Memory is rarely as polite as we would like it to be. It does not preserve things intact; it scratches them, distorts them, misplaces them and occasionally returns them years later in a form we barely recognise. "Vestiges", the new album by French composer Olivier Alary for LINE, is built around precisely this unruly quality of remembrance. A continuous 43-minute composition divided into five movements, it brings together twelve amplified lap steel guitars and electronics, treating the ensemble almost as a single instrumental organism rather than twelve separate voices.

The concept may sound cerebral, but the music itself is remarkably physical. Alary's starting point is almost disarmingly simple: sustained slide movements across the strings generate resonance, interference and tiny fluctuations in pitch. From this limited vocabulary emerges an extraordinarily unstable sonic field. The guitars begin to lose their conventional identity, producing tones that hover somewhere between strings, voices, electrical hum and distant environmental noise. It is less a choir of guitars than a choir remembering that it was once something else.

Alary has been exploring the borderlands between composition, electronic music and sound art for decades, with previous work appearing on LINE including "Pieces for Sine Wave Oscillators" and "Apparitions (Vol. 1)". His approach has consistently favoured acoustic phenomena that seem to occupy the threshold between recognisable sound and abstraction. With "Vestiges", that threshold becomes the entire subject.
The opening movement establishes the principle without rushing to explain it. Sustained tones gradually interfere with one another, creating beating frequencies and harmonic shadows that seem to appear independently of the performers. Nothing dramatic happens, yet the ear becomes increasingly occupied. What initially resembles a static drone reveals itself as a landscape in constant microscopic motion.

The second and third movements deepen the illusion. Noise, saturation, friction and unstable intonation become structural components rather than imperfections to be corrected. The effect recalls the physical deterioration of analogue recordings: hiss, distortion, wear and the vague sensation that something has been copied too many times. Yet there is no nostalgia for obsolete technology here. These qualities have become part of the composition itself.

This is particularly effective because "Vestiges" never tries to imitate an old recording. Instead, it behaves like one.

Alary's fascination with Robert Smithson's "Partially Buried Woodshed" and Daniel Spoerri's "Le Déjeuner sous l'herbe" provides an illuminating parallel. Both works involve objects or events being buried, concealed and subsequently encountered through excavation. "Vestiges" applies a similar logic to sound. These tones feel less composed than unearthed, as if they had spent years underground accumulating pressure and geological dirt before somebody finally decided to listen to them.

That metaphor also explains why the album can feel strangely intimate despite its scale. Twelve lap steels should, theoretically, announce themselves as an ensemble. Here they dissolve into a collective body. Their proximity produces psychoacoustic effects that are almost vocal: pitches seem to breathe, tones swell and recede, and harmonic combinations appear where no individual instrument appears responsible for them.

The fourth movement is particularly striking in this respect. The music seems to hover between emergence and disappearance, with fragments of apparent melody forming briefly before being absorbed back into the surrounding mass. It creates the peculiar impression of hearing something through a wall, or perhaps remembering a sound rather than actually hearing it. The distinction becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

By the fifth movement, the music has acquired a remarkable emotional weight without ever resorting to conventional expression. There are no melodies to hum afterwards, no dramatic climax waiting patiently for its cue, no obvious narrative resolution. Instead, Alary makes tiny alterations feel consequential. A change in density, a slight shift in pitch or a new layer of distortion can suddenly alter the entire perceived architecture.

That patience is the album's greatest virtue.

"Vestiges" demands attention, but it does not reward impatience. Its drama exists at the scale of minute changes, where listening becomes less about following events and more about noticing that the supposedly static object has been moving all along. Human beings usually require explosions, choruses or at least someone falling down the stairs before they agree that something has happened. Alary gets away with a tremor in the harmonic field.

The result is haunting without relying on the usual vocabulary of haunted music. There are no ghosts being theatrically summoned. Instead, the instruments become conduits for absence. The “voices” we seem to hear are produced by resonance and interference, but our perception insists on giving them a human quality. The séance is therefore partly performed by the musicians and partly by our own brains, which remain stubbornly committed to finding faces in clouds and voices in static.

"Vestiges" ultimately suggests that deterioration can be a form of creation. Its sounds become beautiful not despite their noise, instability and opacity, but because of them. Every imperfection seems to carry evidence of something having happened before.

And that may be the album's quietest achievement: it makes time audible without trying to illustrate it.

The music does not reconstruct the past.

It lets the past leave a stain.

There are bands that blend genres because they cannot decide what they want to be, and then there are bands that do it because deciding would be terribly boring. New York's Makes My Blood Dance belong firmly to the second category. On their debut album "#Z3R0 2 LGHT $P33D!", electro, goth, metal, industrial funk and disco are thrown into the same room and somehow emerge looking like they had planned the meeting all along.

The band's formula is deceptively simple: serrated guitars, synthetic rhythms, heavy bass and vocals capable of moving from theatrical grandeur to intimate seduction. But the real trick is the rhythmic architecture. MMBD understand that darkness becomes considerably more effective when it can dance. “Time And A Place” establishes this immediately, balancing melancholic reflection with a beat that refuses to sit quietly in the corner. The song's sense of longing is wrapped in something almost club-oriented, creating a curious tension between vulnerability and propulsion.

“Black Summer” and “Impossible Odds” push further towards the industrial-metal side, where distorted guitars and electronic pulses collide without either element being reduced to decoration. The production by Bret “Epic” Mazur and Mikal Blue keeps the record polished and forceful, but there is enough contrast between the tracks to prevent the album becoming one extended wall of synthetic testosterone.

“Your Little Hand In Mine” introduces a more sensual dimension, while “Heavy Metal Armour” is considerably less interested in subtlety. The title alone apparently decided that subtlety had already been adequately represented elsewhere. Yet beneath the oversized gestures, MMBD have a good instinct for hooks, repetition and theatrical pacing. Their music is clearly designed with performance in mind, and the songs often feel as though they are already illuminated by strobes.

The most intriguing detour is “Lately”, a reworking of Macy Gray's song featuring Gray herself. Turning a soul-pop composition into industrial funk could easily have become an exercise in unnecessary violence, but MMBD preserve the emotional centre while surrounding it with harder electronic and rhythmic contours. Gray's unmistakable voice provides an important contrast to EV0's more dramatic delivery, making the track feel less like a novelty collaboration and more like an encounter between two different musical worlds.

Elsewhere, “Forget To Let It In” and “Invisible Friend” reveal a slightly more melodic side, suggesting that beneath the band's deliberately exaggerated visual and sonic identity there is a genuine interest in atmosphere. “Spin You Around” then brings the dance impulse back to the foreground, before the EDM remix of “Time And A Place” closes the album by making explicit what the rest of the record has been quietly insisting upon: these songs are built to move people physically as much as emotionally.

That is perhaps the key to understanding MMBD. Calling them “electro-goth” or “disco-metal” is useful only until the music starts playing. Their real territory lies somewhere between the nightclub, the metal venue and the theatrical stage, a place where a bass drum can be both a club pulse and a rock weapon. Their live aesthetic, with its carefully constructed visuals and ritualistic presentation, reinforces this sense that the songs are components of a larger spectacle rather than isolated recordings.

There is certainly an element of excess here. The band is not frightened of melodrama, grand gestures or titles written as though a keyboard had been left alone with a teenager's password generator. But excess is not necessarily a flaw when it is understood as part of the language. MMBD know that gothic culture has always contained a strange relationship between sincerity and spectacle, and they exploit that contradiction rather effectively.

What makes "#Z3R0 2 LGHT $P33D!" more than a collection of stylistic references is its consistency of purpose. The album wants darkness without austerity, heaviness without abandoning the dance floor, and theatricality without losing the songs underneath the costumes. It occasionally comes close to overplaying its hand, but that is preferable to sounding timid. A band calling itself Makes My Blood Dance has presumably accepted certain responsibilities.

The strongest moments arrive when the genres stop behaving like separate ingredients. Guitars become rhythmic machinery, synths become atmosphere, bass becomes physical pressure and the voice becomes both narrator and performer. The resulting sound is glossy, muscular and knowingly dramatic, but there is enough emotional uncertainty beneath the surface to keep it from becoming mere spectacle.

"#Z3R0 2 LGHT $P33D!" is therefore less a declaration that goth has discovered the dance floor than a reminder that the two were never really strangers. It is music for the moment when the apocalypse gets bored with being apocalyptic and decides to put on better clothes.

Human civilisation may be collapsing. At least someone remembered to bring the synthesizers.

There is something almost perversely physical about "Sustained". Fabian Altstötter, the Berlin-based musician behind Jungstötter, builds his third album around the human breath, but refuses to turn that idea into some tasteful wellness metaphor. Breathing here is effort, interruption, desire, exhaustion: the sound of a body trying to remain present while everything around it seems determined to become noise.

Compared with the denser architecture of "Love Is" and "One Star", "Sustained" is remarkably reduced. Piano, strings, harmonica, electronics and abrasive fragments occupy a narrow but intensely expressive space, while Altstötter's voice moves through it with an unusual mixture of distance and immediacy. Sometimes it sounds barely attached to the body producing it; elsewhere it suddenly becomes almost startlingly melodic. The contrast gives the songs their peculiar tension. Nothing is quite comfortable, including the beautiful parts.

The opening "Overturn" establishes the album's language through repetition and disruption, its rhythmic pattern constantly threatening to lose its balance. "Sunk" then sinks into something more intimate, where piano and harmonica seem to rub against one another like two memories that cannot quite agree. On "That Noise", disturbance becomes almost a character in itself, while "Tell This Lover" and "Loud Fingers" reveal how effectively Altstötter can let conventional songcraft emerge from the wreckage.

The remarkable thing is that "Sustained" never mistakes fragility for gentleness. Its quiet moments can be more unsettling than its eruptions. Noise scratches at melodies; melodies retreat rather than resolve; instruments seem to breathe, hesitate and occasionally lose patience. Even "Again", featuring Ronja's spectral vocals, feels less like a duet than two separate bodies briefly discovering that they occupy the same atmosphere.

Altstötter's lyrics are similarly resistant to tidy interpretation. They move through love, exhaustion, desire, alienation and bodily sensation using images that feel half-remembered rather than explained. "Seaweed", "Consume Me" and "Elastic (Avenue)" are particularly good examples of this strange poetic elasticity: concrete images become psychological states without ever settling into symbolism with an instruction manual attached.

There is also something quietly political beneath the romanticism. Altstötter describes the album through the idea of a communal body, sustained by many people breathing alongside one another. That notion gives the record an emotional dimension beyond private melancholy. The “I” is repeatedly invaded by other voices, other hands, other breaths. Even solitude becomes relational.

This may explain why the album feels intimate without becoming confessional. "Sustained" is not interested in handing the listener a diary and asking for sympathy. It creates a fragile acoustic organism and lets us hear it struggling to remain alive. The music contracts, expands, scratches, pauses and starts again.

Human beings have spent centuries trying to make suffering sound profound. Altstötter takes the more difficult route: he makes it sound ordinary, physical and occasionally beautiful.

Then he lets it breathe.

An ear is a rather indiscreet creature. It cannot close its eyes, look away or politely pretend not to have noticed something. It collects voices, footsteps, machines, weather, fragments of conversation and noises whose meaning may only become apparent decades later. "L’oreille Voleuse", the extraordinary collaboration between Brunhild Ferrari, Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke, begins with precisely this idea: sound as something accidentally stolen from the world and subsequently kept as a memory.

Brunhild Ferrari is hardly a newcomer to this particular form of acoustic kleptomania. After working with Pierre Schaeffer at the ORTF's research department, she developed her own practice in electroacoustic composition and radio art, while also spending four decades alongside Luc Ferrari and later becoming one of the principal guardians of his extensive archive. Her approach has always been less about constructing an artificial sonic universe than remaining alert to the one already happening around us. "L’oreille Voleuse" gathers recordings accumulated over many years, mostly on magnetic tape, and turns them into a twenty-minute composition in which memory refuses to behave chronologically.

The original version is wonderfully disorientating. Sounds appear without announcing their origins: voices emerge from somewhere inside the texture, environmental noises pass across the stereo field, mechanical hums and sudden disturbances interrupt one another, while occasional musical gestures seem to materialise from the surrounding debris. There is a sense of travelling without ever being given a map. The piece does not ask us to identify every sound. In fact, doing so would rather miss the point. These are not exhibits in a sonic museum. They are memories whose labels have fallen off.

Ferrari's connection with Luc Ferrari (they were partners in life and sometimes in art) inevitably hovers over the project, particularly his "Presque rien" works, where apparently insignificant environmental details could become the substance of a composition. But "L’oreille Voleuse" is not an exercise in historical reconstruction. The recordings are treated as living material, with all the ambiguity that implies. What was once simply heard becomes something remembered, and what is remembered is never quite identical to what actually happened.
Then the second side changes the rules.

Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke take the original material and perform it anew, recorded live at La Muse en Circuit in Paris in October 2025. Their version is not a respectful dusting-off of Ferrari's archive. It is more like entering somebody else's dream and moving the furniture around. Certain sounds disappear, others become more prominent, new textures are introduced, and the relationship between foreground and background is constantly renegotiated.

Ishibashi, whose work moves freely between experimental music, improvisation, songwriting and film composition, and O’Rourke, whose career has wandered through contemporary composition, electronic music, rock, improvisation and production with almost unreasonable persistence, are particularly well suited to this task. Neither approaches the source material as something that must remain untouched. They listen for possibilities.

The result is darker and more unstable than the original, with electronics and instrumental sounds creating new pressure around Ferrari's recordings. Yet the intervention never feels like an attempt to improve the source. That distinction is crucial. The duo does not correct the archive; they activate it.

This makes the two versions fascinating when heard together. The first is a collection of memories assembled by their owner. The second is what happens when those memories are handed to other ears. Suddenly the same fragments acquire different emotional temperatures. A voice that seemed incidental can become ominous; a mechanical sound can acquire rhythm; an apparently empty stretch can suddenly feel charged with expectation.

The title therefore works on several levels. The ear is “thieving” because it takes without permission, but there is nothing particularly criminal about the act. Listening itself is a form of involuntary collecting. We carry around sounds we never consciously decided to remember: the noise of a particular room, an engine heard at night, a voice from a distant apartment, rain against a window whose location we have forgotten. Eventually these fragments become part of the internal furniture.

There is something quietly moving about hearing Ferrari reopen this archive at this stage of her life. The project does not romanticise memory or pretend that preservation means keeping everything unchanged. Quite the opposite: "L’oreille Voleuse" suggests that a sound becomes alive again only when someone is willing to disturb it.

That is why the Ishibashi/O’Rourke version is so important. It demonstrates that an archive is not necessarily a cemetery. It can be a playground, provided one is careful with the ghosts, and there are plenty of them here.

What makes the record remarkable is its refusal to separate composition from listening. Ferrari listens to the world, records it, remembers it and rearranges it; Ishibashi and O’Rourke listen to that rearrangement and produce another. The listener then enters the chain, hearing both versions and inevitably constructing a third in the imagination.

Nobody owns the final piece. The ear has already stolen it.

There are places where ambient music makes sense almost before the first note is played. La Rosa, a former Benedictine monastery and church in Tucson transformed into a concert venue in 2025, is one of them. On December 6, 2025, Steve Roach entered this unusual space for a two-hour performance that now arrives as "LA ROSA – Live in Tucson, 2025", a two-CD document of an artist reaching an intriguing point in the fourth decade of his live career. The setting matters, but not simply because “ambient music in a former monastery” is the sort of sentence that practically writes its own press release. The architecture gives Roach's music somewhere to resonate beyond the speakers.

Few electronic musicians have spent as long investigating the relationship between sound, space and altered perception. Since "Structures From Silence" in 1984 and "Dreamtime Return" in 1988, Roach has developed several intertwined languages: deep ambient, sequencer-driven electronic music, tribal and trance-inflected material, and an increasingly sophisticated fascination with environmental sound. "LA ROSA" brings these strands together without making them feel like exhibits in a museum of Steve Roach. This is not a retrospective with convenient labels attached. It is a living sequence in which different periods of his work begin to recognise one another.

The opening “Spirals of Yearning” occupies more than thirty-six minutes, and that duration immediately establishes the rules. Roach is not interested in getting anywhere quickly. Slowly evolving harmonies, spacious electronic textures and carefully articulated sequencer patterns create a sense of motion without conventional progression. The music seems to expand sideways rather than forwards, as though someone had removed the walls from a composition and left the architecture exposed.

Then “Born of Darkness” changes the temperature. The fujara, a remarkably large overtone flute, introduces an organic, almost archaic voice into Roach's electronic environment, while percussion and electronic resonance create an uneasy meeting between primordial and futuristic sound. It is one of the album's strengths that these elements never feel like exotic decorations. They belong to the same vocabulary. Roach has spent decades making acoustic instruments and environmental recordings coexist with synthesizers without allowing either side to become merely illustrative.

“Desert Solitude” returns to a more spacious register, and here the Tucson connection becomes especially palpable. Nocturnal ambience and natural sounds are not simply inserted as documentary evidence of the surrounding landscape; they dissolve the boundary between the physical location and the imagined one. A coyote can suddenly seem like part of the electronic composition, which is probably the only sensible career move for a coyote.

The second disc opens with “Prometheus Returns / The Continent”, bringing greater rhythmic definition into the picture. Sequencers become more prominent, patterns interlock and the music acquires a subterranean momentum. This is the side of Roach that connects him to the wider history of Berlin School electronics, but his approach is rarely merely retro. The sequencer is not a machine for demonstrating technical nostalgia. It becomes a pulse around which harmonic and textural events can orbit.

“Songlines / Otherworld” is perhaps the most obvious bridge between Roach's electronic and organic vocabularies. Its roots reach back to "Dreamtime Return", the 1988 landmark that emerged from his engagement with the Australian landscape and Aboriginal musical traditions. The didgeridoo becomes an important presence, but the performance does not simply reproduce the old album's mythology. Decades later, the material has acquired another layer: memory itself.

That sense of accumulated time is one of the reasons "LA ROSA" succeeds. Roach is not trying to sound young, contemporary or fashionable. Thankfully. There are enough electronic musicians desperately trying to convince us that a new sequencer preset constitutes a cultural event. Roach instead sounds like someone who has spent forty years learning exactly how little needs to happen for something to become immersive.

“Magnificent Gallery / Circular Ceremony” and “Bliss Current” continue this balancing act between pulse and suspension. The music can become surprisingly propulsive before dissolving back into spacious harmonic fields. “This Moment of Today” then strips the momentum down, preparing the ground for the final threshold: “Structures From Silence”.

Ending with that piece is almost impossibly loaded. The original 1984 album remains one of the foundational works of ambient music, built around sustained, slowly breathing harmonies and a radical willingness to let silence become part of the composition. Yet hearing the piece here is not simply a trip back to 1984. The intervening decades are audible. The composer performing it is no longer the young synthesizer enthusiast who discovered how far a single chord could travel. He is someone who has spent a lifetime refining the same question.

What happens when electronic sound stops behaving like machinery and starts behaving like breath?

"LA ROSA" never answers this directly. It does something more convincing: it keeps demonstrating the question.

The lack of post-production overdubs or edits is significant. What we hear is a performance constructed and mixed by Roach from the stage, preserving the continuous movement of the evening rather than manufacturing a cleaner studio object afterwards. There are therefore moments where the music feels slightly vulnerable, where transitions retain the physicality of performance rather than the suspicious perfection of a carefully assembled album. That vulnerability suits the material. Ambient music is often accused of being too immaculate, too frictionless, too determined to make the listener comfortable. Roach allows the concert to remain a concert.

The result is not really about escape, either. It is about attention. The deeper one listens, the more distinctions begin to dissolve: electronic and acoustic, ancient and futuristic, rhythm and stillness, composition and environment. The sacred character of La Rosa becomes less a religious statement than a condition of listening. For two hours, the venue becomes a resonating chamber for memories that belong partly to Roach, partly to the audience and partly to the music itself.

When the final applause arrives after “Structures From Silence”, it feels less like the end of a concert than the moment when a dream remembers that it has a waking world outside it.

For an artist whose career has been built on extending time, that is perhaps the most appropriate conclusion.

The remarkable thing about "LA ROSA" is not that Steve Roach still sounds like Steve Roach.

It is that, after more than forty years, he still seems capable of discovering new rooms inside the same sound.