Tobias Vethake, alias Sicker Man, has always been less interested in riding the gravy train than in derailing it, bending the tracks into strange loops, and planting wildflowers in the wreckage. Over the last quarter-century, he’s moved restlessly through film scores, collaborations, and solo works - always circling back to his electric cello, the instrument he treats not as a chamber relic but as a living organism that hums, snarls, and folds itself into electronic architectures. His latest 7-inch, "Stop the Gravy Train / Hollowed", feels like a miniature universe compressed into two sides of vinyl - short in duration, long in resonance.

“Stop the Gravy Train” has the swagger of dub, the angularity of noise, and the pulse of experimental pop, yet it’s pierced by a saxophone line that sounds like it wandered out of a smoky late-night jazz session and accidentally fell into a whirlpool of delay units. Vethake’s cello becomes a subterranean engine here, less melodic than seismic, pushing the track forward with a kind of nervous propulsion. It’s as if Moondog had been handed a drum machine and told to rewrite the script for a protest march.

“Hollowed”, by contrast, drifts into more spacious territory. The saxophone stretches itself like a beam of light across broken beats and electronic debris, while Sicker Man sculpts the surrounding space with sculptural precision - like a sound architect carving rooms for ghosts to inhabit. There’s something haunted about it, though not in the gothic sense; more like wandering an abandoned modernist building where every echo carries traces of conversations that once mattered.

Across both tracks, what impresses is Vethake’s refusal to settle: his music is never content to stay in one genre lane but instead plays traffic cop to dub, noise, spiritual jazz, and electronics, orchestrating near-collisions that somehow resolve into clarity. His longtime fascination with performance spaces - whether in theatres, galleries, or tunnels - shows up here too: these tracks feel like they’ve been built to breathe in real air, not just to live as digital files.

The irony of the title is hard to miss: after 15 releases and countless collaborations, this is about as far as you can get from gravy. No excess, no comfort food. Just two meticulously boiled-down reductions, sharp, and bitter on the tongue, but with a strange aftertaste that makes you want to put the needle back and start again.

Yearns’ "Fata Morgana" drifts into the ear like a trick of light on a hot horizon - half real, half hallucinated, but fully absorbing. The duo of Andrew Foley and Joel Saunders built it not side by side but across suburban fences, tossing sound files back and forth like paper planes in the dark. What begins as a humble Casio keyboard phrase or a murky tape loop gets refracted into a drone, reshaped into a ghost of itself, then layered with hiss, degradation, and sleepy-eyed transformations. The result is music that often feels like it was discovered in tide pools at dawn, fragile and unrepeatable, carrying sand in its circuits.

The title is no accident. Like its namesake optical illusion, these pieces hover above perception, constantly blurring what you think you hear. A seagull hymn melts into soft electronic vapors, while basslines lurk like sea creatures below the surface. “Depth Sounder” feels like sonar pinging the subconscious; “Mariana Radar” scans a trench where melody and murmur swap disguises. By the time “Siphonophore” and “Kaupichthys Eels” arrive, the album has fully surrendered to a pelagic dream, equal parts field recording, ambient sculpture, and aquatic myth-making.

There’s something slyly funny in how domestic the process was. Joel mentions emailing Andrew tracks after putting his child to bed, only to wake and find them transfigured overnight into otherworldly textures he could hardly recognize. The suburban dad routine colliding with underwater science-fiction soundscapes is the kind of paradox that ambient music thrives on: transcendence squeezed between bedtime stories and inbox notifications.

Mastered by Lawrence English (who knows a thing or two about turning subtle frequencies into tectonic events), "Fata Morgana" is as much about perception as it is about sound. It resists the tidy category of “ambient”, because its textures are too tactile, too salty, too flickering with life. This is not background music - it’s foreground mirage, a reminder that illusions can be more nourishing than the supposed real.

Norman Westberg has always been the quiet storm inside the hurricane. For decades, his guitar work in Swans has been synonymous with tectonic slabs of sound - massive, relentless, overwhelming. Yet when Westberg steps out alone, the roar softens, and what’s left is something oceanic: vast, patient, shimmering with shifting light rather than brute force. "Milan", his latest release on Room40, is another reminder that the guitar can be less a weapon and more a lens - something that refracts, bends, and blurs perception.

Recorded during a tour that had him supporting Swans, these pieces retain the scale of his band work but not its brutality. Instead, they flow like liquid architecture, structures of delay and resonance that slowly tilt, as if the floor beneath the listener were gently revolving. Titles like "A Particular Tuesday" or "The Early Middle" suggest not epics but diary entries, the sort of half-notes one scribbles down to anchor time. Yet the music itself feels anything but casual - it is dense in texture, unfolding in waves of tone that surge, ebb, and fold back upon themselves.

Westberg’s guitar becomes a membrane rather than a stringed instrument. You don’t hear him so much as inhabit him: the circuits and pedals breathing like lungs, feedback rising not as aggression but as atmosphere. At moments you could swear the record was recorded underwater; at others, it feels like the sky itself has been coaxed into oscillation.

There’s also a sense of continuity here, as "Milan" revisits motifs from earlier records like "After Vacation", reframing them in a new light. It’s not nostalgia - it’s more like looking at the same coastline from another vantage point, noticing details you missed the first time.

If Swans are the cathedral, Westberg solo is the stained glass window: intricate, fragile, and quietly luminous. "Milan" doesn’t shout; it doesn’t need to. It invites you into its porous edges, where repetition turns into trance and time dissolves into resonance.

Listening feels like drifting through a city at night - unhurried, alert, open to the glimmer of unexpected reflections in darkened windows. It’s music that insists the smallest vibration, stretched and sustained, can hold as much power as the loudest crash.

There are storm records, and then there is "A Storm and its Aftermath". Where most works lean into thunder as spectacle - nature’s percussion section turned up to eleven - Kate Carr and David Donohoe instead take the quieter, stranger road. They don’t dramatize; they observe. They don’t thunder; they listen for the tremor before the crack, the bird’s sudden hush, the way a breeze gathers itself like an orchestra nervously tuning. It’s less Wagnerian tempest and more Virginia Woolf with a field recorder.

Recorded as a live piece on Sherkin Island during the Open Ear Festival, the album unfolds across 45 minutes like a patient meteorological diary. The storm doesn’t arrive until well past the half-hour mark, and even then it mutters rather than roars. What lingers are the in-betweens: wind dissolving into horn-like drones, shakers disguising themselves as raindrops, metallic echoes that slip into the soundscape as if they’ve always been there. The interventions are subtle acts of camouflage - until they’re not. Suddenly a clang cuts across the mix, and the whole environment seems to shift, animals scattering, amphibians answering, as though the island itself has been startled awake.

The brilliance of this record lies in its refusal to give us a clean narrative arc. Where does the storm start? Where does it end? Perhaps the aftermath is not on tape at all but inside us, in the way we listen differently after the fadeout. It’s an ecological sleight of hand: Carr and Donohoe don’t just portray a storm, they hand us the responsibility of carrying its residue.

Carr’s reputation as a field recording alchemist and Donohoe’s long history of threading instruments into electroacoustic contexts make this collaboration more than a one-off. Together they create a kind of storm-without-spectacle, one that insists that the most radical gesture in 2025 might simply be attention.

Storms always promise drama. This one delivers something rarer: the gift of duration, of patience, of being with the weather as it happens - not as a headline, but as a life lived among gusts, silences, and the afterglow of rain that never quite arrives.

How many bones does it take to make a record? Primeiro seems to count them one by one on Music for Horses I & II: clavicle, scapula, humerus. The track titles name the body’s architecture, but the music aims elsewhere - toward that uncertain border where human fragility meets the inscrutable non-human.

The story is already myth: a horse-riding accident fractures Primeiro’s life, splitting his compositions in two. Side B, recorded before the accident, floats with almost Yoshimura-like serenity, its arpeggios gliding in luminous loops. Side A, composed after the fall, listens differently. It hesitates, breathes heavier, carries the weight of impact. Suddenly “ambient” is not a mood-setting Spotify tag but an embodied condition: fragile, obsessive, a body re-learning the rhythm of time.

Primeiro himself calls it “ambient manija” - obsessive ambient - and it’s hard to imagine a more accurate description. Every sequence here is turned over like a stone in the hand, every delay examined until it glows. What begins as a meditation on horses becomes, paradoxically, a meditation on listening itself: can you hear patience? Can you hear fortune?

The digital version adds another layer of estrangement: Primeiro slows down his own vinyl pressing, runs it through Buchla synths, adds drum machines and tape haze, effectively remixing his accident in slow motion. It places him in dialogue with the strange internet phenomenon of time-stretched albums (Eno slowed to a crawl, Bieber dissolved into cathedral drones), but here the gesture is deeply personal, almost therapeutic: replaying his fall at half-speed, rewriting trauma as texture.

None of this stands in isolation. Primeiro’s Feed the River project - placing musicians along riverbanks to play with water as co-composer - already made clear that his art is less about self-expression than about porousness, about dissolving the human ego into other flows. Music for Horses carries that same instinct, only here the collaborator is accident, bone, and memory.

The result is an album both soothing and slightly uncanny. It may remind you of pastoral ambient traditions, but listen longer and you’ll notice how tightly woven it is, how it obsesses over every repetition until repetition becomes ritual. Horses gallop in the distance, perhaps, but what you really hear is the fragile endurance of a body - and of sound - after the fall.

Music for Horses I & II is, in the end, less about horses than about survival: about how we stitch sound to broken bone, how we let repetition carry us forward when certainty has collapsed. Ambient music, yes, but obsessive ambient - the kind that doesn’t let go of you once it starts.