Futurism Restated 104: Shades of Gray

Mercurial moods from Raisa K, Patrick Shiroishi & Piotr Kurek, Upsammy, Actress, and more

There’s a bumper crop of new releases this week, so I’ll spare you any lengthy introductions. Today we’ve got a killer new album of lo-fi guitar pop from Raisa K, a member of Mica Levi’s Good Sad Happy Bad, via the ML Buch-affiliated 15 love label; a new album of tape-warped electroacoustic psychedelia from Muscut/Shukai label head Nikolaienko; a gorgeous ambient-jazz foray with Patrick Shiroishi and Piotr Kurek; a newly released longform headtrip from Actress; and much more.

But first, a few links and other curios:

• Being as cool as Kim Gordon’s a tall order, but now you can at least dress like her—in a Gulf of Mexico long-sleeve t-shirt from Provincetown’s the Old Baby; 80% of the proceeds from every shirt (“about $30”) go to United Farm Workers, a non-profit working on behalf of migrant workers.

• Grayson Haver Currin’s one of the best profile writers we’ve got, and he is in stellar form in this Panda Bear feature, reported across several days on tour with Noah Lennox and his band. (I was honored to see my 2015 Pitchfork feature get a shout-out, but I’d be raving about Grayson’s piece even without it.)

• I have not been closely following the legal battle around the Internet Archive, and I feel like I should probably rectify that. This Ars Technica piece reports that the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, an attempt to digitize three millions of 78 RPM discs from the 1890s through the 1950s, has drawn the ire of record labels accusing IA of copyright infringement. The labels have added those 78 recordings to an existing infringement lawsuit, which clearly seems like an attempt to nuke IA from space—damages for the archival project could reach $700 million. (To put the absurdity of the labels’ attacks in question, just consider this: “[T]here seems to be little evidence that the Great 78 Project is meaningfully diverting streams from labels' preferred platforms. Bing Crosby's ‘White Christmas’ is perhaps the most heavily streamed song in the case, with nearly 550 million streams on Spotify compared to about 15,000 views on the Great 78 Project. Most of the other songs at issue were viewed at most ‘hundreds of times’ on IA, music labels’ complaint said.”)

• I was *nonplussed to see New York streetwear emporium Supreme quote my 2014 Aphex Twin profile—without attribution—in the press materials for their new Aphex Twin merch drop. The very existence of the collaboration, of course, is something of a head-scratcher. (I’m far more partial to Dreem Street’s bootleg Selected Ambient Works longsleeve, which I picked up at their (defunct, I think?) Lloyd Center shop a few years ago. If you know, you know.) To promote the playlist, Aphex put together a nearly 13-hour Spotify playlist of what he/they call “mostly mellow” music. It’s heavy on vintage jazz-funk and wonky electronic fusion, and features some provocative sequences—I wouldn’t have thought that a passage from Derrick May to Marvin Gaye to Simple Minds would hold up well, but damned if he didn’t find a coherent throughline between the three. The tracklisting looks like a bit of a mess, and things go a little haywire toward the end—to go from Dopplereffekt to Ween to Brian Eno to Burial isn’t the choice I would have made—but there’s plenty to discover, regardless. (Thanks [SIC] Weekly for alerting me to the playlist.)

• Finally, if you missed it last week, I dug into the reader mailbag and unpacked some of the peculiarities of my music archiving and promo listening, with a detour through 2007 Barcelona, just because.

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 (now available on Deezer as well as Apple Music and Spotify); the semi-regular Mixes Digest posts (the next one coming soon!); 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.

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Record of the Week

Raisa K: Affectionately (15 love)

Mica Levi fans may know Raisa K as a member of Good Sad Happy Bad (fka Micachu and the Shapes); ML Buch fans will recognize 15 love as the label that put out Suntub in late 2023. Good Sad Happy Bad’s recent album All Kinds of Days (smartly reviewed by Ben Cardew for Pitchfork) is my kind of indie—a little scrappy, a little inchoate, hovering somewhere in between the immediacy of the practice space and the dubwise interzone of the mixing desk. It’s a little bit post-punk, a little bit Broadcast; it’s slippery, offering up one idea, or identity, then slipping behind a curtain and emerging with a whole different face on.

Affectionately shares a vibe with GSHB’s album, thanks in large part to Raisa K’s airy, sing-song voice. But this is clearly a studio album—or, quite possibly, a Portastudio album, happily lo-fi, unbothered about pretending to be something that it’s not. The guitars have been squashed down to fit alongside digitally looped drums; the reverb bears little relation to actual room tone. It sounds like a fully in-the-box recording. That’s not a value judgement—I like the small, slightly claustrophobic sound; I like the suggestion of a personal vision being worked out on the artist’s own terms. There are flashes of shoegaze (“Both Still”) and dubby post-punk (“Feel It”), and some gently fingerpicked guitar gives “Stay,” with Coby Sey, a ballad-like feel. But mostly Affectionately feels fiercely private. More than anything, it reminds me of Tirzah’s hermetic 2023 album trip9love…??? (produced by Mica Levi, as it happens), right down to the recycling of key tropes (like the fuzzed-out guitar that appears again and again). Like that record, Affectionately asks you to meet it on its own terms, but at its best—in songs like the title track, “Both Still,” and “Final Generations,” say—it more than rewards the effort.

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Albums

Patrick Shiroishi & Piotr Kurek: Greyhound Days (Mondoj)

Piotr Kurek’s solo work, which I’ve written about a couple times now, maintains an uneasy relationship with both jazz and ambient music—it’s not ironic, not in the slightest, but there’s still something slightly arch about it, a slight remove detectable in his scraps of Auto-Tuned warble and plasticine textures. Peach Blossom, in particular, felt eerily, warily other, a collection of scale models with a quietly subversive edge. Smartwoods is harder to get a bead on; it’s lush but diffuse, foggily dissonant, ambiguous and ambivalent (and also, at the same time, just straight-up beautiful). But Greyhound Days, with the saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, strikes me as a very different kind of record. It’s much simpler, for one thing. Kurek mostly sticks to keys, with a little electric bass as a treat; what comes out of Shiroishi’s tenor sounds completely spontaneous. There are no obvious edits; it sounds improvised on the spot. Emotionally, it’s a more sentimental record than Kurek’s solo stuff, much of which comes down to Shiroishi’s lyrical sensibility on his horn—contemplative, reverent, sometimes mournful. But there are little tufts of dissonance, tangles of odd timbres, that keep you from getting too comfy. Shiroishi’s playing is direct and openhearted, but Kurek’s sour tunings remain cautious, guarded. It’s a good match, a provocative contrast. And even more than Smartwoods, Greyhound Days is just flat-out gorgeous, a companion for the loneliest nights.

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Nikolaienko: Love Fidelity or Hiss Goodbye (Muscut)

Dmytro Nikolaienko’s music has never sounded quite of our time; his spring reverbs and watery oscillations conjure images of an era when electronic sound was not yet taken for granted, when magnetic tape felt as much like a spirit medium as a technological advancement. In the same way, his music doesn’t even feel like it’s part of this earthly plane; it seems to have traveled from far, far away—possibly light years, possibly from parallel dimensions. His fourth solo album retains the uncanny vintage cast of his previous records; a track like “Belated Procession IV,” with its wonky electric bass and effervescent analog delay, might be mistaken for a soundtrack cue from Krtek, or the Little Mole, the Czech cartoon from the ’50s and ’60s. But his palette has evolved, blossoming from the synthetic squiggles of a record like 2022’s Nostalgia por Mesozóica (a kind of spiritual kin to Andrew Pekler’s Tristes Tropiques and Sounds from Phantom Islands) to a more pastel-colored array of xylophone, bongos, and woodwinds. The “Belated Procession” tracks pursue a kind of mutant jazz across squirrely figures and shifting terrain; “Hiss Goodbye” and “Sorry for (Tape) Delay” are gently psychedelic love letters to the magic of repetition; and “How to Get to the Library?” is among the sweetest, most sentimental pieces in his catalog.

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Max Eilbacher: 7 Runs (in arc mental styling) (OMA Editions)

Andrew Bernstein: Shadows and Windy Places (OMA Editions)

Horse Lords launch their new label OMA Editions—“a home for the band’s outlier material and solo works from individual members, as well as outside collaborations”—with a pair of LPs from bandmembers Max Eilbacher and Andrew Bernstein. The A-side of Eilbacher’s 7 Runs (in arc mental styling) is a kind of Escherian staircase of jittery, mallet-like tones, like a very nervous gamelan running laps; made out of digitally synthesized piano, violin, and metal percussion, it reaches deep into the uncanny valley between physical instruments and their computerized clones. The longer it runs, the more psychedelic its effects become. (Apparently he wrote the thing in the tour van? Madness.) The B-side is a more streamlined look at the resonance of physical modeling that goes from trim plucks to cavernous clang.

Bernstein’s Shadows and Windy Places is a simpler affair on the surface, a solo album for soprano and alto saxophones and tenor recorder; while electronics are involved, it’s the sounds of the instruments, and the feel of Bernstein’s playing, that mostly dominates. “A Shadow, Blooming” is an airy fugue reminiscent of Terry Riley; the warbling “Of Infinite Space” picks up the minimalist theme, yet seems to bend its frequencies like gravitational lensing; “In Blue” is a ragged celebration of breath. But it’s not all so pure: “On Nine” is a psychoacoustic mindfuck of strangely tuned tone clusters, a dial tone dipped in psilocybin, and the closing “A Mutable Wave” is white-light drone in the tradition of Folke Rabe’s “What?!”

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Nickolas Mohanna: Speaker Rotations (AKP)

Nickolas Mohanna’s Speaker Rotations is a soft tumult, an explosion of cotton balls, a fitful rain. The New York musician’s guitar is the centerpiece of these four longish meditations, looped and delayed and scattered like metal filings, and fleshed out with what sounds like the nervous patter of ride cymbals—though they’re not so much a rhythmic force as a steady downpour, like sleet. The four tracks (a fifth, the two-minute “Method Actor,” is really just a lead-in to the much longer “Night Horses”) all offer slightly different perspectives on a similar idea—a balance of dark and light, density and porousness. It’s pouring outside as I write this, so maybe I’m unduly influenced by today’s weather, but these tracks—particularly “Holly in the Rock”—feel like snapshots of similar energy: stormy, blurred, sponging up light like a charcoal drawing. The dubbed-out feedback tangles of “Future Light Cone” make me suspect that Mohanna’s a fan of Lee Ranaldo; the grumbling trombone laments of “Night Horses” is a kind of scowling post-punk minimalism with flashes of Arthur Russell. And the closing track, “Past Light Cone,” trades guitar for layer upon layer of multi-tracked piano, a surging fantasia for out-of-tune beach-house uprights.

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M. Geddes Gengras: QUIK-MELT (self-released)

If Mohanna’s album has me thinking of downpours, M. Geddes Gengras’ latest might be a deluge of rainbows. Written for a January performance at New York’s Public Records, the 41-minute album is broken into four tracks but flows as a single piece of music. I can’t claim intimate familiarity with most of the machines he’s using here, but the list of gear—Squarp Pyramid, Make Noise 0-Coast, Korg Opsix, Critter & Guitari 5Moons, Strymon El Capistan, Audiomerge King Tubby Big Knob (that name!), etc.—are enough to give you some sense of the tonal and timbral complexity that’s going on beneath the surface. Structurally, it’s a rising tide of wave after contrapuntal wave, with so much going on that it’d be a fool’s errand to try to enumerate the music’s elements; in place of standout moments, you’re swallowed up into the flow of glistening, chiming radiance. (Well, the brief arrival of what sounds like fretless bass in the closing track might count as an event, and a really satisfying one, at that.)

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Bambinodj: Silent Dispatches (OST)

Bambinodj’s debut album feels slightly out of time, or at least, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone else combine the same genres and eras that he is. The high-gloss digital sheen—particularly on the hazy ambient R&B of the opening “Closure”—is entirely of the now, and so is his predilection for hi-def dembow rhythms that class him alongside DJ Python. But I also detect something sneakier going on, a sentimental fondness for the corporate pop and Muzak of the ’80s and ’90s, which comes out in airy melodic riffs and richly colored harmonies. I guess what I’m talking about is a kind of vaporwave, really; many of the album’s tracks feel like they might have begun life as Weather Channel background music, and the FM synths and flanged guitars and occasional LinnDrum-esque thwacks also anchor us in the half-remembered media past. But even when you can trace the provenance of his sounds, the way he uses them is never quite the way you expect, leaving you floating in the most delectable sort of uncertainty.

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EPs

Actress: Grey Interiors (self-released)

Darren Cunningham first presented Grey Interiors live in 2021 at the Berliner Festspiele’s New Infinity event, in a collaboration with creative studio Actual Objects. “The three-part composition presents our civilisation as an imploded space with no discernable gravitation, of which only drifting machine fragments and decaying objects are left – like quotes without reference system,” wrote exhibition curators. “Floating through the gloomy ether, ‘Grey Interiors’ takes us into the otherworldliness of a landscape beyond man.” Now, the 21-minute soundtrack hits Bandcamp. (As I write this, Boomkat still has copies of Smalltown Supersound’s vinyl pressing in stock.) Grey Interiors could very well title any one of Actress’ records, of course, and it certainly fits the bill here, where we’re plunged into a thick haze right from the start. It’s an intense piece, both claustrophobic and wide open; as soon as you’ve settled into any one phase—gravelly, dissonant synths; absent-minded piano; vast webs of cosmic buzz—the landscape is morphing again, taking you with it. Halfway through, there’s even a brief eruption of a chest-massaging electro rhythm, but that, too, is quickly swallowed up by a Xenakis-like expanse of radiance. The last few minutes are black holes all the way down.

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Upsammy: Open Catalyst (Dekmantel)

Thessa Torsing shifts up a gear on Open Catalyst, her first 12-inch for Dekmantel in four years: All four tracks hurtle along at upwards of 160 BPM, propelled by carefully machined drum & bass rhythms. Still, for dnb, these things are unusually sleek, even delicate. Even the heaviest cut, the 180-BPM “Telluric,” glides like skipping stones, its low end restricted to short, downward bursts that fizzle out before long (though their is an almost inaudible layer of sub bass running deep below). The others feel less like dancefloor weapons than demonstrations of a watchmaker’s prowess—intricate assemblages of glistening crystals and frictionless gears. For timbres, she defaults to mallets, chimes, and other marvels of physical modeling, lending even the most dazzlingly heady rhythms a deeply physical cast.

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St. Amp: TiHKAL001 (TiHKAL)

Wordcolour—the UK producer of glistening, ultra-vivid offworld club music—has a new label, TiHKAL, and the first release is a doozy. (You’d hope so, given that the name is a reference to an Alexander and Ann Shulgin book about tryptamines, the chemical compounds found in many hallucinogens.) UK producer St. Amp gave us an early peek at his sleek, slippery style on last year’s Lyra Pad EP (complete with a characteristically bonkers Will Hofbauer remix, for once slinking his way around a dembow rhythm), but this is a whole different bag of bionic worms. “Outline (Float Mix)” is a pointillist drum & bass that does just what its title promises; the almost drone-oriented bass feels practically all-consuming, but redirect your attention to the upper midrange and a whole ecosystem of brilliantly colored sounds snaps into focus, tiny trilling figures that hover like insects. “Cave,” suffused in radiant FM synths, is darker and more paranoid, lurking somewhere in the netherzone between techstep/neurofunk and Photek/Source Direct. Wordcolour’s “Cave” remix is exactly what you’d hope for: polyrhythmic, hyperkinetic, bristling with texture, iridescent as a beetle. For nearly five and a half minutes, it draws out the tension, promising climax and steadfastly refusing. The opposite of a programmatic club track, with its standardized ups and downs, it feels simply alive, beholden to nothing beyond its own biochemistry.

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Sa Pa: The Fool (Short Span)

With the exception of a slightly more muscular early 12” for Marcel Dettmann’s label, most of Sa Pa’s work has seemed like a strong gust of wind might blow it away. On albums for Forum and Mana, he swept grainy textures and airy streaks of color into heavily abstracted swirls, only occasionally indulging himself the support of a grounding kick drum or a reassuring cushion of dub techno. For the inaugural release from Short Spain—a new label from Matthew Kent, formerly of Blowing Up the Workshop mix series and the Mana label, which put out Sa Pa’s 2019 album In a Landscape—Sa Pa seems to be looking for ways to fuse rhythmic drive with all things atmospheric. Three of the four tracks here ride deep-diving pulses, yet the atmosphere is so thick, it’s almost impossible to separate the outline of the drums and bass from the murk swallowing them up. The provocatively titled “Captigon” and “So Simple” both sound like Basic Channel as heard through a storm drain from hundreds of meters away; the 13-minute “Boredom Memory (Extended Mix)” is similarly proportioned but stranger in mood, suffused in the weak, silvery glow of what might be very old recordings of violin. The closing “Gausian Ecstacy” (sic) backs off the beats and sinks into an absent-minded reverie of distant piano and midsummer fireworks display, somewhere between nameless melancholy and total numbness.

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Gabe & Jude: Gabe & Jude 007 (Gabe & Jude)

I had no idea until this week about Gabe & Jude, an alias that Martyn 3024 uses for releases that fall outside his usual bassy wheelhouse. The project’s sporadic output goes back to 2017; there was a flurry of releases in 2022-23, but this is the first new release under the umbrella in two years. Many of the G&J releases until now have fallen either to the housey or jazzy ends of the spectrum, but I don’t know where you’d file a track like “Binding Mochi,” an unsteady pile of watery piano, hiccupping vocal chops, and a “Loose Lips”-grade broken beat, all wobbling atop a gelatinous foundation of Reese bass. It’s one of the freshest, most distinctive club tracks I’ve heard in ages.

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Ilayruni: Mountain Flyers (Sungate)

Despite the Spanish provenance, Sungate is a new name to me, and so is Ilayruni, though a little digging reveals that he’s from Valencia and—if my math is right—can’t be more than 19 years old (!). The five original tracks on his Mountain Flyers EP split the difference between Autonomic-style drum & bass and corkscrew, psychedelic techno with a minimal edge, all of it richly textured, deeply hued, and unusually sleek. Just check the rolling glide of “Cleanse.”

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Pye Corner Audio: The Deep Cut (self-released)

It’s pouring rain as I write this; the hills just a few kilometers away have disappeared behind a curtain of gray. This pay-what-you-can loosie for Bandcamp Friday perfectly suits the mood: slow, skulking, visibility nil, with slightly anxious chords over a reluctant 4/4 kick at 100 BPM—clinically proven to be the best tempo, bar none.

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Balmat News

We’ve just released our 15th album, from Brussels’ Le Motel, and we’ve got what I think is a frankly earth-shaking announcement coming up less than a month away. Get up to speed with our recent releases on Bandcamp, or listen to the full catalog in this 11-and-a-half hour Spotify playlist.

Le Motel: Odd Numbers / Số Lẻ

DOVS (aka Tin Man & AAAA): Psychic Geography

Luke Wyland: Kuma Cove

le.motel

A post shared by @le.motel

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*This may be the first time I’ve ever found exactly the situation to use that word correctly; thank you, Benjamin Dreyer, once again.

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