Futurism Restated 95: The Rings of Saturn
Recent releases from Fennesz, Shinichi Atobe, and more, plus a remastered dub-techno masterpiece.
One benefit of living on a small island: a dark sky, in which the stars haven’t yet been crowded out by light pollution. A couple weeks ago, we gathered with a small group of people at an observatory in Ciutadella, a city of some 35,000 people on the west side of the island. The goal: to watch Saturn’s passage behind the Moon. There was a telescope set up inside the dome of the observatory itself; outside, amateur astronomers had mounted their own gear, including one with a computer monitor attached. Even there, right between the highway and the town itself, the viewing was remarkably good. Shortly before 6:30 p.m., our target drew near the top edge of the Moon; Saturn, its rings visible, and even three of its moons, spread out like tiny ball bearings.
To have something like that made visible, right before your eyes—not visible to the naked eye, of course, but still, not mediated through cameras or screens, like most of our world is—was remarkable. It left me speechless. I’m still trying to find words for why it affected me so profoundly.
And then, as one does, of course, I tried taking pictures with my smartphone, lining up the camera lens with the eyepiece of the telescope. (Everyone was doing it.) It was futile, absurd, but irresistible: Even when confronted with the immediacy of the sublime, I wanted to try to capture it. The pictures are crap, of course—tiny, pixelated dots against a gray-blue haze. Still, I can make out Saturn’s rings as something not quite as indistinct as a blown-out smudge, and I can detect a pixel’s worth of shadow on one of Saturn’s moons, something that in “real life” had given it a thrillingly three-dimensional quality. Gradually, Saturn and its moons disappeared behind our moon, and we passed the time zooming in on the orb’s craters and crags, or, on a computer screen, looking at the thumbprint that was Jupiter, a dark smudge indicating one of its moons—Ion, if I recall correctly—floating in front of it. (At one point, a meteor blazed directly overhead, remarkably bright, inspiring oohs and aahs from the crowd. At another, I asked one of the astronomers if a fast-moving dot overhead was a satellite—in fact, he said, it was Tiangong, the Chinese space station. It brightened momentarily, I suppose illuminated by the sun, and then slipped into darkness as it continued its passage.) Finally, some 59 minutes later, Saturn popped out from behind the Moon. This time we watched it on the computer screen. It was bigger on screen than through the viewfinder, but it didn’t have quite the same magical aura as before.
In today’s newsletter, I do a deep-ish dive into two late-2024 albums that I hadn’t yet had the chance to wrap my head around: Fennesz’s Mosaic and Shinichi Atobe’s Discipline—both of them cases of straining my perception to perceive aspects that I hadn’t initially been aware of. A little like looking at the night sky, perhaps.
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Albums
Fennesz: Mosaic (Touch)
Fennesz is so consistent it can be easy to take him for granted. At the same time, as Mark Richardson writes in a recent piece for Hearing Things, the consistency of the Viennese musician’s work may make you look for differences (say, between albums made up of shorter, more song-like pieces and the ones given over to long, imposing dronescapes) where said differences are actually negligible. “As a critic, I’m always looking for progress, a narrative, something to distinguish why a given record is happening now and not then,” he writes. “But Mosaic shows us that Fennesz’s career has been less about exploration and more about chipping away at an idea of sound that in the beginning lived only in his head.”
When I first heard Mosaic, I was a little disappointed—or if not disappointed, exactly, then perhaps underwhelmed. It sounded 100 percent like a Fennesz record. There wasn’t anything that particularly surprised me. And perhaps that’s one of my flaws as a listener: I get restless; I crave surprise, even when I don’t want an artist to abandon the sound I fell in love with in the first place. (The more I think about it, I think it’s a failing that so many fans have: We want our favorite artists to stay the same—yet differently, every time. It’s an impossible bind.)
Also, I think I feel guilty about getting too comfortable with something familiar. Despite my ambient inclinations, I distrust music that’s too nice. Maybe it’s something in my Protestant genes: I’ve been trained to crave the hairshirt, whereas Fennesz’s music is all silk and down and handspun wool. His work is hardly uncomplicated—just see the often omnipresent layer of distortion or buzz, which gives his music the feel of bright summer sun streaming through the windshield as you drive, partially obscuring your vision—but it’s always beautiful. Beauty is its starting point, its end point, its everything. Christian Fennesz is an old-school Romantic, a believer in the sublime. He’s not an ironist or a postmodernist. For him, purity of feeling is the be all and end all, no matter how impure the sounds themselves may be.
As Daniel Bromfield writes in his excellent Pitchfork review, “Mosaic is the closet thing to a ‘guitar album’ he’s put out since 2008’s Black Sea. It feels played, not arranged.” Compared to the stark expanses of 2019’s Agora, Mosaic floats on gentle chord progressions, and it’s shot through with an air of sentimentality. In the opening “Heliconia,” his chords trail off into delay that seems to rise shimmering into the sky; every note feels crowned in a celestial halo.
The difference that Mark writes about here is mostly internal. The more I’ve listened to Mosaic, the more its internal changes have revealed themselves, like the way the distortion of “Heliconia” suddenly burns off, halfway through, revealing the virtually unprocessed sound of Fennesz’s guitar. Or the way the distortion rises halfway through “Love and the Framed Insects,” a fiery punctuation mark that just as abruptly fades away. Fennesz has a way of lulling you into an almost soporific state and then pulling the rug out from under you.
As much as Mosaic sounds like Fennesz, you can tell that he’s not done looking for new ways to tweak his sound. “Personare” has a crunch and a zest that feels unique to this song; it feels like dub techno that’s been charred to ashes. And “Patterning Heart” sounds almost uncannily like Stars of the Lid in places. It’s got the same yawning attacks, the same sunrise glow. It’s among the most unabashedly sentimental music I’ve heard from Fennesz. And then comes the closing “Goniorizon,” which takes all that beauty and wads it up, like a fistful of tinfoil, till it feels like a white-hot ball of harmonics, bristling with overtones. It’s as audacious as it is gorgeous.
Mark’s piece is interesting to me, because he seems to be grappling with certain contradictions in Fennesz’s music. You might expect, given its ambient nature, that Fennesz’s music would fade neatly into the background. But, Mark writes, “His music doesn’t work as a soundtrack to another activity because it’s always pushing against you, standing close, crowding you, defying the distance you want to put between yourself and it.” That observation came as something of a surprise to me; I think one of my problems with Fennesz’s music is that, if I don’t pay close attention, it’s too easy for me to tune out. But “Goniorizon,” once I really focused, was different: It snapped vividly to life, like a three-dimensional sculpture framed against the blue of the sky, a feast of textures and shapes that I don’t recall having heard from Fennesz before. Mark’s right; you really need to listen to a track like “Goniorizon,” actively, to get it. There’s a weirdness and a wildness here that I don’t remember hearing in Fennesz. And it’s drawn me back to him, eagerly.
Shinichi Atobe: Discipline (DDS)
Shinichi Atobe has also become somewhat easy to take for granted. That might seem counterintuitive; after all, this is a guy who released one record on Chain Reaction in 2001 and then disappeared for 13 years, leaving some wondering if he was really just an alias of Basic Channel or someone in their camp. But over the past decade, Atobe has put out an average of one record a year, most of them on Demdike Stare’s DDS label. And, like Fennesz, he’s been remarkably consistent, with a signature that sounds like no one else. Perhaps also like Fennesz, he tends to occupy ambivalent emotional terrain. His debut EP, Ship-Scope, may have been warm, dusty, sumptuous dub techno in the classic Berlin mold, but over the years his music has become brighter and pricklier—the tempos faster, the timbres more needling. A lot of his music doesn’t neatly resolve; instead, he carves out a single trenchant loop—a splash of Rhodes over a boom-click beat, say—and milks it for all it’s worth.
Dissonance and digital crackle are frequent visitors to otherwise placid soundscapes; his music often leaves me feeling slightly unsettled. His FM chimes and bristly hi-hats make me think of ice-cream headaches, or a coffee buzz, or perfumes with an aggressively chemical nose. Is it any wonder he made a record called Love of Plastic? Unlike a lot of artists working in the overlap between ambient and techno, Atobe takes pains not to tell you how to feel; he likes to let you squirm a little bit. (Or, as someone very astutely put it on Bandcamp: “Someone hasn't locked their car properly and the ringing is annoying. When it finally stops, you feel a strange sense of loneliness in your chest.”)
But Discipline, which comes mere months after the exceedingly prickly Peace of Mind EP, feels different. From the very first track, it wraps you up in a warm hug. The opening “SA_DUB_1” has a housey groove, in keeping with much of his music of the past 10 years, but the brightness has been turned down; the multiple layers of chords feel more pastel than fluorescent, and they’re dappled rather than stabbing. Most of all, the bassline suggests the firmest ground in a Shinichi Atobe track in some time. The majority of the record follows suit. Even on a brash chromatic stepper like “SA_DUB_4,” with its sashaying NY house sensibility, the delay has a muting effect, like a roll of fogged color film. The FM keys of “SA_DUB_8” have a misty-eyed quality to them; the dubbed-out chimes of “SA_DUB_7” are as dreamy as a Smallville release.
There’s exactly one curveball: “SA_DUB_5,” a beatless ambient-dub track that brings to mind Vainqueur and other classics of golden-age Chain Reaction. It’s the warmest and most straightforwardly beautiful thing I’ve heard from Atobe in decades. And while part of me wishes he’d make an entire album of the stuff, it also occurs to me that part of what makes it so special is its rarity; even on a comparatively placid record like this one, it’s the contrast with everything around it that makes it so special. (Buy from Boomkat here.)
Tolouse Low Trax: Fung Day (Tal Music)
Tolouse Low Trax—Kreidler’s Detlef Weinrich, a resident at Düsseldorf’s Salon des Amateurs—makes a skulking, dusky strain of music that I tend to slot alongside artists like Don’t DJ and the Durian Brothers: a chugging, machinic, and often quite slow sound that hovers somewhere in between krautrock, industrial, Craig Leon’s Nommos, and vintage ethnographic percussion records. Fung Day, for his Kreidler colleague Stefan Schneider’s TAL label, is another wonderfully weird, lumpy, off-kilter report from Weinrich’s twisted universe. “Lost at Rue rue Lemon” arrays elastic loops and rudimentary hip-hop scratching over brittle, insistent drum programming. “Traction Avant” keeps up the ’80s electro vibe over a beat that reminds me of Broker/Dealer’s iconic Hall & Oates sample flip. (I get a heavy flohmarkt-sampling vibe from his beats in general; they feel steeped in weird breaks sourced from unremarkable 1€ finds from the back of the cardboard box at a Neuköllln trödl.) As the record progresses, things get murkier, the salient details—backmasked vocal samples, dial-tone buzz—darkening like the shadows inside a diving bell. I love the wonkiness of the whole thing—the feeling of beats cobbled together from pause tapes, the errant scraps of Radiophonic Workshop warble, the dented grooves of Dettinger or M:I:5.
Pugilist & Pod: Iridescent (Of Paradise)
Pugilist isn’t nearly as confrontational as his alias would imply. On Iridescent, the Melbourne producer—teaming up with fellow Australian Pod—is all about playing nice, forging copacetic fellowships between dub techno, bass music, electro, and jungle. I joked on Lapsus Radio this week that this might be the best recent Skee Mask album by an artist not named Skee Mask, and I don’t mean that dismissively; the duo taps a similar vein of sensual dread, fleshing out sternum-punching drum programming and gut-rumbling low end with dusky synths and the occasional flash of Balearic bliss. None of these are original sounds, or even original combinations of sounds, but it’s rare that you hear this stuff rendered with such finesse.
The Nighttime Ensemble: The Nighttime Ensemble (Longform Editions)
The Nighttime Ensemble found its origin in an unlikely creative prompt: A YouTube commenter underneath Bohren under der Club of Gore’s Midnight Radio: “I can feel how fragile our world is, how lonely people are after midnight, how absurd it is to be attached to anything!” Daniel Wyche, on guitar, and Brian J. Sulpizio, on piano, set out to bring that sentiment to life: After an initial performance with bassist Ro Lundberg at Chicago’s Elastic Arts in 2022, they headed into the studio with Lia Kohl (cello, radios) and Sam Scranton (drums, objects) and recorded this 52-minute structured improvisation. It is, indeed, exquisitely lonely, with echoes of not just Bohren und der Club of Gore but also Talk Talk, the Necks, the Boxhead Ensemble, and other collective efforts for whom emptiness is as important to the picture as fullness; their parts frequently feel like ships passing in the night, isolated beacons signaling to each other through the darkness—never making contact, but hardly without a sense of hope. It’s a gorgeous piece of music.
EPs
uon: superbath (2024 remaster) (3 X L)
I was hesitant, I will admit, to spend 6€ on a remaster of a single track that I already own. Nevertheless, the track in question is 24 minutes long, and I would not blink at spending 6€ on a, say, four-track EP clocking in at the same length. More to the point, the track in question—originally released on Barcelona’s Anòmia label in 2017—is one of the finest pieces of Chain Reaction-esque ambient that I’ve heard in the past decade. It’s so simple, harmonically, just a matter of cannily contrasted fifths, arranged for maximum emotional pull. But the feel of the thing is simply immense, like being confronted with one of JMW Turner’s seascapes come to life, all luminous vapor and seismic rumble. It’s wonderful. And Stephan Mathieu’s remaster really does make a difference; he’s cleared some of the murk and crisped up the high end—all that electrifying fog—without sacrificing any of its churning mystery. (Per the artist’s promotional email, the source stems for the track apparently go back nearly 15 years.) The new download is tagged with Special Guest DJ in the artist field—the artist told me that he’s trying to consolidate all his work (Caveman LSD, DJ Paradise, Final POV, uon, et al.) under just the one name—but I changed it back to uon in my own Apple Music metadata, in honor of the fact that it’s such a special project; with such a slim catalog under the uon moniker to begin with, it felt like a shame to deprive it of one of its masterpieces.
That’s it for this week—thanks for reading!
Been boring everyone in earshot about the planets lining up by the moon. Nothing like a glowing orb in the sky to restore your sense of wonder.
A real rim rocker, excellent