Futurism Restated #66: Pulse, Flash, Bubble
Back to the club with Maurice Fulton, Peverelist, and more
A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I’d been having trouble finding new club-oriented music that I connected with. Well, I take it all back. I’ve been going through a backlog of promos and Bandcamp saves and come up with an embarrassment of riches. After months of mostly ambient-focused newsletters, this week’s edition zeroes in on releases that go thump in the night.
I’ve been wondering why it is that, all of a sudden, there’s so much dance music that’s sounding good to me, and I suspect that a lot of it comes down to the simple fact that my mood has improved in the past week. (Provisionally, anyway; editing this paragraph several hours after writing it, I’m already feeling less sanguine than I had been. The parental care issues I wrote about last week have gotten even thornier than while I was in Portland, so my days tend to be emotional roller coasters based on Messenger notifications, or the [blissful] lack thereof.) I have recently come to the conclusion that my mood has a huge impact on how a certain piece of music might sit with me. I don’t particularly like that revelation; I’d like to think that a powerful enough piece of music can cut through whatever emotional noise I’m experiencing at the moment. I would like to believe, in other words, in the absolutism of artistic transcendence. But maybe it doesn’t work that way? In total darkness, after all, even gold coins don’t shine—yet that doesn’t take away from their value. (Apologies for the tortured metaphor there—this is not going to turn into an inspirational-aphorisms account, I swear.)
As far as my relationship to dance music goes, I will note that I’ve never felt less connected to any given scene or aesthetic. Part of that’s a factor of age and geography; it’s rare that I set foot in an actual club nowadays. But how much of a difference that distance makes, I’m not really sure; I’ve always connected to dance music more through the records than the in-person experience of it. That was true even when I lived in Berlin and Barcelona. And I don’t see a lot out there that makes me think, Man, I’d like to be a part of that. I suspect a lot of it comes down to the increasing fragmentation of dance music—the endless atomization of microscenes and sounds and trends, and the dissolution of anything resembling a monoculture (something Shawn Reynaldo has explored recently) even within the so-called underground. We’re all dancing to different drummers these days. Perhaps it’s local scenes—community, friends—that matter more than subgenres these days, and perhaps that’s for the best. As for patently overground dance culture, I just don’t connect with it at all. I tried listening to a recent Four Tet set that Michelangelo Matos had written approvingly of in his Beat Connection newsletter, and its big-room tech-house bent just didn’t do anything for me. And maybe that’s OK! I’ve always known that my tastes are idiosyncratic; I’m happy to embrace that.
This past week I helped put on a pair of shows here on Menorca—something I’ve been dreaming of doing since I moved here six years ago, but hadn’t yet made any headway on. Through a mutual friend, I learned that the great Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński would be touring Spain, and was interested in playing our fair isle. I ended up hooking him up with the folks at Hauser & Wirth, a gallery located on a tiny island in the middle of the harbor, for a free outdoor Sunday-afternoon concert, and then a Thursday-night event at Es Claustre, a stunning open-air space at the center of Maó’s historic city market. (If you follow my Instagram, you probably saw me posting incessantly about both events.) Turnout was pretty low for both; promoting leftfield music on an island like this one isn’t easy, particularly outside of the high season. But both performances were sublime; I’ve heard feedback that those who did attend (including stray gallery passersby who had no idea who Rogiński is) found his music moving; and what makes me happiest is that Raphael was thrilled with both gigs. The whole experience was a reminder that while it’s nice to have a sold-out crowd, sometimes the important thing is simply making something happen for the benefit of those people who do go. I think of it as like tending a garden; the first season, your harvest is going to be modest at best. But put in the work, and over time, you can create something beautiful.
I recorded both those sets, and who knows, maybe they’ll see the light of day someday. For now, let’s dig into today’s roundup, which includes:
the return of one of Maurice Fulton’s best aliases
contemporary dub-techno mutations from Priori, Carrier, and Tyus
a quixotic downcast pop gem on Posh Isolation
Naemi’s stunning Dust Devil, easily among the year’s best albums so far
Futuris Restated faves Purelink megamixing a forgotten gem of y2k post-rock
Lao’s sneaky cumbia cover of an Aphex Twin classic
…and much more!
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Record of the Week
Syclops: Black Eye (Bubble Tease Communications)
Maurice Fulton has never played by anyone else’s rules, so it’s perfectly in character for him to drop a new album, his first in ages, with no prior notice, as far as I can tell. Syclops has always been among my favorite of his aliases, for its punchy, unhinged energy—just check the hole-in-the-pocket funk of 2001’s “Fairlight Sunrise,” or the sawtooth yelps and whipcrack drumming of 2005’s “Mom, the Video Broke,” or the John Bonham-slapping-mosquitos intensity of “The Fly.” Black Eye, the follow-up to 2018’s Pink Eye, is perfectly in keeping with his take-no-prisoners style. The common denominators here are tightly coiled drum programming, sizzling analog synths, and jabbing funk riffs, and he covers a lot of ground, from the deranged industrial hip-hop of “La Nelson” to the staccato percussive workout of “5 Right,” fueled by the rolling congas that Fulton loves so much. There’s an uncompromising, fuckoff quality to some of these tracks, like the chaos-laced bursts of “New Bro’s in NYC” (spiritual kin to some of Pépé Bradock’s most uncompromising work) or the haywire electronics and slo-mo trand of “Karo Is Going Swimming.” I’m particularly struck by the radical shifts in style and mood: In the title track, full-band funk-rock vamps—whether an original recording or an obscure sample flip, I couldn’t tell you—alternate with extended passages of bleepy proto-techno, and the track just keeps morphing as it goes, taking in ever stranger and more improbable vistas (hotel lounge jazz, why not?). My favorite track, “Jason & Paul,” is a dead simple deep-house floor-filler that boasts a gorgeously tactile LFO riff and a perfectly swung house beat. Halfway through, though, it gives way to an absolutely deranged, absurdly excessive clavinet solo that sounds like something out of Daft Punk’s worst nightmares—yet just as it’s about to wear out its welcome, the clav simply vanishes, and the track snaps back to its clean, efficient groove. It’s ridiculous, in the best way.
Albums
Priori: This But More (NAFF)
When I wrote about Priori’s “Learn to Fly” back in March, I took issue with the vocal sample—a street kid from Mary Ellen Mark’s 1984 documentary Streetwise, intoning, “I love to fly—it’s just, you’re alone with peace and quiet, nothing around you but clear, blue sky.” In retrospect, I’m not sure why it bothered me. Whatever the context, it’s clearly been used with respect and a generosity of spirit, given the dreaminess of the track that enfolds it. Maybe I was just in a grumpy mood that day. But the Montreal producer’s third album, This But More is just the thing to keep grumpy moods at bay: It’s a wonderfully nuanced album that draws from dub techno, ambient, downtempo, and more, its textures grainy-smooth as sandstone and just as appealing to the touch. He’s come a long way from the relatively conventional (if beautifully rendered) deep house of early singles like 2018’s Anform EP, and even from the more considered mixture of styles of 2020’s On a Nimbus and 2021’s Your Own Power: The production is more enveloping, the blend of digital and acoustic timbres more holistic, the rhythms more densely woven into the atmospheres, until there’s little daylight between pulse and empty space; it’s all a rippling continuum. There are genre studies—the dub techno of “Learn to Fly,” the ambient of “Segue,” the downbeat of “Like it Shouldn’t,” the melodic dnb of “Wake,” featuring James K—but they all spring from the same source, variations on a single overarching idea. It all comes to a head on “Basalt Tones,” featuring Jesse Osborne-Lanthier, a mammoth slab of Dozzy-esque techno festooned with ambient greenery, like a hanging garden dripping from a brutalist basalt slab.
GB: Gusse Music (Posh Isolation)
When Gustav Berntsen emailed me about his new album as GB, he said that he was “interested in the melancholy of the infinite.” That’s an ambitious theme by any measurement, but I think I know what he’s talking about; particularly when I was younger, looking out the window while flying over the Rockies used to fill me with an almost unbearable melancholy, all the more unbearable because I couldn’t quite make sense of it. Gusse Music would make a fine accompaniment to moodily resting one’s forehead against the plastic pane of seat 9F—in large part because, fortunately, it never takes itself too seriously. The album offers a shifting mix of ambient-adjacent electronics, post-post-shoegaze (or post-post-post-grunge?) indie textures, all very agreeably lo-fi and home-recorded (check Sebadoh-meets-José-González-via-Ableton vibes of “Bloodstream,” say); it’s canny in its reference points, quoting the Cure’s “Lovesong” in “Love Song” and slipping into the language of trap in “Opps.” (Like a lot of contemporary Swedish pop music, it has a fascination with American hip-hop that, to my ears, verges on appropriation; hearing a white European sing “running from my opps” in a flat, affectless voice will never not be strange to me.) Berntsen’s not a polished singer but therein lies his charm, and judicious strings and other acoustic instruments splash a luxe veneer on his homespun creations. More than anything, it reminds me of Jolly Discs’ RAP in its downcast yet slightly inscrutable air.
Various: Compilado 1 (Resonancias Records)
I wrote about Chile’s Bahía Mansa back in June 2023, when he self-released his atavismos EP, and then again in February, when Santiago’s Resonancia label put out his Patagonia EP. One track from that record turns up on Compilado 1, a label sampler that showcases a number of tracks with a similarly foggy air. The range is pretty wide: Klub-Der-Klang make dubbed-out krautrock, Agujeros Negros’ Alberto Parra does dreamy slowcore, and Diego Flex even tackles peak-time techno (not a great fit for the context, really, particularly where it falls in the track sequence). But the bulk of the material hews to a kind of Kranky-adjacent post-rock vibe that warrants further listening.
Naemi: Dust Devil (3XL)
I trust that few readers of Futurism Restated aren’t already aware of this masterpiece from Shy’s (aka Special Guest DJ, Caveman LSD, uon, et al.) 3XL label—it was even reviewed (brilliantly, by the inimitable Matthew Schnipper) in Pitchfork. So let me merely join the chorus of its praises. Naemi, aka exael (and, in a clever nod to their grunge/nu-metal roots, Alison Chains), has been moving from ambient and IDM toward a more idiosyncratic blend of sounds for years now, via Cocteau Twins covers and atmospheric grunge flips. On Dust Devil, they definitively fold all their influences into a single overarching sensibility. Come for the snowdrift ambient and blissed-out dream pop (including an opening track that gives Erika de Casier the chance to cosplay Julee Cruise, to rapturous effect) and stay for “Day Drifter,” a note-perfect shoegaze ballad sung by Perila. I’m well aware that the shoegaze revival is nostalgia in its purest form, an aesthetic dead end, but this song is so perfect that it stands easily outside its 2020s hall-of-mirrors context.
I’ve been reading Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, a remarkable novel about an undead woman, possibly a zombie, reckoning with, well, life and death. It’s funny and surreal and crushingly sad. Last night I came across a passage whose sonic descriptions reminded me of the feeling of listening to Naemi’s album, so I photographed the page before I could forget:
EPs & Singles
Lao: Coastal Acid (Extasis)
Aphex Twin: “Vordhosbn (LAO Wepa Mix)”
Ocean currents can foster unexpected connections. On Lao’s Coastal Acid, the Mexico City producer imagines a maritime link between Cornwall and the Gulf of Mexico, fusing the classic sounds forged on Rephlex in the ’90s—Aphex Twin, Ceephax Acid Crew, DMX Krew—with the loping grooves and sneaky syncopations of contemporary Latin club music. (Tricky disco indeed.) It’s a beautifully intuitive pairing, with the creamy analog (or analog-inspired) pads and acid squelch of the braindance icons rerouted down channels carved by dembow patterns and rippling hand drums, in “Coastal Acid” and “727 Special,” and fleshed out with trance-arp triplets in “Mad Arp Rnd” and “Palito Trance.” For slow-mo freaks, there’s “Mazunte Acid,” a 96-BPM dembow tribute to an idyllic-looking beach town in the state of Oaxaca, while “Encanto Nocturno” closes things out on a slightly sinister note. A clever idea brilliantly executed—and there’s more where that came from: “Vordhosbn (LAO Wepa Mix),” in which Lao reimagines Aphex Twin’s skittering Drukqs fave as a lush, shuffling cumbia jam. A él le importa porque a tí te importa.
Cola Ren: Hailu Remixes (AMWAV)
I didn’t clock Guangzhou producer Cola Ren’s debut EP, Hailu, when it came out a year ago, but this remix compendium is love at first listen. It’d be hard to come up with a stronger list of MVPs: Salamanda turn “Baraka” into a new-age sun salutation—brushed cymbals, cooing vox—set to a gentle downtempo shuffle; Al Wootton’s “Riot on the Hush” rework is a coastal rainforest frug, an overgrown garden of forking percussive paths; K-LONE offers a brighter take on the same tune, high end glistening like the morning after a summer storm has cleared; Will Hofbauer’s “Heart Shaped Mole” is a wonky midtempo stunner in his own mischievously idiosyncratic fashion. My unexpected fave might be Knopha’s bassy “Outta Space,” with its late-’90s progressive chug. Working backward to Cola Ren’s originals, it’s clear that while the remixers have added their own respective brands of fairy dust, the magic was right there in the songs from the beginning: Across the EP’s five tracks, she lays out a beautiful and remarkably coherent blend of Hiroshi Yoshimura vibraphones and Balearic percussion, with some of the most inventive percussion I’ve heard from a new producer in a while. Highly recommended.
Peverelist: Pulse Phase EP (Livity Sound)
Peverelist is making the best music of his life right now. Case in point, just check last year’s “Pulse I.” For the first three minutes, it’s a study in textural and rhythmic finesse—tension-stoking syncopated stabs, bear-trap snares, vertiginous empty space; so far so good, perhaps a modest improvement on the kinds of things he’s been doing his whole life. Then, nearly halfway through its seven-minute run, a new pair of chords enter the fray—a rich, fizzing pad—and it’s like the sun has broken through for the first time in a month. Pulse Phase is the third installment in the Pulse series, following two EPs last year, and it might be my favorite yet. “Pulse IX” reprises the chordal vibe of “Pulse I,” yielding a gorgeous deep-house cut halfway between Carl Craig and Luomo’s Vocalcity. “Pulse TEN” (as Resident Advisor notes, the Roman numeral’s been swapped out to avoid confusion with Youngstar’s foundational grime track “Pulse X”) pairs a minimal groove with cosmic arps; “Pulse XI” is a sneakily syncopated UK techno anthem, a real wolf in sheep’s clothing; and “Pulse XII” flashes back to the dark UKG of Horsepower Productions.
Tyus: 1-5 (Ro Pax)
I still haven’t unraveled the story around Munich’s Ro Pax label and a constellation of affiliates—wrk.dat, We Go, et al.—making dusky techno of various stripes while keeping an intriguingly low profile; in the age-old tradition of Basic Channel, they hold their cards close to their vests. The latest missive from the crew comes from one Tyus—their first release under the alias, as far as I can tell—and pays explicit tribute to the hazy dub techno universe that began with the Basic Channel big bang and continues to ripple outward. (The alias “Tyus” even sounds like Cyrus, one of Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald’s early monikers.) They explore multiple modes here: the undulating chords and pitter-pat rhythms of Purelink and Vladislav Delay on track 1, my favorite of the EP; a harder, almost Kompakt-esque kind of techno-trance on track 2; dry, pummeling loops on track 3; and on track 4, an unusual fusion of pastel Chain Reaction chords with a tumbling 145-BPM rhythm with a deceptive downbeat. Vainqueur fans will be delighted by track 5, a black hole of frozen digital reverb that sucks you in deeper with every stereo-panned churn.
Carrier: In Spectra (Carrier)
Carrier’s a good name; it makes me think of signals, of chains of communication, of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier-bag theory” of fiction, which Laurel Halo cited in the title of a mindblowing mix four years ago. It didn’t occur to me until I typed the artist’s name into Discogs, but it’s also the title of one of Rhythm & Sound’s best tracks, which makes sense, given that Carrier’s music is deeply steeped in Basic Channel and the dub techno tradition. Formerly known as Shifted, the artist behind the project, Guy Brewer, seems to have gone all in on his new alias, with at least half a dozen releases in just the past 18 months, for labels like The Trilogy Tapes, FELT, and Berceuse Heroique. Like his previous releases, the new EP focuses on meticulous rhythmic studies awash in a thousand shades of gray, as crisply detailed as a Dürer etching. The loping grooves lean toward drum & bass, but the vibe is pure Chain Reaction.
Absis: FENIX (Hivern Discs)
One of my favorite made-up-by-me genres is trepanning-drill techno—that is, techno that feels like a very fine drill neatly boring a hole in your skull (but, somehow, painlessly, if such a thing were possible). A decade or so ago, this stuff was sometimes called “headfuck” techno, which also works. In any case, the latest release from John Talabot’s always interesting Hivern Discs—a label that I feel gets weirdly overlooked these days, but maybe that’s just because there’s so little discourse around virtually any left-of-center electronic music that doesn’t happen to be the buzz of the month—plunges deep into the most psychedelic trep-tech territory. It’s minimalist, acidic, and lean; there’s not a hi-hat out of place, not a single extraneous sound. All six of the mini-LP’s tracks are sculpted out of skeletal machine rhythms, bleepy arps, and gradual filter sweeps; chirping frequencies suggest of metallic birds, and glassy drums sound like temple rituals on fantastic planets imagined by fantasy artist Roger Dean (and I mean that in the best way possible). Some tracks are slow, some tracks are fast, some fall in that delectable slow-fast netherzone where beats double and stumble, and the closing title track is a surprisingly straightforward floor-filler with a springy groove that leavens the appealingly atmospheric gloom.
Lina Filipovich: Music for an imaginary dancefloor (Blank Mind)
The last time I heard Lina Filipovich, she was deconstructing Bach and Handel into nearly unrecognizable forms, balancing church-organ shards against scraps of Autechrean electro and modular squeal. It wasn’t a rejection of tradition, exactly, but she sounded wary about it, keeping hallowed forms at arm’s length. A similar sense of unease pervades Music for an imaginary dancefloor, in which the Belarus-born, Paris-based musician warily circles the very idea of techno, teasing its tropes with one hand and yanking them away with the other. It’s a kind of notional dance music, a series of familiar shapes shrouded in fog. I like the fact that nothing about it sounds “correct”; the drums are muted, the atmospheres murky, the mixdown clotted and gunky. In tracks like “Villain dot” I hear the spirit of some of dance music’s great refuseniks, the kind that labels like Rephlex and Sähkö once championed; it’s a music of shadow and squelch and suggestion, and nowhere does it sound more mysterious than on “999,” in which a chill wind of white noise strafes across gravelly tritones and lumpy Drexciyan genuflections.
Peder Mannerfelt: Flash My Flip Phone (Peder Mannerfelt Produktion)
Peder Mannerfelt—a member of the groups Aasthma, Roll the Dice, and Van Rivers & the Subliminal Kid, and a co-producer of Fever Ray’s 2017 album Plunge—is having a big-room moment and loving it. Recent singles like “Town Crier,” “Big Ball,” and “Pumping Plastics” have put a squealy spin on the slam-bangiest strain of peak-time bangers. “Flash My Flip Phone” is just as brash but even cheekier, with a bleepy touch-tone melody reminiscent of vintage Nokias, and a y2k-inspired bounce to match. The 142-BPM beat’ll play plenty nice with the gonzo, uptempo trance-techno that the kids are into these days, but it’s got enough meat on its bones to keep a grumpy old purist like me happy. On the flip, the “Flipped Groove Mix” slips in some rolling hardgroove flair—which is, when you think about it, just part of the Swedish producer’s heritage.
Deetron presents Soulmate: Drone (Ilian Tape)
You never quite know who’s going to turn up on Ilian Tape. This time it’s Deetron, a Swiss DJ who’s weathered the changing winds of European dance music since 1997, and keeps doing pretty much what he’s always done: deep, pumping, fairly classicist techno and house with a fair debt to Detroit. The toms-driven percussion here also owes a little something to hardgroove (and in fact he put out music on Ben Sims’ Hardgroove label more than 20 years ago). The mix of rolling congas and lush, almost chunky pads reminds me a little bit of E-Dancer’s (aka Kevin Saunderson) timeless “World of Deep”—particularly on the bittersweet “Bourg,” the most emotional of the five tracks here.
Corker Conboy: “In the Light of That Learnt Later (Purelink Remix)” (Corker Conboy)
Back around the turn of the millennium, London’s Vertical Form label was behind some of the most scintillating leftfield electronic music of the era—records from Arovane, Kit Clayton, Opiate, Piiri (aka Pan Sonic’s Ilpo Väisänen), and, particularly, Pub, whose “Summer” is one of ambient dub techno’s all-time classics. In 2002, the label took a detour into post-rock with In the Light of That Learnt Later, an album from the duo Corker/Conboy that fell somewhere in between Tortoise, Kranky, and Morr Music. A new remix from Purelink closes the circle, in a sense (given that Purelink’s 2021 single “Maintain the Bliss” was the closest thing I’ve heard to “Summer” in the past 20-odd years). A sort of granular megamix, Purelink’s rework takes elements from across Corker Conboy’s album and weaves them into a loose, easygoing arrangement of rippling percussion, drones, and guitar plucks; there’s a lovely onionskin quality to it, like a cassette tape that’s been overdubbed so many times, stray artifacts are audible through the blur.
Roman Flügel: Hotel Karthago / Energies (Phantasy Sound)
The A-side’s fun, sure, in a vaguely retro, speedy, trance-channeling way that feels tailored to contemporary dancefloor tastes. But the B-side, “Energies,” is the one. Roman Flügel may have earned his stripes with any number of rave smashers, but I’ve always preferred him in melancholy mode, and he’s rarely sounded more bittersweet than he does here. Paced at 136-BPM clip that floats at half-speed, it’s suffused in chiming new-wave synths and boasts an effortlessly sentimental melody; one for the Speak & Spell fans.
Balmat News
The shrink wrap has barely cooled on copies of Panoram’s Great Times and we’ve already got a new record on the way: Dreams & Whispers, a phenomenal album from the Polish artist better known as Earth Trax under his own name, Bartosz Kruczyński. After a number of increasingly squirrelly releases, this one really brings us back to the ambient mothership. Two tracks are streaming now, but it’s really meant to be taken in as a single piece of music; I can’t wait for you to hear the whole thing.
That’s it for this week—thanks for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this issue, please share it with a friend!
what a deep reflection on moods and music, our vibes and the vibes of the universe 🌟
Thanks a lot, great lecture ♥️🇲🇽