There are musicians who play instruments. Then there are musicians who build a machine, wire it to misbehave, and call that the instrument. Richard Francis belongs firmly in the second category.

With "Combinations 4", Francis continues a practice he has refined since 2010: live, improvised takes recorded straight to stereo, barely edited, occasionally layered, and otherwise left to stand or fall on their own unstable circuitry.

He calls his setup the “fugue system”, which sounds faintly academic until you hear it operate. Built from digital and analogue components, the system merges found sound, feedback loops, generative channels, and hands-on control into a dense electronic ecology. The key detail is that he once intended it to replicate the complexity of studio composition in real time. Then he discovered he preferred the accidents. Sensible choice.

The pieces on "Combinations 4" do not unfold like linear compositions. They accumulate. Multiple signals drift toward each other, tangle, lock into patterns, then dissolve. The “combinations” of the title are not decorative overlays; they are interactions, small negotiations between forces that were never meant to coexist politely.

“Four A” opens with a cautious layering of textures, faint pulses nudging against grainy washes. It feels like stepping into a room where several machines are already humming and deciding not to turn any of them off. “Leave it all alone for months (edit)” suggests patience as a compositional method. Loops emerge as if they have been fermenting. The edit in the title hints at restraint, but the sound itself remains porous, raw at the edges.

“Parehuia” and “Phase effect on wet road” play with movement and reflection. Tones flicker and smear, as though light were refracting through damp asphalt at night. The music does not chase drama. It studies motion. Subtle shifts in phase create rhythmic illusions that appear and vanish before you can fully name them.

Then there are the titles that sound like marginal notes in a notebook: “The alphabet is a sampler”, “My instrument is a systems diagram”. Francis has a dry sense of humor about his own practice. He is not pretending this is mystical revelation. It is circuitry. It is process. It is an architecture of signal flow that occasionally stumbles into something unexpectedly lyrical.

“My fuel! Love it!” injects a jittery propulsion, feedback skittering like nervous energy trapped in a grid. “Like a forest” offers a brief, almost meditative clearing - thin strands of sound spaced with unusual generosity. Even here, however, nothing resolves into comfort. There is always a faint hiss of instability.

Francis’ biography reads like a map of serious experimental credentials: releases on labels such as Senufo Editions and Entr’acte, collaborations with figures including Ralf Wehowsky and Francisco Lopez, performances at institutions from ZKM Karlsruhe to Issue Project Room in New York. The pedigree is formidable. The music, however, resists prestige. It sounds provisional, alive, occasionally on the brink of short-circuit.

What distinguishes "Combinations 4" is its quiet confidence in process. The layering feels more deliberate than chaotic, suggesting that the system has matured. Patterns recur, semi-complex rhythms crystallize, and motifs reappear just long enough to imply structure without locking into it. You sense Francis guiding rather than commanding, adjusting parameters in real time while the network responds with its own stubborn logic.

There is something almost ecological about it. Feedback behaves like weather. Noise pools and evaporates. Signals migrate.

Despite its technological underpinnings, the album never feels sterile. The stereo field carries depth and air. Imperfections are not corrected; they are acknowledged. Trimmed beginnings and endings retain the sense that you are hearing a slice of an ongoing continuum, not a polished artifact.

Room40’s catalog has long embraced works that blur composition and improvisation, environment and abstraction. "Combinations 4" sits comfortably in that lineage while asserting its own temperament: less concerned with spectacle, more invested in the slow choreography of interaction.

In the end, this is not music that demands emotional confession. It invites attention. It rewards close listening with subtle shifts in pattern and density. It treats sound as a living diagram, lines crossing and recrossing until meaning emerges from friction.
Plenty of artists talk about systems. Richard Francis lets his system talk back.

Eighty percent of the ocean floor is unmapped. Most bands can barely map a rehearsal room. Split Apex, naturally, choose the Mariana Trench.

With "Thoughts In 3D", the duo of Jussi Palmusaari and Peter Blundell deliver a vinyl debut that behaves less like an album and more like a deep-sea expedition log written under crushing pressure.

Palmusaari, who cut his teeth in Finland with Preesens in the late 90s and early 2000s, arrives in South London carrying a particular northern severity: guitar lines that feel chiseled rather than strummed. Blundell’s lineage runs through the angular, literate sprawl of Mosquitoes, and onward to Komare. His voice has that distinctly British quality of sounding observational and slightly detached even when the ground is splitting open beneath it. Together, they formed Split Apex in autumn 2024, rehearsed obsessively in Croydon, and apparently decided that subtlety was for people who enjoy breathable air.

Across five extended tracks, the record moves like a submersible lowering itself past sunlight.

“Peninsula” is the descent. Bass pulses like sonar. Guitar clangs and scrapes as if testing the hull integrity of the song itself. There’s a mechanical patience to it. You don’t get riffs; you get tectonic adjustments.

“Crux Machine” settles into something heavier, more sedimentary. A solitary guitar figure repeats with stubborn clarity while low-end loops throb underneath, like an engine that might be failing or might be achieving transcendence. It’s hard to tell. That ambiguity is part of the thrill.

On “Cast In Light”, the duo veer into what could be described as laboratory rock. If The Shadow Ring had abandoned literary introspection for surgical experimentation, this might be the result. Blundell’s vocal delivery sounds almost clinical, as if he’s documenting specimens rather than performing songs. Yet there’s tension in that restraint. You sense awe and dread occupying the same narrow corridor.

The title track, “Thoughts In 3D”, slithers rather than strides. Synth lines glow faintly, like bioluminescent organisms drifting just out of reach. The music feels dimensional not because it is busy, but because it has depth. Layers move independently, intersecting without resolving neatly. It refuses the easy climax.

“People, Nerves” completes the arc, rising toward the surface but carrying pressure scars. The guitars shimmer, the rhythm section tightens, and Blundell’s voice hovers between witness statement and existential report. The ascent is not triumphant. It is informed.

Reviews circulating online have pointed to the album’s balance between abrasion and atmosphere, its refusal to flatten intensity into mere noise. That assessment holds. What’s striking is the discipline. Split Apex do not indulge in chaos for its own sake. Every scrape, loop, and bass surge feels positioned with intent, as though the duo are charting coordinates rather than improvising freely.

The production keeps edges intact. Nothing is softened for comfort. The LP format suits it: five substantial tracks, each given space to breathe and to weigh on the listener. This is not background music. It insists on attention. It rewards patience.

If "Thoughts In 3D" has a central thesis, it is that pressure clarifies. Under enough weight, superficial gestures collapse. What remains is structure. Tone. Nerve.

Most bands write songs. Split Apex conduct sound pressure tests on the psyche and press the results to vinyl.

It turns out the ocean was not the dangerous part. The dangerous part is how calmly they guide you through it.

There are albums that revisit the past. And then there are albums that take the past apart with a jeweller’s screwdriver, lay its gears on a velvet cloth, and ask: "so, how exactly does this thing tick?"

With "Covers", released by Hallow Ground (H2509) on December 21st, 2025, CoH and Wladimir Schall offer not a tribute record, not a nostalgic mixtape, but something closer to a philosophical experiment pressed on vinyl.

Ivan Pavlov - known for decades as CoH, a restless explorer of digital signal, conceptual rigor and elegant reduction - has long treated sound as both sculpture and proposition. His earlier detours into homage (including his austere engagement with John Everall) already suggested that influence for him is less about admiration and more about interrogation. Schall, equally elusive, previously stretched Erik Satie’s "Vexations" into a looping temporal labyrinth. Neither artist is interested in faithful reproduction. They are interested in exposure.
And here, exposure is the operative word.

The seven pieces on "Covers" begin with piano material - but what begins as ivory soon becomes circuitry. The album opens with “Merry Xmas Mr Erik”, an oblique triangulation between Erik Satie and Ryuichi Sakamoto. It’s not a mash-up; it’s a slow dissolving of stylistic fingerprints. Satie’s dry wit and Sakamoto’s fragile lyricism are nudged into a shared acoustic twilight, where melody feels less like narrative and more like residue.

Elsewhere, a four-note cell associated with Sergei Rachmaninoff is inflated into a thick, hovering mass - like a Romantic ghost caught inside a server rack. The gesture is almost mischievous: what was once pianistic drama becomes a field of granular tension. Rachmaninoff’s emotive surge is rendered as a kind of architectural hum.

“Kohtakt” and “Okolo Kolokola” nod toward Soviet animation - particularly the 1978 short Kontakt and the cult series Nu, pogodi! - but instead of cartoonish exuberance, we encounter suspended atmospheres. Childhood memory here is neither sweet nor ironic; it is filtered, slowed, refracted. Like trying to recall a dream through frosted glass.

“SOII BLANC” revisits Pavlov’s own earlier work through the distant, hovering sensibility of Morton Feldman - that master of time stretched thin as tracing paper. The result is not imitation but displacement: tones seem to hesitate before existing, as if unsure whether memory deserves to solidify.

And then there is “Snowflakes”, a cover of something that never existed. A delicious paradox. A melody without ancestry. A wink at Immanuel Kant and the idea that meaning can emerge without semantic scaffolding. The track floats - light, crystalline, faintly absurd. It smiles without showing teeth.

If there is a unifying thread, it is the ambiguity of nostalgia. Not the syrupy variety, but the kind that tastes slightly metallic. The closing track, “Starost ne radost”, invokes a Russian proverb - old age is not joy - and the album indeed circles around that friction between tenderness and erosion. Joy and sadness are not opposites here; they are phase-shifted versions of the same waveform.

What makes "Covers" compelling is its refusal to romanticize memory. Pavlov and Schall treat recollection as unstable hardware. The “faults” of traditional instruments and compositions - those imperfections we often forgive because we love them - are not corrected. They are highlighted. Amplified. Turned into structural features.

This is electronic music with a scalpel: calm, exacting, faintly amused. It asks uncomfortable questions. What are we really hearing when we hear a “classic”? Where does authenticity reside - inside the score, the instrument, the ear, or the cultural myth wrapped around it?

As a limited art edition LP with handcrafted covers, the release reinforces the paradox: a tactile artifact dedicated to deconstructing tradition. Mastered by Andreas Lupo Lubich, the vinyl breathes with clarity; its quiet passages feel architectural rather than decorative.

In the end, "Covers" is not about covering songs. It is about uncovering mechanisms. About peeling varnish from melody. About placing memory under laboratory light and discovering that it flickers.

You don’t hum these tracks in the shower. You ponder them at 2 a.m., wondering whether the piano was ever innocent to begin with.

There is a particular kind of composer who does not simply write music but builds worlds and then invites you to get lost in them. With "Cartografía interior", his first solo release on empreintes DIGITALes (IMED 25200), Diego Bermudez Chamberland does precisely that: he drafts a private cosmogony and hands us the map - though not without erasing the legend first.

Composed between 2020 and 2023 and revised in 2025, this 44-minute acousmatic triptych draws inspiration from Scandinavian mythology as recounted in Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. But let’s be clear: this is not programmatic folklore with surround-sound Vikings. Bermudez Chamberland is not illustrating sagas; he is metabolizing them. The mythic scaffolding becomes an energetic principle rather than narrative content. Yggdrasil may hover in the background, yet what we encounter is less a tree than a network of forces.

Online responses to the album have often highlighted its sculptural quality - and rightly so. Bermudez Chamberland, trained at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and shaped by years of dialogue with figures such as Martin Bédard and Louis Dufort, approaches sound as a malleable substance. His studio becomes both laboratory and observatory. Field recordings of natural elements, instrumental gestures from collaborators, and a battery of synthesis techniques are fused into a fixed stereo medium that feels anything but static. The “2.0” format might suggest limitation; the listening experience suggests vertigo.

The opening movement, "Chronomundo", operates at a planetary scale. It unfolds like a slow rotation of cosmic matter, with dense textural strata that seem to drift across enormous distances. Spatial depth is not decorative here; it is structural. One senses tectonic shifts, orbital sweeps, the almost comical audacity of trying to sonify something as grand as cosmology. And yet, the piece resists bombast. Instead of thunderous clichés, we get evolving masses and microscopic fissures within them. Time feels stretched, elastic, as if the listener were perched somewhere between geological patience and stellar combustion.

If "Chronomundo" maps the macrocosm, "Destin // Trouble" zooms in on turbulence. The double slash in the title becomes audible as montage logic: call-and-response fragments, sudden anticipations, sonic behaviors that appear, scatter, regroup. Bermudez Chamberland personifies nature without anthropomorphizing it. Woody timbres sprout and dart; iterative flutters evoke insect wings clustering around a light source; storms accumulate not as Hollywood drama but as layered agitation. The movement is playful in its complexity - one can almost imagine the composer smiling while coaxing chaotic systems into temporary alliances.

What stands out is the music’s vitality. Reviews circulating online frequently note how alive the material feels, how it refuses to settle into static drones. Even when textures sustain, something is always mutating at the edges. Energy here is not merely volume or density; it is behavioral. Sounds behave like entities with impulses, hesitations, and collisions.

The final movement, "Punto maximal", turns inward - or downward - toward the infinitely small. If the first movement surveyed mythic vastness and the second dramatized conflict, this one examines intimacy. The microscopic becomes epic. Tiny iterative “points” punctuate the sonic field, suggesting cellular or particulate life. The humor, perhaps unintended, lies in the realization that the smallest gestures can feel as overwhelming as galaxies. Bermudez Chamberland treats the micro-world with the same grandeur he afforded the cosmic, collapsing scale into perception.

It is tempting to describe "Cartografía interior" as immersive, but that word has grown tired from overuse. What makes this work compelling is not immersion alone, but its elasticity of perspective. The composer revisited and revised the piece in 2025, reinserting materials, rebalancing energies - effectively bending his own past into the present. The album becomes a meditation on time not only thematically, but structurally. Past, present, and speculative future coexist in the studio’s layered memory.

There is also something tender beneath the mythological ambition. The project’s genesis traces back to youthful readings of Nordic lore, encouraged by a mother who nourished imagination with books. That detail matters. Beneath the sophisticated sound design and conceptual architecture lies a child enthralled by infinite worlds and cosmic trees. "Cartografía interior" is, in a sense, a grown-up answer to that early wonder.

And perhaps that is its quiet achievement: it reminds us that mythology was never about gods alone. It was about scale - about locating oneself between the titanic and the microscopic. Bermudez Chamberland does not give us a literal Valhalla or a faithful sonic Yggdrasil. He gives us thresholds, energies, morphologies. He gives us a universe that feels invented yet strangely familiar.

In the end, the “inner cartography” of the title is less about mapping territory than about mapping attention. The record suggests that every listener carries a cosmogony inside - vast, turbulent, teeming with unseen life. This album simply hands you the coordinates and says: explore.

"Kitbuilders are an electro duo from Cologne, Germany, made up of Ripley (vocals) and Benway (keyboards). Since 1997, they’ve blended Electro, New Wave, and IDM influences into a unique sound that helped shape the Electroclash and Electropunk scenes. Their music has appeared on respected labels such as Ersatz Audio, Breakin’ Records, and Play It Again Sam, and has earned airplay from influential DJs like John Peel and Laurent Garnier. Kitbuilders have performed at major festivals and renowned clubs across Europe and beyond, sharing their distinctive style with audiences worldwide."

The previous text was lifted verbatim from Kitbuilders' Bandcamp site. This is my first acquaintance with them, and they are probably much better known in Europe than the U.S. The CD came with a lot of promo material on paper, but music speaks louder than words, so let's dive in, shall we? First track, "Tenderness" sounds like typical beat-oriented electro, and Ripley's voice kind of reminds me of The Residents. "Dark Angels" is more experimental with effects-laden synths, an old-school beat, and lots of sonic manipulation. This could easily have been done in the '80s/ early '90s, and sounds it. "No Good (X Version)" reminds me of XEX, an '80s avant synth-pop outfit from New Jersey. The song is okay but goes on too long. The entirely instrumental "Slow Dance" makes use of oddly melodic synth arpeggios and could have been inspired by early 1970s Kraftwerk. "Follow Me (Concrete Version)" features a relentless beat, and aggressive bass. The vocals don't come in until about 1:20. Ripley's vocals on this one are reminiscent of Cosey Fanni Tutti (of Chris & Cosey) mixed with Lydia Lunch; darkly seductive with a touch of menace. "Get Your Glow On" is a rather happy instrumental tune, perhaps rave-fodder for the completely molly-dosed. "Poison Me" naturally takes on a more menacing tone. This track squarely fits in the Suicide-style No Wave genre. I think the verse is stronger than the chorus on this one but still pretty cool.

Overall I think 'Stupid Games' is really cool album, in spite of some tracks that seem to go on a bit too long, and these folks can pull it off live as well, as evidenced by their "Stupid Games" live video. (A lot of the music is sequenced and programmed but Ripley's vocals are obviously done live real time.) Both the CD and the aforementioned 7" vinyl are limited editions (100 copies for the CD, 40 for the 7" single), The CD also has a bonus remix of "Tenderness" not found digitally on their Bandcamp site. I think the retro artwork by David H. Sekulla / Yeti Popstar is great. (It's like something my synth-pop band Chemistry Set might have done back in the '80s.) I've added "Stupid Games" to my 'New Wave No Wave Next Wave' Spotify playlist, and "No Good" to my 'Electro-Q-shun' Spotify playlist. You should too.