Here's a group that's been around for a while, at lest since 2017. Comprised of East Tennesseans Evan Lipson and Evmh, 'Empire of Liberty' is Meinschaft's fourth full length album, and their first on a label I'm familiar with. Prior efforts by this outfit have been compared to Dead Can Dance, Coil, Scott Walker and Insane Clown Posse, but over the first few tracks I'm not hearing any of that. The opening number, "Freezing Rain," employs acoustic guitar and acoustic bass with mournful synth voice which is rather nice, but unlikely to reveal what you're in for.

"Lux Æterna, Part One" begins with a baritone choral voices, adding a sequenced synth line, some spoken word about destructive sunshine, then adding freefrom brass, and again the song changes before conclusion. "Lux Æterna, Part Two" offers some cool chord changes over intense beats, somewhat reminiscent of outfits like AIR, with a touch of Tuxedo Moon-style melancholy. So far this is all rather mellow compared to what I was expecting, and quite melodically musical. The weirdness doesn't really begin until the third track - "Gay Parade." It's a downtempo crawl with gravelly vocals - "I saw you at the gay parade, you were drinking a Gatorade..." ... utter silliness beneath a darkly furrowed brow. The song that follows, "French Erection," begins with buzzy sawtooth bass and Residents-style vocals with other percussive elements. It becomes rather disjunct when the acoustic guitar and watery elements enter towards the end.

"Event Horizon" is a nice old school synth instrumental that borrows the melody from Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner," in a child-like voice before it descends into chaos and noise, and then its back to the Vega melody again. "Biting the Hand" sounds like a stoned or drunken Jonah Hex, if he was fronting some industrial slowcore metal outfit. "Remember to Remember (You Must Die)" juxtaposes acoustic guitar with electronic effects and sad synth lines before a baritone vocal croons out a melody at the end. The familiar "Heart of Glass"/Wall of Voodoo-like electronic percussion pattern opens "Anacalypto," reminiscent more of the latter than the former, likely due to the stark, minimal guitar riff. "Pneumatic Waltz" is a quirky but genial synth instrumental. There is something familiar about "Wave Train" that I just can't put my finger on. It could be the simple treble melody, the moving bass lines, the fluid-echo slide guitar, the percussion./drum loops, the stolen background voices...I dunno...but it's interesting.

"Mother & Son" is an acoustic guitar-backed melancholy ballad that goes through a brief harsh section before ending placidly. "Haints & Sinners" is a spooky finger-poppin' back alley number with free jazz elements on the horn-side. I think there's a missed opportunity with this one as it doesn't really go anywhere until the end when it devolves into a hokey melody. Maybe that's the point. Last track (or next to last, depending on whether you sprung for the CD or not) is "The Fall," which starts out as a quiet Death In Juney kind of ballad before it zzz's out. Very nice! On the CD there's a hidden track called "For Francis Scott Key" which is part Star Mangled Banner and part chaos. As strange as many parts of this album are, there is almost as much that's rather normal, and I daresay, a bit sentimental, making this even a more eclectic listening experience.

It should be mentioned that Evan Lipson's previous project include Normal Love and Satanized, and also produced the synaesthetic internet radio show, Evcast with Evmh. Lipson has performed and/or recorded with artists such as Susan Alcom, Eugene Chadboure, Elliott Sharp, Col. Bruce Hamopton (of the Hampton Grease Band), Pauline Oliveros, and Mat Maneri, among others. 'Empire of Liberty' also features appearances by FKA ICE, Greg Kelly, Jonathan Moritz, Ben Bennett, Jack Wright, Mike Pride, and Brandon Seabrook. My guess is that if you like the Residents and Tuxedo Moon, or left-of-center electronica projects, you will probably enjoy this. CD limited to 250 copies.

There is something almost perversely appropriate about making a forty-three-minute electronic composition during lockdown and deciding that its principal subject should be persistence. Humanity had temporarily discovered that time could become a viscous substance, that Tuesdays could last approximately three geological eras, and that staring at the same four walls was apparently an acceptable lifestyle. Solís Arenazas responded by asking what happens when sound refuses to leave. "Conatus" is the answer.

The word comes from Spinoza's notion of the fundamental tendency of every being to persevere in its existence, to continue being what it is while simultaneously entering into relations that inevitably alter it. Solís Arenazas does not merely borrow this idea as an intellectual ornament. He builds the entire piece around it. A small number of sonic materials persist for an extended duration, repeating without ever remaining perfectly identical. Their survival depends on change. That distinction is crucial.

A loop normally promises recurrence: here we are again, back at the beginning, congratulations, humanity has invented the circle. But "Conatus" is interested in a less obedient kind of repetition. Its materials return altered by their previous encounters. Frequencies interfere, textures thicken or thin, microscopic deviations accumulate. What initially appears static gradually reveals itself as a system in continuous negotiation with itself.

This is also where Solís Arenazas' wider practice becomes relevant. The Mexico City-based sound artist, essayist and composer works across electroacoustic music, synthesis, acousmatic research, installations, radio and documentary sound, with a recurring interest in ambiguity, language and the behaviour of indeterminate materials. His work has appeared in contexts ranging from contemporary dance and film to sound installations and experimental music. His 2026 LINE release "Displacements", for example, explores relationships between language, chaotic systems and randomness through feedback, noise, field recordings and electronic processes. "Conatus" approaches similar territory from a considerably narrower doorway. Everything happens inside a single piece. That could sound restrictive. It isn't. The forty-three minutes function less like a conventional composition than like a laboratory in which a handful of sounds are left alone long enough to reveal their bad habits. The materials were originally recorded at Vano Sonoro's studios in Mexico City in early 2021, then subjected to processes involving Markov-chain probability, interference modulation, low-frequency oscillation and resampling. But the interesting thing is not the technology itself. It is the composer's decision to listen before intervening.

The procedure is almost anti-virtuosic. Instead of constantly demonstrating control, Solís Arenazas allows the system to produce unexpected consequences and then responds to them. Parameters are adjusted sparingly. The composer becomes partly gardener, partly scientist, partly person sitting in front of a computer wondering whether that strange sound was intentional. It is a productive relinquishing of authority. The piece consequently develops through tiny discrepancies. A tone that initially seems merely functional begins acquiring grain. A pulse creates secondary vibrations. One frequency appears to lean against another. A texture thickens enough to become almost architectural before gradually losing its solidity. The listener's attention is repeatedly redirected from the object itself toward the space around it. This is where "Conatus" becomes genuinely compelling. Its repetition is not about hypnosis in the conventional ambient sense. It is about "perceptual recalibration". The longer the same materials remain present, the more aggressively the ear starts examining them. What sounded like a single event becomes a cluster of internal movements. What seemed motionless begins crawling.

There is a beautiful paradox here: the music changes because it insists on remaining itself. Spinoza would probably approve. Or at least he might have found the premise less ridiculous than most things humans do with synthesizers. The piece also has an interesting relationship with the experience of lockdown without attempting to turn itself into a pandemic document. There are no obvious gestures toward catastrophe, isolation or collective trauma. Instead, the connection is temporal. "Conatus" remembers a period in which duration became unusually conspicuous. Ordinary time lost its usual punctuation. Days ceased to be differentiated by events and became quantities of waiting. Solís Arenazas translates that experience into sound without narrating it.

The result is not music about lockdown so much as music that understands what it meant for time to become materially noticeable. At first, forty-three minutes can seem like an extravagant amount of time to ask from a listener. By the end, the opposite becomes true. The duration feels necessary because the composition needs enough temporal distance for its smallest deviations to become significant. This is the great risk of such music, naturally. Minimalism can easily become minimal effort wearing a serious expression. Put a drone on for forty minutes, mention phenomenology somewhere in the accompanying text and humanity will occasionally reward you for it.

"Conatus" earns its duration because the repetition contains consequences. Its materials do not simply persist. They remember.

Every recurrence carries traces of what happened before. The sonic environment therefore becomes cumulative rather than cyclical. The listener is never returned to precisely the same point, even when the surface suggests otherwise. The piece behaves more like a spiral than a loop, gradually circling the same territory while changing its altitude.

There is also something quietly physical about the music. The low-frequency components and interference processes give the piece a sense of pressure. It does not merely occupy listening space; it modifies the perception of that space. Headphones make this particularly evident, because the apparently modest events begin revealing depth and lateral movement that the first pass may have concealed. This is perhaps the most successful aspect of "Conatus": its ability to turn small differences into events.

Nothing needs to explode. Nothing needs to announce a climax. There is no heroic final transformation waiting patiently at minute forty-two. Instead, the reward lies in discovering that the supposedly identical thing has been changing all along. That idea extends beyond music. A person repeats habits and remains recognisably themselves, yet is altered by every repetition. A relationship returns to familiar gestures but never to the same circumstances. A memory resurfaces with a slightly different emphasis. Even an apparently stable identity is continuously modified by its encounters.

Persistence is therefore not the opposite of change. Persistence is one of the mechanisms through which change happens.

That is what gives "Conatus" its philosophical weight without requiring it to behave like a philosophy lecture with a synthesizer underneath. The Spinozist premise is useful because it is audible. You can hear the materials trying to remain themselves. You can also hear them failing, which is arguably the more interesting part.

The piece ends, but it does not feel concluded in any conventional sense. It simply reaches the point at which the listener is released from the experiment. The processes could presumably continue. The sounds could keep modifying one another indefinitely. And perhaps that is the final trick.

"Conatus" makes us aware that repetition is never really repetition. There is always another microscopic difference waiting inside the return, another accidental relation, another mutation too small to notice until we have stayed still long enough.

In a culture addicted to novelty, Solís Arenazas proposes something considerably stranger: stay with the same thing until it becomes something else.

It turns out that patience, unlike most fashionable production techniques, still has consequences.

There is a peculiar irony in "Stockholm 2019-2023": Kasper Agnas arrives at meticulously notated music after spending years becoming very good at doing precisely the opposite. A guitarist deeply rooted in Swedish jazz and improvisation, Agnas has built much of his reputation around the unpredictable possibilities of playing in the moment. He has worked with musicians including David StackenÄs, Joakim Milder and Per “Texas” Johansson, and as part of Agnas Bros he has become one of the more recognisable names in Sweden's adventurous jazz scene. His 2017 Montreux Jazz Festival guitar prize confirmed the technical side of that reputation, while releases such as "Grain" and "1305" increasingly revealed a composer unwilling to leave the instrument's possibilities safely inside the jazz department.

"Stockholm 2019-2023" takes the next step. Over four years Agnas wrote around thirty compositions for different chamber formations, selecting six for this album. The instrumentation changes from piece to piece, bringing together guitars, pianos, violins, cello, trumpet, voice and drums. The result is neither conventional chamber music nor jazz stripped of improvisation. It occupies a more curious middle ground, where repetition, counterpoint, timbral colour and tiny rhythmic displacements generate movement without relying on spontaneous intervention.

The crucial question is therefore not whether the music is improvised. It isn't. The more interesting question is why it often "feels" as though it could be.

That sensation becomes immediately apparent in “Parus Major”. The piece is brief, but its compactness is deceptive. Small figures appear to circulate among the instruments, each repetition slightly altering the listener's sense of where the musical centre lies. There is no grand exposition followed by development in the traditional sense. Instead, the music seems to observe itself changing. This is one of Agnas's most distinctive qualities as a composer: he seems fascinated by the difference between repetition and recurrence. A repeated figure is never entirely the same because the context around it has shifted. A phrase returns, but another instrument has moved half a step in perception, if not literally in pitch. A rhythmic cell acquires a different weight because the silence before it has changed. The music behaves like an object being turned slowly under a lamp.

“Springs” makes this particularly evident through its treatment of trumpet lines. Phrases overlap with a slight delay, producing something close to a musical afterimage. The effect is almost comic at times, as though one instrument has heard the other and decided that copying it three seconds later would be an excellent idea. But beneath the simplicity lies considerable structural precision. The pieces do not simply repeat. They pursue.

This sense of musical pursuit becomes even more pronounced in “Nostalgi I-IX”, the album's longest composition. Written for two guitars and cello, it works with small melodic units that are repeatedly rearranged through different temporal relationships. The title promises nostalgia, but the music is not particularly sentimental. Instead, it examines what nostalgia might actually consist of: the recognition of something familiar that is never quite reproduced in the same form. Memory, after all, is a terrible archivist. It keeps the outline and loses the furniture. “Nostalgi I-IX” understands this beautifully. A tiny musical fragment can become almost hypnotic through repetition, then suddenly seem unfamiliar because another voice has changed its position around it. The piece feels less like a story than a sequence of rooms connected by doors that are all slightly misplaced.

This is also where Agnas's transition away from improvisation becomes philosophically interesting. His own reasoning is that improvisation may not possess an inherent artistic value simply because it is improvised. What matters may instead be the sensation of immediacy, the impression that the music is unfolding rather than merely being reproduced. That is a dangerous thought for a jazz musician. It is also an unusually productive one. Because if spontaneity is partly a "perception", then composition can attempt to manufacture that perception. Agnas does exactly this. He builds pieces in which musicians follow predetermined structures, yet the interaction of their lines creates enough instability to suggest that the music might take another route at any moment.

“Agogics I” is perhaps the clearest demonstration. Written for guitar, two violins and piano, it layers independent repetitive processes whose speeds and points of emphasis do not always coincide. The resulting texture is both orderly and slippery. You can hear the mechanisms, but you cannot quite predict the next convergence. The music resembles several clocks placed in the same room, all accurate, none quite agreeing about what time it is. Human beings have spent centuries inventing clocks and then becoming upset when they disagree. Agnas turns the problem into composition. What makes “Agogics I” particularly effective is that its complexity does not depend upon density. There is plenty of space between events. The listener can isolate individual lines, follow their trajectories, lose them, rediscover them. The piece therefore rewards both analytical listening and passive absorption.

That balance is central to the album. Agnas's music is constructed with enough detail to withstand close examination, but it does not punish anyone who simply lets it happen. This is important because minimalist and repetitive music can sometimes become an exercise in endurance disguised as profundity. Here, repetition is not used to tell the listener that patience is morally superior to pleasure. There are things to enjoy.

“Waves, surge, float” is the most immediately evocative title on the record, and the music lives up to it without becoming illustrative. Its gestures seem to swell, recede and return, creating a gentle sense of instability. The piece has an almost physical relationship with motion: not the dramatic movement of a crescendo, but the continuous shifting of something suspended in water.

The final “Agogics II” brings the album's concerns back into sharper focus. The title itself refers to expressive changes in rhythm and tempo, and Agnas uses that territory not as decoration but as structural material. Timing becomes melody. Acceleration becomes colour. A pause can alter the shape of an entire phrase.

The musicians on the album are crucial to making these ideas convincing. Mandus and Sabina Agnas join Kasper on guitars; Johan and Max Agnas contribute piano; Alva Press and Josefin Runsteen play violin; Linnea Talp cello; Urban and Joakim Agnas trumpet; Stina Agnas voice; and Nils Agnas drums. It is a sizeable ensemble by the standards of much contemporary chamber music, yet the sound rarely becomes crowded. That restraint is one of the album's strengths.

The instruments are not arranged as competing personalities. They behave more like different materials inside a single mechanism. Brass can provide a pulse rather than a fanfare. Guitars can function almost percussively. Strings become lines of duration rather than emotional decoration. The piano may establish a harmonic field only to have that field gradually destabilised by repetition.

There is something almost architectural about the whole thing. Not architecture in the grand, monumental sense. More like a carefully designed building where you only notice the geometry after walking around inside it for a while. This is perhaps why the album's title matters. "Stockholm 2019-2023" sounds deliberately administrative, almost bureaucratic. A location and a date range. No poetic subtitle, no grand conceptual declaration. Yet those five years contain a significant transition in Agnas's musical thinking.

The album documents a period in which he stopped treating improvisation as an unquestionable good and began asking what composition could do once that assumption had been removed. The answer is not rigidity. It is freedom of another kind.

When musicians are no longer responsible for inventing the material in real time, Agnas can construct relationships that would be difficult to sustain through spontaneous playing. Tiny temporal shifts can be repeated precisely. Multiple processes can coexist. A phrase can return at exactly the right moment, then be displaced just enough to alter its meaning. Paradoxically, removing improvisation gives the composer more room to manipulate uncertainty. That is the album's real conceptual achievement.

It does not reject jazz so much as examine one of its fundamental assumptions from the outside. The improviser is not necessarily freer because everything is open. Sometimes freedom comes from knowing exactly where you are, precisely enough to notice what happens when the surrounding structures move. And there is a quiet emotional dimension to this process.

The album is not cold mathematics. Its repetitive figures accumulate a peculiar tenderness. Perhaps that is because repetition is inherently human. We repeat things when we practise, when we remember, when we worry, when we love, when we fail to say something properly the first time. We return to the same places hoping that this time the view will be different. Agnas's compositions understand that instinct without turning it into sentimentality. The music keeps moving. Not dramatically. Not urgently. It moves because standing still, in music as in life, is usually just another form of motion measured badly.

"Stockholm 2019-2023" is therefore an unexpectedly convincing argument for composition as a form of controlled uncertainty. Its precision does not eliminate spontaneity; it relocates it. Instead of asking musicians to invent the material, Agnas asks them to inhabit a structure so carefully that the structure itself begins to breathe.

For a guitarist who came from improvisation, that is quite a beautiful contradiction. The musician who once trusted the instant has learned to write it down.

And somehow, the instant survives.

A saxophone is usually expected to do certain things. It can sing, howl, swing, whisper, shriek, seduce, irritate the neighbours. It can be virtuosic, lyrical, vulgar, majestic. Alex Zhang Hungtai takes the instrument and appears to ask a considerably less sociable question: what happens if the saxophone forgets it was ever supposed to be a saxophone? "Dras" is the answer.

The nine pieces collected here originated in 2019, recorded inside Montreal's Saint Joseph Oratory during late-night sessions, with the vast church providing the initial acoustic environment. They then sat on Hungtai's hard drive through the pandemic before being completed during lockdown in Los Angeles. The delay is more than an interesting piece of chronology. It seems to have given the recordings time to lose their original identity. What emerged years later is not a document of a saxophonist playing inside a church, but a work assembled from the memory of that event, with digital manipulation pushing the instrument into unfamiliar territory while preserving the physical evidence of breath and pressure.

Hungtai, of course, has been doing this sort of disappearing act with musical identity for a long time. Best known initially as the force behind Dirty Beaches, he developed a deliberately elusive relationship with genre, moving through lo-fi rock'n'roll, experimental composition, free improvisation, jazz-adjacent work and increasingly abstract instrumental music. His earlier solo releases already demonstrated an interest in stripping away the recognisable functions of an instrument until something more elemental remained. On "Dras", that process becomes almost forensic.

“Erg”, the opening track, is an excellent example. There is saxophone here, but its conventional vocabulary has already begun to dissolve. Repeated figures appear and recede, tones are stretched into resonance, and the acoustic source seems to hover somewhere between instrument and environment. The piece does not announce itself with the usual gesture of a soloist entering a room. It feels as if the room was already making the sound and Hungtai merely discovered how to disturb it. The effect is strangely intimate despite the scale. This is partly because the saxophone's breath remains audible. However much the sound is processed, there is still a human body somewhere behind the electronics. The instrument strains, exhales, cracks and resonates. The digital treatment does not sterilise these qualities. Instead, it enlarges them.

“Dras” itself is considerably more severe. Tones appear to be pulled apart from within, creating metallic edges and dense resonant masses. The sound can be abrasive, but its aggression is oddly restrained. Nothing here feels like an attempt to overpower the listener. The physical force comes from the tension between recognisable instrumental origin and increasingly alien result. You know there is a saxophone in there. You just aren't sure whether it knows. That uncertainty becomes one of the album's central pleasures.

“El Khela” works through fractured gestures and spectral responses, allowing sounds to appear as though they are arriving from different depths of the same enormous acoustic chamber. The church is no longer simply an echoing venue. It becomes an invisible participant, a kind of acoustic memory that has been carried forward into the digital processing.

This is where the Saint Joseph Oratory recordings acquire their real significance. The building is enormous, with a famously resonant interior, and Hungtai recorded there under conditions designed to minimise outside noise. The resulting material contains an extraordinary amount of spatial information, but "Dras" does not behave like a field recording. Hungtai takes that spatial residue and rearranges it until physical location becomes psychological atmosphere. “Xilitla” and “Estado” make this transformation especially clear. The former seems to float away from its instrumental source almost completely, settling into sustained tones that could be mistaken for electronic composition if one did not know where they originated. “Estado” is subtler, with barely perceptible rhythmic movement giving the music a sense of direction without turning it into anything resembling a beat.

These pieces are among the album's most convincing because they demonstrate that Hungtai is not interested in hiding the saxophone. He is interested in changing the conditions under which we hear it. That is a different proposition. The distinction matters because experimental music can sometimes become obsessed with disguising its sources. Here the opposite happens. The further the sound travels from the conventional saxophone, the more one becomes aware of the instrument's physical characteristics: the vibration of metal, the pressure of air, the instability of pitch, the human effort necessary to make the sound exist. The machine does not erase the body. It puts the body under a magnifying glass.

The track titles add another layer of geographical and material suggestion. “Rub' Al Khali”, named after the vast Arabian Empty Quarter, and “Pulque”, referring to the traditional Mexican fermented drink, seem to open doors onto places and sensations without turning the music into literal travelogue. “White Dwarf” shifts the scale completely, moving from geography to astrophysics. These names are useful precisely because they refuse to explain the sounds. They provide coordinates, not destinations. And then there is “White Dwarf” itself, one of the album's most luminous moments. Its progression has a rare sense of warmth, with tones gradually revealing harmonic relationships beneath the apparent abstraction. After so much erosion, the emergence of something recognisably melodic feels almost startling. But Hungtai does not let melody settle comfortably. The tonal material remains surrounded by grain, distortion and spatial ambiguity. Beauty appears, but it arrives with its fingerprints still dirty.

This is perhaps where "Dras" differs from the more purely austere traditions of drone and electroacoustic music. Hungtai's work retains a sense of song even when the song has been almost entirely dismantled. There is an instinct for melody underneath the abstraction, a memory of phrasing that keeps resurfacing. The record never becomes purely textural because the saxophone continues to suggest a human voice.

That voice becomes most powerful on “Mazil”, the closing piece. Low, guttural tones emerge beneath thinner melodic traces, creating the sensation of something enormous moving underneath the music. The piece does not build toward a conventional climax. Instead, it gradually reveals the full physical character of the instrument. After all the processing, fragmentation and spectral manipulation, the saxophone finally seems to stand in front of us rather than behind layers of transformation. It is almost like meeting the suspect after spending an hour interviewing the fingerprints. The emotional effect is surprisingly strong.

There is loneliness in "Dras", but not the theatrical loneliness of an empty landscape. It feels more like the solitude of somebody listening carefully to their own thoughts and discovering that the thoughts have echoes. The album's repetitions and transformations suggest memory without ever becoming nostalgic. A phrase returns altered. A tone loses its original shape. Something familiar becomes difficult to recognise and then, suddenly, familiar again.

The pandemic history inevitably casts a shadow over the record, but "Dras" is fortunate enough not to sound like a “pandemic album”. There are no obvious attempts to document a particular historical moment. Instead, the long gap between recording and completion becomes part of the music's character. The sounds were captured in 2019, but their final form emerged through a period in which ordinary relationships with space, silence and physical presence were radically disrupted. That may help explain why the album feels simultaneously solitary and communal.

Hungtai made the original recordings alone with his instrument, yet the finished work is concerned with space, resonance and the sensation of sound occupying a place. It is intimate music that nevertheless seems to require a room around it.

This is also why the vinyl format makes sense. "Dras" is not background music. Its details depend on volume, physical space and the listener's willingness to remain inside sounds that do not immediately resolve themselves. The record rewards attention, but it does not demand analytical concentration. One can simply allow the textures to accumulate until the distinction between listening to music and listening to a room begins to disappear.

There is a paradox here that Hungtai handles remarkably well. The album is constructed from a very limited palette: essentially one saxophone, extensively processed. Yet it feels enormous. Conversely, the recordings were made inside one of Montreal's great architectural spaces, but the finished music often feels intensely internal.

Exterior becomes interior. Architecture becomes memory. Breath becomes electricity. And the saxophone becomes something that could almost be mistaken for a machine until the human body suddenly returns through a single cracked note.

That is the real achievement of "Dras". It does not simply demonstrate that one instrument can produce unconventional sounds. Plenty of experimental musicians have established that fact, and humanity has been dismantling musical instruments with commendable determination for decades. Hungtai goes further. He makes the transformation emotionally meaningful.

The unfamiliar noises are not trophies of technique. They are stages in a process of searching. Melodies fracture because they are being examined. Repetitions accumulate because they are trying to find a way through. Distortion becomes less an aesthetic effect than a method of seeing what remains when the familiar surface has been disturbed.

The album consequently feels less like a collection of compositions than nine examinations of resonance, each asking how much identity a sound can lose before it becomes something else. The answer, intriguingly, is: quite a lot. But not everything. The breath remains. That is enough.

"Dras" is austere without being cold, abstract without abandoning melody, and imposing without ever becoming merely loud. Its strange beauty lies in the contradiction between the enormous spaces suggested by the recordings and the unmistakably human effort contained inside every sound.

The saxophone does not disappear. It dreams itself into another form.

The problem with Mr.Vast is that he makes it extremely difficult to behave like a respectable music reviewer.

One can begin with genre. There is electronic music here, certainly. There are rave rhythms, drum'n'bass, acid-adjacent twitching, synth-pop, ambient passages, folk gestures, spoken word and things that appear to have wandered in from a children's television programme being broadcast from a parallel universe. One can mention absurdism, English eccentricity, cabaret, music hall, post-punk, techno and Wevie Stonder. All of these descriptions are technically defensible. None of them survives contact with the album for very long.

"Upping The Ante" is the third solo album by Henry Sargeant's Mr.Vast persona, following "Grievous Bodily Charm" and "Touch & Go". Sargeant's background as an actor and “dark clown”, together with his long-standing role as vocalist and frontman of Wevie Stonder, goes some way towards explaining why his relationship with the conventional idea of a song remains so cheerfully dysfunctional. Working with Al Boorman, who provides the music, production and mixing, Sargeant treats the pop song less as a fixed structure than as a piece of furniture that can be dismantled and rebuilt while somebody is still sitting on it. The remarkable thing is that "Upping The Ante" is not actually as chaotic as it first appears.

Its opening, “What's Difficult About Being Stupid?”, lasts twenty-eight seconds and immediately establishes that conventional introductions are not going to survive the afternoon. “Scatterbrain” follows with a miniature burst of warped, pseudo-medieval absurdity before “This And That” suddenly launches into a dance track that could, under different circumstances and with substantially less personality, have been mistaken for an actual club record. This is where Mr.Vast becomes particularly cunning.

The music is often genuinely catchy. That fact is easy to overlook because Sargeant fills it with linguistic detours, character voices, surreal observations and the general sensation that somebody has misplaced the instruction manual for human behaviour. Yet Boorman's productions are carefully constructed. Rhythmic transitions, synth figures, bass movements and abrupt changes of atmosphere are not random interruptions. They provide a stable framework against which the verbal nonsense can ricochet.

The absurdity works because the music underneath it works. “This And That” is perhaps the clearest example. It begins with enough dancefloor propulsion to make the listener suspect that Mr.Vast has finally agreed to behave, before the arrangement starts expanding into rave melodrama and rhythmic excess. The track becomes a kind of damaged celebration, simultaneously inviting the body to move and the brain to question why it is doing so.

This tension between genuine musical pleasure and comic disruption runs throughout the album.

“The Bench” takes a gentler route. Its softer electronic setting gives Sargeant room to occupy a more conversational space, creating the impression of a strange little monologue that has accidentally acquired accompaniment. It is almost conventional, which in the Mr.Vast universe means that something is probably about to go wrong.

“Neural Preening” supplies the expected malfunction. Nervous electronic figures, clipped rhythms and an animated vocal performance create a miniature nervous system operating at slightly too high a voltage. The influence of early electronic pop is audible without becoming imitation. There is something of the mechanical twitch of early-80s synth music, but the track is too self-aware to settle comfortably into retro territory.

That is important because "Upping The Ante" is not really interested in nostalgia.

It borrows historical materials the way a magpie steals shiny objects: because they look useful, not because it wishes to preserve them. A rave rhythm from one decade, a folk cadence from another, a lounge-piano gesture, a synth-pop texture, a documentary-music cliché: everything becomes available.

Then “Ants” arrives and demonstrates just how far the album can travel while apparently remaining in the same room.

A wandering vocal narrative is placed over a more relaxed musical setting, producing something halfway between a pub conversation, a spoken-word performance and a song that has forgotten what its chorus was supposed to be. The deliberately skewed imagery is funny, but the real pleasure comes from the way Sargeant's delivery keeps shifting the listener's understanding of what is happening. Is he telling a story? Performing a character? Improvising? Making fun of storytelling itself? Probably all four.

And this is where the connection to his theatrical background becomes more significant than the word “comedy” might suggest. Mr.Vast is not simply a musician who tells jokes between tracks. The voice is a dramatic instrument. Characters appear through changes of diction, accent, rhythm and attitude. The songs behave almost like miniature scenes in which the protagonist is never quite stable.
The album consequently has more in common with theatre than a superficial listen might suggest.

But it is theatre that has been fed through a malfunctioning jukebox.

“I Can't Help It” moves back toward rave and drum'n'bass territory, but the energy is constantly interrupted by vocal and narrative diversions. “Guess Who” provides one of the album's most convincing moments of relative simplicity, allowing the songwriting itself to emerge more clearly. It is a useful reminder that Sargeant and Boorman could presumably make something much more conventional if they were ever seized by an unfortunate lapse in judgement.

They simply don't seem interested. “Crumpet Man” is perhaps the record's great absurdist centrepiece. The music gradually adopts the proportions of an overly serious documentary soundtrack while the subject matter heads in a considerably less respectable direction. The contrast is exquisite. Grand electronic gestures promise historical significance; the vocal supplies something much closer to breakfast.

This is a recurring trick throughout the album: inflate something ridiculous until it becomes strangely majestic. It works because Boorman takes the musical arrangements seriously even when Sargeant refuses to take the subject matter seriously. The result is not novelty music in the disposable sense. The jokes have structural consequences. The music changes around them, accommodates them, contradicts them and occasionally makes them funnier by treating them with complete solemnity.

That solemnity is essential. If the production were merely goofy, the album would become exhausting very quickly. Instead, Boorman gives these songs enough musical weight to survive repeated listening. There are genuine textures, effective hooks, carefully chosen timbres and convincing rhythmic constructions underneath the nonsense. The humour is therefore sitting on top of actual composition rather than being used to conceal its absence.

The title track, “Upping The Ante”, pushes this approach into a kind of mock-anthemic territory. There is a sense of escalation, but also a recognition that escalation itself has become absurd. The album keeps raising its own stakes without ever explaining what game we are playing.

By the time “The End” arrives, the joke is almost philosophical.

Almost.

The record has spent forty-something minutes refusing to settle into a stable identity, and now it reaches a track called “The End”. Even that promise is treated with suspicion. Of course the ending is not quite an ending. With Mr.Vast, closure would probably require a permit.
What makes "Upping The Ante" more than a collection of eccentric sketches is its attitude toward sincerity.

Sargeant's performance is funny, but there is something vulnerable underneath it. The characters, voices and absurd situations are not simply exercises in distancing himself from the audience. They create a way of communicating that bypasses the embarrassment normally attached to direct emotional expression. He can be ridiculous without becoming emotionally empty.

That distinction matters.

There is a long tradition of British eccentricity in which silliness becomes a method for examining social behaviour. Mr.Vast belongs to that lineage, but "Upping The Ante" updates it through electronic music and rave culture. The music is not simply a soundtrack for eccentricity. It provides the contemporary machinery through which the eccentricity moves.

The result is a strange portrait of England assembled from fragments: pub speech, rave culture, music-hall exaggeration, absurd bureaucracy, overheard conversations, old-fashioned characters, contemporary electronic production and the peculiar national ability to discuss complete nonsense as though it were a matter of urgent public policy.

The record's apparent randomness is therefore deceptive. Its subject is actually quite coherent: the instability of identity and language in a culture saturated with performance.

Everyone is playing a role.

Mr.Vast simply refuses to hide the costume.

That refusal gives "Upping The Ante" an oddly liberating quality. The album does not ask the listener to admire its cleverness. It asks them to participate in the confusion. You can dance to it, laugh at it, wonder whether you have misunderstood it, or occasionally discover that a supposedly ridiculous passage has lodged itself in your head with alarming permanence.

The danger is that the sheer density of ideas can occasionally become exhausting. There are moments when Sargeant's verbal energy competes with Boorman's production rather than complementing it, and some of the jokes are sufficiently committed to their own absurdity that they risk wearing out their welcome.

But even that excess is part of the record's character.

"Upping The Ante" does not believe that restraint is automatically a virtue. It would rather throw another idea into the room and see what happens.

In that sense, Mr.Vast's third album is surprisingly serious about being unserious.

It understands that humour can be a form of musical structure, that nonsense can expose things literal language conceals, and that a dance track can be both ridiculous and genuinely exhilarating. Beneath the costumes and comic voices, there is an unusually precise collaboration between Sargeant and Boorman: one supplying a restless stream of language and persona, the other constructing musical environments capable of absorbing almost anything thrown at them.

So perhaps the most useful way to approach "Upping The Ante" is not to ask what genre it belongs to.

Ask instead what happens when somebody stops respecting the borders between genres long enough to discover that they were mostly imaginary anyway.

The answer is eleven tracks of warped pop, rave, theatre, nonsense, melody and electronic mischief.

It is funny.

It is occasionally beautiful.

It is frequently ridiculous.

And, rather inconveniently for anyone hoping to dismiss it as a joke, it is very well made.