Futureproofing #1: Welcome + Peverelist

An introduction and a DJ mix to get us started.

Hello, and welcome to Futureproofing.

In 2010, before I had a real job in music, I started a blog with this same name—titled after the track from Actress's album Splazsh. Now it's back, in a different form. This time around, the site will focus on things I love personally, new and old. There will be artist interviews and profiles, music roundups, retrospectives about archival albums and a series called Then & Now focusing on the sometimes lesser-known origins of artists. You'll find great new music and brilliant old music, presented with little to no bullshit. (That's the idea, anyway.) There's an option to subscribe, and nothing will be paywalled for now, though as the archive builds, some things may disappear behind that invisible fence. I'd be grateful for your support if you can swing it, and if you can't, I hope you enjoy reading anyways.

I've spent my entire adult life sharing and writing about music, and I don't plan to stop—this platform just gives me the freedom to do it how I want to do it, without worrying about traffic stats, engaged minutes or brand partnerships. Futureproofing will update at least once a week, though sometimes more than that. Bear with me while I figure out the best way to package everything.

When I started Futureproofing the first time, it was with a mix from dubstep legend Peverelist. That felt like quite a coup for a relative novice at 20 years old. Now, in 2024, I'm starting a new website called Futureproofing, with a new set from Peverelist. I won't be starting a mix series or anything, but I couldn't resist the symmetry, or the gift from one of my favourite dance music producers ever.

Futureproofing means something different now than it did in 2010, when it felt like dance music, especially UK dance music, was hurtling toward some great unknown and brighter future. Cyclical musical trends and advances in technology—storage, streaming, sharing, DIY publishing—mean that the past is more accessible than ever before, and people are constantly creating alternate histories through unearthed rarities and once-overlooked personal favorites. My idea of the origins of dubstep might be different than yours, and both could still be valid. Look no further than CCL’s time-collapsing A Night in the Skull Discotheque mixtape, which traces dubstep’s spiritual influences as far back as the ‘70s.

What once seemed like a fairly straightforward lineage now has endless forks in the genealogical tree. There are parallel universes and timelines for almost every genre and style, as if music histories could be explained by quantum physics, existing in several iterations at once. As touched on in a recent Phillip Sherburne piece, this everything-at-once reality means that there is no longer an agreed-upon trajectory, or a main stage, or anything approaching consensus. So what you’ll get here is electronic music, past and present, from my perspective—starting with a mix from one of my historical favourites presenting brand new material.

Enjoy and read on below for an introduction.

May 2011: It was my first night in London. Honestly, it was my first night anywhere, as I had never left the Pacific Northwest in my then-21 years. I took the tube to Shoreditch for a night that was the stuff of dreams for a dubstep-obsessed kid from Canada: a Hessle Audio showcase launching their label compilation featuring all three founders, plus Loefah, a very young Objekt and, my personal favourite, Peverelist.

King of what was briefly called dubstep-techno, the Bristol-via-Essex artist had captured my imagination with tracks that sounded like the dance music version of Howl's Moving Castle. His elliptical drum patterns held the tracks afloat without ever letting them actually drop, and so the sub-bass became meditative—scaffolding instead of the focal point. This approach came off best on "Clunk Click Every Trip," a track that still sounds mind-blowing, like something sculpted out of ancient stone that has just always existed. (The B-side “Gather” is pretty great too.)

Needless to say, I was stoked. I shakily went up to Peverelist and introduced myself, and he insisted on buying me a beer. I think it was a Red Stripe. I hadn't developed a taste for beer yet, so I slunk off and quietly deposited it into a garbage can, but it might as well have been a sacred object for a few seconds. Two months later, after being robbed at gunpoint in Barcelona, losing everything but my wallet and phone, I was pulling into Bristol Temple Meads train station for one of the final legs of my trip. I got to the Idle Hands record shop, where I was staying on the second floor, and in helping owner Chris Farrell lug a TV up the stairs, I cut my hand wide open on the rather sketchy-looking railing. A truly great omen for Bristol.

That night featured another dream party, Pinch's Subloaded series with Pearson Sound, Dean Grenier (literally the first person I ever met involved in dance music) and, by some cosmic coincidence, Daega Sound from my hometown of Vancouver. My hand was bandaged up, I ran out of money and had no computer or other useful possessions to speak of, but it felt like a homecoming. And, of course, Peverelist was there too.

During my two-month jaunt across Europe that summer, Pev was in the process of launching Livity Sound, the label that would refigure him from dubstep upstart to elder statesman, and a mentor to Asusu and Kowton, Bristol's new guard who injected the city's dubwise sound with even more techno. Having first shifted the landscape of UK music with his weirdo dubstep, he was doing it again with a wide-open sound whose reverberations are still being felt across UK dance music and beyond, with labels like Timedance, Wisdom Teeth and even TraTraTrax carrying the torch Peverelist lit with their own sets of fuel and kindling. 

Because of these people, and the surreal wellspring of talent that was and still is Bristol, the West Country city has long felt like my spiritual UK home (even if I haven't visited in far too long). I probably wouldn't be where I am in my life if it wasn't for artists like Pinch and Peverelist, and not only because of the music they made, but because of the access they graciously granted me so early in my career.

October 2024: In the midst of a career transition, I found myself in DIY publishing territory again. Who better to help than Peverelist? This new mix lands in the middle of Pev's Pulse series, and it’s a reflection of where he's at right now: a retrofuturist blend of house, jungle and UK leftfield techno/club/bass, whatever you want to call it. There are plenty of tracks from the newer generation—K-LONE, Smiff, Decka, Dismantle, Burland—but he also burrows deep into contemporary techno with tracks from Polygonia and Huey Mnemonic. It's both severe and funky, even featuring some house diva vocals that you'd probably never expect from the helium-drunk chipmunk samples of the late '00s.

It also includes two tracks from his new EP, Pulse Echo, one of which, "Pulse XVI," has a splash of old-school housey piano—but, which he pointed out to me, is "much more Leeds than Chicago." This new EP, and the mix, is Peverelist at his most approachable, where the dub influence lurks in the snaking basslines beneath tracks that pay tribute to the history of UK dance music. This increasing focus on house and techno—the mix also includes cuts from French tech house savant Malin Genie—feels like the future and past mixed into one, which is pretty on brand for our current era, and for Futureproofing.

Come back in a few days for a roundup of some of my favourite recent releases, plus articles on an essential but forgotten compilation curated by The Bug, the late Mika Vainio, and interviews with artists like YATTA, Lawrence English and more.

1. Malin Genie - Hedonic Setpoint 4

2. Silver Ash - Cantalas (Shed’s Wax’d Dub mix)

3. K-LONE - Drums (Leod edit)

4. Smiff - Blinker

5. Bakongo - Level Cowbell

6. Peverelist - Pulse XVI

7. Dismantle - Damage Work

8. Peverelist - Pulse XIII

9. Hypogean Dweeb From The Deep - Parametric Experimental Studies on Supersonic Flow Unsteadiness Over a Hemispherical Spiked Body

10. Gafacci & Sam Interface - Brekete

11. Decka & Roseen - Frameworks Pt1 & Pt 2 (Don Williams remix)

12. Huey Mnemonic - Brainscraatch

13. Danny Goliger - Local Cable

14. Hodge - Free

15. Polygonia - Mind Alteration

16. Eleanor - Thin End Of The Wedge (Black Rave Culture Freak Mix)

17. Don Williams - Solutions

18. Neil Landstruum - Droop

19. Burland - Untitled 140

20. Tinashe - Nasty (Leonce instrumental dub)

21. Mantra - Schemes and Dreams