Futureproofing #28: Radiance

Hi everyone,

I feel like a broken record talking to everyone I know about Carrier, but the guy formerly known as Shifted’s new album came out in late October and I gave it a Best New Music review over at Pitchfork. It’s one of the most stunning electronic albums of the year, and the culmination of a project that puts together a new kind of dub techno from the bones of drum & bass and jazz. It’s like molecular gastronomy but for dance music, but also way, way better than that sounds. I also wrote about the new Squarepusher reissue, originally from 1994, which is fun in an innocent, the “MDMA still hits right” kind of way (and bears little resemblance to the drill & bass and jazz experimentation that came later).

Anyway, here are some other records I’ve been digging recently.

Edited by Tom Gledhill

Binary Algorithms - Reminiscencias [Furatena, 2025]

With a name like Binary Algorithms, I was expecting drab, steely techno, but Reminiscencias is actually bright and full of color right from the beginning. Opener “El Alba En Tu Mirada” centers around a shower of cartoonish arps that sound like a cross between peak-era Todd Terje and Marcel Fengler. The broken beat thrust of “Cenizas,” where the drums are buffeted by synths that swell like Hollywood movie strings, only underlines the 2010s techno comparison. (Throw in a little Answer Code Request, too.)

The track titles are vaguely political (”To Resist And Break,” “Something To Fight For,” “> Dissidente”) but those themes don’t really come across in the music. The latter tune is massive, though it’s more elegant than it is forceful, with chunky Shed-like drums that roll in a slow and sweeping rhythm.

Where Reminiscencias really succeeds, though, is sequencing. Shifting between razor-sharp electro, leaden techno, dubby skanking and lighter, early Warp-style IDM, it reminds me of some of my most beloved techno full-lengths—the records that use the genre as a jumping off point for exploration without losing sight of the fact that this is still supposed to be dance music. There’s a sense of melody and structure that should appeal to non-techno heads, like the wistful and windswept “Sub-Periphery,” but there’s still enough clanking metal (”Resplendor Perdido”) to work the darkest of rooms.

Opsin - Through The Wall [Hypnic Jerks, 2025]

This record, on the other hand, goes so far into the murky depths of electronica that it’s more of an experimental album with a few accidental dance tracks. Made during pandemic-induced isolation—throwback!—by two roommates, the record uses the house it was recorded in as a sort of canvas. You can hear a real-world sense of space and echo, and all kinds of sounds sourced from god knows where: rattles, clinks, mutters, human sonic detritus collected into electronic music in a very Matthew Herbert way. Each producer ran the elements through their own separate rigs, sharing and combining the results. Despite that, it evades sounding overcooked, with all that extra effort going toward detailing the dense sonic landscape.

At its knottiest, Through The Wall approaches academic electroacoustic music. “Lumbar”’s rumbles, drones, and discrete plucks and scratches sound like they’re happening in a room, not on a grid, and the drums constantly change tack, rarely staying on the same rhythm for long. This track, and the dissolute jungle of “elbow split,” give a whole new meaning to deconstructed club. Imagine dance tracks literally taken apart with wrenches and pliers. Samples unspool in real time, changing speed and pitch rapidly, which makes an already disorienting record even more disorienting. Its only real flaw is an occasional lack of tension and narrative, but I’m not sure that’s the point anyway. Instead, Through The Wall is about immersion in a fully realistic soundscape full of unreal sounds. It makes me think of a more quotidian but infinitely more complex version of the software architecture world that the characters enter in Tron.

SDEM - At Quadrant Park [Quadrant Park]

This release launches a new label from Ian Fenton, who also runs prestigious avant-garde label frozen reeds. Recorded for an “audience of one” at an empty, disused Leeds venue, At Quadrant Park is an hour-long live set of sticky, hydraulic electronic music that feels laser-focused to appeal to fans of Autechre, though that comparison is more of a starting point than a definition. Over the course of 61 nonstop minutes, rhythms form and decouple and discrete songs occasionally come into view, with the drunken swagger of modern IDM occasionally lockstepping into broken techno, electro, and an industrial approximation of ‘80s hip-hop, with crushed bits of synth flying off every which way like debris. Aside from its improvised feel, it doesn’t necessarily sound like a live album. It’s a near-virtuosic record of nu-IDM that reins in the frantic experimentation of the genre’s newer incarnations with an economy of ideas, rhythm and melody.

Sister Irene O’Connor - Fire Of God’s Love [Freedom To Spend, 2025]

This cult classic, recorded by an Australian nun 1973, has lived many lives. Its latest rebirth is through a reissue on the RVNG Intl. sub-label Freedom To Spend, who claim it’s the first authorized reissue since the ‘70s. Fire Of God’s Love is a religious album made with clear pop instincts, with a slight strangeness only intensified by O’Connor’s use of a dinky sounding electric organ and a drum machine. It predicts bedroom pop from 10, even 20 years later, with a sonic language that’s immediately familiar to a certain kind of music nerd, albeit with totally unfamiliar subject matter. This album speaks to a nun’s life, and faith, through the lens of naive pop music and contemporary folk, all infused with a palpable joy that feels miles away from the glazed-over, sanitized worship of contemporary Christian music, (CCM for those in the trenches). Not even I can resist the jaunty “Teenager’s Chorus,” which has a fantastically wordy chorus centered around the line “we like to serve God in everything.” O’Connor rushes through the tightly-packed syllables with all the urgent glee of John Lennon in the earliest Beatles songs.

There’s curiosity and infectious wonder here, like the paean to the everyday beauty of life on “Nature Is A Song,” or how “Fire” highlights the power of emotion and interpersonal connection that should be part of any life lived for faith. “Fire”—famously sampled by James Blake and featured on a few soundtracks—has an absolutely perfect slapback echo that could read Lynchian or just blithely retro. To me, it sounds timeless. Singing in English, French, Latin and Malay, Fire Of God’s Love glows with a polyglot warmth that transcends language and organized religion, or at least it seems that way to this non-religious person. It’s impossible to listen to “Messe du Saint Esprit” and not be taken by O’Connor’s voice, which curls upwards in melodic loops like wisps of smoke from a stick of incense, spiraling up towards the heavens as far as they can go.

Katatonic Silentio - Mantis 17 [Delsin Records, 2025]

Another Futureproofing, another Katatonic Silentio release. This one comes on Delsin’s slightly experimental-leaning Mantis imprint, which the Italian artist uses as an excuse to retool her leftfield techno into even stranger shapes. These tracks alternately writhe and float, with a swing borrowed from early dubstep and a mischievous sound palette taken from late ‘00s microhouse. “In Battere” is the highlight here, with hats and snares that ring out like gunshots and a melody that stalks the background like the synths on an old DMZ record. Though I’m also partial to “Radiance,” a springy, rattling thing that takes pleasure in the sheer ridiculousness of its own sounds. Weird squiggles and bursts of color land like accidental ink splatters, like if peak-era Bruno Pronsato or Villalobos made a record for Apple Pips back in the day. It also feels completely different from the last few records that I’ve featured in Futureproofing, but with the same fathoms-deep sound design and vaguely dubby sense of sonic architecture—she’s one of my favorite producers going in any genre right now.