'Mirror At Night' is the second solo album by the male half of Lore City, from Portland, Oregon. It's funny how this review came about. I received a 7" vinyl record in the mail titled "Mirror At Night B-Sides" when I wasn't even aware Bessel had a new album out (released October 31, 2025). The release date for this record (they call it an EP but really it's just a 2-sided single) is February 25th for preview and Mach 27th for the physical product.

So this review is for both the album and the single. Eric's first solo album ('Visitation') was ambient and so is 'Mirror At Night,' consisting of twelve brief tracks, most of which barely exceed the four minute mark. Kicking things off with "Tendons," the track seems to rely solely on manipulated guitar sonics that incorporates elements of feedback. "Snow Globe" has a more expansive sound with shimmering echo and heavily modified synth pads. "Scavengers" incorporates interesting synth programming with heavily chambered ambience. Somewhat spooky, or ghostly. "Recombinant" has a more experimental temperament with broken melodies floating and bumping into each other in a weightless dimension. "Non-diegetic Sound" is typically ambient with sustained, richly textured chordal pads. There is a sense of motion on the aptly titled "Moving Walkway" and some sonics in it could allude to a transportation hub or station. The briefest track, "Hesitation" (only 1:43) is primarily sustained melancholy strings. "Headlamps" takes echo effects to a new level but manages to coax something nearly melodic out of the chaos. It kind of reminds me of radio music from a distant station that comes in waves when the signal is not strong. It's all heavenly clouds on "Coming Around" and there is a subtle melodic loop in the drift. "Clearing" is richly orchestral and sonically the opposite of the previous track. I'm imagining Poseidon's orchestra tuning up. So what stays afloat in this ocean of sound? Must be the next track, "Buoy," adrift on the sea of sonority. Finally, we end up in the "Aphotic Zone," a murky trip into the underwater depths. Quite an interesting episodic album.

As for the 'Mirror At Night B-Sides,' these are two track not on the album. The A-side is "Double Helix" (4:31) and "Upstate" (4:08) as the B-side. While the A-side of the B-sides is a little better than the B-side of the B-sides with its echoey shimmering slice of ambience, it sounds more like an effect that should lead to something else and not stand alone. To me, this is merely a curiosity piece and less interesting than anything on the album. I think the ten-buck price tag will limit the appeal to vinyl collectors of oddities on wax with money to burn. Just buy (download) the album and leave it at that as it is a dollar cheaper, or $22.00 if you want it on vinyl.

Ambient music often promises transcendence and delivers wallpaper. "Nine Breaths" by theAdelaidean aims smaller and, paradoxically, reaches further. It does not attempt to soundtrack the cosmos. It studies dust in a beam of light and treats it like revelation.

Behind the moniker stands Sean Williams, known in another literary universe as a #1 "New York Times"-bestselling author and award-winning poet. Here, prose discipline and poetic economy migrate into sound. The concept borrows from the haiku’s brevity, the idea that a single breath can contain an entire emotional shift. Each track corresponds to a short poem, and rather than illustrating them in a literal way, the music expands their internal atmosphere.

The palette is restrained: sustained drones, gently evolving synth layers, thick but soft harmonic beds. There is no percussive insistence, no theatrical crescendo. The focus is on micro-variation. Frequencies drift, overlap, dissolve. The production avoids sharp edges, favoring a rounded resonance that feels less like composition and more like a slowly inhaled thought.

"The Unforeseen" opens with a fragile spaciousness. Tones hover as if uncertain of their own gravity. It mirrors the haiku about a shattered window framing what lies beyond. The music does not dramatize the break; it lingers in the opening. "Sunrise", stretching past ten minutes, unfolds with incremental harmonic brightening. It avoids sentimental uplift. Instead, it suggests the quiet mechanics of light expanding across a surface.

On "Resonant Woods", layered textures accumulate in subtle dialogue, evoking the poem’s “call and response”. There is a suggestion of depth, like standing within a forest where echoes blur direction. "Tremble in Worship" introduces faint tremors within the drone field, barely perceptible fluctuations that keep the stillness alive. The effect is meditative without becoming inert.

"Courting Dust" may be the album’s most delicate moment. High-frequency shimmer interacts with lower sustained tones, producing a sensation of particles suspended mid-air. It would be easy to dismiss this as pleasant ambience, but the detail work resists that reduction. Each layer enters with intention.

"Cathedral Under Construction" builds slowly, not in volume but in density. Harmonic overtones stack carefully, as if architecture were forming from vapor. "Loss" compresses its emotional weight into a shorter frame, a muted resonance that never spills into melodrama. "Spiraling Thought" circles gently around a central tonal axis, echoing the haiku’s interrupted motion.

Then there is "Horizon". At over an hour, it occupies the entire second disc alone. This is either bold minimalism or a test of patience, depending on your temperament. The track evolves at a glacial pace, expanding and thinning in long arcs. It asks for surrender. If you are inclined to check your phone every few minutes, the piece will outlast your attention span without apology. If you remain, it gradually reframes perception. Subtle modulations become events. Silence gains contour.

What distinguishes "Nine Breaths" is its refusal to equate stillness with emptiness. The album suggests that beneath routine moments lies a layered emotional topography. Williams’ literary background is audible not through grand gestures, but through restraint. He understands negative space. He allows implication to do the heavy lifting.

This is not background music for productivity playlists. It is closer to an invitation to slow down and notice the small internal shifts that occur between inhalation and exhalation. The record implies that every breath contains a composition, if one listens carefully enough.

In a culture addicted to acceleration, "Nine Breaths" proposes something almost subversive: depth without spectacle. It does not demand transformation. It simply demonstrates how quietly it can happen.

Some projects rush into the world like overeager interns. Parajekt took more than a decade to arrive. That alone deserves a raised eyebrow. In an era where albums are sometimes assembled faster than a food delivery order, Bernhard Hammer and Matija Schellander let this one ferment.

Released as Parajekt on Palazzo Recordings, the label run by Hammer and his long-standing band Elektro Guzzi, this self-titled debut feels less like a beginning and more like the crystallization of a long internal dialogue. Hammer, known for translating techno logic into live-band formats with Elektro Guzzi, joins forces here with Schellander, whose background in experimental sound practices and low-frequency explorations informs the duo’s depth-oriented approach.

The setup is entirely electronic: drum machines, samplers, modular synths, effects, and crucially, a reel-to-reel tape machine. The tape is not nostalgic decoration. It functions as both boundary and instigator. Its mechanical steadiness and saturation imprint a physical grain onto the sound, while its limitations force decisions. The first recordings become a kind of skeletal score, later reworked through overdubbing and dub-inflected studio manipulation. Production is not postscript. It is performance.

The opening track, Parajekt, unfolds with patient insistence. A beat emerges, not aggressively but with measured clarity, while layers of processed guitar and electronics accumulate like sediment. There is a sense of architecture under construction, each element positioned rather than sprayed. The rhythmic immediacy draws from electronic beat music, yet the textural density hints at musique concrète and noise traditions. It is cerebral without becoming aloof.

Camel and Cow introduces a more playful pulse, its title suggesting asymmetry. The groove shifts weight subtly, as if testing balance. Schellander’s drum programming avoids rigid quantization fetishism. Instead, there is a tactile quality, a slight push and pull that keeps the body engaged. Hammer’s electric guitar, filtered and refracted, often ceases to behave like a guitar. It becomes grain, shimmer, interference.
On Cambio and Below the Surface, reduction becomes strategy. Motifs are stripped to essentials. Repetition operates not as club hypnosis but as structural inquiry. What happens if we stay here longer. What happens if we subtract instead of add. The answer is tension that breathes rather than explodes.

The shorter pieces, Objem and Val di Festa, function almost like interludes, compact studies in texture and pacing. They prevent the album from settling into predictability. Then Primal Compression stretches out again, its title accurately describing a pressure that builds from within. Frequencies press against each other, bass weight anchoring the composition while higher elements flicker and dissolve. It feels controlled, but not sterile.

Closing track Mani e Pane offers a quieter resolution. There is warmth here, understated and deliberate. After the density of earlier moments, it lands like a modest gesture, a reminder that reduction can carry emotional charge.

Parajekt’s live approach, where the studio process itself becomes performative, is audible throughout the record. You can sense decisions being made, layers being negotiated. This is not preset culture. It is construction in real time, even when meticulously edited.

What distinguishes Parajekt is its relationship with time. The duo embraces duration, accepts restraint, and resists the temptation to over-explain. Complexity and immediacy coexist without competing. The album does not clamor for attention. It holds its ground, patient and deliberate.

After more than ten years of gestation, this debut does not sound tentative. It sounds considered. Not flashy, not hurried, not apologetic. Just two musicians who understand that depth is not a plug-in, and that sometimes the most radical move is to let sound take the time it needs.

There is something suspicious about a band called Jejeje. It sounds like a laugh typed into a message you are not entirely sure how to interpret. Is it irony, politeness, mockery, flirtation, discomfort. In Spanish it can mean all of that at once. That ambiguity is not branding. It is thesis.

With "Ambivalencia Artificial", released on 12-inch vinyl by Kitchen Leg Records in collaboration with Repetidor and Sub Post, the Berlin-based trio delivers a debut that feels less like a collection of songs and more like a corrective gesture. Against flattening algorithms, against the smooth plastic sheen of consensus culture, against the idea that everything must be optimized and categorized, Jejeje chooses friction.

The band’s roots stretch back to Barcelona’s DIY constellation around Ojalá Esté Mi Bici, eventually crystallizing in Berlin after a house concert involving Geoff Farina of Karate. The members, Jordi, Itacate, and Zutoia, bring histories from projects that orbit punk, experimental pop, and noise. You can hear that lineage, but you do not hear nostalgia. This is not retro post-punk cosplay. It is a recalibration.

Musically, the album constrains post-punk into taut, almost mathematical structures. Rhythms twitch and pivot, shifting weight with a kind of nervous intelligence. Math-rock signatures appear, but without technical grandstanding. The guitars avoid decorative flourish. Melodies slip through cracks rather than sitting proudly on top. Everything feels deliberately lean.

The opener, "Evitacionismo", sets the tone with angular propulsion. It does not explode. It tightens. The drums snap into irregular patterns while the bass line traces a minimal but insistent contour. "Ser" and "Hablar con la pared" continue this approach, building tension through repetition and abrupt turns rather than through crescendo. The title “Talk to the Wall” feels apt. There is a sense of communication attempted under adverse conditions.

Lyrically, the record addresses social homogenization, artificial intelligence, and the erosion of ambiguity. It would be easy to lapse into didactic slogans. Jejeje avoids that by staying oblique. Words are clipped, sometimes almost thrown away. The skepticism embedded in the band’s name carries through the vocal delivery. It sounds like someone laughing at a system that insists it understands you better than you understand yourself.

On "Solas en casa" and "Patético", vulnerability slips in sideways. The minimalism amplifies small gestures: a vocal inflection, a sudden rhythmic pause, a guitar line that feels like it might unravel but holds. Even moments that flirt with catchiness, such as "Peces Voladores", remain slightly off-balance. Hooks are offered, then subtly distorted.

Side B deepens the unease. "Miedo" operates on a pulse that feels simultaneously mechanical and anxious. "Copa Triangular" plays with geometric rigidity in rhythm, as if structure itself were under examination. "Televisor" and "Rayos X" lean into surveillance-era imagery, musically echoing that theme with clipped patterns and exposed spaces. The closer, "Soccorista", leaves things unresolved, hovering rather than concluding.

Kitchen Leg Records, with its long-standing DIY ethos inspired by collage culture, riot grrrl energy, and Minutemen’s econo philosophy, is a fitting home. The limited black vinyl edition with lyric inserts reinforces the physicality of the project. In a landscape saturated with frictionless streaming, this is an object that insists on edges.

What makes "Ambivalencia Artificial" compelling is its refusal to comfort. It proposes that ambivalence is not weakness but necessity. That clarity can be oppressive. That a laugh typed into the void can carry critique. The trio does not provide grand answers to technological anxiety or social flattening. Instead, they construct tight, wiry songs that embody resistance through form.

It is a debut that trusts tension more than resolution. And in a cultural moment obsessed with optimization, that feels almost radical.

Roland Schappert has a habit of speaking about routes, distances, crossings. With "Hellherz", he seems less interested in mapping territory and more in throwing messages into the water and seeing what refuses to sink. It is a small digital release, three tracks only, but conceptually it behaves like a sealed letter addressed to anyone who has ever been held hostage by language.

Schappert’s project label, r-ecords, founded in 2022 with critic Joachim Ody, was initially framed around inner and outer travelling. The earlier "ROUTE" albums traced those coordinates through what Ody once described as an “organic digitality”. That phrase still applies. Schappert builds his synthesizer sounds from scratch, shaping each tone with an almost tactile attention, as if circuitry could develop a pulse. The bass is rarely decorative; it is structural, a warm axis around which rhythm and melody rotate.

"Waiting for Nothing" opens with restraint. The beat does not rush; it calibrates. There is a subtle tension between propulsion and suspension, as if forward motion were constantly reconsidered. Schappert’s rhythmic play is not bombastic. It prefers sidesteps. The promotional text mentions shifts between 3/4 and 4/4, hopping rather than marching, and that metaphor is apt. The grooves feel elastic. They bend, then recover.

The centerpiece, "Wrap Your Words", settles into a deep 138 BPM pulse. A rounded, almost comforting fundamental tone anchors the track, while crunchy bass figures weave through it like thick threads. Bell-shaped organ synths shimmer overhead, precise but never sterile. The vocal line, delivered via a revised AI voice, hovers between intimacy and distance. This is not a gimmick. The artificial timbre reinforces the lyrical theme: words that once trapped us are bottled and sent out to sea. The gesture is both romantic and faintly absurd. There is something oddly moving about entrusting emotional residue to a synthetic throat.

Schappert’s strength lies in balance. He works within electronic frameworks that could easily tilt toward cold minimalism or over-polished club functionality. Instead, he introduces small irregularities. Hissing textures, subdued humming, melodic fragments that refuse to resolve. The music invites movement but also reflection. You can dance to it, but you may find yourself thinking mid-step about what you are trying to release.

The title track, "Hellherz", closes the trio with a slightly darker hue. The warmth remains, yet there is an undercurrent of friction, as if the heart referenced in the title were glowing and smoldering at once. The bass line presses forward insistently, while upper layers sketch angular contours. It does not explode. It smolders.

Schappert’s biography speaks of border crossings between melos, sound, and rhythm. On "Hellherz", those borders are less about genre and more about interior states. Abstraction coexists with emotional accessibility. Clarity of structure meets associative imagery. The label’s ethos of creating sound spaces for memory and dream is evident here, though without drifting into ambient vagueness.

"Hellherz" is concise, deliberate, and modest in scale, but it carries Schappert’s signature: crafted synthesis, grounded bass architecture, and rhythms that prefer leaping to stomping. It does not shout for attention. It sends its bottle out and trusts that someone, somewhere, is willing to read what washes ashore.