Futurism Restated #80: Maps, Veils, Machines
Deconstructed guitars, reconstructed corridos, meditative minimalism, and more
School starts tomorrow—my daughter’s that is, though I am eyeballing an introductory Catalan course for myself for later this fall—so we’ll keep today’s intro brief; there a few final hours of merriment to squeeze out of the summer, after all.
This week’s recommendations are a low-profile bunch; half of them are artists I’d never heard of, or barely knew, before not long ago. But that makes discovering them now that much sweeter. I recently got off a Zoom call with an artist for a forthcoming Pitchfork interview, and they talked about how many more artists there seem to be these days than there were 10 years ago, particularly in dance music. It’s easy to feel a certain anxiety around that point, but the flipside, of course, is that more different perspectives are more accessible than ever. This week’s roundup covers:
a head-spinning collage of sounds and styles that straddles the border between the U.S. and Mexico, via Rabit’s Halcyon Veil label
experiments in acoustic minimalism that achieve nearly psychedelic effects
a collection of inquisitive ambient-adjacent music from a London label that’s recently woken from its slumber
And more!
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 picks.
Record of the Week
Nudo: Alma Blindada (Halcyon Veil)
Texas duo Nudo’s alias translates as “knot,” which makes a good place to start: Alma Blindada, their recent album for Rabit’s Halcyon Veil, is knotty as hell, a disconcerting tangle of samples and textures that sometimes suggests being pinned between two competing radios. That sense of simultaneity reminds me a little bit of Chuquimamani-Condori’s recent work, but Nudo have been developing their borderland style for a while; you can hear it fully formed on 2022’s quematrasgos. I couldn’t find a ton of information about them, but apparently Nudo are the duo of Eric Hernandez and Joaquín Tenorio, who got their start as an industrial duo in Austin, but grew up between rural Texas and Juarez, Mexico.
Betweenness is a defining feature of Alma Blindada, which translates as something like “bulletproof soul” or “armored spirit.” Corridos collide with larynx-shredding death-metal growls. Gelatinous jazz-funk bleeds into pedal steel, accordions, and what sounds like scraps of 20th century avant-garde composition. Cumbia rhythms thump beneath psychedelic keyboard fizz. “we came to this via heavily following border war and cartel violence news/corrido lore,” they write; “the power vacuums, the cannibalization of heroes and villains and how who’s who morphs depending on what side you’re rooting for or what area you’re from. we knew we wanted full unironic corridos, we knew we wanted songs and not just world building exercises.” I’ll admit that, as an outsider, I don’t fully follow how the border war informs these pieces, unless it’s as the omnipresent current of unease running through the music. But these are very much songs and world-building exercises; each piece here might well be a radio play, a miniature narrative in which every juxtaposition suggests a chain reaction of stories, conflicts, and syntheses.
Albums
Leo Chadburn: The Primordial Pieces (Library of Nothing)
Leo Chadburn used to make disorienting, theatrical, circuit-fried synth-pop under the name Simon Bookish (once reviewed for Pitchfork by none other than Matmos’ Drew Daniel). But in the 2010s, working under his own name, he shifted toward avant-garde composition. The Subject / The Object, from 2015, paired two 20-minute vocal tracks: one a breathless, seemingly stream-of-consciousness spoken-word piece shadowed by dusky drones, the other purely a cappella choral piece of morphing vowel tones. Slower / Talker, from 2021, set conceptual texts (a reading of a list of moth species, an intoned set of terms from the fragrance industry) to airy, spacious, minimalist pieces for piano and strings. The Primordial Pieces, based on reworked sketches initially composed around the turn of the millennium, is strictly instrumental and more intensely minimalist than any of its predecessors—and perhaps for that reason it has an intensity and focus outstripping anything that has come before.
“The Reflecting Pool,” featuring Ben Smith on piano, is nothing but a set of rising glissandi set against Chadburn’s low, droning synthesizer. It’s a densely, knottily chromatic progression that shifts slightly with every repetition; I find myself attempting to track the changes—an impossible task—with every pass, retracing the glissando’s slippery path as the notes dissolve in real time. “Map of the World” and “De La Salle (Violins)” smear a violin quartet into a blurry form that makes me think of the texture and lumiosity of rippled glass; “Camouflage,” for solo piano, rolls like a dust bunny, a pinkish cloud of next-to-nothing. It’s gorgeous. Finally, “A Secret” reprises the format of “The Reflecting Pool”: rising piano figures—slow and drowsy this time, languid as a post-nap stretch and yawn—shadowed, barely, by the faintest trace of synthesizer. The whole thing’s stunning, with a rare purity of focus and intent—not so much minimal music, perhaps, as mineral music, glinting like quartz and mica.
Dustin Wong & Gregory Uhlmann: Water Map (Otherly Love)
What is a guitar? Should you know it when you hear it? How much might its output wander from the apparent functions of its form—the usual cause-and-effect of plucking a string or strumming a chord? Dustin Wong and Gregory Uhlmann have both been asking questions like those in their respective work for a while now, so it’s a treat to hear them join forces, spurring each other on as they take the vocabulary of strings and frets, picking and strumming, and radically defamiliarize it, wresting it from familiar associations and wrangling it into fanciful new forms. I love the balance between abstraction and lyricism—the way a melody teasingly traces itself in reverse, or lines blur between stringed and percussion instruments. The mood is carefree and exploratory; the plastic textures and brightly colored fragments of “Fruit Shaped Sweat” could almost pass for a Hausu Mountain record, and in “Ranka” I hear parallels with Piotr Kurek’s blend of the pliant and the brittle.
Alejandro Cohen: Chamber of Tears (Geographic North)
Alejandro Cohen’s debut album under his own name arrives just in time for the melancholy final days of summer. In the band Pharaohs, alongside Suzanne Kraft and Cam Cooper, Cohen used to make sleek, synthy dance music for labels like ESP Institute and International Feel. But Chamber of Tears, for the excellent and underrated Geographic North label (home, for what it’s worth, to some of the best graphic design out there), is an entirely different affair—written mostly around his acoustic guitar, and fleshed out with the occasional slow-attack electric lede or wash of wind chimes, it’s a shimmering blend of low-key psych pop and folk-adjacent porch-sitting sounds. Titles like “American Primitive” and “The Seven Dolphins” might give you an idea of what to expect: not really folk, not quite new age, but nestled somewhere in between, an easygoing collection of understated delights.
Various: Liminal VA 001 (Oscilla Sound)
London’s Oscilla Sound launched seven years ago with a pair of releases aligned with foggy ambient and spiky bass music. Their output—from artists like Paris’ E-Unity, Brooklyn’s Significant Other, and the UK’s Notte Infinita—has been sporadic since then, but this, their first compilation, reestablishes their presence and identity. The club elements of their catalog have been set aside, at least for now, but it’s not really an ambient release, exactly—not in the “set it and forget it” sense of the term, if only for the range of sounds and moods engaged here. Heavy digital sound design is the principal through line; Infra’s “Core” smears vocal tones in a way that reminds me, faintly, of Visible Cloaks; Kincaid’s “Scree Slope” pairs clicky detailing with almost liturgical clouds of choir; and Slowfoam and XENIA REAPER both slip into a shape-shifting nether realm between luminous tones and the kinds of timbres you can practically feel beneath your fingertips. Toward the end, there are even some beats: Losssy’s “Propane” is an airy tuft of atmospheric trap, while Toupaz’s “Motif” looks back to the glitchy glory days of Pole and Mille Plateaux while nonetheless sounding totally contemporary.
Umberto: Black Bile (Thrill Jockey)
I haven’t been paying close attention to Umberto since 2010’s Prophecy of the Black Widow, which was a straight-up John Carpenter/giallo homage, so I was entirely unprepared for the sound of the project’s new record on Thrill Jockey. Gone are the throbbing synths and purplish hues and faint air of kitschy menace; in their place, Umberto roll out lush, evocative mood pieces mixing airy synths with piano and guitar. Apparently, at some point Umberto became a solo project, which might account for the shift in tone and mood, but there’s a significant leap here even from the last Thrill Jockey release, 2019’s Helpless Spectator, which still held onto some of the synth-heavy affect of earlier releases. That Umberto’s Matt Hill moonlights as a soundtrack composer might help explain the obviously cinematic bent to these textures, but even so, there’s a gentleness and a tenderness that take this beyond the merely atmospheric or pretty.
The Bug: Machine (Relapse)
That the Bug should sign to Relapse—a metal and hardcore label whose catalog features acts like Mastodon, Pig Destroyer, and the Dillinger Escape Plan—is surprising, but it’s also not that surprising. Because the music that Kevin Richard Martin makes under the alias may be rooted in dub and post-techno, but it’s also music in which heaviness is as important as any other quality. It’s just that, unlike most metal bands, the Bug’s heaviness is measured in bass weight rather than volume, distortion, or midrange punch. In fact, Relapse already reissued Martin’s group Techno Animal’s 2001 classic The Brotherhood of the Bomb, a devastating fusion of illbient, hip-hop, and dub techno (let’s not forget that Techno Animal’s other half, Justin K. Broadrick, was in Napalm Death); they also put out Martin and Broadrick’s 2019 Zonal album.
Machine began life as a series of five digital EPs between March 2023 and February 2024; the 2LP (and digital release) culls those 21 tracks down to a cool dozen. There’s also a 5LP set that includes all 21 songs.) For anyone who’s been following Martin’s work as the Bug, this will be familiar territory. His midrange rattles like a torn speaker cone flapping in the wind; his textures are encrusted with dust and dried blood; the mood is an all-pervasive amalgam of rage and sorrow. But it also never feels like he’s repeating himself; this is simply what he does, and it’s a treat to hear him dig in so intensely. Perhaps his neatest trick is that as overwhelmingly heavy as Machine is, there’s always room for small, graceful details swimming in its porous interior. A ribbon of acid twists mournfully through “Vertical (Never See You Again).” A hint of the Bomb Squad’s muted horn bleats occasionally rises up from the depths of “Floored (Point of Impact).” The LFO effect in “Buried (Your Life Is Short)”—an effect he’s been using since the days of Techno Animal vs. Porter Ricks—feels like someone’s running a piece of corrugated cardboard against your ear. It’s breathtakingly physical stuff.
(Purchase from Relapse here)
Ken Ishii: Reference to Difference (Remastered 30th Anniversary Edition) (Sublime / Music Mine)
There are artists whose hard drives (or, more probably, old cardboard boxes full of DATs) I’d love to access, to see what unreleased material they might be sitting on. Failing that, they make me wish for a time machine, in order to go back and say: “More of that, please.” These days, Ken Ishii mostly makes big-room techno. But back in the 1990s, his music sounded like little else out there—glistening, high tech, neatly marrying ambient atmospheres with powerfully driving grooves. Albums like 1995’s Jelly Tones (R&S) and 1996’s Grip (Sublime) are classics. And his 1994 debut album, Reference to Difference, is infused with a powerful sense of strangeness. It’s full of timbres half gelatinous and half metallic; it has one foot in Detroit techno and the other in the environmental music of Japanese artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura. To mark its 30th anniversary, it’s been newly reissued, alongside Susumu Yokota’s Acid Mount Fuji, which was released alongside it in 1994. My favorite Ken Ishii record, though, 1993’s Deep Sleep EP (of which two tracks are included on the 1994 anthology Innerelements); I bought the 12-inch back in the day and promptly had my mind blown by the shimmer and squelch of “Naiad” and “Kala,” which constitute some of the best ambient techno (and, in the latter case, straight-up ambient) that the era produced.
EPs
Gyrofield: These Heavens (XL)
If you want to feel old, consider Gyrofield: They apparently discovered electronic music via Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, on YouTube—at the age of nine. Now they’re signed to XL; on These Heavens, they present four tracks of lithe, shape-shifting drum & bass that pulls off a careful balance of muscle and subtlety, veering between the bludgeoning techstep of “Cold Cases” and the nimble, liquid movements of “Occam’s Razor,” which sounds like it was composed under the influence of Aphex Twin and whale songs.
Zenker Brothers: Workhorse Supply (Ilian Tape)
Munich’s Zenker Brothers seem to be firmly in a techno phase right now; all five tracks here are tough, rolling, and percussive, with a distinct touch of ’90s Scandinavia in their pummeling loops. But there’s also a lightness to them; just listen to those buoyant chords that come rising up halfway through “Workhorse,” or the sunrise pads halfway through the absolutely dreamy “Two Paths (ADT Version).”
Will Hofbauer: Pond Party (Third Place)
Will Hofbauer’s club tracks are always at least 73% more good-natured than his peers’, and Pond Party is no exception: The title track turns meowing kittens and ribbiting frogs into percussive elements, while “Woop” begins with a burst of sinister laughter. Honestly, some of these tactics aren’t all that far off from what the Dirtybird crew used to do, but I feel like Hofbauer’s lightness of touch sets him apart; there’s no Hey ma lookit me here, just a low-key dude making squirrely, screwball club tracks.
Balmat
Luke Sanger: Dew Point Harmonics (Balmat)
Balmat’s latest release closes a circle: Norfolk’s Luke Sanger inaugurated the label in 2021 with the wonderful Languid Gongue, and now he’s back for lucky number 12 with Dew Point Harmonics, which plays out very much like a companion piece to its predecessor, with a mixture of sparkling synth sketches and more restive textural experiments. (Many thanks to Line Noise’s Ben Cardew for the lovely recent review.)
Recommended Reading / Watching
Teaching Techno (Artforum)
Dada Strain’s Piotr Orlov looks at new pedagogical initiatives from King Britt and Wajeed aimed at elevating techno’s Black creators and fostering a new generation of artists. (Read here)
Emily Witt Interviewed (First Floor)
I was spellbound and shaken by “The Last Rave,” a recent excerpt in the New Yorker from journalist Emily Witt’s forthcoming Health and Safety: A Breakdown, a memoir of the author’s experiences in New York’s club scene. In conversation with Shawn Reynaldo, she offers candid, considered answers about raving, drugs, and more.
That’s it for this week—thanks for reading!
Wow, that Nudo album is really special. Compellingly rhythmic and hard to stop listening - I’ve had it on repeat this morning, even during a run around Hackney marshes and I didn’t really anticipate it being suitable running music but it was! Tip the hat to Halcyon Veil as usual!
fantastic selections as always 🙏