There are albums about memory, and then there are albums that seem to understand that memory is a rather untidy substance. It does not sit politely in chronological order, waiting for somebody to retrieve it. It leaks into bodies, places, habits, landscapes and family stories, occasionally resurfacing because a particular sound, smell or patch of ground has decided that the past is not finished with us yet. "lights shimmered like whispers in the depths of the trees", the latest work by Manja Ristic, belongs firmly to the second category.

Ristic is a Belgrade-born violinist, sound artist, curator and researcher whose work has for years occupied the borderlands between electroacoustic composition, improvisation, field recording and sound installation. Trained at the Belgrade Music Academy and later at the Royal College of Music in London, she has developed a particularly recognisable practice around environmental listening, hydrophone recordings, violin, analogue electronics and found materials. Her recent work has repeatedly returned to questions of ecological damage, memory and the historical traces embedded in landscapes, but without treating field recordings as postcards from interesting places.

That distinction matters here because "lights shimmered..." is ostensibly concerned with something deeply personal: Ristic's grandmother Negosava, born Stefanovi, and the generation of young people who helped rebuild post-war Yugoslavia with their labour. There are abandoned railway lines, forests, industrial remnants and the uneasy inheritance of a country whose physical reconstruction became part of its mythology. It would have been very easy to turn this into a sonic documentary, complete with archival voices and appropriately sorrowful historical punctuation. Ristic chooses something much less literal.

The album consists of just two pieces, “thick green bed of a land” and “bore its wounds in silence”, running sixteen and twenty-three minutes respectively. Their titles already establish the basic tension: vegetation and injury, shelter and damage, fertility and historical violence. Yet the music does not translate those oppositions into obvious effects. Instead, it lets them accumulate gradually, through field recordings gathered across Italy, Portugal, Croatia and Austria, underwater recordings from rivers and coastal environments, violin and cello, the extraordinary EMS Synthi 100 from the Electronic Studio of Radio Belgrade, and a piano once belonging to Austrian artist Karl Katzinger, also known as John Tylo.

The geographical spread is considerable, but the album never feels like an audio scrapbook. This is partly because Ristic is remarkably careful about the density of her materials. Water is not simply “water”; vegetation is not simply “nature”; industrial spaces are not automatically made to sound sinister. The recordings are allowed to retain their ambiguity. A distant movement may be mechanical or organic. A vibration might belong to an instrument, a structure, a current or some combination of all four. The listener is repeatedly placed in the uncomfortable but productive position of having to decide what exactly is being heard.

“Thick green bed of a land” develops with particular patience. Environmental sounds emerge and recede without the reassuring hierarchy of foreground and background that conventional composition tends to impose. The electronic material does not arrive to announce itself as the “musical” component. It inhabits the same acoustic territory as the recordings, sometimes almost indistinguishably. Violin and other instrumental sounds appear less as melodies than as extensions of the surrounding acoustic environment, allowing pitch to materialise briefly before being absorbed again into texture.

This is one of Ristic's great strengths. She has a talent for making instrumental sounds feel as though they have been discovered rather than inserted. Her previous works, including "Dew" and "Sargassum aeterna", have used violin, EMS Synthi 100 and hydrophone recordings to construct similarly porous relationships between composed material and environmental sound. In "Dew", for instance, train stations, lakes, rain, underwater sounds and instrumental material become part of an intimate meditation on memory rather than functioning as illustrative effects. "Sargassum aeterna" expanded the method into a darker ecological imagination, using field and hydrophone recordings from several locations alongside violin and electronics.

Here the emotional charge is more familial, and consequently more difficult to keep at arm's length. The dedication to Negosava gives the album a human centre, but Ristic wisely avoids sentimentalising her grandmother. There is no attempt to reconstruct her life in musical form. Instead, the work asks what remains when the individual is gone but the places, gestures and consequences of a generation's actions remain.

That question becomes particularly resonant in the references to railway construction. The abandoned tracks in the accompanying narrative are almost brutally ordinary. People built them because they believed they would carry something into the future; eventually the trains never came, the infrastructure was abandoned, and the material was dismantled or sold. History is full of such projects, although official history tends to photograph the successful ones and quietly forget the rest. Ristic's music is interested in precisely that residue.

The forest, consequently, is not presented as an untouched refuge standing outside history. It remembers the human presence that preceded it. The railway, meanwhile, is not simply a symbol of failed modernity. It becomes another layer in the landscape, alongside roots, water, industrial contamination, footsteps and stories. Nature and history are not opposites here. They have been rubbing against each other for decades.

“Bore its wounds in silence” deepens this idea. The second piece is less concerned with establishing a particular location than with allowing sounds to accumulate into something resembling geological memory. Hydrophone recordings are especially effective because underwater sound immediately disrupts our normal assumptions about distance. Familiar phenomena become strange when heard through water. A vibration can seem enormous, intimate or impossibly remote. Ristic uses that acoustic uncertainty to loosen the boundary between physical environment and recollection.

There is also something quietly unsettling about the album's use of the body. The text accompanying the work invokes epigenetics, ancestral experience and the transmission of memory across generations. Scientifically, that territory needs more caution than poetic language usually provides. Human beings are not literally carrying their grandparents' memories around in their DNA like tiny family USB sticks. But as an artistic proposition, the idea becomes considerably more interesting when Ristic translates it into sound. What does inherited experience feel like when it cannot be narrated directly? Perhaps something like a recurring vibration whose original source has disappeared.

The album never attempts to answer that question definitively. Instead, it creates conditions in which the question can remain audible.
This is also why the environmental recordings avoid becoming merely picturesque. Recent writing on Ristic's work has noted the tension between the recognisable world captured by her microphones and the subtle transformations that turn those recordings into compositions. One particularly perceptive response to this release points out that the autobiographical and genealogical material is communicated through atmosphere rather than explicit narrative, allowing the listener to recognise that these are constructed works rather than straightforward documentary recordings.

That is probably the best way to approach "lights shimmered...". It is not a story being told through sound. It is a story being allowed to lose its edges.

The use of the EMS Synthi 100 is significant in this respect. The instrument carries its own historical associations, particularly within the experimental tradition of the Electronic Studio of Radio Belgrade, but Ristic does not treat it as an exotic relic to be wheeled onto the stage whenever the music needs an official certificate of experimentalism. Its electronic tones enter into dialogue with the hydrophone recordings, acoustic instruments and environmental sounds. Technology becomes another historical layer rather than a sign of progress.

The same applies to the piano once owned by Karl Katzinger. Its provenance could easily become a piece of collector trivia, but within Ristic's larger practice it makes sense as another object carrying traces of previous lives. The instruments are not merely tools for producing sounds. They arrive already burdened with histories.

And this may be where the album's title becomes most convincing. The lights in the trees are not presented as a beautiful visual spectacle. They are fleeting signs of something that cannot be held still. A memory behaves similarly. It appears, changes the emotional temperature of a moment, and disappears before one can inspect it properly. The title's whispered shimmer is therefore less decorative than it initially sounds.

There is, however, nothing especially whispery about some of the album's underlying tensions. Industrial spaces, toxic residues, post-war reconstruction and ecological transformation remain present even when the music becomes quiet. Ristic's earlier work has often approached environmental crisis without resorting to the conventional vocabulary of catastrophe, and that restraint remains valuable here. A ruined landscape does not need to scream in order to tell us that something happened there.

In fact, the quietness can make the political dimension more effective. Grand declarations tend to tell us what we should think. Ristic's landscapes instead ask us to notice what is still there. The abandoned railway, the forest, the contaminated industrial structure, the river, the body: none of them delivers a speech. They simply continue existing after the people who gave them their original meaning have moved on.

There is a gentle irony in the album's treatment of endurance. The humans imagine themselves as builders, destroyers, historians and owners; the landscape simply waits long enough to outlive most of those categories. The railway disappears. The forest remains. The grandmother dies. The story continues. The toxic residue persists with the stubbornness of a particularly unpleasant family heirloom.

Still, "lights shimmered like whispers in the depths of the trees" is not pessimistic in any straightforward sense. Its melancholy is balanced by an extraordinary attentiveness to survival. The title image itself contains light. The green bed of the land is thick, not dead. Water continues to move. Sounds continue to circulate. The past may be wounded, distorted and incomplete, but it has not become silent.

Ristic's most impressive achievement is therefore one of scale. She can move from the intimate body to a river, from a grandmother to a generation, from a railway embankment to the long history of a landscape without making any of those things feel like merely convenient symbols. Everything remains material. Wood, water, metal, skin, strings, soil, circuitry and memory occupy the same perceptual field.

Two long tracks are enough because the album is not really interested in giving us more events. It is interested in making the existing ones last long enough for their relationships to become visible. That requires patience, but not the kind usually associated with “slow music”. The patience here belongs to observation. Ristic listens until the distinctions between environment, instrument and recollection become unstable.

And perhaps that is what inheritance actually sounds like: not a message passed intact from one generation to another, but a collection of faint disturbances whose original causes have become difficult to identify. Someone built a railway. Someone walked through a forest. Someone remembered. Someone recorded the water. Someone else listens decades later and discovers that none of these things has entirely disappeared.

The forest, after all, does not need to remember in the human sense. It only needs to remain.

A snare drum is usually asked to do one of two things: keep time or make a loud, emphatic noise while somebody else gets to have the melody. Etienne Nillesen has spent years politely refusing both assignments. With "TWEE", he takes two snare drums, tunes them in close relation, and spends thirty-five minutes discovering how much musical information can be extracted from an instrument that most of us have been trained to recognise by its characteristic little burst of military punctuation.

The title is a useful place to start, if only because "twee" is an almost comically inappropriate word for what follows. In English, it describes something excessively cute or precious, the sort of adjective that might be applied to a miniature teacup, a knitted animal or a song that has been aggressively instructed to have feelings. There is very little of that here. The title's mismatch may be deliberate, accidental or simply Nillesen having a sense of humour. In any case, the music quickly settles the matter: this is not twee, unless one has developed a remarkably liberal definition of cuteness.

Nillesen is a Dutch percussionist, composer and sound artist based in Cologne whose career has moved progressively away from the conventional drum kit. He began playing drums as a child, studied jazz and subsequently became increasingly fascinated by the possibilities contained within a much smaller setup. The reduction was not an aesthetic stunt but part of a long process of finding out what he actually needed to say. Eventually the snare became the central instrument of his practice, and his work now occupies an unusually fertile point between improvisation, contemporary composition and sound art. He has collaborated with musicians including Rudi Mahall, Simon Nabatov, Philip Zoubek, Elisabeth Coudoux, Kaja Draksler and many others, while also developing an extensive solo practice around the extended snare drum.

His previous "en", released by Sofa Music in 2024, already demonstrated how far this investigation could go with a single snare. "TWEE" adds a second drum, and that apparently modest numerical increase changes the physics of the situation considerably. The two instruments are tuned close to one another, producing beating patterns and shifting relationships between their partials. Nillesen does not simply strike them and wait for interesting things to happen. He applies sustained pressure, moves in circular patterns across different parts of the drumheads and adjusts the contact points so gradually that the listener begins to hear pitch where there ought, according to the percussion department of common sense, to be nothing but membrane and metal.

This is where "TWEE" becomes more than an extended demonstration of unusual technique. The sound does not proceed through a succession of discrete events. It behaves more like a continuously changing condition. A tone appears, another begins to interfere with it, a pulse emerges from their disagreement, and then the whole relationship shifts. What initially seems static reveals itself to be packed with microscopic activity. The closer one listens, the less “minimal” the piece becomes.

That paradox is central to Nillesen's music. The means are extremely limited, but the perceptual consequences are not. The instrument remains recognisable throughout, yet its familiar identity gradually becomes irrelevant. You can still hear the snare drum, but you stop hearing it as “a snare drum”. It becomes a resonating surface with pitch, grain, friction, sympathetic vibration and a surprisingly elaborate internal weather system.

The recording venue matters. "TWEE" was recorded at the Deutschlandfunk Kammermusiksaal in Cologne, the same chamber-music hall used for "en", and the acoustics are not merely a neutral container around the performance. They participate in it. The resonance of the room allows small differences between the two drums to become legible, while the sustained tones expose the relationship between direct sound and reflected sound. This is music in which the room has almost as much patience as the musician.

Nillesen's technique is physical, but the result is strangely disembodied. One can imagine the movements required to create these sounds, yet the recorded music encourages a different kind of attention, because the gestures themselves have disappeared. What remains is friction transformed into tone, pressure transformed into duration, and tiny movements transformed into a shifting field of pitch. It is one of those cases in which knowing how the sound is produced makes the listening more fascinating rather than less mysterious.

There is also a quiet rhythmic dimension here, although calling "TWEE" rhythmic music would be misleading. The beating between closely tuned drums generates pulses that appear without being explicitly played. Their frequency can change as the intonation changes, so rhythm is not imposed upon the sound from outside. It grows out of the acoustic relationship between the two instruments. Nillesen effectively discovers rhythm inside pitch.

This connects "TWEE" to a much older experimental tradition in which musicians stop accepting the conventional distinction between sound and musical event. But Nillesen avoids the solemnity that can sometimes accompany such investigations. He is not trying to convince us that a drum is secretly a philosophical object. He is simply listening to it closely enough to discover that it has been hiding things in plain sight.

That sense of discovery is perhaps the strongest aspect of the piece. There are no obvious climaxes to reward impatient listeners, no sudden changes inserted to reassure us that something is happening. Instead, the music asks whether our attention can become sensitive enough to register change at a scale normally dismissed as insignificant. A slight alteration in pressure can modify the overtone balance. A different position on the membrane can change the apparent pitch. Two nearly related frequencies can produce a third sensation, a wavering that is neither exactly one sound nor the other.

The effect can be hypnotic, but “hypnotic” is only part of the story. There are moments when the resonance becomes abrasive, almost metallic, and the apparently serene surface develops a harder edge. Other passages produce sounds that seem closer to voices, electronic oscillations or some malfunctioning piece of machinery than to percussion. Recent criticism has rightly noticed that the piece can move from sustained, delicate vibration towards much harsher and more insistent textures, preventing the work from settling into the comfortable category of ambient meditation.

This is important because "TWEE" could easily have become a rather respectable exercise in contemplative minimalism. It does not. Nillesen's concentration is rigorous, but the sounds themselves remain unpredictable. The drums occasionally seem to resist the performer, producing unstable resonances that have to be followed rather than completely controlled. The music therefore has an element of negotiation: Nillesen proposes a condition and then responds to what the instruments give him back.

That quality is consistent with his wider approach to improvisation. He has described his attraction to the freedom of creating music in the moment, but also to the idea that improvisation requires preparation and discipline rather than simply waiting for inspiration to descend from the heavens, presumably after checking its parking arrangements. His solo work turns that principle into an unusually concentrated practice. The material is carefully developed, yet the precise behaviour of the resonating drums cannot be entirely predicted.

The 35-minute duration is therefore well judged. A shorter piece might merely demonstrate the technique. A much longer one could begin to demand an almost monastic level of commitment from the listener. Here there is enough time for the ear to recalibrate itself. What initially sounds like a sustained tone gradually separates into layers, then those layers become relationships, and eventually those relationships become the real composition.

The achievement is especially striking because Nillesen does not conceal the limitations of his chosen instrument. He embraces them. The snare has a finite surface, a finite resonance and a very familiar cultural identity. Instead of escaping those constraints, he investigates them so thoroughly that they become sources of freedom. The narrower the vocabulary becomes, the more finely he is able to distinguish its smallest variations.

That makes "TWEE" an unusually good example of what experimental music can accomplish when experimentation is based on sustained curiosity rather than novelty for its own sake. There is nothing particularly spectacular about the premise. Two snares. One musician. One continuous piece. No electronics, no ensemble, no elaborate technology. Human civilisation has spent centuries developing increasingly complicated instruments and recording systems, only for Nillesen to turn around and ask what happens if we pay very close attention to two pieces of stretched material. The answer is unexpectedly rich.

By the end, the snare drum has not been reinvented so much as patiently reintroduced to us. We thought we knew its sound because we had heard it thousands of times. Nillesen demonstrates that familiarity is often just laziness with good public relations. "TWEE" makes the ordinary strange without disguising it, and makes minimal means feel expansive without inflating them into something grandiose. It is music that rewards concentration without demanding reverence. The listener does not need to meditate, light a candle or acquire a sudden interest in Tibetan philosophy. Sitting still and listening carefully is already sufficient. The rest happens inside the sound: two nearly related bodies rubbing against one another until pitch, rhythm, resonance and texture become difficult to separate.

Perhaps that is what "TWEE" ultimately has in common with the best experimental work. It does not give us more things to hear. It teaches us to hear more things in what was already there.

There are bands for whom the word “anthology” suggests a dignified procession through the past, perhaps with a tasteful booklet and several paragraphs about artistic development. IRM have never been particularly interested in dignity. Their history is populated by crucifixions, blind men being killed, nooses, young men, nigredo, inner phobias and various other cheerful invitations to spend an afternoon reconsidering the human condition. So "Anthology", originally assembled in 2012 and now reissued by Zoharum, is less a retrospective album than a reasonably well-organised tour through one of Sweden’s more uncompromising industrial nightmares.

Formed in Norrköping in the late 1990s by Erik Jarl and Martin Bladh, IRM emerged from the power-electronics and death-industrial underground around the time when Cold Meat Industry was providing a particularly hospitable environment for people who believed that music could still be used to make the listener physically uncomfortable. Mikael Oretoft joined as a permanent third member in 2007, expanding the project beyond its original configuration. Over the years, IRM gradually moved away from the relatively direct violence of their early work towards more elaborate structures and a broader range of sound sources, eventually arriving at the conceptual trilogy that began with "Indications of Nigredo", continued through "ORDER4" and concluded with "Closure…" in 2014.

That trajectory is already audible on "Anthology", which is why the collection remains considerably more interesting than its title might suggest. The first disc gathers studio recordings originally scattered across smaller releases and compilations, while the second collects live material from performances between 2002 and 2011. The result is not chronological autobiography but a deliberately shaped argument. The live disc in particular was rearranged and remixed rather than simply dumped into chronological order, turning several years of performances into a continuous sequence. The old "Noise Receptor" review of the original edition rightly identified this as an important distinction: "Anthology" is not merely a box in which IRM put whatever they found underneath the bed.

The opening “Order” immediately establishes the peculiar IRM balance between repetition and instability. The rhythm is insistent without becoming conventionally danceable, the electronics have a physical density that seems almost architectural, and Bladh’s voice arrives not as a conventional vocal presence but as another abrasive material inside the construction. This is one of the characteristics that made IRM stand apart from much of the more primitive power-electronics vocabulary of their era. Their work could be extremely harsh, but the harshness was rarely the whole point. There was always a concern with structure, atmosphere and psychological suggestion beneath the surface brutality.

“Like Hearts” and the twelve-minute “Purple Screen” extend that tension. Particularly in the longer piece, IRM demonstrate that repetition need not mean stasis. Sounds accumulate, mutate and acquire different weights, while the sensation of pressure is maintained without requiring the obvious escalation that so much noise-based music treats as compulsory. It is a useful reminder that volume and intensity are not synonyms. Sometimes the more unpleasant thing is to keep a sound in exactly the wrong place for exactly the right amount of time.

Then come the four “Study For A Crucifixion” pieces, and the title is already doing some of the work that IRM’s music prefers to leave unfinished. These tracks belong to the project's more abrasive vocabulary, where mechanical pulses, harsh electronic matter and Bladh's confrontational delivery create something closer to ritualised psychological theatre than to a collection of songs. The material was recorded years before some of its eventual publication, and that temporal distance adds an odd quality to the sequence. It sounds both historically rooted in early industrial music and strangely resistant to becoming a historical artefact.

That resistance is important because IRM's influences were never limited to musical predecessors. Martin Bladh's artistic practice has always crossed between music, visual art, film, writing and performance, and his work has drawn on figures including Francis Bacon, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Yukio Mishima. The relationship between image, bodily vulnerability and psychological extremity therefore isn't an accessory attached to the music after the fact. It is part of the project's basic vocabulary.

The middle stretch, with “The Cult Of The Young Man”, “Kill The Blind”, “Strictly Platonic”, “Noose Of Silver”, “Euphoria (Rebirth)” and “Human Substance”, provides perhaps the clearest demonstration of IRM's ability to make repetition feel disturbingly purposeful. “The Cult Of The Young Man” is especially effective because its heavy pulse does not produce the reassuring catharsis that industrial music occasionally promises. Instead, the track keeps circling its central gesture, as though the mechanism itself were more important than the destination. The material from the "Nihil" compilation represented much of IRM's severe early period, and contemporary commentary on "Anthology" identified these tracks as among the clearest evidence of the project's ability to combine clinical repetition with genuinely oppressive weight.

Yet "Anthology" becomes more compelling when it starts showing cracks in that earlier formula. “Inner Phobia” and “Janus Introduction” feel less concerned with simply delivering impact, while “Here Are The Young Men” and the second appearance of “The Cult Of The Young Man” begin to suggest a vocabulary in transition. This is where the later IRM becomes visible: less interested in the blunt mechanics of power electronics, more willing to let spaces between sounds become active components of the composition.

That development would eventually become much more pronounced on "ORDER" and "Closure…", where IRM introduced increasingly unconventional structures and a wider variety of instruments and sound sources. "Anthology" consequently works almost like a geological section. Different layers of the project remain visible instead of being polished into a single, supposedly definitive identity.

The second disc changes the perspective considerably. Studio IRM can feel meticulously arranged and heavily controlled; live IRM sounds as though the machinery has been given permission to develop its own opinions. The performances retain the band's recognisable vocabulary but introduce more urgency, instability and variation. Bladh's voice becomes particularly important here. In the studio it can function as a severe compositional element, whereas live it seems to acquire a more unpredictable physical presence, as if the person producing the sound has become increasingly irritated by the fact that microphones exist.

“Aktion Anathem”, “Medley For A Hanging” and “Stage Of Crucifixion” preserve that sense of confrontation, but the real revelation comes towards the end. “Nigredo Indicator:2” and the various “Order Variation” pieces strip the material back and expose another side of IRM, one less dependent on the expected vocabulary of industrial aggression. The repetition becomes more abstract, the textures more spacious, and the distinction between composition and live manipulation increasingly uncertain.

And then there is “Sebastian”, the final track, which remains one of the most peculiar and effective pieces in the collection. Rather than closing with a grand final assault, it reduces the means considerably. Repetitive dissonant piano tones and agonised vocals create an atmosphere that is almost skeletal. The old review of "Anthology" singled it out for precisely this reason, describing it as an exceptional example of IRM's live minimalism. The assessment still makes sense because the track demonstrates something that can easily disappear beneath the genre's more spectacular surfaces: IRM were often more frightening when they stopped trying to sound frightening.

This is also why the reissue matters beyond simple archival housekeeping. IRM ceased performing live several years ago, and although the project continued to leave behind substantial studio work, the period documented here captures an important stage in the transformation from a relatively orthodox power-electronics unit into something considerably stranger. The later material would ultimately push that development so far that, after "Closure…", the band decided to retire the IRM name rather than continue without a convincing way forward.

Zoharum's presentation is suitably excessive without being entirely pointless. The regular edition comes as a double CD with booklet, while the collector's version expands into an engraved wooden box containing postcards, stickers, poster, badges and a bag reproducing the cover imagery. It is exactly the kind of packaging that makes the practical question “where am I supposed to put all this?” temporarily inseparable from the artistic question “why does an album need all this?”. In IRM's case, the answer is that Bladh's visual work has always been inseparable from the project's identity. The images are not merely merchandise surrounding the music. They belong to the same larger aesthetic system.

The remastering by Peter Andersson also serves a useful purpose. It does not magically turn thirty-year-old industrial recordings into pristine audiophile objects, because doing that would rather defeat the point. Instead, the restored presentation allows the different textures, frequencies and layers to register more clearly, which becomes particularly valuable when moving between the studio and live material.

Ultimately, "Anthology" is valuable because it refuses to turn IRM's history into a clean narrative. There is no convenient progression from primitive noise to enlightened experimentation. The earlier violence remains compelling; the later abstraction does not invalidate it; the live recordings complicate both. What emerges is a portrait of three musicians repeatedly testing how much structure can be extracted from extremity before the whole thing collapses into pure sensation.

The album's greatest achievement, then, is not that it sounds old-fashioned or timeless. It sounds specific. It belongs to a particular Swedish industrial culture, to a particular generation of power electronics, to a particular artistic relationship between sound, body and image. But it also contains enough compositional intelligence to resist being sealed inside that context. The machinery still runs, even if the factory closed years ago.

And perhaps that is the most appropriate way to approach IRM now. Not as a museum specimen from the heroic age of power electronics, nor as a relic to be praised simply because it survived, but as a body of work that understood something rather uncomfortable about extreme music: brutality becomes much more interesting when it has an architecture. "Anthology" lets us walk through that architecture without pretending it was ever designed for tourists.

There is something pleasingly suspicious about calling a record "Orizzontale". The word suggests calm surfaces, extended perspectives, perhaps a tasteful line disappearing towards the horizon. NEA Ensemble have other ideas. Their first release is less a line than a tangle of wires, reeds, skins, strings, circuitry, breath and electricity, produced by twelve musicians who seem to have agreed that hierarchy is best abolished by making sure nobody is entirely sure what is going to happen next.

Based in the Murgia Materana Park, NEA is a multidisciplinary collective bringing experimental, electronic and electroacoustic music into contact with visual art, Mediterranean traditions, technology and the physical character of its territory. The collective was formally established in 2025, around a core including Daniele Antezza, Federico Nitti, Pietro De Ruggieri and Andrea Taeggi, with the aim of developing artistic practices outside the usual metropolitan circuits. "Orizzontale", recorded live at the NEA headquarters in Matera, is the first release on the collective's own NEA Editions label and documents an improvisational encounter involving twelve artists.

The interesting part is that the music does not sound particularly interested in proving the manifesto right. It simply behaves as though the manifesto were already a practical necessity. There is no obvious attempt to construct a reassuring fusion of styles, no polite multicultural buffet where jazz is placed beside noise and a small portion of Mediterranean folklore so everybody can go home feeling enlightened. The ingredients collide, interrupt one another, occasionally cooperate and sometimes appear to have forgotten why they entered the same room. This is precisely where "Orizzontale" becomes convincing.

“Ferula” opens the album with a low-slung mixture of percussion, electronics and unstable timbral material, establishing a vocabulary in which acoustic sounds are rarely allowed to remain innocent for long. “Ruta” and “Lentisco” deepen the relationship between rhythm and electronics, but without settling into anything as conveniently identifiable as a genre. The percussion has physical weight, while the synthesizers and processing repeatedly undermine that weight, turning gestures into something more ambiguous. It is music that seems to be constantly negotiating its own centre of gravity.

That tension is particularly effective because the ensemble contains musicians with very different backgrounds. There are frame drums, percussion, double bass, esraj, electric bass and tenor saxophone alongside several analogue synthesizers, digital synthesis, samplers, tape decks and electronics. The result is not merely a large instrumental palette. It is a collision between different ideas of what a sound is supposed to do. A drum can become a rhythmic object, a ritual suggestion or simply a particularly persuasive piece of noise. A brass instrument can announce itself melodically and then dissolve into texture. Electronics can provide structure, contamination or sabotage. Nobody appears obliged to remain faithful to the traditional job description of their instrument.

“Camedrio” and “Clematide” are among the places where the album's unruliness becomes especially rewarding. The former moves with an almost mischievous physicality, while the latter brings together rhythmic drive, abrasive electronics and something distinctly theatrical. An Italian listener may occasionally experience the peculiar sensation of recognising a cultural accent without being able to reduce it to a quotation or reconstruction of tradition. This matters. NEA are not treating Mediterranean culture as an antique object to be polished before being displayed inside an electronic composition. They are allowing it to misbehave.

This is also where the title starts making more sense. Horizontality here is not simply about everyone having an equal turn. It is about refusing to establish a single musical language as the superior one. The tracks can move from improvisation to noise, dub, jazz, electronic abstraction and traces of traditional practice without having to justify the transitions. The ensemble's strength lies precisely in the fact that these elements are not completely reconciled. Their friction remains audible.

There is a certain risk in such an approach, naturally. Collective improvisation can become the musical equivalent of a meeting in which everyone has been encouraged to contribute and nobody has been authorised to edit the minutes. "Orizzontale" occasionally approaches that territory, but its better moments are held together by an unexpectedly strong sense of proportion. The players know when to intensify, when to leave space and, crucially, when not to demonstrate how clever they are. Utility Fog similarly noted the emphasis on live expression and the restraint of the musicians in combination with the live processing.

The presence of Giusi Zaccagnini is particularly useful in this respect. Her voice introduces an unmistakably human and theatrical dimension into a record otherwise populated by sounds that frequently seem to have escaped from the laboratory, the workshop and the percussion cupboard simultaneously. On “Issopo”, the longest piece, that presence helps prevent the music from becoming an abstract exercise in collective texture. It gives the turbulence a body. “Asfodelo”, meanwhile, pushes the acoustic side into a more mysterious territory, with saxophone and percussion contributing to a sound that feels ancient without pretending to reconstruct some imaginary prehistoric ceremony. These tracks have also emerged as particular points of attention in the early critical response.

There is some impressive experience hidden inside this apparently unruly gathering. Daniele Antezza, known internationally through Dadub and his work as a mastering engineer and sound producer, has long operated at the intersection of electronic experimentation and meticulous sound treatment. Andrea Taeggi brings an equally substantial history of investigation into the physical behaviour of sound, analogue synthesis, unconventional instrumental techniques and the ambiguous border between acoustic and electronic sources, both under his own name and through projects such as Gondwana and Lumisokea. Their presence helps explain why the electronics on "Orizzontale" rarely feel like decorative seasoning added to an acoustic ensemble. They are structural participants in the argument.

Yet the record's most interesting quality may be that it does not sound like the work of two established electronic musicians surrounded by supporting players. The opposite seems closer to the truth. The individual identities are constantly being absorbed and re-emitted by the group. The album's ten pieces, named after Mediterranean plants, acquire a curious botanical logic: each has its own shape and character, but the larger organism is impossible to divide neatly into roots, stems and leaves. One can hear individual gestures, but the real subject is what happens to those gestures once they enter collective circulation.

The unusual physical edition reinforces this idea rather beautifully. Instead of manufacturing another piece of plastic whose principal function is to occupy a shelf until humanity finally invents a better system for storing obsolete objects, NEA accompany the digital release with an olive-wood stamp containing a QR code and access to the lossless files and additional material. It is an object that makes the relationship between territory, craft and technology tangible rather than merely describing it.

By the time “Polipodio” closes the sequence, "Orizzontale" has not arrived at a neat synthesis, and that is probably its most honest achievement. The album does not demonstrate that twelve people can become one. It demonstrates something more useful: that twelve people can remain recognisably different while producing something that none of them could have produced alone.

That distinction is important. Too much collective art either dissolves individuality into a vague idea of community or turns collaboration into a polite division of labour. NEA Ensemble takes the more difficult route. Here, difference is not an obstacle to overcome but the material from which the music is made. The result can be messy, abrasive, funny, beautiful and occasionally baffling, sometimes within the same few minutes. In other words, it behaves rather convincingly like an actual community.

"Orizzontale" therefore works best not as a manifesto set to music, but as an experiment in whether the principles behind that manifesto can survive contact with sound. They do, although not quietly. The album's ten plant names may suggest a catalogue of Mediterranean flora, but what grows here is considerably less domesticated: an unruly sonic ecology in which analogue circuitry, ancient percussion, human breath, electronic interference and collective instinct are allowed to occupy the same patch of earth. It does not always bloom politely. Thankfully, neither does it need to.

Some albums arrive on schedule. Some arrive late. "Matter And Desire" belongs to the more complicated category of records that spend years refusing to arrive at all, presumably because they have other things to do.

For a place both wonderful and strange, the New York duo of Russ Marshalek and Laura Hajek, this album began roughly eight years before it finally emerged. Songs accumulated, disappeared, returned, changed shape and waited around while life did what life generally does best: complicate everybody's plans. A performance in 2023 eventually reanimated the material, and in 2025 the pair finally entered the studio and completed what had become less a delayed album than an unresolved relationship with one. That history is unusually audible.

"Matter And Desire" doesn't sound like a carefully preserved artefact dragged from a drawer and dusted off for contemporary consumption. It sounds as though the intervening years have been allowed to leave fingerprints all over it. There is something slightly weather-beaten about the record, but also something newly alert, as if these songs had spent years watching the world deteriorate through a window and had finally decided that observation was no longer enough.

The title comes from Andreas Weber's ecological writing, but the album isn't interested in turning ecology into a collection of tasteful field recordings and concerned-looking photographs. Nature here is inseparable from politics, technology, intimacy and personal exhaustion. Apocalypse is not some cinematic event occurring somewhere conveniently far away. It is sitting in a car, looking through glass, trying to decide what the hell you are supposed to do next. That sense of suspended decision becomes the record's real subject.

"Intro444", featuring vocals from Devery, introduces the album with a short, uneasy invocation rather than a conventional opening song. The atmosphere is already damaged. Electronics seem to emerge from a place where machinery and emotion have been left in the same room overnight. There is darkness, certainly, but it isn't the theatrical darkness of someone turning off the lights because they have discovered eyeliner. It is more intimate than that, a darkness produced by uncertainty.

Then "Shedding Velvet" makes the machinery move. The duo's music has long occupied an area where darkwave, industrial electronics, witch house, experimental dance music and noise can rub against one another without quite merging. Their earlier releases already demonstrated an interest in abrasive textures and distorted club rhythms, while their Twin Peaks-inspired projects gave them a taste for psychological unease and cinematic suggestion.

Here those ingredients are considerably less interested in announcing their identities.

"Shedding Velvet" has a physical pulse, but the beat doesn't feel like an invitation to dance so much as evidence that something is still alive. Synth textures smear around the rhythm; voices appear as another layer of unstable matter. The title itself suggests transformation through loss, the skin coming away from whatever lies underneath. It is a useful metaphor for the whole album: things are being stripped down, but nobody has promised that what emerges will be prettier.

"Crying In An Uber" is perhaps where the album's peculiar sense of humour becomes most apparent. The title sounds almost comically mundane, until you realise how perfectly it fits the band's larger worldview. There is something profoundly contemporary about having a minor existential collapse in the back seat of a car while traffic continues outside as if the universe has not received the memo.

The song turns that absurdity into a dark electronic vignette. Personal crisis and urban routine occupy the same frame. The apocalypse doesn't stop the ride-share economy. It merely changes the soundtrack. This is one of the album's most effective tricks: it repeatedly brings enormous subjects down to human scale.

Climate catastrophe, political exhaustion, alienation, mortality and ecological collapse are all lurking here, but they are filtered through bodies, rooms, cars, voices and relationships. The result avoids the grandiose language that often accompanies explicitly ecological music. There are no sermons from the mountaintop. There is a person sitting somewhere thinking about what comes next.

"A Map For Birds (Behind The Glass)" expands this idea considerably. The song has been part of the band's live repertoire for years, apparently existing in various forms before they managed to capture it satisfactorily in the studio.

That long gestation seems appropriate. The title suggests orientation and confinement simultaneously. A map is supposed to help you find your way; glass lets you see without allowing you to touch. The song therefore occupies an uncomfortable position between knowledge and agency. You can see the world. You can understand that something is wrong. You may even possess an excellent map. None of this guarantees that you can get out.

Musically, the duo exploits that tension through layers of distorted electronics, pulsing rhythms and spectral vocal material. The track doesn't simply progress toward catharsis. It keeps looking through the glass.

"It's Not That Bad, Muffin" is the album's most disarmingly strange title and perhaps its most immediate song. The accompanying visual treatment has been associated with the band's Lynchian sensibility and with a deliberately warped sense of repetition and déjà vu. Contemporary coverage has also heard traces of trip-hop and acts such as Ladytron, Massive Attack, Portishead and Björk in the song's combination of fuzz, beat and melancholy. But the interesting thing is that it doesn't sound like a checklist of influences.

Instead, the song occupies a kind of emotional traffic jam. The groove keeps moving while the psychological situation remains stuck. Something unpleasant is happening, but the music keeps insisting on forward motion. The title offers reassurance that nobody quite believes.

There is a small masterpiece of human behaviour contained in that contradiction. “It's not that bad” is one of our favourite lies because sometimes it is the only sentence that allows us to get through the afternoon.

Then comes "I Am Stretched On Your Grave", based on the traditional Irish song "Táim sínte ar do thuama". The inclusion of this material shifts the album into a more explicitly archaic register. The old song carries grief, devotion and physical proximity to death, while the duo places it inside an electronic environment that makes the traditional lament feel less like an inherited object and more like a message arriving from somewhere the present hasn't completely managed to erase. The band's own release information confirms the traditional source.

The juxtaposition is particularly effective because "Matter And Desire" is constantly concerned with what survives.

What survives a person? A landscape? A culture? A relationship? A song?

"Vegetation" approaches the ecological dimension more directly, but its brevity prevents it from becoming an explanatory footnote. At just over two minutes, it feels more like a disturbance passing through the album. The title is almost deliberately neutral, which makes the music behind it more unsettling. “Vegetation” sounds like something catalogued by an indifferent database, while the actual sound suggests a living environment that is considerably harder to categorise.

And then "Dissociation (A Map For Birds)" returns to the earlier material in altered form.

This is a smart structural choice. Rather than ending with resolution, the album folds back upon itself. The map returns, but now it has become dissociation. Orientation has turned into fragmentation. What was previously seen through glass is now psychologically separated from the observer.

The nearly thirty-minute album therefore behaves less like a linear narrative than a sequence of pressure points. Each track catches someone immediately before a decision, a breakdown, a departure, a recognition or a transformation. The band has described the record precisely in those terms: each song occupies the instant before something changes permanently, with the possible direction of that change remaining uncertain.

That uncertainty is what prevents the ecological theme from becoming merely worthy.

There is nothing especially comforting about "Matter And Desire". It doesn't pretend that awareness automatically produces action, or that every crisis contains a noble lesson waiting to be extracted. People change reluctantly. Sometimes they change too late. Sometimes they change in the wrong direction. Sometimes they sit in an Uber and cry, which is probably not covered by most sustainability frameworks.
The music understands this.

Its electronics are dark but not monolithic, danceable but rarely celebratory, experimental without becoming an academic exercise. There is a persistent sense of tension between propulsion and paralysis. The rhythms suggest movement while the textures suggest entanglement.
That tension also connects "Matter And Desire" to the duo's longer trajectory. a place both wonderful and strange emerged in 2016 and have spent the intervening years developing a distinctive world of dark electronic music, performance, remixing and audiovisual work. Their long-running relationship with "Twin Peaks", including projects centred on Laura Palmer, explains some of the dream logic and cinematic unease that surface here, but the new album feels less like an extension of that mythology than a maturation of its underlying sensibility.

The name itself, borrowed from the strange description of the Black Lodge in "Twin Peaks", has always implied a place that cannot decide whether it is beautiful or horrifying. "Matter And Desire" finally gives that ambiguity a distinctly material dimension.

The world is beautiful.

The world is damaged.

We are both observers and participants.

And wanting something better does not automatically make us better people.

That may be the album's most thoughtful achievement. It doesn't separate the personal from the political or the ecological from the emotional. The same nervous system that worries about a relationship also has to live through a changing climate, an unstable political landscape and the increasingly bizarre experience of watching history unfold through glowing rectangles.

The production reflects that compression. Synths feel dense without becoming overdecorated. Distortion is used as atmosphere rather than mere aggression. Vocals are often placed inside the electronics rather than perched above them, which makes the songs feel less like conventional compositions and more like environments with human beings trapped somewhere inside.

And despite the album's bleakness, there is a peculiar vitality running through it.

Perhaps that is because the record is not actually about apocalypse.

It is about "choice under pressure".

The distinction matters. An apocalypse is an ending. A decision is what happens when an ending hasn't happened yet. That tiny interval is where "Matter And Desire" lives.

The eight-year delay becomes almost accidentally appropriate. The album itself spent years suspended between existence and non-existence, between intention and completion. The musicians had to become different people before the songs could finally become what they were supposed to be.

So the record arrives carrying its own argument inside it: sometimes nothing changes because the conditions for change aren't there yet. Then, suddenly, they are.

The strange thing about "Matter And Desire" is that its darkness never entirely closes the door.

There is always another beat.

Another fragment of melody.

Another route on the map.

Another possibility, however inconvenient.

And perhaps that is enough.

Not optimism. Nothing so suspiciously well behaved.

Just the stubborn fact that the future has not happened yet.