Fencepest is a collaboration between fencepost and Pestzone. I had reviewed previous releases by each and enjoyed them, so I was interested to see how this would turn out, even though they seem to be the same person running both projects based on the Bandcamp page. In one review, I wrote, “If Fencepost was going for maximum creepiness, they nailed it.” In another review, I wrote, “Pestzone manages to evoke a sense of existential dread without resorting to cheap gimmicks like horror movie samples or jump scare noises.” You can understand why I thought that this would be a good combination, right? So let’s see what’s happening in the garden, shall we?

We kick it off with “bloom_II,” which is heavy cinematic ambience. This would be perfect for a suspense movie. You're in the dark, but you know that you're not alone. Waves of cascading sounds and ambient noise. Nice. “decay_XIII” keeps this cinematic feeling going, but the conflict is now on and the antagonist has revealed themselves. Pulsing bass with crashing noises surround you. “bloom_I” is spacey and dark. To keep the story going, the conflict is over, but everyone is wounded. You have survived, but at what cost? It would almost be peaceful if it were not so unsettling. With “decay_XIV,” you thought that the conflict was over, didn't you? There are still unseen forces that seek your demise hiding in the forest. You think that you can almost make out their eyes, but you're not sure if it is just your imagination. The sounds of malevolent bird songs ring in your ears. “bloom_VIII” is a bit grittier, featuring drone with just a bit of distortion. There is a lot going on here, which keeps it interesting. “decay_III” is a bit more chaotic and noisy. This is not to say that this is harsh noise, but imagine the cacophony of a high school band warming up, then run it through some reverb and you are heading in the right direction. This mellows out at times, but the overall feel is chaotic. “bloom_XI” is a bit more subdued, like the previous track has been totally fuzzed out and dissolved into a wall of sound. It's still gritty, but with a little less edge to it. “decay_XVII” is like a cow mooing (trombone or trumpet actually) with subterranean drones and other snippets of noises that sounds like heavily processed field recordings. This one went on a bit longer than it needed to though.

Somehow, they managed to attenuate the creepiness of their previous albums. But the overall result is still more than the sum of both band’s parts. Overall, if you want something that will serve as good background music to the soundtrack of your life, this is one to pick up. This album weighs in at around 70 minutes, so there is a lot to sink into.

I did not know much about this artist before getting it for review, but he now has a coule of releases with Inner Demons, some as collaborations as well as solo, as in this case. Hasegawa hails from Tokyo Japan, and his bio states that “After a long career as a systems engineer, he began producing music at the age of 50, bringing a unique perspective shaped by structure, logic, and disruption. His work explores density, rupture, texture, and live improvisation. Moving between harsh noise and electroacoustic expression, he develops performances focused on immediacy, instability, and sonic intensity.” Well, that sounds like something up my alley, so let’s dive in and see what it’s like in quarantine.

We kick it off with “Live in Jan-18-2021,” which is a short piece of harsh noise wall, with just enough variety to keep it engaging. Up next, we have “Fundamental 432HZ Pure Tone Music,” which is an interesting piece with test tones mixed with clattering metal noise and other field recordings and voices. The juxtaposition of the static tones and the spastic noise elements works well together and provides a nice contrast. There are spoken word lyrics at the end that sound like text to speech philosophizing on the nature of human existence. “Supplement to Fundamental 432HZ Pure Tone Music” is a short piece that continues the feel of the end of the previous track with layers of tones and spoken word. “Awaking and Walking in a Hospital” closes it all off. Imagine a thousand off balance washing machines and you'll get a sense of this track. It's heavy with some rhythm hidden in the noise. Well done.

Overall, this is an interesting mix of styles, and the test tone pieces work well against the harsh noise tracks that bookend them. This album weighs in at around 26 minutes.

I was unfamiliar with Jabe Ledoux, but they hail from Vergennes, Vermont and they also run the "Flux ov Time" netlabel. According to his Bandcamp bio, he creates “site specific percussion/found sound pieces that focus on repetition and poly rhythm to create trance-like states." The liner notes go further into this particular release: “I've been humping my drums to gigs in my car - or cars of bandmates- for several decades now, and I’ve always loved the random & chaotic jingle jangle of various percussive doodads bumping & grinding together over uneven roads. Recently, I found myself alone in my Kia Sportage (tm) with my Dookie Dickie drum and my Wh!skey drum, doing that dance that they do. I recorded a few minutes and was delighted by the deep bassy drones of the engine & tires-on-road that occurred. Thus, Sacred Quietude was born.” Sounds interesting, so let’s dive in.

This album consists of three tracks that are all variations on a similar theme. There is droning wind noise with some clattering metal and other field recordings and bits of noise. On the third track this noise comes center stage. The wind noise is still present but this is much more pronounced than in the other two where it servea mainly as incidental sound to the drone. It's peaceful but doesn't really seem to go anywhere.

Although there are some subtle differences between the tracks I would have liked Ledoux to branch out a bit. As it stands there are a bit too similar for my taste, but perhaps that is the entire point. This album weighs in at around 30 minutes.

If "TKSM 01" was Tokesmo’s exercise in making sounds forget where they came from, "TKSM 02" gives those same kinds of materials something considerably more troublesome to do: keep time. The result is a seven-track EP in which small acoustic sounds are enlarged, dissected and reorganised into rhythmic structures, with synthesised layers supplying the surrounding architecture. It is less concerned with the mysterious life of a sound than with what happens when that sound starts developing habits.

The titles offer no assistance whatsoever. “02”, “02.02”, “02.02.02”, eventually arriving at the almost comically recursive “02.02.02.02.02.02.02”, suggest that somebody has mistaken a musical tracklist for a directory tree. Yet there is a logic to this numerical escalation. Each title seems to imply another subdivision, another level of examination, and the music behaves accordingly: tiny sonic events are repeatedly magnified until they become patterns, pulses and structures large enough to occupy the whole room.

Behind Tokesmo is Andrea B., a musician whose relationship with sound has been developing for rather longer than this project’s deliberately anonymous presentation might suggest. He began playing bass in Lodi in 1994 and in 2004 co-founded Morkobot, the Italian trio built around two basses and drums. His electronic work goes back to the mid-1990s, through projects including Otrom and Garaliya. That background matters because "TKSM 02" does not approach rhythm from the perspective of somebody merely discovering that computers can make beats. There is a physical musician underneath the circuitry, and the fascination here comes partly from watching physical sound become something increasingly abstract without completely losing its bodily impulse.

The central idea is wonderfully simple: acoustic percussive sounds are used as raw material, while the other elements are synthesised. Tokesmo takes small sonic objects, the sort of details that normally disappear beneath our threshold of attention, and expands them until they acquire structural importance. A tiny click can become a pulse; a scrape can suggest a hi-hat; a transient can acquire the authority of a kick drum. The studio becomes less a recording environment than a peculiar optical instrument, except that instead of enlarging a cell under a microscope, it enlarges the microscopic behaviour of sound.

“02” introduces this vocabulary economically. At just over three minutes, it does not waste time explaining itself, establishing a relationship between percussive fragments and synthetic tones that feels precise without becoming clinical. There is movement everywhere, but not the blunt forward propulsion of conventional club music. The beat seems to assemble itself from fragments that have only recently learned that they belong together.

“02.02” and “02.02.02” push that process further. Their short durations are important because they make the EP feel modular rather than linear. Instead of seven tracks behaving like chapters in a conventional narrative, each piece seems to expose another variation of the same mechanical organism. Patterns appear, mutate, disappear and leave behind traces that the following track can exploit. It is composition by incremental pressure rather than grand gesture.

This is where the comparison with IDM and industrial electronics becomes useful, although neither label quite explains the appeal. There is the obsessive attention to timing associated with intelligent dance music, but Tokesmo is less interested in virtuoso programming than in the physical character of the sounds being programmed. Likewise, there is an industrial sensibility in the harder textures, yet the music rarely settles into the predictable machinery of genre industrial. The machinery here is constantly being rebuilt from pieces that do not initially look like machinery at all. External listeners have similarly picked up on the record’s combination of found sounds, percussive transformation and IDM/industrial rhythmic language.

The fourth piece, “02.02.02.02”, is the longest track at 4:14, and its position at the centre of the sequence gives it a disproportionate sense of importance. By this stage, the listener has become accustomed to hearing small objects acquire rhythmic functions, so the question is no longer what the original source might have been. The more interesting question is why the resulting pattern feels convincing. Tokesmo's achievement is to make the process disappear just enough for the music to stop sounding like an experiment and start behaving like music.

That distinction matters. Experimental electronics can sometimes become so devoted to demonstrating the procedure that the procedure becomes the only interesting thing left. "TKSM 02" avoids that trap because its rhythms have physical consequences. They make you want to follow them. Even when the sounds are dry, metallic or slightly alien, there is a tactile quality in their repetition. You can almost imagine the objects from which they originated being moved around a table, struck, rubbed, dropped or manipulated, although the finished music never settles into straightforward field-recording documentary.

The shorter “02.02.02.02.02” and “02.02.02.02.02.02” continue the process of fragmentation. Their titles become increasingly ridiculous while their musical purpose becomes increasingly clear. The decimal points could be read as little gates between levels of perception: sound, fragment, pulse, pattern, sequence, structure. Tokesmo seems to be asking how much information can be extracted from something before it stops being the thing it originally was. The answer, judging from these tracks, is quite a lot.

Then comes the nearly five-minute “02.02.02.02.02.02.02”, which closes the EP and gives the accumulating logic enough space to expand. Rather than providing a conventional climax, it feels like the system finally running at full resolution. Percussive elements and synthetic components have become difficult to separate, and the original acoustic source material has effectively surrendered its identity. What began as an object has become an event; what began as a noise has become a rhythmic proposition.

This also explains why "TKSM 02" makes more sense when heard alongside "TKSM 01". The two April 2026 EPs were conceived as complementary halves of a larger project: the first focuses on abstract and tonal transformation, while the second concentrates on rhythm and percussion. The pairing has been described as deliberately complementary, rather than simply two unrelated releases arriving on the same day. Yet "TKSM 02" has enough personality to stand on its own. It does not require its quieter, more elusive sibling in order to justify itself.

There is something particularly satisfying about the project’s refusal to make a fetish of its own technology. Tokesmo composed, recorded and mixed everything himself, with Rashad Becker handling the mastering, but the EP does not advertise the studio as a technological playground. The technology is simply the means through which material can be resized, repeated and reorganised. The interesting thing is what happens to perception, not which machine performed the trick.

And perhaps that is the hidden humour of "TKSM 02". Its titles become progressively more complicated while the fundamental idea remains stubbornly primitive: hit something, listen carefully, repeat. Civilization spent thousands of years developing increasingly sophisticated instruments and recording systems only to arrive at an electronic music project that discovers the dramatic possibilities of a tiny noise. There are worse ways of spending the afternoon.

What Tokesmo ultimately builds is not a collection of beats so much as a small grammar of percussion. The sounds are isolated, enlarged and placed into relationships, and those relationships gradually acquire their own momentum. The EP makes rhythm feel less like a pre-existing framework into which sounds are inserted and more like something that can emerge from the microscopic behaviour of matter.

If "TKSM 01" asks what remains when sound is detached from its source, "TKSM 02" asks what can be built from the fragments left behind. The answer is surprisingly physical. Beneath all the synthesis, processing and microscopic scrutiny, these tracks still have a pulse. Tokesmo simply makes us wait long enough to notice where it came from.

There is something almost bureaucratically mysterious about the title "TKSM 01". It sounds less like the name of an EP than the first surviving file from an experiment that somebody forgot to explain. The track titles are no more helpful: “01”, “01.01” and “01.01.01” suggest a system of classification rather than conventional compositions, as though Tokesmo had decided that naming things was an unnecessary distraction from examining what they actually sound like. It is, in fact, a rather fitting approach for music that seems interested in stripping acoustic reality of its passport and sending it somewhere else.

Tokesmo is the solo project of Andrea B., whose history already makes the apparent distance between organic matter and electronic manipulation less surprising. He began playing bass in Lodi in 1994 and later became one of the two bassists in Morkobot, the Italian instrumental trio whose muscular combination of bass-heavy experimentation and drums has occupied considerably more physical territory than the polite word “rock” would suggest. Since the mid-1990s he has also worked with electronic instruments under other names, including Otrom and Garaliya. "TKSM 01" therefore does not sound like a musician suddenly discovering field recording as a fashionable accessory. It feels more like another branch growing from a practice that has been concerned with the behaviour of sound for decades.

The three pieces are built from recordings made in both outdoor and indoor environments, captured through different microphones, techniques and materials, then subjected to electronic processing and placed in relation to synthesised elements. That description makes the procedure sound tidier than the result. The point is not to preserve the identity of the original sounds, but to make their previous identity increasingly irrelevant. A noise that might once have belonged to a room, an object, a surface or some fragment of the outside world becomes material without a stable address. Tokesmo is less interested in asking “what was that?” than in seeing how long the question can survive before the sound becomes something else.

The short opening “01” works almost like an aperture. At barely three minutes, it establishes the EP's peculiar sense of scale without giving away the central argument. Sounds seem to occupy different depths, sometimes close enough to touch, sometimes receding into a space whose dimensions are difficult to calculate. There is an intriguing refusal of conventional foreground and background here. Instead of arranging sounds into a hierarchy, Tokesmo allows them to behave like competing physical phenomena. Some emerge, others dissolve, and occasionally it becomes difficult to decide whether a sound is moving through space or whether the space itself is changing.

Then comes “01.01”, the fourteen-minute centre of gravity, and this is where "TKSM 01" stops behaving like a collection of processed recordings and starts resembling an ecosystem with a nervous system. Its extended duration gives Tokesmo room to work with gradual alterations rather than obvious events. Layers accumulate, mutate, thin out and return in altered states. Synthetic tones do not sit above the field recordings like a technological commentary; they contaminate them, while the acoustic material gives the electronic elements a physical ambiguity they would not otherwise possess.

This is perhaps the most interesting quality of the EP. There is no reassuring opposition between “natural” and “artificial.” The synthesised sounds can acquire the roughness of physical objects, while recorded environments become strangely synthetic after enough manipulation. The distinction starts to collapse, which is precisely where the music becomes intellectually interesting. We spend most of our lives assuming that sound carries evidence of its source. Tokesmo treats that assumption as something that can be quietly dismantled.

The absence of rhythm is also significant. A musician associated with Morkobot could hardly be unaware of rhythm's power, yet "TKSM 01" largely refuses to provide the listener with the usual temporal handrails. This is not music that wants to march anywhere. There are shifts, pulses, tensions and internal movements, but they are not organised into the kind of reassuring periodicity that lets the brain put its feet up. One contemporary radio description neatly identified this first Tokesmo EP as the more sound-art and noise-oriented counterpart to "TKSM 02", whose source material is turned into percussive structures and IDM-leaning industrial rhythms.

That pairing makes the project considerably more intriguing. The two releases were conceived as complementary investigations, with "TKSM 01" concentrating on abstract, tonal and textural transformation while "TKSM 02" moves towards rhythm and percussion. In other words, Tokesmo appears to be conducting a rather elaborate experiment on the same basic question: what happens when recorded matter is progressively detached from its original function? On one side it becomes atmosphere, texture and ambiguity; on the other, it becomes rhythm.

The final “01.01.01” lasts just under four minutes and functions less like a conventional conclusion than a change in perspective. After the long middle section, its shorter duration feels almost like returning to the laboratory after having spent too much time inside the experiment. The numbers have acquired a strange logic by now. “01.01.01” no longer looks like an unimaginative title. It looks like a reminder that the same piece of sonic matter can be subdivided indefinitely, each decimal point suggesting another microscopic level at which perception might change.

There is also something quietly amusing about Tokesmo's decision to call these pieces precisely what they are not. The titles tell us nothing, the sources are deliberately obscured, and the music continually undermines our desire to identify things. Human beings, after all, have spent centuries developing increasingly sophisticated ways of putting labels on everything they encounter, only to produce a genre called “experimental music” for people who would rather remove the labels again.

"TKSM 01" is therefore less an album about field recordings than an investigation into what remains after a field recording stops behaving like documentary evidence. Its acoustic origins matter, but only as the beginning of a process. What emerges is neither a portrait of a particular environment nor an electronic imitation of nature. It is something more ambiguous: an environment rebuilt from memory, processing and physical residue, where the distinction between object and sound gradually loses its usefulness.

With eight "TKSM" EPs planned as four paired releases, this first instalment feels deliberately incomplete in the best possible sense. It establishes a method rather than exhausting it. "TKSM 01" asks the listener to pay attention not to what a sound represents, but to what it can become once representation is removed. That is a subtle difference, but an important one.

Sometimes experimental music wants to show you a strange new world. Tokesmo is doing something more mischievous here: taking pieces of the world we already know, erasing their name tags, and watching what happens when we can no longer tell what we are hearing.