There are composers who try to fill the world with sound, and then there is Rytis Mazulis, who calmly takes a single semitone, places it under a microscope, and proceeds to dissect it as if time itself were a specimen slide. "Tempered Tempus", released by Music Information Centre Lithuania, is less an album than a controlled experiment in perception. Two pieces, just under an hour in total, and enough micro-intervallic tension to make your inner ear question its own career choices.

Mazulis has spent decades refining what is often described as radical minimalism, though “minimal” feels misleading. There is nothing sparse about the psychological density of this music. Born in 1961, trained under Julius Juzeliunas, later head of the Composition Department at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and recipient of the Lithuanian National Culture and Arts Prize, Mazulis has built a reputation not by multiplying materials but by restricting them until they combust. His work has long circulated internationally, yet this is the first portrait album issued in Lithuania since the late 1990s, marking the beginning of a two-part cycle. The timing feels deliberate, almost defiant.

Schisma (2007) is the first incision. The title refers both to the acoustical term for a minute interval in tuning systems and to the idea of a split, a fracture. The half-tone is divided into the smallest audible units; time follows suit. The result is a polyphonic micro-canon for cello and fourteen virtual instruments, each operating at its own slightly divergent tempo. The performer, Anton Lukoszevieze, stands at the centre of this vortex, bow in hand, threading a “melody” that feels increasingly unstable as its harmonic ground dissolves into hairline cracks.

Listening to "Schisma" is uncannily clinical. The texture resembles a diagnostic procedure for the brain’s tolerance of ambiguity. Intervals hover in the uneasy space between consonance and abrasion. The canon is strict, but its strictness produces vertigo. One becomes aware not of thematic development in any conventional sense, but of microscopic displacements accumulating over time. The piece does not shout; it insists. It demands a specific kind of attention, one that accepts multipolarity as a basic condition. Endurance is required, but not as punishment. More as initiation.

If "Schisma" is about fracture, Solipse (2018) turns inward. Commissioned for the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow and dedicated to Lukoszevieze, it is conceived for cello and phonogram, the electronic layer realised in collaboration with Julius Aglinskas. Here, micro-intervals are arranged according to a statistically derived arithmetic progression. That sounds dry. It is not. The gradual expansion of pitch space creates a slow, hypnotic drift, as if the music were exhaling in increments too subtle to measure without instruments.

The title suggests solipsism, and indeed the piece feels monistic: a single consciousness unfolding within itself. The cello line interacts with its pre-recorded double in a dialogue that never quite becomes a duet. Instead, it is a mirroring process, slightly misaligned, producing a shimmering hyper-dissonance. Mazulis’ frequent use of computer technology underlines the repetitive principle, yet the live instrument keeps the texture alive, imperfect, almost vulnerable. The transformation is glacial, but it is real. By the end, one’s sense of temporal proportion has shifted, quietly but irrevocably.

Lukoszevieze proves an ideal interpreter. Founder of the experimental ensemble Apartment House and a longstanding advocate of contemporary repertoire, he approaches Mazulis’ demands not as exotic challenges but as natural extensions of musical practice. His tone remains focused even when the harmonic field fractures into microtonal dust. The recording, made at the Music Innovation Studies Centre in Vilnius, captures this balance between austerity and organic resonance with remarkable clarity.

Recent events underscore Mazulis’ continued relevance: a new version of "Canon Mensurabilis" premiered at the 2025 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and a nomination for the Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation’s Musical Composition Prize places him firmly within a broader European conversation. What distinguishes him, however, is not institutional recognition but consistency of vision. Few composers pursue a single idea so relentlessly without collapsing into self-parody.

"Tempered Tempus" does not offer comfort listening. It is precise, ascetic, and occasionally unnerving. Yet within its narrow parameters lies a strangely expansive experience. By subdividing pitch and time to near-absurd degrees, Mazulis opens a space where perception itself becomes audible. The album feels like a study in limits, and in the quiet ecstasy that can emerge when those limits are accepted rather than denied.

One finishes the disc slightly altered, as if the internal clock had been recalibrated by a patient, uncompromising hand. Not many records can claim that. Fewer still would dare try.

'Mirror At Night' is the second solo album by the male half of Lore City, from Portland, Oregon. It's funny how this review came about. I received a 7" vinyl record in the mail titled "Mirror At Night B-Sides" when I wasn't even aware Bessel had a new album out (released October 31, 2025). The release date for this record (they call it an EP but really it's just a 2-sided single) is February 25th for preview and Mach 27th for the physical product.

So this review is for both the album and the single. Eric's first solo album ('Visitation') was ambient and so is 'Mirror At Night,' consisting of twelve brief tracks, most of which barely exceed the four minute mark. Kicking things off with "Tendons," the track seems to rely solely on manipulated guitar sonics that incorporates elements of feedback. "Snow Globe" has a more expansive sound with shimmering echo and heavily modified synth pads. "Scavengers" incorporates interesting synth programming with heavily chambered ambience. Somewhat spooky, or ghostly. "Recombinant" has a more experimental temperament with broken melodies floating and bumping into each other in a weightless dimension. "Non-diegetic Sound" is typically ambient with sustained, richly textured chordal pads. There is a sense of motion on the aptly titled "Moving Walkway" and some sonics in it could allude to a transportation hub or station. The briefest track, "Hesitation" (only 1:43) is primarily sustained melancholy strings. "Headlamps" takes echo effects to a new level but manages to coax something nearly melodic out of the chaos. It kind of reminds me of radio music from a distant station that comes in waves when the signal is not strong. It's all heavenly clouds on "Coming Around" and there is a subtle melodic loop in the drift. "Clearing" is richly orchestral and sonically the opposite of the previous track. I'm imagining Poseidon's orchestra tuning up. So what stays afloat in this ocean of sound? Must be the next track, "Buoy," adrift on the sea of sonority. Finally, we end up in the "Aphotic Zone," a murky trip into the underwater depths. Quite an interesting episodic album.

As for the 'Mirror At Night B-Sides,' these are two track not on the album. The A-side is "Double Helix" (4:31) and "Upstate" (4:08) as the B-side. While the A-side of the B-sides is a little better than the B-side of the B-sides with its echoey shimmering slice of ambience, it sounds more like an effect that should lead to something else and not stand alone. To me, this is merely a curiosity piece and less interesting than anything on the album. I think the ten-buck price tag will limit the appeal to vinyl collectors of oddities on wax with money to burn. Just buy (download) the album and leave it at that as it is a dollar cheaper, or $22.00 if you want it on vinyl.

Ambient music often promises transcendence and delivers wallpaper. "Nine Breaths" by theAdelaidean aims smaller and, paradoxically, reaches further. It does not attempt to soundtrack the cosmos. It studies dust in a beam of light and treats it like revelation.

Behind the moniker stands Sean Williams, known in another literary universe as a #1 "New York Times"-bestselling author and award-winning poet. Here, prose discipline and poetic economy migrate into sound. The concept borrows from the haiku’s brevity, the idea that a single breath can contain an entire emotional shift. Each track corresponds to a short poem, and rather than illustrating them in a literal way, the music expands their internal atmosphere.

The palette is restrained: sustained drones, gently evolving synth layers, thick but soft harmonic beds. There is no percussive insistence, no theatrical crescendo. The focus is on micro-variation. Frequencies drift, overlap, dissolve. The production avoids sharp edges, favoring a rounded resonance that feels less like composition and more like a slowly inhaled thought.

"The Unforeseen" opens with a fragile spaciousness. Tones hover as if uncertain of their own gravity. It mirrors the haiku about a shattered window framing what lies beyond. The music does not dramatize the break; it lingers in the opening. "Sunrise", stretching past ten minutes, unfolds with incremental harmonic brightening. It avoids sentimental uplift. Instead, it suggests the quiet mechanics of light expanding across a surface.

On "Resonant Woods", layered textures accumulate in subtle dialogue, evoking the poem’s “call and response”. There is a suggestion of depth, like standing within a forest where echoes blur direction. "Tremble in Worship" introduces faint tremors within the drone field, barely perceptible fluctuations that keep the stillness alive. The effect is meditative without becoming inert.

"Courting Dust" may be the album’s most delicate moment. High-frequency shimmer interacts with lower sustained tones, producing a sensation of particles suspended mid-air. It would be easy to dismiss this as pleasant ambience, but the detail work resists that reduction. Each layer enters with intention.

"Cathedral Under Construction" builds slowly, not in volume but in density. Harmonic overtones stack carefully, as if architecture were forming from vapor. "Loss" compresses its emotional weight into a shorter frame, a muted resonance that never spills into melodrama. "Spiraling Thought" circles gently around a central tonal axis, echoing the haiku’s interrupted motion.

Then there is "Horizon". At over an hour, it occupies the entire second disc alone. This is either bold minimalism or a test of patience, depending on your temperament. The track evolves at a glacial pace, expanding and thinning in long arcs. It asks for surrender. If you are inclined to check your phone every few minutes, the piece will outlast your attention span without apology. If you remain, it gradually reframes perception. Subtle modulations become events. Silence gains contour.

What distinguishes "Nine Breaths" is its refusal to equate stillness with emptiness. The album suggests that beneath routine moments lies a layered emotional topography. Williams’ literary background is audible not through grand gestures, but through restraint. He understands negative space. He allows implication to do the heavy lifting.

This is not background music for productivity playlists. It is closer to an invitation to slow down and notice the small internal shifts that occur between inhalation and exhalation. The record implies that every breath contains a composition, if one listens carefully enough.

In a culture addicted to acceleration, "Nine Breaths" proposes something almost subversive: depth without spectacle. It does not demand transformation. It simply demonstrates how quietly it can happen.

Some projects rush into the world like overeager interns. Parajekt took more than a decade to arrive. That alone deserves a raised eyebrow. In an era where albums are sometimes assembled faster than a food delivery order, Bernhard Hammer and Matija Schellander let this one ferment.

Released as Parajekt on Palazzo Recordings, the label run by Hammer and his long-standing band Elektro Guzzi, this self-titled debut feels less like a beginning and more like the crystallization of a long internal dialogue. Hammer, known for translating techno logic into live-band formats with Elektro Guzzi, joins forces here with Schellander, whose background in experimental sound practices and low-frequency explorations informs the duo’s depth-oriented approach.

The setup is entirely electronic: drum machines, samplers, modular synths, effects, and crucially, a reel-to-reel tape machine. The tape is not nostalgic decoration. It functions as both boundary and instigator. Its mechanical steadiness and saturation imprint a physical grain onto the sound, while its limitations force decisions. The first recordings become a kind of skeletal score, later reworked through overdubbing and dub-inflected studio manipulation. Production is not postscript. It is performance.

The opening track, Parajekt, unfolds with patient insistence. A beat emerges, not aggressively but with measured clarity, while layers of processed guitar and electronics accumulate like sediment. There is a sense of architecture under construction, each element positioned rather than sprayed. The rhythmic immediacy draws from electronic beat music, yet the textural density hints at musique concrète and noise traditions. It is cerebral without becoming aloof.

Camel and Cow introduces a more playful pulse, its title suggesting asymmetry. The groove shifts weight subtly, as if testing balance. Schellander’s drum programming avoids rigid quantization fetishism. Instead, there is a tactile quality, a slight push and pull that keeps the body engaged. Hammer’s electric guitar, filtered and refracted, often ceases to behave like a guitar. It becomes grain, shimmer, interference.
On Cambio and Below the Surface, reduction becomes strategy. Motifs are stripped to essentials. Repetition operates not as club hypnosis but as structural inquiry. What happens if we stay here longer. What happens if we subtract instead of add. The answer is tension that breathes rather than explodes.

The shorter pieces, Objem and Val di Festa, function almost like interludes, compact studies in texture and pacing. They prevent the album from settling into predictability. Then Primal Compression stretches out again, its title accurately describing a pressure that builds from within. Frequencies press against each other, bass weight anchoring the composition while higher elements flicker and dissolve. It feels controlled, but not sterile.

Closing track Mani e Pane offers a quieter resolution. There is warmth here, understated and deliberate. After the density of earlier moments, it lands like a modest gesture, a reminder that reduction can carry emotional charge.

Parajekt’s live approach, where the studio process itself becomes performative, is audible throughout the record. You can sense decisions being made, layers being negotiated. This is not preset culture. It is construction in real time, even when meticulously edited.

What distinguishes Parajekt is its relationship with time. The duo embraces duration, accepts restraint, and resists the temptation to over-explain. Complexity and immediacy coexist without competing. The album does not clamor for attention. It holds its ground, patient and deliberate.

After more than ten years of gestation, this debut does not sound tentative. It sounds considered. Not flashy, not hurried, not apologetic. Just two musicians who understand that depth is not a plug-in, and that sometimes the most radical move is to let sound take the time it needs.

There is something suspicious about a band called Jejeje. It sounds like a laugh typed into a message you are not entirely sure how to interpret. Is it irony, politeness, mockery, flirtation, discomfort. In Spanish it can mean all of that at once. That ambiguity is not branding. It is thesis.

With "Ambivalencia Artificial", released on 12-inch vinyl by Kitchen Leg Records in collaboration with Repetidor and Sub Post, the Berlin-based trio delivers a debut that feels less like a collection of songs and more like a corrective gesture. Against flattening algorithms, against the smooth plastic sheen of consensus culture, against the idea that everything must be optimized and categorized, Jejeje chooses friction.

The band’s roots stretch back to Barcelona’s DIY constellation around Ojalá Esté Mi Bici, eventually crystallizing in Berlin after a house concert involving Geoff Farina of Karate. The members, Jordi, Itacate, and Zutoia, bring histories from projects that orbit punk, experimental pop, and noise. You can hear that lineage, but you do not hear nostalgia. This is not retro post-punk cosplay. It is a recalibration.

Musically, the album constrains post-punk into taut, almost mathematical structures. Rhythms twitch and pivot, shifting weight with a kind of nervous intelligence. Math-rock signatures appear, but without technical grandstanding. The guitars avoid decorative flourish. Melodies slip through cracks rather than sitting proudly on top. Everything feels deliberately lean.

The opener, "Evitacionismo", sets the tone with angular propulsion. It does not explode. It tightens. The drums snap into irregular patterns while the bass line traces a minimal but insistent contour. "Ser" and "Hablar con la pared" continue this approach, building tension through repetition and abrupt turns rather than through crescendo. The title “Talk to the Wall” feels apt. There is a sense of communication attempted under adverse conditions.

Lyrically, the record addresses social homogenization, artificial intelligence, and the erosion of ambiguity. It would be easy to lapse into didactic slogans. Jejeje avoids that by staying oblique. Words are clipped, sometimes almost thrown away. The skepticism embedded in the band’s name carries through the vocal delivery. It sounds like someone laughing at a system that insists it understands you better than you understand yourself.

On "Solas en casa" and "Patético", vulnerability slips in sideways. The minimalism amplifies small gestures: a vocal inflection, a sudden rhythmic pause, a guitar line that feels like it might unravel but holds. Even moments that flirt with catchiness, such as "Peces Voladores", remain slightly off-balance. Hooks are offered, then subtly distorted.

Side B deepens the unease. "Miedo" operates on a pulse that feels simultaneously mechanical and anxious. "Copa Triangular" plays with geometric rigidity in rhythm, as if structure itself were under examination. "Televisor" and "Rayos X" lean into surveillance-era imagery, musically echoing that theme with clipped patterns and exposed spaces. The closer, "Soccorista", leaves things unresolved, hovering rather than concluding.

Kitchen Leg Records, with its long-standing DIY ethos inspired by collage culture, riot grrrl energy, and Minutemen’s econo philosophy, is a fitting home. The limited black vinyl edition with lyric inserts reinforces the physicality of the project. In a landscape saturated with frictionless streaming, this is an object that insists on edges.

What makes "Ambivalencia Artificial" compelling is its refusal to comfort. It proposes that ambivalence is not weakness but necessity. That clarity can be oppressive. That a laugh typed into the void can carry critique. The trio does not provide grand answers to technological anxiety or social flattening. Instead, they construct tight, wiry songs that embody resistance through form.

It is a debut that trusts tension more than resolution. And in a cultural moment obsessed with optimization, that feels almost radical.