Pitchfork / Futurism Restated / Balmat
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Label: balmat.cat
Mixes: soundcloud.com/psherburne
Articles by Philip Sherburne
FR 194: SML’s Jeremiah Chiu Is Activating Wildly
The L.A. electronic improviser brings it all together on his latest album, Edge Conditions Jeremiah Chiu (photo: Sam Lee) Jeremiah Chiu’s favorite word might be “activate,” which seems fitting, because the Los Angeles synthesist knows how to stay engaged. It’s hard to think of many artists who have had a more productive run over the past four years.
Maxime Denuc: Club Imperiale
When two paths to ecstasy unexpectedly converged in the middle of the Mediterranean, Maxime Denuc’s Club Imperiale was born.
FR 193: Eleven Albums
I’m missing Unsound this week, which is a strange sensation; aside from the canceled 2020 edition, the last year that I missed was 2008. But after my recent trip back to Portland to take care of my mom, I was reluctant to up and leave my own family again so soon, and for 10 whole days at that. I’m happy that at least I got to go to Ephemera this year, for the first time (FR174); I’m making do with reports sent from my friends on the scene, and already looking forward to next year.
FR 192: “Infinite Personalized Music” Is Just Music
Everything else is merely narcissism The other day a post from some tech bro started making the rounds. There are many things wrong with his framing, beginning with the smug attitude (“Yes, this probably hurts your feelings. It’s still going to happen,” he wrote, or asked AI to write for him, in another post), although such triumphalist smugness seems to be the default setting for tech bros these days.
FR 191: The Shameless Heyday of Novelty Minimal
18 tracks of wackadoo samples, cheeky edits, and, why not, animal noises I was recently tickled pink to discover that Kórnel Kovács, one third of Stockholm’s Studio Barnhus, has joined Substack. He calls himself “a failed music writer at heart,” but he’s clearly not doing himself justice: Based on the evidence of Clown minimal: 20 tracks from techno’s goofiest moment, his pen is as sharp as his ears.
Hallucinator: Landlocked
Some record labels, particularly in electronic music, loom so large that they threaten to eclipse the names on their roster. That was the case for Chain Reaction, the Berlin-based outfit helmed by Basic Channel’s Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald.
FR 190: Nearly Gold
Thoughts on Bullion’s almost-pop music I’m experimenting with something new this week: just one review. Part of that’s because I’m behind schedule, particularly after the epic task of writing about Sasha & Digweed’s Northern Exposure—at the last minute, it got bumped up from regular review to Sunday Review, and after several days of research, I ended up writing 3,500 words in one very long day day—and I’d like to get my newsletter out the door.
Sasha / John Digweed: Northern Exposure
The recorded DJ mix—as both musical format and unit of cultural currency—has come full circle over the past four decades. In the Wild West era, sets captured off the soundboard at raves and nightclubs circulated as bootlegged cassettes. Then came the mix CD boom of the 1990s and 2000s—an explosion of series like X-Mix, DJ-Kicks, Global Underground, and fabric, whose fractal paths through electronic music’s tangled genre tree mirrored the scene’s rapid worldwide spread.
FR 189: Frames, Mirages, Wells
Before we get to the music, a quandary: Because I never seem to learn, over the weekend I updated the operating system on my Mac to OS 27, aka Golden Gate. (Adobe Acrobat had abruptly quit functioning on my machine; it turned out that I was still running a version so antiquated that, frankly, I’m embarrassed to name it.) Part of that update entails a new version of Apple Music. Great, I thought.
FR 188: Melting Days
I’m back home after two-plus weeks in the States. It was not an easy trip, as I wrote about in my recent piece on Lambchop’s Punching the Clown. I listened to that album yet one more time on the flight out of Portland. It felt good—not as cathartic as I expected, perhaps, as simply pleasurable. Maybe, with the worst in the rearview mirror, I no longer needed catharsis. Some gorgeous vocal harmonies and Kurt Wagner’s inscrutable wit were enough on their own.
Bitchin Bajas: Isle Peaks EP
Despite Bitchin Bajas’ name, with its drug-ruggy whiff of slacker insouciance—to say nothing of the unabashedly tongue-in-cheek tone of titles like Bajas Fresh—there’s nothing self-conscious about the Chicago trio’s music. To the contrary: Their cosmically unfurling synth epics seem unbesmirched by consciousness at all. The Bajas—Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan—come across like a walking flow state, music bubbling forth like water from a geyser.
FR 187: Matthew Schnipper on grief, art, and learning (not) to be like Henry Rollins
I read Matthew Schnipper’s book Rise Above in two sittings—a sitting and a half, really. There are a number of reasons that I found myself unable to put it down. Matthew is a friend (and former work colleague), and one of my favorite writers. And its subject matter—Rise Above is about the aftermath of the death of his son, Renzo, at 22 months old—lends the book unusual gravitas. Beyond that, though, I found myself captivated by his ability to keep surprising me, page after page.
FR 186: Levitating With Lambchop
I can’t remember the last time I connected with an album the way I have with Lambchop’s Punching the Clown—the last time an album has gone almost instantly, within three or four plays, from object of curiosity to something more like a ritual ablution, and then retained that sanctified air, assuaging some deep and unnameable need, for days on end. I can’t remember the last time I’ve kept coming back to a record like I have this one, as though in search of answers.
Donatell: Water, CA
Water, California, doesn’t exist on any map that I’m aware of. At least, I can’t find any place by that name—neither town, nor burg, nor suburb, nor metropolis.
FR 185: Clashing Tribes
In observation of the dog days of summer—aka the “silly season”—I leave you with an essay inspired by Pitchfork’s recent electroclash list, to which I contributed both voting and blurbs, as well as Anna Gaca’s related hyperclash essay and Sam Valenti IV’s excellent Herb Sundays essay on the topic.
FR 184: Terra Incognita
Last week I saw my first eclipse. We were among the luckiest of the lucky. While 18,000 people here on Menorca crammed into the beach of Son Bou, on the island’s southwest coast, and roads to the northern lighthouses and other scenic vantage points were closed to traffic as early as 8 a.m., we knew the event would be visible from our backyard, so we threw a party. Maybe 25 people, including a ton of kids. There was beer, there was swimming, there was potluck.
FR 183: Luminous
As I mentioned last week, I’ve been so busy with interviews—with Topdown Dialectic, GB, Lifted, Smalltown Supersound’s Joakim Haugland, and Balmat’s own Play Time (the trio of Ben Vida, Booker Stardrum, and Will Epstein)—that I’ve been neglecting the newsletter’s new-release roundups. That changes today! This week is all about the records that have been keeping me company over the past month or so. Hopefully, there’s a little something for everyone.
A Month of Interviews and a Summer Top 10
Unicorn in the forest, Oswald West State Park, Oregon Summer barrels onward. You may have noticed that it’s been a minute, certainly longer than I’d intended, to publish a fresh roundup of new releases. In large part that’s because I’ve been fortunate enough recently to secure interviews with some fantastic interview subjects.
FR 183: Topdown Dialectic Is Real
For a while there, everything about Topdown Dialectic seemed carefully designed to defer any question of identity, meaning, or context.
Eden Aurelius: Entre Nous
Eden Aurelius is a relatively recent arrival to New York’s underground club scene, but her slim discography so far shows remarkable focus. With the exception of an early, techno-leaning compilation track that pushed to the center of the dancefloor, virtually everything she has put out so far has used the tools of dance music to carve out a space of sanctuary, pairing hypnotic dub rhythms with billowing ambient chords.
FR 182: Picture’s Eeeeeeee Perfects a Forgotten Strain of Minimal Techno
For paying subscribers: some thoughts on the retromanic pleasures of Picture’s Uuuuuuuu (Short Span), which I was thrilled to see receive Best New Music on Pitchfork this week, smartly reviewed by H.D. Angel. Should music move forward? Not in time—all music, after all, does that—but in history? Should musicians strive to reflect, or express, or even prod the changing times in the forms they choose and the sounds they imagine?
Leo: Cicada Burnt
The artist known simply as Leo is a conductor of shards. He favors blunt attacks and sharp edges, and his overwhelmingly percussive club tracks move like flying debris. The Manchester musician’s preference for the fragmentary extends to his approach to genre.
FR 181: How AD 93’s GB Fused Dire Straits With Coil on His New Album Herzsprung
GB (photo: Samuel Wilson) If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the AD 93 label, it’s that virtually anything might happen on one of its records. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the sounds that greeted me when I first pressed play on the promo of Herzsprung, the forthcoming album from the Copenhagen artist known simply as GB. The London label’s previous forays into rock music have veered variously toward gloomy post-punk (Moin) or batshit chaos (YHWH Nailgun).
FR 180: Lifted’s Cinema for the Ears
Matt Papich & Andrew Field-Pickering (photo: Farrah Skeiky) Back in 2005, when Tortoise released an album-length set of remixes of their self-titled debut album, it was a rework from Steve Albini dubbed “The Match Incident” that most caught my attention—all the more so because it didn’t sound anything like that band’s music. In fact, it didn’t really even sound like music at all. His remix is essentially a film without images.
ʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(̸̢̛̼̞̭͋ͅ)̸͚̰͛̔̾̀̿͒͂:̴͓̞̑̌̂̆̊͋̀:̸͎̟̯̂̓̌ ҉ ͡ ͞ ͞ ͞ ҉● ࿀ ● ࿀ ● ҉⃝ ⃝͢ ͞ ͘ ͞⃝̕ ͢ ̛ ⃝ ̸ ̡ ͢⃝̧ ͡ ͡ ̀ ̧ ̢⃝͜ ҉ ͞ ͞ ⃝͞ ͘ ͞ ͡⃝ ⃝҉҈҉҈҉҈҉҈҉҈҉ :̶̢͙͙͕̠̩͆(̷̮͍͚̫͚͂̍)̵̳̗̊( ̟̞̝̜̙̘̗̖҉̵̴̨̧̢̡̼̻̺̹̳̲̱̰̯̮̭̬̫̪̩̦̥̤̣̠҈͈͇͉͍͎͓͔͕͖͙͚͜͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢ͅ l̡̡̡ ̡͌ Ɵʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(̸
Dance music prides itself on big-tent inclusivity, but DJ culture thrives on jealously guarded secrets. In some ultra-competitive genres—Northern soul, hip-hop, jungle—selectors have been known to cover up the center stickers of their records, or leave white labels unmarked, to throw boothsnooping DJs off the scent. No artist has had more fun subverting the conventions of the track ID than Kieran Hebden, better known as Four Tet.
Four Tet: ʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(̸̢̛̼̞̭͋ͅ)̸͚̰͛̔̾̀̿͒͂:̴͓̞̑̌̂̆̊͋̀:̸͎̟̯̂̓̌ ҉ ͡ ͞ ͞ ͞ ҉● ࿀ ● ࿀ ● ҉⃝ ⃝͢ ͞ ͘ ͞⃝̕ ͢ ̛ ⃝ ̸ ̡ ͢⃝̧ ͡ ͡ ̀ ̧ ̢⃝͜ ҉ ͞ ͞ ⃝͞ ͘ ͞ ͡⃝ ⃝҉҈҉҈҉҈҉҈҉҈҉ :̶̢͙͙͕̠̩͆(̷̮͍͚̫͚͂̍)̵̳̗̊( ̟̞̝̜̙̘̗̖҉̵̴̨̧̢̡̼̻̺̹̳̲̱̰̯̮̭̬̫̪̩̦̥̤̣̠҈͈͇͉͍͎͓͔͕͖͙͚͜͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢ͅ l̡̡̡ ̡͌ Ɵʅ͡͡͡͡
This free browser-based sampler turns YouTube into an MPC If you're looking for a way to lose an hour or two of your day to some good old-fashioned musical procrastination, look no further than YPC, a …
FR 179: Smalltown Supersound Is a Feeling
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.
FR 178: Ben Vida, Booker Stardrum, and Will Epstein Are Play Time
“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.
Batu / Donato Dozzy: Exhale
When Donato Scaramuzzi and Omar McCutcheon stepped into the DJ booth together at the Netherlands’ Draaimolen festival in 2023, their back-to-back set represented a meeting of two different generations, and two distinct sensibilities.
FR 177: The 20 Best Albums of 2026 So Far
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.
Dinosaur L: “Go Bang! (#5)”
Some artists have eras, experimental phases, detours, creative dalliances; Arthur Russell’s career, for all its seeming contradictions—avant-garde minimalism and lascivious disco, Zen Buddhist mantras and winsome country pop—was a continuum. Gaze back over the broad sweep of his work and it comes to resemble a river: forever changing, forever the same. Yet a pair of back-to-back shows Russell played in the spring of 1979 looks, in retrospect, like a turning point.
FR 176: Sip a Likkle Fenugreek
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.
Gold Panda: TON UP
Dance-music producers are notorious for mellowing in middle age. With enough bangers under their belt and enough sunrises burned into habitually widened retinas, many ultimately decide it’s time to get presentable, responsible, grounded like a barefoot Rick Rubin sipping green tea. But what do you do if you were pretty mellow to begin with? Since 2010, Gold Panda’s Derwin Dicker has been making opalescent, gossamer-tufted tracks in the tradition of Four Tet, J Dilla, and Susumu Yokota.
FR 175: The Field’s Axel Willner Unpacks His Looping State of Mind
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.
FR 174: All the Things That Could Happen Next
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.
Mixes Digest 26: Parallel Lines
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.
FR 173: Eleven Albums in Search of a Theme
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.
Martyn: Music for Existing
Not long after Martyn Deykers had a heart attack, in 2017, he was listening to an album by jazz drummer Max Roach when he discovered an unusual side effect of returning from the brink of death. “It was like I could hear more space in the music,” he said. “It was almost 3D hearing.” The artist known simply as Martyn can count his blessings twice: first, for surviving the cardiac event, and second, for discovering how to harness that newfound energy for his own work.
FR 172: Hexagons Everywhere
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.
Boards of Canada: Inferno
A week before the release of Boards of Canada’s Inferno, attendees in a Barcelona arthouse cinema watched a flaming hexagon rotate slowly in the darkness while the album played back in its entirety—part of a series of listening sessions held that day in theaters, auditoriums, churches, and record stores around the world.
Boards of Canada: Inferno
Dennis Quaid Wants to Terminate Child Support of Twins Who Almost Died - and Who He Collected $750,000 for in Malpractice Case - Showbiz411 It’s not possible that there is a word Quaid than Randy. But Dennis, who always considered the normal one, has turned out to be far worse. According to …
FR 171: Martyna Basta Is Seeking Shelter in Sound
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.
FR 170: Is Music Discovery Really Broken?
Mystery records in a Kraków flea market Resident Advisor reported this week on a new AI startup aimed at facilitating music discovery in underground electronic music. Paste a link to a track you like, and it spits out other tracks that (purportedly) sound like it. Below the jump, I take it for a spin—and ask why we’d even need something like that in the first place.
FR 169: Primordial Minds and Tactical Magic
The Field is back! Plus new albums from Matt Evans, Imaginary Softwoods, Memotone, and more. All hail the looping state of mind. That’s the title of a great 2011 album from the Field, of course; after an eight-year silence, he’s finally back with a new album on Studio Barnhus, and as I write below, it offers a fresh look in at his singular and woozily psychedelic musical universe, an infinite expanse of smeared loops, diamantine drums, and understated pop sentimentality.
Jesca Hoop: Long Wave Home
In her 2022 song “Sioux Falls,” Jesca Hoop looks out an airplane window and sees a whirling vortex the size of a stadium. Is it a body of water? A crop circle? No—as the plane descends, the scene comes into focus: thousands of men, women, and children, spinning “like thread around a spool,” terror on their faces, trampling those who lose their footing. The uncanny vision is made even eerier when Hoop spots her late mother dragging her five children through the human tide.
Jesca Hoop: Long Wave Home
1 day ago The part in Kendrick Lamar’s diss tracks that really shattered Drake’s ego—more than “The Epstein Angle,” the accusations of ironed-on abs, or losing custody of DeMar DeRozan—was framing him as a hip-hop Christopher Columbus. “No you not a colleague, you a fuckin’ colonizer,” barked Kenny on “Not …
FR 168: Yu Su Is Forging Her Own Path
Yu Su’s past decade has been a process of steady if unpredictable change. Born and raised in Kaifeng, China, she didn’t encounter electronic music until coming to Vancouver for university, and since then it’s almost as though she’s been making up for lost time. Her earliest material was sample-based, lo-fi, and psychedelic, followed by a run of blissed-out, Balearic downtempo inspired by her friends in the Mood Hut crew.
FR 167: Three Albums, Reviewed
I’m switching up the format slightly this week, exploring fewer albums in greater depth. Nothing wrong with a capsule review, but as I began writing about Yu Su’s fantastic new Short Span album Foundry last week, I found myself wanting to go longer, and the same thing happened to me with Ben Vida’s revelatory Shelter Press release Oblivion Seekers.
Seefeel: Sol.Hz
It takes some time to clock that Sol.Hz, the latest album from British ambient-dub droneshapers Seefeel, has even started. At first it’s just silence. If you’re listening on a phone or computer and you don’t have the volume turned up loud, you may at first wonder if some kind of glitch has interrupted the stream. But once your ears become accustomed to the foggy swell leaching into the air, the music comes on like financial ruin did for one of Hemingway’s characters: Gradually, then suddenly.
FR 166: Colombian Drone Mafia Is Imagining New Futures for Ambient Music
Colombian Drone Mafia (photo: Manu Uribe) Space Talk is a hi-fi listening bar tucked behind a forest green facade in Clerkenwell, London; over the past year, it has doubled as a virtual garden of experimental sounds tended by Bogotá’s Nicolás Sánchez, better known as TraTraTrax cofounder Nyksan.
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