Futurism Restated: Mixes Digest #1

A dub-techno “jam band,” a canonical minimal landmark, a Mallorcan ambient extravaganza, and more

With Pitchfork’s features in limbo, my long-running mixes column—which I’ve been writing since 2016, and last updated in November 2023—seems to have gotten left out in the cold. But then I remembered: I have a newsletter! Which would be an excellent place to start writing about mixes again! Which is what I’m going to begin doing right now. 

For now, anyway, these posts are going to be a bonus for paying subscribers.

A brief digression related to that point. I’ve never really laid out my thinking about paywalled content, in part because I’ve been trying to figure out what I think about it. But I’ve come to realize a couple of key things:

As long as Futurism Restated isn’t my chief source of income, I think it’s important to keep the weekly recommendations emails free to read for all. Part of the purpose of those roundups is to A) facilitate discovery and B) offer a platform to artists. I feel similarly about the handful of interviews I’ve done so far (though I did, in fact, paywall some of those)—what sense does it make for an artist to give me their time if only a few hundred people are going to get to read it? 

At the same time, I want to give paying subscribers something in return for the generosity of their contributions. So far, that’s meant the ongoing playlist (which, in 2024, has become a pair of playlists). Hopefully, adding the newly christened Mixes Digest to the pile of perks—additional missives for the paying massive!—will offer some recompense.

This is an experiment; for the moment I’m not sure how often I’m going to be publishing the mix newsletter. Probably not weekly, but hopefully more often than monthly? I’m going to try to keep these brief, to facilitate hitting that “publish” button with a quickness. We’ll see how that works out. (Update: I wrote this intro before finishing the blurbs, and guess what—they’re not nearly as brief as I intended them to be, lol/sigh.)

For our inaugural installment, I cover an ambient techno “jam band” kicking up dusty bliss in their wake; a Mallorcan ambient savant with a dreamweaver’s touch; a techno B2B with the precision of a trepanning drill; a 1980 set full of Mediterranean disco flair; and, finally, a canonical minimal mix from 2002. Read on.