There are musicians who approach death with a whisper, and there are those who apparently feel that the appropriate response is to assemble an orchestra, a choir, three percussionists, an organ, an accordion, a tuba, several saxophones and enough low frequencies to make the afterlife check its foundations. Gellért Szabó belongs rather firmly to the second category. Yet "Vom Willen und Tod" is not simply an exercise in musical excess. For all its enormous forces and operatic emotional temperature, this is an album preoccupied with something surprisingly intimate: what happens to the self when the things that once gave it direction begin to disappear.

Szabó, a Leipzig-based composer, conductor and electric guitarist, studied guitar at the Franz Liszt Hochschule für Musik Weimar with Frank Möbus and also pursued composition with Ulrich Kreppein and Stefan Schultze. His Ideal Orchestra, founded in Leipzig, grew out of experimental and improvisational practice, bringing together musicians from jazz, free improvisation and contemporary music. That background matters because "Vom Willen und Tod" is much more than an attempt to write a conventional large-scale orchestral work. Szabó has learned from improvisation how unstable a large ensemble can be, and from composition how to turn that instability into deliberate architecture. The result is music that sounds capable of falling apart at any moment while being, in fact, exceptionally controlled.

The album begins with "Geburt", only two and a half minutes long, but its brevity is deceptive. It does not so much introduce the record as throw open a door onto a much larger psychological space. "Tod" then takes nearly twelve minutes to examine the opposite pole, and here Szabó's peculiar gift becomes obvious: he can make density feel dramatic without reducing it to mere loudness. Brass, reeds, strings, percussion and voices accumulate until the ensemble becomes less a collection of individual timbres than a single organism with too many lungs. There are eruptions, but also moments when the mass seems to inhale and hesitate. Death is not represented as a theatrical villain. It is a force constantly altering the behaviour of everything around it.

The two Brahms-derived pieces are crucial precisely because they prevent the album from becoming a closed system of Szabó mythology. "Herr, lehre doch mich" brings in the historical weight of the "German Requiem", but the treatment is not antiquarian. The familiar sacred material becomes a point of contact between centuries, between inherited consolation and contemporary uncertainty. Then "Requiem für Gellért Szabó" follows, a title that initially sounds almost indecently self-dramatising until the album's personal context makes it stranger and sadder: this is not simply a fantasy of one's own funeral, but part of a work shaped by the death of Szabó's father and by questions of origin, belonging and inheritance. The personal and the theatrical keep looking at one another across the music, neither entirely willing to blink.

And then comes "Wille", the eighteen-minute centre of gravity. This is where the orchestra's accumulated vocabulary finally seems to escape its containers. The music moves through enormous clusters, sharply etched instrumental attacks, choral presences and stretches of near-overwhelming orchestral pressure, but the important thing is not simply scale. "Wille" is about directed force. The German word suggests will, desire, determination, perhaps even stubbornness, and the piece behaves accordingly. It keeps pushing forward even when the music seems to have reached a point at which forward movement should no longer be possible. At its most intense, it has the slightly alarming quality of an orchestra trying to think itself into existence through sheer volume.

This is also where Szabó's relationship with improvisation becomes most revealing. The Ideal Orchestra originally developed through conducted improvisation and unusual forms of collective coordination, but "Vom Willen und Tod" sounds considerably more composed and concentrated than some of the ensemble's earlier material. That does not mean the exploratory impulse has disappeared. It has been compressed into the writing itself. Individual instruments periodically emerge from the mass like thoughts surfacing from a fever, while the percussion section supplies an almost physical sense of resistance. The orchestra does not merely perform the score; it seems to wrestle with it.

The voices are equally important. Rather than using the singers as conventional narrators, Szabó often treats the human voice as another unstable colour inside the larger body of the ensemble. This is especially effective because the record repeatedly moves between gigantic collective gestures and vulnerable fragments. After the accumulated pressure of "Wille", the closing "Traurigkeit" is almost brutally simple in its effect. The German title means sadness, but the music does not need to explain the emotion. After all that force, a relatively exposed musical gesture can feel more devastating than another crescendo. Apparently even twenty musicians eventually discover that volume is not the only way to frighten the heart.

The church in which the album was recorded adds an important physical dimension. Sacred architecture is not treated here merely as picturesque background. Its resonance becomes part of the composition, extending the orchestra beyond the number of bodies actually present. The organ, meanwhile, is another reminder that Szabó is not afraid of historical baggage. Brahms, church acoustics, requiem traditions, Mahlerian scale, modern improvisation and contemporary experimental composition are all allowed into the same room. This could easily become a catalogue of cultural references. Instead, the music makes them compete for oxygen.

There is a danger in work this emotionally charged: existential seriousness can very quickly become self-important. "Vom Willen und Tod" occasionally walks right up to that cliff, looks over it, and then somehow keeps going. Its saving grace is physicality. The brass crack, the percussion hits, the strings scrape and swell, the voices tremble, and the organ adds another layer of historical gravity. The music never sounds like an essay about mortality. It sounds like a group of people physically trying to contain an idea that is too large for them.

That may be why the album's most affecting moments are not necessarily its biggest ones. Szabó understands that grandeur only becomes meaningful when something fragile is placed inside it. The gigantic passages acquire their emotional force because somewhere underneath them there is a person mourning a father, remembering where he came from, wondering what remains when inheritance becomes memory. The orchestra can construct an almost absurdly vast sonic body, but it cannot prevent the small human fact at its centre: someone is gone.

"Vom Willen und Tod" consequently feels less like a requiem in the conventional sense than an argument between the desire to transcend mortality and the stubborn fact of having a body that cannot come along. Its scale is enormous, but its subject is not. It is grief, ambition, memory, love and the rather inconvenient human conviction that our individual existence ought to mean something. Szabó simply gives that conviction twenty musicians and asks them to make it audible. The result is excessive, vulnerable, occasionally terrifying and, at its best, genuinely moving. Death gets the final word eventually, as it has a notoriously good contract, but for almost forty minutes Szabó's orchestra makes a considerable amount of noise in reply.

Longtime ambient/experimental guitarist Aidan Baker, from Toronto, Canada has been releasing music since 2000 and of the hundreds of albums he released on various labels, sad to say the only one I'm familiar with is 'Gathering Blue' (2009) on the now defunct Equation Records boutique label, primarily because I know the owner and had a CD (Chemistry Set - 'Experiments From The Lab', 2023) released on that label myself. 'Gathering Blue' was a good deal more calm, gentle and meditative than 'Adverse Camber,' and there was a little singing on it, albeit very much relegated to the background. This is not to say that either of these albums are indicative of Baker's oeuvre; one could spend months listening to his discography and come away with only a general sense of what Baker's music is all about.

'Adverse Camber' is five tracks in a little over 47 minutes, and as Baker describes it, "A return to simple solo guitar with heavy ambient sounds, combining drifting drones with noisy textures in attempt to encompass both the light and the dark at the same time." All sounds on the album were achieved via playing electric guitar, and with electronic processing of the same. "Petrol/Jasmin" employs some rapid finger-plucking obscured by electronics over a droning background, adding in some feedback as the track progresses, also echoey sliding fret noises. The feedback shifts in waves as the track nears its conclusion. "Coma" turns up the volume and intensity on the noise aspect, and anyone expecting anything akin to traditional ambient is likely to be put off before the track gets really interesting. Halfway through when the distortion subsides, a dream-like atmosphere emerges in thick, dense layers of ambient drone. How this is achieved with guitar is beyond me but suffice to say that it is remarkable.

"A Scent Like Oblivion" begins with harmonic picking that could be reminiscent of clockwork - like the inner working of a pocket watch. It is hypnotic and meditative up to the point where snarling, backwards feedback takes over and twists it into oblivion. "Everything Is Dark Until You Say Yes" seems to be the lightest, calmest track on the album, with various forms of strumming through electronic processing. 'Adverse Camber' is closed out by “Superelevation," the longest track on the album at 18:26. It begins with dark or grey ambient drones in shifting, echoed tones. This continues until about halfway through a more industrial type drone emerges, something you'd hear on certtain releases by Peter Andersson's Raison d'être. The industrial noise element increases and dominates the track for a while, re-emerging and subsiding like a monster being birthed from the primordial ooze. Before that phase is over, a single drone of light emerges from the firmament, and all is lifted back into the galactic cosmos.

This is a remarkable album that can blend experimental noise with ambient and not overshadow either. Experimental but stimulating, 'Adverse Camber' should have listeners searching out Aidan Baker's other releases for more, and there certainly are quite a few to choose from.

An organ looks like an instrument, behaves like a small weather system, occupies the architecture around it, and has spent centuries persuading people that sound should probably be taken seriously. Puce Moment’s "O.R.G.II" does not exactly dispute this reputation, but it removes the ceremonial tie and asks what remains when the organ is allowed to become a machine again. The answer is a remarkably strange and patient record, where pipe, air, electricity and repetition gradually stop behaving like separate categories.

Nicolas Devos and Pénélope Michel have been circling this question for years. Their 2019 "O.R.G." approached the limonaire organ as both instrument and conceptual object, while Puce Moment as a whole has developed out of their broader work across sound, visual art, electronics and performance. Their history with Cercueil is important here too, not because "O.R.G.II" sounds like an experimental-electronic album with an organ pasted onto it, but because they have long been interested in what happens when apparently incompatible materials are made to occupy the same physical and emotional space. The collaboration with choreographer Christian Rizzo provided another decisive context: their music for "à l’ombre d’un vaste détail, hors tempête", premiered at the 2025 Biennale de Lyon, was conceived for a work in which apparently ordinary gestures become strangely concentrated and perceptually charged. That sensibility survives here, even without the dancers.

The six pieces of "O.R.G.II" are therefore less interested in conventional development than in alteration. "Simoon" begins as though someone has opened a large, dusty door somewhere inside the building and discovered that the building has opinions. Tones emerge, overlap and acquire weight; the electronic material does not simply decorate the organ but seems to question its behaviour. "Pavana" introduces a more recognisable suggestion of form, although Puce Moment wisely avoid allowing the title to turn the piece into a historical costume drama. What matters is the friction between an idea of musical order and the unstable matter underneath it. The organ can sound monumental, but it can also sound granular, breathy, almost embarrassingly physical.

This is where the electronic component becomes particularly effective. Rather than using synthesis to modernise the organ, Devos and Michel make the two systems contaminate one another. Sustained frequencies begin to acquire the stubbornness of acoustic phenomena, while the organ loses some of its traditional sense of hierarchy. Registers become colours; resonance becomes material; repetition becomes a pressure applied slowly enough that the listener can notice the smallest changes. The effect is not really “organ plus drone,” which would be a rather easy equation. It is closer to watching two kinds of machinery gradually develop an awkward relationship and discovering that awkwardness can be musically productive.

The titles add another layer without functioning as a secret decoder ring. "Simoon", "Imbat" and "Tehuano" evoke winds, while "Ruach" and "Ilma" carry associations with breath, spirit and air across different linguistic and cultural contexts. Even "Pavana", with its historical dance reference, seems less like a destination than another piece of cultural debris placed inside the machine. This fits Puce Moment’s broader interest in what they describe as fictional ethnology: not the collecting of exotic references for decorative purposes, but the construction of imaginary systems in which musical and visual forms can mutate.

"Ruach" is perhaps where the record’s central ambiguity becomes most apparent. The music seems to hover between something entirely physical and something that the human brain, being constitutionally incapable of leaving things alone, wants to interpret as spiritual. The organ certainly encourages that response. Its history makes transcendence almost unavoidable, but Puce Moment repeatedly drag attention back toward mechanism: air, pipes, vibration, electrical control, resonance. Their approach is secular without being reductively materialist. The machine is not stripped of mystery; the mystery is relocated inside the machine.

"Ilma", the longest piece at more than fourteen minutes, benefits from this patience. There is no need for a grand climax because the real drama lies in persistence. Small shifts become events. Frequencies that initially seem static begin to reveal internal movement, and the listener becomes increasingly aware that “nothing happening” and “something happening very slowly” are radically different experiences. The distinction is one of the great tests of drone music, and "O.R.G.II" generally passes it by refusing to confuse duration with inertia. "Tehuano", considerably shorter, provides a useful final contraction, leaving the album less like a completed argument than a system whose machinery has simply stopped moving for the moment.

There is also something quietly funny about the whole enterprise. The pipe organ, an instrument historically employed to make human beings feel small in the presence of eternity, has here been introduced to modular synthesis, another technology with a suspicious fondness for cables, control systems and knobs. Neither side wins. Instead, they produce an unstable truce in which sacred grandeur, mechanical labour and electronic abstraction keep rubbing against one another. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate musical situation for the present century, when even our attempts to escape machinery usually involve buying another machine.

What ultimately distinguishes "O.R.G.II" is its refusal to make the organ either respectable or strange for the sake of it. Puce Moment listen to the instrument closely enough to find its rough edges, its breath, its limitations and its capacity for transformation. The result is music that can feel ritualistic without pretending to belong to a ritual, contemplative without becoming decorative, and electronic without needing to announce its technological credentials every five minutes. The organ remains an organ, but it has been allowed to forget, temporarily, what society expects an organ to be.

And perhaps that is the real achievement of "O.R.G.II": not making an ancient instrument sound contemporary, but making it sound temporarily undecided about its own identity. Six pieces, nearly an hour, a handful of pipes, some electronics and a considerable amount of patience. Humanity has spent centuries building enormous instruments to communicate with the heavens; Puce Moment seem content to let one listen to itself breathing instead.

There are albums about places, and then there are albums that seem to have been made because a place refused to shut up. "Quadro" belongs to the second category. Federico Perotti’s recording is ostensibly an album for organ, but that description is about as adequate as calling a cathedral “a building with a roof”. The real subject is absence: specifically, the absence of Raphael’s "Sistine Madonna" from the Basilica of San Sisto in Piacenza, where it remained from the sixteenth century until the Benedictines sold it in 1754 to Augustus III of Saxony. The original now hangs in Dresden, while the Piacenza church has a copy above its altar.

Perotti’s ingenious response is not to recreate the missing painting in sound. Instead, he asks what has remained in the building since it left. The answer is an organ. More precisely, the Facchetti-Lanzi organ, whose oldest material dates to Giovanni Battista Facchetti’s construction of 1544-45 and which was subsequently expanded by Carlo and Giuseppe Lanzi. Its history is therefore inseparable from the building and from the historical period Perotti is investigating. The instrument becomes a kind of unwilling witness, an object that could not leave when the painting did. Paintings travel rather well, as history has repeatedly demonstrated. Organs have the slightly less glamorous problem of being buildings with pipes.

That distinction gives "Quadro" its peculiar emotional force. The album does not attempt to make us imagine what the "Sistine Madonna" looked like. It makes us listen to what it means for something no longer to be there.

Perotti, born in Piacenza in 1993, is a composer, organist and conductor whose work repeatedly examines the relationship between music, material history and the traces left by time. He studied organ and composition in Como and Milan, subsequently working with composers including Salvatore Sciarrino and Francesco Filidei, and his practice moves comfortably between historical performance, contemporary composition and experimentation with the physical possibilities of the organ. His own website describes an interest in damaged objects, missing things and imaginary parallel histories, which makes "Quadro" feel less like an isolated project than a particularly concentrated expression of his wider artistic concerns.

The album begins with Claudio Maria Veggio’s "La Fugitiva", a brief opening that immediately places us inside a musical history older than the loss itself. Veggio, a Piacentine composer of the sixteenth century, also returns at the end with "Donna, per Dio vi giuro". Between those two pieces, Perotti constructs a historical corridor involving Michelangelo Rossi, Girolamo Frescobaldi and Claudio Monteverdi, interspersed with his five "Toccate Sistine", composed between 2017 and 2025. The track sequence therefore does not behave like a conventional recital programme. It resembles an architectural excavation in which different layers are exposed without pretending that the building has ever had only one age.

The first three "Toccate Sistine" are concerned with the basilica itself: its light, form and scent. This might sound dangerously close to the territory of tasteful heritage tourism, but Perotti's conception is considerably stranger. The pieces attempt to imagine a place outside ordinary chronological progression, where repetition has replaced development and where the building seems to exist in a permanent present. The organ's sustained sonorities make this idea tangible. Rather than using historical timbre simply as an authenticity certificate, Perotti treats the instrument as an acoustic environment with its own memory.

His relationship with the organ is particularly revealing. The Facchetti-Lanzi is not merely old. Its construction, later alterations and restoration have left it materially layered, and its meantone temperament contributes to a sound that is markedly different from the homogenised pitch environment familiar from much modern keyboard music. The surviving instrument includes a 1545 core and later interventions, with the current specification reflecting centuries of alteration and preservation. On "Quadro", that history is audible without having to be explained first.

Then comes "Toccata Sistina IV", the album's rupture. Here Perotti deliberately deprives the organ of its normal wind pressure. The consequence is not simply that the sound becomes quieter. The pipes begin to destabilise: harmonics sag, collide and produce a strangely dusty, exhausted sonority. This is an unusually effective compositional metaphor because it operates physically rather than illustratively. The historical rupture is not represented by a dramatic musical quotation or some cinematic minor chord. The instrument itself is made to behave differently. It is one of the album's best ideas. The organ, which has spent centuries being asked to produce controlled pitches, suddenly begins revealing all the unstable frequencies that ordinary performance suppresses. The “wrong” pressure releases another personality hidden inside the pipes. Perotti's missing painting consequently finds an unexpected sonic equivalent: not an image, but a disturbance in the mechanism that has remained behind.

The effect is especially striking because the surrounding repertoire establishes such a strong historical continuity. Frescobaldi's "Toccata seconda" and "Partite sopra Passacagli", Rossi's "Toccata VII" and "Toccata XII", and Veggio's music belong to different points along the development of Italian keyboard writing, yet they are all made to inhabit this one physical instrument. Perotti's compositions do not attempt to disguise their modernity. Instead, they enter into conversation with the older works through the very thing they share: the organ's body.
That is where "Quadro" becomes more interesting than a historical reconstruction. Reconstruction wants to restore an imagined past. Perotti seems more interested in exposing the impossibility of restoration.

The fourth "Toccata Sistina" therefore functions almost like a crack in the album's architecture. Before it, the basilica exists in a state of repetition and continuity. After it, history has acquired a wound. The fifth toccata deals with what followed: the centuries after the painting's departure and the continuing attempt to make sense of what is missing. The music does not “heal” the absence so much as repeatedly touch its edges.

Monteverdi's "Lamento della ninfa", arranged here for organ, is an especially apt intervention. A vocal lament transferred to an instrument that cannot literally sing turns loss into a problem of translation. The organ can sustain, imitate and colour, but it cannot reproduce the human voice's physical vulnerability. The absence has therefore multiplied: the painting is gone, the voice has become organ, and the listener is left with the residue of both.

Yet "Quadro" avoids becoming relentlessly mournful. There is too much curiosity in Perotti's treatment of sound. He seems genuinely fascinated by what the organ does when pushed slightly outside its expected behaviour. The album's emotional vocabulary consequently includes wonder, irritation, melancholy, historical awareness and even a faint mischievousness. The instrument is an ancient machine, but Perotti does not treat it as a sacred relic that must be approached with cotton gloves.

That attitude is central to his musicianship. His practice combines the historical consciousness expected of an organist with the exploratory instincts of a contemporary composer. He has written for ensembles and orchestras including MusikFabrik, Jack Quartet and the SWR Symphonieorchester, and his work has appeared in contemporary-music contexts well beyond the traditional organ circuit. He was also the organist accompanying Giorgio Armani's 2025 funeral, an oddly fitting footnote to an artist whose work so often concerns the relationship between elegance, mortality and ritual.

The album's title, "Quadro", consequently becomes increasingly ambiguous. It means painting, but also frame, object, bounded image. Yet the music repeatedly escapes the frame. The absent painting creates the conceptual perimeter, but the organ fills the space beyond it with centuries of vibrations. What is missing becomes the thing that structures everything else.

There is an even subtler paradox in Perotti's decision never to have visited the original painting in Dresden. One might expect such a project to culminate in pilgrimage: go to the museum, stand before Raphael, compare the original with its absence in Piacenza, complete the circle. He has chosen not to do so. It is an almost perversely elegant decision. The album is about the experience of not possessing something, and therefore direct possession might actually destroy part of the question.

The copy in San Sisto is not treated as a consolation prize either. It is evidence of the gap. The original painting's departure transformed the meaning of the church, while the surviving organ continued producing sound in the same place. The resulting asymmetry is precisely what gives the project its power: one object became internationally celebrated because it left; another became historically precious because it stayed.

This makes the wooden analogy in Perotti's notes particularly apt. Wood ages, is cut, seasoned, incorporated into an object and eventually altered again. Its material history does not disappear when its original form disappears. The same is true here of music. A score becomes sound, sound becomes memory, memory becomes interpretation, and centuries later another musician can make the old material speak differently without pretending to become its original author.

The final return to Veggio closes the circle without actually closing the wound. "Donna, per Dio vi giuro" takes us back to the beginning, but the listener now hears the same historical material after passing through the album's central rupture. Time has behaved exactly as Perotti suggests it does: it has moved forward while repeatedly pretending to be circular.

"Quadro" is therefore not really an album about Raphael, nor even principally an album about an organ. It is about what objects leave behind when they disappear. The missing painting becomes a negative space; the organ becomes the positive remainder; the repertoire becomes a chain of witnesses; and Perotti's own music becomes the attempt to make the gap audible.

There is something deeply Italian about such an obsession with a building, a painting, an organ and several centuries of accumulated cultural sediment. But "Quadro" never collapses into nostalgia. Its most compelling proposition is almost the opposite: absence can be productive. The fact that the "Sistine Madonna" left San Sisto may have diminished the physical completeness of the church, but it also created a historical fracture large enough for new music to enter.

The painting is still in Dresden. The organ is still in Piacenza. The copy still hangs where the original once did. Nothing has been restored, despite the best efforts of civilisation's favourite hobby, restoration.

What "Quadro" restores instead is attention. Not to the missing masterpiece itself, but to the room that remembers it, and to the instrument that has been quietly breathing inside that room for centuries. In the end, Perotti's most convincing time machine is not nostalgia at all. It is the organ: wood, metal, air and human hands, making the past happen again without ever quite making it the same.

There is something almost suspiciously cheerful about "Medications In Bloom". The title sounds like a pharmaceutical company has finally discovered the benefits of flower arranging, while the songs themselves move through romance, vanity, loneliness, sexual confusion, disappointment and decay with the elegant disobedience of people who have decided that misery does not get to dictate the dress code. For Astari Nite, darkness has never been merely an aesthetic colour, but this six-track EP suggests that even the darkest wardrobe occasionally needs something violently pink.

Formed in Miami around vocalist Mychael Ghost and drummer Illia Tulloch, with Howard Melnick on guitar and Danny Ae on synthesizer and bass, Astari Nite have spent more than a decade negotiating the territory between alternative rock, post-punk, new wave and dark glam. Their history includes appearances alongside figures ranging from Peter Murphy and The Damned to Clan of Xymox, Peter Hook and the Psychedelic Furs, while their recent records have gradually loosened the band's relationship with conventional goth gloom. "Resolution Of Happiness" already pushed toward a brighter, more 1990s-inflected vocabulary, retaining the nocturnal atmosphere while allowing more colour and melodic eccentricity into the room. Contemporary reviews have noticed precisely that expansion, describing a band increasingly comfortable with glam, alternative rock, shoegaze and synth-driven textures rather than simply reproducing darkwave orthodoxy.

"Medications In Bloom" takes that development somewhere stranger and, importantly, more personal. Its title comes from Ghost's experience of accompanying his seriously ill mother through years of medical appointments and prescription refills, where flowers, medication alerts, childhood memories and the repetitive bureaucracy of care become tangled together. That background changes the way the EP's apparent frivolity reads. Glamour is not necessarily denial here. It can also be an act of maintenance: putting on the lipstick, making the joke, buying the flowers, continuing to participate in the world when circumstances would make retreat considerably easier.

The opening “Why Are You So Lame” establishes this attitude beautifully by refusing to choose between vulnerability and mockery. Its lyrics keep slipping between romantic disappointment, self-conscious posing and absurd little objects of desire, turning the language of seduction into something almost deliberately unstable. The song's central complaint is less “you hurt me” than “your performance is embarrassing,” which is a wonderfully petty distinction and therefore a very human one. Beneath the sarcasm, though, there is loneliness: the singer wants to be seen while simultaneously distrusting the theatrical machinery through which people attempt to see one another. Astari Nite understand that glamour is often just insecurity with better lighting.

Then comes “Dry Shampoo X”, perhaps the EP's most immediate demonstration of its preference for motion over solemnity. The song seems to take fragments of alternative-rock romance, disco imagery and slightly deranged pop language and shake them together until they become something brightly bruised. The emotional narrative repeatedly collapses into consumer spaces, bedrooms and strange little observations, as if heartbreak has been forced to shop for groceries. The contrast is important: rather than making romantic failure monumental, Astari Nite make it ridiculous, which can sometimes be a more accurate form of grief. A recent review similarly identified the track's more explosive rock character as a continuation of the band's move away from their earlier death-rock beginnings.

“Lennon Yellow Tangerine” shifts the temperature. Its title alone sounds like an object assembled from pop-cultural residue, colour, memory and a mildly unreliable dream. The song's repeated telephone imagery creates an intimate but unstable relationship between wanting contact and wanting escape. The request to call becomes almost immediately followed by the desire to be left alone, while the mysterious queen, nameless waitress and submarine tambourine inhabit a private mythology that makes very little effort to explain itself. This is one of the EP's strengths: Astari Nite can write lyrics that sound frivolous on first encounter but become increasingly suggestive when their images are allowed to remain unresolved. The darkness is there, but it has learned how to accessorise.

The two revamped pieces, “Unisex Games” and “Miss Rain On My Parade”, reveal another characteristic of the record: Astari Nite are not interested in treating their own back catalogue as sacred furniture. Both songs are revisited with the knowledge of a band that has changed since their earlier incarnations. “Unisex Games” is particularly unruly, turning desire, jealousy, friendship and sexual games into a collage of damaged memories and flamboyant self-incrimination. Its repeated accusation that guilt is petty sounds almost like a moral philosophy reduced to a nightclub chant. “Miss Rain On My Parade,” meanwhile, places the EP's central idea almost nakedly on the table: validation is wanted, rejected, demanded and mocked simultaneously. The song's imagery of makeup, pills, rain and ashtray residue makes self-presentation feel less like vanity than a survival technique.

That tension reaches its most tender form in “I Lack Nutrition”. Beneath its deliberately awkward title is a breakup song that gradually reveals a much more serious fear: what happens to affection when the relationship has already become part of your body's routine? The repeated desire to remain friends is surrounded by uncertainty, contradictory impulses and the fear of waking up to an absence that cannot be repaired. Even the familiar romantic sunshine metaphor becomes uncomfortable because the song keeps questioning whether the beloved is actually a source of nourishment or merely another dependency. The title therefore turns emotional hunger into physical comedy, and then quietly removes the joke.

Musically, the EP sits in the space Astari Nite have been cultivating over recent years: alternative rock with post-punk bones, new-wave colour, dark-glam theatricality and a conspicuous affection for the 1990s. Previous coverage of "Resolution Of Happiness" noted the band's tendency toward unusually dense guitars, forceful drums and a bass approach less rigid than traditional post-punk marching patterns, while other writing around the band has highlighted the combination of Bowie-like theatricality with darker alternative textures. On "Medications In Bloom", those ingredients feel less like a collection of influences and more like a wardrobe the band has finally stopped apologising for wearing.

What makes the EP interesting, however, is not simply that Astari Nite sound brighter. Plenty of dark bands eventually discover colour, usually somewhere around the point where someone in the studio says “perhaps we should try a major chord”. Here the brightness is psychologically connected to the subject matter. The record understands that positivity can be defensive, theatrical, even slightly ridiculous, and still be genuine. A person can be grieving and glamorous. Someone can be exhausted and flirtatious. You can spend years inside hospitals and still notice the flowers. You can be frightened and tell somebody to wear better lipstick.

That is where "Medications In Bloom" earns its title. Medication does not magically transform suffering into happiness, and flowers do not make illness disappear. The phrase instead joins two things that are usually kept apart: clinical repetition and sensual beauty, maintenance and decoration, vulnerability and performance. Astari Nite turn that collision into pop music without ironing out its contradictions.

There is something oddly reassuring in that. Not because the EP pretends everything will be fine, but because it refuses the rather exhausting cultural assumption that seriousness must always look miserable. Sometimes survival arrives wearing eyeliner. Sometimes it laughs at the wrong moment. Sometimes it writes a six-song record about desire, decay and pharmaceutical notifications and decides that the appropriate response to all of it is, somehow, to bloom.