Futurism Restated

There’s a funny contradiction with Norway’s Smalltown Supersound label. It keeps a relatively low profile—or at least, it never seems to go out of its way to promote itself. And owing to the vast array of music that it releases, you’d never really think of a Smalltown Supersound sound. And yet, at the same time, Smalltown has become a stealth behemoth.

“I feel like we’re more like a band than a project,” Ben Vida said to me a few months back when I spoke with him and his friends Booker Stardrum and Will Epstein about their collaborative debut, which they released last week—under the name Play Time—on Balmat. That band-versus-project distinction is key. All three musicians are, of course, wildly prolific.

Ranking’s a funny thing. It’s a fool’s errand, to begin with. The numerical certainty of a ranked list has nothing to do with the way a person experiences music—or the ways a person experiences music, in fact, which is just one of the problems with the entire premise. The experience of music is contextual; it varies with the place and time and company we keep, the mood we’re in, the drink in our cup. No list could account for all those variables.

And just like that, it’s summer: As of this week, my daughter’s out of school, which means that finding time to write, to listen to music, to think, is suddenly a much more fraught proposition than before. I’m sure fellow parents will know what I’m talking about. So if I’m feeling scattered, maybe that’s why my selections seem scattered for this week’s bonus selection of new releases (!). Today’s issue is held together not by a throughline but a zigzag.

Axel Willner (photo: Sonia Alvarez) For more than a decade, Axel Willner’s output was as consistent as the loops at the heart of his music. Every two (or, once, three) years, a new album—once again on Kompakt, once again with a nearly identical cover, once again sounding like nothing but the Field.

Festivals are by nature ephemeral affairs, so overwhelming in their constant barrage of sensation and stimuli that moments tend to blur together in the rearview, or evaporate entirely. So it’s ironic that a festival named Ephemera—little sister to Poland’s Unsound, it’s the upstart Warsaw counterpart to the long-running Kraków event—should have left me with such an indelible set of impressions. Of course, I’ve only just returned, so they’re fresh in my mind.

I’m in Warsaw this week for Unsound’s Ephemera festival, and since things don’t get hectic until the weekend, it means I finally had time to sit down and put together a new Mixes Digest, something I’ve been meaning to do for, well, months. Still, I’ve tried to keep the energy fresh. These are the sets I’ve been rinsing over the past week or so (including one that just published yesterday). And in something of a departure, there’s not an ambient set among them.

I rarely structure my new-release roundups around anything like a theme, and that’s especially true of this issue, where I tried mainly to catch up on the bumper crop of standout albums from recent weeks. That means there’s even more range than usual.

In my review of Boards of Canada’s Inferno for Pitchfork last week, I mentioned that, in the days following a Barcelona listening session a week prior to the release, I suddenly seemed to see hexagons everywhere I looked. I wasn’t exaggerating. It was as though I’d stepped into Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, except instead of muted horns, they were six-sided polygons.

With just guitar, field recordings, and voice, the Polish musician is capable of stopping time. The first time I saw Martyna Basta perform, at Kraków’s Unsound in 2022, she left me spellbound. She performed in one of my favorite venues there: Kopernika 15, a surgical theater in a former medical college, where the audience sits arrayed on a circle of risers, staring down at the performer in the pit.