When Michael Plaster resurfaced in 2025 with "an extremely slow motion explosion", the album felt like a message that had spent two decades drifting through strange currents before finally reaching shore. It was deeply concerned with memory, entropy, and the peculiar beauty of things falling apart in slow motion. Listening to it was like wandering through someone else's dream and gradually discovering traces of your own reflection hidden inside it.

With "Solipsis", Plaster does not simply revisit that territory. He walks beyond it.

The second release under the yttriphie name feels less concerned with memory itself than with the consciousness experiencing that memory. If the previous album gazed outward toward the vast machinery of time and dissolution, "Solipsis" turns its attention inward, into the endlessly baffling chamber where perception, imagination, doubt, and identity all seem to share the same cramped apartment. Unsurprisingly, none of them get along particularly well.

Plaster remains best known to many listeners as a founding member of soulwhirlingsomewhere, one of the most beloved acts associated with Projekt Records' golden era. Yet yttriphie increasingly feels less like a nostalgic return and more like the continuation of a conversation interrupted by life, silence, and the passing of years. The sensibility remains recognisable: melancholy, introspective, and emotionally generous. But the perspective has shifted.

The title itself offers a clue. By removing the final "m" from "solipsism", Plaster transforms a philosophical doctrine into something slightly stranger and more personal. The album circles questions that have haunted thinkers for centuries: How can we know what is real? What is consciousness? Are we experiencing the world, or merely our interpretation of it? Thankfully, "Solipsis" never attempts to answer these questions. Humanity has already produced enough certainty about things it barely understands.

Instead, Plaster composes eight long-form pieces that inhabit uncertainty with remarkable grace. Across sixty-seven minutes, synthesizers, treated guitars, piano fragments, distant percussion, and countless half-glimpsed textures drift through one another like weather systems sharing the same sky. The music remains recognisably ambient, yet it possesses a narrative instinct that prevents it from becoming static. Every piece feels like a journey, however abstract its destination may be.

What distinguishes "Solipsis" from its predecessor is its increased sense of contrast. The previous album often resembled a continuous state of suspended reflection. Here, emotional weather changes unexpectedly. Gentle passages darken. Seemingly ominous textures soften into tenderness. Beauty and unease become inseparable companions, each revealing new dimensions within the other.

"Paddock of Skies" exemplifies this beautifully. Its immense duration allows Plaster to unfold ideas with patient confidence, gradually revealing hidden details buried beneath luminous surfaces. Sounds emerge and recede like distant landmarks seen through rain. The effect is immersive without ever becoming overwhelming.

That rain imagery proves difficult to escape throughout the record. Much like the strongest moments on "an extremely slow motion explosion", these compositions often evoke landscapes suspended between external reality and emotional projection. One is never entirely certain whether the storm exists outside the window or within the listener. The distinction gradually loses importance.

The album's centrepiece, "The Pulpy Center", introduces a welcome increase in density and momentum. Horn-like textures, percussion, and swelling synthesizers gather into one of the record's most dramatic passages. Yet even here, Plaster resists the temptation of grandiosity. The music expands rather than explodes. It accumulates pressure without seeking release. The result feels more psychologically complex than a conventional climax.

Meanwhile, "Everything is Disappearing" emerges as perhaps the album's emotional core. The title echoes themes present throughout Plaster's recent work, but the perspective feels different. Rather than contemplating disappearance as loss, the piece seems to accept impermanence as a condition of existence. There is sadness here, certainly, but also curiosity. The music asks what remains when familiar structures dissolve.

This sense of inquiry permeates the entire album. The tracks do not function as static ambient environments so much as thought experiments rendered in sound. Not intellectual exercises, but emotional investigations. Each composition explores a particular state of mind, tracing its contours without rushing toward conclusions.

Plaster's experience as a songwriter continues to shape his approach, even when traditional song structures are absent. Beneath the drifting atmospheres lies a strong sense of direction. Themes return in altered forms. Tensions emerge and resolve. Emotional arcs develop naturally. The listener is never simply floating. There is always movement, however subtle.

The closing "Underplump" serves as a fitting conclusion, gathering many of the album's recurring qualities into a final meditation on perception and uncertainty. By the time its last sounds fade, one has the sensation of waking from an unusually vivid dream and briefly questioning which side of sleep constitutes reality.

Like its predecessor, "Solipsis" thrives on ambiguity, but it deploys that ambiguity differently. "An Extremely Slow Motion Explosion" explored the poetry of dissolution, finding beauty in gradual collapse. "Solipsis" examines the observer standing amidst the fragments, wondering who is doing the observing in the first place.

The result is a richer, more expansive work that deepens rather than repeats the concerns of its predecessor. Michael Plaster has created an album that feels philosophical without becoming academic, emotional without becoming sentimental, and immersive without losing its sense of narrative purpose.

For a record built around the possibility that consciousness might be the only certainty available to us, it displays a remarkable generosity toward the unknown. It doesn't seek answers. It cultivates wonder.

And sometimes wonder is the most honest response available.

Some live albums are planned with military precision. Microphones are carefully positioned, performances are chosen months in advance, and musicians become acutely aware that posterity is listening. "Torsdag 24 april 2025" emerged through a far more appealing method: somebody simply pressed record without telling the band. Humanity occasionally stumbles into good ideas by accident, and this album is one of those fortunate cases.

Captured at Jazzstudion in Umeå during a sold-out concert, Hederosgruppen's first live release documents a band operating without the self-consciousness that often accompanies official recordings. There is no sense of musicians preserving a legacy. Instead, there is only the evening itself: five players responding to each other, to the room, and to an audience whose anticipation seems to vibrate through every note.

The story of Hederosgruppen is, in many ways, a story about collective chemistry. Originally assembled by pianist Martin Hederos, whose work with Tonbruket and The Soundtrack of Our Lives had already established him as one of Sweden's most distinctive musicians, the ensemble quickly evolved beyond the concept of a leader with accompanists. Today, the group functions as a genuinely democratic organism, with all five members contributing compositions and ideas. In jazz, where ego can occasionally arrive before the instruments are unpacked, such equality remains refreshingly uncommon.

That collective spirit defines "Torsdag 24 april 2025". The album never feels like a showcase for individual virtuosity, despite the obvious technical prowess on display. Instead, it resembles a conversation among exceptionally articulate friends who frequently interrupt one another, finish each other's sentences, and somehow emerge with a more interesting story because of it.

From the opening "Luftskepp", the band's approach becomes immediately clear. Themes appear and dissolve with remarkable fluidity. Rhythms shift direction without warning. Melodies emerge from unlikely corners before being handed off to another instrument. Yet for all its unpredictability, the music never feels chaotic. There is an internal logic at work, a shared intuition that allows the musicians to navigate abrupt turns with almost telepathic ease.

Part of Hederosgruppen's appeal lies in their refusal to respect stylistic boundaries. Jazz remains the obvious reference point, but folk traditions, chamber music, free improvisation, cinematic atmospheres, and even traces of popular songwriting continuously drift through the music. The result is neither fusion nor pastiche. It feels more like a natural ecosystem where different influences coexist without needing to justify their presence.

Emil Strandberg's trumpet frequently serves as an emotional catalyst, capable of moving from lyrical warmth to sharp-edged urgency within a single phrase. Andreas Sjögren's saxophones provide both momentum and texture, weaving lines that alternately challenge and support the ensemble. Beneath them, Josef Kallerdahl's bass and Konrad Agnas' drums create an elastic foundation that can swing, stumble, sprint, or hover depending on the demands of the moment. At the centre sits Hederos, whose piano and organ work often acts less as a lead voice than as a source of constant provocation, nudging the music into unexpected territory.

Track titles such as "HÄr kommer en dikt jag skrev inatt" ("Here Comes a Poem I Wrote Last Night") suggest a playful sensibility that carries through the entire performance. There is humour embedded within the music, not in the form of novelty or irony, but in the band's willingness to embrace surprise. One gets the impression that even the musicians are occasionally delighted by what happens next.

"Lurlåt" and "Mjuk grupp" provide particularly vivid examples of the ensemble's dynamic range. The former unfolds with a mischievous energy that seems perpetually on the verge of transforming into something else, while the latter explores a more spacious and reflective mood without sacrificing momentum. Throughout, the musicians display an impressive ability to balance complexity with accessibility. The music remains intricate, but never academic. Curious, but never aloof.

Perhaps the album's greatest strength is its sense of presence. Many contemporary recordings strive for perfection, sanding away imperfections until all evidence of risk has disappeared. Hederosgruppen embrace the opposite philosophy. These performances breathe. Tiny imperfections remain intact. Tempos stretch and contract. Decisions are made in real time. The listener hears not only what the musicians know, but also what they are discovering.

This quality becomes especially apparent during "Allt ledde hit!" whose title translates roughly as "Everything Led Here!" It functions almost as an accidental mission statement for the album. Every previous rehearsal, every tour, every individual musical background converges in these moments of collective creation. Not toward a grand climax, but toward a shared experience.

The closing "Jennie" leaves a lingering impression of warmth and possibility. Rather than ending with a dramatic flourish, the performance feels like a door left slightly open, suggesting that the conversation could easily continue long after the recording stops.

What makes "Torsdag 24 april 2025" so rewarding is not merely the quality of the musicianship, impressive though it is. It is the reminder that music remains, at its core, a social act. Five people listening, responding, and trusting one another enough to leap into uncertainty together. In an era increasingly dominated by algorithms designed to predict our preferences before we know them ourselves, there is something quietly radical about a band dedicated to surprise.

This album captures that surprise in its natural habitat. Not polished into a monument, but alive, restless, and gloriously present. Like the best conversations, it leaves you with the feeling that something meaningful happened, even if you're not entirely sure how.

There is a peculiar courage required to make quiet music. Not the kind of quiet that functions as decorative ambience while someone answers emails or wonders where they left their keys, but the kind that asks for genuine attention. The kind that forces listeners to confront the uncomfortable possibility that silence may contain more information than noise. On "Variations for Light Waves", Swedish composer Linnéa Talp embraces precisely this challenge, creating a record whose most remarkable achievement is not what it adds to the air, but how carefully it inhabits it.

Talp has been gradually moving toward this territory for years. Before focusing on minimal composition and improvisation, she worked under the moniker Deerest, crafting songs that already hinted at an unusual sensitivity toward listening itself. The title of her 2020 album "Cochlea" now feels almost prophetic: the inner ear becoming both subject and instrument, listening elevated from passive reception to active practice. Since then, her work has increasingly explored breath, resonance, and the fragile threshold where sound emerges from silence.

"Variations for Light Waves" feels less like a collection of compositions than an extended study of attention. Recorded across several pipe organs in Sweden over a four-year period, the album examines the instrument not as a monument of ecclesiastical grandeur but as a living organism. The pipe organ, after all, is essentially a machine for transforming air into architecture. Talp seems fascinated by the mechanics of that transformation, by the way breath becomes vibration and vibration becomes emotional space.

From the opening "She Came Out of the White Fog", the album establishes its central concern with fragility. The organ's pipes struggle for air, producing tones that feel vulnerable and slightly unstable. Many musicians spend their careers attempting to make instruments sound more powerful. Talp appears more interested in the opposite question: what happens when an instrument reveals its limitations? The answer, it turns out, is often more moving than perfection.

Throughout the record, chords are treated less as harmonic destinations than as environments to inhabit. Talp lingers within them, examining their internal colours and microscopic shifts with the patience of someone studying changes in light across a winter landscape. The title itself proves revealing. These are not variations in the classical sense, where themes are transformed through compositional ingenuity. These are variations of light itself: changing angles, altered densities, subtle refractions.

The centrepiece "Air on Both Sides", recorded with veteran Swedish improviser Christer Bothén on contrabass clarinet, unfolds with extraordinary restraint. The two musicians seem less interested in dialogue than coexistence. Their sounds drift alongside one another like neighbouring weather systems, occasionally converging, occasionally separating, always maintaining a sense of mutual respect. In lesser hands, such sparseness could become austere. Here it feels generous.

Much of this generosity stems from Talp's remarkable understanding of space. Every sound appears positioned with careful consideration of its surroundings. The pipe organ's resonances are allowed to bloom naturally, while subtle appearances of modular synthesis gently blur distinctions between acoustic and electronic sources. One often loses track of where one sound ends and another begins. This ambiguity becomes part of the album's quiet magic.

The presence of trombonist Mats Äleklint on selected pieces further enriches the sonic palette without disrupting the album's cohesion. His contributions seem to emerge from within the organ itself, as though the instrument had suddenly developed additional voices hidden deep within its wooden frame. The collaborations throughout the album demonstrate an unusual degree of trust. Nobody appears interested in occupying the foreground.

Thematically, "Variations for Light Waves" is deeply intertwined with memory, landscape, and transformation. Talp has spoken about childhood experiences by the sea, about light emerging through thick fog, and about the birth of her daughter. These associations are never illustrated directly. Instead, they exist as emotional traces embedded within the music's structure. The pieces feel shaped by lived experience without becoming autobiographical documents.

This relationship between the personal and the elemental gives the album much of its emotional force. Water, air, fog, light: these recurring images suggest phenomena that are both intimate and universal. They resist ownership. They belong to everyone and no one. Talp's music operates similarly, inviting listeners into spaces that feel profoundly personal while remaining open to individual interpretation.

The closing title track provides the album's most striking demonstration of impermanence. Descending chordal patterns slowly unravel, losing stability and definition as they proceed. Yet the process never feels tragic. There is tenderness in the dismantling, an acceptance that transformation is inseparable from existence itself. The music does not mourn change; it inhabits it.

In an era increasingly dominated by acceleration, "Variations for Light Waves" offers a different proposition. It suggests that meaning may reside not in constant movement but in sustained attention. That listening can be a physical act. That a breath, a chord, a faint resonance hanging in the air may contain entire worlds if one remains present long enough.

Many records ask to be understood. Linnéa Talp's asks to be listened to. The distinction may seem small, but it changes everything. Like light moving through fog, the album reveals itself gradually, softly, and without certainty. By the end, one realises that its true subject is neither the organ nor the landscape nor even memory itself. It is perception: that fragile, miraculous process through which the world continuously arrives.

And for forty minutes or so, Talp makes that arrival feel new again.

There is a peculiar kind of ambition at work in this self titled album, the debut full-length under Dario Gatto’s bod kin alias. Not the ambition of scale, nor the grandiose urge to overwhelm through sheer volume. Rather, it is the ambition of someone attempting to build a machine from fragments while simultaneously documenting its collapse. A very human pastime, really: spending years assembling a structure only to discover that the cracks were part of the design all along.

Gatto, a Milan-based composer whose activities range from shoegaze-inflected electronics and live coding to electroacoustic composition, approaches sound here less as a sequence of events than as a field of unstable relationships. His academic background in contemporary composition is evident, yet "bod kin" never feels trapped inside the sterile glass cabinet where experimental music occasionally locks itself for safekeeping. Instead, these six tracks remain stubbornly alive, twitching, mutating and occasionally misbehaving.

The album’s conceptual core revolves around control and its inevitable failure. bod kin's own description speaks of attempting to harness an impossibly fluctuating sonic instinct, and that tension becomes audible from the opening moments. Beats appear as if assembled from damaged circuitry. Harmonic material emerges briefly through clouds of abrasion before being swallowed again by noise. Rhythms refuse stable footing. The music seems caught between architecture and erosion, as though every structure is being simultaneously designed and dismantled.

What makes this release particularly compelling is its refusal to choose between brutality and delicacy. Tracks like “fragile” and “fragment:passacaglia” suggest forms inherited from older musical traditions, but they arrive filtered through post-grime disintegration and industrial residue. The result is neither nostalgic nor futurist. It inhabits a strange middle ground where medieval ghosts, tracker software logic and broken bass frequencies appear to share the same cramped apartment.

The influence of the Dirtywave M8 tracker is more than a technical footnote. The album often feels composed from the inside of the machine itself, embracing the tracker’s grid-based mentality while constantly sabotaging its inherent rigidity. Sequences splinter into noisy cut-ups, abrupt edits become compositional gestures, and microscopic details acquire an almost disproportionate significance. Viewed from a distance, everything appears blurred; examined closely, every scratch and rupture acquires surgical sharpness.

Yet despite the album’s fascination with fragmentation, there is an emotional undercurrent running beneath the static. “cura:organo” in particular introduces a fleeting sense of vulnerability, as if some damaged sacred music had survived a catastrophic hard-drive failure. Even the closing “sctrr”, brief as it is, feels less like a conclusion than a transmission abruptly interrupted. Not because the story is unfinished, but because completion was never part of the project’s vocabulary.

There is a tendency among listeners to treat noise and power electronics as confrontational genres, forms of sonic hostility aimed at the audience. bod kin proposes something subtler. The aggression here is not directed outward. It is directed at certainty itself. Every texture challenges fixed interpretation. Every rhythm questions its own existence. Every moment seems aware that permanence is an illusion.

In that sense, the album functions almost as a musical essay on instability. Not an academic one, despite the intellectual framework surrounding it, but a deeply tactile and physical exploration of what happens when composition stops pretending that order can ever be complete. The album does not resolve its contradictions. It lives inside them.

For listeners seeking clean narratives, identifiable grooves or reassuring destinations, this record may feel like trying to read a map while someone continuously redraws the borders. For everyone else, this album offers a fascinating glimpse into a sound world where fragmentation becomes form, noise becomes language, and uncertainty becomes the only reliable guide. In an age obsessed with optimization and precision, there is something strangely refreshing about music that proudly admits it has no idea where it is going, yet somehow arrives exactly where it needs to be.

Time is a notoriously difficult collaborator. It ignores deadlines, refuses creative input, and continues moving whether anyone has approved the arrangement or not. Entire philosophical traditions have exhausted themselves trying to understand it. Deaf Center, thankfully, choose a more practical approach on "Through Time": they listen to it.

The Norwegian duo of Erik K Skodvin and Otto A Totland have spent nearly two decades refining a language that occupies the territory between modern classical composition, ambient music, electroacoustic experimentation, and something more elusive that resists easy categorisation. Since landmark releases such as "Pale Ravine" and "Owl Splinters", Deaf Center have become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary atmospheric music, creating works that seem less concerned with melody or narrative than with the architecture of perception itself.

Their fourth studio album arrives seven years after "Low Distance", and the intervening silence appears to have altered their relationship with sound. Rather than returning with a collection of miniature piano meditations framed by environmental textures, "Through Time" embraces duration as a compositional tool. The pieces unfold with unusual patience, allowing ideas to emerge gradually, as if the music were discovering itself while being played.

From its opening moments, "Open Upon" establishes an atmosphere of suspended motion. Totland's piano, long one of Deaf Center's defining signatures, appears less frequently than in earlier works, yet every note carries greater weight. It functions almost like a distant lighthouse emerging through fog: not constantly visible, but deeply reassuring when it appears. Around it, Skodvin constructs vast fields of drones, resonances, and subtle electroacoustic currents that seem to stretch far beyond the speakers.

The album's centrepiece, divided into the two parts of the title track, reveals the duo's increasing fascination with scale. These compositions do not progress in conventional terms. They accumulate. Textures gather slowly, densities shift almost imperceptibly, and tiny sonic events acquire disproportionate emotional significance. Listening becomes less about following musical development and more about inhabiting an environment whose contours gradually reveal themselves.

This quality has often distinguished Deaf Center from many of their ambient contemporaries. Their music rarely functions as background. It demands attention, though never through force. Instead, it creates situations where attention becomes inevitable. A distant harmonic bloom, a low-frequency tremor, the sudden appearance of a piano figure after minutes of abstraction: these moments feel less like compositional techniques than discoveries.

There is also a notable sense of physicality running throughout "Through Time". Despite its abstract nature, the album never drifts into weightless ambience. The sounds possess grain, texture, and mass. One can almost feel surfaces being brushed, strings vibrating in dark rooms, air moving through unseen spaces. The recordings made at Morphine Raum and Funkhaus contribute to this tactile quality, allowing acoustics to become active participants in the music.

The latter half of the album introduces a subtle but significant transformation. Rhythmic pulses begin to surface beneath the drones, creating a tension between movement and stasis. "I Myst" in particular generates a curious sensation of travelling without leaving one's position, as if standing still while landscapes quietly rearrange themselves around you. It is both unsettling and strangely comforting, rather like discovering that the train station was moving all along.

The closing piece, "Further", marks another first for Deaf Center through the inclusion of guest musician Simon Goff on violin and viola. His contribution expands the emotional vocabulary of the record without disturbing its coherence. Layers of strings emerge from the surrounding drones like shifting weather fronts, creating a finale that feels simultaneously intimate and immense. The piece never reaches a traditional climax. Instead, it widens, opening new horizons until the distinction between foreground and background dissolves entirely.

What makes "Through Time" particularly affecting is its refusal to dramatise its central theme. Many artists approaching a subject as vast as time might be tempted toward grand conceptual gestures. Deaf Center remain remarkably restrained. Their achievement lies in recognising that time is experienced not through abstractions but through accumulation: moments becoming memories, sounds becoming spaces, silences becoming meaning.

The album often feels like an exercise in attentive observation. Not observation of external events, but of internal shifts that usually pass unnoticed. The listener becomes aware of duration itself, of waiting, of anticipation, of the subtle emotional changes that occur when one remains present long enough. This may not sound thrilling in a culture increasingly designed to eliminate every spare second, but perhaps that is precisely the point.

"Through Time" is not concerned with novelty. It is concerned with depth. Rather than constantly introducing new ideas, it excavates existing ones, digging patiently until unexpected dimensions emerge. In doing so, Deaf Center have created one of their most immersive and mature works to date: an album that understands that the most profound transformations are often the slowest.

By the time "Further" fades into silence, one is left with the curious impression that nothing dramatic has happened and yet everything has subtly changed. Time, after all, tends to work that way. It rarely announces itself. It simply leaves traces. Deaf Center have transformed those traces into music of remarkable grace, patience, and quiet wonder.