There is a particular kind of electronic music that seems less interested in making sounds than in finding out how much punishment a sound can withstand before it becomes something else. Forster, the Berlin duo of Mitchell Keaney and Davide Luciani, have made a practice of this precarious experiment, where industrial abrasion, noise-rock aggression and club-derived propulsion are fed into a system with very little concern for preserving their original identities. "Live at Ohm" catches them in their natural habitat: not a pristine studio environment where every frequency has been persuaded to behave, but a live performance in which the sound is allowed to acquire its own bad manners. Recorded on 16 January 2026 at Berlin’s Ohm during the KooKoo event curated by Mieko Suzuki and Arno Raffeiner, the set arrives in four untitled sections. The titles, helpfully, offer no interpretive handrails. We are left with the music and the questionable decision to turn the volume up.

The opening stretch establishes an uneasy balance between pressure and inertia. Low frequencies seem to occupy more space than the speakers were designed to provide, while distorted electronic layers scrape against one another without settling into a stable arrangement. There is a rhythmic intelligence at work, but it rarely presents itself as a conventional beat; instead, pulses and clipped repetitions appear to be struggling for control of the material around them. Forster understand that heaviness need not mean constant acceleration. A sound held in place can be every bit as threatening as one hurled at speed, particularly when its internal components seem close to coming apart. Then the balance shifts. The third part is especially striking, pushing towards a damaged, irregular form of industrial techno, with bass pressure that feels almost architectural. A faint, voice-like trace briefly offers the possibility of something recognisably human, only to be swallowed by the surrounding turbulence. It is a small moment, but an effective one: a reminder that even the most hostile electronic environment can suggest a presence without granting it the courtesy of becoming intelligible.

The four pieces work less like chapters in a carefully narrated story than successive changes in the conditions of an experiment. Keaney and Luciani make extensive use of signal processing, compression and wave shaping, but the technical apparatus never feels like the main attraction. What matters is the instability it produces: rhythmic figures acquire a rough, physical edge; noise develops a peculiar momentum; and passages that might initially seem static begin to reveal movement within their own density. There are traces of dance music here, although the dance floor imagined by Forster may require a waiver from the building inspector. Their music has enough propulsion to activate the body, but not enough predictability to let it relax into habit. The result occupies an awkward and productive zone between club music and its refusal, between repetition as a means of organising time and repetition as a way of wearing it down.

The live setting is crucial. This is not simply a studio composition presented with an audience somewhere off-camera; the performance seems to retain the uncertainty of decisions made in real time, when a change in intensity can redirect everything that follows. Davide Luciani’s experience across electronic composition and audiovisual art, alongside Keaney’s club-facing instincts, gives the duo a useful double perspective: sound can be treated as a physical event and as a pattern that the listener’s body instinctively tries to interpret. Neither approach wins outright. "Live at Ohm" keeps its structures unstable enough to prevent easy classification, yet focused enough to avoid the familiar experimental-music trap of confusing difficulty with depth. There is a certain dark humour in the proceedings, too. The electronics appear to be conducting a strenuous negotiation over who gets to occupy the available bandwidth, and diplomacy is clearly not among their strengths.

Released by The Tapeworm’s Wormhole imprint, "Live at Ohm" documents a project more interested in testing its limits than polishing a signature sound. It offers no tidy resolution, no grand crescendo designed to make the preceding twenty-odd minutes seem worthwhile, and no reassuring sense that the damage has been contained. Instead, its four sections leave the impression of a performance continually revising its own rules under pressure. The reward lies in listening closely enough to catch the moments when apparent chaos begins to organise itself, only to lose that organisation again. It is an invigorating, occasionally punishing record, and a persuasive argument for live electronics as a practice of risk rather than mere reproduction. Just remember that the volume knob is not a philosophical instrument. Sometimes it really is just too loud.