There are musicians who play instruments. Then there are musicians who build a machine, wire it to misbehave, and call that the instrument. Richard Francis belongs firmly in the second category.

With "Combinations 4", Francis continues a practice he has refined since 2010: live, improvised takes recorded straight to stereo, barely edited, occasionally layered, and otherwise left to stand or fall on their own unstable circuitry.

He calls his setup the “fugue system”, which sounds faintly academic until you hear it operate. Built from digital and analogue components, the system merges found sound, feedback loops, generative channels, and hands-on control into a dense electronic ecology. The key detail is that he once intended it to replicate the complexity of studio composition in real time. Then he discovered he preferred the accidents. Sensible choice.

The pieces on "Combinations 4" do not unfold like linear compositions. They accumulate. Multiple signals drift toward each other, tangle, lock into patterns, then dissolve. The “combinations” of the title are not decorative overlays; they are interactions, small negotiations between forces that were never meant to coexist politely.

“Four A” opens with a cautious layering of textures, faint pulses nudging against grainy washes. It feels like stepping into a room where several machines are already humming and deciding not to turn any of them off. “Leave it all alone for months (edit)” suggests patience as a compositional method. Loops emerge as if they have been fermenting. The edit in the title hints at restraint, but the sound itself remains porous, raw at the edges.

“Parehuia” and “Phase effect on wet road” play with movement and reflection. Tones flicker and smear, as though light were refracting through damp asphalt at night. The music does not chase drama. It studies motion. Subtle shifts in phase create rhythmic illusions that appear and vanish before you can fully name them.

Then there are the titles that sound like marginal notes in a notebook: “The alphabet is a sampler”, “My instrument is a systems diagram”. Francis has a dry sense of humor about his own practice. He is not pretending this is mystical revelation. It is circuitry. It is process. It is an architecture of signal flow that occasionally stumbles into something unexpectedly lyrical.

“My fuel! Love it!” injects a jittery propulsion, feedback skittering like nervous energy trapped in a grid. “Like a forest” offers a brief, almost meditative clearing - thin strands of sound spaced with unusual generosity. Even here, however, nothing resolves into comfort. There is always a faint hiss of instability.

Francis’ biography reads like a map of serious experimental credentials: releases on labels such as Senufo Editions and Entr’acte, collaborations with figures including Ralf Wehowsky and Francisco Lopez, performances at institutions from ZKM Karlsruhe to Issue Project Room in New York. The pedigree is formidable. The music, however, resists prestige. It sounds provisional, alive, occasionally on the brink of short-circuit.

What distinguishes "Combinations 4" is its quiet confidence in process. The layering feels more deliberate than chaotic, suggesting that the system has matured. Patterns recur, semi-complex rhythms crystallize, and motifs reappear just long enough to imply structure without locking into it. You sense Francis guiding rather than commanding, adjusting parameters in real time while the network responds with its own stubborn logic.

There is something almost ecological about it. Feedback behaves like weather. Noise pools and evaporates. Signals migrate.

Despite its technological underpinnings, the album never feels sterile. The stereo field carries depth and air. Imperfections are not corrected; they are acknowledged. Trimmed beginnings and endings retain the sense that you are hearing a slice of an ongoing continuum, not a polished artifact.

Room40’s catalog has long embraced works that blur composition and improvisation, environment and abstraction. "Combinations 4" sits comfortably in that lineage while asserting its own temperament: less concerned with spectacle, more invested in the slow choreography of interaction.

In the end, this is not music that demands emotional confession. It invites attention. It rewards close listening with subtle shifts in pattern and density. It treats sound as a living diagram, lines crossing and recrossing until meaning emerges from friction.
Plenty of artists talk about systems. Richard Francis lets his system talk back.