Futureproofing #26

Hi everyone,

A new round of reviews here featuring some of my favorites of the last few weeks. It’s a pretty solid mix of dance music and less-dancey music. If you get anything out of this newsletter, it should be listening to the Weston Olencki and Sub Basics records, which I haven’t seen get much attention elsewhere.

Edited by Tom Gledhill

Mika Vainio - Sysivalo

Mika Vainio is near and dear to my heart. I devoted an early issue of Futureproofing to him after the release of a posthumous EP of icy, technoid recordings under his Ø alias. This latest album, Sysivalo (whose title very roughly translates to darkness and light), was put together by Vainio’s ex-partner Rikke Lundgreen and Sähkö Recordings boss Tommi Grönlund based on notes and recordings that the late Finnish artist left behind.

Vainio’s catalogue as Ø has spanned eerie ambient abstraction, straight-up techno, and electroacoustic music that could’ve soundtracked Turku’s answer to Twin Peaks. Sysivalo hews closer to ambient music, but it’s the most varied full-length he’s put out, with brief sprints of techno broken up by chilly passages of drone and dry ice smoke.

The album is roughly structured around a series of “Etudes” that dominate its first half, a title that suggests a level of rigour and composition unexpected from an artist best known for the unpredictable roar and buzz of electricity. The album’s opening stretch creates a suitably gothic atmosphere, one that’s more grotesque gargoyles on building facades than ‘80s hair and makeup. And while Sysivalo is as emotionally ambiguous as anything else Vainio has done—his work can feel as gruff and obtuse as his demeanor once was—there are moments of unguarded beauty. The closing track “Loputon”’s plaintive organ melody and glockenspiel-like chimes should earn it a place on any Best of Mika Vainio list from here on out, ending an album that not only closes Vainio’s career in grander, more complete terms than we could have hoped for, but also makes a great way in for beginners.

Paul St. Hilaire - w/ The Producers [Kynant Records, 2025]

This next release on the consistently great Kynant Records is a spiritual sequel to Basic Channel’s Rhythm & Sound w/ The Artists LP. The label invites contemporary producers to do their best impression of Mark & Moritz in reggae mode with occasionally stunning results, like Priori’s fantastic “Send Them On,” where the chords wobble and shimmer like blobs of liquid mercury. His track is the most convincing, but almost everyone is firing on all cylinders here. Aurora Halal and DJ G come with a big room, LSD-ready take on “Mango Drive”-style grooves, and Batu jerry-rigs a bassline that sounds like it’s falling off the rails and tumbling down a staircase. St. Hilaire’s voice is pleasingly aged, the close-miking technique revealing new crags and creaks, like new wrinkles appearing around the corners of his mouth. It’s a lot sleeker and more technoid than Rhythm & Sound, but this is 2025 after all, with a whole different slate of producers who could have been cribbed from the pages of Resident Advisor. Ask yourself this: do you want to hear Tikiman’s voice echoing across a typically brilliant Shinichi Atobe track? If the answer’s yes, you’ll be happy.

Weston Olencki - Broadsides [Outside Time, 2025]

This record was sent to me by a friend who read my Grateful Dead newsletter, and indeed it touches on a similar New Weird America vibe as some of that band’s spaciest moments. It’s a clash of roots and computer music, compiled from recordings made during a trip from South Carolina to West Virginia. Here, traditional American folk art meets the traditions that came after the ‘50s—and you could even draw a line to artists like Pat Metheny or Steve Reich. For me, the album centers around the “Foggy Mountain Breakdown // Ground Speed,” which indeed sounds like a cousin to Reich & Metheny’s “Electric Counterpoint.” It’s 11 minutes of beautiful banjo loops rearranged by software, creating an intense and intricate latticework that feels inhuman, but only gently so—it makes me imagine an orchestra of banjo players, each playing a pattern slightly different than the player next to them.

That’s followed by the discordant “All My Father’s Clocks,” which sounds like a fiddle being attacked by a barbed wire bow. It’s actually an autoharp, found warped and detuned in a strip mall, played with reckless aplomb by Olencki, at turns approximating the sound of Tuvan throat singing, a factory, and the shrieking strings of Penderecki. It’s a difficult listen, but that makes its coda—what sounds like rain, and the strum of nylon strings—all the sweeter in its almost dumbfounded innocence.

In some ways, Broadsides is really just the sum of its parts: traditional American music shaped into electronic-adjacent avant-garde music. But there is profundity in these tones and rumbles, and in the way that instruments and loops interact with each other. Much of the melody here feels almost accidental, with tracks that feel like recordings of lengthy improvisations rather than compositions. But they are happy accidents, moments of unity and harmony cobbled together from creaks, drones, and scrapes. It’s a vision of the American South that acknowledges both its beauty and its ghosts, the way that both things exist side by side, without resorting to clichés or platitudes.

Katatonic Silentio - Water Dubs [A Walking Contradiction, 2025]

There’s a few producers I feel like I’m always banging on about (*cough* Polygonia), and Katatonic Silentio is another one. She makes sound design-y techno that skirts the outer reaches of the genre, often tossing aside functionality but keeping the aesthetics: namely, metallic, minuscule sounds that reverberate across the stereo field and play funny tricks on the brain. Water Dubs is one of her most out-there releases, and it really juices the water theme: “Tidal Reverie” is dub techno with aquatic atmospherics, with drums and sounds that move with a strange gravity, like they’re darting through the depths of the ocean. “Deep Water Dub” could make Donato Dozzy envious, but it’s more enveloping and dark than it is hypnotizing, with high-pitched sounds ricocheting off the corners like echolocation sonar waves. But maybe the most remarkable thing about Water Dubs is how it conjures these deep sea atmospheres with what are essentially basic dub and techno devices: drum machines, rattles, and a trigger-happy delay effect. Dub techno is one of the most svelte, but also formulaic, styles of techno—here, Katatonic Silentio finds something genuinely new to say with it. I only wish it were a full album.

Sir Hiss - Time Dilation [Pineapple Records, 2025]

I’m not sure why the cover art for this new record on Sam Binga’s label looks like a cartoon version of a ‘90s death metal LP, because the music inside is bouncy, lighthearted, and clearly geared towards having a good time. Then again, the low-end is nearly demonic, so maybe there’s something there. Easily one of the best produced dance floor LPs of the year, it pulls together elements of East Coast club, grime, drum & bass, and even some shades of EDM. But the key here is the drums, which are always lithe and funky, letting these coarse, buzzy textures speak for themselves—like the larger-than-life bass and blown-out synths of “Wild Strikes,” which melds Pulse X with rowdy electro.

Harvey Sutherland - Debt [Clarity, 2025]

A friend of mine described Debt as “Las Vegas pool music,” which is not that far from the truth, and also not a bad thing. For this album, Australian Mike Katz takes a microhouse approach to his usual discofied house, for a record that’s curiously maximalist and ultra-lean at the same time. Sutherland is one of those people I would describe as “good at music,” meaning that no matter what style he’s tackling, you can count on it to be well-produced, catchy, and a little more song-oriented than your average dance music producer. That comes through even with the Cécille-worship here, like the tight George Clinton-via-Luomo groove of “Cigarette,” or the reassuring strut of “What Do You Need To Feel Heard,” which is like a tenderqueer version of a Tulum anthem circa 2013.

Katz is also wry and unafraid to make fun of himself (like on 2022’s wonderfully neurotic Boy), and with Debt, he reckons with getting old, going out, and trying to make it as an electronic music artist when you’re teetering close to being over the hill. It might be a little on-the-nose to do that with a self-consciously retro album, but these Metro Area-via-Luomo beats are convincing enough to make it work. Ever the crossover star, Katz includes a few vocal features here, but I like it more when he lets the blips and beats speak for themselves.

Sub Basics - Never Too Late [Temple Of Sound, 2025]

File under “records that feel like they were made specifically for me.” Following a 12-inch of wigged-out psy-dub on Animalia, the UK producer returns to his own label for an album that effortlessly hopscotches between drum & bass, dubstep and dub techno. It’s tempting to say it could have come out in 2010—and its shimmering sound palette and sunny-but-slightly-severe disposition certainly hark back that era, like vintage Appleblim or Headhunter—but there’s also a level of jittery drum jiu jitsu that places it somewhere a little later in the 21st century dance music lineage. Like “Theory,” which juggles ideas from early breakbeat hardcore with Samurai Horo-style genre fusion and a sense of melancholy that weighs down the propulsive drums. But I leave you with “Nevermind,” which is simply a perfect house track: a springy bassline built like a pogo stick, hopping merrily on its way through sculpted dub techno chords and cocooning melodies.

Call Super - A Rhythm Protects One [Dekmantel, 2025]

An album disguised as a mix CD, A Rhythm Protects One is a savvy marketing move as well as an excellent LP. The concept allows JR Seaton to pull in eyes with his Call Super alias but explore tangents he would usually reserve for other names like Ondo Fudd and Elmo Crumb. This record stitches together the stylistic extremes of his music into one technicolor patchwork of genres and moods, heavily informed by the recent minimal revival but built with the rhythmic ingenuity and wandering muse of Seaton’s best records. A few dodgy aesthetic choices—some meandering clarinet here, an out-of-place vocal there—are rescued by Seaton’s almost happy-go-lucky willingness to go down whatever path his mind takes him, through tumble-dryer microhouse (it is 2025, after all) and chunky house beats. I’ve always thought of him as someone who makes albums like a good DJ puts together sets: adventurous yet consistent all the way through, the kind of thing you could listen to for hours on end and not get bored with. A Rhythm Protects One is basically both things at the same time; though I’d give the unmixed version the edge, as these tracks are fascinating enough to stand on their own.