Sluta Leta’s return after a prolonged “digital hiatus” reads like a ghost story with a dance floor inserted. Thirty years after their chemo-electronic EPs and a decade and a half after their last significant statement, they have resurfaced on Cheap Records with "Drift Dekoder", a fractured dream of funk, broken rhythms, and icy vocal fragments. If one wanted a manifesto for how to re-emerge without nostalgia, this is it: beautifully strange, slyly ambitious, fond of missteps.

The Viennese electronic cult label Cheap - co-founded by Erdem Tunakan (among others) - has always backed visionary misfits. Sluta Leta’s presence there feels fitting: a band first heard on Lisa 94 back in 1998 is now speaking into 2025’s circuitry. After fading into virtual myth and a brief resurgence in 2020 with "Entrée Contrôle", Pieper, Bauer and Potuznik reconvene Sluta Leta as a patchwork collective: past members return, guests appear, and the lines between eras collapse.

From the opening "Prélude Gas", one senses tension - as if the air is just about to crack. "Tidsflayer" pulses with a determined glitch-funk, a motor rhythm that feels determined to destabilize itself. "Past in Reverse", with Gerhard Potuznik’s voice, glides across treated synthesizer shadows: voice as spectral anchor in a sea of drift. "Bjorn i FarklÄder" brings warm electronics and lean drum machine zeal; "First Order" leans into minimalism, letting silences speak. "Driftstopp" - as much concept as track name - halts the flow, inviting we listen to what’s left. "Moment Eternal" is the emotional core: a duet with Luise Nehl that glitters with tension. "Rymdpatrull" and the closing "Efterfest" and "Sodala" feel like after-hours fragments, pieces you overhear when the speakers are dying.

What gives "Drift Dekoder" its weight isn’t just sound design, but its relationships - between memory and advance, between imperfection and intention, between identity and access. The album’s very structure favors interruption over continuity; ideas do not always resolve, but that’s part of the point. The “drift decoder” is both metaphor and tool: a filter that tries to reassemble fragments from different technological epochs into something coherent enough to dance to, strange enough to recall dreams.

Sluta Leta have never sounded like they were trying to fit a genre. Rather, they sample their past selves, sabotage their own tropes, and invite you to wander their wreckage. "Drift Dekoder" is not a retro return - it’s a sideways jump, a reactivation of glitch-poetics for a new generation that’s never known smooth lines.

If you listen close, you hear the gap between then and now - and realize that it’s not a void but a room in which they’re still working.

Water and electricity rarely mix well. But when they do - carefully, dangerously - something alchemical can occur. "Smelter", the long-gestating collaboration between Faith Coloccia and Daniel Menche, feels exactly like that: two distinct chemistries-hers fluid and patient, his fierce and magnetic-meeting in a controlled storm. Released on Room40, the ever-consistent Australian label that treats the word "drone" like a verb, "Smelter" is both molten and glacial, an album that suggests slowness as a form of resistance.

Coloccia’s past work (with Mamiffer, Mára, and her many ethereal solo releases) has often circled themes of decay, renewal, and maternal temporality-how sound ages and breathes. Menche, by contrast, is an artisan of intensity: his solo catalog is a thunderhead of feedback, rumble, and field recordings sharpened to a knife’s edge. The beauty of "Smelter" lies in how neither yields to the other. Instead, they merge into something neither ambient nor noise, neither human nor geologic - a terrain where the microphone becomes both compass and confessor.

The album’s core is built from water - in all its shapes and moods. Rain, ice, streams, melting snow, the sound of a ferry parting the Puget Sound: each track feels like a memory of water trying to remember itself. You can almost hear Coloccia’s son laughing in the distance, his voice digitally blurred, a trace of time suspended. Menche, the eternal wanderer, seems to have met her there with his trademark field rituals - recording in wild Oregon, letting static and reverb bloom from wind and stone. Together, their material becomes less documentary and more dreamlike.

"Land Form" opens with a tectonic patience: drones like heat rising from metal, piano submerged beneath strata of noise. "Codec" hums with restrained violence - a dialogue between signal and dissolution. "Winter Enclosure" could almost be described as devotional, but its faith is geological, not spiritual. "Kettle" is the album’s quiet epic, a slow exhalation of feedback and breath that feels like time reversing. "Main Field" wavers between electronic and organic, while "Acequia", the 15-minute closer, is the record’s spiritual afterimage: a floodplain of resonances, water trickling through buried circuits, a hymn to entropy.

Despite its density, "Smelter" never lapses into chaos. The sound feels sculpted, not improvised - shaped with the same care one might use to polish a fossil. Each layer of drone carries memory: the hiss of a stream recorded in haste, the hum of Menche’s machines tuned to match it. This isn’t field recording as scenery; it’s field recording as archaeology, as a way of retrieving something personal from the landscape.

And yes, there’s a touch of humor here too - the irony that a record built on water and patience is called "Smelter". Fire meets flood. Steel meets ice. The title fits perfectly: this is sound as transformation, as the slow act of melting and re-solidifying meaning.

Room40 has long served as a home for such elemental dialogue - artists who speak through temperature and topography more than rhythm. In this context, "Smelter" feels both timeless and very much of its age: an album about collaboration in the truest sense, where two distinct languages fuse into a new, untranslatable dialect.

Every ambient artist eventually gazes at the dunes - and Geoglyph does so not just with reverence but with a certain British restraint, as if staring at Arrakis through a window streaked with London rain. "Otherworldly" is his driest record yet, literally: an arid sound world of shimmering mirages, analog mirth, and slow, hypnotic motion that seems to exhale more than it plays.

Chris Charles - the man behind the Geoglyph alias - has always moved between two ecosystems: the deep-sea dubscapes of "Geolinguistic" (2018) and the lush psychedelic bass terrain of "Messages from the Resonator" (2020, with Globular). Here, he trades his subaquatic palette for sand, grit, and sunlight. The water has evaporated, leaving behind a mineral shimmer and the pulse of wind over dunes. The result feels like the moment between heat and hallucination - when a mirage starts to believe in itself.

The record’s architecture is patient and precise. “Desert Sky” opens like a time-lapse of dawn, breakbeats flickering like insects under synthetic heat. “A Gentle Breeze” - irony noted - moves like a meditation in motion, its flute phrases and bass curvatures recalling Kaya Project’s organic-mechanical balancing act. The title track, "Otherworldly", stands at the album’s core: a slow, almost devotional drift that flirts with psydub but ends up somewhere more mysterious, a sacred space built from delay tails and analog sighs.

Throughout, Geoglyph uses his tools like an archaeologist of sound - uncovering, brushing, unearthing the grooves rather than composing them. There’s a strong sense of temporal ambiguity here, reinforced by his declared fascination with “deep time.” Tracks such as “Resonant Structure” and “Pyramidion” might as well be soundtracks to shifting tectonic plates - trance not as club form, but as geological process. And then there’s “Start from Scratch”, a charmingly brief outro that reminds us that even in an age of plugins and presets, one can still pick up a bass guitar, learn it from zero, and mean it.

What gives "Otherworldly" its depth isn’t just technical craft but emotional intelligence. This is ambient with a heartbeat, psydub with humility. The production is meticulous, yet it never feels sterile; the rhythm breathes, the reverb sweats. It’s a record of paradoxes - dusty but lush, digital yet handmade, cosmic yet intimate.

Released on DJ Maggie Houtz’s "Over the Moon Music", the album fits perfectly within that label’s elegant downtempo cosmos - kin to Bluetech’s analog mysticism, but slightly more earthbound, more grounded in human pulse and ecological reflection. You could say this is the sound of "Dune" reimagined by a mindful engineer who left his synths in the desert overnight and came back to find them meditating.

In short: "Otherworldly" is a mirage that leaves footprints.

Pierre Bastien has always built his music as if he were a watchmaker working on a surrealist’s heartbeat - precise, absurd, and tenderly human. With "Tools", he returns not to his beloved trumpet or the orchestral tangle of the Mecanium, but to the humble instrument behind it all: the Meccano screwdriver. That flattened rod of metal - half toy, half relic - becomes both muse and method, an object capable of tightening screws and unfastening worlds.

The album’s premise could almost sound like parody - “I compose with a screwdriver” -, but Bastien has never been one to wink too hard at his own eccentricities. His obsession with mechanisms is not irony, but devotion: the screwdriver, in his hands, is a philosopher’s stone of sound, the bridge between childhood play and disciplined invention.

Across "Tools", Bastien assembles a kinetic orchestra that hums, rattles, and sighs like a workshop dreaming of Bach. The machine-instrument at the core of the record is a marvel of absurd engineering: valves breathing six major chords, a rotating nail violin, a family of flute mouthpieces that whistle autonomously, and the ghostly pulse of an automated record player skeleton. From this menagerie of moving parts emerges something fragile and uncanny - not just rhythm or harmony, but the sound of function itself.

Part I (side A) feels like a patient awakening, a series of slow, irregular pulses that seem to test their own endurance. It’s mechanical, yes, but not cold - more like watching an old engine rediscover its purpose. Part II (side B) opens up into longer exhalations, a chamber of air and friction where every accidental creak becomes intention. Somewhere in there, you think you hear the screwdriver itself - not as percussive element, but as presence, as memory of the hand that built all this.

Bastien’s music has always danced between invention and poetry, but "Tools" might be his most distilled expression of that balance. Each gesture is deliberate, yet open to the unexpected: precision becomes chance, and vice versa. There’s no melody in the traditional sense, only a chain of mechanical causality that somehow turns into music - the way wind becomes melody when it finds the right bottle.
The conceptual charm of "Tools" lies in its humility. In an era of software-based everything, Bastien’s screwdriver feels like a relic from another planet - or a future that decided to regress with elegance. His machines don’t simulate emotion; they generate it, through friction, delay, resistance. It’s music that refuses spectacle and instead finds beauty in the smallest functional gesture.

To listen to "Tools" is to stand in the middle of Bastien’s atelier, surrounded by whirring contraptions and quiet ghosts of art history - Matisse’s scissors, Niki de Saint Phalle’s rifle, César’s hydraulic press. Each imaginary object vibrates with the same reverence for making, for transforming labor into grace.

Pierre Bastien, the eternal tinkerer, has once again proven that mechanical repetition can be lyrical, and that the screwdriver - modest, forgotten, indispensable - is perhaps the most musical tool of all.

Vessitt doesn’t make ambient music for yoga studios. His compositions belong to the hour after the lights go out, when the body hums with insomnia and the window glass quietly pretends to be water. "Chapter Two: Reflections" is not a sequel in the narrative sense, but a continuation of method - a further bending of tone and perception, a mirror that doesn’t flatter but refracts.

From the first moments of "Prologue to the Beginning and End", one senses that Vessitt, this Los Angeles-based sculptor of frequencies, has learned to let silence breathe between the pulses. His guitar - processed beyond recognition - becomes vapor, memory, occasionally blade. Synth textures enter like latecomers to a dream, not quite invited but perfectly timed. The pieces seem less composed than condensed, the way dew collects meaning overnight.

He speaks of reflections and perception, and indeed, every sound here feels doubled - part physical, part phantom. On "Peaking", for instance, the tones wobble as if observed through heat. "Dogma in Ergosphere" trades strings for pure synthesis, its triangle waves tracing the outline of a cybernetic prayer. There’s humour in the title, but the music remains stern, elegant, and faintly radioactive - the kind of sound that seems to illuminate the listener rather than the other way around.

By the time "Gyokuro" arrives - a long-time live piece finally crystallized - Vessitt opens his palette toward the melodic, or at least the suggestion of melody. It’s the record’s breathing space, where harmonic shimmer briefly pretends to be hope before collapsing into slow-motion static. The album’s architecture mirrors a thought experiment: what if reflections could feel pain, or nostalgia?

Dragon’s Eye Recordings, with its long history of championing the spectral and the precise, is a fitting home. Vessitt’s work aligns with a particular strain of West Coast minimalism - lucid, disciplined, but emotionally unruly. His sounds are never ornamental; they behave like questions with no interest in answers.

There’s a sly tension running through "Chapter Two: Reflections": it’s meditative, yes, but also slightly paranoid, as though every sustained note was being observed from behind the mirror. The closing "Epilogue for Everything" completes the loop - not a resolution, but a graceful recursion. The sound doesn’t end; it simply turns its head and looks back at you.

Listening to this album is like staring into dark glass: the longer you gaze, the more you suspect the reflection might blink first.