You wake up in a dream where a malfunctioning amusement park ride is narrating your life. A turntable needle, caught in a loop, replays the sound of a monastery exploding in slow motion. Somewhere nearby, a modular synthesizer is wrestling with itself, while a drummer - possibly a jazz percussionist, possibly a construction worker - insists on hammering out the rhythm of an ancient language no one speaks anymore. Welcome to "Combination Without Repetition", where Joke Lanz and Thomas Rehnert make music that feels like a broken machine discovering consciousness in real time.

Joke Lanz is best known for his work as a turntablist, notably with the anarchic "Sudden Infant" project, where he weaponized vinyl manipulation into a dadaist ritual of noise and absurdity. Here, his turntable techniques - cut-ups, rapid-fire switches, serrated scratches - collide with Rehnert’s analog synths and percussion, creating a live-improvised ecosystem where electroacoustic chaos meets cartoon physics. Rehnert, a longtime experimentalist in modular synthesis and sound art, builds dense, unpredictable textures that flicker between drone, noise, and something resembling broken free jazz.

The album consists of two long-form pieces: "Variation" and "Permutation", titles that suggest both mathematical precision and the joy of rule-breaking. "Variation" starts like an orchestra being fed through a woodchipper - jittery turntable cuts bounce off sputtering synth tones, while percussion skitters across the stereo field like an impatient glitch. The duo’s interplay is telepathic; sounds emerge, mutate, and vanish before they can be identified. Rehnert’s synth work doesn’t just provide a backdrop; it reacts, provokes, and at times, seems to hijack the performance itself.

"Permutation" turns the screw even further, stretching time and texture like a piece of magnetic tape that’s been chewed up and spit back out. Percussion takes on a more tactile role - scrapes, knocks, metallic shuffles - while Lanz’s vinyl interventions blur the line between intentional composition and pure accident. There are moments where it sounds like a conversation between machines speaking different dialects, occasionally aligning in eerie unison before splintering apart again.

There’s humor in this music, but it’s the kind that emerges from surreal juxtapositions - a voice fragment caught mid-sentence, a snare drum that sounds like it’s apologizing, a synth tone that wobbles like it’s had one too many drinks. But there’s also something deeply methodical at play; for all its chaos, this is an album of tight reflexes, a study in sonic cause-and-effect where no gesture is without consequence.

The self-playing modular system adds a wildcard element - an artificial intelligence improviser, a rogue third band member with its own unpredictable logic. It’s a fitting metaphor for the album as a whole: structured unpredictability, the art of losing control while still keeping a grip on the wheel. "Combination Without Repetition" isn’t noise for noise’s sake - it’s an exercise in sonic mischief, a game of sound played by two masters who understand that sometimes the best results come from setting things in motion and seeing what happens next.