There’s a kind of hush in Itoko Toma’s world - not silence, exactly, but the tender vibration of everything that refuses to shout. "Beside the Moon", her new solo piano album, feels like a sibling to "Beyond the Mountain" - another meditation on space, stillness, and the small, luminous details that make life bearable. Recorded in the coastal quiet of Oiso’s Studio SALO, this collection isn’t just music to be heard, but an atmosphere to inhabit.

Toma, who has long worked in that delicate intersection between neoclassical grace and Japanese minimalism, composes like someone sketching with light. Her piano doesn’t perform; it breathes. Each note lands with the inevitability of moonlight on water - soft, cold, exact. You can almost see the salt air moving between the keys, or the shadow of a hand hesitating before a memory.

Pieces like “Robin” and “Yolu” play out like haiku: brief, precise, and utterly transparent. “Shine” stretches time into a slow exhale, as if Toma were tracing the pulse of night itself. Even the recording seems to listen - you hear the weight of the keys, the quiet friction of hammers, the reverberation of the room behaving like a shy collaborator. It’s the sound of a musician not trying to impress the listener but to disappear into the instrument.

There’s humor in that modesty too - the gentle irony of someone titling an album "Beside the Moon", as if to say: I’m not aiming for transcendence, just sitting next to it. And perhaps that’s why it feels so honest. This isn’t “background” music; it’s foreground for your interior life.

At a time when “calm piano” has become a streaming cliché, Toma’s music remains gloriously human - full of pauses, fragile imperfections, and unguarded tenderness. She doesn’t play to decorate silence, but to converse with it. And somewhere, in that quiet dialogue, something like joy happens - small, unassuming, and as constant as the moon she sits beside.

If Brian Eno had taken up residence inside a slowly rotating satellite over the Swabian Alps, "Drifting" might be the transmission we’d receive - faint, elegant, and strangely intimate. The duo of Roman Leykam and Frank Mark, veterans of the German ambient underground, return with a work that floats between reverence and restraint: an album that doesn’t seek your attention so much as it dissolves the boundary between presence and perception.

Leykam, known for his tactile, painterly approach to the electric guitar - one that recalls the liquid melancholy of Fripp, the hovering minimalism of David Torn, and the patient austerity of late Talk Talk - weaves tones like threads of fog. His e-bow notes feel almost sentient, bending around silence as if negotiating with gravity. Frank Mark, meanwhile, works in the invisible domain of pulse and texture: field recordings, synthetic breaths, distant percussions, and the ghostly murmur of machines that seem to be dreaming of the sea.

The result is music that drifts, yes, but not aimlessly - more like a thought caught between two meanings. “Suction Effect” exhales warmth and metallic shimmer; “Crescent Moon” glides with the calm inevitability of something remembered too late. On "Illusions of Unearthly Nature", Leykam’s guitar becomes pure atmosphere, an instrument that has forgotten it was once made of wood and strings. Even the track titles read like internal weather reports: "Oddity", "Breakwater", "Cognitive Process" - each suggesting a subtle shift of mental climate.

There’s humor here too, if you listen closely - a kind of cosmic irony in the way this duo sculpts silence with such devotion. Their “Deep Joy” is quiet but persistent, like the satisfaction of aligning two universes for a brief second before they drift apart again.

In an age of overproduced introspection, "Drifting" feels refreshingly unhurried, almost monk-like in its clarity. It’s music that refuses spectacle - the kind that prefers to hum in the background of your bloodstream rather than the foreground of your playlist. An album for those who find movement in stillness, or who suspect that the void hums back when you listen hard enough.

Daniel Szwed doesn’t play drums - he summons them. He drags the instrument down into the furnace of his own invention, hammers it with noise, scorches it with electricity, and lets it whisper, when needed, through the smoke. "Splinter", his new album on Rope Worm, feels less like a collection of tracks and more like the aftermath of an eruption: shards, pulses, fragments of ritual that still glow with heat.

The Polish percussionist - known from BNNT, Dynasonic, and collaborations that stretch across the borders of noise, art, and techno - has always sought sound not as texture but as resistance. Here, under the guidance of producer Mateusz Rosiski, he continues that trajectory but narrows the focus: "Splinter" is both heavier and more skeletal than its predecessor "Sun’s Mother", stripping away any hint of grandeur to reveal what’s underneath - nerve, tension, and the slow violence of rhythm itself.

The guests, scattered like echoes across the album, are not collaborators so much as apparitions. Jessica opens the record with "S1", a vocal incantation half-drowned in distortion - a voice caught between invocation and malfunction. Natalia Górecka’s piano on "S2" introduces a strange calm, as if a room momentarily cleared of smoke, before the machinery starts again. Mala Herba, who appears twice, adds her signature haunted presence: not singing over Szwed’s sound but inside it, like someone trapped in its circuitry. And Liam Andrews - of My Disco and Big Brave lineage - lends weight and gravity to "S4", where bass, flutes, and percussion merge into something that resembles a collapsing building played in reverse.

What makes "Splinter" compelling is its sense of moral urgency beneath the noise. There’s the explicit shout - “Free Palestine!” stamped on the credits - but also a deeper resonance: an artist refusing to make neutral sound. Even the structure of the album feels political - fractured, unresolved, unpolished in the most deliberate sense. It’s a work of defiance, of brokenness embraced as the truest possible form.

If "Sun’s Mother" was the ritual at sunset, "Splinter" is the one performed under emergency lighting, when power’s been cut but something still needs to be said - loudly, through the cracks.

Szwed’s music has always balanced between endurance and transcendence, but here it feels as if he’s stopped seeking either. What’s left is something more vital: pulse as protest, distortion as confession, feedback as a form of prayer.

And when the final track fades, it doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like standing in the silence after an explosion - counting, not casualties, but survivors.

There’s a certain grim laughter humming inside Elektroniczne Systemy. It’s the kind that sneaks out from between dusty oscillators and corroded guitar cables, that peculiar Polish humour which sounds like despair trying to dance, failing gracefully, and deciding that failure is, in fact, the point.

Marmur - that’s Artur Rumiski and Macio Moretti - are two shapeshifters from different ends of the country’s experimental underground: Rumiski, the architect of texture and tension in outfits like Furia, Thaw, and Arrm, and Moretti, the cosmic jester behind LXMP and countless side aliases, who treats irony like a musical instrument. Together, they form a duo that sounds less like a band and more like a "malfunctioning ecosystem", where guitars melt into static, machines breathe, and feedback turns into a form of prayer.

The album’s title, Elektroniczne Systemy (“Electronic Systems”), is wonderfully misleading. There’s nothing systematic here. Everything bleeds. Circuits collapse into drones, drones crack into glitches, and every sound feels like it’s trying to reform itself after a slow disaster. It’s ambient music if you redefined “ambient” as “the inside of a broken fax machine dreaming of the sea”.

Opener “Ludzko” (Humanity) begins like an autopsy of civilization recorded through a wet contact mic - metallic hums, ghostly overtones, a texture that hovers between sacred and decomposing. “Drena” stretches out into twelve minutes of magnetic fatigue, like a field recording of entropy itself. And “Objazd” (Detour) closes the album with an oddly optimistic sputter - the sound of a detour that never quite finds its way back, yet enjoys the confusion.

What’s striking is how Elektroniczne Systemy feels neither nostalgic nor futuristic. It exists in a present tense of corrosion - a moment where analog and digital, human and mechanical, serious and absurd, all short-circuit into one another. The production, courtesy of Bartek Kapsa, preserves that instability with surgical precision: everything sounds deliberate, but nothing feels safe.

It’s music for the non-functioning device that is you: funny, unsettling, tender in its mechanical coldness. Rumiski and Moretti manage to build an emotional architecture out of glitches, feedback, and small domestic ghosts.

In the end, Elektroniczne Systemy doesn’t really play - it persists, like a faint electric hum in a dark room after you’ve turned everything off. A reminder that the machines are listening too.

The Mad Laboratory of Anti-Matter sound like they’ve just detonated a club inside a philosophy department - and filmed the aftermath with a contact mic. *Study of a Dead End*, their debut for moli del tro, is a volatile collision of industrial fury, Lebanese pulse, and Swiss precision, crafted by the duo of Nadia Daou and Paed Conca - two restless multi-instrumentalists who turn discontent into audible chaos.

The record opens like a manifesto scribbled on the back of a circuit board. “Annihilation of Denial” is not a song but a declaration - a mechanical stomp drenched in distortion, clarinet howls, and Daou’s hypnotic vocal fragments, which sound like coded messages from a future uprising. By the time “Punching at Power (Tribute to Allen Ginsberg)” arrives, you start to suspect the duo might be channeling the Beat poet’s ghost through a malfunctioning drum machine. Their rebellion is not nostalgic but visceral - you can almost hear the sweat of resistance under the synthetic glare.

Conca, a veteran of Europe’s experimental scene (BNNT, Port Said, Praed), and Daou, known for her raw fusion of Middle Eastern and electronic ritualism, forge an unlikely hybrid: part techno séance, part anti-fascist cabaret. Every beat seems to question authority; every processed reed line feels like a call to arms disguised as a groove. It’s music that scratches, bites, and sometimes even smiles - but never politely.

The title, Study of a Dead End, could be ironic. Nothing here feels like a dead end. If anything, this album studies collapse the way arsonists study fire - intimately, with curiosity, and a touch of perverse affection. “Society of the Spectacle”, the brief, twitching centerpiece, plays like a Situationist prank - a noisy wink at Debord’s ghost before Roman Hiele’s remix turns it into a neon labyrinth of loops and disintegration.

What makes the record fascinating is its duality: it’s both methodical and manic. The drums march like an algorithm; the clarinet melts like mercury. Nadia’s electronics hum like overheated machinery. And underneath it all, a pulse - not quite human, not quite robotic - keeps beating, stubbornly, like a protester’s heart under a riot helmet.

In the end, Study of a Dead End feels like a question thrown at the listener: what happens when you dance at the edge of collapse? Daou and Conca don’t give an answer - they just turn up the volume, open the lab door, and let the feedback do the talking.