There is something beautifully stubborn about releasing a live recording from 1995 in 2026 and calling it "Mean Times". Like opening a forgotten drawer and discovering that the future has already been there, smoking nervously and muttering about temporal harmony. Denman Maroney’s long-shelved performance, now finally unearthed by Cuneiform Records, does not sound like archival nostalgia. It sounds like a system malfunctioning intelligently. Which, frankly, is rarer than functioning intelligently these days.

Maroney has long occupied one of those strange coordinates in experimental jazz where academia, improvisation, and outright sonic mischief intersect. His “hyperpiano” concept, involving digitally manipulated and sampled piano textures, was never merely a technical gimmick. It was a philosophical irritation directed at the piano itself, almost as if he wanted to ask the instrument whether it still deserved to survive modernity. On "Mean Times", that question becomes a six-part suite performed by a quintet that reads like a summit meeting of downtown New York improvisation: the late Herb Robertson on trumpet, Ellery Eskelin on tenor saxophone, Mark Dresser on bass, and Phil Haynes on drums. A lineup capable of turning abstraction into something oddly physical, like architecture built out of cigarette smoke and probability theory.

The album’s title turns out to be a semantic trap. Maroney clarifies that “mean” refers not to cruelty but to intermediary temporal structures, to rhythmic relationships suspended between fixed points. Yet hearing this record thirty years after its performance inevitably bends that meaning. These "are" mean times now, just not in the mathematically elegant sense he intended. The music seems aware of this accidental prophecy, stumbling through fractured rhythms and unstable melodic fragments with the uneasy grace of a city trying to remember its own street map after an earthquake.

What immediately strikes the listener is how alive the instability feels. So much experimental jazz from the mid-1990s can sound trapped inside its own cleverness, like graduate students arguing inside a boiler room. "Mean Times" avoids that fate because its complexity sweats. Robertson’s trumpet arrives in eruptions that feel simultaneously comic and apocalyptic, while Eskelin’s tenor often snakes through the arrangements like somebody trying to escape a building whose exits keep rearranging themselves. Dresser and Haynes operate less as rhythm section than as tectonic activity. Their playing shifts underneath the music constantly, causing the entire structure to tilt without collapsing.

Meanwhile, Maroney’s sampled hyperpiano functions almost like a ghost version of the acoustic instrument. The digital fragments flicker around the ensemble with an uncanny presence, neither fully synthetic nor recognizably human. At moments, the record resembles an argument between player pianos possessed by Morton Feldman and malfunctioning jazz clubs haunted by Conlon Nancarrow. Which sounds unbearable written down, admittedly. Yet the music itself carries an oddly joyous momentum, as though everyone involved understood that experimentation without playfulness quickly turns into homework.

The low fidelity of the recording, rather than diminishing the experience, becomes strangely essential. There is grit everywhere. Instruments blur at the edges. Frequencies crowd each other. The performance occasionally feels as if it were rescued from a damaged transmission orbiting somewhere between free jazz and electroacoustic composition. Clean production would probably have sterilized its nervous energy. Instead, the roughness preserves the sensation of discovery, of musicians collectively feeling their way through an unstable sonic landscape in real time.

What makes "Mean Times" especially compelling in retrospect is how little it cares about genre loyalty. The record does not treat jazz as tradition to preserve, nor as rubble to destroy. Maroney approaches it more like a mutable physics engine. Monk-like angularity appears briefly, then dissolves into algorithmic repetition. Swing emerges for a few seconds before getting folded into digital abstraction. Even the silences feel engineered rather than merely absent. Time itself becomes elastic, stretched and compressed until chronology starts behaving like another instrument in the ensemble.

There is also something unexpectedly moving about hearing Herb Robertson here. His playing carried a rare mixture of aggression and vulnerability, as though every note were both confrontation and plea. Knowing he is gone now lends the recording a quiet emotional gravity without turning it into memorial music. The band sounds too alive for mourning. If anything, the album argues against artistic expiration altogether. Ideas abandoned for decades can still return breathing heavily, covered in dust, demanding relevance.

Maroney ends his liner notes by disagreeing with Oscar Wilde’s famous claim that all art is useless. Listening to "Mean Times", one begins to understand his objection. Useful art does not necessarily solve problems. Sometimes its usefulness lies in destabilizing certainty, in reminding listeners that sound can still reorganize perception rather than merely decorate existence. This record does exactly that. It bends time, mocks categories, and leaves the listener pleasantly disoriented, like waking from a dream in which mathematics learned how to improvise.

Humanity keeps inventing algorithms to predict behavior, flatten emotion, optimize attention spans. Meanwhile a forgotten 1995 concert arrives decades late to demonstrate that unpredictability remains the more interesting machine.

There’s something mildly encouraging about two musicians barely out of high school deciding not to form yet another interchangeable indie-rock band about emotional confusion and cheap beer, but instead building a psychedelic concept album around botanical taxonomy, hypnagogic narration, and orchestral arrangements. Humanity occasionally stumbles into grace by accident.

Taxology’s debut, "A Deep Dive In The Colourful And Mysterious Garden Of Mr. Taxology", arrives with the kind of absurdly elaborate title that practically dares listeners to take it seriously. The surprising thing is that it earns that seriousness. Emerging from Taranto, the southern Italian duo of Andrea Rizzi and Giuseppe Bitonte construct an album that feels less like a conventional debut and more like a carefully cultivated ecosystem: a surreal greenhouse where progressive pop, psychedelic chamber music, cinematic spoken-word interludes, and faded dream logic all coexist under strange artificial sunlight.

The concept itself could have collapsed under its own decorative ambitions. Taxonomy as a metaphor for consciousness is exactly the sort of premise that can become unbearable after twelve minutes if handled without restraint. Yet Taxology avoid turning the record into a university lecture disguised as psychedelia. Instead, the scientific nomenclature becomes an organizing principle for mood and transformation. Tracks behave like living organisms, each possessing its own texture, temperature, and emotional metabolism. The garden is not ornamental. It breathes.

Musically, the album occupies a fascinating liminal space between vintage Italian progressive traditions and contemporary psych-pop sensibilities. One can hear faint echoes of the theatrical surrealism of Italian progressive rock from the 1970s, but filtered through a younger generation raised equally on streaming-era eclecticism, soundtrack culture, and bedroom-production intimacy. There are moments where the album seems to wander through abandoned libraries of library music, only to suddenly stumble into kaleidoscopic folk passages, dreamy orchestral detours, or grooves that briefly flirt with funk before dissolving into mist again.

The instrumentation deserves particular attention because it never feels included merely for prestige or ornament. Sitar, clarinet, flute, cello, timpani, viola, mandolin: these elements move through the album organically, like strange plants intertwining rather than guest appearances politely waiting for applause. Andrea Rizzi’s production is especially impressive given the home-studio context. The arrangements possess an expansive, almost cinematic depth without losing the handmade quality that keeps the album emotionally approachable. You can hear curiosity inside the production choices, which is increasingly rare in an era where so much “psychedelic” music sounds generated by algorithms trained exclusively on vintage pedal advertisements.

The narrated sections by Bruno Vergani function as portals more than explanations. They guide the listener without reducing the mystery. That restraint becomes one of the album’s strongest qualities: "A Deep Dive In The Colourful And Mysterious Garden Of Mr. Taxology" never fully explains itself because dreams do not issue instruction manuals. The listener is invited to drift through associations rather than decode hidden meanings like a bored detective in a prog-rock escape room.

Tracks such as “Mandragora Caulescens” and “Daphne Mezereum” reveal the duo’s talent for balancing melodic warmth with subtle disorientation. Elsewhere, pieces like “The Garden” and “Clara Lunaris” unfold with a cinematic patience that recalls the peculiar emotional logic of waking up from a vivid dream and temporarily forgetting which century you belong to. Even the shorter interstitial pieces contribute to the album’s architecture, creating the sensation of moving through rooms within a larger imagined structure.

What makes the record particularly compelling is its refusal to become cynical. Many contemporary psychedelic releases hide behind irony or retro fetishism, terrified of sincerity. Taxology instead embrace wonder openly, which is much harder and infinitely riskier. The album believes in imagination without needing to posture as “important”. That innocence, combined with the sophistication of the arrangements, gives the music a peculiar luminosity.

There is also something quietly moving about hearing such young musicians create work so unconcerned with immediacy or commercial pragmatism. These are compositions built around atmosphere, patience, symbolic resonance, and internal coherence. In an attention economy optimized for interruption, Taxology made an album that asks listeners to wander slowly through an imaginary garden and contemplate the possibility that classification itself might become poetry. A reckless decision, financially speaking. Artistically, however, it works remarkably well.

By the time “Pieris Japonica” closes the journey, the garden no longer feels imaginary at all. It has become psychological terrain: half sanctuary, half hallucination, populated by fragile melodies and shifting identities. "A Deep Dive In The Colourful And Mysterious Garden Of Mr. Taxology" is not merely an impressive debut. It is the sound of two young artists discovering that music can still function as world-building, ritual, and transformation rather than background decoration for scrolling through advertisements for ergonomic socks. A comforting thought, however temporary.

Family bands often carry an unavoidable mythology around them. Audiences instinctively search for inherited chemistry, shared blood translated into shared rhythm, as if surnames themselves might function as instruments. Sometimes this produces unbearable sentimentalism. Other times, as with by Palmer Generator, it produces something far stranger and more compelling: music that feels less “played” than collectively inhabited, like three people dreaming inside the same gravitational field.

Active since 2010, the Jesi-based trio of Michele, Mattia, and Tommaso Palmieri, father, son, and uncle respectively, have gradually carved out a distinctive place within the Italian experimental rock landscape. Across earlier releases like "Shapes", "Discipline", "Natura", and "Ventre", Palmer Generator refined a language built from post-rock architecture, psychedelic repetition, noise-rock abrasion, and ritualistic pacing. But "Corpo Celeste" feels less like another chapter than a condensation of everything they have been circling for years: the transformation of instrumental rock into something almost cosmological.

Structured as a four-part suite, the album unfolds with the patience of a celestial event unconcerned with human attention spans. Which is refreshing, honestly. Contemporary culture treats every eight-second distraction like a moral victory. Palmer Generator instead ask listeners to surrender to duration, repetition, and gradual mutation. They trust tension. They trust accumulation. They trust that sound can still alter physical perception if given enough room to breathe.

The references cited in the press materials are accurate but maybe incomplete. You can certainly hear traces of Glenn Branca in the orchestrated mass of overtones, echoes of Mogwai in the emotional surges, and the angular nervous system of Slint lurking beneath the quieter passages. The hypnotic propulsion of Neu! also runs deep throughout the record, particularly in the cyclical drumming patterns that seem designed to bypass cognition entirely and communicate directly with the spinal cord.

Yet the album never feels derivative. Palmer Generator absorb these influences into a sound that is unmistakably their own: dense but spacious, ritualistic without becoming pompous, emotionally expansive without collapsing into cinematic cliché. The bass is particularly crucial here. Rather than functioning merely as support, it acts almost tectonically, shaping and deforming the music’s terrain in real time. At moments it growls with noise-rock aggression; elsewhere it opens sudden melodic clearings inside the distortion, like discovering a chapel hidden inside an industrial ruin.

The guitar work avoids the obvious post-rock temptation toward endless crescendos for their own sake. Instead, tones stretch, erode, and reform continuously, generating drones and harmonic halos that feel almost liturgical. Meanwhile the drums maintain the album’s sense of bodily movement. Not flashy, not technical in the self-congratulatory prog sense, but deeply physical. The rhythms breathe. They pulse with the logic of tides, machinery, and heartbeat simultaneously.

The album’s conceptual framework around “cosmic vibration” could easily have become insufferable in lesser hands. There is always a thin line between metaphysical ambition and sounding like a man in a linen shirt trying to sell crystals beside a motorway service station. But Palmer Generator approach spirituality with enough seriousness and ambiguity to avoid easy caricature. The influence of Anna Maria Ortese’s thought, especially the notion of the sacredness permeating all existence, lingers beneath the surface without ever becoming dogmatic.

What emerges is an album deeply concerned with interconnectedness: between family members, between instruments, between repetition and transformation, between the terrestrial and the celestial. The title "Corpo Celeste" ultimately feels less astronomical than corporeal. These are cosmic ideas experienced physically through amplifiers, vibration, sweat, and collective momentum.

There is also something distinctly Italian about the record’s sense of drama and texture, though not in the operatic sense outsiders often imagine. More in its relationship with space, ruins, mysticism, and emotional intensity. The music feels connected to landscapes both geological and spiritual, equally capable of evoking abandoned factories, Adriatic coastlines at dusk, or medieval cathedrals vibrating under feedback.

Most importantly, "Corpo Celeste" succeeds because it understands that repetition is never truly repetition. Every cycle returns altered by memory, by resonance, by microscopic shifts in pressure and intent. Palmer Generator build their music around this principle with remarkable discipline and instinct. By the time the closing “Coda” dissolves, the listener has not so much finished an album as emerged from an environment.

A powerful and deeply immersive work. Post-rock not as genre exercise, but as ritual architecture for uncertain times. Humans, against all evidence, occasionally still manage to build cathedrals out of noise.

Minimalist piano music has become dangerously close to a global utility service. Somewhere, at this very moment, an algorithm is probably recommending “peaceful neoclassical focus music for deep productivity” to exhausted office workers while a grey drone delivers toothpaste overhead. The genre risks dissolving into scented-candle functionality. Yet every so often a record appears that reminds us why sparse piano music can still matter when approached with sincerity rather than lifestyle branding. "no na me" by Laur Pihel is one of those records.

Released through Schole Records, the EP carries an unusual stillness that feels less composed than revealed. Pihel himself describes his process not as writing music but allowing it to “appear”, and while such language can sometimes drift into mystical vagueness, here it genuinely aligns with the listening experience. These pieces do not behave like carefully engineered compositions striving toward climax or technical display. They arrive tentatively, almost shyly, as if overheard rather than performed.

Pihel’s background as both architect and composer proves quietly significant. There is an architectural awareness throughout the EP, not in grand structural complexity but in the careful treatment of space, resonance, and proportion. Silence is not emptiness here; it functions like negative space in a building, shaping emotional movement through absence as much as presence.

The opening “i had a dream” immediately establishes the emotional climate of the record. The piano phrases emerge delicately, hovering somewhere between memory and hesitation. Pihel avoids the polished emotional manipulation common within much contemporary neoclassical music. There are no dramatic swells demanding catharsis, no cinematic crescendos auditioning desperately for television sync placements about emotionally complicated Scandinavian detectives staring at fjords.

Instead, the music breathes.

And that breathing matters.

The performances retain a fragile immediacy that makes the listener acutely aware of human presence behind the instrument. Slight pauses, tentative repetitions, and unresolved harmonic movements give the pieces their emotional weight. Pihel understands that vulnerability often resides in incompleteness. The music feels unfinished in the most beautiful sense, not lacking form but remaining open to uncertainty.

“fibich”, one of the EP’s shorter pieces, distills this quality especially well. Its melodic fragments seem to search gently for orientation without fully settling. There is melancholy present, certainly, but not despair. More a quiet recognition of impermanence. The kind of emotional atmosphere that arrives late at night when memory becomes temporarily louder than language.

Schole Records has long cultivated a particular aesthetic territory where minimalism, fragility, and contemplative ambience intersect, and "no na me" fits naturally within that lineage while maintaining its own intimate identity. Pihel’s approach differs from more overtly virtuosic modern classical composers because technical display never becomes the focal point. The piano serves less as an instrument of mastery than as a medium for attentiveness.

The title track deepens the record’s introspective atmosphere. Here Pihel’s improvisational philosophy becomes particularly compelling because the music resists obvious narrative development. Notes recur like recurring thoughts. Harmonies hover without insisting upon resolution. The listener is invited into a suspended emotional state rather than guided through predetermined emotional architecture.
And yet the record never becomes abstract or cold. There is warmth underneath the sorrow, exactly as the accompanying notes suggest. Pihel’s music recognizes suffering without fetishizing it. That distinction feels increasingly important in a culture that often aestheticizes sadness until it becomes decorative. "No na me" remains grounded in something more humane and spiritually searching.

“nnm oae” perhaps comes closest to pure meditation. The piece unfolds with almost ceremonial patience, allowing resonance itself to become part of the composition. One becomes aware not only of the notes but of the room surrounding them, the decaying echoes, the subtle textures of touch and release. Pihel’s emphasis on “less is more” could sound clichéd in lesser hands, but here restraint genuinely functions as artistic principle rather than branding exercise.

The closing “tallinn-kathmandu” subtly broadens the emotional horizon of the EP. The title alone suggests distance, spiritual searching, geographical and inner travel. The piece carries a slightly more expansive feeling while preserving the intimate fragility permeating the entire release. There is movement here, but slow movement, contemplative movement. Not escape so much as quiet transition.

Pihel’s reflections on music as “vibration and information”, simultaneously material and empty, reveal philosophical influences that seem adjacent to Buddhist thought without becoming explicitly doctrinal. That spiritual dimension permeates the EP subtly. The music does not preach transcendence; it creates conditions where stillness becomes perceptible again.

In practical terms, yes, this is music suitable for meditation, journaling, solitude, or moments of emotional exhaustion. But reducing it to functional ambience would miss its deeper achievement. "No na me" succeeds because it preserves ambiguity. These pieces do not tell the listener what to feel. They simply create enough emotional space for feeling to occur honestly.

That honesty is rare.

Especially now, when so much music arrives over-explained, over-produced, and emotionally preformatted for immediate consumption. Pihel instead offers small, imperfect, searching fragments of presence. Music that trusts silence. Music that accepts incompletion. Music that seems to emerge from the piano almost reluctantly, like fragile thoughts becoming briefly audible before returning to wherever they came from.

A modest but deeply affecting release, then. Not an album that shouts for attention, but one that waits quietly until the listener is finally willing to hear how much noise they have been carrying around inside themselves.

There is a particular kind of album that does not merely ask to be listened to, but asks to be inhabited like an abandoned manor at dusk, where every room contains perfume, dust, old letters, and the suspicion that someone invisible just crossed the corridor. "Dawn Breakers" by France de Griessen belongs firmly to that category. It does not move in straight lines. It circles itself like incense smoke. It whispers, scratches, sighs, disappears behind velvet curtains, then suddenly stares directly into your face with unnerving emotional clarity.

France de Griessen has long existed in a peculiar artistic territory where folk music, cinema, performance art, romantic symbolism and gothic cabaret overlap without ever fully settling into stable form. Calling her merely a singer-songwriter feels insufficient in the same way calling Salvador Dalí “a painter” technically works while ignoring the melting elephants wandering through the background. Over the years, de Griessen has built an interdisciplinary practice touching photography, film, poetry and visual art, collaborating with figures such as Virginie Despentes and Bruce LaBruce while cultivating a singular aesthetic that merges vulnerability with ritualistic theatricality.

On "Dawn Breakers", that sensibility reaches perhaps its most distilled form. Recorded in Somerset, in the tiny English city of Wells, the album feels saturated with landscape. Not landscape in the pastoral folk sense of cheerful meadows and acoustic authenticity, but landscape as psychological architecture. The songs seem to emerge from damp stone walls, candlelit chapels, forgotten gardens and dreams interrupted just before dawn. The countryside here is not comforting. It is enchanted in the old sense of the word: beautiful, disorienting, faintly dangerous.

Musically, the record is deceptively sparse. Acoustic guitars, shruti box drones, discreet percussion, occasional piano and organ textures create a framework that often feels closer to incantation than arrangement. De Griessen’s voice remains the gravitational center throughout, shifting between fragile intimacy and something more spectral. She does not sing in a traditionally “perfect” manner, which is precisely why the performances work. Her phrasing often feels instinctive, almost trance-like, as though the songs are arriving through her rather than being carefully delivered by her. In an era where many vocal performances are polished until they resemble motivational software updates, this rawness feels strangely radical.

The influences mentioned around the album are revealing but never oppressive. Echoes of Nico appear in the funereal calm of certain refrains, while traces of Donovan emerge in the record’s strange balance of melancholy and luminous mysticism. Yet "Dawn Breakers" avoids collapsing into retro-folk cosplay because de Griessen approaches these traditions less as references than as spiritual tools. The songs do not imitate the past; they rummage through it like someone searching an attic during a thunderstorm.

“Punch Me” opens the album with unsettling directness, immediately establishing the record’s emotional duality: tenderness contaminated by bruising self-awareness. Then comes the almost absurd micro-fragment “Start All Over”, lasting four seconds, functioning less as a song than as a crack in the mirror. These abrupt interruptions recur throughout the album and become part of its grammar. De Griessen understands that fragmentation itself can create emotional continuity. Human consciousness rarely behaves like a polished narrative arc anyway. Mostly it resembles someone carrying twenty half-finished conversations through a fog.

“Cloud Cakes” may be one of the album’s most revealing titles because it encapsulates her artistic method perfectly: sweetness hovering beside instability, fantasy brushing against decay. The imagery throughout the record constantly bends physical reality into symbolic dream logic. Snow turns blue, voices become ghosts, memories mutate into living presences. At times the album feels almost synesthetic, as though colors, textures and emotional states are quietly exchanging identities behind the listener’s back.

The duet moments with Cannonball Statman add another dimension entirely. His presence introduces a faint anti-folk abrasion that prevents the record from floating entirely into ethereal abstraction. These interactions ground the songs, adding friction and occasional unpredictability. The album needs that tension. Without it, the dream might become too comfortable.

“Blue Snow” stands among the record’s emotional peaks, carrying the strongest connection to the cinematic influences surrounding de Griessen’s work. You can almost feel the ghosts of Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini hovering somewhere nearby, not through direct imitation but through atmosphere: the sense that beauty and alienation are inseparable companions wandering through the same frame.

Then comes “July”, perhaps the album’s emotional core, where de Griessen confronts the internal multiplicity she describes in the accompanying notes. The song feels populated by invisible presences, ancient narratives surfacing and colliding inside the mind. There is something deeply human in the way she treats psychological fragmentation not as pathology but as mythology. We all carry entire choirs of contradictory voices within us. Most people simply bury them under productivity apps and supermarket loyalty cards.

What makes "Dawn Breakers" particularly compelling is its refusal to fully resolve its tensions. Is this album made of love songs, prayers, hallucinations, diary entries, occult rituals, or theatrical monologues? The answer shifts constantly. De Griessen thrives in ambiguity because ambiguity itself becomes a form of emotional truth. Life rarely provides clean symbolic categories. Most of existence is spent trying to understand whether the thing haunting you is grief, desire, memory, imagination, or merely exhaustion from living inside modern civilization’s fluorescent migraine.

And yet despite all its spectral qualities, "Dawn Breakers" never feels cold. Beneath the mysticism and surrealism lies genuine emotional urgency. De Griessen is not hiding behind aesthetics. She is using them as portals toward vulnerability. The album’s recurring concern with transformation, with bringing darkness into light without erasing the darkness itself, gives the record its quiet power.

In the end, "Dawn Breakers" resembles a strange devotional object washed ashore from another artistic era, one where symbolism still mattered, where art could be irrational without apologizing for it, where beauty and discomfort were allowed to coexist without corporate mediation. France de Griessen offers no easy catharsis here. Instead, she hands the listener a lantern and invites them deeper into the fog.