There’s a special category of “side projects” that artists describe as a "break", a palate cleanser, a moment of relief from more demanding work. "Standard Cap" by Daniel Szwed belongs to that category in theory. In practice, it sounds like the kind of break where you go outside to clear your head and end up shouting at the sky.

Originally released in a tiny tape edition - because of course it was - this second solo outing now resurfaces in a more accessible format via Rope Worm, still carrying the residue of its initial intention: something immediate, unfiltered, almost inconveniently direct. Conceived during sessions for the more elaborate "Sun’s Mother", it functions less as a companion piece and more as a deliberate stripping-down, like removing insulation just to see what kind of noise leaks through.

The setup is deceptively simple: drums, synths, vocals. No conceptual overload, no decorative excess. And yet, from the opening moments of “Standard Cap 1”, it’s clear that restraint here doesn’t mean minimalism in the polite sense. It means pressure. Repetition locks in quickly, rhythms hammer rather than groove, and the synth layers grind against them with a stubborn, metallic persistence.

Szwed’s approach to structure feels almost willfully blunt. Each of the six tracks sits around the same duration, titled with an efficiency that borders on indifference. No narrative cues, no emotional signposting. Just iteration. But within that repetition, small instabilities emerge - shifts in texture, slight ruptures in rhythm, moments where the system seems to falter before reasserting itself. It’s not evolution so much as controlled erosion.

The industrial and noise elements aren’t deployed as aesthetic markers so much as working conditions. This isn’t “influenced by” anything in a referential way; it’s built from the same logic: friction, density, refusal. The drums feel physical, almost claustrophobic, while the synths oscillate between drone and abrasion. Vocals, when they appear, are less communicative than symptomatic - signals of strain rather than carriers of meaning.

There’s something oddly methodical about the whole thing. Despite its rawness, "Standard Cap" never collapses into chaos. It holds its form with a kind of stubborn discipline, as if Szwed is testing how much repetition and distortion a structure can withstand before it loses coherence. The answer, apparently, is quite a lot.

The production - handled by a certain Jessica at Where is the Studio, according to release notes - maintains that balance between immediacy and control. Nothing feels overly polished, but nothing feels accidental either. It’s rough by design, not by limitation.

As a “mind refresher”, this is almost comically intense. If this is what Szwed does to relax, one can only assume the main project operates somewhere near tectonic levels of pressure. But that’s precisely what gives "Standard Cap" its peculiar clarity. By removing layers of intention, it reveals a core impulse: to push sound until it resists, then keep going.

It’s not inviting. It doesn’t pretend to be. But it is focused, consistent, and strangely honest in its refusal to offer anything beyond its own internal logic.

Six tracks, minimal variation, maximum insistence. A break, apparently.

Naming your project "The Future Sound of Koyaanis Naqoy" is already a commitment. It suggests collapse, imbalance, cinema, philosophy, and at least a mild distrust of comfort. Delivering on that without collapsing into self-parody is another matter. "Ancient Impulses of a Paranoid Idol" manages, somewhat stubbornly, to do both: it takes itself seriously and survives the attempt.

The duo - Andrea Doro and Antonio Vessa - operates along a fault line between density and rupture. Doro, emerging from a background in poetry and experimental electronics, brings a kind of narrative obsession even when no words are spoken. Vessa, younger and rhythmically restless, injects a drumming language that refuses to behave like a mere structural support. Together, they construct something that feels less like a collaboration and more like a controlled imbalance.

The album unfolds as a single arc divided into five chapters, tracing the trajectory of a nameless figure swallowed by the city, slowly reduced to routine, and finally pushed toward a late, catastrophic awakening. It’s a storyline that could easily become heavy-handed. Instead, it dissolves into gesture, texture, pressure. The narrative is there, but it behaves like a shadow: visible, shifting, never fully graspable.

“Open the Door, Your Uncle Is There To Greet You” begins with a deceptive stillness, the kind that suggests anticipation but delivers unease. Electronics stretch out like fog over a landscape you’re not entirely sure you want to enter. Then Vessa’s drums arrive - not as a beat, but as an event. They fracture the space rather than organize it.

“We Believe In Werner Herzog” carries a title that feels like a manifesto and a warning. The track leans into a kind of existential weight, where each rhythmic gesture feels burdened, as if the act of moving forward required justification. There’s a faint cinematic quality here, though not in the polished sense. More like a film reel left out in the rain.

The central pieces - “Under The Pressure Of Giada’s Eyes” and “I Flatten Myself Like A Biscuit, One Day, On Tuesday” - extend into longer forms where time becomes elastic. Repetition appears, but it doesn’t stabilize. Instead, it tightens, like a loop that gradually becomes a constraint. Vessa’s drumming is particularly striking here: fluid, unpredictable, occasionally almost groove-like before veering off into something more fragmented, more anxious.

By the time “Look Mum, The Blue Monsters Are Coming” arrives, the album has accumulated enough tension to justify its own collapse. And collapse it does, though not in a dramatic explosion. It’s more of a dissolution, a slow erasure of boundaries where sound loses its coordinates. The “end of horizons” promised in the concept doesn’t arrive as spectacle. It arrives as absence.

The fact that the entire record was captured live at Goldmine Records in Cilento gives it a certain raw coherence. There’s no safety net here, no post-production smoothing of edges. The imperfections remain, and they matter. They anchor the work in a physical reality that balances its more abstract ambitions.

Stylistically, the album sits somewhere between dark ambient, noise, and a kind of destabilized jazz logic, but those labels feel increasingly irrelevant as the record progresses. What matters is the interaction: electronics that expand and suffocate, drums that resist containment, and a constant sense that the structure could give way at any moment.

Self-released, which feels appropriate, "Ancient Impulses of a Paranoid Idol" doesn’t attempt to position itself within a scene. It operates on its own terms, for better or worse. At times, it risks excess - too much tension, too little release - but that imbalance is also its defining trait.
It’s not an easy listen, and it doesn’t pretend to be. But it does something quietly compelling: it turns narrative into pressure, rhythm into instability, and space into something that can, at any moment, disappear.

Not bad for a debut that sounds like it’s already dismantling its own foundations.

It helps, occasionally, when an album decides to hand you its inner logic in plain text. Not to simplify things - don’t worry, that would be too easy - but to confirm that what you’re hearing is, in fact, as tactile, messy, and quietly unsettling as it feels.

"Shrew" by Propan and Stina Stjern already suggested a world of bodies, substances, and slow transformations. The lyrics make it explicit: this is not abstraction. This is labor. This is ritual. This is the long choreography of hands doing things that stain.
“We lift carry cucumbers on our backs… it seeps into us, we seep into it”.

That line alone dismantles any safe distance between subject and material. The boundary dissolves early: the workers become the work, the process becomes identity. What initially sounds like domestic routine - washing vegetables, kneading dough, pressing fruit - gradually mutates into something more ambiguous. The gestures accumulate weight. Repetition becomes incantation.

Musically, that’s exactly what happens. Voices layer, thicken, lose their individuality, much like the bodies described in the text. In “Fern”, the slow build mirrors the preparation phase: gathering, washing, kneading. But nothing is innocent here. Even the pastoral imagery carries a faint unease. Grapes crushed underfoot, butter melting into surfaces, fluids seeping everywhere. It’s sensual, but not comfortably so. There’s always a hint that something is being transformed beyond recognition.

Then comes the pivot. The chicken, suddenly present, headless, dripping. Plucked. Reassembled into “feather knickers”, which is either dark humor or something more ritualistic, depending on how charitable you’re feeling. The album doesn’t clarify. It just keeps going.

“Maret” expands the scene into a collective act. Cooking becomes communal, almost ceremonial. Ingredients are coated, chopped, mixed into something that resembles a feast but behaves like a rite. “We assemble this night”, they say, as if time itself were an ingredient to be handled. The table is set with obsessive care - flowers, candles, glasses in different shapes - yet the atmosphere is unstable. Celebration and tension coexist without resolving.

The music follows suit. The density increases, the layering becomes more insistent, but never chaotic. There’s control in the repetition, a discipline that keeps the ritual from dissolving into noise. It’s not about explosion. It’s about sustained pressure.

And then “Sybil”, where the aftermath unfolds. Eating, drinking, talking - then silence. The ritual completes its cycle not with a climax, but with cleaning. Washing, rinsing, brushing away crumbs “from the minds and from time itself”. It’s almost absurdly literal and strangely profound at the same time. As if the entire event - this feast of bodies, labor, and shared space - must be erased to exist properly.

“We own this time. all time”.
A bold claim, delivered without emphasis, which makes it land harder. Ownership here isn’t about control. It’s about inhabiting the moment so fully that it temporarily suspends everything else.

The music mirrors this dissolution. By the end, the layers feel less constructed and more residual, like traces left after something has already happened. The final gesture - burning leftovers, pulling the plug, leaving - feels less like closure and more like withdrawal. The space empties, but something lingers.

What the lyrics clarify is that "Shrew" isn’t just exploring voice as sound, but voice as collective body, as laboring force, as something deeply entangled with material processes. The “shrew”, in this context, isn’t a stereotype to be reclaimed politely. It’s a figure that absorbs, transforms, and ultimately outlasts the structures meant to contain it.

The mixing and mastering by Lasse Marhaug keeps everything grounded in a thick, immersive field without smoothing over its roughness. Nothing feels decorative. Even the more beautiful passages carry a residue of something slightly off, slightly too physical to be comfortably aesthetic

Released by SusannaSonata, the album maintains its refusal to be easily categorized. With the textual layer fully visible, it becomes even clearer that this is less a collection of pieces and more a sustained enactment: preparation, gathering, consumption, erasure.
A cycle. Messy, repetitive, oddly precise.

And, against all odds, completely controlled.

Tradition is usually treated like a fragile object: handle with care, don’t touch too much, definitely don’t plug it into an amplifier. "Sephardic Dialogues I–III" takes that idea, folds it neatly, and puts it somewhere out of sight.

The Sephardics approach centuries-old Sephardic material not as a museum artifact but as something unfinished, still arguing with the present. This three-part release - spread across collaborations with Biensüre, Oren Ambarchi & Ramesh Shotham, and Elliott Sharp - doesn’t so much “reinterpret” tradition as place it under pressure and observe what survives.

The premise sounds dangerously worthy: three years, three programs, heritage meeting experimentation. The result, fortunately, is far less polite.

The first disc, with Biensüre, is the most immediately disorienting. Sephardic melodies slip into anatolian-tinged psychedelia, disco fragments, and electro-funk textures that feel slightly unstable, like a dance floor built on uneven ground. Vocals drift between intimacy and incantation, while the rhythmic framework keeps shifting just enough to prevent comfort. It’s the closest the project comes to something resembling groove - and even that is handled with suspicion.

The second chapter, featuring Ambarchi and Shotham, withdraws from that outward energy and turns inward. Here, space becomes the primary material. Ambarchi’s extended guitar work stretches tones into long, patient lines, while Shotham’s percussion introduces a kind of organic complexity that never settles into pattern. The Sephardic themes appear almost as echoes, emerging and dissolving within a broader field of sound. It’s less about dialogue in the conversational sense and more about cohabitation - multiple musical languages sharing the same air without fully merging.

By the time Elliott Sharp enters on the third disc, any remaining sense of stylistic stability is quietly dismantled. Sharp, being Sharp, doesn’t “adapt” to the material so much as interrogate it. The result is the most fragmented and unpredictable section of the trilogy, where avant-garde gestures, sudden shifts, and textural collisions push the source material to its limits. Tracks expand and contract unpredictably, as if testing how far a melody can be stretched before it ceases to be itself.

Across all three discs, what holds the project together is not a consistent sound but a consistent attitude: refusal. Refusal to fix the material in a single identity, refusal to resolve tensions between past and present, refusal to treat tradition as either sacred or disposable.

The core ensemble - Patrick Hengst, Ludger Schmidt, Martin Verborg, and Manuela Weichenrieder - operates less like a backing band and more like a flexible organism. Their role shifts constantly, sometimes leading, sometimes dissolving into the texture, sometimes acting as a hinge between radically different approaches. Weichenrieder’s voice, in particular, functions as a kind of thread, not anchoring the music but keeping it from dispersing entirely.

What’s striking is how little nostalgia there is. Despite drawing from songs that date back to the 16th century, "Sephardic Dialogues" avoids the usual reverence. Instead, it treats history as something active, unstable, occasionally contradictory. The past isn’t reconstructed; it’s re-experienced under altered conditions.

Of course, this approach comes with risks. Not every transition feels seamless, and at times the sheer variety of methods can border on fragmentation. But smoothness was never the goal. The project gains more from its friction than it would from coherence.
Released by Umland Records, this three-disc set feels less like a definitive statement and more like an open process - one that happens to have been documented with unusual care.

If there’s a unifying idea, it’s hidden in plain sight: dialogue implies difference. And difference, here, is not something to be resolved. It’s something to be sustained.

Three discs, multiple voices, no final agreement. Which, considering the subject matter, might be the most faithful outcome imaginable.

Some records try to tell you what they are about. This one behaves more like a late-night radio that refuses to stay on one station, drifting between memory, theology, childhood static, and the faint suspicion that all of it is somehow connected.

Kodax Strophes - that wonderfully unstable alias of Martyn Bates - has always worked in this liminal space between song and transmission. With "Christ In The House Of Martha & Mary", he leans fully into the metaphor he himself proposes: music as signal, as residue, as something received rather than constructed.

And like most signals worth listening to, it’s not clean.

The album is framed as a life-journey, sliding across time rather than moving through it. You can hear that immediately in the opening fragments: short bursts, test tones, half-formed melodies that feel less like introductions and more like tuning attempts. “Signal”, “Test Transmission”, “Call Sign” - these aren’t just titles, they’re instructions. You are not entering a narrative. You are scanning.

What emerges from that scan is a collage of songs that oscillate between the intimate and the cosmic, often within the same breath. In “Prescient”, the language is almost devotional - waiting, calling, reaching across loss - yet it never settles into religious certainty. It hovers. Bates’ voice, fragile and insistent, carries that tension beautifully: always on the edge of revelation, never quite arriving.

Then there’s “The Good Luck Book”, where memory becomes something sensory and overwhelming - “perfumes rich like bibles”, “seven senses soaring”. It reads like a childhood myth rewritten from inside the body, where perception itself is a kind of blessing. The phrasing is simple, almost naive, but the accumulation of images creates a strange density, as if the past were pressing too close to the present.

Of course, Bates being Bates, the album doesn’t stay in that register for long. “Skulls” introduces a darker procession - dancers, roses, repetition turning into something ritualistic, almost obsessive. The word itself - "skulls" - loses meaning through insistence and becomes pure sound, a percussive mantra. Language here is not stable. It erodes, loops, reconstitutes.

And then he does something quietly audacious: he inserts echoes of existing cultural memory without fully claiming them. “Flowers”, with its ghost of a familiar anti-war lament, doesn’t quote so much as haunt. The effect is unsettling. You recognize the shape, but it arrives distorted, as if carried through decades of interference.

The title track is perhaps the closest thing to a center, though calling anything here a “center” feels optimistic. It draws on the biblical scene - Martha busy, Mary contemplative - but reframes it as an interior state. “You are the room”, Bates sings, collapsing space, presence, and memory into a single point. The spiritual question isn’t staged as doctrine, but as proximity: how close can you get to something before it dissolves into you?

Throughout, the instrumentation remains deliberately porous. Guitar, piano, tape fragments, radio noise - they don’t form a stable arrangement so much as a shifting backdrop, like stations fading in and out. Even the additional tracks, presented almost as a second, tangential broadcast, reinforce this sense of overflow. The album doesn’t end; it trails off into other possible versions of itself.

What ties all of this together is the idea of transmission - not just in the electromagnetic sense Bates fixates on, but in the broader human one. Songs, memories, cultural fragments, spiritual anxieties: all of them traveling across time, degraded, reshaped, reinterpreted. Like starlight, to borrow his own metaphor - arriving long after the source has vanished.

Released on Hive-Arc Records, the album feels less like a finished statement and more like a living archive. Messy, inconsistent, occasionally frustrating. Also, inconveniently, quite moving.

There’s a question running underneath it all: how do you resist, how do you serve, how do you remain yourself within this constant flow of signals? Bates doesn’t answer. He tunes the dial, lets the noise through, and leaves you to decide which fragments matter.

Not the most comforting approach. But then again, clarity was never really part of the broadcast.