There is something pleasingly perverse about a band called Portion Control delivering a four-CD collection that contains enough material to keep an industrial dancefloor occupied until the building is condemned. Formed in London in 1979, Portion Control emerged from the post-punk underground with an approach to electronic music that was abrasive, rhythmically inventive and distinctly uninterested in behaving itself. Their importance is often measured through the artists who followed their lead, from Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb to Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, Nine Inch Nails and Orbital. Yet influence can be a rather lazy form of historical recognition: it tells us who borrowed from whom, but not necessarily why the original music still deserves attention. "1983-86 - Hit The Pulse to Purge…" makes a fairly convincing case for listening to the source rather than merely admiring its descendants.

The collection covers a particularly fertile stretch of the group's history, bringing together the "Hit The Pulse" mini-album (1983), "..Step Forward" (1984), "Psycho-Bod Saves The World" (1986), the "Purge" EP and a selection of singles, B-sides, rarities, remixes, demos and live recordings. Its opening disc establishes the group's distinctive vocabulary: sequenced electronic patterns, hard-edged percussion, rough vocal delivery and bass lines that seem to have been designed with the express purpose of making furniture nervous. But the music is not simply an exercise in mechanical aggression. There is a strong sense of songcraft beneath the rough surfaces, with hooks, structural shifts and an instinct for rhythmic tension that prevent the material from becoming a monotonous parade of electronic blunt instruments.

The early tracks retain something of post-punk's unruly spirit, although guitars are largely replaced by synthesiser sequences and sampled fragments. Portion Control's relationship with technology was experimental in a practical rather than romantic sense. In the early days, the group worked with an ARP Axxe, Roland CR-78 drum machine and the Greengate DS:3 sampling system running on an Apple II computer, an arrangement whose limitations were apparently more productive than discouraging. Sampling was still a relatively young technique, and the available equipment offered little of the convenience that contemporary producers take for granted. The band's solution was not to wait for better tools, but to find ways of making the existing ones misbehave. Their early fascination with dub, particularly its use of echo, space and repetition, also helped distinguish their sound from the more straightforward electronic constructions of the period.

That mixture of rhythmic discipline and unruly detail is especially evident in "Hit The Pulse" and the material surrounding it. Tracks such as “Chew You To Bits”, “Discord” and “Death By Venom” have a wiry, confrontational energy, while “Abbo Dabbo” demonstrates that the group's sense of humour was not confined to the occasional eccentric title. The subsequent singles “Raise The Pulse”, “Rough Justice” and “Go-Talk” move more decisively towards the dancefloor, stretching the rhythmic framework into longer forms without sanding away the band's abrasive character. Their appeal lies partly in the tension between physical immediacy and sonic oddness: these are records that can make a body move while leaving the brain wondering what exactly has just happened.

"..Step Forward" marks another important stage in that development. The increased use of sequenced synthesiser lines, including the Roland MC-202, gives the music a more defined electronic architecture. “Havoc Man” and “Refugee” are particularly revealing examples of the band's ability to construct momentum through interlocking patterns rather than relying on conventional instrumental gestures. There is a curious balance between precision and volatility: the sequences are tightly controlled, but the vocals and surrounding textures retain a distinctly human roughness. The result is neither polished synth-pop nor industrial noise in its most uncompromising form. Portion Control occupied a productive patch of territory between the two, and seemed quite happy to leave the borders unmarked.

The second disc brings "Psycho-Bod Saves The World" into focus, alongside the "Purge" material and later reconstructions. The album's title alone suggests that the group had no intention of allowing solemnity to become a permanent condition. Its music continues the band's interest in forceful electronic rhythm, but the collection's broader range becomes more apparent here. “Brain Scraper Death Dive”, “Siren City”, “Danger Zone” and “Cut And Thrust” demonstrate different shades of the group's approach, from compact rhythmic assaults to more developed, dance-oriented constructions. The humour embedded in the titles is worth noting, too. Portion Control have always understood that darkness need not be accompanied by a compulsory facial expression suggesting a particularly difficult tax audit.

The "Purge" versions of “Raise The Pulse”, “Go-Talk” and “The Great Divide” provide an interesting opportunity to compare the band's treatment of familiar material. The latter, in particular, appears in several forms across the set, making its development one of the collection's recurring reference points. Rhys Fulber's rebuild of “Refugee” adds a later perspective, connecting the original recording with one of the artists whose work grew out of the same electro-industrial lineage. It is a useful inclusion, although the original remains essential to understanding the band's own musical language.

The third disc, devoted to B-sides, compilation appearances and demos, is where the collection becomes especially valuable to listeners interested in the mechanics of the creative process. Some of this material is less immediately accessible than the principal album tracks, but that is hardly a fault. “The Man Who Did Backwards Somersaults”, “Upside Down” and “Justice” reveal a group willing to explore less predictable structures, while the two demos of “H.O.T. Matter” offer a glimpse of how a composition can change during development. The Arthur Baker demo mix of “Conscience” is another welcome archival detail. These recordings do not merely pad out the running time; they broaden the picture of a band whose catalogue was never limited to a handful of genre-defining singles.

The final disc moves from the studio to two live recordings, captured in Amsterdam in 1984 and Lausanne in 1985. Their value is partly historical, but also musical: tracks such as “Eat Your Heart”, “Go-Talk”, “Raise The Pulse”, “Karateka” and “Havoc Man” acquire a different character when heard in performance. The sound is less controlled, the transitions more exposed, and the material's physical qualities become harder to ignore. These are documents rather than pristine concert productions, which is precisely why they belong here. They offer a useful reminder that Portion Control's music was never intended to remain safely inside the circuitry of a recording studio.

As an archival release, "1983-86 - Hit The Pulse to Purge…" is impressively comprehensive. All the material has been remastered by Paul Lavigne at Kontrast Mastering, while the 24-page booklet and archive photographs give the package a welcome visual dimension. The limited red-vinyl edition, with ten selected tracks, offers a more compact entry point, but the four-CD version is plainly the more rewarding option for anyone wanting to understand the full scope of this period. Its sheer length can occasionally test one's attention, and not every demo or alternate version is likely to become indispensable. That is an inevitable consequence of opening the archive rather than simply selecting the most obvious highlights.

Portion Control's subsequent return in the 2000s, followed by records such as "Wellcome", "Filthy White Guy" and "Pure Form", demonstrated that the group was not interested in treating its early catalogue as a museum exhibit. Their later work continued to develop the same interest in electronic construction, texture and rhythmic force, using newer tools without abandoning the independence that had shaped their beginnings. This collection therefore feels less like a nostalgic detour than an opportunity to reconsider a group whose historical importance has sometimes exceeded its public visibility.

The best thing about "1983-86 - Hit The Pulse to Purge…" is that it does not need to rely on influence as its main selling point. The music remains inventive, energetic and occasionally gloriously peculiar on its own terms. Portion Control were not simply preparing the ground for other artists to build something more commercially successful upon it. They were making records with their own personality, their own sense of rhythm and a healthy disregard for the boundaries between experimentation and entertainment. Forty years later, the pulse is still very much present. The purge, apparently, can wait.

There is a particular kind of ambition that involves putting several musical languages in the same room and trusting them not to start arguing before the first track is over. On "Solari", Maxime Corbeil-Perron seems quite comfortable with that risk. Under the new moniker Courant Zéro, the Montréal-based artist returns to recording-focused electronic music after several years devoted to experimental cinema, audiovisual performance and installation. His debut for Constellation gathers together ambient, IDM, electroacoustic composition, glitch, noise and modern composition, but the result is not an exercise in genre collecting. It is a densely constructed work whose strongest moments emerge from the friction between melodic clarity and electronic instability.

The opening title track establishes the album's more contemplative side. Cavernous drones and modular arpeggiations move through a thick electronic atmosphere, with small changes in timbre providing much of the movement. It is not exactly an invitation to relax, unless one's preferred relaxation technique involves spending time inside a malfunctioning observatory, but there is a curious sense of space within its darker textures. "En deçà du réel" gradually increases the emotional and compositional intensity, using interwoven melodic lines played on Buchla and other synthesizers. Dedicated to video artist Manon Labrecque, the piece was conceived partly through an image of her suspended between two frames of magnetic VHS tape. The influence of Andrei Tarkovsky's approach to cinematic pacing also informs its slow development. The result is a patient, carefully layered composition in which repetition becomes a means of altering perspective rather than simply filling time.

Corbeil-Perron's cinematic background is more than a convenient biographical detail. His work across experimental film, audiovisual performance and sound installation has clearly shaped his understanding of musical duration and detail. He is accustomed to working with images that resist straightforward narrative progression, and "Solari" carries a similar sensibility: events are allowed to develop at their own pace, while the listener is encouraged to notice how one texture changes the meaning of another. There is a visual intelligence to the arrangements, but the music never feels like an incidental soundtrack waiting for a film to arrive. It has its own internal drama, even when that drama is conducted at a speed that would make most action-film editors develop a nervous tic.

The third track, "Strange Aorta", introduces a more personal dimension. Its title refers to the pulsating rhythm surrounding the central melody, but also to the grief Corbeil-Perron experienced after his father's death and his confrontation with mortality. The emotional weight is not expressed through conventional elegiac gestures. Instead, wistful melodic fragments are surrounded by shifting low frequencies and sharp electronic interruptions, producing a tension between vulnerability and physical force. The title's anatomical reference is apt: the piece seems to draw its momentum from an internal mechanism, something that continues to function even when the surrounding system is under pressure. It is one of the album's most affecting passages precisely because it does not attempt to explain its sadness.

The next two tracks, "La peau des dents" and "Horizon n'arrête", demonstrate how far apart the album's compositional approaches can be. The former is more closely associated with electroacoustic and aleatoric systems, using colliding loops and unstable patterns that seem to resist settling into a fixed arrangement. The latter offers a striking change of temperature, with piano material transformed through digital processing. Its relative delicacy provides a necessary pause, though not a conventional moment of rest. The piano retains a recognisable expressive character, but its sound is subtly altered, as if the instrument were being recalled through an imperfect electronic memory. Corbeil-Perron understands that a piano does not need to be surrounded by an orchestra to sound emotionally substantial. Sometimes a few carefully handled notes can do more than an entire committee of cinematic strings.

Then comes "Unyeldd", the album's longest piece and arguably its most immediately engaging rhythmic statement. Over nine minutes, broken beats, skittering percussion and cascading melodic figures create a restless but remarkably coherent electronic structure. Its kinetic character distinguishes it from the more suspended passages elsewhere, while the recurring melodic details prevent the rhythmic activity from becoming an end in itself. Corbeil-Perron has cited the music of Do Make Say Think as an influence, particularly after rediscovering the group's records following a 2024 performance. That connection makes sense: there is a shared interest in the expressive possibilities of intricate rhythmic interplay, although "Unyeldd" translates that impulse into a more synthetic vocabulary. The piece has a certain mischievous energy, like a machine that has been programmed to perform a complicated task and has decided, halfway through, that dancing might be more interesting.

"Eroding Us", which follows, returns to the more abstract procedures heard earlier. Its unstable loops and shifting electronic patterns provide a less immediately accessible conclusion to the album's central sequence. The final piece, "Journée au bout de la nuit", then brings the record to a close without resorting to an emphatic resolution. Its title suggests a day at the far end of the night, a phrase that could easily belong to a particularly disorganised diary. Musically, it offers a final change of atmosphere, leaving the listener with the sense that the album's different tendencies have not been reconciled so much as allowed to coexist.

That is both the strength and the occasional weakness of "Solari". Its wealth of ideas gives it a distinctive character, but the transitions between its different compositional approaches are not always equally convincing. The more experimental passages sometimes seem content to explore their own sonic mechanisms without developing the kind of larger structural argument that makes the album's strongest pieces so compelling. One published assessment has similarly questioned whether the record's diverse materials always form a fully coherent whole, while another has praised its cinematic development and textural range. Both reactions point towards a genuine tension in the music: Corbeil-Perron is clearly interested in the expressive possibilities of complexity, but complexity alone does not guarantee that every musical idea will find its most persuasive form. The album is more successful when its intricate production serves a clear emotional or rhythmic purpose, as on "Strange Aorta", "Horizon n'arrête" and "Unyeldd".

The person behind Courant Zéro has accumulated plenty of experience to support such an ambitious undertaking. Based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, Maxime Corbeil-Perron is a composer, filmmaker and multimedia artist whose practice spans electroacoustic music, improvisation, sound art, experimental cinema and installation. Originally trained as a pianist and jazz drummer, he has released more than fifteen albums under various projects and pseudonyms, including M.edium, DRESDEN and Le Poisson d'argent. He also co-founded Kohlenstoff Records, an independent Montréal label that has supported experimental electronic and electroacoustic music. His film and audiovisual work has received recognition at festivals including Ann Arbor, Festival Tous Courts, Dérapage and Vienna Shorts, while his compositional practice earned an Honorary Mention in Digital Music and Sound Art at Prix Ars Electronica in 2021.

This background helps explain why "Solari" feels less like a fresh start than a consolidation of several artistic interests. Corbeil-Perron's work has frequently explored the relationship between obsolete media and contemporary technology, a concern associated with media archaeology. His interest in the material qualities of image and sound is evident here, even without the visual component. The electronic textures have a physical presence, and the music often seems concerned with the behaviour of its own materials: how a melodic line can be interrupted, how a rhythmic pattern can mutate, how a familiar instrument can retain its identity after being digitally altered. His early musical experiences also remain relevant. The piano's expressive potential and the drummer's instinct for rhythmic displacement are both audible, even when the instruments themselves are transformed beyond conventional recognition.

The album's artwork, "Cryptography I" by Yen-Chao Lin, provides an appropriate visual counterpart. Its intricate, maze-like circuitry combines sharply defined structures with a handmade quality, suggesting an object that is simultaneously engineered and organic. The image does not simply illustrate the music, but shares its fascination with systems whose apparent order contains plenty of room for uncertainty. The record was composed, performed, mixed and produced by Corbeil-Perron, with mastering by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier. Its recording and mixing took place across Montréal, Morelia, Mexico City and Stockholm, a geographical spread that seems fitting for an album whose identity is built through the accumulation of different artistic environments.

"Solari" is not a perfectly seamless statement, and its more exploratory passages occasionally expose the difficulty of bringing such varied materials into a single compositional framework. Yet its unevenness is also part of what makes it interesting. Corbeil-Perron is not trying to produce a neatly packaged demonstration of his technical abilities, nor does he seem particularly concerned with making every track equally accommodating. Instead, he allows the album to move between suspended electronic forms, intricate rhythmic constructions, abstract sound processing and moments of genuine melodic tenderness. The result is a debut that feels both assured and open-ended.

Courant Zéro is therefore a meaningful addition to Corbeil-Perron's already extensive body of work, not because it abandons his previous interests, but because it gives them a more concentrated musical setting. "Solari" contains enough detail to reward repeated listening, but also enough warmth to prevent its technical ambition from becoming an obstacle. Its most successful passages achieve something more interesting than mere sonic complexity: they make the machinery feel emotionally consequential. And that is no small achievement, particularly in electronic music, where occasionally even the machines seem to have more feelings than the people operating them.

Nature has never been particularly concerned with sounding pleasant. Water can murmur, certainly, but it can also grind, crack, roar and produce noises that would make a badly maintained industrial plant seem positively melodic. The interesting question is what happens when those sounds are removed from their familiar surroundings and subjected to the unruly imagination of electronic musicians. "Tales from the Source", the collaborative soundtrack by Bear Bones, Lay Low and Laszlo Umbreit, approaches this question with considerable patience and a healthy suspicion of pastoral prettiness. Originally composed for Belgian-Congolese artist and filmmaker Léonard Pongo's 2024 film of the same name, the six-part suite transforms environmental recordings into a dark, slowly evolving electroacoustic composition. It is less interested in accompanying nature than in discovering how strange nature can become once its familiar vocabulary has been disturbed.

The collaboration rests on a productive division of labour. Laszlo Umbreit supplies the initial material, recording water, riverbeds and other environmental details, alongside additional electronic sounds. Bear Bones, Lay Low then takes these recordings apart and rebuilds them through synthesizers, samplers, tape loops and effects processing. The distinction between the two approaches is important: one begins with the physical presence of a place, the other with the possibilities opened up by altering its acoustic properties. Yet the result does not feel like a simple sequence of field recordings followed by electronic decoration. The two processes become difficult to separate, as recognisable traces of the original sounds are gradually absorbed into an increasingly abstract mass of resonance, friction and low-frequency movement.

The six titles, "Eye", "Sun", "Bee", "Land", "Spider" and "Star", suggest a rudimentary taxonomy of the living and non-living world. They are short, almost elemental words, but their apparent simplicity conceals a broad range of associations. The sequence moves between perception, celestial bodies, insects, geography and the less immediately visible structures that connect living organisms. There is no need to impose a rigid symbolic interpretation on each title. Their function is more suggestive than explanatory, allowing the listener to approach the work through different points of reference without being handed a programme note for every sound. The absence of conventional song structures reinforces this openness. The six pieces are edited to flow into one another, forming a continuous composition in which the divisions serve more as changes of emphasis than as clear boundaries.

That continuity is particularly suited to the film's visual conception. Pongo presents the landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo not as passive scenery but as an active presence, shaped by cultural symbolism, knowledge and a sense of time that exceeds the human scale. His visual approach employs modified full-spectrum imaging, capturing wavelengths beyond ordinary human vision and producing colours that challenge familiar expectations of photographic representation. The result is not simply an attempt to make the landscape look unusual. It questions the limits of what the camera, and by extension the viewer, can perceive. The soundtrack extends this investigation into the auditory domain, suggesting that the sounds we associate with a particular environment are only a fraction of what might be experienced if we stopped treating the world as a collection of recognisable objects.

This is where the collaboration becomes especially compelling. Environmental recordings often carry an implicit promise of authenticity: the microphone captures something that happened somewhere, and the listener is invited to imagine being there. But recording is already an act of selection. A microphone has its own limitations, the position of the recorder determines what becomes audible, and editing inevitably changes the relationship between an event and its surroundings. Umbreit and Bear Bones, Lay Low take this instability as a starting point rather than something to conceal. The recordings are not preserved as documentary evidence; they are treated as material capable of undergoing radical transformation. A sound may retain the suggestion of water while acquiring an entirely different physical character, becoming a drone, a pulsing texture or an opaque electronic presence. The original source remains somewhere inside the result, but identifying it is no longer the main objective.

For Ernesto González, the Venezuelan-born musician behind Bear Bones, Lay Low, this kind of transformation is consistent with a practice developed over many years. Based in Brussels, he has worked across psychedelic electronics, noise, drone and experimental improvisation, both under his principal alias and through a range of collaborations. His early involvement with the free-form collective Silvester Anfang helped establish an interest in repetitive structures, raw sonic material and altered states of perception. Subsequent work has expanded into more rhythmically defined electronic forms, often combining analogue and digital sources with an instinct for unusual timbral combinations. His music can be hypnotic without becoming predictable, and playful without losing its capacity to unsettle. Here, however, the rhythmic and psychedelic tendencies are largely subordinated to the demands of the source material. The electronics do not provide an escape from the environment; they make it harder to recognise where the environment ends and the machinery begins.

Umbreit's contribution is equally fundamental. Born in Brussels in 1986, he works as a sound designer, editor and musician, with a practice that frequently connects recorded material to moving images. His work combines field recordings, electronic improvisation and meticulous post-production, often pushing familiar sounds through extensive processing until their original identity becomes uncertain. His 2023 album "Pas de regrets", released by Sub Rosa, offers another example of his interest in reshaping recorded memories and environmental material. He has also collaborated with audiovisual artist and drummer Eitan Efrat in the duo RHH, exploring the relationship between electronics, percussion and sounds drawn from their work in film and contemporary art. In "Tales from the Source", his experience in sound editing is particularly relevant: the material must retain enough internal detail to suggest a tangible world, while being organised into a musical form that can sustain attention without relying on conventional melodic development.

The film's own production history also helps clarify the soundtrack's position. Pongo worked with sound recordists Cedrick Mbongo Mbulu and Laszlo Umbreit, while Bear Bones, Lay Low provided the original music. The film runs for approximately 39 minutes and contains no dialogue, placing unusual weight on the relationship between image and sound. The album, at around forty minutes, is not simply a conventional collection of cues extracted from a longer production. It has been reworked into a continuous listening experience, with the six sections arranged to preserve the gradual development of the material. This makes it possible to approach the music independently of the images, although knowledge of the film adds another dimension to its more abstract passages.

There is a certain irony in the fact that a work concerned with the natural world should rely so heavily on electronic equipment. But the opposition between nature and technology is becoming increasingly unhelpful, particularly when the technology is used not to impose a reassuringly human order on its surroundings but to expose the instability of our own perceptions. The processed recordings here do not turn the environment into a decorative backdrop. They make it seem unfamiliar, occasionally threatening and sometimes almost impossible to locate. The darker passages resist the easy consolations of ambient music, where a few distant textures and a generous amount of reverb can apparently solve every problem known to civilisation. Instead, the music is patient, dense and occasionally uncomfortable, with its textures changing gradually rather than announcing their intentions.

The artwork and physical presentation contribute to this sense of a carefully considered audiovisual project. Rutger Zuydervelt is responsible for the layout, while Gonçalo F. Cardoso handled mastering. The credits also identify Ernesto González Rondón and Laszlo Aurélien Karl Bernard Umbreit as responsible for mixing and editing at THD Studios in Brussels. These details matter because the final form depends heavily on the organisation of the material. The transitions between the six sections are not merely convenient ways of dividing a long recording; they help preserve the impression of a single evolving organism, in which individual sounds appear, recede and return in altered forms.

"Tales from the Source" is ultimately a work about the limits of recognition. It begins with sounds that belong to identifiable environments, then gradually deprives them of the familiar qualities that would allow us to name them with confidence. What remains is not an abstract rejection of the physical world, but a different way of approaching it. The music asks us to consider how much of what we hear is shaped by expectation, and how easily a familiar sound can become something else when its context is changed. It also avoids the temptation to present the natural world as a source of uncomplicated serenity. There is pressure, density and a certain darkness in these recordings, as well as the possibility of unexpected beauty.

The film's title suggests that there is something to be discovered by returning to an origin, but the soundtrack offers no comforting promise of a pure or untouched beginning. Its source material has already passed through microphones, editing systems, tape loops and electronic processors. What emerges is neither pristine nature nor a technological fantasy, but an uneasy and rewarding exchange between the two. Bear Bones, Lay Low and Laszlo Umbreit have made a soundtrack that can stand apart from its visual counterpart without losing its connection to it. It is a work of considerable restraint, but not of passivity: beneath its slow progression, the sounds are constantly being reconsidered, reshaped and made strange. Nature, as it turns out, has plenty of experimental tendencies of its own. It simply doesn't bother to put them in the liner notes.

There is something both touching and faintly absurd about the idea of three musicians attempting to make sense of their emotional lives by sending sounds across cities. Most people resort to long messages, badly timed phone calls or the occasional ill-advised purchase. Enrico Coniglio, Saverio Rosi and Matteo Uggeri have chosen a more elaborate method: turning a collection of intense personal experiences, gathered over five months in 2023, into a ten-part musical work. The result, "Beyond the Emotional Flood", is the seventh album by Open to the Sea, and perhaps one of the project's most explicitly narrative undertakings.

The circumstances behind its creation are central to the record. Conceived between Venice, Amsterdam and Milan, it grew out of experiences lived separately by the three musicians, yet connected by a curious sense of synchronicity. Messages, fragments of conversations and personal accounts became material for an album divided into four Acts. The idea of parallel lives intersecting without necessarily touching is an appealing one, although it also carries a certain risk: emotional significance can be difficult to translate into music without making the result feel like an illustrated diary. Open to the Sea avoid that trap by treating these experiences less as stories to be explained than as impressions to be rearranged, filtered and allowed to acquire a life of their own.

The trio's working method has always encouraged this kind of transformation. Originally formed in 2016 by Coniglio and Uggeri, Open to the Sea became a permanent three-piece with Saverio Rosi's arrival in 2022. Their music has gradually developed through an exchange of instrumental fragments, electronic treatments and compositional interventions, rather than the conventional rehearsal-room dynamics of a band. Coniglio's guitar work provides much of the project's melodic and harmonic character; Rosi brings the OP-1 and acoustic guitar into the equation, while Uggeri handles laptop processing, rhythmic interventions and the final assembly of the material. The latter's credit for random drumming is particularly welcome: randomness is one of those concepts that sounds considerably more romantic before somebody has to organise it into a finished record.

There is a recognisable continuity with "Tales from an Underground River" and "Ten Rooms Under the Sea", both of which explored the relationship between acoustic instrumentation, electronics and narrative suggestion. Yet "Beyond the Emotional Flood" seems to place greater emphasis on the human material behind its construction. Its ten titles function almost like entries in an unconventional correspondence: "Deficit di accudimento (Crying while Running)", "The Secret Bathroom on the Moon (Her Big Dark Hands)", the two-part "Conversations Between Houses", "When are We Lost in Paris" and "A Love Letter Disguised into a Book List". These are not exactly the sort of chapter headings one would expect in a conventional song cycle. They suggest private jokes, unresolved conversations, fleeting encounters and the peculiar vocabulary that develops between people who have accumulated too much shared experience to explain everything from the beginning.

The titles are often disarmingly specific, occasionally surreal, and sometimes funny in a way that seems to have escaped the authors' attempts to be serious. "The Secret Bathroom on the Moon" sounds like an exceptionally niche architectural problem; "Waterproof White Horses" might be the title of a children's book whose illustrator has had a difficult week. But this eccentricity serves a purpose. It prevents the emotional framework from becoming too solemn, allowing intimate material to coexist with a degree of mystery and even playfulness. The album does not insist that every image must be decoded, nor does it offer a neat sequence of revelations. Its narrative is deliberately incomplete, much like the stories we construct from other people's messages when we lack the context to understand what really happened.

The presence of Andrea Serrapiglio's cello on four tracks adds another human dimension to the instrumental palette. His contribution is particularly appropriate within a project that has consistently favoured acoustic timbres without treating them as decorative gestures. The cello can suggest vulnerability and gravity, but it can also introduce a physical warmth that resists the more abstract qualities of electronic processing. Vocal samples by Amanda, Max, Vanè, Celeste and Basil further complicate the relationship between musical texture and personal testimony. Voices are among the most immediate signs of human presence, yet once detached from their original circumstances and placed within a composition, they become something else: traces of people, no longer entirely belonging to the situations from which they came.

This tension between intimacy and distance is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the album's concept. The musicians were not necessarily sharing the same events, but they were experiencing emotional intensity within the same period. Their eventual collaboration creates a kind of indirect portrait of connection, one that does not depend on conventional storytelling or a single protagonist. The four Acts offer a framework, but the ten pieces retain the fragmented quality of recollection. Some titles point towards particular locations, such as Paris, Milan and Amsterdam; others seem to belong to a private symbolic vocabulary. Together, they form a loose constellation of emotional states rather than a chronological account. The listener is invited to make associations, but not given the responsibility of solving somebody else's life. There are limits to how much unpaid psychological work one should be expected to perform while listening to an album.

The project's musical identity is well suited to this approach. Open to the Sea have long occupied a space between ambient, post-rock, electroacoustic composition and modern classical sensibilities, with an interest in melody that keeps their work from becoming merely an exercise in texture. Their first album, released through Dronarivm in 2017, already established the combination of Coniglio's instrumental writing and Uggeri's treatments, while subsequent releases expanded the arrangement through additional musicians and increasingly elaborate structures. The arrival of Rosi gave the project another source of instrumental colour and a more flexible exchange of ideas. On the evidence of this evolving catalogue, the trio's strength lies not in maintaining a fixed sound but in allowing its components to be recombined according to the demands of each project.

The delay between the album's composition in 2023 and its eventual release in September 2026 also seems significant, even if it should not be mistaken for an additional narrative chapter. Time has passed between the original experiences and their public presentation. What was once immediate has had an opportunity to settle, change shape and perhaps lose some of its original urgency. The album's title suggests a movement beyond emotional overwhelm, but not necessarily a clean escape from it. Floods leave deposits; they alter the appearance of familiar places, and sometimes the damage becomes visible only after the water has receded. The music's underlying premise seems to acknowledge that emotional events are rarely resolved simply because we have found a way to describe them.

The visual presentation reinforces the record's narrative ambitions. Polish artist Marta Mez provides the painting used for the cover, while Matteo Uggeri's graphics extend the artwork through the inner posters. This unfolding presentation is more than a packaging detail: it gives the physical edition an additional dimension, suggesting that the album's story is revealed gradually rather than delivered in a single explanatory statement. In an age when much music is encountered as a small rectangle on a screen, the decision to make the artwork part of the experience feels refreshingly deliberate. The CD edition comes in a gatefold card case, while the vinyl release is issued through Secret Lovers in the United States, with Silentes handling the Italian CD edition.

"Beyond the Emotional Flood" is ultimately an album about the strange ways in which separate experiences can acquire a shared form. Its emotional centre is personal, but its method is collaborative; its source material is rooted in particular moments, but its presentation avoids the confessional directness that might have made it overly literal. Open to the Sea continue to favour subtle transformations over dramatic gestures, and their willingness to leave certain connections unexplained gives the record room to breathe. The result is less a musical account of emotional recovery than an attempt to understand what remains when intense experiences have been translated into something that can be shared.

Perhaps that is the most persuasive aspect of the project: the recognition that connection does not always require proximity, complete understanding or even a particularly sensible explanation. Sometimes it takes three musicians, several cities, a handful of messages and a considerable amount of editing to establish that other people have been feeling something vaguely similar. It is an elaborate procedure, admittedly, but considerably more productive than sending another message beginning with "We need to talk".

There are records that invite you to lose yourself in sound, and then there are records that would quite like you to know exactly what sound is made of before you start losing yourself. "Prime Frequencies", the latest work by Mo H. Zareei under his mHz alias, belongs firmly to the latter category. Its starting point is deceptively modest: the sine wave, that elementary building block of electronic sound, and the prime number, that stubborn mathematical entity divisible only by itself and one. Put the two together and you have the basis for a rather unusual compositional system. Put 47 pieces on a CD and you have something that might initially look like an especially demanding mathematics examination, although the prospect is considerably more entertaining than it sounds.

The connection is more than a clever intellectual exercise. A sine wave represents the simplest form of periodic oscillation, while prime numbers occupy a foundational position in arithmetic. Both are elementary structures from which more complicated systems can be assembled. Zareei takes this parallel as the organising principle for a collection of sonic studies, each corresponding to a particular category of prime numbers. Frequencies and time-domain values are determined by the relevant primes, with algorithmic and aleatoric procedures developed in ChucK, a programming language designed for audio synthesis and real-time sound processing. The result is a work in which mathematical properties are not merely illustrated by sound: they become the parameters through which sound is generated.

The distinction matters. "Prime Frequencies" does not attempt to make mathematics sound beautiful by adding a suitably tasteful electronic soundtrack to it. Instead, it asks what happens when mathematical relationships are allowed to determine the material and behaviour of a composition. The sine wave is stripped of much of the expressive baggage traditionally associated with musical instruments. There are no guitars yearning for a lost summer, no strings performing their customary emotional blackmail, no percussion pretending that every human experience can be resolved through a well-timed crescendo. The basic ingredients are frequencies, durations, numerical relationships and the procedures that connect them.

That reduction does not necessarily mean an absence of complexity. A pure tone may be elementary, but the interaction between multiple frequencies can produce interference, beating and shifting perceptual relationships. Small changes in frequency or duration can have consequences that are disproportionate to their apparent simplicity. The listener is therefore confronted with a peculiar paradox: the materials are minimal, but the system governing them is anything but trivial. What appears to be a straightforward electronic tone can become an investigation into how we perceive difference, repetition and organisation. The ear, meanwhile, is expected to do its part without demanding a melody every thirty seconds. Not everybody will consider this a reasonable arrangement.

The tracklist reinforces the work's unusual character. Its 47 titles read like a gathering of mathematical personalities, some familiar enough to suggest a school textbook, others apparently determined to make the average listener regret having skipped a few lessons. "Fibonacci", "Mersenne", "Fermat" and "Factorial" sit alongside "Wieferich", "Wagstaff", "Woodall", "Motzkin" and "Newman-Shanks-Williams". There are also combinations of categories, including "Safe + Sophie Germain", "Good + Happy + Lucky + Super" and the rather imposing "Centered Square + Centered Triangular + Centered Heptagonal + Centered Decagonal". One might reasonably suspect that the last title was devised by someone who had run out of room on a conference badge.

Yet the nomenclature has a useful effect. It gives each miniature a distinct conceptual identity while making the album feel like a catalogue of related but non-identical experiments. The pieces vary considerably in duration, from fleeting gestures lasting only a few seconds to longer studies such as "Quintuplets", "Quadruplets", "Circular", "Solinas" and "Sextuplets". This difference in scale is not incidental. The short works offer concentrated encounters with a particular numerical category, while the longer ones provide more time for the underlying processes to unfold. The sequence consequently resists the expectation of a conventional album in which every track must contribute to a continuous emotional arc. It is closer to a collection of specimens, although specimens that happen to have been given the opportunity to make themselves heard.

There is a risk in this approach. When a work is built around a clearly articulated conceptual framework, the explanatory text can become more fascinating than the listening experience itself. The danger is that the listener ends up admiring the mechanism rather than engaging with its results, rather like someone spending an entire evening discussing the engineering of a clock without noticing that it has stopped. Zareei's decision to make the compositional code available alongside the album is therefore especially important. It prevents the project from becoming a sealed intellectual object and offers another way into its construction.

The two versions also establish a revealing distinction between composition as a finished recording and composition as an executable process. The CD presents a single rendering of the code, subjected to basic audio processing to provide a more consistent listening experience. The accompanying code version, available in both browser-based and locally compiled formats, dispenses with that additional processing. It allows the pieces to be navigated interactively, displays the numerical values responsible for the active frequencies and, where generative or aleatoric procedures are involved, produces slightly different results each time they are played. In other words, the CD offers a fixed document of the experiment, while the code version exposes the experiment as an ongoing event.

This is not simply a bonus for people who enjoy rummaging around in programming environments. It changes the nature of the work. The code becomes both score and instrument, while the listener is given access to the rules that shape the audible result. The distinction between composition and performance becomes less straightforward: the system establishes its conditions, but its real-time execution can introduce variations that prevent every encounter from being identical. The listener's equipment and hearing also become part of the equation, particularly in the unprocessed version, where the perceived loudness of different frequencies can vary substantially. A computer may be perfectly indifferent to the listener's comfort, but the human auditory system has its own rather uncompromising quality-control department.

The artist's background makes this combination of mathematical thinking and sonic investigation entirely coherent. Mo H. Zareei, an Iranian sound artist and researcher based in New Zealand, has a BSc in physics from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, a BFA in Music Technology from the California Institute of the Arts and a PhD in Sonic Arts from Victoria University of Wellington, where he works as a lecturer. Under the mHz name, he has released music through labels including Room40, LINE, Important Records, leerraum and KASUGA, while his wider practice encompasses electronic composition, kinetic sound sculptures and audiovisual installations. His work has repeatedly examined the relationship between noise and formal structures, often using custom-built software and hardware to turn apparently restrictive systems into sources of unexpected activity. His installation "Rasping Music" received the first prize in the Sound Art category at the 2015 Sonic Arts Award, while "Material Sequencer" was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2024. This is an artist for whom the machinery behind a sound is not an invisible technical detail but an essential part of its identity.

The project also has a significant research context. "Prime Frequencies" was commissioned by Laboratoire formes•ondes as part of "Towards an Aesthetic of the Sine Wave", a research-creation initiative led by Nicolas Bernier at the University of Montreal. The project investigates the aesthetic possibilities of the sine wave through commissioned works, research papers, a database and the development of different approaches to composition and performance. Zareei's contribution is particularly apt because it takes the investigation beyond the familiar question of what a sine wave sounds like. It considers how an elementary acoustic unit might be organised according to a different elementary system, and what aesthetic possibilities emerge from that correspondence.

There is something quietly provocative about this proposition. Electronic music has often celebrated the machine as a means of expanding the possibilities of sound, but "Prime Frequencies" moves in the opposite direction, reducing its resources to an almost austere minimum and then examining the consequences. Its conceptual ambition is not to make the simple appear complicated, but to demonstrate that simplicity is not necessarily the same thing as predictability. A handful of numerical rules can produce an extensive range of relationships, and the most basic ingredients can still resist complete anticipation. The process may be mathematical, but the experience remains dependent on perception, attention and the peculiar ways in which the ear responds to patterns.

The album's 47 pieces could easily have become an academic demonstration with an accompanying audio file, but the decision to present them as individual compositions gives the project a more open character. Their titles are informative without being entirely explanatory, and their different durations suggest that no single formal solution is imposed on every category. The result is a work that can be approached through its underlying theory or simply through the succession of sounds. Neither approach invalidates the other, although the code version clearly rewards listeners willing to look beyond the conventional boundaries of a recording.

"Prime Frequencies" is not an invitation to hum along, unless one's idea of a memorable chorus involves a mathematical constant and a particularly disciplined oscillator. Its pleasures are more cerebral, but not exclusively so. It encourages a heightened awareness of elementary sonic events and the relationships that emerge when they are arranged according to precise conditions. More importantly, it demonstrates that conceptual rigour need not suffocate curiosity. Zareei has devised a system with clear rules, yet the system's output remains open to variation and interpretation. There is a certain elegance in that balance: the numbers provide the discipline, the sound supplies the uncertainty, and the listener is left to negotiate the distance between them.

In the end, "Prime Frequencies" makes a persuasive case for listening to the smallest possible components without assuming that smallness means insignificance. It is a record about foundations, but not one that spends its time gazing nostalgically at the ground floor. Instead, it examines what can be built from apparently indivisible elements, and how much activity can be concealed within a single, unadorned tone. The universe may or may not be humming in prime numbers, but Zareei has at least provided a rather convincing reason to pay closer attention to its basic ingredients.