Dream Sequence feat. Blake Baxter’s "Endless Reflection" (Tresor, 1995) makes its long-awaited digital return - and it’s less a dusty archive and more a genre time capsule, crackling with the raw energy of mid90s Detroit techno reshaped in Berlin’s vaults. Blake Baxter, a Detroit originator linked to Underground Resistance and KMS, revisits his second Tresor album with fresh ears, reactivating a classic collection for modern dancefloors.

The opening title track, "Dream Sequence", still feels like you’ve been flung into a neon haze - handbuilt 909 drums, acid-tinged synth stabs, and Baxter’s signature seductive vocals hovering between intimacy and incantation. It’s vintage Detroit techno, but with a Berlin twist: crisp, cavernous, more observatory than overtly aggressive. Tracks like "Kiss It" and "Pump It" lean into dancefloor immediacy - low-slung grooves built on funkinfluenced heft - while "Endless Reflection", the centerpiece, demonstrates Baxter’s ability to balance euphoria and restraint in four minutes of melodic hypnosis.

There are moments that retain canonical Detroit warmth - "Luv Is Blind" offers soulful brevity - while wetter, clubby textures on "Energizer" and "Theme Song" lean hard into the era’s ravebottom aesthetic. "Drum Major" flips it by sampling a speech from MLK Jr. - a dose of rhetorical gravity amidst the groove. "Modulation" closes things in a swift, almost postproduction micropause, a wink of experimental closure.

Online buzz about this digital reissue remains muted - some note that Baxter’s later work better refined his voice, and a few underground notes grumble that "Endless Reflection" can feel ofitstime, a little dated. But that’s precisely its charm: it isn’t overly polished. It feels like the sound of raw ideas, studio experiments, and gestural performances, sausagemachinecut with authentic sweat and unfinished edges.
What stands out most on this retrospective is its contextual resonance: the album is a milestone in the BerlinDetroit dialogue, released after Baxter’s original Tresor appearance in ’92 and part of a lineage that shaped techno globally . And Tresor’s carefully curated relaunch and forthcoming 12″ "Dream Sequence X" show that these tracks aren’t dusty relics - they’re blueprints.

"Endless Reflection" is not just nostalgia - it’s a sonic fossil that still radiates heat. Its juxtaposition of dubby space, analog warmth, and emotive synth lines makes it both a historical artifact and an emotional engine. It’s danceable, yes, but more importantly, it’s a historical conversation dressed in groove - Detroit politics, Berlin acoustics, mid90s techno ethos.

If you’ve never journeyed through Baxter’s discography, this is a fine middle chapter - less refined than later classics, but richer for its rawness. And if you’re a longtime fan, it’s a welcome digital resurrection that reminds you why this era mattered: when techno was still clanging doors open, not just filling rooms.

Let’s begin with an image: a flock of starlings at dusk, weaving silken shapes in the sky. Now slow that image down until it becomes a drone, a breath, a shimmer of air. Welcome to Murmuration and Stasis, the new album by Fredrik Rasten, a Berlin-based guitar whisperer whose music feels less like composition and more like listening to how time wants to be heard.

Rasten has been quietly building a body of work that’s as delicate as it is rigorous. His palette isn’t flashy - just intonation, Ebows, long tones - but his results are like examining a single snowflake under a microscope and realizing it’s humming a fugue in slow motion. This new release, housed on a lovingly austere CD from the ever-attentive Moving Furniture Records, is yet another subtle wonder in his ongoing inquiry into rational harmony and the shimmering strangeness of sound when tuned to just the right proportions.

The setup here is simple, in theory: six electric guitars, played with Ebows, creating long, luminous tones that interact like ghost ships passing through each other in harmonic fog. But in practice, it’s less like a “guitar record” and more like tuning your ears to a different weather system. Rasten doesn’t strum, he summons.

The album opens with "Murmuration XVI (beginning)", and from the first second, you’re suspended. Tones hover, converge, recede. Nothing quite starts, and nothing really ends - it’s all in slow flux. As the title implies, there’s motion, but it’s the motion of clouds, of gliding tectonics. Rasten’s murmurations aren’t illustrations of birds in flight, but echoes of the hidden forces that coordinate them - that eerie cohesion beyond intention.

And then comes "Stasis I". But Rasten’s idea of stasis isn’t stillness as in stagnation; it’s stillness as a high-resolution state of listening. The overtones shift like light refracting through a cut gem. If you’re not paying attention, it may seem like nothing is happening. If you are paying attention, it’s everything, all at once.

"Murmuration XVI (ending)" functions less as a reprise and more like a subtle unraveling - as if the structure from the first track had kept evolving in secret and was now returning, not to repeat itself, but to remind you it was never really gone.

"Stasis II" closes the album with what might be the closest Rasten gets to a climax - which, in this context, means a moment when the harmonic tension tightens just enough to make your spine tingle, before relaxing again into a blissful standoff with silence.

This is music for people who hear a radiator hum and wonder what key it’s in. It’s not dramatic, unless you consider the slow detuning of your inner ear dramatic (which you should). It’s not ambient, though it certainly doesn’t mind being ignored. But ignore it at your own loss: there’s a rich microcosm here, humming just below the edge of what most people consider "music".

Rasten’s discipline lies not in flashy innovation but in devotion to precision - not the sterile kind, but the kind that reveals new worlds when you look (or listen) close enough. Think Éliane Radigue, but with Scandinavian restraint and a bit more guitar geekery. Or Tony Conrad, if he traded his violin for a flock of invisible magnetized birds.

As the title suggests, Murmuration and Stasis is all about the tension between movement and stillness, about forms that hover between coherence and evaporation. It’s meditative, but never mood music. It doesn’t ask you to chill. It asks you to attend. It demands the kind of listening that slows your pulse, recalibrates your breath, and maybe - just maybe - makes the world outside feel slightly less scrambled when you come back.

Just don’t be surprised if, afterwards, your refrigerator sounds like it’s in just intonation.

Limited to 200 copies. So if you're curious what it sounds like when six guitars try to harmonize with the sky, don’t wait - these kinds of murmurs don’t last forever.

Time capsule? More like a detonator. This lavish 2×LP box set, accompanied by a hefty 60-page bilingual book, mines the psyche of East Berlin’s late-’80s counterculture and reanimates the avant-garde energy of Der Expander des Fortschritts. Born in the crucible of 1986’s “other bands” scene, this group trafficked in “pop musique concrète” - a jagged fusion of experimental rock, bricolage theatre, field recordings, and early sampler art.

Framed as a “risk band”, they didn’t toy with subversion - they chiseled it through tape loops - sampling bird cries, Brucknerian brass, military dispatches, and officialese, then splicing it into both pop and collage formats . They were as at home in youth clubs as they were in galleries or scientific symposia - one early gig took place during a GDR symposium on postmodernism, a stage-sit that seemed both absurd and inevitable.

This collection explores two facets: Vinyl1: Lost Tapes (sessions from 1989 underlying their debut); Vinyl2: Popmusique Concrète, tracing their underground cassette beginnings in 1987–1990. The result is a beautifully curated archive of pre-fall-of-the-Wall experimentation, where saxophone shards pierce synth washes and literary material by Brecht and Müller is wedged against absurdist bureaucracy, creating an eerie, uncanny pop chemistry.

What’s most striking is the balance: this isn’t dry academic treacle nor abrasive noise-for-noise’s-sake. Tracks like “Das kleinere Übel” tackled rising right-wing sentiment in the GDR, addressing it via atmosphere and implication rather than didactic signposts. Subversion arrives almost through the back door.

Listening now, in 2025, feels like tuning into a parallel East Berlin, one where art didn’t wait for official sanction, and where experimentation was the most potent form of dissent. Recorded in forbidding institutional spaces - like Georg Katzer’s Academy electroacoustic studio - this material captures tension, curiosity, and collective improvisation in equal measure.

The physical package reflects the band’s uneasy marriage of DIY grit and art-world ambition: lavish gatefold box, rare archival artwork, candid photos from backyard gigs and scientific panels, and a hard-bound compendium of essays filling the cultural void around them.
Above all, "Kluge Köpfe rollen gut" reminds us that the Expander weren’t “just another GDR underground band”. They were a collision of literature, sound experimentation, punk spatialism, and political mimicry. This box set allows their vision to re-enter collective awareness - no small feat for musicians who once had to err in public just to stay visible.

If you’re drawn to moments of sonic archaeology - where music closes gaps in history and reactivates them - you’ll find "Kluge Köpfe rollen gut" both an invitation and a challenge. This is not nostalgia. This is renewed urgency.

Nobuka’s "Monologue Intérieur" is the sonic equivalent of wandering through the rooms of a once-shared house where the furniture hasn’t moved but the air has shifted irrevocably - every object charged, every silence louder than speech. This is not an album in the traditional sense, but a sonic diary scratched onto the walls of grief with instruments that have known better days and field recordings that haven’t asked for this kind of responsibility.

Michel van Collenburg, under his Nobuka alias, presents what he himself calls “the music I never wanted to make”, a painfully sincere admission that hovers over every piece like a damp fog. Here, each track is named after an everyday object or space - "ventilator", "afwas", "balkon", "percolator", "sleutels"- not out of banality, but because in the aftermath of emotional collapse, the mundane becomes monumental. The ventilator doesn’t just hum - it gasps. The dishes don’t merely clink—they mourn. Rain on the skylight isn’t weather - it’s punctuation for a sentence that no longer needs a subject.

Musically, Nobuka confines himself to acoustic and analog means - an upright piano, a prepared guitar, a child’s bass, a cheap Jazzmaster - eschewing electronic polish in favor of tactile vulnerability. The piano improvisations, unshaped by premeditation, waver between melodic tenderness and manic bursts, invoking John Cage in a depressive spiral with Erik Satie as his reluctant flatmate. The production is skeletal, yet not barren - there’s blood in these bones. Every hesitation, every microsecond of reverb, every unresolved cadence feels deliberate, or perhaps just unfiltered, and that’s the key: this is not music seeking redemption or resolution. It’s not a narrative arc - it’s a snapshot of emotional inertia.

Reviews from the online corners of experimental music communities have described the work as emotionally naked, but that might be understating it. This is nudity under fluorescent lights, where vulnerability borders on discomfort, where beauty is inseparable from awkwardness, and where you, the listener, are not invited to relate - you’re invited to witness. And yet, something about the rawness invites not pity but recognition.

There’s a quiet dignity in allowing sorrow to sound like itself without orchestration, without metaphor, just the raw clatter of a life being rearranged. "Monologue Intérieur" is what happens when the world collapses and the only thing left standing is your own breath echoing off the tiles. It’s intimate to the point of claustrophobia, beautiful in its refusal to pretend, and ultimately, more about surviving a feeling than expressing it. Not a healing record, not a comforting one - but maybe, just maybe, a necessary one.

There are trios, and then there’s PURPLE TRAP - not a name, but a warning. Imagine a cosmic séance between a shaman, a warlock, and a thunderstorm, and you’ll start to get a sense of what’s happening in The Stone, a long-delayed document of a one-night stand that sounds like it might have lasted for centuries.

Recorded live in December 2005 at John Zorn’s mythically cramped (and now sadly closed) venue The Stone, this performance captures three musical titans - Keiji Haino, Bill Laswell, and the late Rashied Ali - at the height of their chaotic communion. A previously unreleased beast now unearthed, The Stone was first exhumed in rough form by Laswell for his Bandcamp followers in 2023. Karlrecords, ever the lovers of elegant ferocity, have now given it a full vinyl resurrection: mixed, mastered, and - crucially - unleashed.

This isn’t just free improvisation. This is free combustion.

From the first lurching groan of “Part I”, Haino’s guitar is less an instrument than an exorcism tool. He moans, howls, and mangles the air - his voice threading through the feedback like smoke in a burned-out cathedral. He doesn’t so much “play” guitar as wrestle with it, dragging out psychic debris and radiating it with abandon.

Laswell, that bass sorcerer of a thousand sessions, stands tall in the maelstrom. He’s not holding things down - he’s mutating them. You can hear the dub-wise instincts slither beneath the noise, his low end not anchoring the ship but warping the gravity field around it. He’s not so much the rhythm section as the event horizon.

And Ali - oh, Rashied Ali, the spirit drummer, the volcanic whisperer of the Coltrane cosmos. His kit sounds like it’s haunted: at times murmuring like leaves in a fever wind, at others galloping like a herd of elephants with something to prove. He’s not keeping time. He’s bending it, fracturing the pulse like a hall of mirrors, then reassembling it mid-fall.

The seven tracks (six on wax, one digital-only like a spectral encore) are all titled “The Stone, Part X”, but this is no static monolith. It’s more like a meteor cracked open mid-air. Part III might seduce you with its flickering restraint, while Part IV drags you bodily into a furnace of ecstatic dissonance. There’s humor too - buried in the absurdity of it all, like laughing in the eye of a sonic hurricane.

This isn’t jazz. It’s not noise, rock, or ambient either, though it contains their bones. It’s an eclipse. A one-off ritual only made possible by the strange geometry of these three intersecting orbits - reuniting seven years after their first and only album, a return never meant to last, and all the more powerful for it.

There’s a touch of absurdity in waiting twenty years to hear this live spell properly mixed. But maybe time had to catch up with it. Maybe the tape had to age like wine - or ferment like prophecy. Now, with new ears and a slightly more apocalyptic world, *The Stone* sounds not like a relic, but a manifesto.

This is not music to like. It’s music to surrender to. If you’re lucky, you’ll come back changed.
If not, you’ll at least come back with your eyebrows singed.
Highly unstable. Highly recommended.