Future3 Turn Jazz Fusion Into a Shared Language on Despite the Rumbling

Future3’s Despite the Rumbling starts from a fairly honest place: the world is loud, unstable, and hard to tune out, but people can still meet in a room and make something together. That idea sits under the whole record. It is not an escape album exactly, though it is not buried under dread either. It sounds like three musicians trying to keep their ears open while everything outside the room keeps getting louder.

The Berlin trio is built around Irina on keys and synths, Miguel on bass and synth, and Rodrigo on drums.

On paper, that reads like a jazz trio stretched into a modern electronic setup. In practice, the music keeps changing shape. A track can sit in harmonic density for a while, move into synth futurism, fall into a looser improvised section, then come back with a rhythm that feels newly assembled in front of you.

That is what makes the album interesting.

Future3 are clearly working from jazz, but they are not treating jazz like a museum language. They use it as a meeting point for live decision-making, electronic processing, and long-form writing.

Future3’s Album Feels Alive Because the Band Let the Room Stay in the Record

Despite the Rumbling was recorded at Butterama Recording Center in Berlin by Daniel Nentwig and Freddy Corazzini, and the album keeps the feeling of musicians listening to each other in real time. That is probably the most important production choice here.

A lot of modern instrumental music gets corrected until the original impulse is almost gone. Future3 take the other route. Some edges stay visible. Some parts feel like they could stretch differently on another night. The record feels played, which matters because so much of the music is built around interaction.

You can hear that in the way drums, bass, keys, and synths leave space for one another. The record does not chase perfect separation. It lets the instruments rub together a bit, which is usually where the personality lives.

That relationship between live performance and electronic treatment reminded me of my older Do It Live feature with Bada-Bada, where jazz, techno, live amplification, and improvisation all sat in the same performance system. Future3 are working in their own lane, but the larger question is similar: how do you keep improvising when electronics become part of the band?

This Is Not a Nostalgia Jazz Record

The gear list tells you a lot about Future3’s priorities. Fender Rhodes, acoustic piano, Minimoog, Korg MS-20, pedal chains, digital sampling, granular synthesis, and resampling all enter the picture across the album. That mix of old and new matters because the record never sounds like it is trying to recreate one clean era of jazz fusion.

The band name-checks Esbjörn Svensson Trio, Sun Ra, 70s Afrofuturism, progressive jazz, psychedelic jazz, and future jazz as reference points, but the album works because those references are absorbed into the writing instead of laid out like a mood board. The pieces often feel like they have several rooms inside them. You enter through one idea, turn a corner, and find the track thinking differently.

That is especially clear across tracks like “It Doesn’t Matter,” “Art, despite,” and “13 2,” where the trio’s internal language feels more important than any obvious genre tag.

The Live History Gives the Album Its Spine

Future3 have already built a live life around this material, playing across Germany, Austria, Denmark, Portugal, Slovakia, Czechia, and Poland after their EP Places and single “No Slip.” You can feel that history in the album’s pacing.

These do not sound like parts invented only for the studio. They sound like pieces that have been tested, stretched, shortened, and opened up in front of people. That gives Despite the Rumbling a different kind of confidence. The tracks can take their time because the band knows where they are going even when the route is loose.

That same patience came up in my article on Mark Barrott’s The Exit Diaries, another record that moved across jazz, soul, synths, percussion, and long-form instrumental writing without rushing to make every moment obvious. Future3 are more trio-driven and improvisational, but both records understand that length and space can be part of the emotional language.