Futurism Restated 102: Après Coup, Indeed
New release from Laurie Torres, Ariel Kalma & Asa Tone, Laurel Halo’s AWE label, and more
What an absolutely shameful shitshow of a week. I barely know where to begin: Trump and Vance’s attempted ritual humiliation of Zelenskyy last week—and by extension, the betrayal of Ukraine and total capitulation to Putin—had me seeing red, but in the days since, we’ve seen the bastards announce massive tariffs on Chinese, Mexican, and Canadian goods that are going to cause untold pain for American consumers; education secretary and former WWE head Linda McMahon has suggested they’ll soon be dismantling the Department of Education; and malevolent narcissist Elon Musk, with the assistance of fascist sociopath Russell Vought, continuing to take sledgehammers to both the federal government and the global structure of humanitarian aid, with deadly consequences for many of the planet’s most vulnerable people, for no greater ideological purpose than pure spite. (And that’s barely scratching the surface of their toxic cauldron of cruelty, ineptitude, stupidity, bad faith, jingoism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and, at the root of it all, the basest and most cancerous form of purely venal corruption.)
I’m sure you don’t come here for my political insights, and rightly so, because I don’t know shit. But we need to remind ourselves, and those around us, how bad this all is—illegal, unethical, wrong in every possible way. We cannot allow ourselves to become complacent; unlike the supine masses in Putin’s Russia, whose silence implicitly condoned the invasion of Ukraine, we cannot remain passive. We need to use everything we can to try to stop this—and what we can’t stop, we need to protest loudly and relentlessly, using every channel available to us. I’m dismayed, if not exactly surprised, by the acquiescence of the Democratic party, but I’m also struck by the lack of public protest; all I can assume is that people on the left are shell-shocked, those in the center are badly misinformed and unwitting to the gravity of the situation, and we have yet to see any leaders step up to coordinate a protest movement.
Lawfare editor in chief Benjamin Wittes wrote this week, noting the curious lack of people in the streets,
“Americans do seem unduly paralyzed. Republicans vote to confirm the president’s nominees and do nothing to defend the appropriations power. Democrats have no coherent strategy or message. So everything ends up in the courts. And Americans wait for their fate as a nation to be decided in litigation over temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions….
I don’t know about you, but I am not interested in cooperating any more.”
He went on to list a handful of actions people could take, from intentional traffic jams and work slowdowns to releasing thousands of crickets at MAGA events. Let’s have more of that energy in the weeks and months to come. Let’s take a page from the #TeslaTakedown movement and get creative.
In the meantime: I write about music, so that’s what I’m going to continue to do. This week’s issue covers a stunning album of solo piano meditations from Laurie Torres, a radiant exploration of pulse and shimmer from Asa Tone and Ariel Kalma, some heady Boards of Canada-style synth investigations from Ilian Tape’s MPU101, and more.
But first, a few quick link I wanted to highlight:
In honor of 303 Day—that is, March 3—Autechre’s Sean Booth posted to Mastodon an original acid creation created “entirely with those newish roland plugins” (and yes, it’s downloadable!)
To coincide with their upcoming EU/North American/UK tours and reissues of seven classic albums, everyone’s favorite Marxist pop stars have posted the COMPLETE CHRONOLOGICAL STEREOLAB, a 365-song, 26-hour playlist of the Groop’s entire catalog in order of release
Finally, Unsound’s Mat Schulz recently sent me this solo guitar set performed last year at MOM-Lublin—the Museum of Housing Estates, a grassroots initiative in the eastern Polish city of Lublin—by Artur Rumiński, guitarist in a bunch of bands I’ve never heard of (Furia, Thaw, ARRM, Mentor, Grieving, Gruzja), as well as the experimental duo Marmur. Running his guitar through a welter of effects devices, he conjures waves of burbling harmonics that remind me somewhat of Rafael Toral; just 31 minutes long, it’s a real journey.
Today’s newsletter is free to read for all, thanks to the generous support of paying subscribers. Those kind souls are duly rewarded with access to exclusive playlists for chilling and clubbing; the semi-regular Mixes Digest posts; and full access to the archives, including interviews with Longform Editions head Andrew Khedoori, Bristol bass trickster Bruce, drone titans Belong, Seefeel’s Mark Clifford, and more.
Keep your eyes peeled for a special issue of the newsletter with a reader-requested essay (not political, I promise) later this week, just for paying subscribers. Paid subs are just $5 a month, or $50 a year, and allow me to keep developing this newsletter for the benefit of readers, artists, and labels alike.
Record of the Week
Laurie Torres: Après Coup (Tonal Union)
Laurie Torres probably never considered the possible implications that a title like Après Coup might take on in 2025; despite the bleakness of current events, however, Torres’ gorgeous album is the opposite of political—if anything, the instrumental record, written mostly around her piano and fleshed out with synth and, occasionally, drums or woodwinds, offers precisely the kind of respite that’s needed when you just can’t stand doomscrolling anymore. Maybe that’s a cliche, but for real: I’ve been in a terrible mood all day, for reasons both political and personal, and putting this on has markedly improved things.
Before now, Torres—raised in Montreal by Haitian parents—was best known for the brightly colored, wistfully folky pop-rock of her group Folly and the Hunter, but Après Sounds is an entirely different affair. The press materials cite Nala Sinephro and Duval Timothy, and while I’m not sure how much of the former I can hear, Torres definitely shares something of Timothy’s harmonic sensibility, and a similar knack for breaking chords into swiftly moving arpeggios. “When making Après coup, the ideas came out so fast, and I didn’t know what I was going to make, so I didn’t have time to think of references,” Torres recently told Flow State. “However, making the record made me want to relisten to artists that had been a part of my music culture for many years. I’m thinking of Rachel’s, Steve Reich, Bing & Ruth, Tristeza.” Those are all solid reference points; I’d add Philip Glass (see “Lisière,” for instance), and in places, I even get hints of George Winston in the simplicity and understated sentimentality of her melodic figures. Or maybe they’re not so simple—in my favorite pieces, like “Intérieurs” and “Carnets,” her repeated patterns have a way of twisting unexpectedly, little ribbons of tone tossed this way and that. She also occasionally hums along, almost inaudibly, which lends the impression that you’re eavesdropping on a private moment, just Torres and her piano. That sense of intimacy carries across the whole album, making Après Coup feel almost like a secret shared.
Albums
Ariel Kalma & Asa Tone: ◯ (Good Morning Tapes)
Asa Tone—the trio of Melati ESP, Tristan Arp, and Kaazi—are master pointillists. Their two albums so far have been feasts of shimmer and pulse, crossing Reichian minimalism with Hiroshi Yoshimura’s tranquility. Their latest has its origins in a chance meeting with Ariel Kalma, a French multi-instrumentalist whose catalog runs the gamut from new-age releases in the 1970s and ’80s through a perhaps less auspicious period (exhibit A: 1997’s Gourmet Sax) before he began collaborating, a decade ago, with a new generation of musicians: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Sarah Davachi, Gilbert Cohen, Jonathan Fitoussi, and, on last year’s International Anthem album The Closest Thing to Silence, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer. Melati ESP and Kaazi laid down initial tracks with Kalma in his Australian studio, with Tristan Arp dialing in remotely; a few years later, the trio reworked the sessions from their respective homes in Indonesia and New York. It’s a gorgeous record, with all the luminosity you expect from Asa Tone; here, though, their characteristic rippling rhythms strike up a dialogue with Kalma’s woodwinds, which sketch airier, more lyrical forms. On “Expanse II,” his saxophone reminds me of Dif Juz—always a welcome reference point.
MPU101: MPU106 (Ilian Tape)
I can’t find much information about Ilian Tape’s MPU101; per Discogs, he was born in Bielsko-Biała, Poland, in 1984, and lives in Bavaria. In photos, he keeps his face covered. But we can deduce a few things from his music. He’s clearly a fan of old synthesizers—much like Aphex Twin, he’s fond of utilitarian titles that sound like technical shorthand (“VMCPU810,” “12bitTOWER,” “BLOCK-1_dv190”)—and he’s really a fan of what Boards of Canada used to do with old synthesizers. Now, if there’s one thing the world doesn’t particularly need any more of, it’s Boards of Canada clones (or, indeed, retro synth fetishists). But MPU101’s ambient and downtempo tone poems are so satisfying that I’ve long been happy to give him a pass. They’re sensuous, nuanced, absorbing; rather than BoC’s quaint third-eye psychedelia, they lean more toward wordless cosmic bliss. And as the project has evolved, it’s become more expressive. These aren’t just gear demos; they’re real songs with real heart. MPU106 is the latest in his more or less annual series (another thing we can deduce about him: he likes consistency), and it’s the most emotional installment yet, full of big, bold leads and spine-tingling harmonies and timbres so vivid they make the hairs on your arm stand on end. It really needs to be heard on good speakers or headphones to appreciate its nuance, though. On laptop speakers, it’s agreeably retro, but heard in proper hi-def, it billows outward in four dimensions.
Gaiko: Gaiko (Nous’Klaer)
Not to be confused with Gaika or Gaister, Gaiko is the alias of the Brussels-based Kaito Defoort (also not to be confused with Kompakt’s Kaito!); his self-titled debut LP occupies the Nous’Klaer label’s sweet spot in the overlap between IDM and more muscular styles of dance music. There are a few comparatively chill tracks, like the trip-hoppy “Millennium” and the glitchy, Incunabula-style “Subdued,” but the bulk of the LP is pretty forceful, riding atop burly drum & bass rhythms. But look at those two- and three-minute track lengths; dancefloor functionality isn’t really the aim here. Instead, each track is a vivid snapshot of a particular mood or state of energy, often drenched in rich, full synths, almost proggy in their splendor. And a few more atmospheric sketches, like the initially drum-free “Weirdo,” take that energy and focus it in a whole new direction. A fresh, inspired record; I’m eager to see where Gaiko goes from here.
Oren Ambarchi & Eric Thielemans : Kind Regards (AD 93)
No matter who Oren Ambarchi collaborates with, the end results are always unmistakably an Oren Ambarchi record. Kind Regards was recorded live in 2023 with Eric Ehielemans in the drummer’s seat—a followup to the duo’s album Double Consciousness (and their trio work with Charlemagne Palestine). I don’t know Thielemans’ own work, but his rhythmic sensibility here feels quintessentially Ambarchi-esque to me, a kind of liquid pulse, with heavy tonal emphasis on the toms, that propels the waves of Ambarchi’s guitar. As he often does, Ambarchi is playing through a Leslie cabinet that inscribes his broad sheets of drone with micro-ripples, alternately speeding and slowing—so while Thielemans’ pulse pushes patiently forward, a kind of accordion effect simultaneously commands the timekeeping, pushing and pulling at its edges. The recording is split, like most of Ambarchi’s work, into two side-long halves. There are no discrete events, really, no firm markers of musical progress—just a long, gradual crescendo in the first half (with occasional eddying pauses), then an extended surge of kinetic dynamism in the back half, as Thielemans breaks away from the steady pulse and carves out little rivulets of micro-rhythm all around the beat, in every possible nook and cranny, and Ambarchi answers him with a veritable fireworks display of harmonics. That you’ve heard Ambarchi in this mode plenty of times before makes it no less dazzling.
Jules Reidy: Ghost/Spirit (Thrill Jockey)
I had completely forgotten that there is sometimes singing in Jules Reidy’s music, but previously—on records like 2019’s Brace, Brace—it was Auto-Tuned and layered just beneath the surface of their just-intoned guitar, more like a flash of iridescence than a lead vocal. But the balance shifts on Ghost/Spirit. The very first sound we hear is Reidy’s voice, wreathed in faint effects but, notably, not aggressively pitch-shifted; it remains front and center throughout the opening song, “Every Day There’s a Sunset,” and comes and goes throughout the album, a silvery counterpoint to the unearthly gleam of their strings. Reidy’s been steadily building their singular sound for years now—chipping away excesses, applying pressure to crucial points—and Ghost/Spirit feels like the fullest expression of it yet, now reimagined, crucially, as an expression of actual songcraft, without abandoning its bracingly experimental sonics. It’s a thrilling development.
MK Velsorf & Aase Nielsen: Opening Night (AWE)
I reviewed this one for Pitchfork this week, so I’ll keep my comments here brief. The second LP from Laurel Halo’s AWE label—home to her astonishing Atlas, one of my favorite albums of 2023—comes from the Danish duo of MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen; recorded live, their performance accompanied the opening gala of the New Theater Hollywood, an experimental space run by artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. On the surface, it’s delectably chill, with echoes of recent albums by Total Blue, Hotspring, Jack J, ML Buch, et al.; but the spareness of their arrangements, and the extreme repetition of some of their extended vamps, lend the album a subtler, more tricksterish quality that sets it apart. The artists cited Erik Satie’s furniture music in their own posts before the gig; doing a bit of research, I was reminded that while Satie’s furniture music is often considered a prototype of ambient and wallpaper music, there was a subversive, Dadaistic impulse behind his idea that’s starkly at odds with the way we tend to think of background music in the 21st century. Maybe I’m overthinking things, but I feel like Velsorf and Nielsen are tapping into that critical tradition.
EPs
Indica II: High in the Sky (Indica II)
Still not sure who alerted me to this, but they had me at the Alan Parsons Project-referencing title and cover art, and they kept me with the four long tracks of nu-cosmic churn and chug—a little bit Göttsching, a little bit Moroder, a little bit Tangerine Dream (the blockier, rockier stuff like Thief). Arps, pads, effects—it’s hardly rocket science, but it’ll get you airborne all the same.
Solitary Dancer: Y-3001 (Y-3)
Doing some cursory googling after Solitary Dancer’s Adam Hodgins released his great new Sabola EP last month (FR100), I stumbled upon this brand-new record that the Montreal duo did for the Spring/Summer 2025 runway show for Yohji Yamamoto’s Y-3 in Paris. Much of the six-track EP is quite different from their previous work; “Movement I” is a scene-setting etude for solitary synth; “Movement II” is low-slung trip-hop with whip-cracking snares, like something off Mo Wax’s Headz 2 comp. With “Movement III,” they dig into something approaching the punchy electro-techno of records like 2016’s “Desire & Apathy,” but they pivot almost immediately: “Movement IV” is a winsome post-rock sketch for viola (I think) and electric bass, while “Movement V” recalls some of the trompe-l’œil sonics of ML Buch and Astrid Sonne, before the EP closes out with a wistful ambient sketch. It’s a fetching little record; sadly, I missed my chance to cop the vinyl at a reasonable price, so thank goodness for Bandcamp.
Venïson Man & St. Mozelle: Red Rabbit Remix Rampage (3XL)
Venïson Man & St. Mozelle’s Red Rabbit EP, released last summer, is a fever dream of a record, hypnotic spoken word droning over ASMR-infused ambient and trip-hop beats. The remix EP, via Special Guest DJ’s 3XL label, is just as hallucinatory. SPDJ dons his DJ Paradise guise for a lumbering rework of the title track, while “Geh Hinter Mich (d.a.w.g. Remix)” drastically slows the vocals until they bristle with digital artifacts over a spectral boom-bap beat that reminds me of vintage Wordsound. Ben Bondy and mu tate both take more ambient approaches, as you might expect, but both leave the voice intact, running narcotically beneath swollen synths like a subconscious monologue just waiting to surface.
Pépe: Frayed, Frog, Bug (Elicit)
Valencia’s Pépe—the creator of Lapsus Radio’s theme song, incidentally—goes ridiculously hard on this new EP for London’s Elicit label. Brittle metallic textures, beats steeped in grime and electro, a veritable cyclone of voices whipping around your head—all three tracks are exhilarating and a little intimidating, hovering uncertainly between the seduction of pure texture and the surging adrenaline rush of a fight-or-flight response. My favorite is the comparatively slinky “It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Free Tour,” which rides one of the most unusual rhythms I’ve heard in a minute. Elpac & Mulholland’s 80/160BPM mix of “Frog Spirit” is a doozy as well—that kind of slow/fast hybrid that my Lapsus Radio cohost and I call “rapilento.” (And in one of the most creative merch offerings I’ve seen lately, this one even comes with socks.)
Holy Tongue: Ambulance (Dub) (Trule)
Valentina Magaletti, Al Wootton, and Susumu Mukai’s debut album as Holy Tongue, 2023’s Deliverance and Spiritual Warfare, is a dub album at heart, a 21st-century take on On-U Sound, perhaps. They lean into their dub roots on this two-track 7-inch: “Ambulance (Dub)” is skulking and slo-mo, with hall-of-mirrors delay chains bending around an architecture of gloomy analog synths; “The Bigger Tutti” is a crisp, stepping bass-and-drums tune with ghostly piano and even shreds of classical guitar floating in the margins; something about its tentative brightness feels like a sign that spring is grudgingly on the way.
Balmat News
Le Motel: Odd Numbers / Số Lẻ (Balmat)
We released Brussels musician Le Motel’s Odd Numbers / Số Lẻ—a travelogue, of sorts, recorded in Vietnam and composed with the help of many collaborators there—last week and we’re thrilled by the response so far. In a Bandcamp listening party for the release last week, I noticed a sound like a pedal-steel guitar for the first time, which illuminated a hidden resonance with the KLF’s Chill Out—another ambient road-trip record, after all—that I’d never picked up on before.
You can pick up the release directly from our Bandcamp page, or Boomkat, or, in the U.S., directly from Forced Exposure; and you can listen to the entire Balmat catalog in reverse chronological order in our 11-and-a-half-hour Spotify playlist.
That’s it for this week—thanks for reading.
Thank you for being a voice of dissent. Very rare these days.
Hey'a... As regards your political commentary, you seem to be unaware of the fact that all that Trump is doing is legal -- he has the authority to do what he does (and will continue to do) because of a 1933 amendment to your Constitution that turned the U.S. from a Republic into a dictatorship in which a ruler can have absolute power. It's called the "Trading with the Enemy Act", and we're seeing that amendment's effects in full force with Trump as the prez.