Some records try to tell you what they are about. This one behaves more like a late-night radio that refuses to stay on one station, drifting between memory, theology, childhood static, and the faint suspicion that all of it is somehow connected.

Kodax Strophes - that wonderfully unstable alias of Martyn Bates - has always worked in this liminal space between song and transmission. With "Christ In The House Of Martha & Mary", he leans fully into the metaphor he himself proposes: music as signal, as residue, as something received rather than constructed.

And like most signals worth listening to, it’s not clean.

The album is framed as a life-journey, sliding across time rather than moving through it. You can hear that immediately in the opening fragments: short bursts, test tones, half-formed melodies that feel less like introductions and more like tuning attempts. “Signal”, “Test Transmission”, “Call Sign” - these aren’t just titles, they’re instructions. You are not entering a narrative. You are scanning.

What emerges from that scan is a collage of songs that oscillate between the intimate and the cosmic, often within the same breath. In “Prescient”, the language is almost devotional - waiting, calling, reaching across loss - yet it never settles into religious certainty. It hovers. Bates’ voice, fragile and insistent, carries that tension beautifully: always on the edge of revelation, never quite arriving.

Then there’s “The Good Luck Book”, where memory becomes something sensory and overwhelming - “perfumes rich like bibles”, “seven senses soaring”. It reads like a childhood myth rewritten from inside the body, where perception itself is a kind of blessing. The phrasing is simple, almost naive, but the accumulation of images creates a strange density, as if the past were pressing too close to the present.

Of course, Bates being Bates, the album doesn’t stay in that register for long. “Skulls” introduces a darker procession - dancers, roses, repetition turning into something ritualistic, almost obsessive. The word itself - "skulls" - loses meaning through insistence and becomes pure sound, a percussive mantra. Language here is not stable. It erodes, loops, reconstitutes.

And then he does something quietly audacious: he inserts echoes of existing cultural memory without fully claiming them. “Flowers”, with its ghost of a familiar anti-war lament, doesn’t quote so much as haunt. The effect is unsettling. You recognize the shape, but it arrives distorted, as if carried through decades of interference.

The title track is perhaps the closest thing to a center, though calling anything here a “center” feels optimistic. It draws on the biblical scene - Martha busy, Mary contemplative - but reframes it as an interior state. “You are the room”, Bates sings, collapsing space, presence, and memory into a single point. The spiritual question isn’t staged as doctrine, but as proximity: how close can you get to something before it dissolves into you?

Throughout, the instrumentation remains deliberately porous. Guitar, piano, tape fragments, radio noise - they don’t form a stable arrangement so much as a shifting backdrop, like stations fading in and out. Even the additional tracks, presented almost as a second, tangential broadcast, reinforce this sense of overflow. The album doesn’t end; it trails off into other possible versions of itself.

What ties all of this together is the idea of transmission - not just in the electromagnetic sense Bates fixates on, but in the broader human one. Songs, memories, cultural fragments, spiritual anxieties: all of them traveling across time, degraded, reshaped, reinterpreted. Like starlight, to borrow his own metaphor - arriving long after the source has vanished.

Released on Hive-Arc Records, the album feels less like a finished statement and more like a living archive. Messy, inconsistent, occasionally frustrating. Also, inconveniently, quite moving.

There’s a question running underneath it all: how do you resist, how do you serve, how do you remain yourself within this constant flow of signals? Bates doesn’t answer. He tunes the dial, lets the noise through, and leaves you to decide which fragments matter.

Not the most comforting approach. But then again, clarity was never really part of the broadcast.

Some records try to address history, which usually means polishing it into something digestible. "Chronicles from the Arab Cold War" refuses that courtesy. It doesn’t interpret events so much as stand uncomfortably close to them, like a witness who isn’t sure whether speaking will clarify anything or just make the silence heavier.

Behind Pharoah Chromium is Ghazi Barakat, a figure who has long treated sound as both archive and intervention. His earlier works already circled themes of displacement and memory, but here the approach tightens: fewer gestures, sharper edges, less distance between material and implication.

The album’s construction is deceptively simple. Flutes, EWI, rhythmic patterns that echo belly dance traditions, and - crucially - voices sourced from a 1970s Omani revolutionary record. That last element could easily slip into the realm of aestheticized politics, the kind that borrows history as texture. Barakat avoids that trap by letting the voices remain stubbornly themselves. They don’t blend seamlessly. They insist.

Side A opens with a strange, almost disarming clarity. The children’s voices - light, collective, carrying something that resembles hope without announcing it - interact with the instrumental layers in a way that feels suspended between eras. There’s a temporal dislocation at play: 1970s revolutionary chants reframed within a present marked by ongoing violence. The dedication to the children of Gaza is not expressed through documentary realism, but through a kind of fragile projection. Not what is, but what could still be imagined. It’s a risky move, bordering on naïve, and precisely for that reason it works.

Then the record turns.

Side B doesn’t escalate theatrically. It darkens. The tonal palette thickens, the rhythms feel heavier, less fluid. The voices shift from children to adults, and with them comes rhetoric, urgency, anger that no longer needs translation. The presence of Philipp Selalmazidis adds a metallic tension, lines that don’t so much accompany as press against the existing material, amplifying its unease.

What’s striking is how the album refuses resolution. There is no synthesis between innocence and anger, no comforting narrative arc. Instead, the two states coexist, uneasily, like parallel realities forced into the same acoustic space. The listener is left to navigate that tension without guidance, which is either a profound gesture of respect or a quiet abdication of responsibility. Possibly both.

There’s also an ethical precision in Barakat’s decision not to use direct recordings from current atrocities. In a cultural landscape increasingly comfortable with turning suffering into raw material, this restraint feels deliberate. The record doesn’t document. It resonates. It creates a space where listening becomes less about consuming information and more about acknowledging presence - past, present, unresolved.

Released by Discrepant, a label known for its interest in displaced sounds and fractured histories, "Chronicles from the Arab Cold War" fits into a catalog that often questions how music travels through time and context. Not everything lands cleanly. At times, the layering feels almost too careful, as if aware of its own weight. But perhaps that hesitation is part of the work. This is not music that wants to convince you. It wants you to remain aware of what cannot be resolved, what cannot be neatly framed.

Between innocence and anger, the record doesn’t choose. It holds both, and lets them interfere with each other.

It’s not comfortable listening. It shouldn’t be.

There’s a long tradition of artists “returning to nature”, usually by recording it, processing it, and quietly rebranding it as something more profound than wind doing its job. "Horizons", the collaboration between Austin Williamson and Thea Maloney, risks falling into that well-worn gesture. Then it does something more interesting: it lets the environment push back.

The record begins with coordinates - “39°02'38.7"N 95°12’21.5"W” - which sounds clinical until you realize it’s a way of refusing metaphor. This is not “a prairie”. This is "that" prairie: Rockefeller Prairie, Kansas. You don’t get pastoral nostalgia here. You get grass, wind, friction, distance. The field recordings aren’t decorative; they’re stubbornly literal.

What follows is less a transformation than a negotiation. Williamson’s background in programming and improvisation meets Maloney’s (under the Blanket Swimming moniker) interest in affective and spiritual landscapes, and neither fully yields. Synth lines stretch across the surface like tentative hypotheses, processed guitar tones hover without committing to melody, and beneath it all the field recordings continue their indifferent activity. Birds don’t care about your compositional arc. The album wisely doesn’t try to convince them otherwise.

“Viewing Ourselves As Strangers”, the central and longest piece, unfolds with a patience that borders on confrontational. Layers accumulate, but not in a way that suggests progress. Instead, they thicken the air. Listening becomes less about following a trajectory and more about adjusting your sensitivity, like your ears are being recalibrated in real time. There’s a subtle tension here between immersion and distance, as if the music is inviting you in while simultaneously reminding you that you don’t belong.

“Temporary Utopias” hints at structure, almost offering a shape you could hold onto, then quietly dissolves it. The title feels less aspirational than diagnostic. Any sense of coherence is provisional, contingent on how long you’re willing to stay with it before your attention fractures.
By the time the closing track “Horizons” arrives, the album has settled into a kind of expanded stillness. Not silence, not quite. More like a field of low-level activity where everything is in motion but nothing demands focus. It’s here that the collaboration feels most resolved, not because it reaches a conclusion, but because it stops pretending one is necessary.

Maloney’s broader practice - spanning sound, photography, and intermedia work - leaks into the music in subtle ways. There’s a visual sensibility at play, a sense of framing and depth that makes the listening experience feel spatial rather than purely sonic. Williamson, meanwhile, maintains a compositional restraint that prevents the material from drifting into pure abstraction. Together, they create something that feels less like a statement and more like a condition.

Released by Dragon's Eye Recordings, a label well-versed in these liminal territories, "Horizons" sits comfortably within a lineage of works that treat environment as collaborator rather than subject. But it avoids the more predictable traps of the genre. It doesn’t romanticize. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t resolve.

It just stays there, wide and patient, while you decide how much of yourself you’re willing to leave in it.

There’s a particular kind of courage in setting Gertrude Stein to music. Not the heroic, trumpet-blazing kind. More the quiet, slightly unhinged confidence of someone who looks at repetition, fragmentation, semantic loops and thinks: yes, this should sing.

Christoph Gallio has been circling the outer edges of jazz and composition for decades, often where structure begins to loosen but never quite dissolves. With "Stone Is A Rose Is A Stone Is A Stone / Yet Dish", he doesn’t just approach Stein’s text, he inhabits its peculiar logic. Or perhaps he lets it inhabit him, which sounds more accurate and slightly more concerning.

The ensemble - Sonia Loenne on voice, Gallio on soprano and alto sax, Vito Cadonau on double bass, and Flo Hufschmid on drums and percussion - operates with the kind of restraint that suggests everyone is acutely aware they are dealing with unstable material. Stein’s language doesn’t progress, it circles, accumulates, erodes meaning through insistence. The music mirrors this, but without becoming a mere illustration. That would be too easy, and also quite boring.

Instead, the six-part structure unfolds like a series of rooms where the same objects are rearranged with minor, disorienting differences. The voice doesn’t interpret Stein in any theatrical sense. Sonia Loenne treats the text almost as a physical substance, something to be weighed, stretched, tested for resonance. Words land, repeat, shift emphasis, lose their footing. Meaning becomes provisional, negotiated in real time.

Gallio’s saxophones rarely dominate. They hover, insinuate, sometimes cut through with a line that feels less like a melody and more like a question asked at the wrong moment. There’s a dryness to his tone that resists lyricism, as if he’s deliberately avoiding the temptation to beautify what is already structurally strange. It’s a smart move. Stein doesn’t need decoration; she needs space.

The rhythm section is where things get quietly subversive. Cadonau’s bass and Hufschmid’s percussion don’t anchor the music so much as unsettle it from below. They introduce pulses that almost cohere into grooves, then withdraw them before anything comfortable can form. It’s like watching someone build a staircase and then casually remove a few steps just to see what happens.

The subtitle might promise “unique and rare beauty”, which is a bold claim in a field where beauty is often treated with suspicion. What "Stone Is A Rose Is A Stone Is A Stone / Yet Dish" offers instead is something more elusive: a shifting surface where language and sound keep misaligning just enough to stay alive.

Soundtracks often pretend to guide you through a story. "Strive – Original Music & Outtakes" does something less polite: it drops you into a malfunctioning system and lets you figure out where the exits used to be.

Timo Kaukolampi has spent years navigating the intersection between kosmische drift, industrial pulse and something colder, more clinical. With K-X-P and Op:l Bastards, he built a reputation for music that feels engineered rather than composed, as if circuitry had developed a taste for rhythm. This first solo soundtrack doesn’t mark a departure. It sharpens the edges.

The premise behind "Strive" - a near-future world where technological obsession has quietly replaced human connection - could easily collapse into familiar dystopian aesthetics. Kaukolampi avoids that trap by refusing to aestheticize the future. Instead, he degrades it. The sound palette is fractured, corroded, intentionally incomplete. Minimalism here isn’t elegant reduction; it’s damage control.

Tracks like “Beginning” and “Max Speaks” sketch out a sonic architecture built from pulses that feel slightly misaligned, like a machine running just off calibration. There’s tension, but not the cinematic kind that resolves into release. It accumulates, compresses, lingers. Even the shortest pieces - “Corpse”, “Overpass” - function less as transitions and more as interruptions, abrupt reminders that continuity is optional.

What makes this release particularly revealing is the inclusion of outtakes and discarded sketches. Normally, these function as archival curiosities, polite extras for completists. Here, they feel essential. The discarded versions - “First Drive”, “End Titles”, “Drive Movement” - don’t just show alternative ideas; they expose the process of erosion, the gradual stripping away of anything too stable, too resolved. You hear decisions being made, or more accurately, unmade.

There’s a lineage here that stretches from the Berlin school’s expansive electronics to the austere patience of Éliane Radigue, but Kaukolampi compresses those influences into something more volatile. His sound doesn’t expand outward. It folds in on itself, creating dense, pressurized environments rather than open sonic landscapes.

Released by Öm Sound, "Strive - Original Music & Outtakes" feels less like a finished statement and more like a controlled exposure of a working mind. Not everything here is complete, and that’s precisely the point. Completion would imply stability, and this music has no interest in reassuring you that things hold together.

Listening to it without the film is a slightly disorienting experience, like reading fragments of a technical manual for a machine you’ve never seen. But the emotional logic still leaks through: obsession, distance, the faint, stubborn trace of connection trying to survive in hostile circuitry.

It’s not immersive in the usual sense. It doesn’t surround you. It encloses you. And once you’re inside, it becomes clear that the system isn’t broken. It’s functioning exactly as designed. Which is, admittedly, worse.