Futurism Restated #92: Soft-Focus Meridians

New albums from upsammy, Jeff Parker, Juana Molina, and more.

Can you feel it? I sure can: The year is drawing to a close, and as strange and apprehensive as the general vibe may be, the mood, or at least my mood, is closely keyed to that odd period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the media world bangs out the year’s final work before that blissful reprieve between Christmas and New Year’s, the closest thing we get to a holiday.

At Pitchfork, our year-end lists have begun rolling out; I wrote about Jessica Pratt and Objekt & Djrum for the songs list, and Pratt once again for the albums list. Her album Here in the Pitch was one of my very favorite records this year, yet I never actually got to write about it in a critical context, so it was a pleasure to get to engage with it in writing, even if only in blurb format. (I did write a bit about her wonderful recent Barcelona concert a few weeks back in FR91; if you get the chance to see her, don’t miss it.)

I’ll be putting together an annotated year-end list for Futurism Restated as well; that’ll probably be coming the week before Christmas. Stay tuned.

This week’s newsletter is dedicated to new and recent releases, including a wonderfully odd ambient full-length from upsammy, the triumphant return of Juana Molina, a season-appropriate ambient gem from Fan Club Orchestra, and more. I also recommend a wonderful 2022 documentary, Music for Black Pigeons, that will be of particular interest to ECM fans, but really, anyone who’s interested in the fundamental mystery of music should seek it out.

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, as well as last week’s Thanksgiving playlist; the semi-regular Mixes Digest posts; and full access to the archives, including interviews with Belong, Seefeel’s Mark Clifford, Kompakt’s Michael Mayer, and more.

Record of the Week

upsammy: Strange Meridians (Topo2)

I fell in love with upsammy’s Strange Meridians on my first listen—which quickly turned into three or four back-to-back spins, half-asleep on a long flight—and my fondness for the album has only grown over time. So has my fascination, because Strange Meridians is one of those rare albums I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s a fantastic first release for ex-Dekmantel director / A&R Bert de Rooij’s new label topo2.

It’s nominally Dutch producer Thessa Torsing’s first ambient album, but while it is indeed that, hers is a curious take on the genre: calming but emotionally ambiguous; atmospheric but also strangely airless. It’s a remarkably dry recording; despite the fact that she makes ample use of the delay chain (in the tradition of some of the best tracks on Aphex Twin’s SAW II), there’s very little reverb, and even her chimes have relatively short decays. The result is a record that seems to flicker against the blackness, like fireflies bobbing in the middle distance, pinprick points of light flaring up and burning out in quick succession. It’s a relatively simple record—there are rarely more than two or three parts at any given time, and her synths, while wonderfully resonant, sound like they could have been programmed at any point in the last 30 or 40 years—but behind that simplicity lies a cryptic atmosphere that keeps me guessing. I’ve written this elsewhere, but it feels like she wrote a far more complex record, then muted all but the merest handful of channels on her mixing desk, leaving us with nothing more than ghostly tracers of an album whose bulk lies beneath the silent surface.

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Albums

Juana Molina: EXHALO (Butterfly)

I’ve been hoping for a new Juana Molina album for a while, and while this isn’t that—these four tracks are home demos dating from around the time of her last studio album, 2017’s Halo—it’s nonetheless a welcome development.

The new EP is rougher and rawer than Halo; in place of that album’s muted psychedelic swirl, the instruments sound slightly more upfront here—but only just, really. “Astro de la luz segunda” starts out with a twisted thicket of detuned guitars and digs into gritty chords that remind me of her very rock-centric Sónar performance a few years ago, before an electronic beat enfolds the whole thing like an embrace and her voice fills in the midrange like a colored liquid. “Invierno” is minimalist and gorgeously overdriven, frequencies rumbling into the red. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Juana Molina unplugged, the skeletal, acoustic “Vagos Iagos” is probably as close as you’re going to get, and it’s so good that it makes me wish for an entire acoustic album from her, honestly. The closing “Hope” feels the most like her album tracks; everything feels just on the verge of melting, or dissipating, of shifting from one state of matter (matter, liquid) to the next (liquid, gas). Atoms quiver, outlines blur, and everything—rippling guitar, bedrock bass, her voice twisted six ways from Sunday—vibrates with the ecstasy of coming undone. (Speaking of Halo: It had been a while since I listened to that album, and my god, I’d forgotten how great it is. Why we don’t all talk about Juana Molina far more often is beyond me; I feel like we’ve been taking her for granted for decades.)

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Jeff Parker & ETA IVtet: The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem)

I don’t often write about jazz; I feel out of my element, just because I’m not terribly well versed in the tradition. But The Way out of Easy is so immediate—like all of Parker’s work, really—that I don’t feel quite so out of my depth. As with Mondays at the Enfield Academy, we’ve got four long tracks, all recorded live in Los Angeles, with four players—Anna Butterss on bass, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone, Jay Bellerose on drums, and Parker on guitar—with practically telepathic powers of communication. The opening track, “Freakadelic” (and at 23:50, the longest), rides a spacey, skeletal funk groove that reminds me of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions” (or, as Mark Richardson points out in his excellent Pitchfork review, Art Blakey’s “A Chant for Bu,” which Tribe sampled). The opening melody, carried by Johnson and Parker in tandem, is both cryptic and intuitive, the kind of thing you feel like might be capable of unlocking universal secrets. I love the way the players circle each other over the track’s run, each one carving out their own little corner. And the shifts in tempo and time signature halfway through, leading to a long psychedelic excursion, are fascinating to follow. My favorite of the album’s four cuts—and the one I put on Futurism Restated’s don’t-call-it-a-Thanksgiving playlist—is the appropriately titled “Late Autumn,” the record’s softest, most lyrical track. The sensitivity of Johnson’s playing, especially early on, gets me every time, and I love the way the players come together in a porous, dubby groove in the second half. On my trip to Portland in October, the album was my go-to soundtrack in the car, and it proved the perfect companion for mind-erasing drives.

Some fun Jeff Parker trivia: I was listening back to some old Smog records, in preparation for a Bill Callahan review that’ll run tomorrow, and I’d completely forgotten that Parker plays on Dongs of Sevotion, a real gem in Callahan’s catalog.

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Tashi Dorji: we will be wherever the fires are lit (Drag City)

I feel a bit about guitar music the way I do about jazz: I don’t play the instrument, and I have no technical grounding in it, so sometimes it’s hard for me to articulate what makes a given record click for me. That’s not always the case, of course; I’ve written at length about Raphael Rogiński, for example. But sometimes, with guitar music, I have a harder time finding a critical foothold. Tashi Dorji is a little bit like that for me. I went down a deep rabbit hole with his music in 2020; in fact, I wrote about that experience for Unsound’s Intermissions, an anthology of writing rooted in that strange pandemic year. And I wrote about his Drag City debut, Stateless, for Pitchfork that fall. But with some of his more dissonant, Derek Bailey-esque recordings, I’d be hard pressed to offer much insight; I just let the music wash over me.

we will be wherever the fires are lit is among his more “structured” works, even though I’m guessing it’s all improvised; the songs tend to hew to a reassuring tonal center, and repetition and pulse play an outsized role in many pieces. As usual, you can hear many different sounds and styles flitting through his music like dry leaves on the wind—bits of blues both American and Saharan, scraps of punk and even industrial, the open-tuned reveries of John Fahey and the charred ostinatos of Sunn O))). Grayson Currin, in his wonderful review for Pitchfork, explores the political valences of Dorji’s work, in which these wordless, often heavily abstracted guitar meditations can be taken as fuel for smashing what is wrong in the world and building something better from the ruins. It’s an idealistic reading, but you can certainly hear that intention in Dorji’s playing. This is music of deep, searching commitment.

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Fan Club Orchestra: VL_Stay (12th Isle)

Fan Club Orchestra go back more than two decades on the Brussels scene and were originally, apparently, a loose assemblage of players—some trained, some amateur—improvising on a motley array of instruments both acoustic and electronic (including Game Boys). (Mark Richardson wrote a fascinating review of one of their albums way back in 2002, because of course he did.) I have vague memories of a 2005 CD on Sonig, which also put out material from the related Scratch Pet Land project, but this new album, featuring original members Laurent Badoux and Ann Appermans, along with trumpeter Zéphyr Zijlstra, is a world away from that record’s wooly, wonky krautrock vibes. It’s the kind of ambient music that’s so simple that it’s difficult to find words for. Pads sail icily toward the horizon, flat frozen lakes glinting in gray light; lone tendrils of guitar lend a tinge of Americana, while Zijlstra’s processed trumpet flashes back to Jon Hassell. Nothing really happens; gaseous pads billow in sunset-colored clouds, while electric bass bobs slowly up and down. It’s an incredibly easy listen, yet it never feels facile; it’s dulcet but never sentimental. It resides in that vibe-warming sweet spot that RVNG and Moon Glyph do so well—a no-frills ambient companion for the winter months to come, and the thaw that follows.

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Pondlicker: Soft Focus (naff)

Pondlicker seems to be a new alias from Montreal’s Adam Feingold, formerly known as Ex-Terrestrial, and a co-founder of naff, the label behind records from Priori, Cousin, and Purelink. I always loved the mossy Balearic house vibes of Ex-Terrestrial’s self-titled 2017 debut; Pondlicker’s Soft Focus translates that understated sensibility to a strain of ambient dub techno in keeping with many of his naff labelmates. It’s a fitting title; all five tracks sink deep into an appealing blur in which there are few fixed reference points, no sharp edges. GAS fans will swoon at the opening “noomi,” with its shoomping boom-hiss beat festooned in oodles of lush pads and chimes. “pluck” is similarly GAS-like, with an even more voluminous low end and even more vaporous highs, those scritchy-scratch hi-hats running like a two-lane highway’s dividing line all the way to the horizon. Turn it up loud and marvel at what you find clicking and clacking its way through the glow. “never hit the bottom” is dnb-tempo ambient dub and “lick” rubs away all but the last trace of the beat, leaving little more than rumbling bass and chordal swirl. But my favorite is “orchid media,” in which reverberant guitar and flyaway synth arps meld into one of the dreamiest examples of dub techno I’ve heard in ages.

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Lifted: Trellis (Peak Oil)

I reviewed this one for Pitchfork, so I won’t say too much about it here, except to note that it’s one of my favorites this fall. I love how effortlessly it rides the line between blown-out abstraction and the kind of structure that you can hang onto—whether a scrap of melody, a reassuring loop, or the subterranean vibrations of Max D’s drumming. And two tracks in particular—the wistful piano meditation “Open Door” and the foggier “The Latecomer”—are exactly the kind of melancholy (yet not maudlin!) mood music I can’t get enough of.

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Various, Piano 1 (Section 1)

I have a few minor gripes about Piano 1, a new compilation of piano music from Section 1, a Los Angeles label I wasn’t previously familiar with. They frame the compilation in the sorts of scientistic terms (“Research has shown that music, especially with a slower tempo and minimal harmonious melodies, can help lower cortisol levels…”) that I find hugely unappealing. I come to a given piece of music for its musical qualities, not for some desired effect on my heart rate. Secondly, the presentation leaves something to be desired; the Bandcamp page doesn’t even list the artists alongside their respective tracks, which, given the talent here—Laraaji, Kelly Moran, ML freaking Buch—feels like a missed opportunity. (You can find the full tracklisting here.) The music, though, is lovely, at least for those of a Satie-esque (or, sure, Windham Hill-esque) disposition. Kelly Moran’s “Heart Thread” is a wistful modal improvisation; Hand Habits’ “Not Worth the Lie” is chordal and elegiac; and pieces from Brad Oberhofer and Alan Wyffels, both new names to me, do fascinating things with harmony. A few selections, like Youth Lagoon’s “The Harvest,” tip a little too far into new-age schmaltz for my taste. But the ML Buch, no surprise, is a keeper.

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EPs

Bruce & Eris FM: The Fool In Reverse / Red (Pain Management)

A curveball from Bruce, via Berlin’s fledgling Pain Management label (what a great name), a leftfield club imprint run by Significant Other. (Check his own When It Rains EP, the label’s inaugural release, from back in May, for four killer tracks of outer-limits, Mark van Hoen-esque trip-hop, including a great James K collab.) The Bristol producer has been branching out from his customary, counterintuitive bass anthems for a while; on last year’s Ready EP, for Timedance, he experimented with a kind of twisted, industrial-tinged vocal pop. “The Fool in Reverse” opens up a third path for his music: grinding, lysergic dub, washed in corrosive distortion and then, toward the end, medieval sounding strings. Eris FM intones an ominous monologue (“When the fool is in reverse, turn your phone off, tell no one where you are…”) that clubbers on psychedelics might want to avoid (or maybe not!). On the B-side, “Red” takes up the same textures but morphs the beat into a gentle heartbeat pulse, while Eris FM’s mostly indecipherable speaking is framed against rosy drones; it’s like Fennesz reimagined for soundsystem culture.

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Shed: Applications (Ilian Tape)

Head High: 2nd-Hand Bassline (Power House)

Ilian Tape has been so prolific lately, it can be hard to keep up with everything they’re putting out—and the same goes for René Pawlowitz, better known as Shed (but also EQD, STP, WK7, the Panamax Project, Hoover1, and a dozen or so other aliases). Shed on Ilian Tape is the perfect pairing—both have a similar interest in heavyweight grooves that look back on UK club traditions without sounding overly imitative—so it’s surprising to find that this is actually Pawlowitz’s first time recording for the Munich label. All three tracks here are among his finest. You may come for the absolutely pummeling grooves, but what really makes them special is the way more detailed, even delicate sounds peel away from the melee, hovering just above the fray, particularly in the muscular “EMCZ” and the more blissed-out “TLSQ.” (What can I say, the man loves him some acronyms.) Few dance producers have a more finely calibrated control of the frequency spectrum than he does. “2nd-Hand Bassline,” from his housier Head High alias, came out back in October, but it’s also worth a listen; here, he displays a slightly lighter touch, arraying silvery chord stabs and the merest sliver of a vocal chop of his characteristic low-end chug, while “Agatha” and “Agatha (Dirt Mix)” veer toward deep house. (Thanks to Andrew Ryce’s Futureproofing for reminding me about the Head High record.)

I think I’ll always feel fondly toward the Head High project simply because I have such strong memories of buying Power House 303 (WK7’s “Do It Yourself” b/w Head High’s “Rave”) at Hard Wax in 2012. It was a white label with no info whatsoever, just the word “RAVE” scrawled in silver sharpie. I think I was just lucky enough to be in the store the day those came in. It eventually got a proper release, but for a minute there, that record felt like a gift from the heavens. That was my last year in Berlin; I was still playing out semi-regularly at Horst (RIP), and I played “Do It Yourself” every damn chance I got, usually blended with a copy of Mad Mike Banks’ “Heartbeat of a Groove” (Happy Trax #1, 1992) that I’d picked up at a Neukölln flea market, if I remember correctly, for a euro or two. Those two records pretty much epitomize euphoric house music, as far as I’m concerned. Good times.

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cheby: ~1 (Ro Pax)

WeGo.: Less “Ugga-Mugga” in the 155 area / Trommel Nr. (Wrk-Dat)

Girl Scout Cookies: Sax (Wrk-Dat)

I’ve been writing about Ro Pax, WeGo., and their expanded universe for a while, but I’m still no closer to really figuring out anything about them. Someone named cheby (aka Markus R, though that doesn’t help us much) is behind the latest release from the label: five tracks of skittering, fragmentary rhythms that land somewhere between drum & bass, Topdown Dialectic, James Devane, Cristian Vogell, and Autechre. There’s a strong suggestion of randomized software processes at work; intriguingly, a link from Bandcamp leads to the artist’s GitHub page, where they’ve uploaded a handful of patches for what I’m guessing is the software application Pure Data. Cryptic title aside, things get somewhat more streamlined on WeGo.’s latest, featuring two tracks of splintered techno grooves; the rolling bass and dubbed-out synth smears of “Less ‘Ugga-Mugga’ in the 155 area” (who isn’t saying that these days) are particularly gratifying. Finally, also from the crew’s Wrk-Dat label, there’s new alias Girl Scout Cookies with Sax, supposedly mastered by Gaspar Noé but somehow I have my doubts. Five tracks of slightly scuzzy techno that’s steeped in classic Klang/Ongaku sounds, but with a frenetic, absurdist edge that’s pure 2024. Imagine something halfway between Farben and Two Shell and you’re halfway there.

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A Recommended Film

Barcelona’s In-Edit festival tapped me to present the introductions to this year’s In-Edit On Tour in Palma de Mallorca. The highlight, hands down, was Music for Black Pigeons, from 2022, directed by Andreas Koefoed and Jørgen Leth. Loosely focused on the Danish guitarist Jakob Bro and a number of players in his orbit—Bill Frisell (who comes across as perhaps the kindest, gentlest human being on the planet), Arve Henriksen, Lee Konitz, Thomas Morgan, Midori Takada, even ECM founder Manfred Eicher—the film took shape across 14 years of filming in studios and green rooms and taxis. It’s a mixture of interviews and fly-on-the-wall footage; neither technique is particularly novel, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another film quite like it. The filmmakers’ aim is to understand the creative process—or, more precisely, the creative spirit. Some of their responses are quite striking. Takada and Joe Lovano both speak about music as a conduit for the dead; Lovano talks about the way, when he’s playing with a seasoned musician, he can feel the presence of all the legendary players they have played with, can feel them in the air with him. You could write it off as too woo-woo, but he says it with such sincerity that it makes perfect sense to me.

The film also doubles as a requiem for a number of its subjects who passed away during its making—notably saxophonist Lee Konitz, a veteran player who recorded with Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and many others. There’s a wonderful moment when Konitz, clearly an outsized character, a real force of nature, is standing in a snowy record store parking lot, somewhere in Scandinavia. “Is that a baby?” he exclaims, noticing an infant lying bundled in a stroller, all alone.

“It’s very normal,” a woman tells him. “His father is in there buying CDs. He’s even snoring.”

“I’d better go check,” Konitz says. He walks over to the baby, watches him in wonder for a while. Finally, the moment ends. “Have a nice life,” he tells the sleeping baby, as he wanders off. “A nice, long life.” It’s a poignant moment; at the time of filming, Konitz was 87 years old, just five years away from his own death, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, in April 2020. And the more I thought about the encounter, the more miraculous it began to seem to me. The person that this sleeping baby grows up to become will probably never know that in his infancy, a legendary jazz saxophonist wished him a nice life while he was asleep in his stroller. This serendipitous yet ultimately completely inconsequential encounter makes me think of the vast universes of possibility that we’re never aware of. Perhaps something similar happened to you. You’ll never know.

It’s a phenomenal movie, and though I’m not sure where or even if it can be streamed, I highly recommend seeking it out.

One more moment stands out. One is an interview with the double bassist Thomas Morgan, an exceedingly soft-spoken person; the thoughtfulness of his answers tells you that he has an uncommonly intimate relationship with music as a way of being in the world, a kind of spiritual practice. “When I see you play, I see that you’re totally absorbed in the process of playing your… Maybe use the expression ‘You lose yourself in the music,’” one of the filmmakers says to him. “How do you feel when you play?” Morgan stares at the camera, his gaze barely wavering; you can tell he’s deep in his mind. His lips half-open, then close again. After 28 seconds have gone by, he offers, “When playing music—” and then falls silent. After 13 seconds of silence, he asks, hesitantly, “Should I restate that, or…?” It’s an astonishing moment. Does he really believe that he’s answered the question? Did he formulate a thought in his mind that he thinks the filmmakers have heard?

“It’s interesting to hear how you see the process of playing in a context like this one,” the filmmaker offers, refocusing his question slightly. “How do you see the process of playing in a group that inspires you?” He adds, “I would like to know how it feels from inside, do you understand?” Morgan nods. “I’m not sure if you can find words for it,” suggests the filmmaker. “Yeah, I’m not sure,” Morgan says. He thinks for a long time, more than 30 seconds. Finally, he says, “I think playing music is so many things. It’s like a meditation that you lose yourself in. Then at the same time, you can be very focused on some specific thing. It can be problem-solving as well. You can… Sometimes you feel like there is some imbalance happening, and you try to see what you can change to restore balance to the music. And then hopefully that results in a situation where… where you’re not trying to do anything. It seems to happen by itself.”

I’ve interviewed scores of musicians over the years, and in my experience, it is so rare to find someone able to address the experience of playing music at a level like this—granular, technical, practical, even, but also tapping into what is, ultimately, music’s fundamental mystery, its fundamental unknowingness.

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Balmat News

DOVS: Psychic Geography (Balmat)

We’ve got a new album on the way, and once again, it’s completely unlike anything else we’ve put out, or so I like to think. This time, we sidle back toward the dancefloor, even though it’s a thoroughly ambient release. DOVS is the duo of acid maestro Tin Man (Vienna’s Johannes Auvinen) and AAAA (Mexico City’s Gabo Barranco); this is their second album together, but it’s the first time they’ve fully jettisoned beats. The result is some of the dreamiest weightless house/techno I’ve heard in ages. Out January 17; listen to two tracks now.

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