Improvised music sometimes gets described as though the musicians have simply agreed to remove the safety rails and see what happens. "Critical Values" suggests something more demanding: three experienced players meeting for the first time and discovering, in real time, which sounds can survive contact with one another. Tiziana Bertoncini’s violin, Jonas Kocher’s accordion and Thomas Lehn’s analogue synthesizer and processing do not form a conventional trio so much as a small laboratory in which acoustic identity is repeatedly placed under pressure. The laboratory happens to have microphones, and thankfully nobody is wearing a white coat.

The recording comes from a single encounter at La Voirie in Biel/Bienne on 17 September 2025, divided into just two pieces, “Complex Plane” and “Bifurcation Points”, lasting roughly twenty-three and twenty minutes respectively. Nothing has been edited or rearranged afterwards. That decision matters because the music depends on the gradual accumulation of microscopic reactions. It is not trying to give the impression of spontaneity. It actually preserves the consequences of spontaneity, including the moments when an idea has to be abandoned because another sound has unexpectedly changed the conditions around it.

Bertoncini and Lehn bring a particularly long history of musical conversation to the meeting. They have worked together since the early 2000s, developing a language in which her classically trained violin can become brittle, granular, skeletal or strangely vocal while Lehn’s analogue electronics respond not merely by accompanying it but by transforming its acoustic implications. Bertoncini’s background is unusually divided between music and visual art: after classical violin studies she also studied painting, and that visual dimension has remained part of her wider practice through installations and interdisciplinary projects. It is tempting to describe her playing in visual terms, therefore, but the more interesting thing is that she often seems to manipulate density and contour as though sound had physical edges.

Lehn has an equally distinctive history. Trained in piano and sound engineering, he has worked with analogue synthesizer systems since the late 1980s and has become one of the central figures in European live electronics, collaborating with musicians ranging from free improvisers to composers of rigorously notated experimental music. His electronics here are particularly effective because they rarely behave like an ornamental electronic layer placed underneath the violin and accordion. They alter the apparent material of the other instruments. A violin attack can become a residue; an accordion tone can acquire a metallic shadow; a tiny acoustic gesture can return with its dimensions quietly rearranged.

Kocher enters this established dyad as the destabilising third presence, although “destabilising” should not be mistaken for “chaotic”. The accordion is an instrument with an unfortunate public-relations problem: it arrives carrying decades of folk clichés, cabaret associations and the faint possibility of someone requesting a waltz. Kocher has spent years dismantling that baggage through improvisation, composition and interdisciplinary work, and here the instrument is treated primarily as a generator of pressure, friction, breath and resonance. Its familiar identity is still present, but it is increasingly difficult to locate.

“Complex Plane” develops through precisely this uncertainty. The opening does not announce a hierarchy. Instead, sounds seem to test their own boundaries, appearing as isolated events before gradually entering relationships with the others. Bertoncini can produce a narrow, almost threadlike violin presence, while Kocher introduces unstable pneumatic textures and Lehn expands or contaminates the acoustic information. The piece advances without conventional rhythmic propulsion, yet it is never static. Its movement occurs through changes in density, duration, register and response. One sound causes another to alter its behaviour, and suddenly what seemed like three independent streams has become a single unstable mechanism.

The title “Complex Plane” is particularly apt without requiring a mathematical lecture, for which everyone should be grateful. The music seems to operate through coordinates that are constantly being recalculated. A sound is not simply high or low, loud or quiet, acoustic or electronic. Its significance depends on what the other instruments are doing at that precise moment. A thin violin squeak can become substantial when surrounded by near-silence; an apparently massive electronic tone can become almost weightless when the violin cuts across it. Scale is therefore psychological rather than fixed.

“Bifurcation Points” is more restless. Its sounds appear to approach thresholds, hesitate and then split into different directions. The accordion becomes especially useful here because its physical mechanism already contains a peculiar contradiction: air produces sound, but the player can manipulate that airflow with almost absurdly fine control. Kocher exploits the instrument's capacity for pressure and interruption, while Bertoncini's violin supplies another kind of instability, moving between recognisable instrumental gestures and sounds that seem to have escaped from the instrument before anyone could identify them.

Lehn’s role is crucial in keeping this from becoming a mere catalogue of extended techniques. His processing creates relationships between sounds rather than simply making them more unusual. At times the electronics appear to enlarge microscopic details until they acquire their own environment; elsewhere they remain almost hidden, changing the listener’s perception without announcing their presence. The effect is less “electronic versus acoustic” than a continual uncertainty about where one ends and the other begins.

There is also something refreshingly physical about the recording. Despite the sophistication of the players, "Critical Values" never sounds like a demonstration of specialist knowledge. You can hear musicians listening, withholding, testing, retreating and returning. Silence becomes an active participant rather than a decorative pause, and individual gestures acquire importance because nobody rushes to fill the space after them. This is one of the reasons the uninterrupted nature of the performance works so well. The music retains its little hesitations and changes of direction, the places where thought can almost be heard happening.

The album's most compelling achievement is consequently not any particular unusual sound. It is the creation of a situation in which sounds are allowed to change their identity through proximity. The violin does not remain “the violin”, the accordion does not remain “the accordion”, and the synthesizer does not simply stand on the other side of an imaginary technological border. Each instrument becomes a set of possibilities that the others continually reshape.

That process also explains why "Critical Values" rewards attention without demanding reverence. It is austere in materials but surprisingly rich in incident. The music does not decorate its ideas, and it does not tell the listener where the important moment is supposed to occur. Instead, importance emerges retrospectively: a tiny noise heard several minutes earlier suddenly makes sense because the trio has moved somewhere else.

Perhaps that is the real meaning of the album's title. The critical value is not a particular point on a graph but the instant when a sound stops behaving as expected. A violin ceases to sound like a violin. An accordion becomes an acoustic machine. An electronic pulse acquires something almost tactile. Three musicians who have never previously made this exact conversation discover that the most interesting territory lies neither in agreement nor conflict, but in the unstable region where one sound forces another to reconsider what it is.

For forty-four minutes, "Critical Values" keeps returning to that region without settling it. No grand climax is required. The experiment works because nobody tries to prove that it has worked. The music simply keeps changing the conditions under which its own sounds can exist, which is perhaps the most convincing form of improvisational intelligence: not knowing what comes next, but being sufficiently attentive to recognise it when it arrives.

The problem with the word “world” is that we tend to imagine everyone is looking at the same one. Igor Ballereau’s "UMWeLT" quietly objects to this arrangement. Borrowing its title from Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the subjective environment inhabited by every living being, the album proposes something considerably more unsettling than an ambient record: four pieces in which perception itself seems to have become unstable, as though the walls of reality were made from a substance that could soften whenever nobody was paying attention.

Ballereau is an unusual figure in contemporary music because his earlier work was deeply connected to the voice, including compositions built around the letters and diaries of Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka and Katherine Mansfield. His trajectory has nevertheless never been particularly interested in staying inside a single institutional definition of composition. After years of writing for ensembles and vocalists, a long silence eventually led to a new phase in which acoustic and electronic materials, darkness and enchantment, composition and the imagined cinema began to overlap. "ijkl" and the seventy-minute "Ptyx" opened that territory; "UMWeLT" goes further by making the territory itself increasingly difficult to locate.

The four pieces are long enough to resist the usual attention economy but not so long that duration becomes a test of moral character. “Umwelt - i” lasts twelve minutes, and its development feels less like a sequence of events than a gradual alteration of conditions. Sounds emerge without necessarily presenting themselves as objects. Something might resemble a voice, a room, a mechanical vibration, a distant environmental disturbance, but just when the ear thinks it has identified the source, the music changes the rules. Ballereau is not particularly interested in giving the listener a comfortable answer to the question of what exactly is being heard. This is less field recording than field hallucination.

That distinction matters because "UMWeLT" is full of traces. The album uses fragments of room ambience, playground sound and indistinct human voices, but their function is not documentary. They are evidence without a crime scene. A murmur may suggest another person; a familiar acoustic space may suddenly feel inaccessible; a human gesture can be reduced to texture and still retain some stubborn residue of intention. The result is strangely intimate without ever becoming confessional. We are not being told someone's story. We are hearing what might remain after the story has disappeared.

“Umwelt - ii” is especially effective in this respect. Its apparently porous environment continually allows sounds to enter and recede, while the piece maintains a remarkable sense of enclosure. There is no conventional melody to hold onto, yet neither is the music formless. Ballereau shapes density, distance, recurrence and disappearance with the precision of someone who knows that silence is not the absence of information. Sometimes it is the most suspicious information available.

This is where his earlier experience with voice becomes perceptible even though "UMWeLT" is not a vocal album in the conventional sense. Ballereau has spent much of his compositional life investigating language and the physical presence of voices, and here the human voice has been stripped of its semantic privileges. What remains is breath, grain, proximity, interruption. A voice no longer needs to tell us what somebody thinks in order to remind us that somebody was there. It is almost perversely effective: after centuries of teaching voices to speak, music discovers that they can be more mysterious when they stop cooperating.

“Umwelt - iii” deepens this sense of unstable recognition. The sonic material seems to circulate rather than progress, but repetition never quite produces reassurance. A sound returns altered by everything that happened around it, so that memory becomes less like retrieval than contamination. The piece has the peculiar sensation of listening to an event through a wall, then discovering that the wall is inside your head. This is not horror in any conventional cinematic sense. There are no monsters jumping out of cupboards, largely because Ballereau understands that cupboards are already quite psychologically complicated.

The final “Umwelt - iv”, stretching beyond thirteen minutes, gives the album its broadest temporal field. By this point, the listener has stopped expecting conventional development and begins noticing smaller shifts: changes in pressure, spectral colour, the distance between sounds, the appearance and disappearance of almost-recognisable presences. The music becomes compelling precisely because it refuses to convert these changes into obvious dramatic gestures. Its drama is perceptual. You notice that the room has changed before you can explain how.

There is a strong connection here with "Ptyx", which Ballereau described as music for imaginary films, but "UMWeLT" seems to remove even more of the cinema. There are fewer obvious postcards, fewer recognisable places, fewer clues about where the listener is supposed to stand. Instead, the album behaves like the soundtrack to a film whose camera has been left somewhere unattended while the world continues without it. The imagined narrative remains, but only as pressure.

Ballereau’s long-standing interest in literary documents is also transformed into something more abstract. Where letters and diaries once supplied words, personalities and histories, "UMWeLT" works with the remains of presence itself. Its sounds feel as though they have passed through an imperfect archival machine. Nothing is reproduced completely. Everything arrives slightly damaged, blurred at the edges, carrying an intensity that seems to belong to something no longer accessible.

That may be the album’s most affecting quality. It does not romanticise disappearance, nor does it attempt to reconstruct whatever has been lost. Instead, it pays attention to the peculiar life of the trace. A sound can survive its source without preserving its meaning. A voice can remain after the speaker has vanished. An environment can continue to exist while becoming completely different to the person who once inhabited it. The four pieces keep circling this paradox without resolving it, which is precisely why they feel alive.

"UMWeLT" is therefore not music that asks to be “understood” in the conventional sense. It asks the listener to surrender the assumption that perception is a neutral activity. Every sound arrives from somewhere, but the somewhere changes according to who is listening. Ballereau constructs that uncertainty with extraordinary restraint, allowing electronic tones, acoustic residues and human fragments to form a private ecology in which nothing quite stays where it was first encountered.

There is no grand revelation at the end, and thankfully so. The album leaves something more elusive behind: the suspicion that reality may consist less of stable objects than of temporary agreements between things, senses and memories. We hear a trace, decide what it might be, and for a moment inhabit the same world as it. Then the sound changes, and so does the world.

Julien Gasc has always seemed slightly suspicious of the idea that a song should behave itself. On "Perles, coraux & requins", his fifth solo album, he gives that suspicion an aquatic setting: beneath the turbulence of ordinary life, somewhere between romantic fantasy, private melancholy and mildly surreal observation, he goes diving. The result is an album that treats French chanson less as a tradition to be preserved than as a strange little animal that can still be taught some new tricks.

Gasc’s background makes the record’s peculiar balance easier to understand. A founding member of Aquaserge, he has also worked with Stereolab, while his solo catalogue has gradually moved between psychedelic pop, intimate songwriting, experimental arrangements and the more eccentric corners of French song. He is a multi-instrumentalist in the literal sense rather than the promotional sense: here he handles voice, guitar, bass, organ, synthesizers, Mellotron and drum machine, constructing a remarkably detailed environment around songs that often sound deceptively simple. His musical vocabulary draws on Brazilian songwriters such as João Gilberto and Chico Buarque, but also on the more elusive tradition of French pop in which melody, verbal absurdity and arrangement can coexist without asking permission from one another.

The Berlin circumstances add another layer of intrigue. Anton Newcombe recorded the album over three sessions between 2023 and 2024, contributing synthesizers, Mellotron and percussion, while Tim Gane adds guitar and Leo Blomov provides arrangements. It is an unusually convincing meeting because Newcombe’s psychedelic sensibility does not turn Gasc into another BJM satellite, nor does Gane merely arrive to provide an instantly recognisable Stereolab signature. Instead, the production gives the songs a slightly skewed depth, allowing apparently modest gestures to acquire strange afterimages. There is plenty of studio detail here, but very little of the modern obsession with polishing every surface until the music looks frightened of being touched.

“Rosen montag” immediately establishes Gasc’s peculiar relationship with rhythm and melody. His singing can sound languid without being passive, as though the words are arriving a fraction later than the music and have decided not to apologise. “Chez Martine” takes that quality further, with Tim Gane’s guitar adding a subtle foreign body to the chanson framework. The song seems simultaneously domestic and elsewhere, which is one of Gasc’s more useful tricks: he can make an ordinary name, place or gesture feel as though it has been lifted from a half-remembered film whose plot nobody bothered to explain.

The album becomes more bodily as it proceeds. “Le goût de tes lèvres” and “C’est dans le corps” bring desire closer to the skin, but Gasc avoids the usual vocabulary of grand romantic declaration. His sensuality is less polished than curious, interested in the awkwardness of inhabiting a body that keeps producing inconvenient emotions. “Plongeon de haut vol” pushes this further by shifting perspective beyond the solitary male narrator. The song’s emotional weight comes partly from this attempt to inhabit another person’s experience, turning the underwater metaphor into something more serious than an attractive bit of album decoration.

Then there is “16”, where the arrangements become especially important. Blomov’s contribution gives the piece a carefully constructed harmonic architecture, but Gasc never lets the arrangement become pompous. This is perhaps the central achievement of "Perles, coraux & requins": sophistication is everywhere, yet sophistication rarely announces itself wearing a name badge. Even the more elaborate passages retain the slightly crooked charm of someone making pop music while refusing to forget that pop music can be wonderfully strange.

“Patrick”, the album’s sole composition not written by Gasc, fits surprisingly well into this universe. Rather than functioning as an obvious detour, it becomes another piece in the album’s collection of romantic and absurdist fragments. “Je t’aime bel et bien” is more direct, but its brevity prevents the declaration from becoming monumental. Love is allowed to be sincere without being sentenced to orchestral grandeur. Livvy O’Hagan’s contribution to this and “Déguste” adds another vocal presence, and the contrast helps make the record’s interpersonal dimension more tangible.

The title track is where the underwater imagery finally becomes fully convincing. At more than five minutes, “Perles, coraux & requins” has room to let its colours accumulate: soft psychedelic electronics, melodic details, rhythmic insinuations and Gasc’s voice moving through the arrangement with an almost weightless authority. Yet the sharks are important. They prevent the album from becoming an entirely benevolent aquarium. Beauty here has teeth, desire has consequences, and introspection is not necessarily a peaceful activity. One can dive beneath the surface and still discover that the ocean contains predators. This is presumably why swimming pools have chlorine.

There is also a subtle tension between Gasc’s apparent nonchalance and the emotional material underneath it. The voice rarely sounds desperate even when the songs deal with longing, vulnerability, love or unease. That distance is not emotional coldness. It is closer to the French tradition of disguising intensity through elegance, allowing a phrase to smile while something considerably less comfortable happens underneath. The effect is particularly effective because the arrangements refuse to settle into a single mood: Mellotron haze can sit beside a drum machine, a guitar line can suddenly sharpen the texture, and the songs can drift from chanson intimacy toward psychedelic pop without announcing a change of government.

What makes "Perles, coraux & requins" ultimately more interesting than its aquatic imagery might suggest is that the sea is never really the subject. It is a way of thinking about consciousness. Above the surface there is noise, pressure, social machinery and all the ridiculous arrangements through which modern life keeps pretending to be rational. Beneath it, Gasc finds another kind of order: slower, stranger, more sensual, but certainly not free of danger. His songs inhabit that contradiction rather beautifully.

The final “Déguste” leaves the album with one last taste of its peculiar mixture of tenderness and mischief. By then, the pearls, corals and sharks have stopped functioning as symbols that need decoding. They have become inhabitants of Gasc’s private aquarium, swimming around the songs as naturally as guitars, Mellotrons and improbable French sentences.

"Perles, coraux & requins" is therefore not really an escape from the world. It is an alternative method of looking at it: from below, sideways, occasionally upside down. Gasc does not make the chaos disappear. He simply discovers that there is enough oxygen beneath it to sing.

There is a particular danger in making an album about spring. Flowers, rivers, awakening bodies, longing, pale light, new beginnings: human beings have been putting these things into poems and songs for so long that one half expects a daffodil to arrive with its own publishing contract. "Spring Flood", however, manages to approach this familiar territory without turning it into a scented candle. Its spring is not merely pretty. It is restless, physical, slightly unruly, and very much alive.

The album began with Mariam Wallentin’s stay in Basel in May 2023, where the Rhine became both background noise and a stimulus for writing. The resulting notes, later brought to Bergen, were not treated as finished compositions so much as material to be opened up. Two days of recording with Vestnorsk Jazzensemble transformed these fragments into something considerably less private: a collective music in which Wallentin’s voice is constantly being reframed by strings, harp, trumpet, saxophones, electric guitar, bass and two drummers. This is important, because "Spring Flood" does not sound like a singer accompanied by a large jazz ensemble. It sounds like a singer entering a room where several different kinds of weather are already taking place.

Wallentin has spent much of her career refusing the polite border between experimental music, improvisation, jazz, soul and alternative song. Her work with Wildbirds & Peacedrums and Fire! Orchestra, alongside her Mariam The Believer project, has given her plenty of experience in treating the voice as something more flexible than a device for delivering melodies. Here she often sings as though language were another instrumental material, something capable of leaning into the arrangements, disappearing inside them or suddenly acquiring enormous physical presence. The ensemble, meanwhile, is not content to provide atmospheric decoration. Its strings can scratch and hover, the harp can glitter without becoming angelic, the horns can introduce colour or pressure, while the two-drum setup gives the music a curious elasticity: sometimes it moves like water, sometimes like a body that has just remembered it possesses muscles.

“Blanket Dance” establishes much of this vocabulary without immediately explaining it. The piece feels intimate and unstable in equal measure, its textures continually negotiating between delicacy and weight. “Basel” makes the geographical origin of the material less important than the sensation of being temporarily displaced. There is something wonderfully un-touristic about it. This is not music about visiting a beautiful European city and having thoughts beside a river; it is about what happens when a familiar inner life is forced to accommodate unfamiliar surroundings. The Rhine becomes less a subject than a pressure exerted on the music, a continuous movement against which Wallentin’s voice can measure itself.

“Red” is more overtly physical, its pulse suggesting the moment when contemplation starts becoming inconveniently corporeal. Spring here is not the gentle rebirth of greeting-card mythology but an increase in circulation, temperature and appetite. The colour is almost audible in the way the ensemble gathers intensity, with percussion and winds pushing the piece forward while the voice retains a certain vulnerability. “No Now”, by contrast, is barely long enough to settle into ordinary song form, functioning almost like a thought that interrupts itself. The album is particularly good at these changes of scale. A two-minute piece can carry as much psychological weight as a seven-minute one because Wallentin does not seem interested in filling time merely because the album has been given a running order.

“Love is Fire”, originally associated with Wildbirds & Peacedrums, introduces another useful complication. Returning to earlier material within a new collective setting could easily have become nostalgic, but here the song seems less like a look backwards than an opportunity to test what survives when the surrounding language changes. The familiar is made strange without being destroyed. That tension runs through the whole record: Basel and Bergen, private notes and public performance, composition and improvisation, tenderness and agitation, the individual voice and a group capable of swallowing it whole and then giving it back transformed.

What makes Vestnorsk Jazzensemble particularly well suited to this material is its very nature as a project-based formation rather than a permanently fixed band. The personnel can change according to the composer and the project, which means that the ensemble is less an established sound than a musical organism repeatedly assembled for particular circumstances. Kjetil Møster’s presence is especially telling, given his long involvement with Norwegian experimental jazz and his ability to inhabit both composed and improvisational environments without treating them as opposing camps. Here, nobody seems excessively interested in demonstrating how adventurous they are. The musicians listen, react, interrupt, reinforce and occasionally get out of the way. This sounds simple. It is not. Musicians are notoriously bad at leaving interesting space alone.

The final three pieces sharpen the album’s underlying idea of movement. “Wide” expands the palette without simply making everything louder, while “Now” reduces the music almost to a momentary intake of breath. Then the title track arrives for less than two minutes, and its brevity is exactly right. Rather than providing a grand finale, "Spring Flood" ends as though the phenomenon itself has passed through the room and is already continuing somewhere else. The river does not care about your preferred album structure.

That may ultimately be the record’s most convincing quality. Wallentin starts from highly personal material, but the musicians prevent it from remaining enclosed within autobiography. Feelings become textures, memories become rhythmic impulses, colours become arranging principles, and landscape becomes a set of relationships between sounds. The album is sensual without being decorative, poetic without becoming precious, and improvisational without confusing spontaneity with randomness.

"Spring Flood" understands that renewal is rarely as tidy as we would like it to be. Things thaw, swell, collide, become excessive, become beautiful, become inconvenient. Something buried starts moving again, and suddenly everybody has to deal with it. That is a rather more convincing definition of spring than the usual collection of pastel flowers.

Some records take five years to make because their authors are perfectionists. Others take five years because life has a habit of throwing furniture down the stairs whenever you are trying to finish something. "recur7" appears to belong, quite happily, to both categories. Conceived between 2019 and 2024 and only cosmetically altered since, this five-track, fifteen-minute collaboration between tsx and Sue Tompkins is a remarkably compact object carrying an unusually large amount of temporal baggage. Its central idea is simple enough: to return to something similar, but never quite the same. Its execution is considerably less polite.

tsx is the beat-oriented persona of Oswald Berthold, whose work with farmersmanual has been investigating digital systems, algorithmic processes and the peculiar aesthetics of computers since the 1990s. The tsx project began in 2017 with "recur", initially developed around the very contemporary idea of making beats while travelling through urban space with a mobile phone. That constraint has remained fundamental even as desktop tools have entered the process. There is something fitting about an artistic method that started with spare moments on public transport eventually producing a piece of music that itself seems permanently in transit.

Sue Tompkins brings a completely different kind of history. Trained as a painter at Glasgow School of Art, she became widely known through Life Without Buildings before developing a substantial visual and performance practice centred on language, repetition, rhythm and the physical possibilities of speech. Her voice has always occupied an interesting zone between speaking and singing, between sentence and gesture. On "recur7", that linguistic personality is not simply sampled. It is subjected to a little computational bureaucracy, chopped into fragments, sorted according to perceived sonic similarity and then rearranged by software. The result is less “vocals over electronic music” than a conversation between a human mouth and a machine that has become irritatingly confident about syntax.

"Mute their knee" establishes the peculiar rules immediately. Its rhythmic background was conceived from the simple physical sensation of rain hitting a skylight, but what emerges is anything but pastoral. Tiny percussive events multiply into a jittering mesh, with the familiar four-square expectations of digital rhythm repeatedly nudged sideways. The track feels as though someone has asked a metronome to describe weather and then refused to correct the answer.

The important distinction is that tsx's glitchiness is not primarily about damage. It is about "reclassification". Sounds are taken out of their original context, processed, sliced, reordered and made to function according to new relationships. The machinery is not hiding behind the music. It is part of the composition's visible logic. That makes "recur7" particularly interesting in the context of Berthold's much longer engagement with computer-based aesthetics. Farmersmanual has spent decades treating digital systems not merely as tools for making music but as environments in which musical decisions can be generated, distorted and reconsidered. Here that approach has been reduced to miniature scale.

Then Sue's voice enters and everything becomes more slippery. "Easily live for" breaks her recordings into minute sonic particles and allows an algorithmic process to determine their new positions. Meaning begins to dissolve not because the words are deliberately obscured, but because the temporal structure that normally allows language to make sense has been dismantled. A phrase is no longer necessarily a phrase. A syllable can become percussion, texture or an almost melodic object. The voice remains recognisably human while the sentence ceases to belong entirely to the human world.

That tension is one of the album's strongest qualities. Tompkins has spent much of her career exploring what language can do when it is treated as physical material rather than simply as a vehicle for information. Her performances, visual work and musical collaborations repeatedly make repetition and rhythm central to the experience of words. "recur7" takes the next step and asks what happens when an algorithm is allowed to participate in that repetition. The machine does not understand the words in the way a listener does. It understands relationships between sounds. Consequently, semantic meaning becomes collateral damage, while phonetic identity survives.

"The pleasure of completed action" is perhaps the funniest title on an album that spends considerable effort refusing to behave as though anything is ever truly completed. Its rain-derived rhythmic material has a nervous, almost granular quality, while the synthetic layers generated through a pulsar synthesis system are controlled by the movement of a pet robot. This is exactly the sort of sentence that would have sounded like an elaborate joke about electronic music thirty years ago. Here it is simply part of the production method. The robot does not need to understand music. It only needs to move, and suddenly its movements become parameters in an electronic composition. Humanity has finally found a use for the domestic pet it invented in order to avoid having a real one.

The middle of the record, "dream city times half", pushes further into the fractured relationship between voice and rhythm. The title itself suggests an operation rather than a statement: something divided, transformed, reduced. Tompkins's vocal fragments are repeatedly interrupted by the system that processes them, producing a form of speech that feels both intimate and inaccessible. You can sense that there was once a complete utterance behind the fragments, but the music has no obligation to reconstruct it for you.

This is where the album's five-year history becomes audible in a curious way. "recur7" is not obsessed with the past in the nostalgic sense. It is interested in what happens when material is revisited. The tracks began years earlier, were iterated over time, circulated in provisional forms and eventually arrived at something that was almost unchanged from an earlier private version. The delay is therefore not merely a production anecdote. It is structurally consistent with the project's central idea: returning to an existing state and finding that the return itself has changed it.

The final "just so, so just" makes that principle particularly clear. The words are still there, or at least their physical ghosts are. They are cut, rearranged, stretched into rhythmic events and surrounded by synthetic textures whose behaviour has little interest in conventional accompaniment. The track seems to ask whether meaning can survive after language has been deprived of its original chronology. The answer is neither yes nor no. Meaning becomes something more unstable: an impression assembled by the listener from pieces that were never put there in that order.

There is an unexpected warmth beneath all this technical cleverness. The machines may perform the rearranging, but the source material remains intensely personal and bodily. A voice recorded casually on a phone carries the imperfections of circumstance. The resulting fragments retain breath, emphasis and grain even after their semantic function has been scrambled. The technology therefore does not sterilise Tompkins's presence. If anything, it makes the human traces more conspicuous by surrounding them with processes that cannot quite reproduce them.

This is also why "recur7" avoids the familiar trap of algorithmic experimental music becoming a demonstration of software capabilities. There is plenty of bespoke technology here, but the technology has a job. Similarity models, beat-aware rearrangement, pulsar synthesis and robotic control are all subordinate to the larger question of recurrence. The interesting thing is not that a machine can chop up a voice. That became obvious some time ago. The interesting thing is what happens to a voice when its fragments are given a new social life inside a rhythm.

There is, finally, a rather lovely contradiction at the centre of the record. Its title promises repetition, while its methods depend upon difference. To recur is not to repeat. It is to approach the same neighbourhood from another street, carrying whatever happened since the last visit. The "recur" series has accumulated its own history since 2017, and this collaboration with Tompkins has become one of its recurring meeting points. Yet "recur7" does not sound like a museum piece from an ongoing series. It sounds like the series has developed another nervous system.

Fifteen minutes is enough. Anything longer might allow the algorithm to develop opinions.

As it stands, "recur7" is a miniature study in digital memory, where beats, words, accidents and machines continually rearrange one another. It is playful without being cute, technically elaborate without becoming a technology brochure, and fragmented without confusing fragmentation with depth. Most importantly, it understands that repetition is never neutral. Every return carries evidence of what happened in the meantime.

Even when the return takes five years.