Futureproofing #20: Lots of techno, and more
Excellent new releases from rRoxymore, Mammo, Uun, Adam Feingold, and more.
Edited by Tom Gledhill
I've found myself listening to a bit more straight-up techno recently, and I'm not sure why. I can’t tell if it's getting better (again), or if it's just that more people are slowing down and making music more palatable to ears that grew up (literally) going to Berghain and gobbling up every Semantica, Prologue and Ostgut Ton release they could find. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but techno producers who I haven't thought of in a few years (Markus Suckut, featured down below) are suddenly capturing my attention again.
This issue's list of releases has quite a few techno releases, but also some beautifully non-functional electronic music, and even a full-on indie rock turn from Naemi. But I’m curious: what's your favorite techno release of the year so far? An EP, a track, an album. Let me know in the comments or email me at andrewryce (AT) gmail DOT com—I want to hear what you’re digging. It’s a two-way street.
The Music
rRoxymore - Juggling Dualities [!K7, 2025]
This is easily rRoxymore's best-ever record, which is funny, because it's also one of her least characteristic. The French artist has never had a signature sound, but for Juggling Dualities she dives into mid-'90s IDM—the slower, more patient side of it—for an album of stunning pastiche, nostalgia done timelessly and elegantly. The slow synths on "Embracing The Unknown" float over the broken beat below like clouds that move just fast enough for the naked eye to see them float across the horizon. Or "Moodified," which turns the bassy boom of techno into the pitter-patter of paws on a hardwood floor. Or the mesmerizing downtempo breakbeat of "Solace," whose arpeggiated lead that feels like it's slipping off the chromatic scale with each new run, weighed down by a melodica-like synth that wails like Augustus Pablo. Juggling Dualities is in-between music—not dance floor, not ambient—that finds strength in its lack of definition, and beauty in the simplest of electronic music structures.
Boundary - Epicenter Imager / Starfish Pool - Sampler [Brutaż, 2025]
These two records were sent to me as a dual-pronged package by Brutaż, a Polish label that operates at a crossroads: half history lesson (previous releases have compiled old tracks from Bulgaria and Vancouver), half cutting-edge electronics. They don't actually have anything to do with each other, but instead offer two opposite takes on vintage electronic music: one is from this year, rose-tinted and retro, and the other collects music from the '90s, scuzzier and rough as the weatherbeaten concrete of a tower block.
The first EP comes from Dominican producer Boundary, who has been making electronic music since he was a teenager and sounds a little different with every new record. This one is theoretically a concept album about "a device that allows the indigenous people of the isle to localise and protect their rare earths and minerals." In execution, though, it's just vintage armchair techno with a contagious sense of wonder and awe—it's hard not to be bowled over by its bright-eyed optimism. "Llegada al cometa" is an early Aphex-style ambient techno groover with splashy hi-hats and a synth lead that sounds a little like bagpipes, while "Terrain Compressor" literally sounds old, as if its backwards breakbeat were sampled off an old cassette that's been rewound by hand one too many times.
Glossy and gritty at the same time, Boundary's EP returns to a distant era of electronic music as a time of infinite possibility and creativity. Starfish Pool's Sampler, on the other hand, is an actual dispatch from that era, revealing a darker disposition. Koen Lybaert (Starfish Pool) is a Belgian sculptor who no longer makes music. This EP collects some of his rarer tracks from the '90s, like "Low Memory" a wonderfully janky techno cut with overdriven drums—imagine Mika Vainio and Hieroglyphic Being jamming in a Helsinki basement. And "Dead Acid Society," with its distant synths and low-pass filter, feels like a portrayal of actual decay, like a pair of beat-up Carhartts next to Boundary's pre-distressed PRPS jeans. Both EPs come from brilliant artists, and though they take opposite tacks, they meet in the middle: vibrant electronic music pitched between the dance floor and an imaginary mad scientist's lab.
Mammo - General Patterns [Short Span, 2025]
Matthew Kent's Short Span label returns with an utterly fantastic dub techno record that asks you to pay attention. This isn't Fluxion-Deepchord axis dub techno, with its thumping groove and chrome-plated textures, but rather the translucent, sheet-metal-and-train-tracks kind of dance music that carries the spirit of dub more than its sound. General Patterns' tracks are long—"An Extension" goes on for 18 minutes, and every one of them is glorious—but they earn their runtime. Like how "Traversing A Raincloud" gathers up dub techno detritus (rattles, breaths, mysterious metallic rumbling) as it cruises along, or the way the 13-minute "Traction" makes the reappearance of a hi-hat feel like the birth of your firstborn child. Or something like that—I wouldn't know.
Mammo's music is monolithic, but there are nooks and crannies to sink into, as well a surprising emotional tenor. It sounds like a break-up record made by an old-school sci-fi robot, made using metal and compressed air rather than the usual dub techno synths and sounds.
Markus Suckut - Moments [Fuse Imprint, 2025]
I don't really remember how I came across this EP. I haven't purposefully listened to Markus Suckut in a while, though I was a big fan of his early work for labels like Figure and Stroboscopic Artifacts about 10-15 years ago. I don't write about a lot of straight-up techno here, but records like Moments make me think I should—this music is just so pleasurable, so straight-to-the-point, it's hard not to fall for it right away. (Has an ugly two-note metallic motif ever sounded as seductive as on "Resurrection?") In 2015, I described Suckut's work as "functional techno as well-engineered and solidly built as a Volvo," and I stand by it, but in the most positive terms possible. Functional here is not a dirty word, but an honest one, because this music works perfectly in techno sets. Still, a track like "Patience" easily holds your attention with its slightly dubby skank and strange background noises. And then there's the intermittently pounding "Moments," which would probably drive a crowd of drunken Europeans wild with its refusal to commit to a kick drum for more than 30 seconds. Useful-but-entertaining is a tough balance to strike, but if there's anything Suckut embodies, it's balance.
Uun - Metamorphic Stratum [Semantica, 2025]
Speaking of good techno: Uun is a producer from Detroit who makes sleek, atmospheric music on European labels like Mord, Dynamic Reflection and Semantica, where he returns for his latest EP, my favorite of his in years. Metamorphic Stratum is exactly the kind of driving, dubby, Fluxion-Deepchord axis stuff I mentioned earlier—but Uun's music is more about kinetic energy and tension building than it is dub techno clichés.
The title track is a masterpiece of melodrama, with a stunning lead that billows out in unpredictable patterns, doubling up before receding again like smoke dissolving in the air. The drums beneath are quick-footed and lightweight, so it moves like a stealth-bomber, especially in comparison to the hulking "Tempest" and its industrial-strength hi-hats. Uun's past work comes out on "Better Left Unsaid," where a swathe of reverb blankets hollow percussion, recalling peak-era Sandwell District. So, yes, the appeal here is that it's a little bit retro, and it sounds like some bigger, more familiar techno acts. But it's the mix of precision engineering and surprisingly straightforward melodies that makes it stand out in a crowded field of totally-fine techno EPs.
Mantra - Locked in, Locked on [Ilian Tape, 2025]
Another Futureproofing issue, another Ilian Tape review. Mantra is nominally a drum & bass artist—she runs the excellent Rupture label and party in London alongside Double O—but Locked in, Locked on leans heavily towards dub, like the title track, which splits the difference between jungle and digidub, while the ultra-spiffy "Levitation Dub" leans more towards techno-dubstep of the Peverelist persuasion. My favorite is "Big Munch," and not just because of the title. Fidgety and dense, it sounds like it's trying to be at least three genres at once, and succeeding.
Adam Feingold - Nothing Is A Field [Temple, 2025]
File under another dude over 30 making minimal-leaning dance music that could have come out in the mid-late '00s. The Bandcamp text says "reductionist house." Think Loidis, but steelier. "Ten yr loop" is downright sexy, with one of those rippling, dubby leads that makes me picture a metal chain link twisting in the sun, reflecting light in every direction every few seconds. It's an eternal groove where not much happens, but the sheer repetition becomes illusory until you start hearing changes that aren't actually there. The other highlight is "Spiral Kiss, Labyrinth Mist," which sounds a little like Shinchi Atobe: glassy dulcet chords, a huge bassline that drives the song with a sweet melody in spite of its domineering heft. When the little guitar strums come in, it should be too cheesy for words, an almost Jamie xx flourish—but instead it just makes me smile.
Ladymonix - This & That [Frizner Electric, 2025]
This & That offers up what Detroit producer Ladymonix does best: ultra-chunky house music that finds a groove and soul in the world's stiffest, most old-school drum machine sounds. "Burnin' Up" is a wonderful vocal house jam with techno-sized kick drums (and well-placed breaks), and "Don't Ya" goes vintage Chicago with its vibraphone loop and highway-cruising pads. The title track is the real monster here, with a stiff strut that calls back to Levon Vincent's "Late Night Jam" in its unstoppable forward motion and sheer simplicity: a monotonous synth lead hammered to oblivion around a jaunty hat-snare pattern that builds up tantric energy and never quite lets off the steam. Just perfect.
NZO - Come Alive [DDS, 2025]
People (me!) use the word "beat science" a lot, and I'm not even really sure what it means, but it should mean this record from Sheffield producer NZO on Demdike Stare's label. I don't know where to start: the drum patterns come together in strange woven patterns—think Hessle Audio's Joe—for a patchwork quilt of styles and genres that are trendy but have never quite sounded like this. Leftfield techno, amapiano, Afro house, dubstep, it's all here, though barely recognizable as more than traces. I'm not even sure how to pick out highlights, but I'd probably go for "K-space (baum bap)," all clammy vocal gasps and discombobulated hand drums—and organ stabs that feel a blast of icy air to the face—or "Looking for ", a sort of modern-day "Hyperballad" reduced to just a few elements that all work in thrilling disharmony, including a log drum that sounds like it's soloing by itself in the corner. It can be an exhausting listen, but it's mostly just thrilling, like if Rian Treanor had a little more spring in his step.
naemi - breathless, shorn [self-released, 2025]
naemi's Dust Devil was one of my underdog favorites of last year, an album that synthesized (and sort of predicted) the dream-pop-ambient-techno-shoegaze crossover into one shining beacon of creativity that still sounds ahead of its time even as other artists are starting to catch up to it. The follow-up is a slightly more traditional indie rock album, but in pulling back the scope, it focuses on its strength: fuzzed-out slacker jams. "puer aeturnus" is breezy but emo, practically gliding on guitar strums that sound like they would shoot out CGI flames if they were pictured in a DIY '90s music video, while "search and destroy anyone with a dandelion motif" splits the difference between Hum and Yves Tumor. The incredible "maze" bolsters its slow, shoegazy melt with a corroded breakbeat that moves at double the pace. The effect is like '90s indie rock and shoegaze as textural ambient music more than rock, a tapestry of sun-faded colors and mottled paint whose beauty lies in its slight imperfections.