There are records that use experimentalism as a promise of freedom, and there are records that use it as an excuse for not having decided what they are doing. "Clock In, Clock Out" belongs to a more interesting category: music in which the rules are quite clearly there, but their main purpose seems to be making ordinary musical behaviour increasingly difficult. Musica Mosaica, the Brussels duo of Xavier García Bardón and Emmanuel Gonay, have been developing this peculiar sensibility for years, following their 2021 7-inch on Les Disques Lexi with an album that feels less like a collection of compositions than a collection of situations. Their materials are often tiny, dry, percussive and strangely precise, yet the relationships between them remain sufficiently unstable to make each piece feel as though it might suddenly acquire a different set of physical laws.

The title is already a small joke about the relationship between music and time. To clock in and clock out is to surrender time to measurement, routine and labour, while music traditionally promises the opposite: duration that becomes subjective, elastic, occasionally even useless. Musica Mosaica place the two ideas in the same apparatus and then start tampering with the clock. Their metronomic principles do not simply impose a common pulse; they generate divergences, overlaps and little conflicts between simultaneous temporalities. The result is rhythmic music without the comforting implication that rhythm has necessarily been hired to keep everyone together.

“Interlocking” establishes this immediately. Its sounds are sharply delineated, almost touchable, with percussive electronic figures and acoustic elements appearing less as parts of a conventional arrangement than as objects being placed beside one another. The piece has an odd mechanical elegance, but there is nothing particularly efficient about the machine. It clicks, hesitates, repeats, veers sideways. One of the more intriguing details is the use of material derived from the E-mu Emulator II's “Loon Garden” sample, a fragment with its own strange history through 1980s electronic music and 808 State. Here, however, nostalgia is almost beside the point. The old digital residue becomes raw material, stripped of its original context and made to participate in a much stranger little economy.

“Codex Sybaris” makes the record's archaeological quality more apparent without becoming retro music. There are sounds here that seem to belong simultaneously to obsolete electronics, percussion practice, laboratory equipment and some imaginary instrument whose manufacturer went bankrupt before writing the manual. This is one reason the album is so difficult to place historically. The FM timbres can suggest early electronic music, yet their treatment avoids the warm nostalgia usually attached to vintage synthesis. The sounds are too exposed, too matter-of-fact. They do not arrive wearing period costume. They simply sit there, behaving oddly.

Then “Tempistica Metronomica” begins multiplying the problem. Its glassy, sliding gestures seem to have rhythm without quite behaving rhythmically, as if several clocks had been instructed to measure different phenomena and had subsequently decided that coordination was an optional feature. This is where Musica Mosaica's method becomes audible rather than theoretical. A constraint is established, but the constraint does not dictate the result. It produces circumstances in which sounds can react to one another. The distinction matters. A composition based on rigid processes can become predictable; here, the process is sufficiently narrow to make every deviation conspicuous.

“Concaténations” is perhaps the most mischievous piece in this respect. Its percussive figures suggest an ensemble of objects rather than instruments, with a peculiar resonance that makes one think of bottles, small pieces of metal, primitive machinery and electronic ghosts all attempting to join the same conversation. Yet the track never becomes cute. That is an important achievement because this kind of miniature sound theatre can very easily collapse into the sonic equivalent of a whimsical museum display. Musica Mosaica keep the materials austere enough that their strangeness remains slightly uncomfortable.

The five pieces were composed between 2022 and 2025 and recorded across several Brussels locations, with Eitan Efrat, Laszlo Umbreit and Iris García Bardón contributing to the project, Umbreit also handling the mix. This is significant because "Clock In, Clock Out" sounds unusually conscious of the difference between collecting sounds and composing with them. The musicians seem to preserve the individuality of their materials rather than melting everything into an undifferentiated electronic surface. There is very little of the fashionable fog that experimental electronics sometimes uses to disguise its own construction. Instead, things are left naked enough for us to hear their edges, their repetitions, their collisions and their sudden disappearances.

The final “Endnotes” complicates the record retrospectively. Its slower, more archaic-sounding elements introduce acoustic and historical associations that were largely concealed beneath the synthetic surfaces of the preceding tracks. Suddenly the album's peculiar objects seem less like products of a particular technology and more like pieces of a much older problem: how to organise sound, duration and repetition without turning them into obedient servants. The effect is not a revelation so much as a shift in perspective. After four tracks of apparently artificial behaviour, the distinction between old and new, acoustic and electronic, composed and found begins to look rather less stable than it did at the beginning.

This is also where the album's scientific vocabulary becomes useful, provided one does not take it too literally. Musica Mosaica are not making laboratory music in the sense of producing demonstrations of a predetermined theory. Their achievement is closer to constructing conditions in which musical consequences become difficult to predict. Their accumulated sound materials function almost like a peculiar collection of specimens, but the interesting thing is what happens when those specimens are forced into proximity. The compositions are therefore neither pure improvisations nor rigidly fixed constructions. They are controlled circumstances with room for accidents, which may be one of the few forms of control genuinely worth having.

The cover drawing by John Merlin from 1950 adds another deliciously inappropriate temporal layer, especially alongside a record that concerns itself so insistently with clocks, obsolete electronics and manufactured systems. Even the physical object seems unwilling to settle on one historical moment. And then there is the instruction that the LP should be played at 45 RPM, which is the sort of practical information that immediately makes the modern listener suspect that there must be a trap. There isn't, presumably. But after listening to "Clock In, Clock Out", suspicion feels like a perfectly reasonable listening method.

At barely twenty-one minutes, the album is over before its mechanisms have had time to become familiar. That brevity is crucial. Musica Mosaica do not explain their procedures through repetition, and they wisely avoid turning their sonic experiments into demonstrations that the audience is expected to admire on schedule. Five pieces arrive, establish their peculiar circumstances, interfere with one another indirectly, and disappear. The record leaves behind not a grand theory of sound but a more modest and much more useful disturbance: the feeling that rhythm, technology, history and even musical "objects" are considerably less fixed than we habitually pretend.

Perhaps that is the real joke hidden inside "Clock In, Clock Out". We spend our lives inventing devices for measuring time, then spend our leisure listening to people trying to escape the measurements. Musica Mosaica simply clock in, dismantle the clock, and clock out again before anyone from Human Resources notices.