This album is a bit of an enigma wrapped in a riddle but a somewhat familiar one. Mana ERG is Bruno De Angelis, having released albums since 1990, both under his own name and Mana ERG. ( I can't help but think the name comes from Van Der Graaf Generator's "Man Erg" track on the 'Pawn Hears' album.) Bruno is also one half of LHAM (Leaving Hardly A Mark) with Giuseppe Verticchio, whose albums I have reviewed here previously. Both LHAM and Mana ERG are soundscape projects, but actually quite different. For one, LHAM is a bit darker with more industrial touches, not to say that Mana ERG doesn't have those moments. De Angelis definitely leaves a unique fingerprint on the music, and now I can see why LHAM is the way it is. If I had to assign a simple genre category for 'Concealed Under A Strange Tongue,' I'd call it Experimental Ambient, but this is a long way off from any kind of conventional ambient music. That the album was mastered by Chain D.L.K.'s own Marc Urselli, which is a big plus. (If you want your album to sound great, go with a Grammy Ward winner who understands what you're trying to achieve.) This is the only Mana ERG album I've heard out of the ten or so that have been released.

The album consists of 12 tracks that seem to resemble some type of fever dream. Bruno describes the album as "twelve instrumentals blending obscure rock textures with cinematic soundscapes...a final salute to the band's legacy and memory of Renaissance soprano Deborah Roberts." (Renaissance being the music genre not the progressive rock band of the same name. That would be Annie Haslam, who is still alive by the way.) The cinematic aspect of this album is partially due to Movie and TV series dialogue samples discreetly woven into the music, such as 'Apocalypse New!', 'Birdman', Blacklist', and others. The album begins with the sound of footsteps walking, a door opening or closing, then some acoustic guitar ("Responsive Pseudofingers") before moving into more rock-oriented terrain. Hey! This even sounds like the opening to a film! "Shades of Vermilion" is at first a confusing jumble of sounds and voices before it takes form as some kind of bizarre ritual or ceremonial semi-psychedelic...thing. (Think latter-day Swans.) "Alea Iacta" features the soothing voice of James Spader while surfing some strange exotica. I don't even know how to describe "Graceful Emanations" except that it sounds a little like something the French band AIR would do in their more experimental moments. While track 5, "Penumbra," will likely be remembered most for Emma Stone's quote "Who the fuck are you? You don't even have a Facebook page. You're the one who doesn't exist!" it is really much more than that. "Graves Of The Fireflies" is the ultimate fever dream piece on the album, and that mysterious, squeaky noise could be anything but firefles...maybe an oscillator?

"How Faint The Tune" WWII Foo Fighters and "How High The Moon" - an ode to distant UFOs and the past, still an enigma today. I think by now you might get the idea of what this album sounds like so I will dispense with describing the rest of the tracks on it. They are all different, but is a similar vein. This is great stuff, just as good as LHAM but in a different way, so if you enjoy that project, you will definitely enjoy this one. The album drops May 20th, and there is no Bandcamp link to it yet, so you will have to take my word, at least until then. Worthy and highly recommended.

The word “fusion” has suffered a long and difficult life. Somewhere along the way it became associated with overly polished virtuosity, airport-jazz catastrophes, or musicians aggressively demonstrating that they attended conservatory while nobody asked. Thankfully, Spiti/Home avoids nearly all those traps by remembering something essential: cultural convergence only becomes meaningful when it carries emotional necessity rather than curatorial ambition.

Led by Marianna Sangita Angeletaki Røe alongside the ever-shifting collective force of Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, this expansive live double album released through Pluritone feels less like a carefully managed world music project and more like the audible construction of identity itself: unstable, multilingual, contradictory, porous, alive.

The title says almost everything. “Spiti”, Greek for “home”, becomes not merely a place but an ongoing negotiation between landscapes, memories, languages, and emotional geographies. Røe’s biography alone already contains enough contrasts to destabilize simplistic notions of belonging: Mykonos sunlight, Sámi environments in Kautokeino, Trondheim’s colder Nordic spaces. Mediterranean warmth colliding with Scandinavian openness. Tradition intersecting improvisation. Personal history becoming sonic architecture.

And crucially, "Spiti/Home" never treats these intersections as exotic decoration. Too many cross-cultural jazz projects resemble diplomatic conferences with percussion solos, everyone politely coexisting while avoiding actual friction. Here, the different traditions genuinely interact, challenge, and reshape one another. The music breathes collectively.

The ensemble itself is extraordinary. Fourteen musicians moving through oud, hurdy-gurdy, Hardanger fiddle, tabla, accordion, bansuri, tuba, saxophone, electronics, bagpipes from Mykonos, Sámi vocal traditions, and contemporary jazz improvisation sounds on paper like the kind of idea capable of collapsing into multicultural chaos within seven minutes. Yet the album succeeds because it is grounded not in spectacle but in listening. Every player leaves space for the others. The arrangements expand organically rather than competitively.

“Olo Bros” immediately establishes the album’s emotional scale. Rhythms pulse with ceremonial energy while voices intertwine across cultural and linguistic boundaries. There is movement everywhere, yet no sense of forced complexity. Røe’s compositional instincts are remarkably generous; she allows melodies to travel through the ensemble naturally, gathering different textures as they move.

The live recording aspect matters enormously. Captured across festivals including Oslo World and Molde Mundo, the performances retain the unpredictability and physicality of collective music-making. One hears musicians reacting to each other in real time, not merely executing arrangements. Tiny imperfections become evidence of life rather than problems requiring correction. Humanity continues trying to sterilize art through perfection while audiences remain emotionally destroyed by breathing and vulnerability.

“Trouble” carries one of the album’s strongest emotional currents. The interplay between Mediterranean melodic sensibilities and Nordic spaciousness creates a fascinating tension, while the ensemble shifts fluidly between intimacy and eruption. Efrén López Sanz deserves special mention here, not only for his instrumental contributions but for the sensitive production and mixing work that preserves the music’s density without flattening its nuances.

Elsewhere, the album drifts into quieter territories. “Kom til meg” and “Døra” reveal Røe’s gift for emotional clarity without sentimentality. Her voice carries warmth but also uncertainty, longing, movement between identities. These songs never romanticize rootlessness, yet they find beauty within the instability of belonging to multiple places simultaneously.

The presence of Sámi traditions throughout the album adds another vital dimension. “Beaivelottáš” and elements of “Rootless”, enriched by Risten Anine Gaup, deepen the album’s exploration of cultural memory and land. These moments avoid tokenism entirely because they emerge from lived relationships rather than aesthetic tourism. The music understands heritage as something active and evolving, not museum material.

Instrumentally, the record is consistently absorbing. Sanskriti Shrestha brings extraordinary rhythmic sensitivity, while Jonas Cambien subtly threads electronics and keyboards into the ensemble without overwhelming its acoustic textures. The low-end foundation provided by cello, bass, and tuba often gives the album a quietly monumental gravity beneath its melodic openness.

“Sommerfuglen/Svalen” becomes one of the album’s most luminous moments, balancing delicacy and propulsion beautifully. The arrangement unfolds like migrating currents of air and memory, voices and instruments circling each other with almost ritual patience. Meanwhile “Tipota” closes the emotional distance between Mediterranean folk resonance and contemporary jazz improvisation so naturally that the distinction eventually feels irrelevant.

And then there is “Rootless”, perhaps the album’s emotional core. The title alone risks cliché in lesser hands, yet here it becomes something more nuanced. Røe does not frame rootlessness as fashionable cosmopolitan identity branding. Instead, the piece acknowledges displacement, multiplicity, and belonging as ongoing emotional conditions. Home is not presented as fixed geography but as something temporarily assembled through sound, memory, and human connection.

That may be the album’s greatest achievement. "Spiti/Home" creates a genuine musical commons without dissolving individual traditions into vague global abstraction. The differences remain audible. The frictions remain audible. Yet they coexist inside a larger emotional and sonic ecology built on openness rather than domination.

At its best, the album feels like standing at a shoreline where multiple seas meet without losing themselves entirely. Not a melting pot. More like converging currents, each carrying histories, languages, and emotional temperatures into shared movement.

A rare thing: an ambitious large-ensemble work that actually earns its ambition.

The human voice is probably the oldest instrument ever invented and still the least stable. It cracks under grief, trembles under fear, seduces, lies, prays, negotiates rent increases, leaves awkward voice notes at 2 a.m. and occasionally sings beautifully despite everything. Experimental music has spent decades trying to dismantle, process, stretch, and reimagine the voice through electronics, yet the most compelling works in that territory usually preserve some trace of human fragility beneath the circuitry. Neural Network does precisely that.

Released through Audiobulb, the debut solo album from Leslie Lowder occupies a fascinating space between improvisational vocal performance, experimental electronics, spiritual practice, and emotional document. Built entirely from improvised voice manipulated through effects and looping, the record transforms vocalization into shifting architecture without ever severing its emotional core.

The obvious comparison point is Laurie Anderson, and the connection is understandable. Like Anderson, Lowder approaches the voice not simply as carrier of melody or language, but as a mutable instrument capable of simultaneously conveying narrative, texture, abstraction, and emotional atmosphere. Yet "Neural Network" feels far less performative or conceptual in tone. Where Anderson often frames technology with ironic distance or theatrical intelligence, Lowder’s work moves inward toward something more vulnerable and spiritually exposed.

That vulnerability becomes central to the album’s identity. The fact that every sound and lyric was improvised, with no pre-composition or post-performance editing beyond mixing and mastering, gives the record a remarkable immediacy. Nothing feels overly controlled. One hears decisions occurring in real time, emotional states unfolding before they can harden into polished artistic intention.

“Call Me In” opens the album almost ceremonially. Layers of treated voice drift and fold around one another, gradually constructing a space that feels somewhere between meditation chamber and unstable digital dream. The loops are intricate but never clinical. Lowder understands intuitively that repetition in vocal music carries psychological weight differently from repetition in purely electronic composition. The body remains audible inside every cycle.

The title track deepens this interplay between organic expression and technological mediation. “Neural Network” is an apt name, though not in the obvious AI-era sense that immediately infects modern discourse whenever anyone says the word “network”. This is not music about machine intelligence replacing humanity. Instead, the album explores the tangled circuitry already existing within emotional consciousness itself: memory loops, grief echoes, spiritual resonance, internal fragmentation. Human cognition was chaotic long before computers arrived to accelerate it.

Lowder’s background in North Indian classical vocal traditions and overtone singing subtly permeates the album without becoming overt stylistic quotation. One hears an unusual sensitivity to sustained tones, harmonic interaction, and the physical resonance of breath itself. The voice often behaves less like linguistic communication than vibrational presence. Certain passages feel almost tactile in their density.

Then comes “Real Sad”, the album’s emotional center and unquestionably its most devastating piece. Created in response to the death of Lowder’s brother, the track avoids sentimental framing entirely. There is no dramatic climax, no manipulative crescendo engineered to manufacture catharsis. Instead, grief emerges as unstable texture, fractured repetition, emotional disorientation. The improvisational nature of the performance becomes crucial here because sorrow rarely arrives in coherent narrative form. It loops. It stutters. It returns unexpectedly through fragments.

What makes the piece especially powerful is its refusal to aestheticize pain into something neat or inspirational. Lowder allows vulnerability to remain unresolved. The electronics do not distance the listener from emotion; they intensify the sensation of consciousness trying to process unbearable absence in real time. It is uncomfortable in the best sense. Honest enough to resist easy beauty.

“The Sun Is In Your Side” introduces a slightly more luminous atmosphere, though the album never fully abandons its introspective gravity. The layering here becomes almost choral, voices dissolving into shimmering clusters that feel simultaneously intimate and cosmic. One begins noticing how carefully Michel Mazza’s mastering supports the material, preserving its rawness without flattening its dynamic subtleties.

“Solitude” closes the record with quiet restraint. The track feels less like conclusion than lingering emotional afterimage, the kind of silence that remains after extended internal conversation. Lowder understands that experimental vocal music often succeeds not through complexity alone, but through the tension between recognizably human sound and its gradual transformation into something stranger.

Stylistically, "Neural Network" touches multiple traditions: electroacoustic improvisation, spiritual minimalism, avant-vocal experimentation, ambient looping structures. Yet it avoids feeling academically assembled from influences. The record’s emotional sincerity keeps pulling it away from abstraction toward lived experience.

That sincerity matters because experimental music can sometimes become emotionally evasive, hiding behind process and technique until nothing vulnerable remains. Lowder does the opposite. Even under layers of effects and looping, the human body stays present throughout the album: breathing, grieving, searching, resonating.

And perhaps that is the record’s quiet triumph. "Neural Network" reminds us that technology does not necessarily erase intimacy. Sometimes it simply refracts it into new forms. Beneath all the processing, all the layered vocal manipulations, all the spectral textures, one still encounters a person attempting to navigate loss, memory, solitude, and connection through sound itself.

A deeply personal debut, then, and an unusually affecting one. Music not merely performed, but emotionally risked.

There is a very specific emotional territory occupied by nighttime driving music. Not “driving music” in the conventional sense, where advertisers imagine attractive people accelerating through mountain roads while emotionally supported by corporate indie rock. No, the real version: empty highways, sodium-vapor lights, distant radio static, the strange loneliness that arrives around 2 a.m. when gas stations begin resembling temporary shelters from existence itself. Transcoastal Night Drive understands that atmosphere with uncanny precision.

Released through Constellation Tatsu, the record by Personal System unfolds less like a conventional album and more like a drifting nocturnal transmission intercepted somewhere between memory and motion. Across seven concise tracks, it constructs an environment suspended between ambient music, vaporwave nostalgia, environmental sound design, and cinematic dream logic. The result feels oddly intimate despite its deliberate distance.

The opening “Last Gas Station Before the Horizon” immediately frames the experience with remarkable economy. Passing cars, distant gulls, low environmental hums: the scene is sketched rather than overstated. One can almost smell fluorescent-lit coffee and overheated asphalt. The concept of the album as an imagined radio broadcast drifting through the drive is especially effective because it transforms the listener into both traveler and receiver, moving physically through space while emotionally tuning into fragments of atmosphere.

This sense of transmission permeates the entire record. “Blurred Streetlights” glows softly with synth textures that feel less composed than remembered. The melodies remain understated, hovering at the edge of consciousness like thoughts that surface briefly before dissolving back into the night. Personal System understands that nostalgia functions most powerfully when incomplete. Too much detail kills the dream. Humanity continues trying to recreate the past in high-definition while memory itself survives primarily through distortion and emotional exaggeration.

Stylistically, the album occupies territory adjacent to vaporwave and late-night ambient traditions, yet it avoids many of the clichés that increasingly burden those genres. There is no ironic overdependence on retro signifiers, no exhausting avalanche of VHS aesthetics desperately trying to manufacture emotion through cultural shorthand. Instead, "Transcoastal Night Drive" approaches nostalgia more subtly, as atmospheric condition rather than aesthetic costume.

“In the Midnight Breeze” becomes one of the album’s emotional centerpieces. The track stretches into gentle rhythmic drift, balancing motion and stillness beautifully. Synth pads shimmer softly beneath understated melodic gestures while the arrangement maintains an almost tidal pacing. Listening feels less like following a composition than watching landscapes pass through a windshield without needing to name them.

“The Gentle Movement of Palm Leaves” introduces one of the album’s most evocative titles, and fortunately the music fulfills its promise. The track carries a humid softness, its textures swaying delicately without collapsing into decorative ambience. There is something deeply geographical about these compositions, though the locations remain intentionally vague. Coastal roads, fading motels, distant neon reflections: not real places exactly, but emotional cartographies assembled from collective memory and cinematic residue.

“Silver Moon ” perhaps best captures the album’s balancing act between serenity and melancholy. The melodies drift with quiet patience while subtle harmonic shifts introduce emotional ambiguity beneath the surface calm. One senses solitude throughout the record, but not despair. More the reflective loneliness of transit itself, that peculiar state where movement temporarily suspends ordinary identity. Long nighttime drives have always functioned as accidental philosophy sessions for exhausted humans trapped alone with their thoughts and overpriced gasoline.

The production deserves particular praise for its restraint. Personal System avoids over-layering or excessive polish, allowing the spaces between sounds to remain active. This openness gives the album its dreamlike permeability. Environmental textures and melodic fragments coexist naturally rather than competing for attention.

“Echoes Along the Coast” continues the slow drift inward, feeling almost like a memory of previous tracks rather than a distinct new statement. That circularity works beautifully within the album’s conceptual structure. Time behaves differently during long nocturnal travel. Minutes stretch, locations blur, songs repeat emotionally even when they technically change.

Then comes “Peaceful Blue”, the closing arrival at dawn. The track does not offer triumphant resolution or cinematic closure. Instead, it settles gently into stillness, capturing the fragile emotional neutrality of early morning after extended motion. The deep blue before sunrise has always carried a peculiar psychological quality: exhaustion mixed with possibility, melancholy softened by light beginning to return. The album ends not with answers, but with quiet continuation.

There are perhaps echoes here of artists associated with ambient drift and liminal electronic nostalgia, from Brian Eno to certain strands of late-night vaporwave and environmental electronic music, but "Transcoastal Night Drive" ultimately succeeds because it avoids becoming trapped inside genre self-awareness. It trusts atmosphere enough to let small gestures resonate fully.

Most importantly, the album understands that travel itself is rarely about destination. The emotional reality of driving through the night lies in suspension: between places, between memories, between versions of oneself. Personal System captures that beautifully across these modest but carefully shaped compositions.

A small record, then, but one capable of subtly altering the emotional temperature of a room. Or perhaps more accurately, of turning any room temporarily into the inside of a moving car somewhere beneath an endless coastal sky.

There is something wonderfully stubborn about Automation Studies Vol. 1. In an era where software updates expire faster than political promises and entire musical aesthetics are discarded every six months by exhausted algorithms, Stefan Goldmann has chosen to excavate his earliest electroacoustic experiments from the turn of the millennium and present them not as nostalgic artifacts, but as living systems still capable of mutating in real time.

Released through Macro Recordings, this sprawling triple-CD set documents compositions originally created between 1999 and 2001 using the internal synthesis and effects architecture of the TC Fireworx processor. Which, admittedly, sounds at first like the sort of sentence capable of instantly emptying a dinner party. Yet the remarkable thing about "Automation Studies Vol. 1" is how emotionally and physically alive it feels despite its deeply technical origins.

Goldmann has always occupied an unusual position within contemporary electronic music. While many producers speak vaguely about “pushing boundaries” before releasing the same kick drum for the seventeenth consecutive year, Goldmann genuinely interrogates systems: rhythm, tuning, spatiality, digitization, media archaeology. His career has moved fluidly between Berghain, electroacoustic composition, site-specific installations, theoretical writing, and institutional commissions, yet none of these contexts seem to fully contain his work. He approaches sound less as entertainment product than as behavioral phenomenon.

What emerges across these seventeen pieces is not simply an archive of early experiments, but the blueprint of an entire aesthetic philosophy already taking shape. The automated synthesis chains inside the Fireworx generate continuously shifting sonic ecologies where repetition exists without exact recurrence. Goldmann describes them almost like flowing rivers, and the metaphor fits: stable currents carrying endless microscopic variation beneath the surface.

“Council”, the opening fifteen-minute piece, immediately establishes the album’s strange temporal logic. Metallic resonances, granular pulses, and evolving harmonic debris accumulate with machine-like consistency, yet the textures never fully settle into predictability. The music seems to think itself forward. Listening becomes less about anticipating progression and more about inhabiting a continuously reorganizing environment.

This tension between automation and instability runs throughout the collection. Goldmann’s systems are algorithmic, but never sterile. Unlike much generative electronic music, which often feels content demonstrating process for its own sake, these pieces possess psychological density. There is friction inside the machinery. The sounds scrape against one another, hesitate, collide, mutate unexpectedly. One senses not cold precision but active negotiation between composer and system.

“Wear and Tear I” and “Grater” explore this beautifully. Their abrasive textures carry an oddly tactile quality, as though digital signal processing had somehow developed rust, fatigue, or nervous exhaustion. Goldmann seems fascinated by the imperfections emerging from automated behavior, the points where technological structures begin producing accidental emotional residue. Humanity keeps trying to build flawless systems while simultaneously being emotionally devastated by slightly distorted cassette tapes. A species committed to contradiction.

The longer works are particularly absorbing. “Feeder”, stretching over half an hour, unfolds like a self-regulating industrial ecosystem operating beneath an abandoned city. Rhythmic implications emerge only to dissolve again into shimmering interference and unstable harmonics. The piece rewards close listening because its details never stop shifting. Tiny fluctuations become monumental over time.
“Data Loss” feels especially revealing within the context of Goldmann’s broader interests in digitization artifacts and media decay. Here glitches, eroded frequencies, and unstable textures are not treated as decorative aesthetics but as structural conditions. The track does not romanticize malfunction; it composes through it. One hears systems remembering themselves imperfectly.

There are moments where the influence of electroacoustic traditions becomes unmistakable. Echoes of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, or even certain aspects of Iannis Xenakis drift through the album’s architecture. Yet Goldmann avoids academic stiffness by grounding these investigations in physical sonic impact. Even at its most abstract, the music remains bodily. Frequencies press against the listener rather than floating conceptually above them.

“Phobos Lab” and “Chamber of Atonement” perhaps represent the collection at its most immersive. These extended compositions function almost like autonomous weather systems, gradually revealing internal logics through prolonged exposure. Goldmann’s handling of duration is masterful here. He understands that long-form electronic music succeeds not through constant escalation, but through sustained perceptual transformation. After twenty minutes inside these sound fields, one begins hearing differently altogether.

The album’s title itself becomes increasingly meaningful. These are indeed “automation studies”, but not in the cold scientific sense. Goldmann investigates what happens when automated systems produce textures that feel uncannily alive, unstable, even emotional. The machine is not replacing human expression here; it is becoming another terrain through which expression mutates.

By the time “Angry Skies” closes the collection, the listener has travelled through nearly four hours of evolving electronic matter that somehow feels simultaneously ancient and futuristic. That temporal ambiguity may be the album’s greatest achievement. Despite originating from technology over two decades old, "Automation Studies Vol. 1" rarely sounds dated. If anything, it sounds strangely ahead of much current algorithmic composition precisely because it refuses polished digital perfection.

Instead, Goldmann embraces complexity, instability, and sonic friction. These pieces breathe, corrode, shimmer, and occasionally threaten collapse. They remind us that machines do not become artistically interesting when they imitate human certainty, but when they expose uncertainty within their own systems.

A triple-CD release devoted to early electroacoustic algorithms should probably feel like homework. Instead, "Automation Studies Vol. 1" unfolds like an archaeological dig through the subconscious of electronic sound itself: rigorous, hypnotic, occasionally unsettling, and unexpectedly beautiful in its restless refusal to remain fixed.