Daniel Szwed doesn’t play drums - he summons them. He drags the instrument down into the furnace of his own invention, hammers it with noise, scorches it with electricity, and lets it whisper, when needed, through the smoke. "Splinter", his new album on Rope Worm, feels less like a collection of tracks and more like the aftermath of an eruption: shards, pulses, fragments of ritual that still glow with heat.

The Polish percussionist - known from BNNT, Dynasonic, and collaborations that stretch across the borders of noise, art, and techno - has always sought sound not as texture but as resistance. Here, under the guidance of producer Mateusz Rosiski, he continues that trajectory but narrows the focus: "Splinter" is both heavier and more skeletal than its predecessor "Sun’s Mother", stripping away any hint of grandeur to reveal what’s underneath - nerve, tension, and the slow violence of rhythm itself.

The guests, scattered like echoes across the album, are not collaborators so much as apparitions. Jessica opens the record with "S1", a vocal incantation half-drowned in distortion - a voice caught between invocation and malfunction. Natalia Górecka’s piano on "S2" introduces a strange calm, as if a room momentarily cleared of smoke, before the machinery starts again. Mala Herba, who appears twice, adds her signature haunted presence: not singing over Szwed’s sound but inside it, like someone trapped in its circuitry. And Liam Andrews - of My Disco and Big Brave lineage - lends weight and gravity to "S4", where bass, flutes, and percussion merge into something that resembles a collapsing building played in reverse.

What makes "Splinter" compelling is its sense of moral urgency beneath the noise. There’s the explicit shout - “Free Palestine!” stamped on the credits - but also a deeper resonance: an artist refusing to make neutral sound. Even the structure of the album feels political - fractured, unresolved, unpolished in the most deliberate sense. It’s a work of defiance, of brokenness embraced as the truest possible form.

If "Sun’s Mother" was the ritual at sunset, "Splinter" is the one performed under emergency lighting, when power’s been cut but something still needs to be said - loudly, through the cracks.

Szwed’s music has always balanced between endurance and transcendence, but here it feels as if he’s stopped seeking either. What’s left is something more vital: pulse as protest, distortion as confession, feedback as a form of prayer.

And when the final track fades, it doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like standing in the silence after an explosion - counting, not casualties, but survivors.

There’s a certain grim laughter humming inside Elektroniczne Systemy. It’s the kind that sneaks out from between dusty oscillators and corroded guitar cables, that peculiar Polish humour which sounds like despair trying to dance, failing gracefully, and deciding that failure is, in fact, the point.

Marmur - that’s Artur Rumiski and Macio Moretti - are two shapeshifters from different ends of the country’s experimental underground: Rumiski, the architect of texture and tension in outfits like Furia, Thaw, and Arrm, and Moretti, the cosmic jester behind LXMP and countless side aliases, who treats irony like a musical instrument. Together, they form a duo that sounds less like a band and more like a "malfunctioning ecosystem", where guitars melt into static, machines breathe, and feedback turns into a form of prayer.

The album’s title, Elektroniczne Systemy (“Electronic Systems”), is wonderfully misleading. There’s nothing systematic here. Everything bleeds. Circuits collapse into drones, drones crack into glitches, and every sound feels like it’s trying to reform itself after a slow disaster. It’s ambient music if you redefined “ambient” as “the inside of a broken fax machine dreaming of the sea”.

Opener “Ludzko” (Humanity) begins like an autopsy of civilization recorded through a wet contact mic - metallic hums, ghostly overtones, a texture that hovers between sacred and decomposing. “Drena” stretches out into twelve minutes of magnetic fatigue, like a field recording of entropy itself. And “Objazd” (Detour) closes the album with an oddly optimistic sputter - the sound of a detour that never quite finds its way back, yet enjoys the confusion.

What’s striking is how Elektroniczne Systemy feels neither nostalgic nor futuristic. It exists in a present tense of corrosion - a moment where analog and digital, human and mechanical, serious and absurd, all short-circuit into one another. The production, courtesy of Bartek Kapsa, preserves that instability with surgical precision: everything sounds deliberate, but nothing feels safe.

It’s music for the non-functioning device that is you: funny, unsettling, tender in its mechanical coldness. Rumiski and Moretti manage to build an emotional architecture out of glitches, feedback, and small domestic ghosts.

In the end, Elektroniczne Systemy doesn’t really play - it persists, like a faint electric hum in a dark room after you’ve turned everything off. A reminder that the machines are listening too.

The Mad Laboratory of Anti-Matter sound like they’ve just detonated a club inside a philosophy department - and filmed the aftermath with a contact mic. *Study of a Dead End*, their debut for moli del tro, is a volatile collision of industrial fury, Lebanese pulse, and Swiss precision, crafted by the duo of Nadia Daou and Paed Conca - two restless multi-instrumentalists who turn discontent into audible chaos.

The record opens like a manifesto scribbled on the back of a circuit board. “Annihilation of Denial” is not a song but a declaration - a mechanical stomp drenched in distortion, clarinet howls, and Daou’s hypnotic vocal fragments, which sound like coded messages from a future uprising. By the time “Punching at Power (Tribute to Allen Ginsberg)” arrives, you start to suspect the duo might be channeling the Beat poet’s ghost through a malfunctioning drum machine. Their rebellion is not nostalgic but visceral - you can almost hear the sweat of resistance under the synthetic glare.

Conca, a veteran of Europe’s experimental scene (BNNT, Port Said, Praed), and Daou, known for her raw fusion of Middle Eastern and electronic ritualism, forge an unlikely hybrid: part techno séance, part anti-fascist cabaret. Every beat seems to question authority; every processed reed line feels like a call to arms disguised as a groove. It’s music that scratches, bites, and sometimes even smiles - but never politely.

The title, Study of a Dead End, could be ironic. Nothing here feels like a dead end. If anything, this album studies collapse the way arsonists study fire - intimately, with curiosity, and a touch of perverse affection. “Society of the Spectacle”, the brief, twitching centerpiece, plays like a Situationist prank - a noisy wink at Debord’s ghost before Roman Hiele’s remix turns it into a neon labyrinth of loops and disintegration.

What makes the record fascinating is its duality: it’s both methodical and manic. The drums march like an algorithm; the clarinet melts like mercury. Nadia’s electronics hum like overheated machinery. And underneath it all, a pulse - not quite human, not quite robotic - keeps beating, stubbornly, like a protester’s heart under a riot helmet.

In the end, Study of a Dead End feels like a question thrown at the listener: what happens when you dance at the edge of collapse? Daou and Conca don’t give an answer - they just turn up the volume, open the lab door, and let the feedback do the talking.

'Rendering Time' is the third collaboration between multi-instumentalist/synthesist Deborah Martin and oboe/English horn/black cedar flute player Jill Haley. If you have heard their previous albums, you may have some idea of what to expect. Haley's melancholy reed/woodwind melodies combined with Martin's atmospheric electronic textures form a magical landscape with cinematic vistas and untamed wilderness explored throughout the ten tracks on this 47 minute album. Although there is plenty of melodic input (primarily from Haley) the focus seems to be more on the mood and ambiance than song-like melodies. To me, this is an autumnal album, not just because it happens to be Fall now, but these wistful compositions create a feeling of nostalgic longing, especially prevalent on track 6, "Shadow of the Moon" with atypical acoustic guitar from Martin in the soundscape. While a couple of tracks like "This Place We Call Home" seem a bit unfocused, there is still an overall beauty to this episodic soundscape and there's nothing wrong with having peaks and valleys in it. This is an outdoors album, a nature walk crunching through leaf-strewn pathways, partially bare trees and cloudy skies. Memories of time and people gone by, events real and imagined, tears and laugher, a flood of emotion, all wrapped up in the sonics of 'Rendering Time.' Of the three albums by Martin and Haley, I like this one best. It is simultaneously emotionally gripping and beauteous in its execution. Absolutely enchanting!

After more than 15 years of drumming in math rock, post-rock and post-hardcore bands, William Covert began experimenting with live-looed synths alongside acoustic and electronic drums. This experimentation birthed two full-length solo albums characterized by post-rock and krautrock inspired synth loops and melodies, all performed solo with loop pedals and sequencers. "I wanted my third solo album to go in a different direction with different instrumentation," explains Covert discussing the process behind the creation of 'Dream Vessel.'
Combining solo and group improvisation to forge a unique sonic landscape, 'Dream Vessel' melds abrasive noise rock, free-jazz textures and cinematic ambient atmospheres. Joining Covert (on drums) for half the album's tracks are longtime collaborators Jack McKevitt (guitar), and Nathan Schenck (bass), performing together as the William Covert Trio.

The album is six tracks beginning with "Brotherhood Of Sleep" with all musicians present and echoed guitar chordal harmonic kicking it off. Sounds a bit like a laid back King Crimson slow jam, nice and atmospheric but lacking any sort of meaningful development. The follow-up, "Trancers" is in the same vein, and this could be nearly any '70s prog-rock outfit jamming with Bruford / Wetton style interplay from the rhythm section and a guitarist who leans so heavily on the effects pedals it's just crushing. Once again, a bit of style over substance.
The mode of the music changes radically on "Dream Void" where droney ambience holds sway. The sonic palette is both light and heavy and the movement is somewhat subtle. A little more than halfway through, Covert comes in with his drumkit adding a rhythmic element that's more improvisational drum solo than developing a steady rhythm. Oddly enough, it works in a strange, abstract way. "C-Beams" incorporates the same modus operandi with drums and ambient drones, but also adds synth-generated guitar loops as what could be construed as the track's main melodic element. Mood-wise, it's rather dour, devolving into a bit of chaos with reverb crashes and other electronic effects, sounding like wild animals sprung from cages.

The WC3 are back together again on "Throttle" and improvisational noise along with Covert's lightning quick drumming are the overarching components here. Schenck's bass is so low I couldn't even distinguish it. Final track, "Come True" is actually the nicest one on the album, and the one that most closely resembles any sort of krautrock. Covert drums consistently with bass and melody synth loops. Plenty of sonic variety makes this one interesting. Over all, 'Dream Vessel' is a hodge-podge of ideas that may delight some and confuse others but showcases Covert's creativity in atypical ways. I should also mention that the album is available on cassette (limited edition) as Chain D.L.K. does not have a CD/Download/Tape category in its auto-formats.