determined. “PicL” and “Deep Tide” are both dubby house groovers, and “Hourglass” slows the tempo to a faintly dancehall-tinged 105 BPM; the common denominator seems to be an interest in blurring background and foreground, teasing the balance between rhythm, timbre, and delay until no one element dominates. The track that intrigues me most is “No King,” if only because I haven’t heard anything like it from him before: a shimmery, 130-plus techno roller (think: Forest Drive West, or even Efdemin?) with all the hard edges worn smooth, buoyant and silvery as driftwood.

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Impérieux: Rezil (Macro)

Stefan Goldman’s Macro label has long had one foot in dance music and the other in more experimental sounds, and the same can be said of this album from Bulgaria’s Impérieux, aka Alper Durmush, from the southern city of Kırcaali (Karzhali). Particularly on rolling, melodic tracks like “Fo Pio,” a highlight, Impérieux’s mix of striking melodies, warm washes of synth, and breakbeat-driven rhythms reminds me of Four Tet, and his use of traditional or folk instruments (see “Deliro” and “Imana”) suggests kinship with artists like Hagop Tchaparian. Beyond the self-evident visceral impact of his best tracks, I’m struck by the frequently otherworldly qualities of his shape-shifting frequencies; cuts like “Objectify” and “Phase Rotation” are microtonal bangers in the tradition of Aleksi Perälä.

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Nina Garcia: Bye Bye Bird (Ideologic Organ)

“During long guitar sessions,” says French guitarist Nina Garcia, “I find things in the middle of a mess—a sound, a sparkle, a gesture—that speaks to me and I decide to work on. But there’s something almost involuntary about this first finding, something that surprises me.” That exploratory impulse is at the center of her work; you can sense her listening as the strings resonate and the feedback curls. Her debut album under her own name, Bye Bye Bird appears on Ideologic Organ, Stephen O’Malley’s label, and you can hear why her music might appeal to him; while it doesn’t sound anything like Sunn O))), her drones have a similarly smoldering intensity, as though her amp were charred and smoking. Garcia’s technique is unusual; it involves a separate electromagnetic pickup that she holds in her right hand, which allows her to coax additional vibrations out of her strings. It’s an easy enough approach to imagine, though I still have trouble deciphering what’s actually happening inside the music, particularly in the noisier pieces, like “Pick-up tentative”; listen closely, and what is most apparent is the sense of things happening beneath the surface—hidden rhythms, ghostly phrasings, inner dialogues between pulse and drone. Thurston Moore is apparently a fan, and it’s not hard to hear why; just listen to the soft explosion of frequencies in the closing “Whistling Memories.”

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EPs

Lucrecia Dalt / Mabe Fratti: Cosa Rara (RVNG Intl.)

A month ago, for Pitchfork, I wrote about Lucrecia Dalt’s new single “Cosa Rara”—a fantastic song, a sort of desert romance with a breathless outlaw spirit and a showstopper of a performance from David Sylvian (“We are out of favour, a danger to ourselves,” he rasps, his voice cracking like a dried-up mudflat: “It's not amphetamines, it's something else/My body's smeared in bloody red/She said she loved me but I don't trust her yet”). Now the surprise B-side of the 7-inch release turns out to be a lilting cover version by none other than Mabe Fratti. It’s a wildly different beast: airy, haunted, hiding sounds I can’t quite make out behind its fuzzy percussion loop and soft-focus keys and strings. She leaves out Sylvian’s monologue—probably a wise move, because who but he could pull it off?—but she does include the car crash implied in the original, scraping at her cello until it resembles a smoking heap of twisted metal glinting in the noonday sun.

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Torn Hawk: Flip to Raw (Fixed Rhythms)

Torn Hawk—the possessor of a truly great alias; the more I repeat it to myself, the more sneakily profound it feels—leans way into the ’80s action hero vibe of his long-running Instagram bit on his new EP for Fixed Rhythms. A lot of the Oklahoma City label’s output tends toward tough, springy house and techno, but Flip to Raw scurries to the far end of the spectrum, where fuzzed-out loops and deadweight breakbeats bog down in a morass of gravelly artifacts and mangled downbeat. The titles suggest a cache of worn-out VHS tapes—“Dirty Black Satin,” “Point Break Font”—and so do the sonics. “Oh Yeah (Cop Collab)” shoehorns a gnarly guitar solo into what otherwise sounds like Mo Wax scoring Michael Mann; “Sulking in the Hallway Outside the Cafeteria” is abject drum & bass; the beat-repeat FM-synth maze of “Make Things So Complicated” might be a chase scene gone haywire. My favorite is the grueling shuffle of “To the Flag,” a no-fucks-given answer to the screwface fugues of old Modern Love.

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Time Cow: Million Leg Millipede (Kullijhan)

Speaking of sulky and slo-mo, the new single from Equiknoxx’s Time Cow puts an unusually somber spin on dancehall. Where his bandmate Gavsborg, aka Unkle G, has a spry, surrealistic bent, Time Cow has been going in a darker direction lately; just check the ominous, eight-minute grind of “Duppy 1+2 (Precious),” from last year. The instrumental “Million Leg Millipede” ruminates on blown-out 808 kicks and hissing shakers; against a backdrop of birdlike chirps and dial-tone pulse, soft string synths sketch a wearily elegiac mood, and the longer it goes, the more eerily atmospheric it feels. If you ever wondered what a dancehall remix of Arvo Pärt might sound like, now you know.

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Rotate: Lower Hz EP (Well Street Records)

London’s Well Street Records doesn’t have the profile of Hessle Audio, Hemlock, Livity Sound, et al. but for my money, their brand of bass music and broken techno—intricate, enveloping, often richly emotional and sneakily understated—is right up there with those more acclaimed labels. (Just check this mind-melter from Yushh.) Recent releases from Buckley and COIDO have revived the dark garage sound pioneered by artists like El-B and Horsepower Productions, updated with an even grimmer, more sinister edge, and Rotate’s Lower Hz EP is in a similar vein. The beats have a delectable shuffle—“Drum Chatter” could easily be a lost Ghost or ShelfLife side from 25 years ago—but the distortion is pushed up way into the red, lending the tracks extra muscle; even when a comparatively gentle melody comes in, the production sounds like it’s bursting at the seams. “Lower HZ” fizzes like a torn speaker cone; “Grey Type” puts a horrorcore spin on jittery breakbeats. I’m not even all that big a fan of UKG revivalism, but when it’s done this well, and with that little extra edge to separate it from the pastiche-makers, I find it irresistible.

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Josi Devil: Make It Better / Restless Sleep (Hessle Audio)

Speaking of both Hessle Audio and UKG revivalism, this double-A-side from Bristol’s Josi Devil is astonishingly good. “Make It Better” takes a gruff, thumping garage groove and threads it with taut ostinato string synths, mirrored by occasional monosyllabic house-diva bursts, that draw out the tension from start to finish; the darker, wobblier B-side pushes deep into the darkside zone of Horsepower Productions, Ghost, et al. It’s one of the heaviest tracks I’ve heard this year. (The EP doesn’t get released until tomorrow, Wednesday February 26, but you can listen to snippets on SoundCloud here.)

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Jo Johnson: Alterations 2: Variance (self-released)

Jo Johnson is rolling out new new album Alterations one track at a time. Last month she debuted with “Unbroken”—it’ll remain online until March 5, and then it’s gone until the end of the year, when she makes the full album available—and now she’s back with “Variance.” Where “Unbroken” was all long, slow brushstrokes, the synths here are livelier: brisk marks on paper, fleeting daubs of color, dappled droplets amassing. For subscribers, there’s also a parallel set of alternate versions, outtakes, and leftovers called Remnants that offers a different perspective on the same material; I’m particularly taken by the broad drones and birdsong of “Variance Remnants 2.”

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Balmat News

Le Motel: Odd Numbers / Số Lẻ (Balmat)

Le Motel gathered the sounds for Odd Numbers / Số Lẻ during his travels in Vietnam. From Hanoi he ventured to Hmong communities in the mountains near the border with China, building out a network of contacts gathered from friends and friends of friends. Back in Brussels after his travels, he sent early drafts to his contacts, inviting their input. This back-and-forth eventually yielded a dynamic collective effort in which nine of the album’s 15 tracks feature multiple composer credits. Among the album’s diverse collaborators are Yvonne Quỳnh-Lan Dương, an educator and ethnomusicologist; Chi Chi, the daughter of a Hmong shaman; and Phapxa Chan, who contributes three poems inspired by landscape and Le Motel’s own music (and, in one case, psychedelics).

The result is an album that is not about making sound, broadcasting it as a one-way communication, but instead about the empathic practice of listening—about listening as an integral and even ethical part of musical creation, even (especially!) when that music is created on a computer, rather than conjured by a group of players sharing space in real time. It’s an album that adopts many of the traditional trappings of ambient music while reminding us of the importance of intentional modes of creation. Brian Eno famously said that ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting, but Le Motel’s Odd Numbers / Số Lẻ suggests, to the contrary, the richness of experience available to us should we make the effort to open our ears.

Balmat and Le Motel will be hosting a Bandcamp listening party for the album on Wednesday February 26 at 7 p.m. CET; more info and RSVP here.

That’s it for this week—thanks for reading!