There is something almost bureaucratically mysterious about the title "TKSM 01". It sounds less like the name of an EP than the first surviving file from an experiment that somebody forgot to explain. The track titles are no more helpful: “01”, “01.01” and “01.01.01” suggest a system of classification rather than conventional compositions, as though Tokesmo had decided that naming things was an unnecessary distraction from examining what they actually sound like. It is, in fact, a rather fitting approach for music that seems interested in stripping acoustic reality of its passport and sending it somewhere else.

Tokesmo is the solo project of Andrea B., whose history already makes the apparent distance between organic matter and electronic manipulation less surprising. He began playing bass in Lodi in 1994 and later became one of the two bassists in Morkobot, the Italian instrumental trio whose muscular combination of bass-heavy experimentation and drums has occupied considerably more physical territory than the polite word “rock” would suggest. Since the mid-1990s he has also worked with electronic instruments under other names, including Otrom and Garaliya. "TKSM 01" therefore does not sound like a musician suddenly discovering field recording as a fashionable accessory. It feels more like another branch growing from a practice that has been concerned with the behaviour of sound for decades.

The three pieces are built from recordings made in both outdoor and indoor environments, captured through different microphones, techniques and materials, then subjected to electronic processing and placed in relation to synthesised elements. That description makes the procedure sound tidier than the result. The point is not to preserve the identity of the original sounds, but to make their previous identity increasingly irrelevant. A noise that might once have belonged to a room, an object, a surface or some fragment of the outside world becomes material without a stable address. Tokesmo is less interested in asking “what was that?” than in seeing how long the question can survive before the sound becomes something else.

The short opening “01” works almost like an aperture. At barely three minutes, it establishes the EP's peculiar sense of scale without giving away the central argument. Sounds seem to occupy different depths, sometimes close enough to touch, sometimes receding into a space whose dimensions are difficult to calculate. There is an intriguing refusal of conventional foreground and background here. Instead of arranging sounds into a hierarchy, Tokesmo allows them to behave like competing physical phenomena. Some emerge, others dissolve, and occasionally it becomes difficult to decide whether a sound is moving through space or whether the space itself is changing.

Then comes “01.01”, the fourteen-minute centre of gravity, and this is where "TKSM 01" stops behaving like a collection of processed recordings and starts resembling an ecosystem with a nervous system. Its extended duration gives Tokesmo room to work with gradual alterations rather than obvious events. Layers accumulate, mutate, thin out and return in altered states. Synthetic tones do not sit above the field recordings like a technological commentary; they contaminate them, while the acoustic material gives the electronic elements a physical ambiguity they would not otherwise possess.

This is perhaps the most interesting quality of the EP. There is no reassuring opposition between “natural” and “artificial.” The synthesised sounds can acquire the roughness of physical objects, while recorded environments become strangely synthetic after enough manipulation. The distinction starts to collapse, which is precisely where the music becomes intellectually interesting. We spend most of our lives assuming that sound carries evidence of its source. Tokesmo treats that assumption as something that can be quietly dismantled.

The absence of rhythm is also significant. A musician associated with Morkobot could hardly be unaware of rhythm's power, yet "TKSM 01" largely refuses to provide the listener with the usual temporal handrails. This is not music that wants to march anywhere. There are shifts, pulses, tensions and internal movements, but they are not organised into the kind of reassuring periodicity that lets the brain put its feet up. One contemporary radio description neatly identified this first Tokesmo EP as the more sound-art and noise-oriented counterpart to "TKSM 02", whose source material is turned into percussive structures and IDM-leaning industrial rhythms.

That pairing makes the project considerably more intriguing. The two releases were conceived as complementary investigations, with "TKSM 01" concentrating on abstract, tonal and textural transformation while "TKSM 02" moves towards rhythm and percussion. In other words, Tokesmo appears to be conducting a rather elaborate experiment on the same basic question: what happens when recorded matter is progressively detached from its original function? On one side it becomes atmosphere, texture and ambiguity; on the other, it becomes rhythm.

The final “01.01.01” lasts just under four minutes and functions less like a conventional conclusion than a change in perspective. After the long middle section, its shorter duration feels almost like returning to the laboratory after having spent too much time inside the experiment. The numbers have acquired a strange logic by now. “01.01.01” no longer looks like an unimaginative title. It looks like a reminder that the same piece of sonic matter can be subdivided indefinitely, each decimal point suggesting another microscopic level at which perception might change.

There is also something quietly amusing about Tokesmo's decision to call these pieces precisely what they are not. The titles tell us nothing, the sources are deliberately obscured, and the music continually undermines our desire to identify things. Human beings, after all, have spent centuries developing increasingly sophisticated ways of putting labels on everything they encounter, only to produce a genre called “experimental music” for people who would rather remove the labels again.

"TKSM 01" is therefore less an album about field recordings than an investigation into what remains after a field recording stops behaving like documentary evidence. Its acoustic origins matter, but only as the beginning of a process. What emerges is neither a portrait of a particular environment nor an electronic imitation of nature. It is something more ambiguous: an environment rebuilt from memory, processing and physical residue, where the distinction between object and sound gradually loses its usefulness.

With eight "TKSM" EPs planned as four paired releases, this first instalment feels deliberately incomplete in the best possible sense. It establishes a method rather than exhausting it. "TKSM 01" asks the listener to pay attention not to what a sound represents, but to what it can become once representation is removed. That is a subtle difference, but an important one.

Sometimes experimental music wants to show you a strange new world. Tokesmo is doing something more mischievous here: taking pieces of the world we already know, erasing their name tags, and watching what happens when we can no longer tell what we are hearing.