Futurism Restated #86: A Bounty of New Releases
New music from More Eaze, Actress, Maral, and more
I’m back from Unsound and, before that, a quick trip to Palma, where I was speaking at the In-Edit on Tour festival, and I feel like I may never catch up on all the listening I want (and need) to do. Making matters worse, this week I head back to Portland for 10 days. I told myself I’d try to make today’s newsletter a lightning round—more records, shorter writeups—but of course I have failed miserably at the “shorter” part. In any case, after too many weeks without a proper new-releases roundup, I’m trying to right the ship with today’s newsletter, which features new releases from Actress, Maral, More Eaze, Thurston Moore, and, uh, more.
Some sad news came across my feeds a couple of weeks ago: The Wighnomy Brothers’ Sören Bodner, better known as Monkey Maffia, passed away. I don’t know the details, and I didn’t really know him, although I spent a weekend with the whole Freude am Tanzen crew in Jena, Germany, back in 2005, and I remember him as a generous host and beautiful human being. It’s hard for me to overstate the influence that the Wighnomy Brothers—which was Sören’s duo with Robag Wruhme, aka Gabor Schablitzki—had on me (even though it’s my understanding that Gabor was the chief producer in the duo). Their early productions, as well as their remixes, struck a thrilling balance between ravey abandon and IDM precision, and they were an absolute hoot behind the decks. He was, especially. Post-Wighnomys, it was Robag’s career that took off, but Sören continued DJing and remained a crucial member of the Jena scene gathered around the Fatplastics record store. RIP and much love to the Jena crew.
Over the weekend, dance music experienced another loss: Scottish DJ Jackmaster, a NUMBERS co-founder, and one of the most celebrated DJs of his generation—one of the few DJs, in fact, who made his name entirely on the back of his DJing. Jackmaster, aka Jack Revill, was known for both his range and and his intuition, qualities in ample supply in mixes like his 2011 FabricLive 57—which you might call a survey in the history of dance music (covering Inner City, Model 500, AFX, and Thomas Bangalter alongside HudMo, Addison Groove, and Skepta), except there was nothing academic about his mixing. I didn’t know Jack personally, but I understood that he was, as Optimo’s JD Twitch put it, “complicated.” He’d made mistakes—in 2018, he attempted to grab and kiss a number of festival staffers while blacked out on GHB—but had also put in the work to try to atone for them. And reading just a few of the testimonials his peers have left him offer a sense of his generosity of spirit. According to a statement given by his family, he died on Ibiza after “complications arising from an accidental head injury.” RA’s Gabriel Szatan wrote a soul-searching remembrance of him this week, and quoted something from Jackmaster’s 2018 “Art of DJing” profile that gave me pause: “It's one of my real regrets, that this portrayal of me as a party boy is maybe leading impressionable young music heads to see and replicate that mentality as a benchmark of cool. Jackmaster is expected to be this guy who is the life and soul, cracking jokes, good times personified. But there is a difference between Jackmaster and Jack Revill. I can't turn it on all the time. That can be very draining because a long party really takes it out of you at the best of times. I've seen quite a lot of DJs fall by the wayside.” Whatever happened, it’s a tragic loss. He was 38 years old.
And yet one more loss that was reported in between writing the bulk of this newsletter and preparing to publish it: Ka, the fiercely independent Brownsville rapper who labored in secrecy before he was finally outed as a New York City Fire Department captain. I don’t pay a ton of attention to rap music these days, but I was instantly captivated by his 2013 album The Night’s Gambit. The dusty, claustrophobic air; the rasp in his voice; the ominously knotted wordplay; the fierce and unflinching moral center—all of it spoke to a one-of-a-kind talent, one that he only continued to sharpen over subsequent releases, all while remaining proudly outside the industry machine.
In happier news, Grayson Haver-Currin, Libby Rodbenbough, and David Walker have put together a 136-track compilation to support flood-relief efforts in North Carolina. Artists contributing exclusive tracks include Angel Olsen, the War on Drugs, Lambchop, Yasmin Williams, Waxahatchee, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Helado NEgro, William Tyler, Daniel Bachman, Deer Tick, Chuck Johnson, Laraaji, Feist, Jeff Tweedy, MJ Lenderman, J.C. McEntire, Iron & Wine, the Mountain Goats, Superchunk, Wye Oak, Sharon Van Etten, Bill Orcutt—the list goes one. (Even R.E.M.!) As of today, it’s in more than 14,000 collections, which, at $10 a pop, means that it’s collected at least $140,000 dollars—and probably a good deal more, since many people will be paying more than the minimum. (I certainly did.)
One more piece of happy news: A number of my former Pitchfork colleagues—Jill Mapes, Ryan Dombal, Andy Cush, Dylan Green, and Julian Escobedo Shepherd—have launched a new music publication, Hearing Things. I had in fact been, um, hearing things about it for a while, and I’m thrilled to see it finally live. (Love seeing illustrations from the great María Medem there, too.) These are some of my very favorite music writers in the world, and I can’t wait to see what they do with their platform. So far they’ve published a robust mix of reviews, interviews, features, and one list (where I was happy to see Beatrice Dillon featured). Subscriptions are $70 a year, and I don’t need to tell you how quickly I smashed that button.
Finally, some housekeeping: This 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 (not at 23 hours and 19 hours long, respectively), the semi-regular Mixes Digest posts (due for an update shortly!), and full access to the archives, including interviews with Seefeel’s Mark Clifford, Kompakt’s Michael Mayer, and more.
Phew… Let’s hear some music, no?
Record of the Week
More Eaze: lacuna and parlor (Mondoj)
The KLF meet Gastr del Sol on Mari Maurice’s gorgeous (and faintly epic) new album lacuna and parlor. Not literally, of course, though you can imagine it’s true if you like. The KLF are there in the pedal steel that goes slipping across the album like honeysuckle on the wind, though if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s probably more Daniel Lanois. Gastr del Sol are there in the way More Eaze’s acoustic textures and minimalist pulses get bunched and digitally crinkled, like a wad of cellophane (in the soft bits) or a car on fire (in the heavy parts). The occasional wisp of Auto-Tune flits about the edges. What starts out like dulcet ambient country on the lilting opener “waltz (in memoriam old ways of living)” turns stranger on the 20-minute “blanking intervals,” with its minimalist pulses and snowballing dissonance, then dissolves in “leap year compersion,” a mixture of violin, synth, and untreated vocals that smears like the northern lights. Violins twine on “materials for memory,” weaving a loosely knotted frame for piano chords that fall patiently like idle thoughts, unhurried and unbidden. The biting edge of the bow on “chords, room, solo” slices cleanly through the silence of “chords, room, solo,” cutting a path for a river of harmony to trickle through, like blood, against a backdrop of murmurs and echo. “a(nother) cadence” is a bracing, seven-minute exercise for solo violin; somehow I feel like she must be a fan of Kim Kashkashian’s Paul Hindemith recordings on ECM New Series. The closing “adagio for pedal steel ensemble and overdubbed room” is the gentlest sort of comedown, layering a plaintive pedal-steel melody over soft metallic loops. It’s a beautifully understated finale to an album whose outward ease—no pun intended, at all—belies its depths.
Albums and EPs
mu tate: wanting less (Warm Winters Ltd.)
After releases on Experiences Ltd. and Utter, Latvia’s mu tate comes to Bratislava’s great Warm Winters Ltd. label with a gorgeous album of static drift and milky swirl. It’s an elusive album, so formless that it can be tough to fix in the mind at first. The shirred textures and shimmery accents suggest an affinity with Huerco S. and the West Mineral Ltd. realm. The more I listen, though, the more I’m reminded of another reference point: the dusty clatter and film-projector buzz of early Vladislav Delay, particularly Entain. Just check the hints of subaquatic jazz percussion of the opening “your host,” or the amoebic bass swells of “sweat.” The whole thing is an ASMR aficionado’s dream; tracks like “basement” offer a feast of texture rippling across the stereo field, and what seems outwardly wispy masks a far more substantial—albeit entirely mysterious—essence. One of the year’s finest ambient albums.
NEXCYIA: Exodus (Haunter)
Exodus is Adam Dove’s second album under his NEXCYIA alias in just a year. Like the March release Endless Path of Memory, it hints at narratives that are never fully revealed. In Endless Path of Memory, calming, somewhat somber ambient washes are roiled by unseen forces, forever at risk of being torn apart; the mood is one of sorrowful grace, and solemn inevitability. Similar feelings ripple through Exodus, which was inspired by his family’s move from Bryan, Texas, a small town halfway between Houston and Austin, to Los Angeles. Occasionally, a voice from the family archives will murmur up from the depths, obliquely, a magnetic echo making its way back to us through the decades. But for the most part, the nature of Dove’s family history is a private one, leaving us to grapple with pure sensation—the low, clanging piano chords, tolling like church bells; the sirens spiraling through “meadow,” so low in the mix I turned down the volume, multiple times, to see if they were bleeding in from the street; the insistent rhythms knifing across the surface of “fade,” like angry crickets or nighttime helicopters. Halfway between GAS and Huerco S., it’s a vision of ambient music where to feel unsettled is half the pleasure.
Actress: Дарен Дж. Каннінгем (Smalltown Supersound)
Back in May, Actress used his RA podcast slot as the canvas for a collage-like mix of all original material, all of it unreleased; now, following June’s Statik, for Smalltown Supersound, he returns to the Norwegian label with a physical edition—vinyl, CD, or tape—of the same set. According to Boomkat, the set folds in some 100 different tracks. Perhaps there’s a prize for anyone who could guess the correct number, like M&Ms in a jar—part of what makes Actress’ music tick, of course, is the way his all-pervasive haze erases the boundaries between discrete elements and ideas, and things are no different here. The 54-minute set glides laterally through dustball techno, pitch-bent pads, desultory piano riffs, bitcrushed video-game effects and further tropes from Cunningham’s customary toolkit, and it’s all woven together in such a way that it pulls you deeper in the further it goes. There are no huge surprises here; any of these tracks might have slotted into virtually any of his albums over the years. But that’s hardly a knock against it; Дарен Дж. Каннінгем captures Actress at his hypnotic best.
Reymour: No Land (Knekelhuis)
Reymour’s Lou Savary and Luc Bersier grew up in small-town Switzerland, but it seems entirely fitting that they should live in Brussels today, because the music they make as Reymour is so clearly indebted to the new-wave legacy of the Belgian capital. Released on Amsterdam’s Knekelhuis label and billed as their second official full-length, No Land gathers 14 short-ish tracks of jewel-toned keys, reverbed-out drum machines, drainpipe bass, and fetching vocal melodies, all of it with a faintly (but never aggressively) retro cast. There’s more than a little Broadcast in the hazy vocals, chromatic changes, and dubbed-out marimba of a track like “Sans éveil,” while the ambient “Interlude” sounds like a hauntological take on Ry Cooder’s desert fantasies. They’re also just really, really good with a riff; “A l’éternelle” suggests a duo that has spent its time studying the Breeders. The mood throughout is faintly spooky but also playful, happy to entertain supernatural notions, but never taking itself too seriously—call it Ouija board pop, perhaps, in which every song seems to float from note to note, all of its own accord.
Alan Licht: Havens (VDSQ)
I love a cover that blindsides you. Having finally read Edward Beaver’s accompanying text for Alan Licht’s first major solo album in nine years, I can now recognize the shape of the Stooges’ “1970” moving inside Licht’s solo guitar version, which closes the album, but despite the stealthy presence of that up-and-down riff, I’m not sure I would have figured it out on my own, given the way his ringing chords and open tunings blow the harmonic dimensions of the song wide open. Havens apparently grew out of Licht’s 2015 album of solo acoustic guitar, Currents: Inspired by the way the songs changed in a live context, amplified by electricity and air, he pursued that sense of billowing volume in the studio this time, using both electric and acoustic guitars, and strumming rich, resonant chords into rainbow-like arrays of tone. He covers plenty of ground within that format; “Nonchalant” strikes a meditative, Faheyesque pose, while “Frank Sinatra Drive” could almost be a Yo La Tengo jam, right down to the title. “The Daily Sit,” “Five Chords and a Sword,” and the title track, meanwhile, are all prismatic stunners (the latter featuring a three and a half minute Mellotron drone outro). Cue this one up for your next long drive.
Thurston Moore: Flow Critical Lucidity (Daydream Library Series)
While we’re on the subject of guitar albums, Thurston Moore’s new one is kind of great! I’ll admit that I haven’t paid much attention to his post-Sonic Youth solo catalog; in fact, I stopped closely following Sonic Youth sometime around Washing Machine or A Thousand Leaves (listening back to that one, I’ve definitely heard it, but I have no real memory of it). Right from the start, it’s steeped in sly good humor—“New in Town” has a sneaky Beatnik vibe, between the bongo rhythm and murmured rhymes (“Yo yo yo, hear that pound/It’s me so high off the ground/The tribe and levels are sound/Just plugged in, you’re new in town”), and how am I not going to love a song that namechecks Minor Threat, Teen Idles, Bad Brains, Fugazi, and other DC hardcore titans? But the opener’s a fake-out of sorts; “Sans Limites,” which follows, stacks guitar harmonies sky-high, bristling with harmonics; “Shadow” proves his knack for wrangling the sharpest hooks out of the most unassuming materials. There’s nothing particularly new here, but it’s a warm, almost reassuring sound, and I like hearing how sweet he can sound on a love song like “Hypnogram” (“Escaping inside/Our own telescope/A universe of shimmering hope”). What might be most surprising—to me, anyway—is how good it feels to tap back into this classic, classic sound. Sometimes going back to your roots just feels right; that seems to be the case for Moore, too.
Felbm & Louis Reith: G, A & D (Objects & Sounds)
Ghent’s Objects & Sounds label specializes in ambient music—full disclosure, their online zine did a feature on my label, Balmat, last month—and while they’ve had a label since 2021, this short, elegant album from Dutch musicians Felbm (Eelco Topper) and Louis Reith is their first vinyl release. Per their respective contrasting styles, and utilizing a supple electroacoustic palette of mallet instruments, singing bowls, synths, and tape loops, G, A & D (a musical pun on “Gand,” the French name for Ghent) strikes a delicate balance between foggy abstraction and expressive musicality—like the gorgeous piano melodies that periodically surface from the murk—and it’s all set against atmospheric field recordings made during their residency together in the Belgian city. It’s a lovely, gentle record, perfect for a good book on a rainy afternoon.
Mark Templeton: Two Verses (Faitiche)
Reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes form the raw material of Mark Templeton’s woozy collages, although as for what’s on those tapes in the first place, your guess is as good as mine. Plunks and clonks and slowed-down flutes, burrs of static, thickets of strings—it’s all swirled into fogbanks of wow and flutter, smudged and smeared, as much a plastic art as a sonorous one. For Two Verses, the Edmonton musician and multi-media artist gave Andrew Pekler access to a batch of unreleased material from his old hard drives, which the Faitiche regular proceeded to rework according to his own abstract fashion. The overall effect is a blur blurred twice over, taking us even further from the original source material and deeper down a rabbit hole of gelatinous, slow-motion psychedelia.
Glyn Maier: Interbedded Gneiss II (Enmossed)
As a fundraiser for local disaster relief, Glyn Maier, of North Carolina’s Enmossed label, has put together a mixtape described simply as “60 minutes of LPs pitched down between 20-50%.” No idea what the actual contents are, but the results are rapturously enveloping, a thick smear of ambient washes, plucked guitar, gamelan-like percussion, and even a scrap of French speech, all of it bleary and gummy. The narcotic smooth-jazz outro makes for a delightful curveball.
Midland: Fragments of Us (Graded)
It takes guts to notch a hit as big as Midland’s “Final Credits” (28 million Spotify streams, another 5 million on YouTube) and simply walk away from it. The UK producer’s 2016 single—which sampled the same Gladys Knight song that DJ Koze would go on to use in 2018’s “Pick Up”[correction: as the intrepid sample-spotter Michael Mayer pointed out to me, “Final Credits” is principally based on Lee Alfred’s “Rockin - Poppin Full Tilting,” though it does include a small Gladys Knight sample in the mix]—was one of the biggest tunes of the 2016 and 2017 festival seasons, the kind of disco-fueled anthem that’s tailor made for outdoor stages and sundown set-closers. But it was also something of a curveball for Midland, aka Harry Agius, who came up in the early 2010s making a much subtler blend of deep house and bass music. (His Graded label, meanwhile, has been responsible for some brilliant techno and electro, like this stunner of an EP from Solitary Dancer.) In the years since, Agius returned to more idiosyncratic club styles, and with Fragments of Us, he delivers something more personal: a concept album, of sorts, about the intertwined histories of gay culture(s) and dance music.
Sometimes the links are merely hinted at, as in the opening instrumental “Omi Palone,” whose title comes from Polari, a secretive lingo popular in gay communities in the UK in the early 1900s. Elsewhere, the subject matter couldn’t be plainer: “In My Head” samples archival news broadcasts about Section 28, a set of laws that were part of Thatcher’s punitive approach to homosexuality; “David’s Dream” is constructed around a heartbreaking journal entry from David Wojnarowicz, in which the New York artist muses on the AIDS crisis that was then raging around him. “I just feel very desolate, very sad, very anxious, a little bit scared,” he says, sounding completely broken. “And the thing that I keep thinking about is my own death—of not wanting to die, this incredible fear of dying. Um, if I really think about it, if I think of sentences like, ‘Are you going to David’s funeral,’ or ‘Are you going to Wojnarowicz’s funeral,’ I just think—I mean, I freeze. Because I think of myself lying inside some plain box, or whatever form of burial I’ll someday have, and it just makes me freeze. What with the disease. Most of my friends… maybe the people I most cared about have died.” It’s haunting.
Midland takes pains to ground his meditations in the language of the dancefloor. “You Said You’d Be Good” spins early-’80s synth pop into cracking electro; “Chapter 10” sculpts wistful synths into a kind of broken techno; “Ritual” reshapes Arthur Russell samples into dusty UK garage. But the overall mood is contemplative rather than celebratory, the vibe less club music than listening music—listening, above all, for traces of the voices that were lost too soon and too young.
Maral: Patience (صبر) (PTP)
Los Angeles’ Maral takes an archaeological approach to her early work on Patience (صبر), sifting through historical layers. The 2013 cut “Patience”—the penultimate track here—is one of her first productions to sample Iranian folk music, setting a wistful vocal refrain to a moombahton-derived beat that ends up sounding more like one of Andy Stott’s slo-mo dirges. “Patience for an Old Friend,” which opens the EP, is a 2020 version of the same material, this time leaning even harder on Iranian folk samples, and flipping the beat into an overdriven wallop that could send the Bug himself scuttling for cover. “Intense” doesn’t begin to describe it. “Retrofit,” featuring the PTP artist YATTA, is apocalyptic dancehall, seductive and menacing in equal measure. Elsewhere, on a trilogy of furious, lo-fi chuggers, she puts drum machines and samples in service of punk indignation, and she torches everything on “Big Hands Reggaeton,” which mashes up anarcho-punks Crass with dembow at its gnarliest.
Malibu: La Fille Qui Explose OST (self-released)
I haven’t seen directors Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s 2024 short film La Fille Qui Explose (The Exploding Girl, not to be confused a 2009 feature of the same name); the animated short is apparently about a girl who does just that, explodes again and again, on a daily basis. Malibu’s soundtrack, however (which she’s adapted to Bandcamp, unmixed and unmastered, for anyone who wanted to listen “without the explosions”), is anything but explosive—like all of Malibu’s work, it’s a kind of synthetic symphonic ambient music of deep, aquatic calm, suffused in angelic vocals and touched with shimmering, beatless trance. It’s the kind of thing that, for my tastes, could so easily go off piste, yet Malibu somehow convinces me every time.
Balmat News
Tom Cathcart, of the UK’s wonderful Last Resort label—the overseas HQ for all the great records coming out of the Akron scene (Gabe Schray, K. Freund, Lemon Quartet, Aqueduct Ensemble, et al.) recently asked Balmat to submit a guest mix for Last Resort’s NTS show. I think it came out pretty great. I stuck to ambient and ambient-adjacent material—you’ll recognize much of it from recent issues of the newsletter—and, in a lot of cases, songs folding together acoustic and electronic textures. And I closed out with a song from Hugo Largo’s Drum—one of my favorite records ever since it came out in 1987, now finally reissued. Listen back on NTS, Mixcloud, or in the SoundCloud embed below.
1. Luke Wyland - Unwinding (Kuma Cove, Balmat)
2. James K - Sketch 4 (UltraBody, 29 Speedway)
3. Civilistsjävel! - IV ft. Mayssa Jalla (Brödföda, FELT)
4. Seefeel - Multifolds (Everything Squared, Warp)
5. NEXCYIA - soak (Exodus, Haunter)
6. Jake Muir - Mirage (UltraBody, 29 Speedway)
7. Oliver Coates - 90 (Throb, shiver, arrow of time, RVNG Intl.)
8. Marina Herlop - Collige Virgo Gladium (VINT, Lapsus)
9. mu tate - sweat (wanting less, Transparent)
10. Luke Sanger - 6am Beach Walk (Dew Point Harmonics, Balmat)
11. Alejandro Cohen - The Seven Dolphins (Chamber of Tears, Geographic North)
12. more eaze - waltz (in memoriam old ways of living) (lacuna and parlor, Mondoj)
13. Hugo Largo - Grow Wild (Drum, Missing Piece)
That’s it for this week—thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more new-release recommendations next week!
Definitely going to check out that Thurston Moore album. Thanks also for the reminders on Actress, mu tate and some others which I have already queued up in my listening pile. So much good music right now! (Not complaining.)
Give a listen to "Hoarfrost" on 1000 Leaves. A Lee Ranaldo track, one of his best...
:)