Futurism Restated #93: Trout, Worms, and UFOs
New releases from Moin, Niagara, Jas Shaw, and more
For anyone looking for a little escapist screen time over the holidays, boy, have I got a recommendation for you: Night Flight Plus, a streaming channel born from the ashes of Night Flight, the USA Network staple that brought import music videos and cult cinema to cable TV back in the early ’80s. The show provided some of my most formative experiences of alternative music culture—as I recount in a new piece for Pitchfork, an early encounter with Cabaret Voltaire’s “I Want You” video permanently flipped my lid—and looking at the streaming channel’s current lineup gives me heavy flashbacks to the video rental stores of my youth.
But Night Flight’s coverage goes way beyond cult classics; they’ve also got a growing collection of acclaimed music documentaries (on Arthur Russell, Bill Callahan, Scott Walker, Sun Ra, Other Music, Aquarius Records, and more), an extensive set of Factory 25 titles, and, for the truly nostalgic, original episodes of the TV show. For those who don’t know where to start, they’ve created a ton of helpful playlists (Video Nasties, Directed by Dario Argento, Undead: Zombie Essentials, etc.), or you can simply fire up either of their two real-time streaming channels, which serve up the classic lean-back pleasure of just turning on the TV and seeing what’s on. I spoke to original Night Flight founder Stuart Shapiro about his path from cable pioneer to streaming maverick, and let me tell you: He is a fascinating dude. Read the whole piece on Pitchfork here.
This week’s issue of Futurism Restated features a killer new LP from the guitars-and-drums trio of Moin (Raime’s Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead and drummer Valentina Maletti), via AD 93; a dank lo-fi techno tape from Portugal’s Niagara, put out by Lisbon scenemakers Príncipe Discos; a really nice collection of noodly synthesizer sketches from Jas Shaw; and more. On the clubbier end of the spectrum, some intriguing news from Will Hofbauer and Sangre Voss, who revealed the existence of a secret track hidden among the shards of white noise that have accompanied the recent series of EPs on their label whirm—like one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets, but reimagined for the Ableton age.
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 a recent 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.
Read on!
Record of the Week
Moin: You Never End (AD 93)
Despite having loved Raime, somehow I never really spent time with Moin, the duo’s subsequent group with Valentina Magaletti. I don’t know why, really; I think the emphasis on guitars and drums made me think they’d be the kind of UK post-punk I didn’t feel a huge need for more of in my life. But You Never End, their third album, has me captivated. It’s not really a UK post-punk retread at all; it has more to do with the melancholy dissonance of the Sonic Youth / Unwound axis, though it also dips, somewhat surprisingly, into grunge—just listen to the melodic lilt of Olan Monk’s vocals on “Guess It’s Wrecked,” and the way the guitars shadow them (a grunge-specific technique that’s all over the new Chat Pile, too). At the other end of the spectrum, “Anything but Sopo” replicates the guitar tone of Shellac’s At Action Park to an almost simulacral degree, then slots it into a completely different context provided by Magaletti’s unpredictable rhythmic bursts. It’s thrilling.
The focal point of the record lies in its guest vocals. James K supplies a nearly indecipherable wash of tone to contrast the gnarled guitar figures of “What If You Didn’t Need a Reason,” while Coby Sey murmurs gently beneath the silvery glint of “We Know What Gives,” one of my favorites. Qatari American writer, filmmaker, and artist Sophia Al-Maria has the two standouts, in part because her speaking voice is so appealing; you suspect she could read a terms and conditions document and make it sound good. On “Family Way” she delivers what sounds at first like a voice note to someone before slipping into a more explicitly poetic cadence. (Maybe it’s just the clanging guitars around her, but when she recites certain lines, I can’t help but hear Kim Gordon’s low-key drawl.) “Lift You” begins by breaking the fourth wall—“I just want to say I really appreciate this, because nobody ever asks to use my voice for a track,” she says, in what’s presumably a personal note the band decided to leave in—before she launches into a series of short, choppy statements that have the pithy, contemplative feel of daily affirmations, but steeped in conflict and laced with doubt. It is a poem about interpersonal communications and a poem about impersonal global forces, and the way the two things inevitably entwine:
“To read in a time of war. To read it again. To think about it. To read it aloud. To record it. To try again. To listen back. To send and unsend. To worry about getting old. To feel old. To remember I felt older before. To have experienced so much love. To have resisted. To be bitter, and think of you. To feel your mood like the weather. To not let it affect me anymore. To not let it affect me anymore. To feel angry, to know what you’re talking about. To fear being taken advantage of. To fear being used, to fear being poor forever, to fear ending up on the other side of a border. To fear imprisonment. To fear detention. To fear witch hunters and the generals. To know what will happen to the people I love. To know if it happened to me. To want to flee precarity. And create a structure, thinking about you and me. To draw the outline of your figure in my mind. To want to lift you. To want to lift you in grace out of gravity. To roll a smoke. To look at my phone. To blow out the smoke. To glance up…. To feel like a failure. To stop trying. To feel like a failure. To stop trying. To change the subject. To prefer not to talk. To laugh, to joke, to ask. Some new friends, an old question’s been bothering me. Do you believe one can love unconditionally? To want to run. To want to hide. To want to talk. To die of pride. To want to run. To want to talk. To die of pride.”
It’s a remarkable song—ruminative and grounded, reflective and autocritical, mirroring Al-Maria’s words with some of the brightest, crispest sounds on the whole record. Moin’s playing sounds almost mechanical: There’s a strange brightness to Magaletti’s (sampled?) open hi-hat hits; the guitars and drums lock together like gears. Much of the record, in fact, blurs the line between the played and the programmed. Perhaps this is the gauntlet that Moin have thrown down: While so much of the world is intent upon using AI to imitate human creation, these humans are using their bare hands to make something that could pass for a machine.
Albums
Niagara: De Motu (Príncipe)
Lisbon’s Niagara were responsible for one of the very first releases on Príncipe Discos, yet they’ve always felt a bit like the odd men out on the label, simply because they don’t make batida, which has long been Príncipe’s core sound. Instead, they ply a kind of psychedelic techno/house sound, drifting and unpredictable. I’m not sure they’ve ever sounded woozier than they do here, though some of that may have to do with the mixtape format, in which watery machine sequences melt into a kind of iridescent goo (complimentary). This is by far the most rhythmically focused of their recordings that I’ve heard, and the most techno, for lack of a better term; the gritty textures and muted colors frequently remind me of Kassem Mosse—in spirit, anyway, if not actual sound. Skeletal 4/4 kick/hat beats, FM synths glinting through thick fog, the occasional twinge of acid—it’s a mysterious, enveloping sound, and perfectly suited to a longform cassette mix that you just want to keep flipping over and over.
Ozoyo: Worm (Threefingers)
Speaking of woozy, the aptly titled Worm, from Istanbul’s Ozoyo, proposes a biomorphic wonderland rendered in iridescent, shape-shifting tones and pulses. New-age textures, hyper-digital sound design, footwork rhythms (kindred spirit Foodman appears on one track), and shuddering cadences combine into a strange, spongy mass that shares DNA with upsammy, RRUCCULLA, and even Jürgen Müller’s Science of the Sea.
Jas Shaw: A Tea Within a Tea (self-released)
Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford and Jas Shaw are a long way from their indie-dance roots, even if they did perform last month at Bugged Out!’s 30th-anniversary celebrations alongside peers like 2ManyDJs, Erol Alkan, Alexis Taylor, and Busy P. (For what it’s worth, SMD were always more unpredictable than the “blog house” designation might have suggested, never mind the notoriety of a certain world-conquering single; they tapped Shackleton for a remix way back in 2007, reinvented themselves as a techno act with 2010’s psychedelic Delicacies, and even tapped a journalist-cum-amateur-producer you might know for their 2010 mix CD Is Fixed. [I’m still honored, and flabbergasted, by my inclusion there; too bad I hate the track they chose.])
Shaw has spent years following his own idiosyncratic muse, teaming up with Gold Panda as Selling, digging into wonky machine techno with 2018’s Exquisite Cops, and then detouring into watery ambient with 2021’s three-part Solbruchstelle series. His new album A Tea Within a Tea is nominally ambient, in that it’s not explicitly beat-driven and not at all floor-focused, but it casts a wider net. It’s exploratory in feel; these 10 pieces are modest and sketch-like, with the cozy, contemplative vibe of someone letting their machines lead them where they will. They can be simple—“A Bag for Life” is little more than a pair of contrapuntal arps being braided together—but they’re satisfying in a way that reminds us that sometimes complexity is overrated; sometimes it’s enough to fire up a reassuring sequence and bathe in the glow. And a few tracks, the first three in particular, are something close to transcendent, with a cryptic mix of shimmer and pulse that reminds me of Pavel Milyakov, Purelink, Kilchhofer, and like-minded artists; the foggy, ambient-dub vibe of “I Sing the Senses Electric” also reminds me of Vainqueur, which is particularly high praise.
Suso Saiz: Distorted Clamor (Music From Memory)
The latest album from Madrid’s Suso Saiz is a typically understated affair, with broad, sweeping drones and foggy pastel clouds harboring melancholy hints of melody. It’s textbook ambient music, really—sometimes heavier and more distorted, as at the beginning of the 21-minute title track, and sometimes airier and more dulcet. I’d be hard-pressed to describe the music in detail; it’s cloudy and drifting and diffuse. It seems almost to go out of its way to resist being pinned down. The most striking thing about the album might be that Saiz apparently used no synthesizers at all. Instead, the label says, he used “water, wood and metals as filters and sound-transforming pedals.” I don’t know what that means, exactly. One track, “...And the Volcano,” seems like it might be related to his recent album Maday, created entirely out of field recordings of a volcano in the Canary Islands (reviewed in FR70); elsewhere, in “Green Stones,” faint clicking and clacking sounds wreathed in reverb point to possibly geological origins of the sounds. Whatever the case, the results make for fine ambient listening, even if they never quite grab your attention.
Crystal Voyager & UFOm: Self-Determination (Moon Glyph)
Portland’s Moon Glyph has never been shy about embracing new-age sounds, and on their latest, they make room for new-age-adjacent philosophies, too; UFOm, the artist behind last year’s Aliens Are Real, is said to have “ties to a low-profile religious organization which necessitates their secrecy.” It’s hard to know whether the whole thing is a bit or whether they really do claim to be channeling intergalactic telepathic communications, but it doesn’t really matter; as far as sci-fi soundscaping goes, it doesn’t get much lusher than these. The opening tracks “Self-Determination of the Cosmos” and “Harmonious Contact” strike me as somewhat more melodious versions of what Ken Ishii was doing on his great 1994 track “Kala,” an ambient masterpiece that’s never far from my mind. Things take a slightly more dulcet turn with “Earthmen,” but no matter how sweet things get, the omnipresent layers of stardust whoosh and cosmic background radiation ripples lend a wonderful sense of otherness, and even given titles like “Flying Saucers Have Landed,” the sounds never feel kitschy. Best of all is the way the whole thing works as a single suite, complete with moments of exposition, high drama, and calming resolution. Unlike Jeff Mills’ far more self-serious takes on space music, it’s a psychedelic radio play that puts equal weight on sensory pleasure and plain old delight.
Nicolas Gaunin: Huti ゲーム (Artetetra)
More from the extended Moon Glyph universe: Earlier this year, Italy’s Nicolas Gaunin (aka Nicola Sanguin) put out the Moon Glyph release Wormhole, an album of playful, percussive sketches somewhere between Mouse on Mars and Raymond Scott. Now he’s back on Italian label Artetetra with an even squigglier, more colorful take on his sound. It’s full of hyperreal vocal pads, haywire MIDI arrangements, plasticky hand drums, and a heavy dose of (presumably artificial) woodwinds and strings. It comes from the same universe as Piotr Kurek, Omni Gardens, and some of the Orange Milk universe; timbrally, it sounds like Visible Cloaks if they were hopped up on sugar cereals and Saturday morning cartoons. It’s a hoot, and it boasts one of the best record covers of the year, to boot.
EPs
Will Hofbauer & Sangre Voss: Ageless Trout and the Chaos of the Salmon (whirm)
There aren’t many labels out there that feel more energized than Will Hofbauer and Sangre Voss’s whirm. The label’s five releases so far, all singles, have all offered strange, squirrelly takes on contemporary UK techno and bass music—unusually springy beats, exceptionally contorted grooves, exceedingly polished sound design. Like Hofbauer’s solo music, the duo’s productions are charged with a winking sense of humor and a healthy dose of eccentricity; they’re playful in a way that not a lot of contemporary dance music is. That’s not to say that they’re silly or kitschy or ironic; no pisstaking Eurodance edits here. But from the oddball sampled sounds to the skittery sense of movement, they’re mischievous, tricksterish. The strangest thing about the series, hands down, has been the presence of a virtual B-side on every release that’s nothing but pure, grating white noise, harsh and clipping. This week, the label finally revealed the secret behind the five tracks on their Instagram. The result—if you have Ableton, anyway—is a bonus secret track that might be the best of the whole lot. I don’t really understand the process—I’m guessing it has something to do with noise cancellation algorithms that cancel each other out—but I got it to work, rendered the audio, and am very excited to get to play it out at some point.
As good-natured pranks go, it’s even better than boring rocks.
Andriy K.: Poetry of the Vanished Territories
Ukrainian artists Andriy K. and pryvyd (aka Bohdan Aleksieienko) pay anxious tribute to the landscapes of their homeland on Poetry of the Vanished Territories, a five-track EP of sandblasted textures and shuddering rhythms. The artists say that they used “open source data and field recordings from the corresponding locations” to create the music, and while I’m not sure what that means, it’s clear that these are places on the brink of disappearance. In “Lybid,” named after one of Kyiv’s rivers, white noise flows in fits and starts; the airier “Kinburn Before” and “Kinburn After” render the Southern Ukrainian Peninsula, along the Black Sea, first as a ghostly series of apparitions flecked with hints of drum & bass, and then as a Fennesz-like color study. The climax of the record is “Ozon Dub,” in which deconstructed drum & bass rhythms lurch wildly through a resonant hollow before “Oily Sea” swallows everything that has come before it into pure, silty texture.
Recommended Reading
José Quintanar: Good Luck (Terry Bleu)
Balmat illustrator José Quintanar has a new art book out via Dutch independent printing studio Terry Bleu. The spiral-bound book features a number of designs you may recognize from the Balmat catalog; the texts tell a surprisingly poignant father-son story. You can order the book here, and you might want to pick up one of his posters, too. I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of a frame so I can put mine up on the wall of my office.
Futureproofing: Here in the Kitsch
Andrew Ryce considers the dominance of retromanic trends in 2024, but he takes an unusual stance: What if looking backward isn’t actually all that bad?
“It might seem odd to celebrate what reads as “retro” music as the best of 2024, but that’s also dismissing the real creativity that goes into it. This music isn’t about nostalgia, nor do I think it has anything to do with our troubled times, or fashion trends, or anything like that. Instead, it’s people expressing themselves through old, often unfashionable forms in an era when the history of any microtrend, scene or place is available in a few minutes to all people at any time. It’s easy to find an era or style to become individually obsessed with, and it’s just as easy to make it your own. I’d sooner call the similarities between Cindy Lee and Jessica Pratt a coincidence than a trend. And the lauding that comes with both? That’s because they’re just good records.”
Kneeling Bus: The Meme Fossil Record
Drew Austin considers the links between memes, AI slop, terminal onlineness, and plastiglomerate, a new form of sedimentary material, part stone and part plastic, “formed by oceanic trash washing onto shores and melting into the sand, solidifying as it cools and congealing into a novel substance that blurs the distinction between natural and manmade.”
Balmat News
DOVS: Psychic Geography (Balmat)
We’ve got a new record coming out in January! It’s by Tin Man and AAAA, and it’s slinky and acidic and oh so atmospheric.
That’s it for this week—thanks for reading!
Thank you, Philip, for these warm words. Open-source data was used for the visual work and scanning.
Looking forward to the upcoming reviews <3
Lots of lovely pictures in the newsletter, I don't know how you get the time! (Lots of lovely words as well, of course, but was just thinking about the pics.)