There is something almost suspicious about an album called "Lichtung" arriving after fourteen years of wandering. A clearing, after all, is not simply a piece of land where the trees happen to be missing. It is a place made visible by an interruption: the forest opens, the horizon returns, and for once nobody has to keep walking. For hackedepicciotto, that distinction matters. Danielle de Picciotto and Alexander Hacke have spent much of their shared artistic life in motion, allowing churches, cities, recording studios and temporary homes to become part of their music. Now they have returned to Berlin, settled on its outer edge, and apparently discovered the radical avant-garde potential of having an address.

"Lichtung" is therefore a homecoming record, but not a cosy one. The forest has been cleared, not domesticated.

The title track establishes this beautifully. Piano, violin, electronics and Hacke's low-frequency presence create an atmosphere that feels neither ambient nor traditionally song-based. There is an almost ritual quality to it, but without the usual incense-and-new-age baggage. The German lyrics move through amethyst, opal, berries, pomegranates, animals, flowers and fire before arriving at the album's central opposition: outside, storms; inside, a place where fear temporarily loses its jurisdiction. The imagery is elemental without becoming decorative. It feels less like a description of nature than an attempt to construct a small protective mythology around it.

That distinction becomes important because "Lichtung" is not really an album about tranquillity. It is an album about what makes tranquillity possible.

"Vogelfrei" introduces a more restless side of the record, its title suggesting freedom from social or legal constraint, but the lyrics are considerably more complicated than a simple liberation anthem. Rivers have to dry up, bars have to be broken, the crowd has to be abandoned, desire and greed have to be escaped. Freedom here is not a picturesque meadow waiting at the end of the road. It requires severance. One has to leave something behind before one can discover what remains.

That idea leads naturally into "Wiederbelebung", perhaps the album's most revealing title. The word means resurrection or revival, but the song is less interested in miraculous rebirth than in the friction involved in becoming alive again. “You want visibility / I want opposition” is the basic tension, and it is a remarkably good description of hackedepicciotto themselves: two radically different artistic temperaments negotiating a common language without sanding down their differences. The lyrics eventually move from solitude into togetherness, which could almost serve as a manifesto for the entire project.

Musically, this is where the album starts to reveal its real development. hackedepicciotto have always been capable of creating vast, dark atmospheres, but "Lichtung" is less content to let repetition do all the heavy lifting. Electronics are no longer merely an atmospheric coating. They become active participants, sometimes mechanical, sometimes spectral, sometimes surprisingly physical. Hacke's bass provides weight and propulsion while de Picciotto's piano, violin and hurdy-gurdy introduce textures that seem to have wandered into the studio from several centuries at once. The resulting collision is neither folk nor industrial, neither chamber music nor electronica, but a peculiar third territory where those categories become increasingly unhelpful.

"Erntedank" pushes this synthesis further. Its imagery of roots, horses, planets, stars and tides makes existence itself sound like some enormous agricultural ceremony conducted by a slightly distracted cosmos. The title, literally connected to harvest thanksgiving, turns the natural cycle into something almost metaphysical: roots grow, stars cast shadows, tides harvest us. Humanity is not harvesting the world here. The world is harvesting humanity.

Then comes "Zeitenwende", and the record stops pretending that the outside world can be kept outside forever. The German word has become particularly loaded in recent years, describing a historical turning point, and the song approaches that idea without resorting to the usual grandstanding. Time, finitude, wars, fate, fire: the vocabulary is stark. Most strikingly, the past follows like a cat dragging tin cans behind its tail. It is a wonderfully strange image because it turns historical trauma into something both absurd and unavoidable. We do not simply remember the past; we hear it rattling behind us whenever we move.

The music responds accordingly. What might have become an obvious political statement instead develops into something more ambiguous and emotionally durable. There is melancholy, tension and a sense of irreversible movement, but also a strange tenderness. The album's turning point is not the discovery of an answer. It is the acceptance that nothing will return exactly to what it was.

That is perhaps where hackedepicciotto's long nomadic history becomes most relevant. After fourteen years of movement, settling down is itself a radical gesture. Not because staying put is inherently virtuous, but because stopping changes one's relationship with time. A traveller accumulates places; a resident accumulates layers. "Lichtung" sounds like a record made at the moment those two forms of memory collide.

The instrumental "Draussen" consequently feels like the album's great paradox. “Outside” should be the expansive counterpart to the protected clearing, yet the music makes the exterior world feel unstable, immense and physically present. Bass, strings, electronics and percussion gradually gather into something more insistent, almost threatening, before the tension begins to dissolve. The clearing is not a bunker. Its walls are imaginary.

"Einig" offers a different possibility. Conflict does not disappear; it transforms. The lyrics describe the stubborn spark of disagreement becoming something lighter when the force of unity creates a bond stronger than discord. It is an unusually mature proposition because it does not demand harmony at all costs. Difference remains. What changes is its function.

And then "Der Marschall" closes the record instrumentally, leaving the listener with no lyrical conclusion, no neatly packaged wisdom, no musical equivalent of a therapist handing over a certificate saying Congratulations, You Have Processed Your Feelings. Instead, there is atmosphere, repetition and an unresolved sense of watchfulness.

The decision to write the album entirely in German is crucial. For de Picciotto, an American who has spent decades in Berlin, this is more than a linguistic experiment. It is an act of belonging, but also of confronting the cultural and historical weight carried by the language. English had offered a certain freedom; German imposes different contours. Rather than disguising that constraint, "Lichtung" uses it as a compositional tool. The words become denser, stranger and more physical. Even without understanding every syllable, their cadence becomes part of the architecture.

That makes "Lichtung" feel less like a departure from hackedepicciotto's previous work than like a reorganisation of it. The nomadic years are still here. So are the darkness, the experimental instincts, the ritual atmosphere, the cinematic scale and the fascination with the border between acoustic and electronic sound. What has changed is the centre of gravity. The duo no longer seems compelled to search for somewhere else.

Perhaps that is the quiet achievement of the record. "Lichtung" does not celebrate arrival as the end of movement. It treats arrival as a new form of movement, one that happens inwardly rather than geographically. The clearing is temporary, the storms are still there, history keeps rattling its absurd tin cans, and the world outside remains perfectly capable of losing its mind. But for a while there is a garden, a piano, a few strange electronic noises, two voices negotiating the same piece of darkness, and enough light to see where the trees end.

After fourteen years on the road, that may be as close to a revolution as one reasonably gets: staying somewhere long enough to hear it change.

There is something faintly suspicious about an album called "Lokalt Piano" by a musician who has spent roughly a quarter of a century travelling around the world making music. After years of Kongsberg, Japan and countless intermediate destinations, Morten Qvenild has apparently discovered the radical proposition that home is also somewhere. This time, the somewhere is Nesodden, where he recorded the album in Ugla Lyd, the green studio in his garden. The title sounds modest. The music is considerably less so.

Qvenild has been one of the more difficult Norwegian musicians to put in a single box. His work has crossed jazz, improvisation, electronics and pop, from In the Country and Susanna and the Magical Orchestra to collaborations with Susanne Sundfør, Arve Henriksen, Nils Petter Molvær and, rather unexpectedly for anyone who insists on keeping musical genres in separate drawers, A-ha. His 2015 "Personal Piano" explored what happens when the acoustic piano is technologically altered and treated almost as a compositional instrument in its own right. "Lokalt Piano" continues that fascination, but turns its attention from what the piano can become to what it means to make music from one particular patch of the world.

The result is an album of eight songs that sounds intimate without becoming cosy. Piano, electronics, programming and Qvenild's deliberately processed voice coexist in arrangements that are often spare but rarely plain. The opening "The Flame" establishes the contradiction immediately: personal responsibility, domestic life and environmental anxiety are placed alongside the image of fire, with the warmth of home increasingly difficult to separate from the consequences of what surrounds it. The song does not need to turn into an ecological sermon. Its unease is already embedded in the music.

That unease becomes more complicated on "Være Lære". The Norwegian title plays on the relationship between “being” and “learning”, and the song circles around the difficulty of remaining present when remaining can itself become a burden. Qvenild's voice is not conventionally polished, and that works in its favour. It sounds like somebody thinking aloud rather than somebody delivering a perfectly rehearsed emotional statement. The electronics give the piano a slightly unstable halo, keeping the supposedly familiar instrument from becoming reassuring furniture.

Then comes "Out of Blue Comes Green", Qvenild's highly personal reworking of the song by Paul Waaktaar-Savoy. Given his history with A-ha, the choice is more than a curious cover. The original belongs to a very different musical universe, yet Qvenild slows its emotional machinery down until its melody seems to have been left outside in the Norwegian climate for several years. His relationship with A-ha is hardly incidental: he joined the group's live band for the 2017 MTV Unplugged concerts and later tours, making this one of those rare covers in which biography actually changes what you hear.

"Stay Alive" moves further into ambiguity. Love, responsibility, fear and the urge to withdraw keep colliding, while the song's understated arrangement refuses to provide the kind of cathartic release pop music normally owes us. Qvenild seems more interested in the uncomfortable middle ground where conflicting impulses simply continue to coexist. It is a recurring quality throughout the album: things are rarely resolved because real life has the irritating habit of continuing after the chorus.

The most obvious emotional centre arrives with "Boys of Summer", where Solveig Slettahjell takes the vocal. The Don Henley cover could easily have become an exercise in tasteful Scandinavian melancholy, a genre with enough practitioners to require its own municipal authority. Instead, Qvenild strips away much of the original's polished nostalgia and lets Slettahjell bring a worn, reflective quality to the song. In this setting, its themes of ageing, absence and the inability to return to an earlier version of oneself acquire a strangely local gravity.

"Ghettoblaster" disrupts the introspection with something much more primitive and insistent. Its repeated central image turns the portable speaker into a kind of unwanted local monument, simultaneously banal and threatening. Qvenild understands that the environment is not merely trees, rain and picturesque oak forests. It also contains noise, technology, neighbours, human intrusion and the various ways we insist on announcing our existence to everyone within earshot.

That tension is central to the album's idea of locality. "Lokalt Piano" was developed alongside the Nesodden art collective Lang Omvei, with visual artist Jon Benjamin Tallerås photographing nearby natural areas and writer Lars Mørch Finborud contributing a text about Nesodden. The project has also been presented through small concerts in churches, forests, museums, mines and other local sites before arriving at the Nesodden Jazz Festival. The music therefore belongs to a broader artistic experiment about attachment to place, rather than simply providing an attractive soundtrack to somebody's garden.

"Relativisme" and "After the Rain" bring that argument towards its quieter conclusions. Things disappear, people change, everything remains provisional. Rain becomes less a picturesque Norwegian accessory than an event capable of changing how the world looks afterwards. Qvenild's music has enough electronic intervention to prevent these songs from becoming straightforward singer-songwriter fare, yet enough melodic instinct to keep the experimentation human-sized.

What makes "Lokalt Piano" particularly interesting is its refusal to romanticise staying put. The album is about locality, but it is also about the complications of belonging to somewhere. A place can nourish you, constrain you, irritate you and become part of your identity without ever becoming entirely yours. Nature can be cherished while simultaneously being altered by the people doing the cherishing. Even the idea of “home” turns out to be less stable than the word suggests.

For a musician whose career has involved so much movement, Qvenild's decision to look nearby is therefore not a retreat. It is another experiment. The piano remains recognisably his, but the scale has changed: fewer airports, more trees; less elsewhere, more here. And perhaps the most convincing thing about "Lokalt Piano" is that “here” proves to be anything but simple.

Sometimes you have to travel for twenty-five years to discover that the interesting material was sitting in the garden all along.

I get a lot of promo emails from PR agencies, bands, indie artists, labels, etc., etc. all fishing for reviews, of course. Many (maybe even most) are not worthwhile pursuing because either the music does not conform to Chain D.L.K.'s genre parameters or just isn't very good. Every once in a while, though, something slips through worth telling Chain D.L.K.'s readers about. Frankie Rose is just such a case. She's from Brooklyn, New York and has been around for years. She was an original member of Crystal Stilts, Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls and Beverly. 'Hila' seems to be Rose's sixth solo album, self-produced at her home studio featuring collaborations with drummer Justin Welch (Elastica/Lush). Other players on 'Hila' include: Ian Campbell and Chris Rager (guitars); Jeff Tobias and Matthew Friedlander (saxophones); and Jake Vest (bass). It's assumed that Frankie handled all the keyboard/synth work, because after all, this is synth-pop.

The album is 10 tracks of quality modern synth-pop, any my first impression is - Strawberry Switchblade meets the Cocteau Twins, sounding like both of them and yet neither. That description is nowhere near the sum total of 'Hila.' While she says that this is an album of loss, there also seems to be hope. It's an album of dichotomies - innocence vs. worldliness; light vs. darkness; the past vs. the future; sweetness against the bitter. The opener, "Olo" sounds like what Lush would be doing now if they were still together. "Can't Be Wrong" is one of those tunes that would fit comfortably on any Britpop radio station in the '80s or '90s. Frankie's vocals are just so perfect for this type of music- absolutely charming! In fact, the song construction, arrangement and recording leaves little to be desired. The commercial appeal is off the charts without sounding like whatever the flavor of the week is currently. While no particular track stands out above the rest (they're all good, really), a favorite of mine is "TV Star," reminiscent of the Cocteau's 'Blue Bell Knoll.' 'Hila' is an absolute winner and since Frankie is on tour NOW until September 26, you might be lucky enough to catch her live if you live in a major city between LA and New York. 'Hila' drops on September 18. Buy it. You won't regret it.

Free improvisation and Zen philosophy make potentially dangerous neighbours. Put “no-mind”, “presence” and “dissolution of ego” together and, before long, somebody is probably selling incense. "Mushin" fortunately has more grit than that. Susana Santos Silva and Vasco Trilla approach the idea through sound rather than spiritual decoration, producing two extended improvisations that depend on alertness, instinct and an almost stubborn refusal to force the music into shape.

The title is important. "Mushin" is the Japanese term for “no-mind”, formed from "mu", meaning nothingness or absence, and "shin", referring to mind, heart or spirit. In Zen and martial arts, it describes a state of “no-mind”: not the absence of thought, but freedom from the fear, anger and ego that can interfere with spontaneous action. The album splits that word into its two components, "Mu" and "Shin", turning the title itself into a loose framework for the music. The idea is less about achieving emptiness than about removing the need to decide in advance what should happen next.

The cover provides an unexpectedly perfect visual joke about all this. A solitary figure sits on a toilet in the middle of an otherwise magnificent mountainous panorama, apparently contemplating nature while attending to one of humanity's least elevated activities. It is difficult to imagine a more efficient image of “no-mind”: forget ego, transcend attachment, and perhaps deal with the plumbing first. The deliberately awkward collage, with its tilted geometric frame and elongated lettering, makes the whole scene look simultaneously contemplative, ridiculous and strangely dignified. Zen masters have traditionally had rather more elegant surroundings, but there is something wonderfully democratic about reducing enlightenment to a toilet with a view.

That distinction is audible from the beginning. Santos Silva's trumpet can be piercing, breathy, brittle or unexpectedly lyrical, while Trilla draws an astonishing range of sounds from percussion without allowing it to settle into conventional rhythmic duties. A metallic strike may provoke a trumpet fragment; a burst of noise may be followed by an almost absurdly delicate response. The musicians seem to be listening for possibilities rather than waiting for their turn.

Santos Silva has become one of the most distinctive figures in European improvised music, working across free jazz, contemporary composition and experimental performance. Trilla, meanwhile, has developed an equally broad percussion vocabulary, using drums and objects as sources of colour, friction and resonance as much as rhythm. Their meeting works because neither needs to demonstrate the full contents of the toolbox. The interesting sounds are often the ones that happen when both players leave something unfinished.

"Mu", at eighteen minutes, is the more exploratory half of the proposition. Small gestures acquire disproportionate importance, with Santos Silva repeatedly testing how far a note can be pushed before it ceases to behave like a conventional trumpet sound. Trilla responds with clicks, scrapes, vibrations and sudden impacts. The tension comes less from volume than from uncertainty: you never quite know whether the next sound will extend what has just happened or overturn it.

"Shin", slightly longer, becomes more volatile. Its exchanges can accumulate into dense bursts before suddenly thinning out again, giving the piece a sense of movement without conventional development. There are confrontational passages, but no sense of competition. Neither musician is trying to “win” the improvisation, which is fortunate because music, unlike competitive swimming, does not improve merely because someone arrives first.

The Zen concept becomes convincing precisely because the performance does not sound serenely detached. "Mushin" is alert, sometimes abrasive and occasionally restless. “No-mind” here means acting without becoming trapped by expectation. Santos Silva and Trilla continually respond to what is happening in the immediate moment, including the silences and gaps left by the previous gesture. The absence of predetermined structure becomes a source of discipline rather than an excuse for chaos.

The cover's absurdity turns out to be another useful clue. Its picturesque mountains suggest transcendence; its protagonist, sitting on the toilet, stubbornly returns transcendence to earth. The album does something comparable with its philosophical premise. Rather than presenting “no-mind” as some elevated state beyond ordinary experience, the music keeps it grounded in breath, impact, hesitation, reaction and the physical behaviour of two instruments. Enlightenment, if it exists here, apparently has plumbing.

Recorded in Barcelona in September 2024, the album captures that physical exchange with considerable clarity. You hear the grain and instability of the trumpet, the mechanics of percussion, the tiny noises that conventionally polished recordings might politely sweep under the carpet. Those details matter because "Mushin" is ultimately about responsiveness: sound is constantly being produced, reconsidered and replaced.

At nearly forty minutes, the album never pretends to offer a conventional beginning-middle-end narrative. Instead, its form emerges through the accumulation and withdrawal of attention. "Mu" and "Shin" are not two songs illustrating a philosophical concept; they are two sides of an experiment in which the musicians try to let the music happen before either of them has time to tell it what it ought to be.
And perhaps that is the most interesting thing about "Mushin": it takes an idea that could easily become pompous and makes it audible through very practical means. Listen closely. React quickly. Do not cling to what has already happened. Then do it again.

The cover may therefore be more than an eccentric visual gag. A human being, a toilet, a mountain, an empty horizon: everything grand and everything ridiculous occupying the same frame. Which is probably a fairly accurate summary of being alive, and perhaps the most convincing definition of “no-mind” this record could have asked for.

There is a peculiar elegance in making something new from material you had already given up on. "The Width of Shadows", Sam Rosenthal's first solo electronic-ambient-drone album in more than a decade, is essentially an exercise in musical salvage: unfinished pieces gathered from the last five years, dismantled, rearranged, processed and allowed to become something other than what they originally intended to be.

Rosenthal is, of course, a central figure in American darkwave and ambient music, founder of Projekt Records and Black Tape For A Blue Girl. Yet this record feels deliberately removed from the narrative density of his vocal work. There are no songs demanding attention, no obvious destination, barely even a conventional sense of progression. Instead, "The Width of Shadows" operates through layers, resonance and gradual changes in emotional temperature.

The short "Sunflow" establishes the atmosphere almost immediately, a fragile electronic shimmer that feels less like an opening statement than the first patch of light entering an otherwise unlit room. "Flare Equilibrium" and "The Visitor" expand that space, introducing slowly shifting tones and submerged harmonic activity. The music is spacious without being empty: there is always something moving somewhere inside it, although it often seems to be moving at the geological speed favoured by ambient musicians and continental drift.

What makes the album particularly interesting is Rosenthal's decision to abandon his former perfectionism. Rather than reconstructing each piece according to its original blueprint, he treats the old recordings as raw material. Sounds are removed, blurred, reprocessed and displaced until the tracks acquire their own internal atmosphere. This gives the music a slightly unstable quality, as though the compositions are remembering what they once were but have decided not to tell us.

"Solar Silent Sound" and "Filament" are especially effective in this respect. Their textures seem to hover between electronic warmth and something colder, almost astronomical, while "Angular Momentum, Vaulted Sky" introduces a stronger sense of gravitational movement. The title itself is revealing: Rosenthal's music rarely depicts darkness as absence. Darkness has weight here. It bends the surrounding space.
The older "The Width of Shadows", originally dating from 2002, becomes the album's emotional hinge. Heard in this context, it no longer feels like an archival inclusion but part of a larger conversation between different moments in Rosenthal's musical life. The past is not being restored so much as made to coexist with the present.

And then comes "Orbital Equilibrium", seventeen minutes that provide the album's real test of patience. It is also its reward. Rather than relying on dramatic development, the piece gradually alters the listener's perception of scale. Sounds become less like individual events and more like a surrounding environment. The distinction between foreground and background begins to collapse.

There is an appealing contradiction at the centre of "The Width of Shadows". Rosenthal approached these abandoned tracks with greater spontaneity, yet the resulting album feels unusually controlled. Its freedom comes not from chaos but from relinquishing the obligation to preserve an original idea. Once the music is treated as material rather than property, it becomes possible to reshape it without nostalgia.

The result is ambient music with a surprisingly human imperfection. It does not attempt to manufacture transcendence through endless clouds of synthetic sweetness. Its beauty is darker, more provisional, occasionally even slightly bruised. These are sounds that seem to have survived something.

Perhaps that is why "The Width of Shadows" feels less like a collection of finished compositions than a landscape assembled from traces: fragments of abandoned ideas, old recordings, new processing and memories that have lost their timestamps.

The shadows are wide because the past keeps taking up space. Rosenthal simply learned how to illuminate them without making them disappear.