Futureproofing #3: False Aralia / DJ Lycox / Toma Kami

An interview with Brian Foote about his new label and what it's like being a PR agent in this godforsaken industry, plus two reviews of under-the-radar albums.

Hello again, and once again a big thank you to all the new subscribers that signed up in the last week. This week's edition has no overarching theme—it features a profile of a fantastic new label from Brian Foote and Izaak Schlossman, along with reviews of two albums from October that I think deserve a little more attention than they got (whatever that means in this increasingly fragmentary world of music press).

The interview below is a casual conversation about a lot more than just a new label. It's a discussion of music consumption, what it means to release music in 2024 (especially paying money to put it out physically) and how everyone being their own business and "brand changes the business even more—or more accurately, turns even experimental music into more of a business itself. We also talk about listening habits and day-to-day routines, which is something I'll be discussing a lot more on Futureproofing, because it's something we all deal with in our own way. When there's more music than ever before, how do you take the time to actually appreciate it?

False Aralia

In the grand tradition of behind the scenes movers-and-shakers, Brian Foote is a pretty major one—at least if you have any sort of interest in ambient music. A veteran of electronic and independent music since he was a teenager in the Wisconsin rave scene, Foote later embedded himself in a Portland musical community that birthed acts like Grouper. He also started working at Kranky, where he's been founder Joel Leoschke's right-hand man for 19 years. (I profiled the label in 2018.) He makes music as Leech, has collaborated with LA denizen Sage Caswell as Smoke Point and used to be in a cool band called Nudge. 

At this point I consider Foote a good friend, and definitely one of my quirkiest—a man in his early 50s who approaches the weirdest, often most subdued music with the giddy feels of a teenager discovering everything for the first time. He devotes whatever part of his life isn't already devoted to his wife and daughter to music. That includes co-producing artists at his home studio, making music as Leech and running his own record labels in addition to kranky. His most well-known imprint is Peak Oil, which he started with another lovably eccentric dude, Brion Brionson. That label's defining artist is probably Topdown Dialectic, an anonymous project that makes abstract dub techno that sells out immediately on release. (A hard recommend there if you aren't familiar.)

Foote is also a long-time PR agent specializing in the fertile netherworld between dance music, ambient and the avant-garde. Now he has a new label, false aralia, dedicated entirely to the work of Izaak Schlossman—Aught, AKA starcircleanatomy, AKA Morris Arch Nightwork, AKA one half of AUGHT and the Music From Memory and Dark Entries-affiliated synth pop duo Loveshadow. False aralia is a conceptual imprint releasing 12-inches, each with their own artist names, featuring four tracks at standardized lengths all based on manipulations or processing of a single track. Think of it as advanced dubbing—or what you might get if vaporwave started in the heyday of Basic Channel sub-label Chain Reaction.

Explaining the name False Aralia, Schlossman told me, "I wanted the music, and the label [to function] as a growing thing… an organic, semi-symmetrical sort of branching out." The music has an alive, ever-shifting feel to it, especially how the four tracks on each release bleed together, but there's also something ghostly about it, like you're hearing the faint impressions of sounds left in a room, rather than the sounds themselves.

"I usually get to a point where it sounds, to me, like there are multiple ideas nested inside what I'm working on," he said, "and my first impulse is to try to reconcile them all—which becomes a process/aesthetic in itself—but more recently I started to lift each thread out and continue to focus on what I like about it apart from the rest. The versioning became central and I started trying to make these suites thatI I wanted to feel like related expressions of the same underlying potential thing, hoping I can better express an idea through these faceted multiples. And maybe then that they can be used by DJs as tools and function as interesting 12-inches, but also try and get at an iterative mode of through-listening."

The first two releases come under the names Zero Key and Selfsame, and both feature vocals from Schlossman's partner in Loveshadow, Anya Prisk. Fittingly, the two releases are mirrors of each other, hollowed-out dub techno presented in different ways. The Zero Key release has more obvious vocal snippets—"Zero Key 01" could be a Drake edit circa 2010—while the Selfsame EP has rippling drum patterns that range from chunky and choppy, like a rough sea ("Selfsame 02"), to wobbly and uneven ("Selfsame 03," which sounds like it's losing mass with each loop). I'm most partial to "Zero Key 02," which moves with a dubby pulse and sounds like it was made up of only the artifacts from a badly-compressed 96kbps mp3, all swishy and metallic. Brian Eno once said we'd be fetishizing the sound of CDs failing much in the way we do vinyl crackle—here, it's Limewire mp3s.

I sat down with Foote on a warm, sunny October day in Glendale at a restaurant appropriately called Kebab Daddy. We started out talking about the label, but in typically furious, passionate Foote fashion, the conversation veered towards music and cultural consumption in general.

You already have a label, Peak Oil. Why start a whole new one?

I've done other labels before Peak Oil, and this time I wanted to keep working with an artist that I had already done stuff with. And they had a vision for it that was more specific than Peak Oil. So it's really simple: it's focused on the work of one person, Izaak Schlossman.

Is there any methodology to each release, or how the original song is processed/manipulated?

I guess they could be used as DJ tools. That's why we pressed it to vinyl—you can change the speed. That's built into the format. But also, the tracks stay in beat with each other. If you're playing it on vinyl and mixing another track in, and the False Aralia record switches to the next track, it stays perfectly on beat. They're abstract DJ tools. Not that we think anyone will use them that way. 

Is there any other reason, aside from hypothetical DJing and speed adjustment, that you need to press this kind of boutique 12-inch in 2024?

Izaak has a real vision for it, like the artwork—you can see the consistency in the artwork. He's always been very particular about the presentation of his work, like with Aught. Even if it's not me doing something like hand-gluing 300 lenticulars to a screen-printed cover, I can appreciate someone not wanting to be willy-nilly with their work. 

So what attracts you to Izaak's work so much that you would want to start a whole new label just for him?

I just think he's brilliant. I'm not a rich man, so I'm just taking this little pile of money we’ve made and walking up to the craps table with it. If someone's like, hey, should we roll the dice again, I'll be like, "Let's do it." This is just that. I thought we were going to lose our asses on this. But so far, so good!

Well, you sold out on Boomkat almost instantly, for example. These kinds of records tend to sell very well with a certain crowd, right?

I've been doing this for 20 years. So people will high-five me and be like, "Damn, Peak Oil is killing it!"—but selling out 300 copies is an abject failure compared to how it used to be. I just press the bare minimum. People have started pressing 100 but that's a false economy. I guess the music business is largely false economies, but for me, I press a safe amount. If I get enough of them sold, we can roll it over to the next one.

So you can at least break even?

Yeah, we break even. But that's not accounting for the artist's sweat or my sweat—it's just cost. The cost of manufacturing, shipping, buying tape, mailers, paying my kid to hand-stamp center labels. [laughs]

So on a more philosophical level.. Why? Aside from DJing, why is it worth sinking so much money into vinyl and putting four songs on one 12-inch?

I just still love it. Also, not to always be of two minds with every answer, but I'm a publicist by trade. There's a marked difference when something is "real" versus when it's not. A release being on vinyl automatically puts it closer to this territory for better or worse. I'm a decade plus into viewing vinyl as something like an artist print. As a collector, I'll do anything to rationalize my bad habit, my hoarding, but the thought that there is a 300-copy print of something that is culturally relevant… I'm not saying anything we do is, like, Fleetwood Mac relevant or something, but to me it's like making something that, in retrospect, could become something more. Like a dollar-bin record that is worth 2000 percent more than it was in its bottomed-out era. I don't think any of these records are going to be worth $90,000 one day, but to me it's the same as buying a print from an artist you like.

You want a physical representation of it out in the world, in the historical archive.   

Its an increasingly bad look to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it's not wildly unrealistic to think that everything digital could be wiped out at some point, right? That might be corny, but it's true. 

I recently lost over 500 gigs of music, collected over almost 20 years. 

That sucks. I've also had that—not like anyone was ever gunning for it, but all of the stems and project files for all my work up until the 2000s is just gone, from that hard drive death. I should be touching wood while saying this, but I have duplicate backups of everything else. Not that you can't have two things dying at once. 

I don't want to sound dismissive using the word hype, but there's definitely a level of hype, like a micro-scene, around this kind of music. Who are these people that are interested in what you're doing—who is this music in dialogue with?

It's a lot of old heads, but there are younger, newer people also into it. It's another continuum—concurrent continuums. It goes back to ambient, techno, IDM, chill out, it's like this leftover smoke wafting out of the chillout room. I always feel like the chillout room is missing, and so I gravitate towards providing that. 

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Kranky employee for 19 years, so I'm extremely familiar with all versions of ambient, and that part is really untouched by Kranky. It's underrepresented in a way. There's clearly other labels doing this type of stuff, but I don't necessarily want to get lumped in with them. I don't know. Does that answer the question?

Pause. Laborious bite of kebab.

One of the value-adds for people who work with me is that I'm a trained publicist. That's a dirty word, but—that's how you and I know each other. I've always loved music, and theoretically, critics do too. Who should love music more than someone whose job it is to write about it? So for me to be in dialogue with those people is not as slimy as it might often seem. 

For me, it's a pure thing—I'm not just "circling back about this thing" or something else that fucking sucks, or, like, "Can you help me, my client's up my ass about this." I love all the music I represent, and I want to talk to people about it. I'm actively working my ass off for the results. I can sleep at night because I feel like I'm doing this with the purest of intent, and I'm halfway good at my job.

Clearly, the music PR game is very different than it was a decade ago. There are fewer outlets. So as someone who does this professionally, how do you go about promoting something as niche as False Aralia?

Well, counteracting my previous statement, I haven't done a whole lot of PR for this one. It's more of a "let's see where this goes" thing. I have stratified lists totaling about 5,000 people, and most of them are gonna hate this music. As a publicist, my job is to think, like, "Hey, I know this person likes this, or they've liked this thing I've sent them before," so I know where to send the music instead of just sending it to everyone.

I also think I have a different relationship with music press than a lot of younger people, because growing up in the middle of Wisconsin, I relied on reviews—even negative reviews—just to look for adjectives that would be indicators of something I would want to check out. I still read music press in this way.

I am voracious in my music discovery. I do that every day. And so I'm always reading music press, and it's just natural for me to be like, "Oh, l know this person liked that, and I've talked to him or her for years." Sure, I do my email blasts, but the most effective is being particular, where I send it to people I know will dig it. Frankly, I wish other publicists would do that more, because otherwise it's just clogging up everyone’s inbox. It's like carpet bombing. It's a terrible business.

You say you're still doing extensive "music discovery" every day. Are you still as passionate about music as you were in your 20s?

Short answer: yes. The means of production are so accessible now, and the means of distribution, it can be daunting—but I'm a pig in slop. There's never been more good music. Every year, more good music. It can be discouraging to try and figure out what's—here's that word again—“real” or not. One thing that's frustrating to me is how people purposefully pigeonhole themselves. Like, "I have to create for something that I perceive as occurring," as opposed to, "I'm an artist, I'm expressing something unique" or even the illusion of doing that. I think that part is so important and getting lost more generally. 

It's half beginner's luck, but I think the whole "the early stuff is better" is because when you're making music at that stage you're not thinking about trends or where you fit in—that's when a larger percentage of people can make magic. and even if you are, you miss the mark due to skill set limitations and that gap yields a unique result.

As a publicist who works primarily with electronic or ambient music—AKA niche music—how has your job changed over the past ten years or so?

It's just more competitive. The turnover is higher. It's a wasteland out there. It's fine, but in order to cobble together a grown person living—despite having a salaried job at a well-respected unicorn of a label—I have to do DJ gigs, label services, artist management, publicity. Possibly cynically, I thought I should lean into freelance publicity because there will always be someone willing to throw money at their thing to try and get up the ladder. I'm just talking nuts and bolts here—I'm working class, I have a family. What I didn't see coming was the ad space being totally destroyed and then what happened to all the outlets because of it.

There's the argument that no one needs music press anymore, that anyone can find new music, but I think it's more important to have maniacs on the level of myself to find the things that I've missed. Maybe I'm overstating it. But for me, that's the main role of the music press: framing things to assist discovery. 

I think everyone having access to their own stats is the worst thing that's happened for music—and maybe just generally—in every direction. I suffer from it as well. It's part of the reason that I do a label and a radio show is to share stuff that I like. I don't care if it's ran-through, or if it's too obscure.

I understand what you mean. Sometimes I think, should I cover this? Is it already getting too much attention? When really the world around it is so small anyway. 

Well, I appreciate your writing because you have the depth—it's clear that you have actually listened to music before. With respect to the field, there's people out there writing who can't formulate a thought—much less have any kind of historical context for it. 

But to finally answer your original question, publicity and music writing is different now because it's so easy for people to level all the way up really fast. There's not much money in it anymore. So if you're even half good and you want it, what used to take people a decade to ascend to can happen in six months. So just updating contacts keeps me busy.

So there's hope for the music press?

I wouldn't go that far.

You probably listen to as much new music as I do. How do you go about listening to it—finding time to listen to it—when you have a family and a whole life? How do you organize or keep track of all of it?

If you really want to know… I have a window from the second when I open my eyes. I look at my phone and make sure there's no fires burning, and then I start deleting release notifications. Then it's a process of putting music very quickly into the "I need to listen to that for five seconds" pile—or not. Then throughout my day I do that, and I move it into a pile of "actually listen." Or not. And there's a chance something might get pulled from the not pile to the actually-listen pile if a few people I respect tell me it's actually good. Like, "I guess I have to give Mk.gee a chance now," or whatever. And I'm often wrong about it!

I know that I have blind spots. And there are so many genres that need different approaches. Imagine the Kranky demo pile. You can't just drop the needle on a 20-minute bell soundscape, and be like, ah, this is a good bell soundscape versus a crap one. So it gets a little bit complicated with certain genres, but usually I can tell right away—and I feel like that's a skill I actively hone.

Do you feel like you also have time to listen to older music, or stuff you already know—stuff that isn't necessarily for a work purpose?

Oh, yeah. That's the default. I probably listen to 94.7 The WAVE way more than I listen to anything else as I only have a radio in my car. If we're talking about sorting into piles, the pinnacle of being a record collector is buying the records, and then looking at my shelf on a Sunday, and it's like, "Damn, I love all of this stuff." It's like when you listen to your own DJ mix and you're like, "Man, I love this DJ." It's the same thing. That's my main way of listening to older music, which is reinforced by the fact that it takes up the most prime location in my house, through the best speakers (aside from my studio monitors, which is a whole other thing.) How about you?

I sometimes struggle with finding time to listen to stuff that's not brand new or for a specific work purpose. I feel guilty about it, which is kind of fucked up. But otherwise I'm the same way as you. Maybe since I quit RA, there's a bit less urgency, but I wake up, check my email, go through the promos, decide what to download and what to toss.

For me… it's all about using the time properly. Everyone sends me podcasts. I don't have time to fucking listen to that. Give me a mix. I don't listen to any podcasts. When am I gonna have two hours to listen to something, and why would it be a podcast?

I don't really listen to podcasts either because I'm not going to spend that time listening to people talk. I can probably read it if necessary—which would be faster—but I don't really want to listen to people talk anyway.

Also, most of the music I listen to is instrumental, or otherwise abstract. I can't listen to a podcast when I'm typing emails. I'll end up transcribing what I'm listening to. I have friends who are more visually oriented, who are designers or whatever, and who need to be listening to someone talk while they work to stay focused. It's two sides of the same coin, I guess.

You've been a professional in music for a long time, and especially in a style of music for a scene that doesn't exactly reward aging. I'm wondering, have you ever had periods where you felt less interested in music or giving up or switching gears at all? 

No. I'm stubborn, and I'm loyal. I started doing a label with friends in Portland in 1999 and it was totally the most innocent and ignorant thing. Like, "My friends' music is at least as good as all this other shit I'm buying." So I figured out a way to put it out, and then they're like, "Wait, how come no one is buying it? Why isn't anyone covering it?" It's all been a journey from that point. It hasn't changed. There's always another weirdo to champion.

If anything, if you like freaky music, you should open my promos or check the labels I'm involved with, because I'm perpetually doing the work. I'm not just calculating it off Spotify monthly listeners and Instagram profiles. I'm listening.

. . .

If you're still here, I wanted to give some thoughts on two albums I've been listening to non-stop this month. 

DJ Lycox - Guetto Star [Príncipe]

DJ Lycox is a standout member of the Príncipe crew both literally and figuratively. (And physically! He's tall.) Unlike the rest of the Portuguese label's crew, who are based in or near Lisbon, Lycox has set up shop in Paris. And while he puts out plenty of romantic, boundary-pushing batida in the Príncipe tradition, he also self-releases mainstream club edits, including versions of "Not Like Us" and "Just Wanna Rock." His return to Príncipe, Guetto Star, mashes these two sides of his music together, almost literally. Tracks like "Energia" and "Contemporaneo" buzz with an anticipatory energy that feels both wistful and uplifting, like a stimulant that brightens your mood but puts you just a little bit on edge.

Guetto Star also underlines the Portuguese batida scene's overall place in the African musical diaspora: several tracks here try out the heave of Afro house and related styles. On the opener "YAAAH," Lycox brings in amapiano-style bassline striking not only for its goopy texture but its dextrous, jazzy melody, unlike almost anything else on Príncipe so far. But of course such an intense pleasure can only last so long, and Lycox yanks away the bassline that only appears halfway through the track after just a few bars.

Those looking for Lycox's lovesick melodies will find some of his most elegant instrumentation on Guetto Star, including pseudo-classical guitar on "Staring At The Moon" and soft piano on the title song, whose deft instrumental interplay makes me imagine a band of Lycoxes all playing different instruments. 

This approach—lifelike synths, giddy rhythms, overcast atmospheres—comes to a head on "Edson no Ulge," which is apparently about a friend who goes to their ancestral home and comes back speaking only a local language called lingala that no one else can understand. There are chattering voices, lilting sing-song and harpsichord, a splash of electric guitar, even a trumpet, as these synthetic instruments come into earshot to tell a story without words, with vocals that approximate a conversation between two people who can no longer understand each other. The beat is strident but vulnerable, a trudge forward in spite of anxiety. Guetto Star might not be as straightforwardly pretty as a record like Kizas do Ly, but there's even more beauty in the tension.

Toma Kami - missed heaven [mb studio]

French producer Toma Kami deserves a bit more attention than he gets. He's been plugging away at his own imprint mb studio since 2018, and released a handful of records on Peverelist's Livity Sound, though he's one of those artists whose sheer versatility probably keeps him from getting called on as much as producers who are easier to pigeonhole. Records like his Speed Oddity series feature some of the cleverest club fusions around, bolstering twitchy drum & bass, jungle and Latin club with the chest-rattlings of subs of peak-era dubstep. His tracks are physically punishing yet hardly ever oppressive, with a lightness of touch that comes out fully on missed heaven. His debut album excels because it takes his hyperactively wandering muse away from the dance floor into twittering, often beautiful two-minute bursts of inspiration.

If there's one word I'd use with missed heaven, it's bright. Toma Kami turns up the contrast to the max. The phased vocals and sparkling keyboards on opener "Fungi" light up like fireflies in a dark cornfield, while "Burning"'s lead melody is the aural equivalent of staring directly into the white-hot filament of an Edison bulb, with a drunken swing that reminds me of peak-era RAMP Recordings, maybe even a hint of skweee. Screamo vocals are layered in the backdrop "Arte Pop Secret," but the effect is more uplifting than jarring—the sample creates a feeling of giddiness and anticipation, and it's among the most creative uses of a harsh vocal sample I've ever heard. (It's not too far off from an act like Fire-Toolz, but it's not the same, either.)

The most impressive example of this contrast is on "Gladly," a remarkable broken beat track with a SOPHIE-esque bassline that quakes with a heart-in-mouth feeling with every note. Imagine a bass guitar that unleashed the heavens with every strum. It's finished off with a vintage DX-7 style synth that feels warm and comforting—a full emotional roller-coaster in bite-sized club track

At just 22 minutes, calling missed heaven an "album" might seem generous, but there are enough ideas here for a full-length. Toma Kami just rushes through them like he's too excited to bother looping. There are stunning interludes that end too quickly ("Anemoia Resorts," "Yung Groom") and club cuts that pack so much into just a few bars that you could imagine them going on for three times as long ("Missed Heaven"), but the brevity is part of the charm. After all, think how many times you can listen to a 22-minute album of pure, unadulterated pleasure.