Love is an awkward subject for music. It inspires some of our most beautiful compositions and some of our least defensible lyrics, often within the same three minutes. Thomas Meadowcroft takes this embarrassing abundance of romantic expression and submits it to a rather elegant experiment: what happens when a statement about desire by Jacques Lacan is made into a song, then placed in conversation with other songs that share its harmonic foundations? The answer, on "love Songs Without Subjects", is a 42-minute composition for voice, chamber ensemble, electronics and fragments of popular music, in which familiarity becomes a slippery business. There is tenderness here, but very little reassurance. Love may be universal, as the greeting-card industry would have us believe, yet the ways we express it are remarkably repetitive. Meadowcroft makes that repetition the subject of his music, and finds something quietly strange hiding inside it.

The work begins with Lacan’s notorious formulation of love as an act of giving something one does not possess to someone who may not want it. It is the sort of proposition that can ruin a dinner party, particularly if delivered by someone who has recently discovered psychoanalysis and is determined to make it everybody else’s problem. Meadowcroft avoids turning it into a philosophical lecture. Instead, the text is carried by the voice of Ditte Marie Braein over a four-measure harmonic pattern built around the descending chromatic bass line traditionally associated with laments. The progression circles through a familiar emotional territory, moving downwards without offering the satisfaction of a final destination. The effect resembles a musical staircase whose steps keep descending while the floor stubbornly refuses to arrive. Love, in this arrangement, is less a destination than a peculiar form of perpetual motion.

Braein’s voice is central to the composition’s ability to remain intimate without becoming sentimental. She delivers the text with delicacy, allowing its contradictions to register without insisting on a single emotional interpretation. Around her, asamisimasa assemble a finely balanced combination of bass clarinet, cello, electric guitar, vibraphone, Fender Rhodes, piano and percussion, while Meadowcroft adds Roland Juno 106 synthesisers and tape delay. The ensemble’s sound is neither conventionally orchestral nor merely an ambient backdrop. The instruments retain their individual contours, but their roles become fluid as the music slowly changes colour. A keyboard figure may suggest a familiar ballad; a low woodwind tone unsettles its sweetness; the electronics introduce a slight blur around the edges, as if the music were being remembered rather than performed in the present. Nothing needs to explode. The unease develops through the patient adjustment of details.

The compositional device that gives the piece its particular intelligence is the way its harmonic progression begins to overlap with other works built around the same descending lament. Henry Purcell’s "Dido’s Lament" appears alongside Prince’s "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World", while the Beatles’ "Michelle" brushes against "My Funny Valentine". These references are not presented as complete quotations or nostalgic cameos. They surface in fragments, entangled with the incidental debris of analogue tape recordings: outtakes, small imperfections and traces of the recording process. Their familiarity is both an invitation and a distraction. The listener recognises something, tries to locate it, and finds that the object of recognition has already shifted. The songs are present without being fully available, like memories that retain their emotional charge while losing the precise circumstances in which they were acquired.

This is where the title’s notion of subjects becomes particularly suggestive. A love song ordinarily appears to have a clear centre: someone sings, someone is loved, and someone else is invited to imagine themselves in the same situation. Here, those positions become unstable. The words belong to Lacan, the harmonic pattern to a long history of musical convention, and the fleeting melodic references to a cultural archive shared by listeners who may have very different relationships with them. No single romantic narrative can comfortably claim the whole piece. What remains is the act of wanting itself, along with the familiar forms through which wanting has learned to express itself. The song becomes an object of desire, but an incomplete one. We hear enough to recognise it, never enough to possess it.

Meadowcroft has long worked across contemporary classical composition, electronics, theatre and radio, often placing recognisable cultural forms in contexts that subtly alter their meaning. That sensibility is well suited to this piece, which neither rejects popular music nor treats it as an inferior language awaiting intellectual rehabilitation. The lament progression is effective precisely because it has been used so widely. Its emotional power is inseparable from repetition, from the way generations of composers and songwriters have found that a descending bass line can make sorrow sound inevitable and desire sound noble. Meadowcroft does not expose this convention as a fraud. He reveals its flexibility, and perhaps its limitations. A familiar progression can make almost anything feel momentous, including a feeling whose object remains unclear. Music has spent centuries refining the art of making emotional uncertainty sound convincing.

The single-track format reinforces the experience. There are no separate songs to provide convenient resting points, no tidy sequence of contrasting moods to suggest that the problem of love can be solved through good programming. Instead, the material unfolds gradually, with its recurring harmonic motion producing a sense of suspension. The music advances, but the progression keeps pulling it back into familiar territory. This can be hypnotic, though the piece is not simply an exercise in slow beauty. Its pleasure comes from noticing the small changes within the repetition, especially when a half-remembered popular melody begins to emerge from the ensemble’s carefully maintained ambiguity. The occasional recognition brings a private thrill, followed by the slightly ridiculous sensation of having been emotionally ambushed by a few notes. Apparently, even the most sophisticated listener remains vulnerable to the musical equivalent of an old text message.

The production contributes to this uncertainty without obscuring the performers. Recorded at the Norwegian Academy of Music in June 2025 and produced by Meadowcroft and percussionist Håkon Mørch Stene, the piece preserves a sense of acoustic space while allowing the tape elements to interrupt its otherwise measured surface. The fragments feel neither like decorative samples nor like a conventional collage. They are part of the composition’s thinking, reminders that music is never entirely separate from the sounds and associations that listeners bring to it. The past enters not as a grand historical statement but as a tune that refuses to remain where it was placed. The result is a subtle negotiation between the composed and the contingent, between a carefully structured score and the cultural clutter that inevitably gathers around a familiar melody.

There is a risk that a work built around Lacan might become so enamoured of its conceptual framework that the music serves merely as an illustration. "love Songs Without Subjects" largely avoids that trap because its central idea is audible rather than simply explained. The descending bass line, the recurring melodic fragments and the gradual displacement of familiar songs allow the listener to experience the argument without needing to agree with Lacan, or even to find him particularly pleasant company. The piece does not claim to solve the paradox of love. It considers what happens when a culture repeatedly gives musical form to an experience that resists clear definition, and how those forms can remain compelling even when their original emotional circumstances are absent.

Ultimately, this is a love song that declines to identify its beloved, and a piece of contemporary composition that understands the value of leaving certain questions unanswered. Its beauty is restrained, its humour dry, and its emotional effects more persistent than dramatic. The familiar tunes never quite become possessions; they remain glimpses, fragments of something that seems close enough to touch but keeps changing shape. Perhaps that is why the music works. Love is rarely short of explanations, declarations or elaborate theories. What it lacks is a reliable method of making desire behave sensibly. Meadowcroft offers no such method. He gives the problem a melody, lets it descend for 42 minutes, and leaves us to decide whether we have heard a confession, a critique or simply another remarkably durable way of being confused.

Every system of belief needs a soundtrack. It helps turn an idea into a feeling, a feeling into a habit, and a habit into something that can pass for truth without having to endure too much questioning. A melody is particularly useful for this purpose: it slips past the defences that might greet a lecture with suspicion, then stays around long enough to become part of the furniture of memory. Perverts in White Shirts, the Zürich duo of Nathalie Dreier and Dave Phillips, take this deceptively simple mechanism apart on "CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories", a sprawling two-CD collection of repurposed songs, sermons, declarations and devotional fragments. The source material comes partly from the Children of God cult in which Dreier spent her childhood, and partly from other movements whose promises of enlightenment, salvation or belonging have carried less innocent implications. The pair subject these remnants to an unruly mixture of electronic distortion, fractured pop, psychedelic haze, dub-like manipulation and outright sonic sabotage. The music can be catchy, even inviting, but the invitation comes with a distinctly troubling small print.

The album’s 28 tracks frequently begin with something recognisable: a melodic contour, a voice delivering its message with conviction, the suggestion of a chorus that might once have brought a roomful of people together. Then the familiar begins to misbehave. Voices are stretched, submerged, interrupted or made to sound strangely mechanical; fragments of devotional enthusiasm acquire an uncomfortable theatricality; arrangements drift between wonky pop, warped psychedelia and noise without settling into a single stylistic jurisdiction. “What A Wonderful World We Live In” opens with a title whose sunny assurance becomes difficult to accept in this company. “Love Is The Only Weapon” and “Truth” place two reassuring abstractions under suspicion before the record has had much time to establish itself. The title “My Truth Is Better Than Yours” could almost be the slogan of an entire civilisation currently arguing with itself online, although the album’s concerns reach well beyond the internet. These are not merely clever names attached to ironic sound collages. They expose the verbal shortcuts through which certainty can be sold, particularly when the person doing the selling claims to possess exclusive access to the answers.

The unsettling thing is how often the music retains its appeal. Dreier and Phillips understand that the most effective forms of manipulation do not necessarily sound sinister. A sugary tune can carry an ugly proposition; an intimate voice can make domination resemble protection; a collective chorus can transform unquestioning agreement into an apparently joyful occasion. The duo exploit this mismatch rather than simply drowning their source material in noise. Their arrangements can be playful and grotesque at once, with crooked rhythms and oddly seductive melodic remnants keeping the listener involved even as the underlying material becomes harder to stomach. “Come To Mommy” has the ominous implications of a lullaby whose promise of safety deserves closer inspection, while “A Wonderful Bright Rhythm Will Meet Your Needs” sounds like a particularly dubious form of customer service. One almost expects the music to offer a free introductory consultation before explaining that cancellation is not permitted.

Yet mockery alone would be an inadequate response to the material, and the album is more interesting when its humour becomes uneasy. Dreier’s biographical connection to the Children of God means that this is not an abstract exercise in collecting examples of other people’s foolishness. The work involves reclaiming material that may carry the weight of an imposed childhood, while acknowledging that memory does not necessarily obey the neat moral divisions preferred by hindsight. Something once associated with isolation or indoctrination may still retain a melody, a vocal inflection or an emotional residue that cannot simply be dismissed. That residue is precisely where the album operates. The music neither restores the original material to innocence nor allows it to remain untouched by its history. Instead, it puts the listener in the uncomfortable position of recognising the attraction of something whose implications are repellent. There is no need to pretend that every fragment is equally sinister, or that everyone who finds a tune memorable has somehow been compromised by it. The point is that musical pleasure can survive the circumstances in which it was manufactured, sometimes long after the original message has become impossible to defend.

Dave Phillips is well suited to this collision of subject matter and sound. His extensive work in noise and experimental music has explored the physical and psychological effects of abrasive audio, while Perverts in White Shirts gives that sensibility a particularly charged relationship with song and language. Here, distortion is not just a way of making things sound unpleasant. It interferes with the authority of the voice, loosens the connection between a statement and its intended meaning, and makes the act of listening feel less passive. The duo can be caustic without becoming musically monotonous, moving from recognisable song forms to fragmented interludes and passages in which the original material seems to dissolve into its own emotional atmosphere. “Never Forever” and “Trust” offer different kinds of ambiguity, while “I Judge Your Guilts One By One” announces its prosecutorial instincts with an eight-minute duration that gives the accusation room to become something more complicated than a punchline. At other moments, the music sounds like a broadcast from a parallel entertainment industry in which the jingles have survived but the institution responsible for them has become increasingly difficult to trust.

The album’s length is part of its argument, although it is also its most obvious practical challenge. Nearly two hours of material can make even a well-intentioned listener wonder whether the subject might have been adequately established somewhere around the first disc. The shorter tracks help by creating a restless succession of perspectives rather than one continuous wall of unease, but the quantity of material occasionally threatens to blur the distinctions between individual pieces. This is not a work whose every idea needs equal time to make its point. Still, the accumulation has a purpose: the repetitions, changes in tone and recurring vocabulary of love, truth, freedom and salvation begin to resemble the relentless circulation of slogans themselves. One statement may seem absurd in isolation; repeated in different forms, it starts to reveal the machinery that keeps such statements alive. The listener is not simply hearing a collection of strange songs, but experiencing how a set of persuasive gestures can become exhausting through sheer persistence.

Then comes “Shangri-La”, almost 29 minutes long, occupying a disproportionate stretch of the album’s closing movement. Its duration changes the terms of engagement. What might elsewhere be delivered as a concise, unsettling vignette becomes an extended confrontation with the remnants of belief, as vocal fragments and electronic treatments linger beyond the point at which a conventional song would have offered a chorus, a resolution and a polite farewell. The title invokes an imagined sanctuary, a place supposedly removed from ordinary conflict, while the music makes the prospect of such refuge increasingly uncertain. It is an effective ending precisely because it refuses the convenience of a final verdict. After so many compact examples of persuasion and distortion, the extended piece leaves space for the material to become emotionally ambiguous rather than merely illustrative. The listener is allowed to remain uncomfortable, which is not the same thing as being left without a point.

The album’s wider implications are difficult to ignore. Cultic thinking is not confined to isolated religious communities or flamboyant gurus with questionable hair and a talent for filling halls. It can flourish wherever belonging depends on obedience, where doubt is treated as a personal defect, and where an authority figure promises to remove the burden of independent judgement. Contemporary wellness culture, political tribes, online communities and the commercial manufacture of identity all offer their own versions of the bargain, though the differences between them matter and should not be casually erased. Perverts in White Shirts do not need to claim that every form of conviction is equivalent to coercion. Their more unsettling observation is that the mechanisms of persuasion can travel between contexts, retaining their effectiveness even when the vocabulary changes. The promise of unconditional love, the assertion of exclusive truth and the demand for loyalty are not inherently sinister phrases. Their meaning depends on who controls them, what they require in return, and whether the person hearing them is free to walk away.

"CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories" is therefore more than a collection of deliberately mangled devotional pop. It is a difficult, darkly funny examination of how ideology attaches itself to the senses, and how the emotional traces of a past can persist beyond the beliefs that once organised them. Dreier and Phillips make no attempt to turn this material into an easy story of escape and recovery, nor do they offer the listener a convenient position of moral superiority. Their music can be absurd, alluring, abrasive and genuinely painful, sometimes within the same piece. The title’s emphasis on revisiting memories is important: what returns is not necessarily what happened in its original form, but what can still be heard, felt and questioned in the present. By the end, the most disturbing discovery is not that a sinister message can be wrapped in a pleasant tune. It is that the tune may remain pleasant even after we understand the message. The difficult work begins when we stop confusing that pleasure with proof.

London has a peculiar talent for making even a short walk feel like an administrative procedure. There are transport systems to negotiate, barriers to persuade, crowds to sidestep, private spaces pretending to be public, and enough competing noises to make silence seem like an expensive subscription service. For "Vertical London (New Year’s Day)", Australian-born, London-based sound artist Kate Carr takes this familiar disorder as the material for a journey with an unusual geographical ambition: rather than crossing the city from one side to another, she travels through its different elevations, from roughly twenty metres below sea level to 240 metres above it. The route begins around Loughborough Junction, descends into the Underground, passes beneath the Thames through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, and eventually climbs towards Hampstead, Crystal Palace and the viewing platform of the Shard. It is a substantial excursion for a winter’s day, especially one on which most sensible people are still negotiating the consequences of the previous evening. Carr, meanwhile, has brought recording equipment.

The 22 short tracks follow the journey in sequence, retaining the small incidents and practical inconveniences that a more conventional composition might discard. Birds and aircraft share the opening scene; underground trains generate electromagnetic hums; cyclists and joggers pass through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel; a transport barrier squeaks with sufficient character to earn its own instalment. Soho supplies tourists and delivery workers, Bloomsbury contributes the first New Year greeting, and a trip to Kilburn acquires personal significance through the presence in its history of geographer Doreen Massey. Later come an unsatisfactory lunch, a pianist outside Aldi, the crows and dinosaur sculptures of Crystal Palace Park, conversations about dogs, a frantic dash to the Shard and the final, slightly tipsy return home. The track titles are a pleasure in themselves, full of understated self-mockery and the sort of commentary that usually remains inside one’s head while waiting for a train. Carr has the good sense to leave it there only when it serves the recording; elsewhere, the sounds make their own case.

What might sound like a diary with microphones gradually becomes a more intricate study of how a city is assembled and experienced. Carr’s earlier work, including "From A Wind Turbine To Vultures (And Back)", explored the idea of a sonic transect: a route through different acoustic environments, allowing one set of sounds to give way to another as the listener moves through a landscape. Here, the method takes on a specifically urban dimension. London’s layers are not simply different neighbourhoods with different atmospheres. They are supported by systems that connect distant places and remain largely invisible until something makes them audible: the electrical activity of rail transport, the mechanical rhythm of lifts, the movement of goods, the controlled circulation of visitors through commercial spaces. The city is continually working, even when its inhabitants are enjoying a day off. Its infrastructure has no concept of a holiday.

Carr’s approach is particularly effective because she does not insist that every recording must become a miniature revelation. Some moments are brief, incidental or mildly disappointing, as ordinary experience tends to be. A squeaky barrier is still a squeaky barrier, however lovingly documented; a mediocre lunch does not acquire culinary distinction through the intervention of an artist. Yet these details give the album its texture and credibility. The recording does not pretend that a meaningful encounter must arrive with dramatic music and a change in the weather. Often, attention is the only thing that distinguishes an overlooked event from an irrelevant one. Carr listens without pretending that listening makes her omniscient, and the result preserves the unevenness of a day rather than editing it into a succession of conveniently profound moments.

There is also a quietly political dimension to the route. The movement between subterranean transport, pedestrian tunnels, neighbourhood streets, parks and elevated tourist attractions reveals a city whose spaces are governed by different degrees of access and control. Hampstead’s discreet security notices and the managed environments of the London Eye and the Shard belong to the same journey as delivery trolleys, public transport and people walking their dogs, but they do not represent the same relationship to the city. From above, London becomes a spectacular arrangement of lights and buildings; at street level, it is a collection of tasks, conversations, interruptions and small negotiations. Neither view cancels the other. The panorama is beautiful, Carr acknowledges, even when the experience of getting there involves queues, bad commentary and a booking that threatens to expire while one is still running towards the entrance. Urban life is full of such compromises between the thing itself and the machinery required to access it.

This is where the album’s apparently modest scale becomes one of its strengths. Carr does not need to manufacture an ominous drone or impose a grand musical arc on the material to make the listening experience coherent. The sequence itself supplies the structure, while changes in acoustic space create their own forms of tension and release. Enclosed passages give way to more open environments; the electrical undertow of public transport contrasts with the irregular activity of streets and parks; voices emerge as fragments of lives that continue beyond the recording. The city never becomes fully available to the microphone, and the album is more interesting for accepting that limitation. What we hear is shaped by where Carr stands, how she travels, what she notices and what happens to be audible at that particular moment. Another person making the same trip would produce a different record, even if they followed the same route and arrived at the same viewing platform.

That subjectivity matters. Carr’s London is affectionate without being sentimental, irritated without becoming cynical, and curious without the relentless cheerfulness of a tourism campaign. Its pleasures are real but rarely immaculate. The unexpected piano performance near Aldi can compete with a famous skyline; a flock of crows may offer a more convincing spectacle than an expensive attraction; the journey home can be as revealing as the ascent. By the final track, the excursion has become less about conquering the city’s vertical axis than about discovering how many kinds of London coexist within a single day. The title promises a physical trajectory, but the deeper movement is between different degrees of familiarity, from the mechanical spaces we barely notice to the unexpected encounters that make a place feel inhabited.

Released by Persistence of Sound, the label founded by composer and producer Iain Chambers, "Vertical London (New Year’s Day)" continues Carr’s sustained investigation into the relationship between recording, place and perception. It is an album that rewards attention without demanding reverence, and one that understands the everyday to be neither inherently mundane nor automatically magical. Sometimes a city offers a remarkable sound; sometimes it offers a squeaky barrier and an overpriced cocktail. Both belong to the record. Carr’s achievement is to make room for them without pretending they are equivalent, and to let the accumulated evidence of one winter’s day suggest something larger than itself. London remains impossible to capture in full, which is perhaps why it is worth trying again, preferably with comfortable shoes and a more realistic lunch plan.

There is a particular kind of electronic music that seems less interested in making sounds than in finding out how much punishment a sound can withstand before it becomes something else. Forster, the Berlin duo of Mitchell Keaney and Davide Luciani, have made a practice of this precarious experiment, where industrial abrasion, noise-rock aggression and club-derived propulsion are fed into a system with very little concern for preserving their original identities. "Live at Ohm" catches them in their natural habitat: not a pristine studio environment where every frequency has been persuaded to behave, but a live performance in which the sound is allowed to acquire its own bad manners. Recorded on 16 January 2026 at Berlin’s Ohm during the KooKoo event curated by Mieko Suzuki and Arno Raffeiner, the set arrives in four untitled sections. The titles, helpfully, offer no interpretive handrails. We are left with the music and the questionable decision to turn the volume up.

The opening stretch establishes an uneasy balance between pressure and inertia. Low frequencies seem to occupy more space than the speakers were designed to provide, while distorted electronic layers scrape against one another without settling into a stable arrangement. There is a rhythmic intelligence at work, but it rarely presents itself as a conventional beat; instead, pulses and clipped repetitions appear to be struggling for control of the material around them. Forster understand that heaviness need not mean constant acceleration. A sound held in place can be every bit as threatening as one hurled at speed, particularly when its internal components seem close to coming apart. Then the balance shifts. The third part is especially striking, pushing towards a damaged, irregular form of industrial techno, with bass pressure that feels almost architectural. A faint, voice-like trace briefly offers the possibility of something recognisably human, only to be swallowed by the surrounding turbulence. It is a small moment, but an effective one: a reminder that even the most hostile electronic environment can suggest a presence without granting it the courtesy of becoming intelligible.

The four pieces work less like chapters in a carefully narrated story than successive changes in the conditions of an experiment. Keaney and Luciani make extensive use of signal processing, compression and wave shaping, but the technical apparatus never feels like the main attraction. What matters is the instability it produces: rhythmic figures acquire a rough, physical edge; noise develops a peculiar momentum; and passages that might initially seem static begin to reveal movement within their own density. There are traces of dance music here, although the dance floor imagined by Forster may require a waiver from the building inspector. Their music has enough propulsion to activate the body, but not enough predictability to let it relax into habit. The result occupies an awkward and productive zone between club music and its refusal, between repetition as a means of organising time and repetition as a way of wearing it down.

The live setting is crucial. This is not simply a studio composition presented with an audience somewhere off-camera; the performance seems to retain the uncertainty of decisions made in real time, when a change in intensity can redirect everything that follows. Davide Luciani’s experience across electronic composition and audiovisual art, alongside Keaney’s club-facing instincts, gives the duo a useful double perspective: sound can be treated as a physical event and as a pattern that the listener’s body instinctively tries to interpret. Neither approach wins outright. "Live at Ohm" keeps its structures unstable enough to prevent easy classification, yet focused enough to avoid the familiar experimental-music trap of confusing difficulty with depth. There is a certain dark humour in the proceedings, too. The electronics appear to be conducting a strenuous negotiation over who gets to occupy the available bandwidth, and diplomacy is clearly not among their strengths.

Released by The Tapeworm’s Wormhole imprint, "Live at Ohm" documents a project more interested in testing its limits than polishing a signature sound. It offers no tidy resolution, no grand crescendo designed to make the preceding twenty-odd minutes seem worthwhile, and no reassuring sense that the damage has been contained. Instead, its four sections leave the impression of a performance continually revising its own rules under pressure. The reward lies in listening closely enough to catch the moments when apparent chaos begins to organise itself, only to lose that organisation again. It is an invigorating, occasionally punishing record, and a persuasive argument for live electronics as a practice of risk rather than mere reproduction. Just remember that the volume knob is not a philosophical instrument. Sometimes it really is just too loud.

Civilisation has a peculiar way of measuring success: build something enormous, extract whatever can be sold, leave behind a mountain of unwanted material, and then move on before anybody asks what to do with it. The shale bings of West Lothian, formed by Scotland’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century shale-oil industry, are rather inconvenient reminders of this arrangement. Some rise to nearly a hundred metres, and what was once classified as industrial waste has gradually become a habitat for plants, birds and other wildlife. Tokoro Wohnen’s "Bing Industries" takes this landscape as its point of departure, finding an unexpectedly fertile correspondence between those artificial hills and the discarded fragments of earlier musical performances. Across four long compositions, Martyn Riley and Beth Robertson assemble a world of unstable tones, manipulated recordings, guitar, cello, drones and spoken word, where the past is not tidied away but allowed to continue behaving unpredictably.

The duo’s working method is central to the result. Riley samples and resamples field recordings, works with manipulated cello loops and builds slowly shifting structures; Robertson brings guitar, spoken word and recordings made with a dictaphone. Their source material comes partly from previous improvisation sessions at Tokoro Studio in London, which they subsequently revisit, dismantle and reorganise. This gives the music an unusual relationship with its own history. Rather than treating an improvisation as a finished event, the duo regard it as something that can be entered again, from another angle, with the benefit of time and a slightly different set of intentions. The process resembles archaeology conducted by people who are not entirely convinced that the objects they have uncovered should remain where they found them. Fortunately, they have the good sense not to label every fragment and put it behind glass.

“Skrepana”, the opening piece, establishes a distinctly uneasy atmosphere. Creaks, rough harmonics and long, strained tones emerge without settling into a conventional musical hierarchy. Robertson’s voice appears amid the sounds, speaking with a measured intimacy that makes the surrounding textures feel even less predictable. There is no attempt to provide a reassuring distinction between foreground and background; a scrape can suddenly become as compelling as a sustained tone, while a seemingly incidental sound acquires an almost architectural presence. As the nearly twenty-minute composition develops, its harsher elements begin to accommodate more delicate melodic gestures. The change is not a triumphant arrival at beauty after a prescribed period of suffering. It is more like discovering that a place you had considered inhospitable contains forms of life that have been there all along.

The twelve-minute “a600w” extends this uneasy coexistence of roughness and tenderness. Distortion and softened tones occupy the same space without cancelling one another out. The effect is especially persuasive because the duo avoid turning contrast into a simplistic battle between darkness and light. A distorted sound does not automatically signify danger, just as a gentle one is not obliged to offer consolation. Instead, each texture alters the way the others are perceived. The music seems to fluctuate between different degrees of focus, occasionally allowing a melodic line to emerge before surrounding it with enough interference to prevent easy sentimentality. The cryptic title offers no interpretative assistance, which is probably sensible: even music deserves the occasional privacy of an unhelpful label.

“Frosty” introduces a grainier, more radio-like character, with fuzzy interference and wavering tones suggesting signals whose origins remain uncertain. Yet the composition is not simply an exercise in sonic decay. Its rough surfaces are balanced by passages of unexpected delicacy, and the movement between the two creates a tension that remains compelling across its thirteen minutes. Sounds appear to lose their stability, then acquire a different kind of coherence through their relationship with neighbouring elements. Riley and Robertson understand that distortion becomes less interesting when it is used as a universal seasoning. Here, it has a specific role: it changes the apparent distance, temperature and weight of the material around it. Even the more delicate passages retain a slight uncertainty, as though they might dissolve if approached too confidently.

“Rogue” closes the album without attempting to settle the questions raised by the preceding pieces. Its darker textures and gradual shifts in intensity suggest a landscape after an event whose details are no longer available. Softer tones occasionally emerge from the denser material, but they do not offer a definitive release from it. The composition’s strength lies in allowing these different qualities to coexist without forcing them into a narrative of damage followed by recovery. Nature does not necessarily repair what industry has left behind; sometimes it adapts, grows around the damage and produces something that would not otherwise have existed. There is a difference between healing and continuing, and "Bing Industries" is sensitive to it.

Beth Robertson’s spoken contributions add another dimension to this relationship between place, memory and duration. Her voice is neither a conventional narrator explaining the music nor an ornamental presence added to make an otherwise abstract recording more accessible. It introduces human thought into a setting that resists human control, and its relative intimacy makes the surrounding sounds feel even larger. Robertson’s wider practice as a sound and radio artist, with an interest in local ecologies and collective listening, finds a natural counterpart in Riley’s work with sampled material and manipulated recordings. Their collaboration is effective because neither element has to dominate. The voice does not translate the sounds into a single meaning, and the sounds do not reduce the voice to another anonymous texture.

There is a risk, with a project so closely tied to an ecological and industrial metaphor, that the music might become an illustration of its own accompanying text. "Bing Industries" largely avoids this trap. Its compositions are compelling even without knowing the history of the shale heaps, although that history gives the listening experience a sharper edge. The music does not attempt to recreate an industrial site through literal sound effects, nor does it romanticise the abandoned landscape as though pollution were simply an attractive filter applied to nature. Instead, its method of recycling earlier performances offers a more subtle parallel: the unwanted, the accidental and the incomplete can acquire new significance through sustained attention and a change of context.

Flaming Pines has long made room for work that approaches listening through field recording, sound art and experimental ambient music, and this release sits comfortably within that territory without feeling like an exercise in genre compliance. Its four compositions demand patience, but not the solemn, self-congratulatory patience sometimes associated with very long drone music. They reward attention because their internal relationships continue to change, not because the listener must endure a prescribed duration before receiving a certificate of spiritual achievement. There are no grand climaxes to congratulate us for staying put, and no convenient final revelation explaining what all the noise was supposed to mean.

The real achievement of "Bing Industries" is its understanding that the remains of one process can become the starting point for another without losing all evidence of their previous existence. Its sounds carry the marks of their origins, yet those origins no longer determine what they can become. The shale heaps have outlasted the industry that produced them; the musical fragments have survived the performances from which they were taken. Neither is pristine, and neither needs to be. Tokoro Wohnen make a persuasive case for forms of beauty that emerge not from perfect materials but from prolonged contact, altered circumstances and the stubborn persistence of things that were supposed to be finished. In a culture devoted to replacement, this is a quietly radical proposition. Even waste, it turns out, can have an afterlife more interesting than its original career.