Andy Futuro: Music

When and Where You Go

Andy Futuro — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 14:26:53 GMT

This is track 9 from the album 1333, which released May 9, what seems like years ago. The whole album is short, punchy, colorful EDM tracks that always find a way to go in a fresh direction.

Buy or stream 1333 at the links below:

(Also available on Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, and other sites. I just don’t have the links yet)

And thanks to everyone who already picked it up 🙏.

Just so you know…

The absolute best way to support me is to become a paid subscriber. Each of these songs takes dozens of hours to make (or more). A predictable income lets me dedicate more time to composing, and spend less time committing acts of banditry to put gruel in my bowl.

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

One Day Now

Andy Futuro — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 12:02:34 GMT

This is track 8 from the album 1333, which released May 9, what seems like years ago. The whole album is short, punchy, colorful EDM tracks that always find a way to go in a fresh direction.

Buy or stream 1333 at the links below:

(Also available on Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, and other sites. I just don’t have the links yet)

And thanks to everyone who already picked it up 🙏.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

You Keep Playing Games

Andy Futuro — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 12:03:16 GMT

This is track 7 from the album 1333, which released May 9, what seems like years ago. The whole album is short, punchy, colorful EDM tracks that always find a way to go in a fresh direction.

Buy or stream 1333 at the links below:

(Also available on Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, and other sites. I just don’t have the links yet)

And thanks to everyone who already picked it up 🙏.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

Came Back

Andy Futuro — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:05:35 GMT

This is track 6 from the album 1333, which released May 9, what seems like years ago. The whole album is short, punchy, colorful EDM tracks that always find a way to go in a fresh direction.

Buy or stream 1333 at the links below:

(Also available on Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, and other sites. I just don’t have the links yet)

And thanks to everyone who already picked it up 🙏.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

A First Love

Andy Futuro — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 14:25:02 GMT

This is track 5 from the album 1333, which released May 9, what seems like years ago. The whole album is short, punchy, colorful EDM tracks that always find a way to go in a fresh direction.

Buy or stream 1333 at the links below:

(Also available on Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, and other sites. I just don’t have the links yet)

And thanks to everyone who already picked it up 🙏.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

Pull Me Closer

Andy Futuro — Tue, 13 May 2025 13:45:12 GMT

This is track 4 from the album 1333, which released May 9, last Friday! What a trip that was. The whole album is short, punchy, colorful EDM tracks that always find a way to go in a fresh direction. It’s a whole lotta music in 33 minutes.

Buy or stream 1333 at the links below:

(Also available on Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, and other sites. I just don’t have the links yet)

And thanks to everyone who already picked it up 🙏.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

Album Release - 1333

Andy Futuro — Fri, 09 May 2025 12:13:07 GMT

It’s here! Thirteen tracks and thirty-three minutes of colorful and always surprising electronic music.

Buy or stream 1333 at the links below:

(Also available on Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, and other sites. I just don’t have the links yet)

Learn how the album was made here:

And if you want to keep getting updates, make sure you subscribe below. You can tailor your subscription to only receive posts about music, or get a chapter from one of my books delivered to your inbox every Friday.

Subscribe now

Letting Go

Andy Futuro — Tue, 06 May 2025 14:00:28 GMT

This is track 2 from my forthcoming album, 1333, dropping May 9 — this Friday! The whole album is short, punchy, colorful EDM tracks that always find a way to go in a fresh direction. It’s a whole lotta music in 33 minutes.

Pre-Save on Spotify or Apple Music

Pre-order on Bandcamp

And in the meantime, check out my other tracks below.

Buy or Stream

If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:

If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

What Are You Waiting For?

Andy Futuro — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 18:48:15 GMT

This is track 1 from my forthcoming album, 1333, dropping May 9. The whole album is short, punchy, colorful EDM tracks that always find a way to go in a fresh direction. It’s a whole lotta music in 33 minutes.

Pre-Save on Spotify or Apple Music

Pre-order on Bandcamp

And in the meantime, check out my other tracks below.

Buy or Stream

If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:

If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

Trying to Feel

Andy Futuro — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 13:05:29 GMT

Trying to Feel Album Art

Since Substack is moving in the direction of videos, I thought I would try my hand at making a visualizer for this song. It’s not a full music video — just some colorful and hopefully interesting images to go along with the sounds for a focused experience.

Buy or Stream

If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:

If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

Kids Like Us

Andy Futuro — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 13:47:35 GMT

This song is stranded in limbo. I wrote it a long time ago — I don't know when, but it was on my very first MacBook, a 2001. Back then, not understanding the implications, I saved all the project files as folders rather than projects. Over the years, as the files made their journey from hard drive to hard drive, a lot of the instruments and a lot of the settings that I had crafted for the song decided not to come along for the ride.

As you can hear, it's kind of a big, messy, loud song, with a lot going on. Just having one or two things off really kind of ruins it. It's hard to slot something back in years later. My plan was to release it as is, but when I uploaded the WAV file — one of my two export files that thankfully I bounced — I learned that there's not enough head room on the file to actually do a master.

I'm hardly the expert on this, but basically the head room is the amount of “volume” measured in decibels that's left in the track for you to play around with. This room lets t…

Laughing with a Foot in the Grave

Andy Futuro — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 13:22:37 GMT

I thought I would have more to say on this subject, but I don't — at least not for now. In 2019 I attempted to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. It was an unusually wet year, high precipitation. The preceding two decades had mostly been drought so 2018 and 2019 were outliers for how wet that they were. In 2018, two hikers had drowned in river crossing, and so everyone was on alert. The passes and the crossings were treacherous.

The conditions caused the usual bubble of thru hikers to disperse — some people flying north, some people hanging out, some people going wherever they thought they could hike. It was a weird year.

I was very much a journey type, so my hiking partner and I decided that we would go straight south to north. In practice, this meant that we spent a lot of time hanging out in various towns, bottlenecked by the conditions in the passes, which we deemed unsafe.

It’s a tricky calculus. You need some of the snow to melt, but you can’t wait too long because you’re losing days left in the season. I was losing a lot of days. Eventually my hiking partner had to give up and I went on alone.

I was late getting north. In another year I probably would have made it safely but this was a wet year. I was one of the last hikers in the field and approaching the Goat Rocks in the Cascade mountains of Washington.

I came to a knife's edge covered at times in waist-deep precipitation, snow and ice. I saw that someone else had made the traverse before me and so without really thinking about it — although I had been warned many times by people in town and by other hikers and by my own intuition — I attempted the traverse.

Almost immediately, I got into a situation where backtracking would be as treacherous as going forward. And so I walked the knife’s edge through deep snow in beat-up trail runners and short shorts.

I had an ice ax — not with me, of course, it was packed up. I thought I was done with it after the Sierra Nevadas and so it had been mailed home to my parents house.

I was scared. I didn't think that I _would_ die, but I certainly knew in that moment it was a possibility. It's a weird quirk where you don't really know where your line is until you've crossed it and I had definitely crossed the line. I did not want to be where I was with the sun setting, no GPS, no one else in sight, and the last people I had talked to over two hours away, not knowing what my plan was, with steep drops on either side of me where I could easily lose my gear, break a leg, break my neck, break my hand, lose a finger, freeze to death, suffer from hypothermia and frostbite.

The consequences of failure were not something I wanted to think about.

I slipped sometimes, but I never fell and then, somehow, over a matter of footsteps, over a stretch of time that seemed like an eternity, but which couldn’t have been more than a few hours, I managed to make it to a wider part of the trail and lose elevation.

My mantra the whole time had been: Don't look down. Just keep moving. You'll get through this.

To my shock and great delight, it worked. Well, I had no choice but to keep moving. I was freezing. I was shocked for sure. I didn't know how to process what had just happened and I still had miles to go to get to tree line and some kind of shelter, so I hiked on.

I made it to a tent site after dark, hiking with my head lamp, pitched my tent, got into my sleeping bag to warm up and watched some Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, which I had downloaded to my phone in town. I couldn't sleep until the early hours because of all the adrenaline my body had released.

Many months later, when I finally had a chance to make some music, this is what came out.

Like what you hear?

You can download this song as an MP3 for free on the Substack website. Please note, this only works on the website, not the app.

1) Click the three dots to the right of the fast forward button. A little option bubble will appear.

Finding the download option

2) Click Download MP3. The download should start. Most MP3s aren’t bigger than 10mb.

3) The file will have a name like: “Andy%20Futuro%20-%20Everything.”

4) Click the file to play or add it to whatever music player you use. Despite the funky file name, the song should be properly tagged with my name, the album, genre, album art, and other information.

Like so:

iTunes screenshot, or I guess it’s called Music now?

Yep, I add all the information manually. These are artisanal handcrafted MP3s.

Buy or Stream

If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:

If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

If you wanna love

Andy Futuro — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:24:50 GMT

As often happens, I completely forgot about composing this song. Until I started my Substack, there wasn’t much incentive to share — why bother if no one is going to hear it? Sure, I can put it on Spotify, but without a social media following, that’s not terribly different from stuffing it in a hole.

So thank you for listening 🙏

“If you wanna love” isn’t a title that naturally occurs to me. It’s a pitfall of using samples; I feel obliged to derive the title from what the vocalists are vocalizing, so someone listening can reasonably guess the title and search for it later. I guess I could have gone with “Break Love” but this is what I chose at the time — and then forgot — so this is what I got.

The color palette for this song is lots of big bassy red synths, with the vocals occupying the blue and purples of the spectrum, and those house keys coming in hard and silver, just the way I like it.

Like what you hear?

You can download this song as an MP3 for free on the Substack website. Please note, this only works on the website, not the app.

1) Click the three dots to the right of the fast forward button. A little option bubble will appear.

Finding the download option

2) Click Download MP3. The download should start. Most MP3s aren’t bigger than 10mb.

3) The file will have a name like: “Andy%20Futuro%20-%20Everything.”

4) Click the file to play or add it to whatever music player you use. Despite the funky file name, the song should be properly tagged with my name, the album, genre, album art, and other information.

Like so:

iTunes screenshot, or I guess it’s called Music now?

Yep, I add all the information manually. These are artisanal handcrafted MP3s.

Buy or Stream

If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:

If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

Let You Go

Andy Futuro — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 13:25:43 GMT

This is another song about letting go.

Like what you hear?

You can download this song as an MP3 for free on the Substack website. Please note, this only works on the website, not the app.

1) Click the three dots to the right of the fast forward button. A little option bubble will appear.

Finding the download option

2) Click Download MP3. The download should start. Most MP3s aren’t bigger than 10mb.

3) The file will have a name like: “Andy%20Futuro%20-%20Everything.”

4) Click the file to play or add it to whatever music player you use. Despite the funky file name, the song should be properly tagged with my name, the album, genre, album art, and other information.

Like so:

iTunes screenshot, or I guess it’s called Music now?

Yep, I add all the information manually. These are artisanal handcrafted MP3s.

Buy or Stream

If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:

If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

Thinking About You

Andy Futuro — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 14:28:31 GMT

This song is something of an experiment in color change. I see the opening vocals and synths as flowery, watercolor brush strokes of pinks and purples and blues. Then they fade as the paint runs thin and I bring in a heavy red base with a rippling, rough edged distortion. The bass rises into a little hillock and then slopes down and away, leaving the silvery drums. For me, as the synths fade leaving only the drums, I start to fill in the silence with notes that are never written.

Like what you hear?

You can download this song as an MP3 for free on the Substack website. Please note, this only works on the website, not the app.

1) Click the three dots to the right of the fast forward button. A little option bubble will appear.

Finding the download option

2) Click Download MP3. The download should start. Most MP3s aren’t bigger than 10mb.

3) The file will have a name like: “Andy%20Futuro%20-%20Everything.”

4) Click the file to play or add it to whatever music player you use. Despite the funky file name, the song should be properly tagged with my name, the album, genre, album art, and other information.

Like so:

iTunes screenshot, or I guess it’s called Music now?

Yep, I add all the information manually. These are artisanal handcrafted MP3s.

Buy or Stream

If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:

If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

A2A

Andy Futuro — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 15:55:09 GMT

Alright, the first paid music post. Let’s see how it goes.

This is one of my earlier “hits” — at least it was a hit in the house I lived in in North Philly, when my roomies and I enjoyed an era of vanishing responsibility. We all had easy jobs and joke college classes, and our primary occupations were drinking, smoking weed, playing frisbee, patronizing dive bars, forming embarrassing libidinal entanglements, and putting on impromptu concerts in the cement courtyard cum flood hazard we shared with the neighboring row home.

Our “band” was called Manfest [sic] Destiny and it’s certainly for the best I can remember almost nothing of these “performances.” Our fanbase was whoever happened to be in the courtyard. Inevitably, bongos, guitars, vuvuzelas, speakers, and shakers would come out, alcohol would flow, bowls would spark, and the line between audience and performer would blur. One of the bandmates is now a surgeon — think about that next time you go under the knife.

I composed A2A in my …

Dirtbag Disco

Andy Futuro — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:29:21 GMT

Keeping with the dirtbag theme this week (check out Josephine Wins Again), here’s something short and funky to put on when you’re dancing around in front of the coffee maker. Or, if you’re in the woods, ripping open a packet of instant coffee and using a titanium spork and a dirty pot to blend it with tepid mountain water.

For my wonderful, generous, glorious, and heroic paid subscribers, know that I am working on some special content just for you.

Like what you hear?

You can download this song as an MP3 for free on the Substack website. Please note, this only works on the website, not the app.

1) Click the three dots to the right of the fast forward button. A little option bubble will appear.

Finding the download option

2) Click Download MP3. The download should start. Most MP3s aren’t bigger than 10mb.

3) The file will have a name like: “Andy%20Futuro%20-%20Everything.”

4) Click the file to play or add it to whatever music player you use. Despite the funky file name, the song should be properly tagged with my name, the album, genre, album art, and other information.

Like so:

iTunes screenshot, or I guess it’s called Music now?

Yep, I add all the information manually. These are artisanal handcrafted MP3s.

Buy or Stream

If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:

If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

Bounce, Jump, Move Your Feet

Andy Futuro — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 13:30:08 GMT

This is just a fun little song to practice some fancy footwork. I managed to crash Logic (the DAW that I work in) a few times on my old MacBook Air because I was running too many arpeggiators. The melody itself is a midi sample that I then constructed the various synths around. An astute listener might notice everything shifts a beat at one of the breaks.

Like what you hear?

You can download this song as an MP3 for free on the Substack website. Please note, this only works on the website, not the app.

1) Click the three dots to the right of the fast forward button. A little option bubble will appear.

Finding the download option

2) Click Download MP3. The download should start. Most MP3s aren’t bigger than 10mb.

3) The file will have a name like: “Andy%20Futuro%20-%20Everything.”

4) Click the file to play or add it to whatever music player you use. Despite the funky file name, the song should be properly tagged with my name, the album, genre, album art, and other information.

Like so:

iTunes screenshot, or I guess it’s called Music now?

Yep, I add all the information manually. These are artisanal handcrafted MP3s.

Buy or Stream

If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:

If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

Your Love Lifts Me Up

Andy Futuro — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 21:08:04 GMT

Indulge me a brief reflection on the music industry. I’m a composer. I don’t tour. I don’t like loud noises and if I see another person in the woods it feels like a crowd. My only revenue comes from direct sales and streams.

This revenue source has been strip-mined by rent-seekers. While the CEO of Spotify is worth nearly $5 billion, artists like me are making $0.002 a stream (roughly).

Over 5k streams

Nets me $10.72. Oh, I get to pay $1 to withdraw, ahaha

And, even when someone buys a song, there is a lag time of two to three months before I see a payment.

My distributor, informing me of my status as a musical peon.

I’ve been wanting to find a way to give paid subscribers MP3 downloads of my songs through Substack. And it turns out, I’ve been doing it by accident this whole time. If you see the instructions below, you’ll see that all of these podcast episodes I’ve kludged into music sharing can be downloaded.

Now, I could truncate the songs, or add a little audio artifact to the end so you have to pay to get the pure song — but I don’t want to do that. I’m a listener and reader too, and I don’t want to pollute the experience for commercial reasons. I guess that’s why I’m getting paid $0.002 instead of $5 billion.

So, here’s the experiment.

I’m putting the music out. I’m going to give you as many options to listen to it as I can, including the free downloads. I’m going to ask you to upgrade to a paid subscription if you want to and you can. And I’m going to create a value add for paid subscribers. It might be liner notes at the end of a post. It might be WAV downloads, if I can figure it out. It might be exclusive remixes or deep-cuts.

At the very least, the paid subscription will give you access to all my writing. And it will keep the music flowing.

So, that’s my pitch. Below you’ll find the new boilerplate for these music releases, which includes instructions for downloading this and future songs, as well as another plea for money.

Thank you for listening 🙏

Thank you for reading 🙏

Like what you hear?

You can download this song as an MP3 for free on the Substack website. Please note, this only works on the website, not the app.

1) Click the three dots to the right of the fast forward button. A little option bubble will appear.

Finding the download option

2) Click Download MP3. The download should start. Most MP3s aren’t bigger than 10mb.

3) The file will have a name like: “Andy%20Futuro%20-%20Everything.”

4) Click the file to play or add it to whatever music player you use. Despite the funky file name, the song should be properly tagged with my name, the album, genre, album art, and other information.

Like so:

iTunes screenshot, or I guess it’s called Music now?

Yep, I add all the information manually. These are artisanal handcrafted MP3s.

Buy or Stream

If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:

If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.

Just so you know…

Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.

I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.

Subscribe now

Heart is Bleeding

Andy Futuro — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 13:55:45 GMT

This week I’m conducting an experiment. If you are so inclined, could you please follow the instructions below to download a free mp3. And could you also let me know if it doesn’t work or if you find a part of the instructions confusing. Or if the mp3 is missing data like Album Art or Artist.

Suggestions welcome.

You can reply to this email (I think). Or post your responses in the comments.

Thank you 🙏

Download Instructions

You can download this song as an mp3 for free on the Substack website.

1) Click the three dots to the right of the fast forward button. A little option bubble will appear.

Finding the download option

2) Click Download MP3. The download should start. Most mp3s aren’t bigger than 10mb.

3) The file will have a name like: “Andy%20Futuro%20-%20Everything.” It’s a quirk of Substack, I dunno why it does that.

4) Click the file to play or add it to whatever music player you use. Despite the funky file name, the song should be properly tagged with my name, the album, genre, album art, and other information.

Like so:

iTunes screenshot, or I guess it’s called Music now?

Yep, I add all the information manually. These are artisanal, handcrafted mp3s.

If you’d like to stream the song or purchase it on the site of your choice, the button below will take you to a link to all the places the song is available:

Heart is Bleeding Stream and Buy Links

Subscribe now