Širom have always sounded like a folk tradition from a planet that hasn’t yet decided whether to evolve or dissolve. On "In the Wind of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper", their fifth and most luminous fever-dream to date, the Slovenian trio take that ambiguity and build a temple out of it - one made of driftwood, bones, and recycled myths. It’s a record that smells of soil and ozone, a kind of acoustic hallucination in which instruments no longer behave, melodies no longer ask permission, and rhythm becomes a collective hallucination rather than a pulse.

Ana Kravanja, Iztok Koren, and Samo Kutin remain devoted to their strange craftsmanship - those hand-built instruments that look like fossils of forgotten civilisations, half ritual, half science project. Their music is a kind of speculative archaeology: you don’t know whether you’re hearing something ancient or something that’s just been invented, and the beauty lies precisely in that uncertainty. Balafons speak to hurdy-gurdies, frame drums converse with ghosts, and the banjo - that eternal trickster - sneaks through the mix like a snake with a sense of humour.

The new album is more melodic, even strangely tender, without losing Širom’s characteristic density. You can trace clearer contours now, moments of air and patience between their usual storms of detail. Tracks like "Curls Upon the Neck, Ribs Upon the Mountain" open like time-lapse flowers, full of lines that don’t quite resolve but still feel complete. "The Hangman’s Shadow Fifteen Years On" stretches out nearly nineteen minutes, a funeral dance for something unnamed - grief maybe, or the illusion of certainty - while "Hope in an All-Sufficient Space of Calm" delivers on its title’s promise, hovering like a breath that doesn’t need to end.

Their compositions, as always, are both wild and deliberate - think of them as woven spells that forgot which god they were meant for. There’s rhythm, yes, but it’s not there to make you move; it’s there to remind you that movement itself is sacred. The interplay among the three musicians has become subtler, almost telepathic. Each gesture feels less like an answer and more like a continuation of the same ancient sentence they’ve been writing since "I Can Be a Clay Snapper" (2017) - a sentence about cooperation, listening, and the slow art of not dominating sound.

Recorded again with their uncanny precision and a feel for natural reverb that makes every pluck and bow sound like it’s resonating inside a cave or a dream, this album marks a shift: Širom are no longer just translating landscapes; they are becoming them. There’s the high plateau of "Between the Fingers the Drops of Tomorrow’s Dawn", where wind and string trade roles, and the humid forest delirium of "Tiny Dewdrop Explosions Crackling Delightfully", which sounds like gamelan played by water spirits.

And beneath it all runs that peculiar Širom humour - sly, almost mischievous, a reminder that even the most transcendent ritual can (and should) grin a little. Their music might sound cosmic, but it’s never pompous. It’s humble, porous, stubbornly human. These are not prophets; they’re artisans of wonder, working with dust, wood, and time.

What they’ve made here isn’t a world music album - it’s an anti-world one, a reminder that the world as we know it is only one possible tuning of the instrument. If "The Liquified Throne of Simplicity" hinted at transcendence, "In the Wind of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper" simply inhabits it. It’s the sound of a folk tradition that doesn’t exist yet, whispered into being by three people who never stopped believing that music could still invent a future.

It ends as it began: not with silence, but with the air vibrating differently. Somewhere between a prayer, a question, and a game.

If Rhizome was a rocket launch, Kimatika is the moment when gravity finally lets go and the ship starts spinning, disorienting and exhilarating in equal measure. Etceteral - Boštjan Simon (baritone sax, electronics), Marek Fakuc (drums), and Lina Rica (visuals) - have been tinkering with the machinery of futuristic jazz for a few years now, but their third record feels like the first time they’ve given themselves full permission to play mad scientists rather than diligent engineers.

The saxophone no longer dictates the path; it appears in the mix like a hologram, sometimes luminous, sometimes fogged over like a shoegaze vocal pushed through broken glass. The drums don’t so much keep time as interrogate it, asking whether rhythm can fracture and still feel inevitable. Meanwhile, sequencers and machines lurk in the background, setting up obstacles that the band hurls themselves against with manic joy.

The opener “Ljolo” squelches into life like some forgotten TV theme from the year 2079, all funk in zero gravity. “Questions” buries its own answers beneath widescreen brass tones, while “Facci Sognare” is the sound of a Balkan carnival colliding with a rave in Detroit. By the time we reach “Prepih” - a delirious handshake between Warp-era bleep and sweaty basement funk - the album has reached its ecstatic core. And just when you think the record has run out of surprises, “Kaneda” swoops in, a closer that plays like a neon sign flickering on in the ruins of a nightclub.

What keeps Kimatika from collapsing under its own maximalism is Etceteral’s refusal to take themselves too seriously. There’s humor tucked into the grooves - sly, playful, a wink through the smoke. Even at its most layered, the music never feels like a lecture on avant-garde possibility; it feels like an invitation to dance, stumble, laugh, and wonder why on earth more jazz records don’t sound this unhinged.

Slovenia may not be the first country that springs to mind when you think of interstellar groove collectives, but maybe it should be. With Kimatika, Etceteral prove that their sound world - part motorik experiment, part cosmic cartoon, part urban noise ritual - is one of Europe’s most vital ongoing projects. It’s an album that dares you to swap nostalgia for velocity, to stop polishing the old CDs and instead step into the vertigo of something truly alive.

There are bands that sound like they’ve been assembled in a laboratory, and then there are bands that actually have. The Shell fall into the latter category, though their lab is less white coat and fluorescent light than smoke, wood, and voltage. With modular synthesizers built specifically for them by Expert Sleepers, they’ve taken the old power-trio format - drums, bass, guitar - and cracked it open like an actual shell, replacing the brittle rock clichés with flowing electronics, electronically augmented sax, and percussion that’s just as likely to be sourced from literal seashells as from a snare.

Recorded live in single takes, The Shell is less an album than a weather system. The opener, “Four Decisions and Revisions Which a Minute Will Reverse”, creeps in with processed shells and fluttering reeds before exploding into a storm that feels equal parts free jazz exorcism and kosmische overture. “Tears Seven Times” finds the trio wrestling with a motorik beat in an awkward meter - 7/8 never sounded so inevitable - layering sorrow, propulsion, and menace into something that both recalls and refuses Krautrock at the same time. And then there’s the vast landscape of “These Five Lidded Bowls”, which grows from the sparsest modular pulses into a crescendo so massive you wonder if Edinburgh itself shook during the take.

The appeal here is not only the scope of the sound but the way it’s made: improvisation that doesn’t meander but builds structures in real time, as though Can’s spirit had been re-engineered in a Scottish workshop. Saxophonist Andrew Ostler can sound elegiac one moment and apocalyptic the next; Simon Kirby’s modular pulses move like tectonic plates; Leigh Chorlton’s drums turn polyrhythms into earthquakes. Together, they conjure something that is less about jazz, less about electronics, and more about the feeling of standing at the edge of an uncertain century, trying to dance while the ground beneath you shifts.

The name The Shell feels apt - protective husk, acoustic resonator, fragile container, and discarded remnant all at once. Their debut is music that can feel both defensive and explosive, minimal and maximal, tender and obliterating. And while the gatefold sleeve comes in red vinyl, the real color of this record is closer to volcanic ash.

It’s tempting to imagine The Shell as the soundtrack to some unwritten apocalypse movie - not the Hollywood one with muscle cars and explosions, but the quieter kind, where three musicians in Scotland summon a world ending and beginning again in the space of a single take.

There’s a kind of geometry to ISHE’s music, though not the neat, Euclidean kind that sits politely on a whiteboard. In Circles is less compass and ruler, more chalk smudged on asphalt after rain - patterns drawn and redrawn until they blur into something more alive than accurate. This three-track EP finds the Denver producer, long a fixture behind decks and mixers, cutting deeper into a mood-driven language that’s as much about suggestion as declaration.

The title track doesn’t spiral so much as it orbits, pulling the listener into a gravity well of delayed synths and ghostly vocal fragments. It’s music that hints at emotional collapse but never succumbs, like someone pacing the same room at 3 a.m. trying to remember if they left the light on. “Auroras” shifts the focus outward, bright washes of sound climbing into the sky and then curdling with just enough tension to remind you that even the most radiant display is caused by collisions at the edge of the atmosphere. Closing piece “Right 4 U” offers the most direct emotional hit - not a ballad in any traditional sense, but a dance track with its guard briefly lowered, revealing the soft machinery of longing underneath the rhythm.

What makes In Circles work is ISHE’s restraint. These tracks don’t try to dazzle with excessive flourishes or show-off complexity. Instead, they carry themselves with a kind of unhurried confidence: textures ebb and flow, vocals haunt rather than dominate, beats emerge like shadows from fog. The result is intimate without being suffocating, melancholic without surrendering to gloom.

Denver may not be the first dot on the map when people talk about electronic music capitals, but ISHE has been quietly proving for years that geography is irrelevant when your sense of atmosphere is this finely tuned. In Circles is not just an EP - it’s a small constellation of moods, three glowing points connected by invisible lines, waiting for the listener to sketch their own meanings between them.

There’s a kind of quiet that hums louder than any amplifier - the sort that lives between gestures, in the slight tremor before a drum skin vibrates, in the shimmer of a guitar string touched but not yet struck. "What We Do When In Silence", the self-titled debut by the trio of Nicola Ratti, Alessandra Novaga, and Enrico Malatesta, is built entirely from that threshold. It’s an album of almosts - of things that seem about to happen but instead choose to hover, to listen back at you.

Each of the three musicians has spent years unlearning the habits of their instruments. Ratti, a sculptor of electronic architecture; Novaga, whose guitar has long ceased to be a vehicle for melody and has become a surface for light; and Malatesta, a percussionist who treats every material as a potential oracle. Together, they behave less like a trio and more like a single, distributed organism. They don’t play with one another so much as they activate one another - sounds trigger responses, responses dissolve into air, and air becomes the actual fourth member of the group.

The record, recorded by Giuseppe Ielasi (another poet of space and subtraction), unfolds like a topographical survey of attention. Titles such as “sessione 3c” or “sessione 8a” suggest documentation rather than composition - moments captured, not manufactured. Yet within this restraint lies a complex grammar: the brush of a cymbal against a drone that seems to be breathing; a guitar note elongated until it stops being pitch and becomes temperature; the quiet tectonics of movement, where rhythm is implied more than declared.

Listening feels like watching a room slowly rearrange itself. It’s music that turns space into an instrument and silence into a conspirator. Every pause carries weight, every rustle a pulse. You start to wonder whether what you’re hearing is sound or just your own anticipation - a small trick of psychoacoustics or empathy.

And yes, it can be funny too, in its own quiet way. The title reads almost like a koan: "what we do when in silence". You can imagine a Zen master smirking as a disciple tries to answer, only to realize the answer is the act of listening itself. There’s humor in their restraint, a sly defiance in making so much out of so little, like three artisans conspiring to show that silence was never empty to begin with.
It’s tempting to call this minimalism, but that misses the point. It’s not about less - it’s about density redistributed. Each grain of sound feels heavy with intent, a whole world folded into a gesture. You could file it next to AMM or Keith Rowe, or alongside the quieter works on Holidays Records, but those are just coordinates. "What We Do When In Silence" belongs to that rare strain of music that does not demand to be heard - it simply exists, waiting for you to meet it halfway.

The trick, as always, is to stop waiting for something to happen. It already is. You just have to listen to what they do when in silence.