There are albums that want to seduce you, albums that want to educate you - and then there are albums like Session VII-II-MMXXV, which prefer to grab you by the inner ear and drag you, unblinking, into a vortex where jazz forgot its manners and noise learned to pray.
Berlin’s Klotz Wenzel Vethake don’t make songs so much as temporary zones of controlled implosion. The trio - Manuel Klotz (saxophone, loops), Karla Wenzel (bass, synths, and an unholy box of noises), and Tobias Vethake (electric cello, percussion) - continue their exploration of anti-form, anti-ego sound communion. This second release, recorded live on the 7th of February 2025, is both a documentation and an act of possession: a séance where the ghosts of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Caspar Brötzmann share the same cracked amplifier.

Part 1 begins in disarray, the kind of chaos that feels like it’s already halfway through an argument with itself. Klotz’s saxophone spits, gasps, and howls - not melody, but exhalation - while Wenzel’s bass grinds underneath, alternately grounding and antagonizing the others. Vethake’s electric cello threads through the maelstrom like an exposed nerve. The trio are not chasing harmony; they’re stalking tension. The result is less free jazz than free fall.

Part 2 could almost be described as minimal - but only if you think of minimalism as a smoldering ruin left after the last explosion. The textures stretch thin, like steel cables trembling in the air. Electronic interventions buzz faintly in the background, as if someone is tuning the city’s power grid. The interplay here is uncanny: nobody leads, nobody follows, yet everything moves with the inevitability of tectonic plates.

By the time Part 3 unfolds, you realize this music isn’t trying to reach catharsis - it’s trying to sustain ignition. The trio’s improvisation hovers on that dangerous edge where energy risks collapsing into entropy, but somehow never does. Each sound feels freshly minted, painfully alive.

There’s a rare sincerity in this chaos: Session VII-II-MMXXV doesn’t pretend to be difficult - it simply refuses to be anything else. Klotz Wenzel Vethake aren’t showing off technique or testing endurance; they’re testing the possibility of collective intuition in a time of atomized creation. You can almost hear them listening to each other, moment by moment, like climbers navigating a cliff face in thick fog.

If punk was once about rebellion and jazz about freedom, this trio fuses both impulses into something wilder and more fragile - an improvised architecture of empathy and dissonance. It’s Berlin distilled: no illusion of perfection, only the beautiful friction of coexistence.
Listening feels like standing inside a weather system made of breath, metal, and feedback. You don’t walk away humming it - you walk away slightly altered, as if your nervous system had been briefly rewired.

As Sun Ra once said (and the trio proudly echo), “The possible has been tried and failed. Now it’s time to try the impossible”.
That’s exactly what this record sounds like: the impossible, mid-flight, refusing to land.

Tim Skold has always been the immaculate undertaker of industrial rock - the guy who shows up at the apocalypse in a tailored leather coat, cigarette unlit, ready to turn collapse into choreography. With "Caught In The Throes", his eighth solo album, he doesn’t so much reinvent himself as reassert his dominion over a kingdom of rusted machines and broken desires. It’s a record that knows the genre is a corpse and still finds new ways to make it dance.

Over fourteen tracks, Skold builds a panorama of synthetic ruin: "All Humans Must Be Destroyed" hammers the listener with sardonic nihilism, as if Ministry had developed a sense of humor and a better haircut. "All The $ In The World" takes aim at late capitalism with bitter swagger - a cynical hymn for the influencer era, where enlightenment is bought on subscription. "Cold As Ice" and "The Great Theatricality" sound like fragments of a cyberpunk opera, oscillating between sleaze and sincerity, menace and melancholy.

There’s something theatrical here, yes - but not camp. Skold’s sense of drama is rooted in discipline, not excess. His voice, half sneer and half confession, cuts through the digital grit like a scalpel. The production, as always, is pristine - distorted just enough to let the blood through. You can hear his years with KMFDM and Marilyn Manson in the precision of the programming and the deliberate density of the mix, yet "Caught In The Throes" feels more self-contained, almost monastic in its focus. It’s as if Skold locked himself in a mirrored studio and decided to hold a séance with all his past selves - the glam-rock miscreant, the industrial tactician, the cynical philosopher - and recorded the argument.

Tracks like "That Kind of Magic (Confessions of a Supermodel)" and "Do You Really?" flirt with the pop end of depravity, melodies dressed in latex, hooks disguised as barbed wire. "In A Grave (Specter)" and "The Inconsolable", by contrast, reveal a more introspective Skold, less the provocateur than the weary chronicler of decay. The closing "Digging My Own Grave" makes no attempt at metaphor: it’s resignation delivered with perfect sound design.

What keeps "Caught In The Throes" from collapsing under its own cynicism is Skold’s uncanny sense of proportion - his refusal to overplay the apocalypse. He knows that the end of the world has become cliché, so he stages it as a sardonic performance piece. You don’t listen to this album to be shocked; you listen to hear someone sculpt despair into architecture, beat by beat.

In 2025, when artificial intelligence writes most of the rebellion, Skold’s human touch feels paradoxically radical. Every hiss, every clipped vocal, every perfectly human imperfection sounds like a small act of defiance. "Caught In The Throes" isn’t just industrial - it’s artisanal nihilism, hand-forged, cold to the touch, and weirdly comforting.

You might not leave the record feeling enlightened, but you’ll know who’s still steering the wreckage - and doing it with unnerving grace.

There’s a certain paradox in seeing Robin Storey (Rapoon) and Robert L. Pepper (Pas Musique) still exploring the margins of consciousness after decades of sonic wandering - as if they’ve both long abandoned the map, yet keep meeting in the same clearing, under the same imaginary sun. Knowledge Has No Enemies But The Ignorant is their latest joint expedition, and probably the most cohesive, profound, and darkly humorous dialogue they’ve ever recorded. Two CDs, thirteen tracks, two hours of music that feel less like an album and more like a drifting séance in the company of benevolent ghosts.

Rapoon brings his trademark ghostly loops, the kind that seem to have been recorded inside a slowly evaporating memory; Pas Musique, on the other hand, injects the organism with improvised electronics, unorthodox rhythms, and strange field recordings that sound like the Earth whispering through broken speakers. The chemistry between them is palpable - not fusion, but osmotic collaboration. One bleeds into the other until distinctions dissolve, and what remains is a landscape of sentient drones, murmuring frequencies, and half-lucid melodies.

“Blending Apricots” opens the set with deceptively pastoral warmth, a sort of ambient mirage that soon reveals a more unsettling texture beneath. “Wastebasket Blues” could be a distant cousin of early Coil improvisations - equal parts decayed jazz and cosmic vertigo. Then comes “Counting Tulips”, whose circular motion feels like a meditation held together by gravity and decay. By the time you reach the second disc - the one that begins with the Latin-titled “Scientia non habet inimicum nisi ignorantiam” - you’ve crossed into something more explicitly ritualistic, even philosophical. Knowledge, here, hums like a low-frequency deity.

What makes the record so fascinating is its refusal to choose between structure and spontaneity. Everything feels composed and discovered, like a fossil uncovered by accident during a casual walk. The duo seems to be listening to each other as much as to the world around them. Their interplay isn’t about virtuosity - it’s about attention, patience, and the kind of trust that can only exist between people who have both seen the void and decided to paint on its walls.

There’s humour, too - that gently absurd, English-American strain of irony that creeps into titles like “Lost in My Closet” or “Remembering Coypus”. It’s as if the two were mocking the solemnity of their own mysticism, winking through the haze. You never quite know whether you’re supposed to meditate or laugh - which, of course, is the point.

Ultimately, Knowledge Has No Enemies But The Ignorant feels like a quietly monumental statement from two veterans who’ve long transcended trends. It’s ambient music that remembers it has a body, drone that’s still capable of laughter, and psychedelia that refuses to promise any revelation. Instead, it offers something rarer: the sound of two artists thinking out loud, together, and finding - amid all the static - a shared, luminous kind of wisdom.

A two-hour conversation between friends who’ve seen too much and are still curious. And in a world this noisy, that curiosity is rebellion.

Dardis is the ambient and experimental sound project for Northern Irish writer, editor and sound artist Colin Dardis. I had previously reviewed “A Chain Reaction of Various Cracks” and “Funerealism” by Dardis and enjoyed them, so I was interested to see what this artist had in store for us this time. First off, a murmuration is when a flock of birds is swirling around, most famously starlings, so this is about movement, rather than sounds. Dardis describes the album thus: “While Trump, Musk, et al. strip away and dismantle the fabric of American democracy and diversity, ‘A Murmuration of Stalins’ finds expression within chaos, reflecting the earlier work of Dardis which sought to give a soundtrack to his experiences of depression. While the news today makes for uncomfortable viewing, we must delve into that discomfort and fight to find ways to express our own desires and frustrations, political and personal. We must shout down the fascists with our own noise.” So let’s dive in and see what we have here.

This is one track titled “A Murmuration of Stalins” that is 40 minutes long, but you could think of it as several movements. This track is droning soundscapes with a tinge of discomfort. At 18 minutes in, it hits its stride with a melancholy melody of sorts, but this devolves into a droning soundtrack of malaise with some heavy bass coming in at times. Eventually it all grinds to a close.

The liner notes state that Dardis “wanted to create something slow and sinister, echoing the spreading malaise and sickness of the Trump administration. Something capturing the dread of the civilized world right now.” I read the liner notes after reviewing the track, and the fact that we both had used the idea of malaise demonstrates that he pulled this off. Beyond this, this would work well as a soundtrack for a black and white sci-fi dystopian film. If you like your stuff cinematic this would be well worth checking out. There's enough going on to keep this thing interesting over 40 minutes.

I've been a fan of R4 since the late 1990s when Fusion Audio began the first time. I'm glad to see he's back and this disc shows that he's still in fine form. R4 is the work of Barry D. Scheffel, who is also the driving force behind Fusion Audio Recordings. He hails from southwest Ohio, which knows a little something about thunderstorms and this disc demonstrates this knowledge. All three of these tracks were created using source material from a rainstorm. I really enjoy field recording based work, so let's dive In and see what the weather is like.

“Rainmaker I” is heavy. Oppressively heavy. You have only the slightest inkling that this came from natural sources as Scheffel lays down massive oppressive drone. This has more in common with a locomotive running through a tunnel than it does rain. “Rainmaker II” is a bit more peaceful. You can hear birds singing and gentle rain. Still, there’s heavy bass drone that takes over as the track progresses. This serves as a nice counterpoint to “Rainmaker I.” “Rainmaker III” brings the thunder. You can almost see this as a combination of the two approaches with the natural sounds being heavily processed and layered to make an interesting composition.

The liner notes state that Scheffel “operates somewhere in between the ambient and noise spaces on the periphery of music,” and this disc is evidence of his ability to walk that line. Overall, this is an excellent disc for fans of field recordings but also for those that might enjoy a little processing with their nature. Very well done and highly recommended. This disc weighs in at around 21 minutes and is limited to 42 copies.