The Futurist is also referred to as the "Friends Of Shellac" record. Apparently, the boys did an album of music for some sort of dance production, and decided to press it to vinyl and give it to 779 of their closest friends. 

The band apparently wants the record to not get into the hands of anyone besides the original recipient. Each receipient's record has their name circled in silver ink (although you [intentionally] can't see it on our scan). This is so that if any of them turn up for sale, the band will know whose copy it is. 

Shellac recorded Futurist for the LA LA HUMAN STEPS dance company of Montreal. Sadly, the album isn't commercially available, but is instead being distributed through the network of friends and acquaintances associated with the band and HUMAN STEPS. So if you're not a friend or acquaintance listed on the LP’s jacket, you're going to have to hustle a little to appropriate this piece of cultural capital. Perhaps you should start sending Mr. Albini those fan letters you've always been meaning to write.

Futurist presents Shellac at its most musically experimental and abstract. Albini and company have created wordless soundscapes of guitar noise and distortion out of remixes of its earliest recorded material such as its first full-length record, Action Park. It’s ambient music with a decidedly sharp, menacing edge. On both sides of the album, these soundscapes are interrupted by interludes of electronic static, buzz and hum. These interludes further propel the album out of the realm of pop music and into that of the experimental.

You can hear echoes of this experimental direction on Terraform. This is especially true of the album's first cut, a long, introspective piece marked by the incessant rumbling of bass and drums broken intermittently by bursts of guitar noise. Shellac has combined the experimental elements with its usual sonic warping of the pop music form to compelling musical effect. In the end, it is not the music that I find problematic on either album. Rather, I find the way in which both records convey a sense of menace problematic. Shellac, and before it Big Black, were very adept at deploying an aesthetics of social decay and alienation. Through their music and lyrics on these and previous releases, Shellac has created a mood of estrangement, threat and danger and has used this mood to express an uneasiness with contemporary political and cultural affairs.