Palace. A word heavy with opulence, draped in velvet, echoing with the soft clinks of cutlery in a candlelit dining hall. But this "Palace" is not a grand hotel - well, not exactly. It’s an autobiographical labyrinth of memory, resonance, and the ghosts of recorded pasts. It’s a place where Charles Ives converses with field recordings, where oscillators hum in conversation with a daughter's spontaneous melodies, where old tapes - long forgotten, carelessly misplaced - whisper back into the present.

Gaudenz Badrutt, a name well-known in the electroacoustic and improvised music circuit, has spent decades sculpting sound, be it through live electronics (Baldrian Quartet, Tetrao Tetrix) or solo compositions that transform raw sonic material into something both intimate and unplaceable. "Palace", his third solo LP following "Ganglions" (2019) and "Conditions" (2022), is perhaps his most personal work yet - a collage of self, stitched together with fragments of piano études, found sounds, and glitching memories.

Structurally, "Palace" is a simple edifice: two sprawling pieces - "in" and "out" - each clocking in around sixteen minutes. But within this framework, Badrutt constructs intricate passageways of shifting textures. The in of "in" feels like stepping into an abandoned concert hall, where distant piano keys reverberate like echoes of past selves. Melodies flicker briefly before being swallowed by feedback loops, as if the tape itself were unsure whether to preserve or erase.

There’s something cinematic about this layering - a Lynchian unease, where nostalgia and dissonance cohabit the same space. Badrutt has always had a meticulous touch when it comes to balancing acoustic warmth with electronic volatility, and here, he lets that tension unfold gradually. Hushed, dusty recordings - his own past as a trained pianist - surface like half-formed thoughts, disrupted by bursts of granular synthesis and errant crackles.

"out" does exactly what its name suggests: an exhalation, a release. The sense of interiority in the first half gives way to something wider, almost celestial. Distant sirens? A half-buried Chopin étude? The sounds of his daughter Greta, whose Angelman syndrome lends a unique, unfiltered presence to her music-making, drift in and out - not as samples, but as living, breathing moments.

Badrutt himself calls this album "a sound palace, making it quite luxurious, priceless". But it’s not the five-star, concierge-at-the-door kind of luxury - it’s the type of palace built from remnants, from things carried in pockets for years, from audio scraps that gain new meaning in their rearrangement. "Palace" is both deeply personal and remarkably generous, offering the listener a chance to enter its hallways, to get lost in its echoes, to experience time folding in on itself.

If "Palace" were an actual hotel, it wouldn’t have a front desk, and certainly no room service. But it would have secret corridors leading to unexpected encounters, grand pianos in rooms where no one’s playing them, and windows that open onto past lives.

Check in. Stay a while.