When you hear that Pain Magazine is a collaboration between Louisahhh and Maelstrom - the techno-punk alchemists behind RAAR - and French post-hardcore institution "Birds in Row", you might expect the resulting album to sound like a violent argument in an abandoned factory. And you’d be right, but only partially. "Violent God" isn’t just confrontation; it’s communion through chaos. It’s the moment when the amps catch fire and everyone keeps playing because, for once, the flames make sense.

This record was born from a sixteen-day creative siege - two worlds colliding like tectonic plates. On one side, Birds in Row’s cracked fury and emotional honesty; on the other, Louisahhh and Maelstrom’s industrial pulse, all machines and menace. The collision didn’t destroy either camp - it forged a new alloy, one that’s simultaneously tender and terrifying, melodic and merciless.

There’s a thread of apocalyptic beauty running through "Violent God". The title track howls against faith and failure with an almost liturgical rage. “Weak and Predatory” dismantles capitalism with a groove so heavy it could level office towers. “Dead Meat” turns the post-hardcore breakup song into a weapon, a blunt instrument of a catharsis that could vaguely resemble the cinematic one by certai outputs by Unkle. And “Magic” - perhaps the album’s most haunting moment - reframes addiction not as sin but as a struggle for transcendence, its synths flickering like dying neon in a holy dive bar.

Louisahhh’s presence is the album’s electric core - shifting between preacher, prophet, and punk banshee. Her voice drips with conviction and corrosion. Beside her, Bart Balboa and Quentin Sauvé provide the kind of roaring, scorched-earth intensity that made "Birds in Row" one of the most human bands in hardcore. The production, handled by Joris Saïdani, is a marvel of contrast: each sound feels like it’s on the edge of collapse, yet nothing falls apart. The record breathes, bleeds, and somehow still dances.

What makes "Violent God" so compelling is that it doesn’t posture. It doesn’t sell despair as rebellion or rage as fashion. Instead, it documents survival - in a world that often rewards numbness, this is an album about feeling too much. Pain Magazine doesn’t glorify the wound; it insists on looking at it until you see its shape, its pulse, its terrible beauty.

If Birds in Row once tore at the social fabric with guitars, and Louisahhh once sought transcendence through industrial rhythms, "Violent God" is where their impulses meet in the middle - a ritual of noise and care, fury and empathy. The title isn’t metaphorical. This is sacred violence, the kind that breaks illusions, not bones.

By the end - after the elegiac “Husk” fades like smoke - what lingers is not pain, but possibility. Pain Magazine, improbably, have made one of 2025’s most urgent and oddly healing records. "Violent God" doesn’t just confront the apocalypse - it sings in it, dances in it, and dares to call it home.

There are records that you listen to and there are records that listen back. Mother Tongue belongs to the latter tribe - albums that seem to breathe and blink, that demand your attention not through force, but through their own irreducible strangeness. This is music in motion, improvised yet deeply rooted, as if the dust of Dakar, the humidity of San Juan, and the restless air of Amsterdam had conspired to invent their own weather system.

The trio - Mola Sylla, Frank Rosaly, and Oscar Jan Hoogland - could hardly have met by accident, and yet their sound thrives on accident. Sylla, a Senegalese griot singer and percussionist, brings not just a voice but an entire oral lineage: every syllable has a genealogy. His phrases rise and fall with that griot elasticity, where melody and storytelling fuse into a single pulse. Rosaly, long revered in Chicago’s improvised scene, turns his drum kit into a city in miniature - shifting traffic, muffled sirens, tin roofs rattling in wind. And then there’s Hoogland, a Dutch keyboard anarchist who thought plugging a 17th-century clavichord into a wall socket was a good idea. Spoiler: it was.

Together, they don’t so much play songs as build storms. The opening track, “Djangaloma Dara”, begins in near-silence before the group erupts in what feels like controlled combustion - voice slicing through electric resonance, percussion answering in cryptic Morse. “Duk Kawe” dances on the edge of collapse, Rosaly’s snare muttering in odd polyrhythms while Hoogland’s electric clavichord flirts with chaos like an old radio picking up transmissions from the future. “Ndap” and “Ker Gi” follow a more meditative path, hovering somewhere between trance and sermon, until “Kang” - the 13-minute closer - swells into a cosmic séance where griot tradition, post-jazz improvisation, and electricity itself merge into one vast current.

If there’s a philosophy here, it’s that of the open circuit. The trio’s music lives in voltage and vibration, in the dialogue between tradition and experiment. Mola Sylla doesn’t sing over the instruments - he sings through them. The griot’s voice, long accustomed to unamplified air, now resonates against crackling wires and metallic ghosts. Rosaly’s drumming, meanwhile, refuses the linear; his rhythms seem to loop back on themselves like memories that won’t settle. Hoogland’s clavichord snarls and hums, both antique and mutant - Bach’s ghost gone punk.

Despite its rawness, Mother Tongue never lapses into noise for its own sake. It’s not chaos - it’s conversation. Each track feels like a living negotiation between continents, centuries, and temperaments. You can hear West African polyrhythms rubbing shoulders with free jazz spontaneity and Dutch absurdism. Somewhere between them lies a space that’s neither world music nor avant-garde, but a raw, breathing fusion of both - a kind of acoustic Esperanto, spoken in tongues older than words.

What’s striking is how joyful the record feels, even in its roughest edges. You sense laughter behind the clang, mischief in the distortion. There’s seriousness, yes - the weight of heritage, the rigor of improvisation - but also an unmistakable pleasure in risk. It’s the sound of three musicians reminding each other that discovery is the reward.

By the end of Kang, you may not know what language they’ve been speaking, but you’ll have understood it perfectly. It’s a grammar built from breath, skin, electricity, and time. This is not fusion - it’s combustion.

Or, as the album itself seems to whisper: "The mother tongue is not what you speak. It’s what you survive by".

Grief, as Arvin Dola reminds us, is not a thing to overcome - it’s a room you learn to live inside. O Ghost, his debut album under this moniker, is a work of quiet hauntings, the kind of record that doesn’t try to exorcise its specters but instead lets them hum gently in the walls. It’s not so much “about loss” as it is about the acoustics of absence - how a voice echoes after it’s gone, how a father or a dog might return as static, as a hum, as a warm crackle in a tape loop.

Dola - Madrid-based composer Daniel Mesa - has a background that leaks subtly through every trembling frequency: classical training, choral discipline, the discipline of breathing in time. He once sang early music, now he writes after it - as if Bach had been digitized and uploaded into a dying hard drive. He’s also worked in cinema and theatre, and O Ghost feels staged like a film you watch in your sleep: dim, elliptical, yet unnervingly coherent.

The opening track, “Geology of Absence”, is an ambient seismograph - tectonic drones rising from under layers of dust and delay. The title track (or its unspoken ghost) drifts nearby, while “Resurrecting the Father (Canon)” takes the form of a sonic ritual - something between a requiem and a malfunctioning prayer wheel. The most politically charged moment, “Rafah”, doesn’t sermonize; it murmurs. The track’s mournful drones stretch like the silence that follows catastrophe - what remains when words are no longer useful.

There’s a philosophical skeleton here, clearly: Derrida’s hauntology and Mark Fisher’s cultural necromancy are not just references but coordinates. Yet Dola handles these heavy concepts with tenderness and tact - his ghosts are not academic; they’re intimate. O Ghost works precisely because it refuses to distinguish between the personal and the political, between one man’s father and a thousand collective losses.

Musically, the palette is restrained but rich: analog synths, processed guitars, and field recordings (some captured during his time in Iceland) merge into a kind of suspended time. Everything flickers in and out, as though composed from the threshold of sleep. The production, mastered by Lawrence English, is immaculate yet fragile - clarity and blur coexisting like candlelight through fog.

If there’s humor in O Ghost, it’s the black kind - the grin of someone who’s spent too much time talking to the past. “Specters of Me” could almost be read as Dola mocking his own sentimentality: a looping self-portrait in spectral feedback, a ghost trying to haunt itself. And yet, there’s beauty in that absurdity - a recognition that memory, for all its pain, is an act of creation.

By the closing piece, “Act of Heresy”, the listener is left suspended in a kind of moral and sonic half-light. The heresy, perhaps, is daring to imagine that ghosts can still be loved - that they might still be listening.

In a landscape where ambient music often dissolves into decorative mist, O Ghost is startlingly embodied. It hums, trembles, bleeds; it remembers. It’s the sound of time, folded and breathing - a séance conducted not for the dead, but for the living who refuse to forget.

There’s a quiet daring in naming yourself after the Latin for “silence”, especially when your music seems so intent on abolishing it. Fickle, the third album by Francesco Zedde under the moniker Tacet Tacet Tacet, is a work of tension and transformation - a place where sound tries to push beyond its own edges, only to find new boundaries.

Zedde, now based in Utrecht but born in Italy, has long pursued a hybrid territory: ambient textures, glitch, concrete fragments, processed instruments, fields and samples. In Fickle, those methods are less ornament than foundation: rather than layering effects over sound, he seems to sculpt from sounds themselves, carving rhythms and melodies out of ambience. Indeed, the label describes the project as assembling ambient noises into structures, letting the listener drift from formlessness into pattern.

The album opens with “Gamble”, a solo drum motif gradually stretched, mirrored, and refracted until it is no longer “just drums” but a shifting terrain of pulses and echoes. It feels like watching a stone drop into a pond at midnight: the ripple becomes the pond. “Dissimulation” follows, unsettling with its lithe dissonances and abrupt silences. The horizon breaks here - what was sparse becomes uneasy, as though the air itself has pitched into fracture.

In “Pertinence”, glitchy rhythms, processed guitar, and irregular beats dance a jittery tango together. It’s one of the more structured moments - but structure here is elastic, always ready to warp. “Unfocus” pushes that warp further: pulses collapse, voices or fragments slide in and slip out, as though you’re half-listening to a hidden conversation in a storm. The field-recorded and elemental influences from Zedde’s trips (notably to Iceland) surface most vividly in “Welter”, which bathes insects, old organ, and bells in a slow, late-night glow.

The closing “Recurrence” is hypnotic minimalism. Two piano chords loop like heartbeats, their repetition both consoling and relentless. Processed breath, glitch and artifact swirl around them, as though the music is both resisting stasis and trapped in it. A voice - Rea Dubach, heavily transformed - drifts almost subliminally in the backdrop, as if memory trying to speak through interference.

For listeners familiar with his earlier work, Fickle might feel like a quieter, more introspective pivot. While the confrontations and noise gestures of past records remain in shadow, here they’re internalized. Rhythm is not a demand but a question. Texture doesn’t envelop - it suggests. Zedde’s collaborators, especially Jacopo Mittino (aka 52 Hearts Whale), help guide that balance; on tracks like “Gamble” and “Unfocus”, their co-composition tempers and redirects the tension.

If you’re a listener who falls in love with a note, Fickle asks you to wait; let it stretch, shift, and reappear. It’s not always comfortable. Some moments feel like your ears are catching shadows. But therein lies its beauty. This is music built from the space between sounds, and from the courage to let that space hold you.

Let’s start with a paradox: "Porcelain" is anything but delicate. It cracks, chips, and clangs; it’s the sound of fragility weaponized - a teacup hurled through a Marshall stack. Sarah and Nico, the volcanic duo behind Pamplemousse, seem to have distilled the entire post-grunge hangover into nine compact detonations recorded once again with Peter Deimel at the Black Box - a place that’s become to noise what Abbey Road was to pop: sacred ground for distortion.

Pamplemousse’s story is already legend on their native Réunion Island - a place better known for its beaches than for feedback and fury. Born in 2016 as a trio, the band’s evolution into a duo has only made them sound more dangerous, more distilled. There’s a strange kind of intimacy in their violence now: the drum hits are like heartbeats in arrhythmia; the guitar riffs, crooked love letters written with a soldering iron.

"Porcelain" continues the band’s progression from "High Strung" and "Think of It" - but what once felt like raw, sweaty catharsis now carries a layer of uneasy clarity. “More Beautiful Than Madonna” opens the record like a slap of irony and joy - the sound of a band laughing at their own destruction. “Smile the Num” and “Miami Blue” stretch between menace and melancholy, where Nico’s vocals slide between a snarl and a confession. Then there’s “Bad Penny”, perhaps their most perfectly unhinged pop moment, a two-and-a-half-minute anthem for anyone who’s ever smiled while falling apart.

What’s striking about "Porcelain" is its sense of proportion. Everything teeters on the edge - the production is precise, the chaos rehearsed but never domesticated. Sarah’s drumming doesn’t so much keep time as threaten it, while Nico’s guitar playing sounds like it’s trying to chew its way out of its own amp. And yet, amid all the abrasion, there’s something beautiful: melody hiding inside the feedback, like a shard of porcelain glinting in rubble.

Thematically, "Porcelain" feels like a document of reinvention. After moving from the tropics of Réunion to the industrial greys of Lorraine, Pamplemousse seem to have found a new temperature - less humid, more electric. It’s as if the duo have traded volcanic heat for metallic tension, replacing sweat with static.

By the time the closer “Brick Head” stretches its seven minutes into a slow, hypnotic sprawl, the album feels less like a collection of songs and more like an exorcism recorded in real time. The chaos has structure, the noise has grace. You could call it grunge, noise rock, punk - but those words don’t quite hold. This is music that claws at its own labels, then dances on the scraps.

"Porcelain" is an album about endurance - not the kind that polishes and preserves, but the kind that chips and scars and still shines through. Fragility, as Pamplemousse remind us, is just another word for being alive loud enough to break.