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.

Crone of the Wildwood return with "A Short Life of Trouble", an album that feels like it was dredged up from the underbelly of American folk itself - a lamentation recorded not in a studio, but in a tunnel in Columbus, Ohio. That detail matters: this isn’t just music performed, but music haunted by stone, air, and echo, where every phrase seems carried off by unseen water trickling through cracks in the concrete.

The collective - anchored, as always, by the indefatigable Zack Kouns - continues its tradition of revolving-door personnel. Here, Kouns is joined by Garrett Maner (whose violin and euphonium sound like ghosts arguing in the half-light) and Drew Sherrick (whose 12-string and percussion lend both shimmer and thud to the proceedings). The instrumentation is spare yet thick with suggestion: a zither can become a spiderweb, a clarinet a half-broken train whistle, and the harmonium a funereal wheeze that would make even the bravest bones shiver.

The source material is a centuries-old folk lament, reimagined through extended improvisation until it feels both utterly new and older than the hills. “A Few More Days Apart” lingers like the echo of a church bell in an empty town, while “I’d Rather Be Dead in Some Lonesome Graveyard” doesn’t so much reinterpret its grim title as embody it - slow, skeletal, and oddly comforting in its honesty. The longest piece, “I’ll Give This World And Half of My Life”, drifts like a dirge turned mantra, spiraling toward catharsis before folding back into the tunnel’s silence.

What makes this release remarkable is how it balances reverence with irreverence. Crone of the Wildwood never treats folk tradition as a fossil, but neither do they dress it up for cheap modernity. Instead, they stretch it, worry it, let it bleed and breathe until it mutates into something unclassifiable: drone-folk séance, funereal improvisation, or maybe just the sound of three people daring to stare too long into the mouth of a song that never ends.

"A Short Life of Trouble" is folk stripped down to its bones, but those bones rattle with electricity. To listen is to be reminded that trouble - like the tunnel - echoes, repeats, and never fully disappears.

Haarvöl have always seemed like time-travelers in reverse: instead of racing toward the future, they slow it down, dissolve it, leave it to drip into pools where sound lingers like dew on glass. "Horizons of Suspended Zones", their new release on Crónica, is very much in this spirit - a refusal to obey the tempo of modernity, a gentle sabotage of the world’s insistence on speed, excess, and constant distraction.

Here, the Portuguese collective distill their methods to something almost monastic. Six “zones”, each a space of resistance, built not from spectacle but from the bare essentials of tone, silence, and repetition. The trio recorded these sessions in the summer and autumn of 2024 without the usual post-production gloss: what we hear is what they played, nothing more. It’s almost an ascetic gesture, as if they are reminding us that the most radical sound in 2025 might simply be the one that refuses to hide behind trickery.

“Zone One [stay]” and “Zone Out [unfamiliarly cozy]” unfold like rooms whose walls are slowly breathing. Drones bend and hover, but they never rush; they wait for you to meet them. “Zone Zero [nameless]” and “Zone Lessness [with Beckett]” are even more uncompromising: slow-motion atmospheres that feel like they’re unraveling the concept of time itself, while whispering that this unraveling is the only true freedom left. By the time “Zone Warming [hidden]” closes the album, we are not quite sure whether we’ve been lulled into stasis or trained to perceive duration anew.

Haarvöl’s references to Hakim Bey and Cage are not academic posturing but lived practice. These “suspended zones” aren’t utopias in the usual sense - more like temporary shelters against a culture addicted to immediacy. They are not spectacular, and that’s the point: they ask you to sit, to endure, to listen, and to realize that simplicity itself can be infinitely complex.

Is it ambient? Minimalism? A protest against Spotify-friendly brevity? Maybe all at once. "Horizons of Suspended Zones" is less an album than a proposition: that in a world chasing novelty with rabid impatience, to sustain a single tone, to linger in silence, to stay—this might be the most radical gesture of all.

English record producer & musician Adrian Sherwood has been around for a long, long time and might be best known to reader of Chain D.L.K. for his remixes of tracks by Einstürzende Neubauten, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Cabaret Voltaire, KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails, etc., etc., but his primary genre is Dub, of which I'm certainly no authority of, but I'll give it ago anyway. His latest album, aptly titled 'The Collapse of Everything'; includes the participation of Brian Eno, Doug Wimbish, Keith Le Blanc, Cyrus Richards, and more.

It begins with the title track, a laid back number with flutes, electric piano, electric guitar, and just the right amount of percussion set in the kind of dubby ambience you might expect.Too brief. Could have gone on for ten more minutes. "Dub Inspector" is a little slower with world music influences and a still prominent flute. "The Well Is Poisoned (Dub)" heads into darker, more psychotropic territory, plenty of echo, more minimal instrumentation, but a highly charged ambience. The melancholy sax and flute interplay in "Body Roll" is spot on and makes me think of wandering lonely streets in some foreign country where I don't know anybody. "Battles Without Honor And Humanity" is a dead-slow oddity to be sure. Held together by synth blips and plucked stringed instruments, it lumbers across a landscape you'd rather not be in.

I had to chuckle at the title, "Spaghetti Best Western," and wondered if that's where Ennio Morricone or Sergio Leone stay when they've visited the U.S.; probably not. Of course, there is the obligatory lonesome harmonica and twangy guitar on this one, and while atmospheric, it's rather tongue-in-cheek.(Could have gotten this on a Stan Ridgway album.) "The Great Rewilding" is purely dub ambience while "Spirits (Further Education)" offers a bit more in the way of structure. "Hiroshima Dub Match" is a plodding slog through the rice paddies of your mind with a vaguely oriental ambience and just the right amount of wah-wah guitar. Ending with "The Grand Designer," this seems to be the most progressive and fully realized track on the album, a great way to end it. BTW, I think I failed to mention that 'The Collapse of Everything' is an instrumental album, leaving a lot to your imagination. It should go down well with Sherwood's fanbase, and dub aficionados in general.