Some records shout. Some whisper. "Interstitial Spaces" barely breathes - and in doing so, says more than most albums with a full lung capacity and a marketing budget.

Martin Brandlmayr, known for his work with Radian and Polwechsel, has always been fascinated by structure, restraint, and the architecture of sound. But here he flips the usual logic inside out: instead of composing with events, he composes with their shadows. Not the notes, not the scenes, not the action - but what leaks out "between" them. The offcuts. The residue. The awkward pauses where nothing “important” is supposed to happen and therefore everything becomes audible.

This isn’t an album in the traditional sense; it’s a listening exercise disguised as a radio collage. Built from fragments of music recordings, films, TV adverts, and field recordings, "Interstitial Spaces" zooms in on those moments engineers usually erase: the tail of a reverb, the silence after applause, the hum of a room, a chair shifting its weight, a breath that wasn’t meant for the microphone. Brandlmayr treats these sonic crumbs with forensic tenderness, placing them under a microscope and letting them become protagonists.

Part 1 feels like wandering through an abandoned studio complex at night. You hear preparations without performances, endings without beginnings, presence without identity. Instruments tuning. Rooms settling. Machinery sleeping. It’s uncanny, but not in a horror sense - more like that slightly vertiginous feeling when you enter a theatre after the audience has left and the building itself seems to be listening to you.

Part 2 slowly thickens the texture. The fragments begin to cluster, forming a denser acoustic fog where individual sources dissolve into structure. Noise becomes rhythm, ambience becomes pattern. And then - cruelly, beautifully - it all releases back into emptiness again, as if nothing ever happened. A full narrative arc built entirely from things that aren’t supposed to matter.

There’s a quiet humor in this gesture. Brandlmayr essentially takes the most ignored material in audio culture and says: "This is the concert". The anti-spectacle becomes the spectacle. The eventful uneventfulness, to borrow the album’s own logic, turns into a strangely gripping form of drama. No solos, no climaxes, no hooks - just the fragile choreography of space itself.

What makes this work is Brandlmayr’s background: decades of working in reduced music, electroacoustic composition, and experimental ensembles have trained his ear to treat silence as material, not absence. He doesn’t aestheticize quiet; he organizes it. The result is not meditative wallpaper, nor academic exercise, but something more physical and slightly unsettling. You become hyper-aware of your own listening body: your breathing, your room, your chair, your presence in the soundfield.

"Interstitial Spaces" is a record that doesn’t want your attention - it wants your patience. It doesn’t seduce, it recalibrates. It’s not about beauty in the conventional sense, but about perception: teaching the ear to recognize that “nothing happening” is never actually nothing.
A bold, stubborn, quietly radical release. The kind of album that doesn’t change your playlist - but changes how you listen to the world after you turn it off.

There are records that seem to be born "in spite of" the world, and others that come into being because the world is the way it is: brittle, frayed, short of breath. IT DEEL IV belongs to the latter species. It doesn’t comment on current affairs with slogans or manifestos, but with something older and more dangerous: listening. In an age of permanent noise, that alone feels faintly subversive.

This fourth and final chapter of IT DEEL, the long-term residency project initiated by brothers Jan and Romke Kleefstra, arrives less as a full stop than as a natural exhale. A door left ajar. Since 2021, the project has staged a yearly dialogue between Frisian poetry, landscape and invited musicians; here the circle tightens and breathes together with Joana Guerra and Maria do Mar, two artists who never tiptoe, yet know how to move across silence without breaking it.

Recorded in the Thomas Church in Katlijk, the album wears its location like a second skin. This is not reverberation as postcard beauty; it’s a space that listens while being listened to. Guerra’s cello and do Mar’s violin avoid ornamental lyricism, working instead like exposed nerves, scraping across bow, wood, air and friction. The music often seems on the verge of becoming noise, then pulls back - not out of politeness, but out of necessity.

Jan Kleefstra’s poetry, spoken or half-embedded rather than declaimed, sits at the core without ever asserting dominance. Frisian here is not an exotic flourish; it’s raw material. It sounds like damp soil under fingernails, like words that don’t ask to be understood so much as "inhabited". Themes of human–non-human entanglement and our estrangement from living systems are not explained or underlined; they’re simply placed there, like objects found in a field after rain.

Romke Kleefstra, drawing on decades of work across ambient, drone, post-rock and free improvisation, acts as an almost invisible director. The structures are sparse, sometimes skeletal, but never rigid. Pieces such as "Pear Wurden Mar" or "As De Ljoft Meisjongt" unfold slowly, with a patience that today borders on the indecent. Shorter tracks feel like sonic marginalia: crooked haikus, breaths taken mid-thought.

With IT DEEL IV, the project settles into a form of active stillness. This is not a record about nature in any illustrative sense, but one that tries to place the human back inside the landscape, stripped of privilege. In a moment obsessed with visibility and instant reaction, this LP opts for duration, attention, and a slower gait. Its message is simple and unsparing: we are not separate from what we are dismantling.
This is not comfort music. It is companion music. And right now, that feels like something quietly essential.

There’s something quietly defiant about "Zonal Disturbances III". No manifesto, no explanatory fireworks - just four long slabs of sound, patiently unfolding, as if time itself had agreed to slow down and listen. Dirk Serries doesn’t announce his presence anymore; he occupies it. After nearly four decades of work, he no longer needs to prove that ambient music can be deep, difficult, or dangerous. He simply demonstrates it, again, with unnerving calm.

This third chapter in the "Zonal Disturbances" cycle continues Serries’ long-standing dialogue with the electric guitar - an instrument he persistently refuses to let behave like one. Here, the guitar is stretched, blurred, and coaxed into dense, hovering masses, less about notes than about pressure, friction, and duration. Recorded live in a single space, these pieces breathe with the slight imperfections of real time: micro-shifts, tiny tremors, the sense that the sound could tilt or collapse if stared at too hard. It doesn’t - but you feel the risk.

The four compositions, cryptically titled like fragments of a lost industrial inventory, are slow-moving yet never inert. Serries works with repetition, but not the soothing, loop-based repetition of background ambient. This is insistence. Chords pile up, hang, decay, and reassert themselves, forming clusters that feel geological rather than musical. Listening becomes less about following progression and more about inhabiting a zone - hence the title - where mood, texture, and endurance quietly conspire.

What keeps "Zonal Disturbances III" from slipping into abstraction-for-abstraction’s-sake is its emotional weight. There’s a somber gravity here, an undercurrent of unease that likely traces back to Serries’ roots in industrial and experimental music. This isn’t ambient as décor; it’s ambient as environment, occasionally hostile, occasionally consoling, often indifferent to your presence. The eeriness doesn’t jump out - it seeps in, like cold through walls you thought were insulated.

Serries’ career arc matters here. From his early days pushing noise and guitar-based experimentation, through various aliases and stylistic evolutions, he has consistently resisted the genre-policing instincts of the music industry. Ambient, in his hands, has never been about prettiness or passivity. It’s about tension held over long spans, about how minimal means can produce maximal psychological impact. If contemporary ambient discourse exists at all, it does so with his fingerprints somewhere on the page.

This installment doesn’t try to outdo its predecessors, nor does it function as a dramatic pivot. It deepens the cycle, widening its internal logic rather than breaking it open. If anything, it rewards familiarity: the more you’ve spent time in Serries’ world, the more these disturbances reveal their subtle internal weather.

"Zonal Disturbances III" isn’t a record you get so much as one you submit to. It doesn’t chase you; it waits. And if you’re willing to slow your pulse to match its pace, it offers a rare luxury in contemporary listening culture: the chance to disappear for an hour without being told what you’re supposed to find when you come back.

On paper, Songlines sounds like a meeting you’d expect to be tasteful, cerebral, and impeccably behaved. In practice, it’s something stranger and more human: a quiet tug-of-war between breath and circuitry, where neither side wins and that’s exactly the point.
Gareth Davis approaches the bass clarinet less as an instrument than as a bodily extension. You hear lungs working, air resisting, wood responding with a dark, pliable grain. His sound doesn’t announce itself; it seeps in, patient and unflashy, carrying the weight of a career that comfortably spans orchestral premieres, free improvisation, noise, and cross-disciplinary work. Davis has long been fluent in different musical dialects, and here he chooses to speak slowly, almost sotto voce, trusting nuance over drama.

Robin Rimbaud, a.k.a. Scanner, meets this with electronics that feel less designed than encountered. His textures hover, crackle, and dissolve like half-caught radio signals or memories that refuse to stay still. Decades into a practice that has ranged from surveillance-inflected sound art to ballet scores and permanent installations, Rimbaud still seems most interested in the in-between: the hiss behind the message, the system noise we’re trained to ignore. On Songlines, that sensibility doesn’t dominate - it listens.

The two long pieces, "Structure of Statements" and "Figurative Language", play a subtle conceptual joke. They promise clarity and rhetoric, but deliver ambiguity and drift. Themes don’t develop so much as wander. Electronics don’t accompany the clarinet; they sidle up next to it, occasionally brushing shoulders, occasionally stepping back into shadow. The music breathes, stalls, resumes - like thought itself, when it’s not being forced into productivity.

The idea of “songlines” - imagined routes, personal geographies stitched together from memory and movement - fits neatly without ever becoming illustrative. This isn’t travelogue music. It’s what remains after travel: blurred landmarks, distorted accents, impressions stripped of context but still emotionally charged. Places that may never have existed, yet feel oddly familiar.

What Songlines ultimately offers is resistance: to speed, to resolution, to the expectation that collaboration must result in synthesis. Davis and Rimbaud don’t merge their languages; they let them coexist, friction intact. The result is music that feels suspended between intention and accident, clarity and interference.

It won’t shout to be heard. It won’t explain itself. But spend time with it, and it quietly recalibrates your ears - reminding you that meaning often lives not in what’s said, but in how long we’re willing to listen.

Some albums feel like postcards. "Minnesota" feels like a bundle of letters found in an attic drawer: edges softened, handwriting slanted by time, the silence between words doing half the talking. Trond Kallevag’s fourth release for Hubro doesn’t narrate a journey so much as hover inside one - somewhere between the Norwegian coast and the American Midwest, between leaving and almost-returning.

Kallevag has made a quiet career out of listening to history without turning it into décor. Across "Bedehus & Hawaii", "Fengselsfugl", and "Amerikabaten", he’s treated migration, memory, and place as emotional weather systems rather than themes. "Minnesota" pushes this approach further, becoming his most cinematic work yet - not because it chases spectacle, but because it understands framing. Every sound here seems positioned with care, as if the music itself were choosing where to stand in the room.

The album’s core tension is geographical but also psychological. The west coast of Norway is present in the grain of the guitar, the patience of the pacing, the way melodies seem to emerge from mist rather than arrive fully formed. At the same time, there’s an unmistakable American pull: pedal steel lines that bend like horizons, slow-burning grooves that recall folk ballads and cinematic jazz without settling into pastiche. Think less genre fusion, more double exposure.

Kallevag is joined by an impeccable ensemble. Gard Nilssen’s drumming is restrained but alert, often suggesting motion rather than enforcing it; Mats Eilertsen’s bass grounds the music with a calm, narrative weight; Tuva Halse’s violin cuts through with a clear, human tone, occasionally sounding like a voice remembering something it never quite lived. Together, they play with remarkable generosity - no one rushes to fill space, because space is part of the composition.

Tracks like “Twins of Træna” and “The Boat Song” feel suspended between lullaby and departure hymn. “Pine Ridge” and “Edward Curtis Portraits”, inspired by Curtis’ photographs of Native Americans, add a more uneasy undertow - reminders that the American dream Kallevag gestures toward is inseparable from displacement and loss. Even when the music feels warm, it never fully relaxes. Longing, here, is not romanticized; it’s handled gently, like something fragile.

One of the album’s quiet triumphs is its production. Kallevag’s fondness for shaping material after the fact - adding subtle overdubs, nudging textures - never overwhelms the spontaneity of the performances. The record breathes. It moves forward, then looks back, then hesitates, as if unsure which direction deserves loyalty. That uncertainty becomes its emotional center.

The cover image - Rune Johansen’s "Jeg var sa forbanna lykkelig" - captures this perfectly: happiness not as climax, but as a fleeting alignment of circumstances. In that sense, "Minnesota" isn’t a historical statement, even with its echoes of Norwegian emigration and the symbolic weight of its title. It’s a personal meditation on distance: between people, between places, between who we were and what we almost became.

There’s a gentle irony in how understated this album is, given the vast spaces it evokes. No grand gestures, no forced nostalgia - just careful listening and trust in small details. "Minnesota" doesn’t wave across the ocean. It waits, patient and open, knowing that some connections only reveal themselves when you stop trying to cross them.