It is rare that I do a review of an album without receiving a physical copy of the release, and lord knows I receive enough email promos from promoters, publicity agents, bands and other music hustlers. Most of them aren't even in the genres Chain D.L.K. covers, but this one qualifies. The Holy Sun Opera House is not an opera company or a cult religious organization, but rather a music project consisting of classically trained soprano and drummer Krissy Barker and composer dl Salo, out of Los Angeles. Together they weave symphonic synths and operatic vocals with heavy drums. What got me was the publicist/promotor's FFO: early Dead Can Dance, Fever Ray, Klaus Nomi. Forgive my ignorance but I have no idea who Fever Ray is, so I watched a few of their videos. Interesting experimental music both sonically and visually out of Sweden with a pretty good following, but this review is not about Fever Ray so check them out on your own time. Just looking for a frame of reference here and I got one.

The album consists of nine tracks and according to info on the duo's Bandcamp site, "The self-produced album was conceptualized as a way to describe an obsessive mind with music and inspired by the recurring dreams of singer Krissy Barker. In it is a realm of shifting rooms, dilapidated houses and passages. These unsettled rooms and spaces pose a striking confrontation of fear and anxiety from deep within." Fair enough. Opening track, "Voice of Gob" sounds heavily gothic from the get-go; heavy orchestrated synth strings with Krissy's angelic voice emerging. It's slow and stately with a simple but effective melody, and they use a real choir for backing vocals. Nice! "Passage II" is sort of an experimental drone piece of cake with operatic voice icing. The singing on "Latched On" is more pop than opera at first but once the orchestration comes in it turns operatic, quite dolorous over all. The title of the next track, "Decrepit Mansion" may seem on the nose (like something off a Halloween sound effects album) but the 3 lines of lyrics sung repeatedly in rounds has nothing to do with decrepit mansions or haunted houses, but about things one does not normally notice. Rather cool in its own way. Has anyone seen or heard the "Witch in the Attic" ? I knew there was someone there, breathing heavily at night while I'm trying to sleep, invading my dreams and turning them into nightmares. The track is a percussion-less dreamscape transitionally leading into "The Attic." The orchestration here is full-on and may remind you somewhat of early Dead Can Dance, Arcana, Gitane DeMone or even Diamanda Galas. Krissy's vibrato is intense and the music is gothic as fuck.

The penultimate song on the album is "Room That Wasn't There Before, " a cool cross between pop and opera with a very memorable melody. My only complaint about it is that the rhythm track is severely buried beneath the orchestration. A remix of this one is sorely needed. With only two tracks left, the tail of the previous slides smoothly into "Passage I" (odd that it comes after "Passage II"), another kind of orchestral ambient drone piece using cathedral-like chord progressions, which I suppose echoes the "Holy Sun" part of the group's name. Finally, there is "Room with the Rain," sung throughout in the operatic mode with a dirgy pace and symphonic orchestration. Not nearly as compelling as "Room That Wasn't There Before " but atmospherically poignant nevertheless. The Holy Sun Opera House is absolutely a project worth checking out. In spite of a few minor flaws (namely, more oomph in the percussion/rhythm department) this album holds up very well, especially for fans of the non-pop-rock gothic. (In days gone by labels such as 4AD, World Serpent or Cold Meat Industry would have signed this act in a heartbeat.) The Holy Sun Opera House is likely to appeal more to European audiences than U.S. listeners but don't let that dissuade you. There aren't many operatic rock outfits out there as a Google search will attest. (Try it; you'll get only mediocre results such as The Who's 'Tommy' and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody.") With the full complement of media options available (LP, CD, cassette, digital) you have no reason not to go for it.

There is something deeply Belgian about "Fata Morgana". Not just because schntzl emerge from that fertile stretch of Europe where surrealism seems less an artistic movement than a weather condition, but because the album treats contradiction as a native language. It is playful and abrasive, euphoric and claustrophobic, emotionally sincere and faintly ridiculous in the same breath. Like finding enlightenment inside a malfunctioning arcade cabinet while someone in the next room is aggressively remixing a rave from 1997.

The duo of Hendrik Lasure and Casper Van De Velde have long occupied an unusual position within contemporary experimental music. Both are highly respected figures in Belgium’s jazz ecosystem, yet schntzl has never behaved like a “jazz project” in any conventional sense. Improvisation is certainly central, but it is weaponized less for virtuoso display than for destabilization. Their music continuously sabotages its own momentum, constructing shimmering emotional architectures only to kick holes through the walls moments later. On earlier releases, especially "Holiday", there was still a trace of chamber-like intimacy lingering beneath the electronics. "Fata Morgana" feels far less interested in comfort. Here, trance is not a genre reference but a psychological state: repetition stretched until it becomes delirium.

The title itself is perfect. A fata morgana is a mirage, an illusion hovering at the edge of perception, and the album constantly behaves like one. Sounds appear solid before dissolving into vapor. Rhythms suggest club propulsion before mutating into fractured abstraction. Hooks emerge like half-remembered dreams from a childhood spent too close to cheap CD-ROM games and overlit shopping centers. The duo understands that nostalgia is most effective when slightly poisoned.

“Magicland” opens the record like the entrance to an abandoned amusement park where the rides still function despite obvious electrical hazards. The synths glitter with synthetic optimism while the percussion twitches underneath like machinery overdue for maintenance. From there, “Fanta Merino” unfolds into one of the album’s strongest pieces, balancing trance-inflected arpeggios with an undercurrent of unease. schntzl seem fascinated by what happens when ecstatic forms are denied emotional resolution. Every build-up threatens catharsis, then sidesteps it with a smirk.

That balance between sincerity and sabotage becomes one of the record’s great strengths. “Tamagotchi Baby” could almost collapse under the weight of its own absurd title, yet beneath the irony lies something strangely tender. The duo clearly understands the emotional residue embedded inside obsolete digital culture. Their references are not lazy retro gestures aimed at people who miss flip phones and glow sticks. Instead, these sounds resemble archaeological fragments from a civilization that believed technology would make everyone happier before social media turned human consciousness into a shopping mall food court with anxiety disorders.

There are moments throughout "Fata Morgana" where the influence of artists like Oneohtrix Point Never or Giant Claw becomes perceptible in the hyper-digital processing and collapsing textures, but schntzl avoid imitation through sheer volatility. The drumming in particular gives the music an unstable physicality. Van De Velde never settles into predictable pulse mechanics; his rhythms constantly feel on the verge of outrunning the tracks themselves. Meanwhile Lasure’s synth work oscillates between luminous beauty and total sensory overload.

“Oasis” and “The Hill” briefly allow air into the system. These tracks reveal the duo’s remarkable understanding of pacing. Beneath all the fragmentation lies an intuitive compositional intelligence. Even the album’s most chaotic passages are carefully balanced. Nothing overstays its welcome. At just over thirty-five minutes, "Fata Morgana" understands a truth many experimental albums forget: disorientation is far more effective in concentrated doses. Nobody wants to wander endlessly through someone else’s conceptual maze. Human beings get tired. They start checking emails. Civilization collapses.

The emotional centerpiece may well be “My Singing Heart”, where sentimentality finally surfaces without disguise. Yet even here, schntzl resist straightforward beauty. The melody flickers through layers of distortion like a damaged transmission trying to remember itself. It is moving precisely because it feels unstable, never fully secured against collapse.

What ultimately makes "Fata Morgana" compelling is the sense that schntzl are less interested in genre than in perception itself. Their music continuously asks how much instability a listener can tolerate before confusion transforms into revelation. The album behaves like a hall of mirrors where every reflection carries a different emotional temperature. Some are euphoric, some vaguely menacing, some unexpectedly funny. A few feel strangely intimate, as though the machines themselves have become emotionally overextended.

And perhaps that is the album’s quiet achievement. Beneath the digital chaos, the kitsch loops, the trance ghosts and absurd detours, "Fata Morgana" is fundamentally about human interaction: two musicians listening, reacting, interrupting, destabilizing, rescuing each other in real time. Improvisation here becomes a social act, a negotiation between competing impulses. The mirage never fully disappears because neither artist allows the other to settle into certainty.

In a musical landscape increasingly obsessed with frictionless perfection, schntzl instead celebrate instability, awkwardness, overload and ecstatic imbalance. "Fata Morgana" does not offer escape from the modern condition. It simply throws brighter colors onto the collapse and hands you a pair of broken 3D glasses to watch it through.

There is a particular kind of album that does not merely ask you to listen, but quietly adjusts your breathing while you are not paying attention. By the time you notice, you are already inside its atmosphere, walking slower, hearing differently, wondering why the world outside suddenly feels louder and more ridiculous than usual. Human civilization has built entire economies around stress and notifications, so naturally an album like this arrives almost as an act of resistance.

For listeners familiar with Andreas Tschopp through projects like Skyjack, Le Rex, or the Indonesian-inspired textures of Bubaran, this first solo release may initially seem surprisingly restrained. Yet restraint is precisely the point. Rather than showcasing virtuosity in the conventional jazz sense, Tschopp constructs a porous sonic ecology where horns, flutes, tape loops, percussion, and electronics breathe alongside one another with unusual patience. The album feels less “performed” than inhabited.

The central presence of the kudu horns gives the record its emotional and physical gravity. Their tones are ancient, unstable, mournful, and strangely intimate, carrying a graininess that modern brass instruments often smooth away. Tschopp does not attempt to tame them into polished melodic tools. Instead, he listens to their imperfections, their hesitations, their rough edges. The result is music that feels startlingly alive, as though every note arrives carrying weather, dust, distance, and memory within it.

What makes the album remarkable is the way it balances spiritual openness with compositional precision. There are traces of ambient jazz here, certainly, but also echoes of indigenous ceremonial music, electroacoustic minimalism, and post-classical texture work. Yet none of these references dominate. The record refuses easy categorization with admirable calm. It simply exists in its own liminal terrain, where improvisation becomes philosophy and resonance becomes political language.

Tracks like “The Poetry of the In-Between” and “I Am Because You Are” embody the album’s core concern: interconnectedness not as slogan, but as lived condition. The influence of ubuntu philosophy is palpable throughout, though never didactic. Instead, collaboration itself becomes the message. South African musicians Shane Cooper and Gontse Makhene contribute with remarkable subtlety, while poet Koleka Putuma brings an incantatory depth to “Sounding the Voice.” Even the electronics behave communally. Synths and tape manipulations do not dominate the acoustic instruments but drift around them like companions sharing the same road at dusk.

The production deserves particular praise. Co-produced and mixed by Cooper alongside Tschopp, the album maintains an extraordinary sense of space. Sounds emerge softly from the edges of perception, overlap gently, then dissolve before they become fixed objects. The mix itself seems committed to coexistence. Nothing fights for dominance. In lesser hands this approach could easily become vague or overly precious, the sort of “healing music” sold to exhausted executives next to Himalayan salt lamps and artisanal regret. Instead, the record remains grounded in tactile detail and emotional ambiguity.

There is also an understated courage in how openly hopeful the album feels. Contemporary experimental music often mistakes emotional detachment for sophistication, as though sincerity might somehow contaminate the conceptual framework. Tschopp avoids that trap entirely. "What If We Align Our Breath" dares to suggest that gentleness may itself be radical in an era increasingly organized around spectacle, division, and algorithmic agitation. Not naïve optimism, but attentive presence.

At moments, the record recalls the spiritual jazz lineage of Don Cherry or the transcultural curiosity of Jon Hassell, particularly in its blending of geographical and sonic identities. Yet Tschopp’s approach feels less cosmopolitan in the fashionable sense and more rooted in genuine encounter. You hear someone trying to build relationships with sound rather than merely collecting influences like stamps in a passport.

The closing pieces leave behind a lingering sensation difficult to articulate. Not transcendence exactly. More like recalibration. As though the album has temporarily restored forgotten frequencies in the listener’s nervous system. Breathing, after all, is both individual and collective: utterly personal, yet shared by every living thing. Tschopp understands this deeply, and the album’s title stops feeling metaphorical after a while. It becomes instruction. Or invitation.

A quietly luminous record. One that trusts silence, trusts listeners, and trusts that music can still create forms of connection more meaningful than the endless digital shouting match humans now mistake for public discourse. An increasingly rare kind of intelligence.

There was probably a time when solitude meant forests, mountains, monks, maybe a lighthouse keeper staring heroically into Atlantic storms. In 2026 solitude mostly means turning your phone face down for eleven minutes and pretending not to hear civilization vibrating inside your pocket. Into this exhausted condition arrives "On Solitude" by Hiroshi Ebina, a record that does not romanticize isolation so much as rehabilitate it. Not loneliness as punishment, but solitude as recovery protocol for nervous systems damaged by permanent connectivity.

Released by KITCHEN. LABEL, Ebina’s third album for the imprint continues his gradual movement toward what might loosely be called post-digital ambient music. Yet that term barely captures the emotional delicacy of the work. Across thirteen tracks, Ebina builds a sound world suspended somewhere between dream techno, environmental composition, ambient minimalism, and faded memory architecture. The album feels less like a sequence of songs than a carefully lit interior space designed for listening to one’s own thoughts without immediately panicking about them.

The influence of Perfect Days hangs gently over the album, not through imitation but through temperament. Like Wenders’ film, "On Solitude" finds quiet dignity in repetition, routine, and attentive observation. Ebina seems fascinated by small internal shifts rather than dramatic gestures. A synth pattern subtly mutates. A field recording drifts through the edge of perception. A piano chord lingers slightly longer than expected. Tiny movements become emotionally seismic because the music leaves enough space for the listener to notice them.

“The Village in the Sky”, featuring Hinako Omori, opens the album with a kind of restrained radiance. Omori’s presence feels almost evaporative, her voice less a lead performance than a soft atmospheric current threading through the arrangement. The track establishes the album’s central emotional paradox immediately: the music feels deeply melancholic without becoming despairing. Ebina understands that sadness and calm are not opposites. Sometimes they share the same room quietly for years.

Elsewhere, “Your Mind Is Like the Ocean” and its mirrored counterpart “My Mind Is Like the Ocean” function almost like emotional weather systems. Low-end pulses drift beneath shimmering synth textures that never fully settle into rhythmic certainty. The tracks evoke internal turbulence rendered at a distance, as though observing one’s own anxiety from the shoreline rather than drowning inside it. Dream techno is an accurate descriptor here, but only partially. These rhythms do not propel bodies toward ecstasy so much as guide consciousness toward stillness.

Ebina’s compositional restraint is crucial to the album’s success. Lesser artists working within ambient-adjacent territories often confuse softness with emotional depth, producing endless washes of decorative melancholy fit mainly for expensive cafés where everyone is typing emails about “creative alignment”. "On Solitude" avoids this fate because it remains attentive to detail. “Saudade da Memória Perdida,” with its delicate music-box motifs, could easily have collapsed into sentimentality. Instead, it feels strangely unresolved, like remembering a childhood place incorrectly yet emotionally accurately.

The shorter interludes, particularly “For Brief Moment” and “Hush”, function almost as breathing spaces between emotional states. Ebina appears less interested in traditional narrative progression than in creating fluctuating conditions of attention. Listening becomes less about anticipation and more about inhabitation. Which sounds suspiciously close to mindfulness culture, admittedly, but the album thankfully avoids the smug therapeutic optimism that often infects music marketed as healing. Ebina does not promise enlightenment. He merely offers a temporary refuge from overstimulation.

Side B drifts even further inward. “Transience/Permanence” and “Quiescence” dissolve rhythmic structure almost entirely, allowing spectral piano tones and suspended harmonics to hover in ambiguous emotional territory. The influence of post-classical minimalism emerges here, though Ebina filters it through electronic atmospheres warm enough to avoid academic coldness. “Hokokuji Bamboo Forest” subtly integrates environmental recordings into the music, transforming natural ambience into part of the harmonic ecology rather than exotic decoration. The piece breathes rather than performs nature.

The closing “A Silent Room”, featuring marucoporoporo, is among the album’s quietest and most affecting moments. The vocals barely insist upon themselves, arriving like traces of human presence inside a room already filled with memory. By this point, the album has abandoned any distinction between external landscape and internal consciousness. Solitude becomes not absence but permeability, a state in which thoughts, sounds, memories, and environments intermingle without hierarchy.

What makes "On Solitude" particularly compelling is its resistance to spectacle. Contemporary electronic music often feels trapped between maximalist stimulation and carefully branded introspection. Ebina chooses neither route. His music unfolds patiently, trusting listeners enough not to constantly demand attention. In a culture optimized for interruption, this patience feels quietly radical.

Mastering engineer Joseph Branciforte preserves the album’s fragile spatial qualities beautifully, while the artwork by Chizuru Masumura complements the music’s understated emotional architecture without overstating its themes. Everything about the release suggests careful attention without preciousness.

By the end, "On Solitude" does not necessarily make the listener feel better. It does something more interesting. It restores sensitivity to small emotional textures modern life continuously erodes. The faint ache beneath routine. The warmth hidden inside repetition. The strange relief of becoming temporarily unreachable.

Humanity spent decades inventing technologies meant to eliminate distance, silence, and waiting. Now entire generations are desperately buying ambient records to simulate the psychological conditions those technologies destroyed. Ebina, at least, understands the irony well enough to turn it into something genuinely beautiful.

There is something beautifully stubborn about releasing a live recording from 1995 in 2026 and calling it "Mean Times". Like opening a forgotten drawer and discovering that the future has already been there, smoking nervously and muttering about temporal harmony. Denman Maroney’s long-shelved performance, now finally unearthed by Cuneiform Records, does not sound like archival nostalgia. It sounds like a system malfunctioning intelligently. Which, frankly, is rarer than functioning intelligently these days.

Maroney has long occupied one of those strange coordinates in experimental jazz where academia, improvisation, and outright sonic mischief intersect. His “hyperpiano” concept, involving digitally manipulated and sampled piano textures, was never merely a technical gimmick. It was a philosophical irritation directed at the piano itself, almost as if he wanted to ask the instrument whether it still deserved to survive modernity. On "Mean Times", that question becomes a six-part suite performed by a quintet that reads like a summit meeting of downtown New York improvisation: the late Herb Robertson on trumpet, Ellery Eskelin on tenor saxophone, Mark Dresser on bass, and Phil Haynes on drums. A lineup capable of turning abstraction into something oddly physical, like architecture built out of cigarette smoke and probability theory.

The album’s title turns out to be a semantic trap. Maroney clarifies that “mean” refers not to cruelty but to intermediary temporal structures, to rhythmic relationships suspended between fixed points. Yet hearing this record thirty years after its performance inevitably bends that meaning. These "are" mean times now, just not in the mathematically elegant sense he intended. The music seems aware of this accidental prophecy, stumbling through fractured rhythms and unstable melodic fragments with the uneasy grace of a city trying to remember its own street map after an earthquake.

What immediately strikes the listener is how alive the instability feels. So much experimental jazz from the mid-1990s can sound trapped inside its own cleverness, like graduate students arguing inside a boiler room. "Mean Times" avoids that fate because its complexity sweats. Robertson’s trumpet arrives in eruptions that feel simultaneously comic and apocalyptic, while Eskelin’s tenor often snakes through the arrangements like somebody trying to escape a building whose exits keep rearranging themselves. Dresser and Haynes operate less as rhythm section than as tectonic activity. Their playing shifts underneath the music constantly, causing the entire structure to tilt without collapsing.

Meanwhile, Maroney’s sampled hyperpiano functions almost like a ghost version of the acoustic instrument. The digital fragments flicker around the ensemble with an uncanny presence, neither fully synthetic nor recognizably human. At moments, the record resembles an argument between player pianos possessed by Morton Feldman and malfunctioning jazz clubs haunted by Conlon Nancarrow. Which sounds unbearable written down, admittedly. Yet the music itself carries an oddly joyous momentum, as though everyone involved understood that experimentation without playfulness quickly turns into homework.

The low fidelity of the recording, rather than diminishing the experience, becomes strangely essential. There is grit everywhere. Instruments blur at the edges. Frequencies crowd each other. The performance occasionally feels as if it were rescued from a damaged transmission orbiting somewhere between free jazz and electroacoustic composition. Clean production would probably have sterilized its nervous energy. Instead, the roughness preserves the sensation of discovery, of musicians collectively feeling their way through an unstable sonic landscape in real time.

What makes "Mean Times" especially compelling in retrospect is how little it cares about genre loyalty. The record does not treat jazz as tradition to preserve, nor as rubble to destroy. Maroney approaches it more like a mutable physics engine. Monk-like angularity appears briefly, then dissolves into algorithmic repetition. Swing emerges for a few seconds before getting folded into digital abstraction. Even the silences feel engineered rather than merely absent. Time itself becomes elastic, stretched and compressed until chronology starts behaving like another instrument in the ensemble.

There is also something unexpectedly moving about hearing Herb Robertson here. His playing carried a rare mixture of aggression and vulnerability, as though every note were both confrontation and plea. Knowing he is gone now lends the recording a quiet emotional gravity without turning it into memorial music. The band sounds too alive for mourning. If anything, the album argues against artistic expiration altogether. Ideas abandoned for decades can still return breathing heavily, covered in dust, demanding relevance.

Maroney ends his liner notes by disagreeing with Oscar Wilde’s famous claim that all art is useless. Listening to "Mean Times", one begins to understand his objection. Useful art does not necessarily solve problems. Sometimes its usefulness lies in destabilizing certainty, in reminding listeners that sound can still reorganize perception rather than merely decorate existence. This record does exactly that. It bends time, mocks categories, and leaves the listener pleasantly disoriented, like waking from a dream in which mathematics learned how to improvise.

Humanity keeps inventing algorithms to predict behavior, flatten emotion, optimize attention spans. Meanwhile a forgotten 1995 concert arrives decades late to demonstrate that unpredictability remains the more interesting machine.