Some musicians spend decades refining a language. Others spend the same decades quietly dismantling it, piece by piece, just to see what survives the collapse. Mike Johnson has been doing both since the early 80s with Thinking Plague, a project that never really treated “rock” as a home so much as a temporary scaffolding. "The Gardens Of Loss" feels like the moment he steps outside that structure, looks back at it, and decides it was never the point anyway.

This is his first official solo album, though “solo” here is more of a conceptual loophole than a practical reality. Nineteen musicians, spread across continents, gather into something resembling an orchestra. Not the polished, obedient kind, but a restless assembly that seems to question its own existence while playing. The result isn’t rock with orchestral decoration, nor contemporary classical with a guitar awkwardly bolted on. It’s a dense electro-acoustic organism where roles blur, collide, and occasionally cancel each other out.

Johnson’s compositional DNA is unmistakable. The harmonic language leans toward that uneasy territory mapped out by 20th-century avant-garde composers, where tonality behaves like a suggestion rather than a rule. But what’s interesting here is not the complexity itself, it’s how it breathes. There are moments where the music loosens its grip, allowing something almost approachable to surface, only to fold back into intricate counterpoint or sudden structural detours. Accessibility, in this context, feels less like a concession and more like a trap door.

“Dies Irae” opens the album with a sense of compressed urgency. It doesn’t announce itself loudly, it tightens. You can feel the political anxiety embedded in its structure, not as a slogan but as pressure. “Boys With Toys” follows with a shorter, more sardonic gesture, like a brief, crooked smile in an otherwise severe conversation. Then pieces such as “The Lords Of Creation” and “Dumbstruck” stretch outward, revealing Johnson’s ability to sustain tension without relying on repetition or predictable escalation. These are not compositions that build toward a climax. They circle, accumulate, and then quietly destabilize.

At the center of all this sits the guitar, but not in the way rock tradition would demand. It doesn’t dominate. It insinuates. Its tone, sharp and slightly corrosive, cuts through the orchestral fabric when necessary, then recedes, becoming just another voice in a crowded, argumentative ensemble. It’s less a protagonist than a disruptive presence, reminding you that this music still carries a certain electric stubbornness.

The title track, “The Gardens Of Loss”, is where the album’s conceptual weight becomes almost tactile. There’s a fragile beauty in how it unfolds, constantly shadowed by a sense of erosion. It doesn’t romanticize decay, it observes it, with a kind of weary clarity. By the time you reach “Soulless In Gaza”, the emotional register has shifted into something heavier, more direct. Not didactic, but undeniably grounded in the present, where abstraction starts to feel like a luxury the music can’t quite afford.

Johnson has always been drawn to darker thematic terrain, but here the darkness feels less theatrical and more resigned. Environmental collapse, political instability, collective regret. None of this is framed as revelation. It’s treated as background noise that has become impossible to ignore. The album doesn’t protest loudly. It documents a state of mind where protest and mourning begin to overlap. What makes "The Gardens Of Loss" compelling is not just its ambition, which is considerable, but its refusal to resolve the contradictions it sets up. Rock and classical, structure and fragmentation, intellect and emotion. They don’t merge into a neat synthesis. They coexist, sometimes uneasily, sometimes beautifully, often both at once.

After more than four decades of bending genre definitions into increasingly abstract shapes, Johnson arrives at something that sounds less like a culmination and more like an exposed nerve. Not a grand statement, not a manifesto. Just a meticulously constructed environment where loss isn’t a theme, it’s the condition under which everything else happens.

Cheerful, in its own way. If your idea of cheer involves staring at the ruins and taking notes.

Some artists make albums. Others build elaborate time machines and then pretend it’s just a record. Sicker Man has been quietly doing the latter for years, and "Spökenkieker" feels less like a new chapter than a return to the scene of the original disturbance.

The title alone already refuses to sit still. A soothsayer cursed with foresight, condemned to see forward only by staring backward. It’s a neat metaphor, but also an uncomfortably accurate description of how this album behaves. Vethake doesn’t chase the future. He excavates it, like something buried prematurely under layers of cultural fatigue.

There’s a specific geography haunting this record. Eastern Westphalia, the Teutoburg Forest, that damp mythological undergrowth where folklore doesn’t quite die, it just waits. You can hear it in the way the music breathes: not in clean lines, but in fog, in half-remembered gestures. The past here isn’t referenced, it leaks.

Musically, "Spökenkieker" is a careful mess. Not chaotic, that would be too easy. It’s more like several centuries arguing quietly in the same room. The electric cello, Vethake’s long-time accomplice, remains the gravitational center. It hums, scratches, dissolves, reassembles. Around it orbit fragments of spiritual jazz, orchestral swing, dub-inflected low-end pressure, and ambient architectures that seem to forget their own blueprints halfway through construction.

Tracks like “Johatsu” and its reprise function as thresholds rather than statements. They don’t begin or end so much as seep in and out, like memory failing to commit to a fixed version of itself. “Stop The Gravy Train” carries a title that suggests sabotage, and to its credit, it delivers something close: rhythms that feel slightly misaligned, as if refusing to fully cooperate with the idea of forward motion. It’s music that distrusts momentum.

The spoken word samples, scattered but never intrusive, act like archival ghosts. Not nostalgic, not explanatory. Just there, insisting that time is layered and inconvenient. Meanwhile, pieces like “Glass” and “Mean Drift” operate in a more fragile register, where texture becomes narrative and the smallest sonic shift feels like a plot twist no one bothered to explain.

There’s an underlying tension running through the album: the suspicion that the future has already happened, and we somehow missed it. This is where the hauntological angle stops being theory and starts becoming mood. Vethake doesn’t illustrate lost futures, he stages their afterlife. And it’s not grand or cinematic. It’s intimate, almost domestic. A flicker in the corner of perception.

For all its conceptual weight, "Spökenkieker" avoids collapsing under its own ambition. Mostly because it never tries to resolve anything. The two parts of “Ad Finem” suggest closure, but deliver something closer to suspension. Ending, in this context, is just another form of delay.
There’s also a dry sense of defiance embedded in the whole thing. The line about either mourning the dead or picking a fight isn’t just a slogan. The album does both, often in the same breath. It mourns through texture, and it fights through structure, or the refusal of it.

After more than two decades of moving through film scores, installations, and collaborations, Vethake still sounds mildly dissatisfied with the idea of settling into a recognizable form. Which is, frankly, the only reason this works. "Spökenkieker" doesn’t offer clarity, comfort, or even a stable identity. It offers a kind of persistent unease that feels strangely honest.

And in a landscape where the future is often marketed like a recycled product with better lighting, that unease might be the closest thing to foresight we get.

There are composers who write pieces, and then there are those who design entire acoustic ecosystems and let you wander inside, hoping you won’t get lost. Arnold Dreyblatt belongs, stubbornly, to the second category.

"Descendants" is not a composition in the usual sense. It’s a space that has been tuned until it begins to think on its own.

Commissioned for the Orgelpark in Amsterdam and released by Unsounds in collaboration with Echonance Festival, the piece unfolds across four pipe organs - each with its own historical baggage, mechanical temperament, and stubborn personality. Instead of forcing them into polite agreement, Dreyblatt lets them coexist within his custom just-intonation system, derived from harmonic overtones that behave less like notes and more like gravitational fields.

If that sounds abstract, it is. Comfortingly so.

The tuning itself - anchored to a fundamental C with A at 415 Hz - creates intervals that don’t quite align with what your ears have been trained to accept as “in tune”. Not wrong, just… differently right. Slightly skewed relationships between pitches generate beating patterns, interference, slow pulsations. The sound doesn’t sit still. It breathes, wavers, recalibrates itself in real time, like a structure constantly adjusting its own foundations.

The result is a 50-minute continuum that resists segmentation, even though it’s technically organized into five sections. You don’t hear “movements” so much as shifts in atmospheric pressure. One cluster of harmonics thickens, another recedes. Certain frequencies bloom unexpectedly, filling the hall like light filtering through uneven glass. Others withdraw, leaving behind a faint afterimage.

Dreyblatt’s background in the second wave of New York minimalism is still audible, but only in spirit. The steady pulse that once defined his early work has been dissolved into something more diffuse. Time here isn’t marked by rhythm, but by accumulation and decay. Events don’t happen; they emerge.

What makes "Descendants" particularly effective is its relationship to the instruments themselves. These are not neutral sound sources. A 15th-century organ reconstruction does not behave like a contemporary one, and Dreyblatt doesn’t pretend otherwise. He distributes his harmonic material across them in a way that highlights their differences rather than smoothing them out. The piece becomes a negotiation between architectures - wood, metal, air, history - each contributing its own resistance.

Performed by Claudio F. Baroni, Reiner van Houdt, Dreyblatt himself, and Lucie Nezri, the work maintains a remarkable balance between precision and instability. You get the sense that everything is carefully calibrated, yet always on the verge of drifting. It’s controlled, but not rigid. Structured, but not fixed.

There’s also a quiet physicality to the experience. Pipe organs don’t just produce sound; they move air. And here, that movement becomes part of the composition. Low frequencies press against the body, higher ones shimmer just out of reach, and in between there’s a constant negotiation between presence and absence. Listening becomes less about following a line and more about inhabiting a field.

As the third volume in the Echonance series, "Descendants" fits neatly into a broader exploration of spatial and perceptual listening. But it also stands on its own as a particularly uncompromising statement. It doesn’t guide you, doesn’t explain itself, doesn’t offer narrative footholds.

It simply exists, with quiet insistence.

And somewhere within that shifting lattice of harmonics, you start to notice something slightly inconvenient: your ears adjusting, your expectations recalibrating, your sense of “tuning” quietly rewritten. Not dramatically. Just enough to make everything else sound a little less certain afterward.

Which, one suspects, was the point all along.

Seven years is enough time for a band to reinvent itself, disappear, or quietly repeat the same ideas with better haircuts. Nagløed chooses a less predictable route with "Everything Is In Everything Else": it returns sounding both more grounded and more elusive, like a conversation that has matured but refuses to settle on a single conclusion.

The trio - Dillian Fevry, Andreas Lagrou and Matthias Dewilde - moves away from the denser electronic textures of their debut "NowHere" and leans into a more acoustic, breathable space. Which doesn’t mean simplicity. It means exposure. There’s less to hide behind, and they seem aware of it.

From the opening “Reality In The Dream”, the album establishes a circular logic that borders on philosophical insistence. Themes return, refract, dissolve, then reappear slightly altered, as if the music itself were testing the idea suggested by the title: that everything contains traces of everything else. It’s a bold premise, dangerously close to sounding like a slogan you’d find printed on a tote bag. Fortunately, the music does the heavier lifting.

“Myuzu” and “Ashore” drift between jazz-informed improvisation and indie-inflected songwriting without committing fully to either. Fevry’s guitar lines stretch and hesitate, occasionally brushing against lyricism before retreating into something more ambiguous. His vocals, when they surface, feel less like declarations and more like fragments of thought - unfinished, searching, unwilling to impose clarity where none exists.

The rhythm section operates with a quiet intelligence. Lagrou’s drumming avoids both rigidity and excess, shaping space rather than filling it, while Dewilde’s keys provide a shifting harmonic ground that never quite settles. There’s a constant sense of negotiation, as if each instrument is testing how far it can go without disrupting the fragile balance.

Tracks like “Dillsong” and “Anima” lean into the band’s more cinematic tendencies, but without tipping into sentimentality. The atmosphere is there, but it’s never allowed to become decorative. Instead, it functions as a kind of emotional undertow, pulling the listener inward rather than surrounding them with easy beauty.

The title track, “Everything Is In Everything Else”, sits at the conceptual center, not by offering resolution but by embodying the album’s core tension. Motifs echo, overlap, and subtly contradict each other, creating a sense of interconnectedness that feels earned rather than imposed. It’s less a statement than a demonstration.

Then there’s “Kontiki” and “Topanga/Psalming”, where the band stretches out, allowing improvisation to take a more prominent role. These longer pieces flirt with drift, occasionally risking dilution, but they also reveal the trio’s strength: an ability to sustain attention without relying on obvious markers of progression. Time expands, contracts, becomes slightly unreliable.

By the time “The Dream In Reality” closes the album, the circular structure becomes explicit. Beginning and end mirror each other, but not perfectly. Something has shifted, subtly but irreversibly. The journey hasn’t resolved anything; it has altered perception.

Mixed by Koen Gisen, the album maintains a delicate clarity, allowing each element to breathe while preserving the overall cohesion. Nothing feels overcrowded, yet nothing feels empty. It’s a careful balance, and one that suits the band’s evolving language.

There’s an underlying sincerity to "Everything Is In Everything Else" that could easily have become heavy-handed. Instead, Nagløed approaches its philosophical ambitions with restraint, letting the music suggest connections rather than insisting on them.

It doesn’t offer answers. It doesn’t even pretend to. What it does is create a space where contradictions can coexist without needing to be resolved.

Which, given the title, feels like the only honest outcome.

There’s a particular kind of confidence required to release an album called "Sentient Being" in 2026 without sounding like a wellness app with better reverb. Steve Roach, unfortunately for cynics, still pulls it off.

By now, Roach is less a musician than a geological formation. Decades of releases have sedimented into a language so recognizable it almost risks becoming invisible. And yet, every so often, he narrows the lens. "Sentient Being" is one of those moments: not the vast desert epics, not the tribal pulses, but a quieter inward turning, where scale is measured in breaths rather than horizons.

The premise is disarmingly simple. Consciousness, not as an abstract idea, but as something lived, felt, noticed in real time. Which sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing people say right before handing you herbal tea and asking you to “just be”. But Roach avoids that trap by doing what he has always done best: letting the sound carry the concept, instead of narrating it into submission.

“Angels in Flight” opens like a slow emergence from sleep, those familiar analog currents rising with almost embarrassing grace. There’s no rush, no need to impress. The tones expand, hover, and gently insist on your attention, like a landscape that doesn’t care whether you photograph it. By the time “I Feel You” unfolds, the emotional register becomes more explicit, though never sentimental. Roach’s gift has always been this ability to suggest warmth without collapsing into cliché, which in ambient music is basically a superpower.

“Rapt in Solitude” does exactly what the title threatens, but with a subtle twist. Solitude here isn’t isolation, it’s density. Layers of sustained sound create a space that feels inhabited, even when nothing “happens” in the conventional sense. It’s the kind of track that reveals how uncomfortable we are with stillness, which is either enlightening or mildly accusatory.

The centerpiece, “Sentient Being”, stretches close to twenty minutes and earns it. This is where Roach leans fully into duration as transformation. The piece doesn’t develop so much as deepen, like a thought that keeps unfolding without ever reaching a conclusion. Small shifts in timbre and harmonic color become events, and you find yourself tracking them with a level of attention you didn’t realize you had. It’s less listening, more participation.

By the time “Angels at Rest” and “This Place of Splendor” arrive, the album feels like it has quietly reconfigured your sense of time. Not dramatically, not in a life-changing, tell-your-friends way. More like adjusting the lighting in a room you thought you knew. Everything is the same, technically. It just looks different now.

Released on Projekt Records, a label that has long functioned as a kind of sanctuary for this strain of contemplative sound, "Sentient Being" fits neatly into Roach’s later-period work while still feeling purposeful. There’s no attempt to reinvent anything here. No sudden detours into trend-chasing relevance. Just a deepening of a vocabulary he’s been refining for decades.

And that’s the quietly radical part. In a musical landscape obsessed with novelty, Roach continues to explore continuity. He trusts that attention, sustained long enough, becomes its own form of change. Which is either profoundly wise or stubbornly unfashionable, depending on how allergic you are to patience.

It’s not an album that demands you. It waits. And if you meet it halfway, it does something rare: it makes you aware of your own listening as it happens. Not in a grand, philosophical sense. Just in that small, fleeting way where you notice you’re here, hearing this, existing in time.

Annoyingly effective.