There are albums that use darkness as an aesthetic, and then there are albums that have clearly spent some time finding out what darkness actually costs. "Antivenom", the fourth full-length by Portland trio Darkswoon, belongs to the second category. Its title suggests a cure, but the music is more interested in what happens when the poison has already entered the bloodstream: grief, fear, alienation, anxiety, political exhaustion, damaged relationships, the uneasy business of remaining a person while the surrounding world keeps providing reasons not to bother. Fortunately, Darkswoon have enough musical intelligence not to turn any of this into a sermon. They make beautiful songs about difficult things, which is considerably harder than making miserable music about difficult things.

Darkswoon began as Jana Cushman’s solo project before evolving into the trio heard here, with Cushman on vocals and guitar, Rachel Ellis handling synths, keys, drum machines and rhythm programming, and Norah Lynn supplying bass. That history remains audible in the band's unusual balance between electronic construction and intimate songwriting. The rhythmic machinery can feel precise and almost impersonal, while the bass and guitar continually pull the songs back toward something physical. Cushman's voice occupies the unstable middle ground between the two: airy without becoming fragile, dramatic without resorting to the theatrical excess that gothic music occasionally mistakes for emotional depth. Recent writing on the album has similarly highlighted the way the trio has tightened its identity around darkwave, post-punk, shoegaze and electronic music without allowing those categories to dictate the songs.

The album announces its intentions with "Connective Tissue", a brief instrumental fragment that is less an introduction than a piece of connective material in the literal sense. It is noise, atmosphere and transition compressed into forty seconds. The idea is significant because Darkswoon repeatedly treat the spaces between things as musically meaningful. The band have explained that this kind of passage also reflects what happens during their live performances, when the noise created by Lynn's effects and the preparation of Ellis's electronic setup becomes part of the performance rather than dead time between songs. The record consequently begins not with a declaration but with something half-formed, as if we have walked into a room before everyone has finished setting up.

Then comes "Antivenom", and the album's emotional stakes become clearer. The song was written in response to the death of Nex Benedict and expands from personal grief toward the broader vulnerability experienced by trans people in a hostile political climate. Cushman conceived the title around the idea of music as a counter-agent to the poisons circulating through contemporary life. It is an unusually direct piece of political songwriting for a band whose music otherwise tends toward ambiguity, yet Darkswoon avoid turning the track into a slogan. The electronic pulse gives it a controlled urgency, while the guitars widen the emotional field around Cushman's voice. The result is not optimism, exactly. It is closer to protective instinct converted into sound.

"Pacific City" changes the temperature. Written during a solitary retreat on the Oregon coast, it carries the peculiar quality of music produced away from one's ordinary surroundings, when isolation can be restorative for about twenty minutes before the brain remembers that it came along for the trip. Its atmosphere is more open, but Darkswoon never confuse openness with weightlessness. The bass remains crucial, providing a melodic undertow beneath Ellis' programmed rhythms and Cushman's layers of guitar. That combination gives the music an interesting physical contradiction: the upper frequencies seem to float while the lower ones keep insisting that gravity still exists.

"Thread" is perhaps the clearest demonstration of how effectively Darkswoon can combine songcraft with accumulation. Its central image of a relationship held together by something increasingly difficult to distinguish from a wound is perfectly suited to the band's arrangement. The rhythm keeps moving, the bass pushes forward, guitars spread outward, while Cushman's vocal remains suspended between attachment and exhaustion. Rather than building toward a conventional cathartic release, the track keeps tightening its emotional knot. It is post-punk not because it sounds like an archaeological reconstruction of 1981, but because tension is allowed to remain tension. The track's move toward shoegaze scale has been noted by several contemporary reviewers, but what matters is that the expansion never swallows the underlying song.

That distinction is important across "Antivenom". Darkswoon understand that atmosphere only becomes interesting when there is something underneath it. There are plenty of records in the darkwave and shoegaze neighbourhood where the guitars become enormous and the vocals dissolve into reverb until everyone involved seems to have forgotten what the song was about. Here the opposite happens. The production gives the emotional content more room to operate. Norah Lynn's bass is especially effective because it does not merely mark the bottom of the mix: it behaves melodically, often providing the movement that prevents the songs from becoming static tableaux. Ellis' electronic percussion supplies a harder skeleton, while Cushman's guitars create the surrounding pressure.

"Monochrome" exploits this contrast particularly well. Its title implies reduction, yet the music is anything but flat. The track's emotional world is built from gradations rather than dramatic colour changes, allowing small shifts in texture and intensity to become significant. "Small Death" is more intimate and unsettling, while "Devour My Eyes" pushes further into the band's ability to make density feel simultaneously attractive and vaguely dangerous. The title itself suggests consumption, and the music seems to understand that attraction and threat are not necessarily opposites. Sometimes the beautiful thing is precisely what you should probably stop staring at.

"Blood Let" is one of the album's most complicated pieces because its musical history mirrors its subject. Cushman originally conceived it as a slower ballad before the band dismantled and reconstructed the material. The final version deals with abandonment, disillusionment, the uneasy relationship between mind and body, and the physical experience that inspired part of its imagery. What could have become an overly literal confessional instead acquires a strangely fragmented momentum. The song sounds as though it is trying to put itself back together while simultaneously questioning whether the original shape deserves to survive.

Then comes "x3", the album's most overtly political and arguably most abrasive moment. Its perspective broadens from private damage toward ecological collapse, inequality, concentrated wealth and the fear of what kind of future is being prepared by people who appear remarkably confident that consequences are a problem for somebody else. The band's response is not subtle, and it does not need to be. The track has the feeling of an alarm that has been ringing for so long that silence would now be more disturbing than noise. Yet even here Darkswoon retain their sense of structure. The anger is channelled rather than sprayed across the walls.

The closing "Going Dark" is consequently more interesting than a simple descent into despair. It considers withdrawal, the desire to disappear from systems that seem increasingly hostile, and the possibility of finding value outside the logic of scarcity and acquisition. But the song remains ambivalent about disappearance. There is a pull toward retreat and another toward staying. That unresolved tension is one of the album's defining qualities. Darkswoon do not manufacture closure because the subjects they address do not conveniently come with an eleventh track called "Everything Is Fine Now". The album ends with uncertainty still breathing.

There is a slight danger in a record this committed to a consistent emotional climate: several songs inhabit similar tempos, densities and tonal colours, and one contemporary review has pointed out that individual tracks can occasionally blur into the larger sequence. Yet in "Antivenom" that continuity also serves a purpose. These songs feel less like ten separate episodes than different rooms in the same troubled house. You can move from one to another, but the atmosphere follows you.

What ultimately makes the album work is that Darkswoon never confuse vulnerability with weakness. Cushman's lyrics can be painfully exposed, but the arrangements refuse to sentimentalise them. The cold electronics, muscular bass, programmed rhythms and increasingly expansive guitars provide resistance around the voice. The songs therefore become places where fragility has to coexist with structure. Even the record's most beautiful passages have something slightly clenched inside them.

"Antivenom" does not really offer an antidote to anything. That would be too easy, and probably rather insulting to anyone who has actually had to live through the things these songs describe. What it offers instead is a form of chemical counterpressure: sound meeting poison without pretending to neutralise it completely. The wounds remain visible. So does fear. So does anger. But so does connection, stubbornly refusing to die.

For a band working in music traditionally associated with beautifully arranged misery, that may be Darkswoon's most useful trick. They do not make darkness comfortable. They make it articulate.

There are many ways of making an album about the ocean. One can record waves, imitate waves, invoke the sublime, stare meaningfully at the horizon and, if absolutely necessary, put a whale somewhere on the cover. Lauri Wuolio chooses a stranger route. For "Ocean in A", his debut as Atonauer, the ocean is not so much represented as approached through a chain of transformations: blue becomes sound, sound becomes vibration, vibration becomes time, and time becomes something that refuses to stay still even when the music barely seems to move.

Atonauer is a new artistic persona for Wuolio, the Finnish composer and sound artist already known internationally through Kumea Sound, whose work has explored handpan-based music, electronics, resonance and spatial experience. The character appeared to him in a dream in 2023 and subsequently developed through writing, drawings and music. Wuolio's background makes the project less surprising than it initially sounds: he studied time- and space-related arts at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, has worked extensively across film, theatre, dance and installation, and has spent years considering sound as something that occupies physical space rather than merely travelling through it. His official biography describes Atonauer as a move toward post-ambient, drone and experimental music, and "Ocean in A" as a deliberately simplified exploration of sustained tones and spatial textures.

The strangest and most beautiful part of the album's origin story is the jar. Wuolio had been making abstract blue paintings in Europe until the colour itself began to acquire too much historical baggage. Rather than continuing to paint blue, he scraped the pigment from the canvases, sealed it in a glass jar and carried it with him to America, along with a Sony Walkman and very little else. In New York, a broken Roland Space Echo supplied by his friend Taka, together with Joachim Sala's experimental filtering devices, transformed urban recordings into harmonic abstraction. At some point, blue stopped being something to look at. It became something to hear.

This is more than an eccentric anecdote. It explains why "Ocean in A" feels less like music attempting to describe the sea than an investigation into how one sensory experience can migrate into another. The album is not particularly interested in making us hear “the ocean” in the literal sense. Instead, it asks what qualities associated with blue, depth, water and distance might survive after the image has been removed. What remains is resonance.

The answer begins with "A1", whose low drone is accompanied by a mechanical breathing sound and a series of pulses that refuse to settle into a common tempo. The effect is remarkably physical. The track seems to breathe without possessing a single body, as though several organisms had accidentally synchronised for a moment and then remembered they had better things to do. The entire album revolves around the note A, which functions less as a conventional key than as a fixed point from which the surrounding frequencies can wander.

That choice is crucial. Atonauer's minimalism is not primarily about reducing the number of sounds; it is about increasing the amount of attention available to each one. A single sustained tone can acquire internal movement through overtones, modulation, feedback and tiny changes in density. The note remains apparently static while its surroundings keep revealing new behaviour. Music Map likewise identifies the A as a gravitational centre rather than a conventional constraint, with drones and harmonics generating movement through minute variations rather than conventional harmonic progression.

"A2" moves further into that upper register of perception, where the fundamental tone becomes less important than the frequencies hovering around it. It is the sonic equivalent of looking at one colour until the colour stops being a single thing. The apparent simplicity begins to contain several layers of activity. This is one of the record's most convincing achievements: Wuolio makes stillness feel populated.

Then "A3" reveals the importance of the New York experience. The broken Space Echo and filtering experiments do not merely provide vintage equipment fetishism, although there is certainly enough malfunctioning analogue hardware here to satisfy the traditional experimental-music requirement that at least one machine must appear to have been rescued from a basement. Their real function is transformational. City noise becomes harmonic fog; mechanical imperfection becomes compositional material. The external world is not recorded and presented as documentary evidence. It is reduced, reorganised and allowed to lose its original identity.

That process continues through "A4", perhaps the album's most delicate piece. A minimal whistle passing through the Space Echo acquires the distant character of a foghorn, and suddenly the music seems to inhabit the strange hour before morning properly begins. It is not quite melancholy, not quite peaceful. There is a suspended emotional state here, the peculiar emptiness in which nothing has happened yet but something inevitably will. The attached notes describe it as a moment before emotional impact, and that seems exactly right.

At the centre sits "A5", the eight-minute heart of the record. Here Wuolio's earlier experiments with the Tascam Portastudio and a salvaged 1950s Buescher saxophone become part of the album's transformation of painting into sound. The saxophone is not deployed as a conventional melodic instrument. Its materiality becomes another source of resonance, another surface to be rubbed, stretched and listened to. The ocean finally appears not as scenery but as pressure: something physically overwhelming whose emotional force is even harder to contain.

This distinction matters because "Ocean in A" is ultimately less interested in beauty than in proximity. Wuolio's own framing repeatedly returns to the impossibility of completely comprehending or containing the ocean, blue or time. The album therefore avoids the temptation to provide a musical equivalent of a postcard. It stays close to the phenomenon without pretending to possess it.

"A6" makes that philosophy considerably more concrete. When the old Space Echo begins malfunctioning again, its mechanical noises are fed back into the tape until they produce ghostly, almost choral harmonies. Control becomes an accidental participant. The machine effectively starts composing, or at least starts refusing to obey. This is where the album's technological and philosophical sides meet most successfully: the equipment is not simply a tool used to realise an idea. Its failures become part of the idea.

There is a pleasing circularity in the final "A7". Rhythm returns, but not as a conventional beat. Space itself becomes rhythmic, while the sustained materials accumulated throughout the album begin to suggest the possibility of song. The ending therefore does not resolve the oceanic metaphor. It expands it. What began as breath and a single note has become a much larger question about duration, movement and the limits of representation.

Some external responses have understandably concentrated on the album's minimalism and its submerged, darkly expansive atmosphere. One review also points to the transatlantic journey between Finland and New York as an important dimension of the work. That geographical reading is useful, but "Ocean in A" ultimately makes geography feel secondary to transformation. Finland becomes New York, painting becomes sound, a broken effects unit becomes an instrument, and a particular pitch becomes a place from which an entire album can be imagined.

Wuolio's wider practice helps explain this unusual elasticity. Through Kumea Sound he has worked extensively with handpans and resonant acoustic instruments, while his film, theatre, dance and installation work has accustomed him to thinking about sound in relation to image, movement and physical environment. His long-running interest in spatial experience is especially relevant here: "Ocean in A" does not merely produce a sequence of sounds, it constructs a space in which those sounds can continue happening after the listener has stopped looking for conventional musical events.

The danger with music this restrained is obvious. Minimalism can become minimal effort. A drone can be profound, but it can also be a very expensive way of discovering that nothing happens for eight minutes. "Ocean in A" mostly avoids that trap because Wuolio understands that repetition only becomes interesting when the listener's perception is changing inside it. The sound may remain nearly still, but we do not. That difference is the real engine of the album.

And perhaps that is what the jar of blue ultimately represents. It was never possible to carry the ocean in it. Nor was it possible to carry blue intact from one medium into another. The pigment had to be abandoned as pigment, just as the ocean has to be abandoned as scenery. What survives is the impulse to keep translating one experience into another, knowing perfectly well that something will be lost.

"Ocean in A" is therefore not an album that captures the sea. It is an album about the futility, and strange necessity, of trying. Its seven movements stay anchored to one note while imagining an almost immeasurable space around it. Its machines break, its sounds dissolve, its rhythms wander, and its central colour disappears into vibration. The result is music that understands a useful truth: sometimes the only honest way to hold something vast is to stop trying to hold it at all.

There is a small joke hidden inside "I Alone", and it is not really hidden at all. Andrea Taeggi gives all six pieces titles beginning with “I alone”, then proceeds to make an album fundamentally concerned with relationships: between frequencies, harmonics, instruments, consciousness and the listener. Solitude, in other words, turns out to be rather sociable. It is perhaps the oldest contradiction in the book of contemplative music: one retreats from the world in order to hear how thoroughly one remains connected to it.

"I Alone" is Taeggi’s latest exploration of Just Intonation, a tuning system based on simple frequency ratios rather than the compromises of equal temperament. The technical choice is important, but what makes the album more interesting is the way he refuses to leave it in the laboratory. For Taeggi, “just” becomes both an acoustic principle and an ethical metaphor, a way of imagining relationships without the distortions produced by hierarchy and domination. That could easily have resulted in music wearing a very serious philosophical beard. Instead, "I Alone" remains surprisingly light on its feet. Its ideas are present, but they vibrate rather than lecture.

Taeggi has been investigating the relationship between technology, acoustic phenomena and musical convention for years. An Amsterdam Conservatoire graduate in piano and electronic music, he has worked under his own name as well as 5HT2 and Gondwana, moving through electro-acoustic composition, musique concrète, experimental electronics and bass music. His catalogue includes releases on Mille Plateaux, Type, Opal Tapes and Hands in the Dark, while his work has taken him from CTM and MUTEK to Moers and numerous venues across Europe, North America, South America and Asia. Earlier projects have frequently involved obsolete measuring equipment, analogue synthesisers and unconventional approaches to rhythm and timbre. "I Alone" represents a noticeable change of emphasis: less concerned with rhythmic machinery, more interested in harmony, resonance and sustained attention.

The prepared-piano samples are particularly important here. Recorded at EMS in Stockholm and Luxus Platte in Berlin, they do not simply provide an acoustic counterweight to the electronics. They bring physical imperfections into a system that could otherwise become almost mathematically pristine. The piano becomes a collection of resonances, attacks, overtones and little disturbances, while the synthesised material supplies slowly changing harmonic fields around it. The distinction between “instrument” and “electronic sound” consequently starts to lose its usefulness. You hear objects, but you also hear the relationships between them.

"I alone drift about" establishes this peculiar equilibrium immediately. The title suggests someone who has misplaced the map, but the music does not sound lost. Its movement is patient, almost gravitational, with sounds appearing to lean toward one another without quite arriving. The melody is understated, yet there is a strong sense of direction in the harmonic changes. This is not ambient music in the conventional sense of asking you to stop paying attention. It asks for the opposite: notice the tiny alteration, the interval that has shifted, the tone whose colour seems to change because another tone has entered the room.

That sensitivity to interval becomes even more revealing in "I alone possess nothing". The phrase could be interpreted as spiritual humility, existential complaint or merely an unusually elegant way of announcing that the rent is due. Taeggi wisely allows all three possibilities to coexist. The music is sparse enough for individual tones to acquire weight, but never so austere that the piece becomes a demonstration of how little sound a person can tolerate before checking their phone.

The six titles draw on Taoist thought, particularly ideas surrounding emptiness, stillness, darkness and not-knowing. Yet the album does not attempt to illustrate those concepts literally. Instead, the titles function almost like small philosophical traps. "I alone am dull", for example, is anything but dull. Its harmonic language keeps the ear slightly unsettled, because the tuning prevents the familiar equal-tempered grid from functioning as an invisible safety net. "I alone am dark" moves toward greater density and shadow, but darkness here is not simply low frequency or melancholy. It is a condition of perception, a reminder that not everything needs to be immediately clarified.

This is where Taeggi's use of Just Intonation becomes musically convincing. He has previously explored the system in works such as "Tableaux Vivant", where a re-tuned piano and closely related frequencies generated beating, friction and unusually vivid overtones. His own writings on tuning show that he is interested not merely in alternative pitches but in the physical consequences of their relationships. On "I Alone", that research becomes less overtly experimental and more compositional. The ear is invited to inhabit the consequences rather than inspect the machinery.

"I alone don't know" may be the album's most telling title because uncertainty is precisely what Taeggi preserves. Electronic music often gives the impression that everything has been controlled down to the last parameter. Here, control and ambiguity coexist. Arpeggiated figures emerge without becoming conventional sequences; prepared-piano sounds suggest recognisable gestures before dissolving into texture; harmonic changes seem both deliberate and strangely organic. Recent criticism has similarly noted the record's movement away from the rhythmic density of "Nattdett" and "Biomimetics toward a more melodic, minimal and harmonically focused language.

The closing "I alone am aimless" brings the paradox full circle. Aimlessness does not mean inactivity. It means movement without the obligation to justify a destination. The piece stretches toward seven minutes, allowing the album's tuning system to reveal itself gradually rather than announcing its credentials at the door. This is perhaps the most persuasive aspect of "I Alone": the music does not demand that its ethical premise be accepted before the listening can begin. It simply creates conditions in which attentiveness becomes possible.

There is something quietly radical about that approach. Taeggi's starting point is the inadequacy of music to repair war, injustice and systemic violence, and he makes no grand promise that six electronic compositions will somehow reorganise society. Sensibly, he aims at something smaller: presence, connection, a change in the way we listen. Whether such changes can migrate from perception into collective life is another question, and the album wisely leaves it unanswered. Political history has never been particularly good at taking instructions from synthesizers anyway.

What remains is a record about tuning in the fullest sense of the expression. Its frequencies are adjusted, but so is the listener's attention. Its apparent solitude is populated by resonances. Its spiritual references are balanced by a dry sense of humour. And its idea of justice begins not with a manifesto but with the simple observation that sounds behave differently when they are allowed to relate to one another without being forced into an artificial uniformity.

"I Alone" therefore feels less like an escape from a damaged world than a modest experiment in hearing it differently. Taeggi does not offer harmony as an answer to disorder. He offers harmony as a question: what might things sound like if their relationships were allowed to become more exact, more patient, and less coercive? It is a rather ambitious question for a digital album. Fortunately, the music has the good manners not to shout it.

There is something wonderfully inconvenient about the title "Elsewhen". Not elsewhere, but else-when: an alternative time rather than an alternative place. It suggests that history might be less like a line than a badly organised cupboard, with different centuries and geographies rummaging around in the same drawer. Futuro Ancestrale’s second album takes precisely this temporal confusion as its playground, bringing together Giuseppe Doronzo’s baritone saxophone and an assortment of traditional instruments with the live electronics of Yannis Kyriakides, Andy Moor’s electric guitar and Frank Rosaly’s drums. The result is neither “world music” nor fusion in the conventional sense, but something considerably more slippery: a music in which old materials are allowed to become strange again.

Doronzo is particularly well equipped for this sort of mischief. Born in Barletta in 1987 and based in Amsterdam, he has developed a practice around the baritone saxophone that moves between contemporary composition, jazz improvisation, microtonality and non-Western traditions. His work with instruments such as the Iranian ney-anban, Chinese hulusi and Albanian longari has never amounted simply to collecting exotic timbres like musical fridge magnets. His interest lies in what happens when those sounds enter an improvisational environment and start behaving differently. Tora Records, the Amsterdam label he founded in 2018, has likewise become a home for music occupying the borderlands between improvisation, electro-acoustic composition and non-Western traditions.

On "Elsewhen", electronics are not pasted onto an ancestral vocabulary as some kind of futuristic wallpaper. They interfere with it. Kyriakides’ sampling and processing can make a flute seem briefly detached from its physical origin, while Moor and Rosaly provide a nervous, often surprisingly muscular framework in which these sounds can circulate. "Eye of the Hurricane" is a good example: the hulusi carries a breathy, almost folkloric identity, but the guitar and drums prevent it from settling comfortably into a picturesque pastoral scene. The electronic interventions further complicate the picture, turning recognisable acoustic gestures into fragments of another chronology. It is as if someone had placed an old photograph on a scanner and then decided that the scanner deserved a solo.

"Ghostline" works differently. The Albanian cyla dyjare, with its peculiar double-voice character, meets drums and electronics in a piece that seems to move rather than simply develop. There is something almost tactile about the way Doronzo’s instrumental colours are retained while being made unstable around the edges. The music does not imitate a shepherd wandering through some idealised Balkan landscape; it makes the very idea of musical memory slightly unreliable. What we hear feels inherited and newly manufactured at the same time.

That tension becomes particularly intriguing in "Scindone". The title refers to a peculiar belief from Lucanian folk medicine, where the scindone is a mysterious headache attributed to exposure to the sun after a day of working in the fields. According to the tradition, however, its real origin is considerably stranger: the condition can be contracted by urinating against a rainbow, after which it supposedly torments the victim throughout the night. The cure is no less ritualistic: before sunrise, the afflicted person must leave the house without speaking to anyone, pass beneath three masonry arches and repeat a protective formula. It is an extraordinary piece of popular imagination, somewhere between medical explanation, superstition and ceremonial magic, and it gives the track an altogether different historical resonance. In this context, Scindone becomes more than a reference to an old Apulian or Southern Italian custom. It evokes a world in which illness, landscape, weather, work and the supernatural are still entangled, where the boundaries between physical experience and symbolic belief have never been tidied up by modernity. Doronzo does not attempt to reconstruct that world literally. Instead, its strange logic seems to seep into the music, adding another layer to "Elsewhen"’s fascination with forms of knowledge that survive outside official histories. The past here is not noble, picturesque or conveniently ancient. It is superstitious, bodily, occasionally absurd and wonderfully difficult to explain, which may be precisely why it remains so evocative.

The same principle governs "Faló", inspired by the Chadian kakaki and by seasonal fire rituals. The piece has a ceremonial quality, but not the sort that demands incense and a respectful silence from the listener. Rosaly’s percussion gives it physical weight, while the electronic treatment and Doronzo’s instrumental interventions prevent the ritual atmosphere from becoming decorative. "Saturno", "Blind Needle" and "Underrun" move further into less obviously folkloric territory, where the album’s vocabulary begins to feel increasingly hybrid. The instruments cease to function as cultural labels and become active participants in an evolving sonic grammar.

This is also where the presence of Andy Moor becomes important. His guitar does not behave like the polite Western representative invited to the intercultural dinner to demonstrate that everyone can get along. His abrasive, electronically extended vocabulary has long belonged to the more unruly corners of European improvisation, from The Ex and Dog Faced Hermans to Lean Left and numerous collaborations. In Futuro Ancestrale he provides friction rather than validation. Frank Rosaly, meanwhile, is equally capable of resisting the obvious role of “the drummer”: his percussion can establish pulse, density or suspense, but it also leaves considerable negative space around the other musicians. Earlier criticism of the trio’s first album already noticed their unusual restraint, particularly in the way Rosaly and Moor avoided turning Doronzo’s unusual instrumental palette into an excuse for perpetual sonic assault.

The arrival of Kyriakides changes the equation substantially. His electronics make "Elsewhen" feel less like an expansion of the first Futuro Ancestrale album than a mutation of it. The earlier trio recording, "Futuro Ancestrale" (Clean Feed, 2024), was recorded live at Amsterdam’s Bimhuis and already explored the collision of baritone saxophone, guitar, percussion and non-Western instruments. Reviews of that album repeatedly identified its unusual balance between heaviness, space, ritual suggestion and improvisational freedom. "Elsewhen" takes that vocabulary and introduces a technological layer capable of altering the evidence while it is being presented.

That makes the album’s recurring fascination with duality more than a conceptual decoration. Acoustic/electronic, ancient/contemporary, composed/improvised, local/distant: these oppositions are constantly being proposed and then quietly sabotaged. "Elsewhen" is strongest when it refuses to decide which side belongs to which era. The hulusi can sound futuristic; the electronics can acquire something almost archaeological; the baritone saxophone can become less a jazz instrument than a large breathing machine whose ancestry is temporarily unavailable.

There is also a more delicate question underneath all this cultural cross-pollination. How do you use instruments associated with particular traditions without reducing them to exotic colour? Futuro Ancestrale does not solve that problem through reverence. It approaches it through interaction. The traditional instruments are not placed behind glass, but neither are they stripped of their identities and thrown into an anonymous experimental soup. Their distinct timbres remain audible while the surrounding musicians continuously challenge what those timbres are allowed to mean. That distinction matters.

The album’s nine pieces therefore feel less like compositions about the past than experiments in how the past behaves once it has been electrically disturbed. "Driftlight", the closing eight-minute piece, is especially effective in this respect, leaving enough space for the album’s various temporal layers to coexist without demanding a grand finale. There is no neat reconciliation, no ceremonial handshake between ancestors and synthesizers. Civilization survives another album without finding a solution to history, which is probably for the best.

Doronzo’s music has always seemed interested in the possibility that tradition can remain alive precisely by refusing to remain unchanged. "Elsewhen" pushes that idea further. Its “ancestral” material is not there to certify authenticity, while its futuristic electronics are not there to certify modernity. Both are simply materials, vulnerable to transformation, misunderstanding, collision and rediscovery. The album’s real subject is therefore not cultural fusion but temporal friction: the strange moment when something very old becomes unfamiliar again.

And perhaps that is why "Elsewhen" works. It does not ask the past to explain the present, nor does it ask the future to rescue it. It lets different times interfere with one another until their boundaries become audible rather than theoretical. Somewhere between Doronzo’s deep baritone, a double flute from Albania, a Chinese gourd flute, Moor’s guitar, Rosaly’s percussion and Kyriakides’ restless electronics, history stops behaving like history and starts behaving like sound.

There is a certain perversity in calling a three-CD set by twenty-five improvisers "25 pièces sans vide". The title suggests an absence of emptiness, while free improvisation traditionally thrives on precisely the spaces where nothing appears to be happening. And then there is Le UN itself: twenty-five people calling themselves “the one”, which sounds either like a philosophical proposition or the name of a particularly badly organised superhero. In reality, the contradiction is the point. "25 pièces sans vide" is an extended examination of how a crowd can remain a crowd without becoming a blur, and how individual freedom might survive when twenty-five nervous systems are making decisions at the same time.

Le UN began in 2012 through the initiative of double bassist David Chiesa, initially bringing together musicians with very different backgrounds and experimenting with graphic, oral and textual forms of direction. In 2019, the ensemble changed course, concentrating exclusively on free or non-idiomatic improvisation and abandoning scores and formal direction altogether. Its members are involved not only in making the music but also in the organisation of the group, which operates horizontally rather than according to a conventional leader-and-orchestra structure.

That distinction is crucial. Le UN is not simply a large free-improvisation orchestra. It is an attempt to make the organisation of the ensemble itself part of the artistic experiment. The group explicitly treats improvisation as an attitude rather than a genre, and its interest in impermanence extends beyond the music: performances leave traces, recordings, memories and consequences, but cannot reproduce the original situation.

The box gathers five substantial pieces recorded between 2021 and 2022, divided between large-ensemble performances, smaller formations and an outdoor intervention. Across roughly three hours, the scale keeps changing: 45 minutes in Gradignan, nearly an hour in Le Havre, then progressively smaller groups at Cluny before the musicians move into the public space of Place Saint-Michel in Bordeaux. It is less a conventional album than a set of different experiments conducted on the same social organism.

The first disc, "Unité nodale T4S", immediately demonstrates the problem Le UN has chosen for itself. Put twenty-five experienced improvisers in the same room and you have an almost absurd quantity of possible decisions. Somebody can become louder. Somebody else can disappear. A saxophone can interrupt a cello; an electronic texture can undermine a percussion pattern; a piano can suddenly provide a centre of gravity that nobody explicitly asked for. The danger is obvious: collective improvisation can become either a polite soup or an arms race. Le UN generally avoids both.

What makes the large ensemble convincing is its ability to create temporary centres rather than a permanent hierarchy. Sophie Agnel's piano can suddenly become structurally important without becoming “the leader”; percussion can gather momentum without turning into a rhythm section; voices, strings and brass can briefly form recognisable relationships before abandoning them. Electronics from Jérôme Noetinger and Lionel Marchetti do not simply provide atmospheric wallpaper, either. They alter the apparent scale of the ensemble, making acoustic gestures seem larger, stranger or more distant.

The musicians are individually too distinctive to disappear completely. That is one of the group's most interesting characteristics. The lineup includes several generations and approaches to experimental music, from piano, strings, double basses and winds to rotating surfaces, electronics, accordion, voice, hurdy-gurdy, light and physical actions. The challenge is not to suppress these personalities but to prevent them from behaving like twenty-five soloists waiting for their turn. Le UN's own description of its practice places individual singularity at the centre while insisting that it must not obstruct shared space. That sounds suspiciously utopian on paper. Fortunately, the music is more complicated than the philosophy.

"Unité nodale ESJ", occupying the whole of the second disc, makes this especially clear. Its length changes the listener's relationship with concentration. There is no convenient three-minute reset button, no chorus to announce that the previous argument has been resolved. Instead, density accumulates and recedes. Electronics can create broad fields of pressure, while strings, percussion and winds introduce irregular disturbances. At times the texture seems almost geological, as if the ensemble were slowly excavating a sound rather than performing one.

This is also where the title becomes useful. There are “pieces without gaps”, but that does not mean there are no silences or reductions in intensity. The absence of a gap is conceptual rather than merely acoustic. One event remains connected to the next even when the audible material becomes sparse. Listening becomes an exercise in remembering what has just disappeared.

A recent assessment of the set rightly emphasised the unusual ability of the musicians to retain their individual expertise inside the larger aggregate. It also noted the markedly different character of the discs: the first and final pieces combine acoustic and electronic impulses, while the second is more heavily oriented toward electronic waveforms and the two middle pieces on CD3 are predominantly acoustic. The observation is useful because it reveals that "25 pièces sans vide" is not really about one Le UN sound. There isn't one.

The third disc is where the proposition becomes more intimate. "PME postes fixes" reduces the ensemble to a smaller constellation involving piano, rotating surfaces, percussion and electronics. The reduction does not make the music simpler. It makes the relationships more exposed. Every sound has more responsibility because there are fewer bodies available to disguise it. A small metallic gesture can suddenly acquire structural significance; an electronic oscillation can become almost architectural; piano fragments can hover between melody and percussive interruption.

It is here that Le UN's approach begins to resemble chamber music without adopting chamber music's usual manners. The players listen closely, but there is no obligation to be elegant about it. Sounds can scrape, interrupt, hover, stutter or simply refuse to develop. The intimacy is therefore not cosy. It is closer to being in a room with several people who are all paying extremely close attention to one another and none of whom has been given the authority to settle the argument.

"PME cordes" goes further by reducing the acoustic palette largely to strings, accordion and voice. Three double basses, two cellos and two violins create a fascinating vertical tension between low resonance and high-frequency fragility. The result is almost a study in how little is required for strings to stop sounding “beautiful” in the conventional sense. Bow pressure, friction, scraping, resonance and interruption become as important as pitch.

The voice and accordion introduce another layer of ambiguity. The human voice can suggest language even when no language is being used, while the accordion is capable of sounding simultaneously mechanical and organic. Together they create the impression of an improvised miniature theatre in which nobody has bothered to write the script. This is perhaps the most persuasive argument for Le UN's insistence that improvisation is not a genre. The music does not need to sound like a particular tradition because its subject is the act of negotiating what happens next. Then the musicians leave the stage.

"Brigade d'Intervention Légère PSM", recorded at Place Saint-Michel in Bordeaux, places the ensemble directly inside public space. Here the environment is no longer a neutral acoustic container. Voices, ambient noise and the unpredictable behaviour of the surrounding square become part of the material. The distinction between performer and audience becomes less secure, which is precisely what Le UN has been questioning throughout its practice.

This is more than an interesting recording trick. Playing outdoors introduces a different kind of risk. A concert hall can be controlled, at least in theory. A public square has traffic, conversations, weather, pedestrians, distractions and people who did not consent to becoming an avant-garde audience. The world is allowed to interrupt the musicians. In such circumstances, improvisation stops being a purely musical negotiation and becomes a negotiation with reality itself.

That interest in displacement is fundamental to Le UN's broader activity. The ensemble has explored streets, rivers, caves, exhibition spaces and acousmatic situations, deliberately placing improvisation in environments that disturb the conventional separation between performer, listener and location. The point is not simply to find exotic places in which to record unusual sounds. It is to discover how much of the music depends on the idea of a stage in the first place. The answer, on "25 pièces sans vide", seems to be: less than we might assume.

There is also a subtle political dimension to the ensemble's method, although it wisely avoids turning the recordings into an ideological lecture. Twenty-five people sharing responsibility without a conductor is not a metaphor for harmonious society. Quite the opposite. It exposes how difficult collective life actually is. Someone has to listen. Someone has to leave space. Someone has to accept that their excellent idea is not going to happen. Someone else has to make a noise at precisely the wrong moment and discover that it was, accidentally, the right one. That tension is what keeps the music alive.

The set is not uniformly easy listening, and it should not be. The extended "Unité Nodale ESJ" can become deliberately dense, with electronic textures occupying enough space to test the listener's patience. A recent review of the set found this concentration less convincing than the more varied acoustic sections, noting the tendency of the long second-disc performance toward sustained electronic density. That criticism is fair, but the slight imbalance also makes the box more revealing. A project genuinely committed to collective risk should occasionally produce results that are less immediately persuasive. Otherwise the “risk” is just good branding.

What ultimately distinguishes "25 pièces sans vide" is therefore not technical virtuosity, although there is an extraordinary amount of it. Nor is it simply the spectacle of twenty-five musicians improvising simultaneously. Its real subject is attention: how individual attention can become collective without becoming uniform, and how a group can construct temporary form without deciding in advance what that form should be.

The three-CD format makes that question physical. You do not consume this music like a playlist. You spend time with it. The box comes with a twenty-page bilingual booklet containing texts by Le UN, Joël Pagier, Jean-Philippe Pierron and Nate Wooley, reinforcing the sense that the release is intended not merely as documentation but as an account of an ongoing practice.

And perhaps “documentation” is the wrong word anyway. The ensemble itself insists on the distinction between traces and proof. A recording can tell us that something happened. It cannot give us the situation in which it happened, the glances between musicians, the physical acoustics, the audience's reactions, the accidental noise outside the room or the precise instant when one player decided to enter and another decided not to.

That missing information is not a defect. It is the residue that makes the recordings worth hearing.

"25 pièces sans vide" ultimately presents improvisation as a strange form of collective architecture. Nothing is fixed, yet structures appear. Nobody is officially in charge, yet decisions accumulate. Individual voices remain audible, yet something larger occasionally emerges from their interference. And the “one” in Le UN never becomes a single voice. It becomes a temporary agreement between many.

Twenty-five people making one music without making themselves one person: humanity has spent millennia failing to solve that problem politically. Le UN at least gets a few hours of excellent noise out of it.