There are records that tell you something, and others that simply sit next to you and start breathing - irregularly, sometimes too close for comfort. "tri-n-os" belongs stubbornly to the second category. Anton Lambert and Thanos Polymeneas Liontiris don’t narrate grief, don’t aestheticize lament, don’t frame sorrow in quotation marks. They let it loop, feedback, short-circuit. They let it misbehave.

The title already gives the game away: it stems from the ancient Greek word θρνος meaning lament, wail, mourn, but it shold be also considered as sound, as drone, as an ancient vibration that predates melody and survives language. This is not mourning as catharsis; it’s mourning as system error, as a recursive process that keeps returning slightly altered, like a memory you didn’t invite back but that knows the door code. The music unfolds as an unstable ecology of drones, eroded field recordings, and feedback structures that feel less performed than coaxed into existence.

Lambert and Polymeneas Liontiris work inside a triadic tension: two humans and a machine that refuses to stay obedient. Live processing, feedback-augmented instruments (the halldorophone is practically a character here), and cybernetic principles form a nervous system where sound listens to itself, reacts, decays, and mutates. The machine isn’t an effect; it’s a collaborator with mood swings. Sometimes it sulks. Sometimes it screams. Sometimes it remembers something the performers were trying to forget.

Tracks don’t develop so much as wobble into being. Drones stretch and fray, feedback blooms and collapses, field recordings flicker like damaged photographs found in a drawer you didn’t know you had. There’s a physicality to the sound - not muscular, but visceral, like pressure changes before a storm. Listening feels less like following a path and more like standing inside a resonant cavity while the walls subtly rearrange themselves.

If there’s humor here, it’s the dry, existential kind: the absurdity of trying to control systems designed to resist control. A title like "a drunk man’s next step" feels less metaphorical than documentary. You can hear the imbalance, the lurch forward, the unavoidable stumble. Elsewhere, repetition becomes ritual, then erosion; what starts as structure slowly forgets why it was built in the first place.

Both artists bring deep research into the room - cybernetics, generative systems, machine listening - but nothing smells of academia. The concepts dissolve into sound, into instability, into a music that refuses to resolve neatly. This is improvisation not as freedom, but as exposure: to failure, to fragility, to the uncomfortable autonomy of the systems we build and then have to live with.

"tri-n-os" doesn’t console. It doesn’t guide you toward acceptance. It lingers in the aftermath, where memory hums like electrical noise and silence is never quite empty. It’s a record that asks for patience and good speakers - and maybe a willingness to sit with things that don’t get better, only different. A lament that doesn’t end, but keeps listening to itself, wondering what remains when the sound finally lets go.