There is a particular kind of composer who does not simply write music but builds worlds and then invites you to get lost in them. With "Cartografía interior", his first solo release on empreintes DIGITALes (IMED 25200), Diego Bermudez Chamberland does precisely that: he drafts a private cosmogony and hands us the map - though not without erasing the legend first.

Composed between 2020 and 2023 and revised in 2025, this 44-minute acousmatic triptych draws inspiration from Scandinavian mythology as recounted in Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. But let’s be clear: this is not programmatic folklore with surround-sound Vikings. Bermudez Chamberland is not illustrating sagas; he is metabolizing them. The mythic scaffolding becomes an energetic principle rather than narrative content. Yggdrasil may hover in the background, yet what we encounter is less a tree than a network of forces.

Online responses to the album have often highlighted its sculptural quality - and rightly so. Bermudez Chamberland, trained at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and shaped by years of dialogue with figures such as Martin Bédard and Louis Dufort, approaches sound as a malleable substance. His studio becomes both laboratory and observatory. Field recordings of natural elements, instrumental gestures from collaborators, and a battery of synthesis techniques are fused into a fixed stereo medium that feels anything but static. The “2.0” format might suggest limitation; the listening experience suggests vertigo.

The opening movement, "Chronomundo", operates at a planetary scale. It unfolds like a slow rotation of cosmic matter, with dense textural strata that seem to drift across enormous distances. Spatial depth is not decorative here; it is structural. One senses tectonic shifts, orbital sweeps, the almost comical audacity of trying to sonify something as grand as cosmology. And yet, the piece resists bombast. Instead of thunderous clichés, we get evolving masses and microscopic fissures within them. Time feels stretched, elastic, as if the listener were perched somewhere between geological patience and stellar combustion.

If "Chronomundo" maps the macrocosm, "Destin // Trouble" zooms in on turbulence. The double slash in the title becomes audible as montage logic: call-and-response fragments, sudden anticipations, sonic behaviors that appear, scatter, regroup. Bermudez Chamberland personifies nature without anthropomorphizing it. Woody timbres sprout and dart; iterative flutters evoke insect wings clustering around a light source; storms accumulate not as Hollywood drama but as layered agitation. The movement is playful in its complexity - one can almost imagine the composer smiling while coaxing chaotic systems into temporary alliances.

What stands out is the music’s vitality. Reviews circulating online frequently note how alive the material feels, how it refuses to settle into static drones. Even when textures sustain, something is always mutating at the edges. Energy here is not merely volume or density; it is behavioral. Sounds behave like entities with impulses, hesitations, and collisions.

The final movement, "Punto maximal", turns inward - or downward - toward the infinitely small. If the first movement surveyed mythic vastness and the second dramatized conflict, this one examines intimacy. The microscopic becomes epic. Tiny iterative “points” punctuate the sonic field, suggesting cellular or particulate life. The humor, perhaps unintended, lies in the realization that the smallest gestures can feel as overwhelming as galaxies. Bermudez Chamberland treats the micro-world with the same grandeur he afforded the cosmic, collapsing scale into perception.

It is tempting to describe "Cartografía interior" as immersive, but that word has grown tired from overuse. What makes this work compelling is not immersion alone, but its elasticity of perspective. The composer revisited and revised the piece in 2025, reinserting materials, rebalancing energies - effectively bending his own past into the present. The album becomes a meditation on time not only thematically, but structurally. Past, present, and speculative future coexist in the studio’s layered memory.

There is also something tender beneath the mythological ambition. The project’s genesis traces back to youthful readings of Nordic lore, encouraged by a mother who nourished imagination with books. That detail matters. Beneath the sophisticated sound design and conceptual architecture lies a child enthralled by infinite worlds and cosmic trees. "Cartografía interior" is, in a sense, a grown-up answer to that early wonder.

And perhaps that is its quiet achievement: it reminds us that mythology was never about gods alone. It was about scale - about locating oneself between the titanic and the microscopic. Bermudez Chamberland does not give us a literal Valhalla or a faithful sonic Yggdrasil. He gives us thresholds, energies, morphologies. He gives us a universe that feels invented yet strangely familiar.

In the end, the “inner cartography” of the title is less about mapping territory than about mapping attention. The record suggests that every listener carries a cosmogony inside - vast, turbulent, teeming with unseen life. This album simply hands you the coordinates and says: explore.

"Kitbuilders are an electro duo from Cologne, Germany, made up of Ripley (vocals) and Benway (keyboards). Since 1997, they’ve blended Electro, New Wave, and IDM influences into a unique sound that helped shape the Electroclash and Electropunk scenes. Their music has appeared on respected labels such as Ersatz Audio, Breakin’ Records, and Play It Again Sam, and has earned airplay from influential DJs like John Peel and Laurent Garnier. Kitbuilders have performed at major festivals and renowned clubs across Europe and beyond, sharing their distinctive style with audiences worldwide."

The previous text was lifted verbatim from Kitbuilders' Bandcamp site. This is my first acquaintance with them, and they are probably much better known in Europe than the U.S. The CD came with a lot of promo material on paper, but music speaks louder than words, so let's dive in, shall we? First track, "Tenderness" sounds like typical beat-oriented electro, and Ripley's voice kind of reminds me of The Residents. "Dark Angels" is more experimental with effects-laden synths, an old-school beat, and lots of sonic manipulation. This could easily have been done in the '80s/ early '90s, and sounds it. "No Good (X Version)" reminds me of XEX, an '80s avant synth-pop outfit from New Jersey. The song is okay but goes on too long. The entirely instrumental "Slow Dance" makes use of oddly melodic synth arpeggios and could have been inspired by early 1970s Kraftwerk. "Follow Me (Concrete Version)" features a relentless beat, and aggressive bass. The vocals don't come in until about 1:20. Ripley's vocals on this one are reminiscent of Cosey Fanni Tutti (of Chris & Cosey) mixed with Lydia Lunch; darkly seductive with a touch of menace. "Get Your Glow On" is a rather happy instrumental tune, perhaps rave-fodder for the completely molly-dosed. "Poison Me" naturally takes on a more menacing tone. This track squarely fits in the Suicide-style No Wave genre. I think the verse is stronger than the chorus on this one but still pretty cool.

Overall I think 'Stupid Games' is really cool album, in spite of some tracks that seem to go on a bit too long, and these folks can pull it off live as well, as evidenced by their "Stupid Games" live video. (A lot of the music is sequenced and programmed but Ripley's vocals are obviously done live real time.) Both the CD and the aforementioned 7" vinyl are limited editions (100 copies for the CD, 40 for the 7" single), The CD also has a bonus remix of "Tenderness" not found digitally on their Bandcamp site. I think the retro artwork by David H. Sekulla / Yeti Popstar is great. (It's like something my synth-pop band Chemistry Set might have done back in the '80s.) I've added "Stupid Games" to my 'New Wave No Wave Next Wave' Spotify playlist, and "No Good" to my 'Electro-Q-shun' Spotify playlist. You should too.

There are albums that ask to be heard. And then there are albums that ask you to recalibrate your ears entirely. "Ecotonalities: No Other Home Than The In-Between" by Ludwig Berger belongs firmly to the second category. Released on -ous (OUS057) and conceived as the sonic centerpiece of Luxembourg’s pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, this LP proposes something radical: that territory itself is an orchestra, and that microphones are not passive witnesses but instruments awaiting performance.

Berger’s premise is disarmingly simple. He “plays” microphones by placing them where forces - water pressure, electromagnetic flux, vibrating steel, insect tremors - can activate them. The result is less a documentary of Luxembourg than a re-composition of its thresholds. The guiding concept is the ecotone: a transitional zone where ecosystems overlap and friction becomes fertile. In Berger’s hands, this ecological term becomes aesthetic method. Each track is a study in in-betweenness - between water and circuitry, wind and wing, earth and signal.

Online responses to the project have often noted its refusal of spectacle. Despite the impressive technological arsenal - hydrophones, geophones, electromagnetic sensors, even a laser Doppler vibrometer - the record avoids gadget fetishism. One does not hear “equipment”; one hears relationships. The hum of a data center leans into the murmur of a forest edge. A wind turbine’s rotation converses with avian movement. The grid and the field are not opposites but uneasy roommates.

Berger is no stranger to this kind of attentive listening. With degrees spanning electroacoustic composition, musicology, art history and literature, and a tenure at ETH Zurich investigating the sonic dimensions of landscapes from Japanese gardens to alpine glaciers, he has cultivated a practice that treats sound as spatial knowledge. His earlier "Bodies of Water" trilogy already suggested that environments sing in registers we rarely acknowledge. "Ecotonalities" extends that inquiry into a country often stereotyped through finance and infrastructure. Here, Luxembourg hums, trembles, pulses.

Side A begins with “Between Water and Circuitry”, where the artificial lake of Remerschen and the Enovos floating solar plant seem to share a common breath. Liquid resonance meets electrical shimmer. There is something almost comic in realizing that photovoltaic panels and rippling water can duet so convincingly. “Between Pressure and Grid” folds hydroelectric force into industrial tension; the piece feels tectonic, as though pylons and dams were clearing their throats.

“Between Wind and Wing” is perhaps the most lyrical segment. Field recordings from a wind farm intertwine with airborne life. The track does not romanticize either element; turbines do not become pastoral flutes. Instead, Berger allows their mechanical rotation to coexist with biophonic flutter, producing a choreography of air in motion. The wind is neither innocent nor guilty. It simply moves.

Side B ventures deeper into abstraction. “Between Earth and Signal” introduces subterranean vibrations and electromagnetic murmurings - an invisible duet of geology and infrastructure. Here the record becomes almost philosophical: what is “natural” when the soil itself carries cables? “Between Data and Field”, the longest piece, brings us to the data centers of Bissen and Kayl. The internal drones and external ambiences create a strangely meditative state. Reviews have highlighted how these passages resist dystopian cliché; instead of presenting digital infrastructure as an alien invader, Berger frames it as another habitat - inhabited not by birds or mammals, but by servers and signals. It is difficult not to smile at the idea that a rack of processors might be granted the dignity of a solo.

The album’s title, "No Other Home Than The In-Between", resonates beyond ecology. It suggests that modern existence itself unfolds in transitional zones: between analog and digital, extraction and preservation, image and sound. As a counterpoint to architecture’s visual dominance - particularly apt within the context of the Biennale - Berger insists on listening as critique. If buildings are typically photographed, here they are overheard.

There is also a subtle humor in the ambition of assembling an “orchestra of microphones”. One imagines them tuning up before rehearsal: hydrophones clearing their watery throats, electromagnetic sensors humming scales. Yet the joke gives way to something tender. Berger’s long-duration recordings - returning to sites across July, September, and February - suggest patience rather than conquest. He does not extract sounds; he negotiates with them.

Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and presented with understated graphic design by Pierre Vanni, the LP format reinforces the project’s physicality. You flip the record, just as you might shift perspective within a landscape. The act becomes spatial.

Ultimately, "Ecotonalities" does not argue that harmony reigns between infrastructure and ecosystem. It reveals tension, abrasion, coexistence. It listens for the seams. In doing so, Berger offers a modest but profound proposition: that attention itself is a form of architecture. And that perhaps our only viable dwelling place - ecological, political, sonic - is the threshold.

Some records arrive like arguments. Others arrive like weather. "azel", the new LP by Anouck Genthon, feels like the latter: a slow atmospheric shift that you only recognize as transformation once you are already inside it.

Released by Sbire Records (SBR017), "azel" consists of a single 22-minute piece whose title refers to a “violin tune”, yet the word carries deeper sediment. Between 2008 and 2012, Genthon conducted ethnomusicological research in Niger, immersing herself in Tuareg musical traditions. At the center of that experience was the anzad, a one-string bowed instrument traditionally played by women. Its tone - at once fragile, nasal, unwavering - lodged itself in her auditory memory. Years later, that memory resurfaced not as citation, but as metamorphosis.

Online commentary has often emphasized the album’s striking austerity. There are no decorative gestures, no folkloric reenactments, no ethnographic display case. What Genthon offers instead is a process of internal translation: from field recording to personal resonance, from archive to living sound. She composes not by imitating the anzad, but by letting its ghost recalibrate her violin technique - bow pressure, microtonal inflections, the pacing of breath. The result is music that feels both ancient and newly invented, as if the instrument were remembering something it never directly learned.

The piece unfolds in patient arcs. At first, the violin seems to search - hovering tones, granular textures, pitches that lean slightly off center. Genthon’s background in experimental and electroacoustic contexts (including collaborations with Lionel Marchetti and the Insub. collective) is palpable here: she treats sound less as melody and more as material. Each note is tested for density, friction, afterglow. Silence is not absence but contour.

Yet there is nothing clinical about "azel". If anything, it is disarmingly intimate. The timbral palette often narrows to a filament, a single vibrating line that feels exposed to the air. Reviews circulating online have pointed out how the music resists climax; instead of building toward a summit, it deepens into itself. Listening becomes less about anticipation and more about attunement. One begins to notice the grain of the bow, the microscopic fluctuations of pitch, the way a sustained tone can feel like a held breath in a vast landscape.

Genthon’s trajectory - from ethnomusicologist to performer-composer - is crucial here. She is not an artist who “borrows” from tradition; she interrogates her own position within it. Her 2012 book on Tuareg music already suggested a sensitivity to the political and aesthetic dimensions of transmission. On "azel", that reflection turns inward. The question seems to be: what does it mean to carry another culture’s sound within your own instrument without reducing it to ornament?

The answer, in this case, is time. Genthon allows the piece to evolve like a memory resurfacing in layers. There are moments when the violin’s tone roughens, becoming almost vocal, almost cracked. Elsewhere, it thins into a reedy thread that could, in a different context, pass for electronic feedback. But everything here is acoustic, recorded in June 2024 between Poschiavo and Le Richoud, and later shaped in collaboration with Lionel Marchetti. The production does not polish away the instrument’s edges; it frames them.

Genthon’s broader practice - sound walks, collective improvisation, large ensembles - often foregrounds listening as a shared responsibility. Here, alone with her violin, she extends that ethic to the listener. The piece asks: can you inhabit a sound long enough for it to change you? Can you accept that continuity is not linear, but cyclical - coming back in order to move forward?

By the end of "azel", nothing has “happened” in the conventional sense. No fireworks. No virtuosic display. And yet the air feels altered, subtly re-tuned. The violin has traced a lineage without drawing borders around it. It has spoken softly, but with conviction.
Sometimes the most radical gesture is not to amplify, but to listen more closely.

There is something gloriously unreasonable about gathering one hundred electric guitars and asking them to behave like the sea. And yet that is precisely what Gilles Laval has done with "100 Guitares sur un Bateau Ivre", released by Cuneiform Records (Rune 535). If this sounds like an avant-garde stunt, it isn’t - at least not only that. It is a pedagogical experiment, a social sculpture, an environmental lament, and a love letter to the electric guitar, all disguised as a maritime hallucination.

The title tips its hat to Arthur Rimbaud’s feverish 1871 poem "Le Bateau ivre", that adolescent masterpiece in which a vessel slips its moorings and dissolves into sensory overload. Laval takes Rimbaud not as a narrative blueprint but as a current - an undertow of revolt, freedom, and ecstatic derangement. The result is not a literal soundtrack to the poem, but a seven-part immersion in what it feels like to read it: colors colliding, surfaces dissolving, beauty shading into menace.

Listeners familiar with Laval’s orbit will know that this is not a sudden infatuation with excess. He has long been an instigator of large-scale guitar happenings across Europe, placing audiences at the center of four stages while he and his co-conductors steer a flotilla of players - students, amateurs, professionals - through music specifically conceived for mass participation. In that sense, the album documents not just compositions, but a process: months of rehearsal, distributed leadership, and the delicate democracy of shared sound. Laval was also a catalyst behind Fred Frith’s 100-guitar project "Impur", and he has performed with Rhys Chatham, whose own multi-guitar works stretched minimalism until it shimmered like heat above asphalt. Those precedents hover here, but Laval’s sea has its own tides.

The opening “De Ses Longs Cheveux Bleus” unfurls like a horizon slowly coming into focus. What could have been an impenetrable wall of strings instead breathes in layers: sustained tones (helped along by eBows and prepared guitars), granular textures, sudden flares of harmonic light. Reviews circulating online often point out the paradox at the heart of the work - how something so potentially overwhelming becomes unexpectedly transparent. Laval avoids bombast; he prefers slow tectonics. When density arrives, it is tidal rather than explosive.

“Embellie” and “Roches” explore contrasting states of the marine psyche. The former glints with cautious optimism, guitars chiming in overlapping figures that feel like sunlight fractured on water. The latter is more geological - hard edges, percussive scrapes, clusters that suggest submerged cliffs and the quiet violence of erosion. Laval’s ear for timbre keeps the ensemble from turning monochrome; he treats the electric guitar as ecosystem rather than instrument.

There is, too, a political undertow. Laval has spoken openly about overfishing and the brutality of bottom trawling, and one hears in the darker passages a kind of submerged protest. This is not program music with didactic signposts, but the unease is palpable. The sea is both playground and graveyard. That tension culminates in “Unsaved”, a wordless elegy for migrants lost at sea. The hundred guitars here do not rage; they hover. Sustains blur into a collective exhale, as if the instrument most associated with individual heroics has chosen, for once, to kneel.

It would be easy to frame "100 Guitares sur un Bateau Ivre" as a spectacle translated to disc, but that undersells its intimacy. Even in recorded form, you sense the smiles Laval describes - the mutual support required to make such a project cohere. Built into the score are varying levels of complexity, allowing novices and veterans to coexist. That inclusiveness is not cosmetic. The electric guitar, often sidelined in symphonic institutions, becomes here a democratic orchestra: one hundred different biographies braided into a single, shifting body.

And yes, there is humor in the premise. One imagines the logistical emails alone: “Dear 97 guitarists, please remember rehearsal six of eight”. Yet the joke, if there is one, is on our expectations. Instead of chaos, we get attentiveness; instead of indulgence, restraint. Laval’s “drunken boat” does not capsize under its own ambition. It drifts, dives, resurfaces - sometimes luminous, sometimes troubled, always alert.
Rimbaud wrote of a vessel that longed for dissolution in breakers and fire. Laval, by contrast, seems committed to navigation. The future may be stormy - climate anxiety, political regression, oceans less known than the moon - yet here are one hundred players choosing to listen to one another. In that act alone there is rebellion.

The sea, after all, is not only depth and danger. It is also resonance. And on this voyage, resonance becomes a form of hope.