There are collaborations that make perfect sense on paper, collaborations that seem designed by an algorithm after being fed the words "legendary", "experimental" and "unlikely". Then there is "Strange City", which belongs to the more entertaining category of ideas that sound both completely inevitable and faintly illegal. Sun Ra and Merzbow.

One spent his life insisting that earthly categories were insufficient for understanding music, identity and existence. The other spent more than four decades demonstrating that earthly categories were also insufficient for understanding what constitutes an acceptable volume level. That they never actually met is, therefore, less a problem than an invitation to science fiction.

Originally issued by Cold Spring in 2016, "Strange City" now returns in an expanded 2CD edition that finally gathers material previously divided between the CD and LP editions. The new edition also adds “Granular Jazz Part 5”, originally made for Stuart Maconie's "Freak Zone" on BBC 6 Music. The result is roughly 104 minutes of music, which is enough time for several philosophical crises, one meal and at least two reconsiderations of your relationship with your neighbours.

The underlying concept is deceptively simple. Masami Akita, the Tokyo-based musician known as Merzbow, was given access to recordings from Sun Ra's archive, particularly material connected with "The Magic City" and "Strange Strings". Rather than presenting these recordings as sacred historical artefacts, he subjects them to his own vocabulary: distortion, feedback, electronic abrasion, loops, granular processing and vast accumulations of sound.

This is not a remix in the conventional sense. It is closer to archaeological vandalism. And I mean that as a compliment.

The opening of “Livid Sun Loop” is perhaps the best place to understand the operation. Fragments of Sun Ra's horns, drums and ensemble emerge sufficiently clearly to establish a recognisable musical past. Then Merzbow begins applying pressure. The original material is stretched, submerged, pulverised and periodically allowed to surface again, like something trapped underneath an industrial machine that has developed an interest in free jazz.

The crucial point is that Sun Ra does not completely disappear. That has been the source of some disagreement around the record since its original release. Some critics felt that Akita's noise overwhelms the source material to the point where the supposed collaboration becomes essentially another Merzbow record. Others have heard precisely the opposite phenomenon: Sun Ra's rhythmic and cosmic logic surviving underneath the violence, providing a hidden skeleton for the apparent chaos. Both interpretations contain some truth. But the ambiguity is exactly what makes "Strange City" work.

Sun Ra's music was never simply “jazz” in the tidy historical sense. His Arkestra could use swing, free improvisation, electronics, ritual, repetition and theatricality without asking permission from genre historians. His cosmic mythology was not merely eccentric decoration either. It gave him a way of imagining music as something capable of escaping the social and aesthetic limitations imposed upon it.
Merzbow's approach is similarly uncompromising, although his chosen vehicle is noise. So the real meeting point is not instrumentation.

It is "cosmology".

Sun Ra imagined music escaping Earth. Merzbow makes Earth itself sound as though it has malfunctioned.

“Livid Sun Loop” consequently feels less like jazz being covered in noise than like a recording being exposed to an entirely different physical environment. The horns are no longer simply horns. Percussion becomes rhythmic debris. Frequencies acquire mass. The music seems to stop obeying the ordinary relationship between foreground and background.

This is especially effective because Merzbow is not simply turning a knob marked "LOUD" and going home.

There is architecture underneath the brutality. The noise shifts in density and frequency. Rhythmic fragments recur. High frequencies sharpen the surface while lower registers provide weight. Layers accumulate and separate. After sufficient exposure, the ear begins to identify patterns inside what initially seemed like undifferentiated destruction. This phenomenon has been noted repeatedly in earlier assessments of the album: prolonged listening changes the listener's relationship with the noise, making its internal movement increasingly perceptible. In other words, Merzbow eventually teaches your ears to live in the disaster. Human civilisation has achieved stranger things, admittedly.

The first disc's second piece, “Granular Jazz Part 2”, pushes the relationship further. It is less concerned with the initial shock of impact and more interested in what happens after the original jazz material has been thoroughly contaminated. Sun Ra's presence becomes spectral rather than obvious, appearing through rhythmic suggestions, fragments of timbre and fleeting instrumental shapes.

This is where the title "Strange City" starts to feel particularly appropriate. A city is recognisable through patterns: roads, buildings, voices, traffic, repetition. Destroy those patterns and the city becomes noise. Yet even inside the noise, traces of the original organisation remain.
Merzbow does something similar to Sun Ra. He destroys the city without completely erasing its map.

The newly collected "Granular Jazz Parts 1–4" deepen this process. “Part 1” establishes a more gradual transformation, while “Part 3” becomes considerably more turbulent. “Part 4”, by contrast, is fascinating because it reduces the obvious violence and allows atmosphere to take over. Earlier criticism has recognised this relative restraint as one of the album's most striking moments.

It is tempting to call this the “quiet” section. That would be misleading.

Merzbow quiet is roughly equivalent to being trapped inside a malfunctioning aircraft engine that has recently discovered minimalism. But proportion matters. After enormous stretches of density, even a modest reduction in pressure becomes almost melodic. The ear recalibrates itself. Space acquires drama.

This is one of the album's most sophisticated characteristics: "volume is not its only weapon".

The newly restored sequence also makes more sense as a whole than the original split-format presentation. The 2016 edition had different music on CD and LP, partly because the extreme durations imposed practical limitations on vinyl mastering. This reissue removes that artificial division and allows the entire project to be heard as a single body. That matters.

"Strange City" is fundamentally about transformation over time. Its enormous durations are not an inconvenience to be overcome but part of the composition's physical logic. A three-minute version would be almost meaningless. The music needs time to become familiar enough for its internal relationships to reveal themselves. And this is where Sun Ra's presence becomes stranger. The longer you listen, the less useful it becomes to ask where Sun Ra ends and Merzbow begins.

At first, you hear a Sun Ra fragment being attacked by Merzbow. Then you hear Merzbow surrounding Sun Ra. Eventually you hear neither. You hear "Strange City".

That distinction is important because the record's greatest success is not preservation. It is transformation. Sun Ra is not being respectfully framed behind museum glass. He is being put through the machine. There is something beautifully appropriate about that. Sun Ra himself was a master of transformation, constantly reinventing his ensemble, his identity, his mythology and his conception of what music could contain. His archive is therefore being treated not as a mausoleum but as raw material. Even the historical gap becomes productive.

Sun Ra died in 1993. Merzbow's "Strange City" sessions took place in Tokyo in 2016. The two musicians belong to different generations, different scenes and radically different technological environments. Yet the album makes that distance feel less like an obstacle than an additional compositional layer.

Time becomes another effect pedal. The bonus “Granular Jazz Part 5”, brief at just two minutes, is almost comically short beside the other pieces. It works as a kind of epilogue, though its existence also reinforces the archival character of this edition. The main body is immense; the final fragment feels like one last transmission picked up from the wrong frequency.

That is perhaps the best way to understand "Strange City". Not as a collaboration between two musicians who never collaborated. Not even as a remix project.

But as a "conversation between two ideas about what sound can become".

Sun Ra supplies the extraterrestrial imagination, the rhythmic intelligence, the sense that jazz might be something much larger than its earthly genealogy.

Merzbow supplies the force necessary to make that imagination physically uncomfortable. One points toward Saturn. The other blows up the launchpad.

The astonishing thing is that the rocket still gets somewhere.

There are moments here when the jazz material is so thoroughly buried that one might reasonably wonder whether the Sun Ra connection has become merely conceptual. That criticism remains valid, particularly for listeners expecting a more balanced dialogue. Earlier reviews have disagreed sharply on precisely this question. But perhaps balance would have been the wrong objective. A balanced Sun Ra/Merzbow record would be considerably less interesting.

The imbalance is the event.

The source material survives not by remaining intact but by being damaged, displaced and forced into another language. That is why the occasional appearance of a horn, rhythm or vocal texture can feel almost miraculous. It is not nostalgia. It is evidence. Something was here. Something is still here. And it has been through hell.

"Strange City" is therefore a peculiar kind of archival release: one that does not merely preserve the past but subjects it to another future. Sun Ra's cosmic jazz is not reconstructed. It is reimagined through one of the most extreme sonic practices of the modern era.

The result is abrasive, excessive, occasionally absurd and frequently magnificent. It is also oddly moving. Not because Merzbow makes Sun Ra sound beautiful. Because, underneath all that electronic violence, Sun Ra still sounds like someone trying to get a message through. Perhaps that is the real collaboration. One musician sends a transmission from Saturn. Another fills the channel with static. And somehow, against all reasonable expectations, the message survives.

I actually had the chance to experience this strange beast in the flesh in Manchester in 2016, around the time the material was being presented live. I still remember the sheer physical impact of it. This wasn't simply something you listened to; it seemed to arrive as a weather system with a personal grudge. The room was being hit by wave after wave of noise, with Merzbow's machinery turning the remnants of Sun Ra's cosmic jazz into something vast, metallic and almost aggressively corporeal. I distinctly remember looking around and wondering whether everybody else was experiencing the same thing or whether my ears had already resigned from their employment. There were, inevitably, people joking about their ears bleeding, but the joke contained an uncomfortable amount of truth: the sound was so intense that hearing became a physical activity, something involving the entire body rather than just the supposedly convenient organs on either side of the head. It was awesome, ridiculous and slightly terrifying, which seems an entirely appropriate description of a Sun Ra/Merzbow encounter. Listening to Strange City again now, almost a decade later, brings back that sensation with surprising force. The record may be archival, but its impact remains stubbornly present tense.

There is a particular kind of musical memory that does not remember events so much as temperatures. A certain afternoon light. Salt drying on the skin. The colour of a wall just before sunset. The sound of water becoming indistinguishable from wind. "Aegean Gold", Ran Slavin's twenty-second solo long-player, operates almost entirely inside that peculiar territory where recollection stops being documentary and becomes atmosphere.

This is important, because an album inspired by the Aegean could very easily have become a soundtrack for an expensive holiday advertisement. One can almost imagine the danger: turquoise water, tasteful linen clothing, an abandoned amphora, somebody gazing meaningfully toward the horizon while a Greek island appears to have been personally curated by a luxury hotel chain. Thankfully, Slavin has more interesting things in mind.

The sea here is not really a landscape. It is a state of mind.

Slavin has spent more than two decades moving between electronic composition, cinematic sound, abstraction and visual art, and "Aegean Gold" feels like the work of somebody who understands that landscape is never merely what stands in front of the eyes. It is also what the mind subsequently does with it. His own Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings, founded in 2022, has become a kind of self-contained home for this ongoing body of work, allowing the albums to exist without having to obey the usual industrial superstition that every record must announce itself as a new beginning. There is, instead, continuity.

The opening trio makes this unusually clear. “Sun Kissed Waters”, “Saffron Breeze” and “Marble & Salt” first appear in abbreviated versions before returning later in more expansive forms. These are not simply radio edits followed by their supposedly serious incarnations. They function more like photographic exposures of different durations. One gives you the glance, another asks you to remain in the room. That structural decision says quite a lot about Slavin's understanding of memory.

Memory rarely operates in real time. Sometimes an entire summer survives as a two-second flash. Sometimes a trivial afternoon returns with ridiculous cinematic detail decades later. The short and long versions of these pieces mirror that instability: recollection can be a postcard or an entire climate.

Musically, "Aegean Gold" is remarkably restrained. Slow-moving drones, vintage-flavoured orchestral pads and delicate electronic textures provide the broad atmospheric field, but the album's most consequential presence is the piano. It does not behave like a grand classical protagonist arriving to explain the plot. It appears modestly, sometimes almost apologetically, tracing melodic paths through the surrounding haze. Bandcamp describes the album as piano-led orchestral ambient, and that description is accurate, although perhaps too well behaved for something whose emotional effects are considerably more slippery. The piano gives the record something human to hold onto. Without it, the surrounding electronics could have become an exceptionally attractive piece of environmental design. With it, they acquire hesitation. A note can sound like a decision. A chord can feel like the recollection of one.

“Golden Haze” is particularly effective in this respect. Its atmosphere does not attempt to imitate sunlight literally. Instead, it creates the sensation of light losing its edges. The drones seem to soften the distance between objects, while the melodic fragments retain just enough definition to suggest that something is being remembered rather than merely observed. “Coral Veil / Glacier Green” extends that ambiguity. Even the title seems to contain two incompatible temperatures: tropical warmth and mineral coldness. Slavin's music thrives on precisely these small contradictions. The Mediterranean is not presented as a single colour but as an unstable palette in which blue can become silver, gold can become grey, and brightness can acquire melancholy.

This is where "Aegean Gold" becomes more than a travelogue. The record certainly contains geographical specificity. “Plomari Days” is named after the town on Lesbos, while “Sea & Santur” places the sea beside the distinctive sound-world of the santur. But these references never become ethnographic postcards. They function as mnemonic triggers. The music does not tell us what the Aegean is. It asks what the Aegean might become inside somebody's memory. That distinction saves the album from the worst excesses of ambient tourism.

There is also something intriguing about Slavin's choice of electronic means. His music has always occupied a zone where sound, cinema and visual imagination overlap, and the present album often feels as though it has been photographed rather than composed. Yet it remains unmistakably synthetic. The orchestral colours have a slight patina, the drones possess the patience of machines, and the electronics never completely disappear behind their picturesque associations. Nature is being remembered through technology. Which is, in fairness, what most of us do now. We photograph sunsets, record waves, geo-tag ruins and then spend years looking at compressed representations of places we once inhabited physically. The machine has become part of memory's vocabulary.

Slavin simply makes that condition sound beautiful. The album's most substantial achievement is therefore its refusal to distinguish sharply between external landscape and internal projection. “Marble & Salt” can suggest architecture, mineral surfaces, seawater and skin without deciding which one matters most. “Saffron Breeze” feels almost tactile despite being constructed from electronic materials. “Sun Kissed Waters” does not need actual waves because the imagination supplies them with embarrassing efficiency.

And then there is “Sea & Santur”, which closes the album without really closing anything. The title proposes an encounter between two things, but the music leaves them suspended in a soft field of resonance. It feels less like arriving somewhere than watching the last light retreat from a shoreline. That is probably the right ending. Because "Aegean Gold" is ultimately not about Greece. It is about "the places we carry after leaving them".

The distinction matters. A geographical location exists independently of our affection for it. Memory does not. Memory edits relentlessly. It removes the unpleasant weather, the arguments, the badly timed ferry, the mosquito bites, the overpriced coffee and the person who was irritating for three consecutive days. It retains the light. Slavin's great trick is to allow the music to behave in exactly this way.

There are no hard edges here because memory tends to sand them down. There is little dramatic conflict because recollection is an unreliable curator. Even melancholy arrives filtered through warmth. The album does not deny sadness; it simply lets it float in the same water as beauty. This is also why the title "Aegean Gold" works better than it initially seems. Gold is not merely a colour. It is what memory does to certain experiences. It makes them precious, sometimes disproportionately so. The ordinary becomes luminous because it has been removed from ordinary time.

Slavin understands that transformation without becoming sentimental about it. The result is a record that can be approached as ambient music, modern-classical electronics, cinematic composition or simply as a place to sit quietly for forty-seven minutes. The ten-track sequence lasts just under forty-eight minutes, with the repeated compositions providing a useful sense of recurrence rather than conventional development. And perhaps that is its deepest strength: "Aegean Gold" does not demand attention through novelty. It asks for time. That can feel almost radical now.

Modern music, like modern life, seems increasingly terrified that you might become bored for seven seconds. Slavin instead allows sounds to linger until they cease being objects and become surroundings. The music does not constantly move forward. Sometimes it simply changes the light.

By the end, the Aegean has become less a place than a condition: sun on water, mineral under fingertips, a piano note suspended in air, an image already fading as it appears.

A beautiful memory, perhaps. Or a memory of something that never happened. At this point, the distinction seems rather unnecessary.

Identity is a rather inconvenient thing. We like to imagine it as a possession, something stored somewhere inside the body alongside our childhood memories, embarrassing photographs and the passwords we will definitely remember this time. But identity becomes considerably less stable once another person enters the room. What do they see? What have they misunderstood? What have we misunderstood about what they have understood?

"Tombeaux Infinis", the third Cyparissus album for Dragon's Eye Recordings, has no tidy answer to these questions. It does something more interesting: it turns the problem into a method of composition.

Cyparissus is the alias of Kenneth Moss, an environmental science educator from central Maine who has been making music since the mid-2000s without following the conventional academic route into composition. Their interests in biology, entomology, language and the natural world have long seeped into the music, which often occupies the porous territory between ambient, experimental electronics, drone and sound collage. Previous Cyparissus releases such as "To the Moon and Back" and "Two Shakes of a Lamb's Tail" already treated identity as something unstable and difficult to observe from within. This new record turns the camera around.

The trilogy's first volume looked backward, the second examined the immediate present, and "Tombeaux Infinis" looks outward, toward the gaze of other people. The conceptual progression sounds neat on paper, but the music itself is anything but neat. It behaves like a collection of damaged mirrors, each returning a recognisable image with some crucial piece missing.

“Calamine Crush” establishes the atmosphere with a strange mixture of delicacy and unease. Sounds seem to emerge from a haze rather than begin at a clearly defined point. There is no insistence on the clean architecture of conventional electronic composition. Instead, Cyparissus allows textures to hover, overlap and acquire meaning through proximity. That looseness is deceptive. The album is carefully constructed, but its construction is deliberately made visible as a process of uncertainty. Voices, fragments and electronic material are not presented as finished objects. They are shown being interpreted.

The most revealing sequence involves Freddy Ruppert. First, his reading of text written by Cyparissus is presented with minimal interference. Then the voice is broken apart, glitched and granulated until language approaches the threshold of intelligibility. Finally, the material is reconstructed so that Ruppert's voice speaks phrases assembled by Cyparissus.

The progression is quietly brutal.

First: this is what you said.

Then: this is what remains when I interfere.

Finally: this is what I hear you saying.

It is difficult to think of a more accurate sonic metaphor for human relationships.

We spend enormous amounts of time interpreting other people, usually with the confidence of people who have never once had access to the complete evidence. A pause becomes a judgement. A facial expression becomes a message. Silence becomes an accusation. Someone says something perfectly ordinary and we spend three days constructing an elaborate psychological opera around it.

Cyparissus turns that basic human malfunction into musical form. “Alces” and “Cimmerian” continue the movement between comprehensible material and atmospheric ambiguity. The sounds are sparse but never empty. There is a sense of information constantly approaching the listener and then withdrawing before it can be completely decoded. This is where the album's title becomes particularly evocative. "Tombeaux Infinis" suggests infinite tombs, endless repositories of things that have been buried but not necessarily forgotten. The record feels populated by such remnants: voices stripped from their original context, phrases severed from their intentions, sounds detached from their sources. Nothing is quite dead, but nothing is entirely alive in its original form either. The past is not preserved. It is edited.

“What is meant by the phrase, ‘La tristesse durera toujours.’” takes this uncertainty into more explicitly linguistic territory. The famous sentence associated with the final words of Vincent van Gogh becomes less a quotation to be admired than a linguistic object to be worried at. Meaning begins to detach from authorship. The question becomes not simply what the phrase means, but what happens when somebody else decides what it means. This distinction runs through the entire album.

Cyparissus is not particularly interested in the idea of an untouched recording. Every recording already involves framing. A microphone chooses what counts as sound. Editing determines what remains. Mixing establishes relationships that did not exist in the original event. Even listening is interpretive. The supposedly objective document is therefore a myth. A very useful myth, perhaps, but still a myth.
“Amplexus” introduces another kind of closeness. Its title refers to the physical embrace used by some amphibians during mating, a detail that might seem biologically specific until one notices how often Cyparissus's music treats bodies, connection and distance as related problems. The biological vocabulary is not decorative. It gives the abstract question of identity a physical substrate.

Bodies touch. Voices overlap. Boundaries become inconvenient. The album repeatedly returns to this problem.

“Saturn Jupiter” widens the scale, introducing an almost astronomical distance into a record otherwise obsessed with interpersonal perception. It is an effective contrast. The farther the music seems to travel outward, the more it raises the question of where the observer actually stands.

“Moo­se Moon” is perhaps the most characteristic title in this respect: animal, landscape, celestial body, observation. A moose does not care what you think of it. The moon certainly does not. Humans, however, have spent thousands of years projecting meaning onto both. We are spectacularly bad at leaving things alone. Cyparissus understands this.

The album's environmental and biological associations therefore never feel like an attempt to create a picturesque “nature” ambience. The natural world functions more like a counterargument to human certainty. It reminds us that our categories are temporary, while the things we classify continue existing perfectly well without consulting us.

“Theriaca” is another beautifully ambiguous piece, its title referring to the old medicinal compound known as theriac. Historically, theriac became an almost absurdly elaborate mixture believed to counteract poisons. It is an appropriate image for an album in which disparate materials are combined in the hope that some larger meaning might emerge. But "Tombeaux Infinis" is suspicious of cures. It does not resolve. It accumulates.

“Cocytus”, named for the river of lamentation in Dante's frozen ninth circle of Hell, brings the album into darker territory. Yet the music remains too restrained to become conventionally gothic. There are no dramatic gestures demanding that we recognise the darkness. Instead, the atmosphere becomes colder, more isolated, more difficult to inhabit. The effect is stronger precisely because Cyparissus refuses to overplay it.

This restraint is one of the album's defining virtues. The record contains plenty of conceptual material, but it never turns into an audio essay with a soundtrack attached. The ideas are embedded in the manipulation of sound itself. You do not need to know the trilogy's theoretical architecture to experience the uncertainty. The music already produces it. That is difficult to achieve.

Conceptual electronic music can easily become a little too pleased with its own explanation. Once the artist has supplied the philosophical framework, the listener is sometimes left feeling like an unfortunate undergraduate who has been handed the reading list before being allowed to hear the album. Cyparissus avoids that trap. The concepts remain useful, but the sounds retain their independence.

The final track, “We'll Never Slow Dance”, provides the most poignant conclusion. The title suggests intimacy, but also its impossibility. A slow dance requires two people to coordinate movement while remaining aware of each other. It is perhaps one of the simplest metaphors for mutual perception imaginable.

Yet there is always a gap. One person moves. The other interprets. Neither ever has complete access to the other's experience. That gap is where "Tombeaux Infinis" lives.

The album is ultimately less about identity than about the impossibility of possessing an identity privately. We are partly made by memory, partly by self-perception and partly by other people's descriptions of us. Those descriptions are inevitably incomplete, sometimes generous, sometimes hostile, often simply wrong. Cyparissus does not try to correct the record. Instead, the record becomes the correction.

A voice is given to another person, broken apart, rearranged and returned. A sound is detached from its origin and placed beside another. A phrase changes meaning because its surroundings change. Something familiar becomes strange, then strangely familiar again. This is not simply an aesthetic technique. It is how identity works. We are all, to some degree, collages made by other people. The uncomfortable part is that some of those people were editing without our permission.

"Tombeaux Infinis" understands that identity is not a monument but an ongoing excavation. Every attempt to uncover a definitive self produces another layer of material. Every explanation creates another question. The infinite tombs of the title may therefore not contain dead identities at all. They contain previous versions of ourselves, along with the versions other people invented for us.

Some are recognisable. Some are grotesque. Some are probably more accurate than we'd like. The album's achievement is to make that philosophical problem tactile. Its electronics do not illustrate an argument about perception. They behave like perception itself: selective, unstable, associative, prone to distortion and absolutely convinced that it is telling the truth.

That last part, naturally, is the most human thing about it.

"Tombeaux Infinis" closes Cyparissus's trilogy without closing its question. There is no final self-portrait, no authoritative answer, no neat psychological frame around the work.

Just another reflection. And behind it, another. And another...

Here's a group that's been around for a while, at lest since 2017. Comprised of East Tennesseans Evan Lipson and Evmh, 'Empire of Liberty' is Meinschaft's fourth full length album, and their first on a label I'm familiar with. Prior efforts by this outfit have been compared to Dead Can Dance, Coil, Scott Walker and Insane Clown Posse, but over the first few tracks I'm not hearing any of that. The opening number, "Freezing Rain," employs acoustic guitar and acoustic bass with mournful synth voice which is rather nice, but unlikely to reveal what you're in for.

"Lux Æterna, Part One" begins with a baritone choral voices, adding a sequenced synth line, some spoken word about destructive sunshine, then adding freefrom brass, and again the song changes before conclusion. "Lux Æterna, Part Two" offers some cool chord changes over intense beats, somewhat reminiscent of outfits like AIR, with a touch of Tuxedo Moon-style melancholy. So far this is all rather mellow compared to what I was expecting, and quite melodically musical. The weirdness doesn't really begin until the third track - "Gay Parade." It's a downtempo crawl with gravelly vocals - "I saw you at the gay parade, you were drinking a Gatorade..." ... utter silliness beneath a darkly furrowed brow. The song that follows, "French Erection," begins with buzzy sawtooth bass and Residents-style vocals with other percussive elements. It becomes rather disjunct when the acoustic guitar and watery elements enter towards the end.

"Event Horizon" is a nice old school synth instrumental that borrows the melody from Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner," in a child-like voice before it descends into chaos and noise, and then its back to the Vega melody again. "Biting the Hand" sounds like a stoned or drunken Jonah Hex, if he was fronting some industrial slowcore metal outfit. "Remember to Remember (You Must Die)" juxtaposes acoustic guitar with electronic effects and sad synth lines before a baritone vocal croons out a melody at the end. The familiar "Heart of Glass"/Wall of Voodoo-like electronic percussion pattern opens "Anacalypto," reminiscent more of the latter than the former, likely due to the stark, minimal guitar riff. "Pneumatic Waltz" is a quirky but genial synth instrumental. There is something familiar about "Wave Train" that I just can't put my finger on. It could be the simple treble melody, the moving bass lines, the fluid-echo slide guitar, the percussion./drum loops, the stolen background voices...I dunno...but it's interesting.

"Mother & Son" is an acoustic guitar-backed melancholy ballad that goes through a brief harsh section before ending placidly. "Haints & Sinners" is a spooky finger-poppin' back alley number with free jazz elements on the horn-side. I think there's a missed opportunity with this one as it doesn't really go anywhere until the end when it devolves into a hokey melody. Maybe that's the point. Last track (or next to last, depending on whether you sprung for the CD or not) is "The Fall," which starts out as a quiet Death In Juney kind of ballad before it zzz's out. Very nice! On the CD there's a hidden track called "For Francis Scott Key" which is part Star Mangled Banner and part chaos. As strange as many parts of this album are, there is almost as much that's rather normal, and I daresay, a bit sentimental, making this even a more eclectic listening experience.

It should be mentioned that Evan Lipson's previous project include Normal Love and Satanized, and also produced the synaesthetic internet radio show, Evcast with Evmh. Lipson has performed and/or recorded with artists such as Susan Alcom, Eugene Chadboure, Elliott Sharp, Col. Bruce Hamopton (of the Hampton Grease Band), Pauline Oliveros, and Mat Maneri, among others. 'Empire of Liberty' also features appearances by FKA ICE, Greg Kelly, Jonathan Moritz, Ben Bennett, Jack Wright, Mike Pride, and Brandon Seabrook. My guess is that if you like the Residents and Tuxedo Moon, or left-of-center electronica projects, you will probably enjoy this. CD limited to 250 copies.

There is something almost perversely appropriate about making a forty-three-minute electronic composition during lockdown and deciding that its principal subject should be persistence. Humanity had temporarily discovered that time could become a viscous substance, that Tuesdays could last approximately three geological eras, and that staring at the same four walls was apparently an acceptable lifestyle. Solís Arenazas responded by asking what happens when sound refuses to leave. "Conatus" is the answer.

The word comes from Spinoza's notion of the fundamental tendency of every being to persevere in its existence, to continue being what it is while simultaneously entering into relations that inevitably alter it. Solís Arenazas does not merely borrow this idea as an intellectual ornament. He builds the entire piece around it. A small number of sonic materials persist for an extended duration, repeating without ever remaining perfectly identical. Their survival depends on change. That distinction is crucial.

A loop normally promises recurrence: here we are again, back at the beginning, congratulations, humanity has invented the circle. But "Conatus" is interested in a less obedient kind of repetition. Its materials return altered by their previous encounters. Frequencies interfere, textures thicken or thin, microscopic deviations accumulate. What initially appears static gradually reveals itself as a system in continuous negotiation with itself.

This is also where Solís Arenazas' wider practice becomes relevant. The Mexico City-based sound artist, essayist and composer works across electroacoustic music, synthesis, acousmatic research, installations, radio and documentary sound, with a recurring interest in ambiguity, language and the behaviour of indeterminate materials. His work has appeared in contexts ranging from contemporary dance and film to sound installations and experimental music. His 2026 LINE release "Displacements", for example, explores relationships between language, chaotic systems and randomness through feedback, noise, field recordings and electronic processes. "Conatus" approaches similar territory from a considerably narrower doorway. Everything happens inside a single piece. That could sound restrictive. It isn't. The forty-three minutes function less like a conventional composition than like a laboratory in which a handful of sounds are left alone long enough to reveal their bad habits. The materials were originally recorded at Vano Sonoro's studios in Mexico City in early 2021, then subjected to processes involving Markov-chain probability, interference modulation, low-frequency oscillation and resampling. But the interesting thing is not the technology itself. It is the composer's decision to listen before intervening.

The procedure is almost anti-virtuosic. Instead of constantly demonstrating control, Solís Arenazas allows the system to produce unexpected consequences and then responds to them. Parameters are adjusted sparingly. The composer becomes partly gardener, partly scientist, partly person sitting in front of a computer wondering whether that strange sound was intentional. It is a productive relinquishing of authority. The piece consequently develops through tiny discrepancies. A tone that initially seems merely functional begins acquiring grain. A pulse creates secondary vibrations. One frequency appears to lean against another. A texture thickens enough to become almost architectural before gradually losing its solidity. The listener's attention is repeatedly redirected from the object itself toward the space around it. This is where "Conatus" becomes genuinely compelling. Its repetition is not about hypnosis in the conventional ambient sense. It is about "perceptual recalibration". The longer the same materials remain present, the more aggressively the ear starts examining them. What sounded like a single event becomes a cluster of internal movements. What seemed motionless begins crawling.

There is a beautiful paradox here: the music changes because it insists on remaining itself. Spinoza would probably approve. Or at least he might have found the premise less ridiculous than most things humans do with synthesizers. The piece also has an interesting relationship with the experience of lockdown without attempting to turn itself into a pandemic document. There are no obvious gestures toward catastrophe, isolation or collective trauma. Instead, the connection is temporal. "Conatus" remembers a period in which duration became unusually conspicuous. Ordinary time lost its usual punctuation. Days ceased to be differentiated by events and became quantities of waiting. Solís Arenazas translates that experience into sound without narrating it.

The result is not music about lockdown so much as music that understands what it meant for time to become materially noticeable. At first, forty-three minutes can seem like an extravagant amount of time to ask from a listener. By the end, the opposite becomes true. The duration feels necessary because the composition needs enough temporal distance for its smallest deviations to become significant. This is the great risk of such music, naturally. Minimalism can easily become minimal effort wearing a serious expression. Put a drone on for forty minutes, mention phenomenology somewhere in the accompanying text and humanity will occasionally reward you for it.

"Conatus" earns its duration because the repetition contains consequences. Its materials do not simply persist. They remember.

Every recurrence carries traces of what happened before. The sonic environment therefore becomes cumulative rather than cyclical. The listener is never returned to precisely the same point, even when the surface suggests otherwise. The piece behaves more like a spiral than a loop, gradually circling the same territory while changing its altitude.

There is also something quietly physical about the music. The low-frequency components and interference processes give the piece a sense of pressure. It does not merely occupy listening space; it modifies the perception of that space. Headphones make this particularly evident, because the apparently modest events begin revealing depth and lateral movement that the first pass may have concealed. This is perhaps the most successful aspect of "Conatus": its ability to turn small differences into events.

Nothing needs to explode. Nothing needs to announce a climax. There is no heroic final transformation waiting patiently at minute forty-two. Instead, the reward lies in discovering that the supposedly identical thing has been changing all along. That idea extends beyond music. A person repeats habits and remains recognisably themselves, yet is altered by every repetition. A relationship returns to familiar gestures but never to the same circumstances. A memory resurfaces with a slightly different emphasis. Even an apparently stable identity is continuously modified by its encounters.

Persistence is therefore not the opposite of change. Persistence is one of the mechanisms through which change happens.

That is what gives "Conatus" its philosophical weight without requiring it to behave like a philosophy lecture with a synthesizer underneath. The Spinozist premise is useful because it is audible. You can hear the materials trying to remain themselves. You can also hear them failing, which is arguably the more interesting part.

The piece ends, but it does not feel concluded in any conventional sense. It simply reaches the point at which the listener is released from the experiment. The processes could presumably continue. The sounds could keep modifying one another indefinitely. And perhaps that is the final trick.

"Conatus" makes us aware that repetition is never really repetition. There is always another microscopic difference waiting inside the return, another accidental relation, another mutation too small to notice until we have stayed still long enough.

In a culture addicted to novelty, Solís Arenazas proposes something considerably stranger: stay with the same thing until it becomes something else.

It turns out that patience, unlike most fashionable production techniques, still has consequences.