6th March 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Matt Wand is best known for his work as a founder member of experimental samplists Stock, Hausen & Walkman between 1989 and 2001, although his body of work in collaboration with other artists, and under numerous pseudonyms, and as a solo artist is extensive. His latest project came to my attention via a friend, and a tape, and suddenly it felt like the 90s again, when word of mouthy was the most likely source of introduction to new music – alongside the weekly inkies and John Peel. Not that I’m about to harp on about the good old days, particularly as I have the good fortune to be fed a constant stream of music that never fails to amaze and confound, but it does highlight and remind just how limiting the force of the algorithm is, the endless conveyor belt of ‘if you like this…’ and services simply lining up the next track in an eternal playlist which subscribers tend to passively permit to pass into their ears, and how the cultural relationship has changed over time. And yes, something has been lost: endless streaming music on tap isn’t the boon it’s often hailed as. Spotify and the like delivers sonic wallpaper. How many of its users will listen to an album end-to-end and multiple times in sequence over the course of a week and a month, really engaging and excavating every last detail while it beds in?
I’ve begun with a digression, but the joy of music – for me, at least – is the way in which it inspires trajectories of thought, often in the most unexpected directions. It’s as if it has the capacity to unlock doors to forgotten recesses within the mind. Anyway, to shift focus specifically to the album at hand, while credited to Small Rocks, the album’s cover (the artwork of which is almost as disturbing as that of the first Toe Fat album) appends this with the words ‘in dub’, and this very much gives a clue to the contents – that is, fourteen instrumental compositions centred around dense, strolling basslines and sparse, echo-soaked beats.
A number of the tracks on here – ‘A Lung Full Of Woofer Gas’, ‘Give Me Back Me Bucket’, and ‘Blind Mute Specialist’ – date back to 2002’s three-way split album Dub TribunL, which featured Small Rocks alongside Atom™ and The Rip-Off Artist. This is an album which has been a long time in its gestation.
Leisurely grooves and rippling reverberations abound, with puns and wordplay making for an added bonus – ‘Curlew Curfew in Corfu’, anyone? On ‘Bassically Unsettled’, the thick, rubbery bass bounced its way through subtle and mildly disorientating tempo changes, while ‘Mirror Sigil Manoeuvre’ is sparse and spacey, the beats landing like drips from stalactites in an immense cavern. And yes, as minimal as it is, the sounds are mentally and visually evocative.
Landing in the middle of the album – or the end of side one on the cassette – ‘The Moss Veil’ is less dubby and more a work of dark ambience with hints of Dr Who amidst the dank swampiness and sporadic whirrs and bleeps. It calls to mind the weirdy sci-fi sounds of soundtracks of the late 70s and early 80s and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
The title track, which raises the curtain on side two, is more uptempo and verges on being some mutant drum ‘n’ bass, before the multi-00layered ‘Keep Quiet & ROT (mit bADbLOOD JA Kötting) ‘, which takes a swerve into more industrial territory, while hinting at the cut-up tape experiments of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, conducted in the later ‘60s and early ‘70s, while at the same time coming on like a reggae Butthole Surfers. It really is all going on here on The Future in a Rearview Thumbnail. ‘a Lung-full of Woofer GAS’ is a hybrid of dub with minimal techno, and ‘Give fe me back Me BUCKET’ brings an industrial-strength percussive clatter that owes as much to Test Dept as any other act, while ‘The Custodian’ closes the set with a warping, glitchy tension that’s again infused with a more retro vibe, although the distant snare which lurks in the background is swamped in reverb and vocal fragments float around in a dubby fashion.
The Future in a Rearview Thumbnail is a rare expression of experimentalism, an album which dares to venture in different directions, and celebrates its strangeness.
AA
Aural Aggravation 