Futurism Restated 94: (Don’t Call Them) Overlooked Records

Hugo Largo, Lasse Marhaug, a sneaky ML Buch EP, and other 2024 releases I couldn’t let slip away

View through a microscope at CosmoCaixa, Barcelona

I’d intended to get back to new releases today, but as I began working on this week’s newsletter, I realized that I hadn’t heard nearly enough of them, or listened deeply enough, to have anything of substance to say. (Is anyone else having trouble getting back into gear after the new year? It doesn’t help that here in Spain, the holiday season goes through Día de Reyes, January 6—my daughter finally went back to school today—which somehow makes the long, protracted process of getting back to work feel all the more agonizing.)

I did, however, have a list full of 2024 records that I had wanted to write about and never got around to, for various reasons. In most cases, it was because I pitched the record for review to Pitchfork—I try not to double up between Pitchfork and the newsletter—and by the time it was confirmed that I wouldn’t be writing about it there, it felt too late to write about in the newsletter. Which is a pretty stupid way of looking at things, really, since this is my newsletter, and release dates are a profoundly irrelevant determiner of whether I should write about something or not. But still, old habits die hard, and the records keep coming, and sometimes you just gotta cut your losses.

In any case, a few records I really loved fell by the wayside, so today’s my chance to rectify that.

This is hardly a complete list of “overlooked” records of last year, since such a list would, practically by definition, have to include hundreds or even thousands of worth releases I didn’t get around to hearing. They’re just great records that made a significant impact on me in 2024—and which I’m still listening to now, and expect I’ll continue to, for a long time to come.

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 (2025 playlists to kick off next week); 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.

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Last Call for These Standout Albums of 2024

Hugo Largo: Drum (Missing Piece Records)

Hugo Largo: Mettle (Missing Piece Records)

Hugo Largo: Unreleased & Live (Missing Piece Records)

My greatest professional failing of the past year—of many, I’m sure—was probably neglecting to write about these absolutely indispensable reissues of the relatively obscure New York band Hugo Largo. I wanted to, but the review I pitched didn’t get assigned, and I was traveling and dealing with family stuff right around the release date, and the calendar moved on. What makes it all the more frustrating is that Drum was such a fundamental record for me, the kind of record without which I might have become an entirely different listener.

A quick recap: Hugo Largo were a NYC four-piece that came up in the post-punk scene yet didn’t sound anything like post-punk, beginning with their lineup: two bassists (Tim Sommer and Adam Peacock), violin (Hahn Rowe), and vocals (Mimi Goese). Previous to Hugo Largo, or shortly thereafter, they collectively amassed some pretty impressive credits: the Soft Boys, Glenn Branca, ROIR’s New York Thrash tape, the Beastie Boys, Eleventh Dream Day, Hootie & the Blowfish (!), and—for Rowe alone—Herbie Hancock, Time Zone, Gil-Scott Heron, the Last Poets, the Golden Palominos, Live Skull, Swans, John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Roy Ayers (!!). Talk about a murderer’s row.

Yet Hugo Largo sounded like no one except themselves. In retrospect, you might call them proto-slowcore; their streaks of feedback and meditative ostinatos had an almost ambient drone quality at times; I suppose you also could call them proto-post-rock. Goese’s voice was more like a series of bright-white contrails streaking across the cerulean dome of their songs than anything approaching conventional singing. Michael Stipe produced their debut, 1988’s Drum, and played and sang on it too; Brian Eno released Drum and 1989’s Mettle on his Opal Records label. Yet somehow, despite those cosigns, Hugo Largo fell by the wayside after they disbanded, sometime in the early 1990s. Their records went out of print; even when streaming services picked up seemingly every last obscurity from the past several decades, their catalog remained unavailable everywhere except YouTube, where a few diehard fans kept the faith. (I’ve only just discovered a 13-year-old Blogspot account dedicated to the band, too.)

I don’t remember where I first discovered them; I’m guessing it was a mention in SPIN magazine, and it was probably a Michael Stipe reference that piqued my interest. I bought Drum the year it came out. I was 17. The record is embedded in my memories of that summer; I did summer school at Wellesley College, where I hung out with a bunch of fellow punks and goths, taking the train into Harvard Square to buy records at Newbury Comics. Back in Wellesley, we’d get lime rickeys and hang out in the town graveyard. With I think of the sticky atmosphere of Massachusetts in summer, and the adolescent rush of spending six weeks with a bunch of likeminded weirdos, feeling like maybe for the first time in your life, you’ve found your people, I’m invariably brought back to Hugo Largo’s woozy undulations, the feeling of floating three feet off the ground. Listening to them, those recollections are almost physical sensations, like sense memories.

Though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it then, there was a sense of space in their music that I found entrancing—for instance, the lullaby-like dual bass interplay of “Eskimo Song,” overlaid with Goese’s largely unintelligible vocalizations—and which, I’m sure, helped point me toward the kinds of ambient music I’d eventually fall in love with, a path I charted for Sam Valenti IV’s Herb Sundays in 2023. (See also: Shriekback’s “Coelocanth.”) Still, unlike ambient music, Hugo Largo wrote real songs charged with emotion and even drama. An old Melody Maker review compared them to This Mortal Coil, which feels right: At its most intense, on songs like “Eureka” and “Second Skin,” Hugo Largo’s music was a music of uncontainable, outsized feeling, an unruly passion that stood at odds to the simplicity and minimalist contours of their music.

Would I be as excited about them if I hadn’t discovered them when I did? It’s impossible to say. I prefer Drum, which soundtracked that summer, to Mettle, which I don’t think I ever spent significant time with. (The new box set also includes a bonus disc of unreleased and live tracks; a lot of it’s great. “Simple Song,” for instance, boats a fuller, cleaner sound, and points at where they might have headed had they kept going.) Perhaps to a contemporary listener who wasn’t around back then, they’d sound merely like a product of their times, falling somewhere between Galaxie 500 and Throwing Muses, an oddball collection of ideas and influences. I think they were more than that, but I’m hardly impartial. (For confirmation of my youthful fandom, you can see their name scrawled on my high-school notebook, tucked in between Tones on Tail and Love and Rockets; if you ever wondered what I was like as a teenager, here’s the evidence.)

Brian Eno was so enthralled with the band, he recorded an entire promotional 12-inch for Opal Records, Brian Eno Wants You to Hear Something - A Band Called Hugo Largo, in which he enthuses about the group over a collage of their songs. What an artifact, right? “When I heard this band for the first time, I thought, ‘This is going to be historic. I know it will affect other artists,’” he says, as if thinking aloud, improvising his text. “And that’s what some music does, you know. Some musicians have a bigger effect on other artists than they do on the public, if you like. And then the work is mediated through those other artists and finally hits the public. Van Morrison is a good example of that, I think. The Velvet Underground, again, a very good example. Both of those people didn’t sell that many records.” It’s ironic to think that a promotional tool intended to sell more copies of Hugo Largo’s records only ended up confirming, 35 years later, the fate to which they’d be consigned.

I didn’t even know about the Eno/Largo curio until I started writing this; fortuitously, there was one copy for sale on Discogs, which I promptly purchased. I don’t know why, exactly, but Eno’s tribute to their status as outsiders struck a chord with me; it felt like part of my story with the band. I figured that was worth the 40 bucks or so, shipping included. Someday I’ll probably pull that record out and think about writing this, too. Some bands accompany you on a lifelong journey. For me, Hugo Largo is one of them. (Purchase the box set Huge, Large and Electric: Hugo Largo 1984​-​1991 from Bandcamp here.)

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Lasse Marhaug: Provoke (Smalltown Supersound)

Lasse Marhaug’s set at Unsound last fall, a highlight, was among those that corresponded most literally to the theme, Noise, but it also showed just how expansive “noise music” can be. The Norwegian musician stood behind a table strewn with gear (a turntable, I think a tape deck, and scads of electronics) and gradually began coaxing loops out of it, which he layered and manipulated; it was abstracted yet rested on a firmly rhythmic base, and even though it built to an overwhelmingly powerful climax—Marhaug now standing atop the table, distorted layers surging and cresting in waves—it never abandoned a fundamental sense of what I can only call pleasure. This relatively compact album operates on somewhat similar principles; its rattling beats (created by what sound like dropped marbles in some places) and scuffed, Philip Jeck-like loops feel both improvisatory and ordered, gathering chaos into surprisingly tidy packages. There’s an almost lyrical sensibility in the winding feedback drones of a track like “Minus 14” (titled, I’m sure, after the wintry temperatures of the far north, where he lives); the gravelly bass and fried circuit-board sonics of tracks like “Ears and Things That Are Not Ears” and “Good Days Quiet” remind me of Pan Sonic and the late Mika Vainio. The latter is a timbral masterpiece, fusing those dropped marbles with blown-out 808 bass, skittering white noise, and chiming aeolian harps; I don’t think I heard a more thrilling textural contrast all year. And the opening “Plates” is one of the most engrossing, dramatic tracks I heard all year, period, simply begging for a cinematic airing—preferably one set in the blasted tundra, perhaps featuring a body lying motionless, face down in the snow. If I were music-supervising an arctic drama, Marhaug is the first call I’d make.

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Whitney Johnson: Hav (Drag City)

Matchess: Stena (Drag City)

Echoes of Mika Vainio also animate Whitney Johnson’s electrifying Hav—particularly the opening “Agora,” in which pure sine tones ping pong back and forth between stereo channels, and microtonal frequency sweeps generate thickets of buzz. It’s both entrancing and overwhelming, adding a third option to the fight-or-flight instinct: surrender. Your nerves are aflame, yet you’re rooted to the spot. Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros are also key touchstones for Hav’s psychoacoustic mind-ear games and patient invitation to deep listening. The Chicago-based musician says that she uses just-intonation ratios to build her compositions in Max/MSP, which makes sense; they’re imbued with the sublime beauty of mathematical perfection and the dizziness of unknowing.

Alongside Hav, she also released another album, Stena, under her Matchess alias, which stands at stark odds to the ordered precision of Hav; as Matchess, she says, “I make irrational decisions based on pure intuition. I write lyrics and sing them in parallel fifths. If at first something sounds unsatisfying, I leave it alone and see if it satisfies me with time.” She told Zen Sounds that when she plays as Matchess, she considers herself “more of a sound artist, or maybe a noise artist,” but there’s also a lyricism here, a melodic intensity—even in a held-tone drone piece like the opening “Biskopskulla Högstena”—that I don’t necessarily associate with sound art or noise; even at their most stripped back, these pieces are going places, tracing vivid lines in a headlong path. On Stena, her viola comes to the fore, paired with Arp Odyssey, hallodrone, and marimba—a rich, sumptuous palette that gives the album its gratifying warmth. The buzzing organ-like tones of “Death in Trafo (or, The Crater)” are the kind of sound I’d like to crawl inside and inhabit all winter; her distant singing, reminiscent of Grouper, only amplifies the music’s bruised humanity. You might never guess that these two records are by the same person, but that only makes the juxtaposition of them all the more fascinating.

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Chat Pile: Cool World (The Flenser)

Chat Pile’s God’s Country blew my mind; a powerhouse sludge juggernaut reminiscent of bands I grew up on, like Big Black, Godflesh, Jesus Lizard, Helmet, Karp, Floor, and even Unwound, with lyrics poised on the knife’s edge between gory derangement and grim socio-political critique. I don’t listen to a ton of heavy music these days, but God’s Country immediately struck me as being extremely my shit. Cool World doesn’t have the same novelty that their debut had for me; that record came out of the blue, whereas this one largely builds on a now familiar sound. But I think Cool World may be the superior record. Its riffs feel tougher, its assault more focused. They’ve dialed up the grunge elements—just listen to the way Raygun Bosch’s vocal melody is shadowed by the guitar on “Shame”; in places I’m reminded of a much gnarlier Alice in Chains. Despite having had the album on steady repeat in my car since June, I don’t really know what any of the songs are about, but I love the sheer force of Bosch’s performance; he’s got masterful vocal control, knowing exactly when to go from speaking to barking to shrieking—just listen to the way he builds tension as he repeats the line “Don’t worry, it’s just a knife,” in “Frownland,” all the way to the final repetition, where he inserts an agonizing breath’s-length pause before the final knife. Cool World doesn’t have the same darkly sardonic or absurdist edge as its predecessor; there’s no “Why,” no “grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg.” But in their place is an even darker, doomier, more concentrated burst of pure bad vibes. That’s good enough for me.

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Body Meπa: Prayer in Dub (Hausu Mountain)

On Another Green World, Brian Eno is credited as playing something called “snake guitar,” along with other cryptic permutations of the six-string instrument (“castanet,” “club,” “desert”). I think I have a pretty good idea of what snake guitar might sound like; less so “owl guitar” and “deer guitar,” which Sasha Frere-Jones and Grey McMurray are respectively credited with on Prayer in Dub, the second album from their group Body Meπa, alongside bassist Melvin Gibbs and drummer Greg Fox. (Interestingly, Frere-Jones mentioned Eno’s snake guitar in a decade-old New Yorker piece on the British experimental polymath; the resemblance here to his nomenclature may not be coincidental.) An owl might swoop or screech, I suppose, while deer forage in the fields, obsidian-eyed, though I’m not sure either description quite corresponds to what I hear on Prayer in Dub; to my ears, the two players’ guitars are locked in a steady churn, like roiling waters where two currents meet. Perhaps the animals signal wisdom and alertness, qualities that do seem baked into this patient, abiding record, which takes post-punk drone—in the Sonic Youth sense, say—and refracts it till it spreads out like rainbow-hued sprinkler spray. Fox and Gibbs are the forces that stir the churn—never showy, and all the more powerful for the understated nature of their propulsion. I was going to say “their weight” but corrected myself, because Prayer in Dub has no anchor; always in motion, it floats above the ground.

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ML Buch: Suntub Extras (15 love)

At year’s end, Copenhagen’s 15 love label sent around something special to those who had purchased ML Buch’s Suntub via the label’s Bandcamp page: a link to a digital EP called Suntub Extras. The six tracks, all instrumentals, sound less like outtakes than demos or early versions. “Opener” is just shy of two minutes of exploratory electric guitar run through fuzz and delay, though the ghost of a song peeks through, briefly, before vaporizing once again. “Sway walking” sounds like it might be a rough draft of something on Suntub, but when I checked it against the songs it reminded me of—“Flames shards goo,” “Fleshless hand”—the chords and riffs turned out to be totally different, so maybe I’m imagining the similarity. “Suncrumb trail, Staging” begins as a multi-tracked guitar sketch and then explodes into drum machine and synth, probing gently at the edges of her spongy universe. They’re all reminiscent of the instrumental interstitials on the album, and if none of them have quite the punch of her vocal tracks, these fragmentary pieces still make for a fascinating peek behind the curtain of her creative process. Without the shards, after all, no flames and no goo.

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