There is a peculiar beauty in watching three people stare at laptops with the intensity of gamblers betting the rent money. Totalee - Giuseppe Pisano, Andrea Laudante, and Paolo Montella - have made an artform out of this posture. Heads bowed, hands twitching, a tangle of cables pulsing like a small nervous system: they look like monks, if monks were allowed to glitch the liturgy in real time. "d!p" is the document of that devotional chaos, a quartet of live recordings stitched together from their spring 2024 zig-zag across Ireland and the UK.

Calling what they do “electroacoustic improvisation” feels both accurate and hilariously insufficient. This is music that behaves like an animal with too much energy and no intention of calming down. It skulks, it lunges, it doubles back. The trio’s stated canine metaphor - "WOOF", their word, not mine - isn’t cute branding; it’s a working description. These sets are patrol routes, scent trails, sudden alerts. One moment you’re lulled by a fine-grain drone, the next you’re ambushed by a metallic convulsion that feels like the room has inhaled sharply.

Totalee aren’t newcomers. All three members have spent years knitting their laptops into the wider web of European experimental music, performing with figures who treat electricity not as a tool but as a narrative partner. Pisano brings a background in textural dissection, Laudante leans into slow-burning dramaturgy, Montella thrives in unstable structures - and "d!p" captures them merging those sensibilities with a kind of wired telepathy. For a band whose stage presence is essentially three silhouettes sitting down, the music fizzes with kinetic violence.

“Prussia 44” sets the tone with its slow-erupting architecture: a jittery surface that keeps threatening to collapse, yet holds together through sheer collective instinct. “La Trota” has the opposite temperament - lighter, skittering, but quick to bare its teeth. “Tribute Unit”, recorded in Dublin like its opener, feels like a faulty circuit dreaming of choreography. And “Ginestra” stretches out into eleven minutes of controlled instability, like someone rewinding a landscape to see where the cracks first appeared.

What’s striking about these performances - and what several commentators have noted across different corners of the internet - is how physical they feel despite being assembled from digital debris. Totalee understand tension: when to let a grain of noise breathe, when to drive a wedge straight through it, when to pile on more sound until the structure strains. You can picture the trio in the moment - shoulders tightening, fingers flickering, choosing between restraint and detonation with a gambler’s calm.

There’s humour in their approach too, intentional or not. These pieces occasionally sound like malfunctioning devices staging their own protest. Yet there’s clarity inside the pandemonium, a sense that each derailment is a deliberate invitation: "Come on, follow us, the ground is safe enough until it isn’t". That balance between menace and play is Totalee’s secret weapon.

"d!p" might be presented as a manifesto about “how we move on our laptops”, but at heart it’s an ode to the live moment - the breath-hold before a sound mutates, the microscopic gestures that steer the whole thing away from disaster or straight into it. This is improvisation as speculative fiction, written in real time by three people hunched over glowing rectangles, conjuring landscapes from pure voltage.

It’s messy, muscular, and strangely tender. And like any good dog on the prowl, it leaves its mark wherever it wanders.