This is quite the set of heavyweights on this release. Noise Hangover hails from Russia, and despite the funny name, this is some serious noise. I don’t know much about the artist, but I have yet to hear a Noise Hangover release that I did not enjoy. Fail is the work of Dan Fox, the hardest working man in noise. He also records under a host of names, including This is What I Hear When You Talk, Fail, Loss, as well as being the driving force behind Inner Demons Records. Platonoff hails from Saint Petersburg, Russia, and has also put out a steady stream of excellent noise discs on Inner Demons. With this roster, I am expecting some good noise, so let’s dive in.

Noise Hangover lays down some thick, heavy, constantly evolving drone. Layers and layers of drone. This would be in the same vein as Troum, but if Troum is a dream, this is not quite a nightmare, but rather a dream from which you awake with a sense of unease. Really solid.

Fail brings the noise with digital noise that sounds like malfunctioning kids toys thrown into a cement mixer. There is a lot going on here, and Fail keeps changing things up to keep it all interesting. This is a fun ride, as expected of Fail.

Platonoff closes it off with the machinelike noise that I have come to expect from this artist. This is a bit more chaotic than previous works I have heard, with the clanking metal combined with squiggly electronic noise. Out of the three, this feels the most harsh.

As expected, all of the artists brought their A game to the split. This would be a fantastic show to see live, and all of the artists are in top form. If you like any of the artists, or just like solid noise and drone, this is well worth picking up. This album weighs in at around 39 minutes.

Fencepest is a collaboration between fencepost and Pestzone. I had reviewed previous releases by each and enjoyed them, so I was interested to see how this would turn out, even though they seem to be the same person running both projects based on the Bandcamp page. In one review, I wrote, “If Fencepost was going for maximum creepiness, they nailed it.” In another review, I wrote, “Pestzone manages to evoke a sense of existential dread without resorting to cheap gimmicks like horror movie samples or jump scare noises.” You can understand why I thought that this would be a good combination, right? So let’s see what’s happening in the garden, shall we?

We kick it off with “bloom_II,” which is heavy cinematic ambience. This would be perfect for a suspense movie. You're in the dark, but you know that you're not alone. Waves of cascading sounds and ambient noise. Nice. “decay_XIII” keeps this cinematic feeling going, but the conflict is now on and the antagonist has revealed themselves. Pulsing bass with crashing noises surround you. “bloom_I” is spacey and dark. To keep the story going, the conflict is over, but everyone is wounded. You have survived, but at what cost? It would almost be peaceful if it were not so unsettling. With “decay_XIV,” you thought that the conflict was over, didn't you? There are still unseen forces that seek your demise hiding in the forest. You think that you can almost make out their eyes, but you're not sure if it is just your imagination. The sounds of malevolent bird songs ring in your ears. “bloom_VIII” is a bit grittier, featuring drone with just a bit of distortion. There is a lot going on here, which keeps it interesting. “decay_III” is a bit more chaotic and noisy. This is not to say that this is harsh noise, but imagine the cacophony of a high school band warming up, then run it through some reverb and you are heading in the right direction. This mellows out at times, but the overall feel is chaotic. “bloom_XI” is a bit more subdued, like the previous track has been totally fuzzed out and dissolved into a wall of sound. It's still gritty, but with a little less edge to it. “decay_XVII” is like a cow mooing (trombone or trumpet actually) with subterranean drones and other snippets of noises that sounds like heavily processed field recordings. This one went on a bit longer than it needed to though.

Somehow, they managed to attenuate the creepiness of their previous albums. But the overall result is still more than the sum of both band’s parts. Overall, if you want something that will serve as good background music to the soundtrack of your life, this is one to pick up. This album weighs in at around 70 minutes, so there is a lot to sink into.

I did not know much about this artist before getting it for review, but he now has a coule of releases with Inner Demons, some as collaborations as well as solo, as in this case. Hasegawa hails from Tokyo Japan, and his bio states that “After a long career as a systems engineer, he began producing music at the age of 50, bringing a unique perspective shaped by structure, logic, and disruption. His work explores density, rupture, texture, and live improvisation. Moving between harsh noise and electroacoustic expression, he develops performances focused on immediacy, instability, and sonic intensity.” Well, that sounds like something up my alley, so let’s dive in and see what it’s like in quarantine.

We kick it off with “Live in Jan-18-2021,” which is a short piece of harsh noise wall, with just enough variety to keep it engaging. Up next, we have “Fundamental 432HZ Pure Tone Music,” which is an interesting piece with test tones mixed with clattering metal noise and other field recordings and voices. The juxtaposition of the static tones and the spastic noise elements works well together and provides a nice contrast. There are spoken word lyrics at the end that sound like text to speech philosophizing on the nature of human existence. “Supplement to Fundamental 432HZ Pure Tone Music” is a short piece that continues the feel of the end of the previous track with layers of tones and spoken word. “Awaking and Walking in a Hospital” closes it all off. Imagine a thousand off balance washing machines and you'll get a sense of this track. It's heavy with some rhythm hidden in the noise. Well done.

Overall, this is an interesting mix of styles, and the test tone pieces work well against the harsh noise tracks that bookend them. This album weighs in at around 26 minutes.

I was unfamiliar with Jabe Ledoux, but they hail from Vergennes, Vermont and they also run the "Flux ov Time" netlabel. According to his Bandcamp bio, he creates “site specific percussion/found sound pieces that focus on repetition and poly rhythm to create trance-like states." The liner notes go further into this particular release: “I've been humping my drums to gigs in my car - or cars of bandmates- for several decades now, and I’ve always loved the random & chaotic jingle jangle of various percussive doodads bumping & grinding together over uneven roads. Recently, I found myself alone in my Kia Sportage (tm) with my Dookie Dickie drum and my Wh!skey drum, doing that dance that they do. I recorded a few minutes and was delighted by the deep bassy drones of the engine & tires-on-road that occurred. Thus, Sacred Quietude was born.” Sounds interesting, so let’s dive in.

This album consists of three tracks that are all variations on a similar theme. There is droning wind noise with some clattering metal and other field recordings and bits of noise. On the third track this noise comes center stage. The wind noise is still present but this is much more pronounced than in the other two where it servea mainly as incidental sound to the drone. It's peaceful but doesn't really seem to go anywhere.

Although there are some subtle differences between the tracks I would have liked Ledoux to branch out a bit. As it stands there are a bit too similar for my taste, but perhaps that is the entire point. This album weighs in at around 30 minutes.

If "TKSM 01" was Tokesmo’s exercise in making sounds forget where they came from, "TKSM 02" gives those same kinds of materials something considerably more troublesome to do: keep time. The result is a seven-track EP in which small acoustic sounds are enlarged, dissected and reorganised into rhythmic structures, with synthesised layers supplying the surrounding architecture. It is less concerned with the mysterious life of a sound than with what happens when that sound starts developing habits.

The titles offer no assistance whatsoever. “02”, “02.02”, “02.02.02”, eventually arriving at the almost comically recursive “02.02.02.02.02.02.02”, suggest that somebody has mistaken a musical tracklist for a directory tree. Yet there is a logic to this numerical escalation. Each title seems to imply another subdivision, another level of examination, and the music behaves accordingly: tiny sonic events are repeatedly magnified until they become patterns, pulses and structures large enough to occupy the whole room.

Behind Tokesmo is Andrea B., a musician whose relationship with sound has been developing for rather longer than this project’s deliberately anonymous presentation might suggest. He began playing bass in Lodi in 1994 and in 2004 co-founded Morkobot, the Italian trio built around two basses and drums. His electronic work goes back to the mid-1990s, through projects including Otrom and Garaliya. That background matters because "TKSM 02" does not approach rhythm from the perspective of somebody merely discovering that computers can make beats. There is a physical musician underneath the circuitry, and the fascination here comes partly from watching physical sound become something increasingly abstract without completely losing its bodily impulse.

The central idea is wonderfully simple: acoustic percussive sounds are used as raw material, while the other elements are synthesised. Tokesmo takes small sonic objects, the sort of details that normally disappear beneath our threshold of attention, and expands them until they acquire structural importance. A tiny click can become a pulse; a scrape can suggest a hi-hat; a transient can acquire the authority of a kick drum. The studio becomes less a recording environment than a peculiar optical instrument, except that instead of enlarging a cell under a microscope, it enlarges the microscopic behaviour of sound.

“02” introduces this vocabulary economically. At just over three minutes, it does not waste time explaining itself, establishing a relationship between percussive fragments and synthetic tones that feels precise without becoming clinical. There is movement everywhere, but not the blunt forward propulsion of conventional club music. The beat seems to assemble itself from fragments that have only recently learned that they belong together.

“02.02” and “02.02.02” push that process further. Their short durations are important because they make the EP feel modular rather than linear. Instead of seven tracks behaving like chapters in a conventional narrative, each piece seems to expose another variation of the same mechanical organism. Patterns appear, mutate, disappear and leave behind traces that the following track can exploit. It is composition by incremental pressure rather than grand gesture.

This is where the comparison with IDM and industrial electronics becomes useful, although neither label quite explains the appeal. There is the obsessive attention to timing associated with intelligent dance music, but Tokesmo is less interested in virtuoso programming than in the physical character of the sounds being programmed. Likewise, there is an industrial sensibility in the harder textures, yet the music rarely settles into the predictable machinery of genre industrial. The machinery here is constantly being rebuilt from pieces that do not initially look like machinery at all. External listeners have similarly picked up on the record’s combination of found sounds, percussive transformation and IDM/industrial rhythmic language.

The fourth piece, “02.02.02.02”, is the longest track at 4:14, and its position at the centre of the sequence gives it a disproportionate sense of importance. By this stage, the listener has become accustomed to hearing small objects acquire rhythmic functions, so the question is no longer what the original source might have been. The more interesting question is why the resulting pattern feels convincing. Tokesmo's achievement is to make the process disappear just enough for the music to stop sounding like an experiment and start behaving like music.

That distinction matters. Experimental electronics can sometimes become so devoted to demonstrating the procedure that the procedure becomes the only interesting thing left. "TKSM 02" avoids that trap because its rhythms have physical consequences. They make you want to follow them. Even when the sounds are dry, metallic or slightly alien, there is a tactile quality in their repetition. You can almost imagine the objects from which they originated being moved around a table, struck, rubbed, dropped or manipulated, although the finished music never settles into straightforward field-recording documentary.

The shorter “02.02.02.02.02” and “02.02.02.02.02.02” continue the process of fragmentation. Their titles become increasingly ridiculous while their musical purpose becomes increasingly clear. The decimal points could be read as little gates between levels of perception: sound, fragment, pulse, pattern, sequence, structure. Tokesmo seems to be asking how much information can be extracted from something before it stops being the thing it originally was. The answer, judging from these tracks, is quite a lot.

Then comes the nearly five-minute “02.02.02.02.02.02.02”, which closes the EP and gives the accumulating logic enough space to expand. Rather than providing a conventional climax, it feels like the system finally running at full resolution. Percussive elements and synthetic components have become difficult to separate, and the original acoustic source material has effectively surrendered its identity. What began as an object has become an event; what began as a noise has become a rhythmic proposition.

This also explains why "TKSM 02" makes more sense when heard alongside "TKSM 01". The two April 2026 EPs were conceived as complementary halves of a larger project: the first focuses on abstract and tonal transformation, while the second concentrates on rhythm and percussion. The pairing has been described as deliberately complementary, rather than simply two unrelated releases arriving on the same day. Yet "TKSM 02" has enough personality to stand on its own. It does not require its quieter, more elusive sibling in order to justify itself.

There is something particularly satisfying about the project’s refusal to make a fetish of its own technology. Tokesmo composed, recorded and mixed everything himself, with Rashad Becker handling the mastering, but the EP does not advertise the studio as a technological playground. The technology is simply the means through which material can be resized, repeated and reorganised. The interesting thing is what happens to perception, not which machine performed the trick.

And perhaps that is the hidden humour of "TKSM 02". Its titles become progressively more complicated while the fundamental idea remains stubbornly primitive: hit something, listen carefully, repeat. Civilization spent thousands of years developing increasingly sophisticated instruments and recording systems only to arrive at an electronic music project that discovers the dramatic possibilities of a tiny noise. There are worse ways of spending the afternoon.

What Tokesmo ultimately builds is not a collection of beats so much as a small grammar of percussion. The sounds are isolated, enlarged and placed into relationships, and those relationships gradually acquire their own momentum. The EP makes rhythm feel less like a pre-existing framework into which sounds are inserted and more like something that can emerge from the microscopic behaviour of matter.

If "TKSM 01" asks what remains when sound is detached from its source, "TKSM 02" asks what can be built from the fragments left behind. The answer is surprisingly physical. Beneath all the synthesis, processing and microscopic scrutiny, these tracks still have a pulse. Tokesmo simply makes us wait long enough to notice where it came from.