There is something almost bureaucratically mysterious about the title "TKSM 01". It sounds less like the name of an EP than the first surviving file from an experiment that somebody forgot to explain. The track titles are no more helpful: “01”, “01.01” and “01.01.01” suggest a system of classification rather than conventional compositions, as though Tokesmo had decided that naming things was an unnecessary distraction from examining what they actually sound like. It is, in fact, a rather fitting approach for music that seems interested in stripping acoustic reality of its passport and sending it somewhere else.

Tokesmo is the solo project of Andrea B., whose history already makes the apparent distance between organic matter and electronic manipulation less surprising. He began playing bass in Lodi in 1994 and later became one of the two bassists in Morkobot, the Italian instrumental trio whose muscular combination of bass-heavy experimentation and drums has occupied considerably more physical territory than the polite word “rock” would suggest. Since the mid-1990s he has also worked with electronic instruments under other names, including Otrom and Garaliya. "TKSM 01" therefore does not sound like a musician suddenly discovering field recording as a fashionable accessory. It feels more like another branch growing from a practice that has been concerned with the behaviour of sound for decades.

The three pieces are built from recordings made in both outdoor and indoor environments, captured through different microphones, techniques and materials, then subjected to electronic processing and placed in relation to synthesised elements. That description makes the procedure sound tidier than the result. The point is not to preserve the identity of the original sounds, but to make their previous identity increasingly irrelevant. A noise that might once have belonged to a room, an object, a surface or some fragment of the outside world becomes material without a stable address. Tokesmo is less interested in asking “what was that?” than in seeing how long the question can survive before the sound becomes something else.

The short opening “01” works almost like an aperture. At barely three minutes, it establishes the EP's peculiar sense of scale without giving away the central argument. Sounds seem to occupy different depths, sometimes close enough to touch, sometimes receding into a space whose dimensions are difficult to calculate. There is an intriguing refusal of conventional foreground and background here. Instead of arranging sounds into a hierarchy, Tokesmo allows them to behave like competing physical phenomena. Some emerge, others dissolve, and occasionally it becomes difficult to decide whether a sound is moving through space or whether the space itself is changing.

Then comes “01.01”, the fourteen-minute centre of gravity, and this is where "TKSM 01" stops behaving like a collection of processed recordings and starts resembling an ecosystem with a nervous system. Its extended duration gives Tokesmo room to work with gradual alterations rather than obvious events. Layers accumulate, mutate, thin out and return in altered states. Synthetic tones do not sit above the field recordings like a technological commentary; they contaminate them, while the acoustic material gives the electronic elements a physical ambiguity they would not otherwise possess.

This is perhaps the most interesting quality of the EP. There is no reassuring opposition between “natural” and “artificial.” The synthesised sounds can acquire the roughness of physical objects, while recorded environments become strangely synthetic after enough manipulation. The distinction starts to collapse, which is precisely where the music becomes intellectually interesting. We spend most of our lives assuming that sound carries evidence of its source. Tokesmo treats that assumption as something that can be quietly dismantled.

The absence of rhythm is also significant. A musician associated with Morkobot could hardly be unaware of rhythm's power, yet "TKSM 01" largely refuses to provide the listener with the usual temporal handrails. This is not music that wants to march anywhere. There are shifts, pulses, tensions and internal movements, but they are not organised into the kind of reassuring periodicity that lets the brain put its feet up. One contemporary radio description neatly identified this first Tokesmo EP as the more sound-art and noise-oriented counterpart to "TKSM 02", whose source material is turned into percussive structures and IDM-leaning industrial rhythms.

That pairing makes the project considerably more intriguing. The two releases were conceived as complementary investigations, with "TKSM 01" concentrating on abstract, tonal and textural transformation while "TKSM 02" moves towards rhythm and percussion. In other words, Tokesmo appears to be conducting a rather elaborate experiment on the same basic question: what happens when recorded matter is progressively detached from its original function? On one side it becomes atmosphere, texture and ambiguity; on the other, it becomes rhythm.

The final “01.01.01” lasts just under four minutes and functions less like a conventional conclusion than a change in perspective. After the long middle section, its shorter duration feels almost like returning to the laboratory after having spent too much time inside the experiment. The numbers have acquired a strange logic by now. “01.01.01” no longer looks like an unimaginative title. It looks like a reminder that the same piece of sonic matter can be subdivided indefinitely, each decimal point suggesting another microscopic level at which perception might change.

There is also something quietly amusing about Tokesmo's decision to call these pieces precisely what they are not. The titles tell us nothing, the sources are deliberately obscured, and the music continually undermines our desire to identify things. Human beings, after all, have spent centuries developing increasingly sophisticated ways of putting labels on everything they encounter, only to produce a genre called “experimental music” for people who would rather remove the labels again.

"TKSM 01" is therefore less an album about field recordings than an investigation into what remains after a field recording stops behaving like documentary evidence. Its acoustic origins matter, but only as the beginning of a process. What emerges is neither a portrait of a particular environment nor an electronic imitation of nature. It is something more ambiguous: an environment rebuilt from memory, processing and physical residue, where the distinction between object and sound gradually loses its usefulness.

With eight "TKSM" EPs planned as four paired releases, this first instalment feels deliberately incomplete in the best possible sense. It establishes a method rather than exhausting it. "TKSM 01" asks the listener to pay attention not to what a sound represents, but to what it can become once representation is removed. That is a subtle difference, but an important one.

Sometimes experimental music wants to show you a strange new world. Tokesmo is doing something more mischievous here: taking pieces of the world we already know, erasing their name tags, and watching what happens when we can no longer tell what we are hearing.

There is a wonderfully mischievous ambiguity in the title "Holzweg". In German, it refers literally to a path through the woods, but figuratively it means taking the wrong path, following a mistaken idea, ending up somewhere you did not intend to go. Forest Factory, the duo of Welsh improvising vocalist and sound artist Elvin Brandhi and Austrian composer and instrument-builder Andreas Trobollowitsch, seem to understand both meanings perfectly. "Holzweg" is made with wood, branches, mechanical turntables, voices and samplers, but it also sounds as if the two musicians have deliberately abandoned the sensible road signs of contemporary experimental music. No GPS, no reassuring arrows, no little voice announcing that you have reached your destination. Just keep walking.

That is not entirely surprising given the backgrounds involved. Brandhi has spent much of her career turning field recordings, tapes, vinyl, instruments and voice into unstable rhythmic structures, while her nomadic practice has taken her through an unusually wide network of collaborations and artistic communities. Trobollowitsch, meanwhile, has developed a body of work around prepared and self-built instruments, modified objects, plants, rotation, vibration, feedback and the relationship between sound, movement and physical space. Put them together and the distinction between instrument, object and environment starts to become rather inconvenient, which is precisely where "Holzweg" becomes interesting.

The album was assembled from recordings made in Naples, Yogyakarta and during the duo's 2024 Japanese tour, so its geography is not merely decorative information in the press sheet. The different locations become part of the record's unstable identity. Rather than attempting to disguise these shifts beneath a uniform studio finish, Forest Factory seem to let the material retain its different densities and temperatures. The result feels less like a conventional collection of compositions than an assortment of specimens brought back from several expeditions, then placed on the same laboratory table to see which ones start moving.

"TIKTIKTIK" immediately establishes this logic. Repetition here does not mean the comforting predictability of a beat; it feels closer to a mechanical process discovering its own rhythm. "METAL" introduces a harder, more abrasive physicality, while "NAKAMA PIETURA" and "ST TSEROF" suggest that Forest Factory have little interest in explaining exactly where one sound comes from. Their titles behave almost like found objects themselves: fragments of language whose meanings remain partially concealed, leaving the ear to perform its own archaeological work.

The most revealing title may be "FOREST LOST". If the album's name promises a path, this is where the signpost finally falls over. The forest is not presented as some postcard-friendly reservoir of organic beauty, full of birds chirping politely while humans contemplate their spiritual renewal. This is a forest understood through friction, rotation, impact and amplification. Wood becomes percussion, surface, obstacle and resonant body. The supposedly natural is subjected to machinery, while the machinery itself begins to behave like something biological. Forest and factory stop being opposites.

That tension is central to the record. There is something almost comic about the basic premise: two experimental musicians build turntables for pieces of wood and branches, then use them to make an album. Civilization spent several centuries developing increasingly sophisticated machines, and eventually somebody looked at a branch and thought, reasonably enough, “this could use a turntable”. Yet the apparent absurdity conceals a serious investigation into how sound is produced. The handmade mechanisms make physical cause and sonic consequence unusually close. You can sense the object being manipulated rather than simply hearing the polished result.

Brandhi's voice is crucial because it prevents the music from becoming an overly tasteful exercise in material-based electroacoustics. Her vocal presence can function as language, rhythm, noise or sudden human interruption, and her long-standing interest in dismantling conventional syntax makes her particularly suited to a project in which objects themselves seem to be speaking in an unfamiliar grammar. When the voice appears against the brittle mechanical textures, it does not necessarily clarify them. It becomes another piece of matter.

Trobollowitsch's contribution works in the opposite direction without actually opposing Brandhi. His practice has consistently treated sound as something physical and spatial, with self-developed instruments and modified everyday materials providing the mechanisms through which composition can happen. "Holzweg" therefore feels less like a meeting between “electronic music” and “acoustic music” than an attempt to make that distinction increasingly useless. A wooden plate can become an oscillator; a branch can become a percussionist; a human voice can become circuitry; a sampler can preserve the memory of something that was never intended to be musical in the first place.

"POPPU" and "TWIST" push the record into more animated territory, while "WOULDCHUCK" has the slightly mischievous quality of something whose internal logic you suspect you are almost understanding before it changes direction. "KASA" is another reminder that these pieces are not simply exercises in abrasion. There is space here, too, and an awareness of silence, resonance and duration. The final "RE-ROTATION SUN" provides a suitably circular conclusion, as if the machine has completed one revolution only to discover that the forest has not moved anywhere at all.

The ten pieces are short enough to avoid turning the project into an academic demonstration of how interesting wood can be. This matters. "Holzweg" is experimental, but it does not seem particularly interested in proving its experimental credentials. Its charm comes from the fact that the underlying mechanisms remain audible without becoming the whole point. There is humour in the clatter, sensuality in the vibration, menace in the metallic edges and something almost primitive in the repeated gestures. The record continually oscillates between deliberate construction and the possibility of accident.

That balance also explains why the album fits so naturally with ato.archives, the Tokyo-based label and archive whose catalogue moves through experimental, electroacoustic and sound-art practices. "Holzweg" has the quality of an artefact that could have been dug out of an imaginary archive devoted to machines that never quite became machines. It documents a peculiar musical technology, but also a way of thinking about collaboration, geography and material.

Ultimately, Forest Factory do not make the forest sound beautiful. They make it sound problematic, which is much more interesting. Nature here is neither pristine sanctuary nor convenient sample library. It scratches, rotates, splinters, loops and interferes. Technology does not conquer it, and neither does the human performer. The three simply get in each other's way until something musical emerges.

And perhaps that is the real joke hidden inside "Holzweg". Being on the wrong path is usually considered an error, but in experimental music it can be the beginning of a method. Forest Factory understand that getting lost is sometimes the only way to discover that the map was rather boring in the first place.

There is a slightly paradoxical ambition at the heart of Lua Jungck’s "chase". It is music made for the dance floor, but it is not especially interested in making the dance floor comfortable. The bass is heavy, the rhythms are fractured, the textures frequently seem to have been dragged through several incompatible machines, and even the moments of apparent melody retain a certain nervousness. This is club music that remembers that bodies are complicated things.

The four tracks of "chase" arrive from a very specific understanding of what a club can be. For Jungck, the dance floor is not merely a location where electronically generated sounds are played at an antisocial volume while humans perform increasingly elaborate negotiations with their own footwear. It is a collective space, historically bound up with queer visibility, gathering and the possibility of being temporarily released from the private self. Her own early experiences of Zurich’s club and rave culture remain important to the EP, but "chase" does not sound nostalgic. It sounds as though those memories have been fed back into the present and subjected to pressure.

That distinction matters because nostalgia tends to polish the past. Jungck does the opposite. She roughens it.

Her musical background helps explain why. A producer, DJ, sound artist and mixing/mastering engineer, she moves between club-oriented electronics and improvised music rather than treating them as separate professions. Her first EP, "girlfluxx", appeared in 2024, while her collaborative work includes GRIDSLOP with Arthur Hnatek and Jules Martinet and OMNIVORE with Silvan Jeger and Vera Baumann. She has also worked in film and theatre and founded the Zurich concert series livelovelava. Her practice therefore sits somewhere between composition, engineering and live experimentation, which may explain why "chase" feels unusually attentive to the behaviour of sound itself.

"liquid plant" begins with a wonderfully appropriate sense of physical instability. The title suggests organic growth, but the music is anything but pastoral. Sub-bass provides the gravitational field while fractured rhythmic elements flicker around it. Jungck does not simply pile textures onto the low end. She leaves enough negative space for the bass to behave like architecture. You do not merely hear it; you become aware of the room in which it is happening.

This is one of the EP’s most effective qualities. Space is treated as an active musical element. Silence and absence are not gaps waiting to be filled, but part of the rhythmic design. The result is heavy without becoming congested. In a genre where producers can occasionally mistake “more bass” for a complete artistic philosophy, this restraint is surprisingly significant.

"lizard" introduces a more elusive kind of movement. Its rhythms seem to change shape while remaining locked into the physical logic of bass music. There is something reptilian about the track, although fortunately not in the embarrassing sense of requiring a man in a rubber suit to crawl across the dance floor. Its energy is low-slung, twitchy and watchful. Sounds appear almost as reactions to one another rather than as fixed layers arranged in advance.

Jungck’s treatment of rhythm is especially interesting because she refuses to let the beat become a cage. The music can sit in half-time, then suddenly acquire a more driving electro impulse, only to pull back again. These shifts create a tension between bodily certainty and perceptual uncertainty. Your body understands what to do before your head has worked out why.

That tension reaches a particularly compelling form in "transients&transition", whose title could almost be read as the EP’s technical manifesto. A transient is a brief event, the sharp edge of a sound, while transition implies movement between states. Jungck is interested in both. Her tracks are full of tiny attacks, clicks, fragments and bursts that provide definition to much larger masses of sound. The music is therefore built not only from sustained bass and atmosphere, but from the fleeting details that make those larger structures perceptible.

The title also hints at something more human. We are transient creatures, forever transitioning between versions of ourselves. The club has historically been one of the places where that instability can become visible rather than something to be concealed. You can arrive alone and leave surrounded by strangers; you can spend several hours becoming someone slightly different without having to write a mission statement about it.

"sleep cache" provides the most intriguing conclusion because its title combines bodily exhaustion with digital memory. Sleep is involuntary, private and physical. A cache is temporary storage, something a machine keeps around because it might need it again. The phrase sounds almost like an accidental diagnosis of contemporary existence: the body wants to shut down while the machine politely insists on retaining everything.

The music inhabits that contradiction. It is less concerned with forward propulsion than with suspended states, with bass and texture continuing to circulate after the urgency of the dance floor has partially dissolved. Yet the track never becomes ambient in the conventional sense. Its rhythms remain encoded beneath the surface. Even when the music seems to be slowing down, some part of it is still moving.
That is perhaps the central achievement of "chase". Jungck understands that club music does not have to choose between physicality and introspection. A sub-frequency can be intellectually suggestive. A syncopated rhythm can carry an emotional memory. A texture can function simultaneously as atmosphere and architecture.

There is a political dimension to this without the music ever turning into a pamphlet. The record’s underlying defence of collective space feels increasingly pointed in an era when social experience is routinely filtered through individualised interfaces. Algorithms are extraordinarily good at predicting what one person might want next. They are considerably less competent at reproducing the strange chemistry of several hundred people occupying the same room, responding to the same bass frequency at approximately the same time.

Jungck does not romanticise that chemistry. The music itself contains fragmentation, abrasion and moments of disorientation. That is important. Community here is not presented as perfect harmony. It is the coexistence of different bodies, reactions and intensities. The beat provides a common framework without requiring everybody to become identical.

This is also where her sound-engineering sensibility becomes useful. "chase" is meticulously controlled, but it does not feel sterilised. The distinction is crucial. Precision is used to create room for instability rather than to eliminate it. Bass hits with purpose; transients have consequences; textures occupy carefully judged positions. Yet the music retains the sense that something could go wrong, or perhaps more accurately, that something unexpected might happen.

The EP's four tracks therefore function less like four separate songs than like different states of the same environment. "liquid plant" establishes the physical terrain, "lizard" introduces movement and nervous energy, "transients&transition" turns attention toward the microscopic details of change, and "sleep cache" leaves us in the residue of the experience. There is progression, but not the kind dictated by verse, chorus and climax. It is a progression of bodily and perceptual states.

And the title "chase" is revealing in that respect. What exactly is being chased? The obvious answer might be the next beat, the next rush of bass, the remembered freedom of an early rave. But the EP seems more interested in chasing a condition that cannot be permanently possessed. Freedom arrives, briefly becomes physical, and then disappears. You can remember it, reconstruct it, make music from it, but you cannot store it like a file.

Perhaps that is why these tracks feel simultaneously grounded and restless. They are trying to recreate something that only exists while people are actually there.

The dance floor, in Jungck’s hands, becomes neither escapism nor utopian fantasy. It is a temporary technology for being together. The bass gives everyone something in common; the fractures remind us that nobody experiences it in quite the same way.

"chase" does not resolve that contradiction. It wisely refuses to. Instead, it keeps the pressure on, four tracks of deep frequencies, broken rhythms and unstable textures asking a fairly simple question in increasingly elaborate sonic language: what happens when the things that connect us are also the things that make us different?

For a club record, that is an unusually thoughtful question. Fortunately, Jungck knows better than to answer it with a speech. She answers with bass.

A house is supposed to keep things out; skin is supposed to keep things in. Clemens Posch’s debut as House of Skin seems determined to sabotage both functions. Sounds leak through the walls, rhythms lose their structural integrity, voices become difficult to identify, and the distinction between an acoustic recording and a digital fabrication gradually becomes as useful as asking whether a dream was recorded with a microphone.

"house of skin" is, in fact, less a collection of electronic compositions than a study in permeability. Recorded and produced between 2022 and 2025, the nine tracks move through dub, experimental pop, trip-hop, leftfield electronics and damaged-sounding digital textures without ever settling comfortably inside any of them. Posch, a Vienna-based musician whose earlier work grew out of songwriting and production, has taken the rather sensible approach of stripping pop down to its nervous system and then allowing the nervous system to misbehave. The result is rhythmically alert but rarely straightforward, strangely intimate while often sounding as though it has been transmitted from somewhere with unreliable reception.

The opening "U Turn" announces the method with almost comic economy: a single drum-brush hit becomes the seed from which an entire piece grows. Filtered, rearranged and repeated, that microscopic gesture gradually establishes a rhythmic environment for a pitched vocal mantra that keeps appearing and receding. It is an excellent introduction because it immediately undermines the assumption that musical abundance requires lots of material. Posch can make one tiny physical event carry an entire architecture. Human beings spent centuries inventing increasingly complicated instruments, only to discover that one brush hitting one drum was apparently enough.

"Stretchin" extends the experiment into dub territory. Loops wobble, the rhythm seems to lean slightly sideways, and the voice begins to become more legible without ever becoming entirely trustworthy. The recurring sense of something trying to find its position is important to the album as a whole. These vocals do not behave like conventional lead vocals. They seem to be searching for the body from which they were separated, occasionally emerging from processing as recognisable speech before sinking back into texture.

That tension becomes more pronounced on "Never Quite", where trip-hop shadows and jazz-inflected fragments produce one of the album’s most compelling grooves. The title is almost an instruction manual: the music continually approaches recognisable form without quite arriving there. A beat starts behaving like a song, a melodic gesture hints at a hook, a voice threatens to communicate something clearly, and then Posch shifts the floor beneath it. This is music with a persistent allergy to completion.

"Light of all Light" takes a more dramatic turn. Its industrial residue and ghost-pop contours suggest an alternate universe in which a pop song has survived a fairly serious technological accident. The melodic elements remain, but they have been rubbed against rougher surfaces until their edges become ambiguous. It is perhaps the closest the album comes to conventional song architecture, yet even here Posch refuses the comfort of a clean chorus or an obvious emotional release.

Then comes "New Physics", whose title could easily belong to an undergraduate science-fiction club, but whose two-minute duration is far more mischievous. Its obscure electronic bleeps gradually assemble themselves into a memorable lead figure. The track behaves like an interlude while secretly becoming one of the album’s little structural hinges. This is one of Posch’s strengths: he understands that a sound does not need to announce itself as a “main theme” in order to lodge itself in the listener’s head.

"Bubbles" initially appears almost playful, a small bop floating on an apparently innocent surface. But its repeated image of bubbles that never burst turns the lightness into something claustrophobic. The contradiction is effective because the song never becomes conventionally sinister. Instead, it creates the peculiar anxiety of being trapped inside something soft. There is a recognisable contemporary nightmare lurking here: the feeling that your environment is perfectly functional while you have somehow lost control of it. Like discovering that your phone has disappeared, except the phone is your entire sense of reality.

The album’s most wonderfully crooked piece of archaeology is "Most Heartless Grave". The track had to be reconstructed from a messy MP3 because the supposed originals had vanished. That fact is more than a production anecdote. It becomes part of the composition’s meaning. The damaged file is not merely a defective copy of something better; it becomes the surviving body of something that no longer exists. The reference to John Cage, treated with a suitably tacky dose of self-awareness, turns the whole episode into a necromantic joke about lost data and artistic resurrection.

There is something beautifully appropriate about this. Contemporary music is surrounded by enormous quantities of supposedly permanent material, yet digital preservation is often a fantasy. Files disappear, drives fail, links rot, formats become unreadable. The cloud, despite its reassuringly fluffy name, is essentially a graveyard with excellent marketing. Posch turns that fragility into musical material. The imperfect MP3 becomes an artefact rather than an inconvenience.

"Vis a Vis" slows everything down again. Its dub pulse is reduced almost to the point of skeletal movement, while the texture grows increasingly grainy. The effect is introspective without becoming sentimental. This is one of the album’s quieter achievements: it creates intimacy through deterioration. Instead of polishing the sound until it becomes pristine, Posch lets abrasion become part of its emotional vocabulary.

And then there is "Clé from 5 to 7", whose title points toward Agnès Varda’s "Cléo from 5 to 7", the 1962 film in which a young singer waits for the result of a medical examination that may radically alter her understanding of her life. The film is structured around suspended time, and Posch’s brief closing piece seems to understand that premise instinctively. Two hours can contain an entire existential crisis; two and a half minutes can contain a remarkably large amount of musical uncertainty.

That reference also clarifies something about "house of skin". The album is obsessed with duration, but not in the conventional sense of long-form experimental music. Posch stretches tiny events. A drum hit becomes a composition. A damaged file becomes a memory. A vocal fragment becomes a character without a stable body. A loop ceases to be repetition and becomes a way of examining the same moment from slightly different angles.

His influences are visible without becoming a catalogue. There are traces of the experimental electronic tradition associated with Warp, the oblique rhythmic logic of artists such as Lolina, the collage mentality of outsider electronics and the haunted vocal processing found in contemporary leftfield music. But Posch's real achievement is that these references never seem to sit on top of the music as badges of taste. They have been digested. The result feels informed without feeling reverential, which is considerably harder than it sounds.

There is also an unusually physical quality to the album. Despite its reliance on digital tools, "house of skin" rarely feels weightless. Bass frequencies, distorted loops, scraped textures and unstable voices seem to occupy actual space. The record repeatedly suggests a body being translated into electronic information and then attempting to return. That makes the title increasingly persuasive: the “skin” is not merely a metaphor for the surface of the music. It is the membrane through which everything passes.

Posch’s real subject, then, may be transformation itself. Not the grandiose kind involving spiritual enlightenment and orchestral crescendos, but the smaller transformations that happen when a sound is copied, filtered, slowed, repeated or damaged. His music pays attention to what remains after something has been altered. A clean original is less interesting than its residue.

That is why "house of skin" feels oddly alive. Its rhythms are constructed, but they breathe. Its vocals are processed, yet they often feel more vulnerable than conventional singing. Its digital surfaces are artificial, but the imperfections make them tactile. Nothing quite stays where it was put.

A house normally gives us coordinates: here is the room, here is the door, here is the wall, and here is the neighbour who has decided that 2:17 a.m. is an excellent time to practise bass guitar. House of Skin offers none of that stability. Its rooms keep changing dimensions. Its walls are loops. Its windows are glitches. Its occupants are fragments of voices and half-recognisable rhythms.

The strange thing is that this instability never feels homeless. Posch has built a place precisely out of uncertainty.

And perhaps that is what "house of skin" finally proposes: that identity is not a fixed structure protecting an essential self, but a surface constantly being stretched, recorded, copied, distorted and rewritten. The house survives not because nothing changes inside it, but because change is the only thing holding it together.

There is a delicious absurdity in the idea behind Jake Muir’s "Pareidolia": take the most atmospheric fragments from hundreds of death-metal and black-metal records, remove most of the things that would normally identify them as metal, slow them down until their bones become difficult to recognise, and then ask the listener to believe that something heavy is still happening. It sounds like an elaborate prank on genre taxonomy. It turns out to be considerably more serious than that.

The title provides the key. Pareidolia is the tendency to discover recognisable forms in random patterns: faces in clouds, animals in stains, divine apparitions in burnt toast, presumably Satan in an unfortunate patch of bathroom mould. Muir applies the same perceptual trick to sound. He wants us to hear metal where the obvious evidence of metal has largely disappeared. The riffs are no longer riffs in any conventional sense, the vocals have been reduced to spectral matter, the guitars become geological formations, and rhythm frequently evaporates altogether. Yet the music retains an unmistakable sense of menace.

Muir is particularly well suited to this kind of forensic listening. The Los Angeles-based artist, DJ and field recordist has built much of his practice around found sound and the transformation of material whose original context is gradually obscured. His previous work has moved through such unlikely territories as church bells and vintage erotic-film soundtracks, while "Talisman", his 2022 collaboration with Evan Caminiti, helped push him toward processing guitar and reconsidering his longstanding relationship with rock music. "Pareidolia" feels like the logical consequence of that investigation: less a tribute to metal than an archaeological excavation of the places where metal stops behaving like metal.

This distinction matters. Muir is not sampling the spectacular bits. There are no heroic solos here, no blast-beat fireworks, no growled declarations demanding that somebody open the gates of hell immediately. Instead, he has gone after the margins: introductions, interludes, atmospheric passages, sustained guitar textures and other moments that metal listeners may regard as connective tissue. By isolating them, he discovers that the supposedly secondary material was carrying an enormous amount of the genre’s emotional architecture all along.

"Beithir" establishes the method with a certain slyness. What might once have functioned as a prelude becomes the event itself. Guitar-derived textures stretch beyond their original proportions, losing the reassuring coordinates of song form. The sound is heavy without having to demonstrate heaviness. "Necrotic Mist" continues the process, with its title practically doing some of the listener's interpretive work in advance. The music itself is more ambiguous: something seems to be emerging from the murk, but every attempt to identify it makes it dissolve further.

Then comes "Unholy Apparitions", where Muir's sense of sonic misdirection becomes particularly effective. Foley-like noises, distorted vocal residues and unstable textures seem to occupy different layers of reality. Nothing quite announces its source. Instead of asking “What am I hearing?”, the track encourages the more irrational question “What does this sound resemble?” That small psychological shift is precisely where pareidolia begins.

"Oblivion" is among the album’s most convincing demonstrations of Muir’s central argument. Its slow-moving, doom-laden weight has the physical presence associated with extreme metal, but without the aggression normally required to communicate it. The piece does not attack. It looms. This is an important distinction, because "Pareidolia" repeatedly suggests that volume and heaviness are not synonymous. A sound can be enormous while remaining almost motionless. It can feel oppressive without actually becoming loud.

This is where the album brushes against dark ambient, drone and the more experimental descendants of industrial music. Comparisons with Lustmord are understandable, particularly because both artists understand that darkness can be constructed through scale, resonance and subtraction rather than through sheer sonic violence. But Muir's particular achievement is to retain a peculiar metallic tension inside those otherwise ambient structures. The guitars may have been chemically processed beyond recognition, yet something of their original threat survives.

"Each Uisge" makes the transformation almost beautiful. High-pitched guitar fragments rise over choral-like pads, while small vocal disturbances appear and vanish before they can become language. The title refers to a water spirit from Scottish folklore, and the music has an appropriately unstable quality: attractive enough to approach, strange enough to make approaching it seem like a questionable life decision.

"Celestial Visions" offers one of the album's more luminous passages, although Muir never allows brightness to become comfort. This is not ambient music designed to improve the user's morning routine, increase productivity or help them discover their inner chakras while answering emails. Its moments of beauty remain contaminated by the material from which they were extracted. The celestial is never entirely separated from the necrotic.

That tension becomes especially potent on "Anima". Here the decelerated metal vocabulary seems to acquire an almost sensual quality. Heavy guitar residues and metallic clatter are transformed into something slower, warmer and strangely intimate. It is a reminder that Muir's work has never been particularly interested in keeping genres in their assigned emotional departments. Eroticism can coexist with decay; tenderness can emerge from distortion; a black-metal guitar can become almost voluptuous once somebody stops insisting that it behave like a black-metal guitar.

The closing "Cathedral of Decay" gathers these contradictions rather beautifully. Its title sounds like something that should be printed in Gothic lettering on a shirt sold by a man who has not seen daylight since 1997, but the music itself is much more elusive. The “cathedral” is not a building so much as a spatial effect, constructed from resonance and distance. And “decay” is not simply horror. It is transformation, the gradual loss of a thing's original identity until another form becomes possible.

This is perhaps what separates "Pareidolia" from a clever sampling exercise. Muir is not simply demonstrating that metal contains ambient music. He is asking what remains of a genre once its recognisable gestures have been stripped away. If you remove the drums, the growls, the riff structures, the theatrical aggression and the cultural uniforms, can the underlying emotional substance survive?

His answer is an unexpectedly confident yes.

In fact, the album suggests something more provocative: perhaps some of metal's most powerful qualities were never located in its loudness at all. They were in its fascination with vastness, dread, ritual, repetition, altered states and sounds that seem to come from somewhere older and less hospitable than ordinary human life. Once those qualities are isolated, they do not necessarily need distortion pedals or a drummer with a personal vendetta against silence.

Muir's real sleight of hand, then, is not turning metal into ambient music. It is making us reconsider how little metal actually needs in order to remain metal.

"Pareidolia" leaves behind a strange residue, like finding an ancient symbol in a patch of moss and then becoming mildly concerned that the moss has noticed you. The original records are mostly invisible. Their identities have been blurred, stretched, liquefied and rearranged. Yet their emotional fingerprints remain.

Heavy music, Muir discovers, does not necessarily require impact. Sometimes all it needs is the suspicion that something enormous is hiding inside the fog.