Muzak was once the polite chloroform of capitalism - slipped into the bloodstream of offices, factories, and shopping malls to keep you docile while your hours and willpower were siphoned away. It was the aural equivalent of a corporate smile: fixed, bloodless, and slightly menacing. Jasmine Guffond takes that same form, drags it to an Amazon packing station, and lets it marinate in the industrial reverb until the shine dulls and the hypnotic beat slows to a crawl.

Commissioned for the 2024 Dystopia Sound Art Biennial - and performed in proximity to one of Bezos’ techno-feudal fortresses - this piece is less a soundtrack for “getting things done” and more a sonic blueprint for the slow sabotage of the productivity cult. Guffond’s horns, clarinets, and low brass drift through a convolution reverb modelled on an actual Amazon warehouse, but instead of urging your next step, they seem to erase the concept of “next” altogether.

Gawronski’s accompanying essay sharpens the context: in an age of rentier capitalism and “bullshit jobs” (Graeber’s term, not a hyperbolic flourish), most “productive” work is theatre - tasks performed for no tangible societal good, sustained largely to keep people too busy to ask difficult questions. In such a world, Muzak’s original function - calming the worker to increase throughput - mutates into Spotify mood playlists, algorithmic soundtracking for every human activity, ensuring the market has a soft grip on your waking hours and, increasingly, your private ones.

Guffond flips this script. Her so-called muzak is too slow for retail, too melancholic for corporate morale. It breathes, it slumps, it admits discord into its bloodstream. It’s ambient music that’s almost anti-ambient: it refuses to dissolve entirely into the background, instead creating subtle fractures in the flow, moments of quiet disobedience.

Conceptually, it’s the perfect double-agent. To the untrained ear, it could still be background music - but it’s background music for the backgrounding of work itself. It’s the hum of a shiftless day, the imagined sound of a warehouse emptied not by automation but by collective decision.

If old muzak whispered keep working, Guffond’s piece murmurs you could stop now. In doing so, it reframes “unproductivity” not as laziness, but as an act of political and existential hygiene - clearing space for the kind of thought and action that the productivity machine cannot measure, monetize, or control.

Some albums accompany your tasks; this one quietly dares you to abandon them.

If this debut isn’t a love letter to the guitar, at least it’s its most heartfelt confession. "Itara" - Paul Pèrrim’s first solo full-length - feels like watching a map unfold in slow motion: drawn from decades of wandering through folk, psychedelia, drone, and ethnographic reverie, yet navigated with the immediacy of emotion.

Pèrrim’s background - an anthropologist turned guitarist, nurtured by the psychedelia of Saliva and the free-jazz tangles of The Transistor Arkestra, and now founder of the Guitarraco contemporary guitar festival - could suggest ambition. Instead, "Itara" sounds curious, fearless, and generous. It’s not a manifesto; it’s a journey log, written in chords and textures, dust and glaze.

The LP opens with “Arkusmaliketus”, a slow surge of electronic haze that gradually coaxes acoustic guitar into the frame. There’s something sunset-like in its pacing - warm, fragile, majestic. From there, each track bends into new spaces: "Furcarkis" casts shifting shadows, "Xankenofa" ascends in chiming abstraction, and "Olekta" gathers acoustic guitar, cümbü, bells, and synth into a migrant caravan of sound. Pèrrim doesn’t just stack genres - he fuses them, letting traditional resonance cohabitate with analog decay.

Yes, he works with folk gestures: fingerpicked patterns, drones, even blues inflections. But he distrusts nostalgia. Each gesture is filtered through tape hiss, pitch drift, and deliberate imperfection, creating a dream logic that’s both ancient and uncanny. "Xileikan" could’ve landed in a Kranky catalog two decades ago, yet here it sounds freshly unmoored, as if discovered in a future barn.

Even the shorter pieces - "Durrisan", "Sachsas" - carry weight. In three minutes he can evoke Monument Valley slide guitars, or the sound of footsteps in a cathedral at dawn. And "Barbarchu", the LP’s epic centerpiece, stretches into a near-eight-minute slow churn of pedal steel-like swoons and subterranean depth, an immersive drift that feels like leaving Earth’s atmosphere.

If Bill Meyer describes Pèrrim’s composing as “econo psychedelic cinema”, that’s generous. No, these aren’t soundtracks - "Itara" is the film, or a memory of a dream you never remember waking from. It’s unfussy and imaginative, tactile and eerie. He’s not trying to impress you with scale or virtuosity; he’s asking you to borrow his body of guitar and walk somewhere together - through desert visions, shadow forests, and mindscapes.

Recorded and produced solo, the album is intimate but not fragile. It demands listening with patience and rewards with wonder. It’s not a record of solos but of unfolded scenes, assembled from fragments found by a guitarist who once quit lessons at ten, then rediscovered the instrument as his own.

Gabriel Brady’s "Day-blind" is what happens when someone decides to write the soundtrack to the moments you don’t post on Instagram: the half-soggy walks home, the lost afternoons staring out of kitchen windows, the quiet intervals where you can’t tell if you’re lonely or just at peace. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, and apparently armed with a Greek bouzouki, a violin, a Wurlitzer, and the sort of restraint that makes other musicians fidget, Brady has produced a debut that’s both disarmingly simple and quietly ambitious.

You can hear the ghosts of old French cinema here, but not in a way that’s leaning on nostalgia like a crutch. Instead, it’s more like he’s using Debussy, Satie, and Ravel as distant weather patterns - you don’t see them directly, but they change the temperature of the whole record. Recorded in a Harvard dorm room and funneled through a modular synth “sound chamber” (which sounds like either a spaceship or a slightly dangerous sauna), these pieces are deceptively delicate: short, drifting, and humid with tape hiss, but riddled with subtle decisions that warp the familiar into something… not quite right. The bouzouki becomes an ambient shimmer, the piano wobbles as if played underwater, and the violin (courtesy of Kalman Strauss) weeps like someone trying not to be overheard.

There’s a strange duality at play - melancholy and contentment swapping seats every few bars. It’s the musical equivalent of noticing the beauty of a streetlight while simultaneously wondering why you’re standing there alone. In "Day-blind", the ordinary isn’t dressed up to be extraordinary; instead, it’s made strange enough to notice again. That might be the real trick here: Brady doesn’t just write tunes, he slightly rearranges reality so the everyday glints in new, unsettling angles.

If you need reference points, think Merope’s folk-ambient glow, The Caretaker’s fading memories, or Jeremiah Chiu’s sun-dappled field recordings - but with an extra thread of quiet mischief. At just seven tracks, it’s over before you realize how much it’s gotten under your skin, leaving you wondering if you’ve actually heard it or simply remembered it.

"Day-blind" isn’t background music. It’s music for the foreground of your peripheral vision - the place where small, odd miracles tend to happen.

Forget “mixtape nostalgia”. "Cassette Album" invites you into a sonic séance where memory is a ghost, and magnetic tape its unreliable medium. Conceived by sound artist and writer Salomé Voegelin as a collection of tape-score prompts, this cassette-only release collects interpretations from eight forward-leaning artists - Pisitakun, super inter, Heather Frasch, Magda Drozd, Mariam Rezaei, Samson Young, Hannah Silva, and Cody Yantis - each contributing their unique reflections on time, decay, and sonic inheritance.

Voegelin’s philosophy is upfront: tape doesn’t just store sound - it warps time, unleashes repetition, and glues the past to the present in ways that are fragile, sticky, and oddly revealing. The artists here don’t aim for polish. They inhabit and co-author the tape’s psycho-geography, navigating its hiss and impoverishment like explorers mapping a crumbling temple.

Pisitakun’s "HOMESIII" opens like a dream submerged in reverb: familiar fragments rearranged until they flicker with new meaning. super inter’s "tape current" shimmers like an analog glitch gone sentient, while Heather Frasch’s "Almost Discarded" seems to unearth buried field recordings, giving them back to breathing, human-sized textures. Magda Drozd offers a "Gentle Escape" through crackled layers, suggesting intimacy across centuries of corrupt audio.

Mariam Rezaei’s "Spirals", featuring Gabriele Mitelli, loops delicate tones into a cyclical lullaby you almost fall asleep to - but not quite, because something in the residue keeps you aware, alert. Samson Young’s contribution, "my face was… different everyday", takes a choir’s voices (from Hong Kong’s Chinese University singers) and fractures them into abstract slate - identity melting like heat on a sundial.

Hannah Silva’s "Snake Jar" coils around your attention with precise restraint, while Cody Yantis’s "Stars of Grass" closes the tape with an elegiac shimmer - like watching field recordings stained with nostalgia drift across a windowpane at dusk.

This isn’t a review of songs. It’s a reflection on absence, on delay, and on the materiality of memory. Each piece isn’t finished - it’s "deferred", gracefully, deliberately, like ephemeral artifacts you hold just long enough to let them unfold in your mind.

Cassette Album feels ephemeral - meant to wear, to gather dust, to be rewound and rewound until you find something you didn’t know you were looking for. It’s Flaming Pines at its finest - a hidden topography of sound where fragility isn’t a flaw, but the point of focus.

When Pan Sonic crafted walls of sound that cracked club floors and shattered complacency, Ilpo VÄisÄnen was half of that kinetic avalanche. With "Asuma", he steps slightly back - but only to whisper more urgent secrets to our ears. "Asuma" isn’t a power chord from the previous duo; it’s a breath, dense with introspection and texture, unfurling in finite, fragile loops.

Originally released in 2001, "Asuma" marks VÄisÄnen's solo excavation into more abstract terrains - still tickling the skeletal rhythms of Pan Sonic, but rendered in quiet intelligence. Now, on vinyl for the first time, the album’s hypnotic minimalism emerges with even greater clarity under Rashad Becker’s remastering - each crackle, click, and drone opening space as much as it fills it.

The album opens not with fireworks, but with "Autioitu 1", where pinball-like clicks dance atop an anxious drone, like tapping a secret code into Finnish midnight air. "Tukahduttaja" follows, a sculptural enigma that warps logic and refuses consensus. Then comes "Klikki", a microscopically playful descent - imagine Pink Floyd’s critters reduced to an inaudible hum, yet somehow deeply felt.

But "Asuma" is no whimsy act. Tracks like "Asumaton" and "Vallitseva" embrace the same icy clicks and stark pulses that defined his Pan Sonic past, casting them in new shapes: more skeletal, resolute, and quietly unsettling. The shortest piece, "Arvioimaton Ongelma", functions like an audio haiku, a sudden vertigo of sound that challenges coherence. And "Autioitu 2" closes things out with ambient thumping that doesn’t fade so much as evaporate, leaving listeners suspended in thought.

What makes "Asuma" unforgettable isn’t volume - it’s intention. VÄisÄnen turns tiny gestures into entire worlds: pixels of sound that suggest forests, freezing shorelines, or the inside of your own chest clogged with unspoken feelings. Imagine what can be described as “arctic dub”, as reviewers have suggested - minimal, cold, and relentlessly alive.

This vinyl release is a gift for anyone who trusts the language of detail over drama. It rewards repeated listening, demanding not applause, but attention. If Pan Sonic made your insides shake, "Asuma" makes them listen - and isn’t that closer to real resonance?