"Pioneering Spirit" is, first and last, a record about sound design as composition. Leykam | Mark | Meyer work in that fertile middle ground where electronics don’t illustrate ideas but behave musically - breathing, stalling, repeating, occasionally misfiring in interesting ways. This is not a record of big gestures; it’s about calibration, balance, and the slow accumulation of detail.

The trio’s division of labor is clear but porous. Roman Leykam’s guitars - especially the fretless and the e-oud - introduce microtonal inflections and grainy attacks that constantly destabilize the electronic grid. Notes slide rather than land, suggesting melody without ever settling into it. Frank Mark’s beats and samples operate less as rhythmic anchors and more as textural engines: patterns loop, fray at the edges, then quietly reassemble, often changing function mid-track. Frank Meyer’s bass and synth work provide weight and depth, but rarely in a traditional low-end role; instead, they act as connective tissue, shaping space rather than asserting dominance.

Tracks like "Invisible Cage" and "Narrow Ridge" stretch time through repetition, but never lapse into stasis. Small shifts - an added harmonic, a recontextualized beat, a filtered tone creeping in from the margins - do most of the narrative work. "Things That Do Not Exist" plays with absence as a musical parameter, letting sounds decay fully before replacing them, creating tension through restraint rather than density.

There’s a consistent attention to timbre over melody. Even when motifs emerge, they feel provisional, almost sketched. "Machine Language" is a good example: rhythmic elements suggest structure, but the real interest lies in how synthetic textures and bass tones rub against each other, producing a kind of low-level friction that keeps the piece alive. "Adorable" and "Interworld" show a lighter touch, with more open harmonies and a slightly warmer palette, yet still avoid anything resembling a chorus or payoff.

What makes "Pioneering Spirit" compelling is its sense of internal coherence. Despite the varied instrumentation, the album maintains a unified sonic grammar: dry beats, carefully processed guitars, restrained use of effects, and a mix that favors clarity over spectacle. Nothing is overplayed; nothing is there to prove a point.

This is music that trusts process - recorded over multiple years, refined without being polished into sterility. It rewards attentive listening rather than emotional shorthand. Not a record that demands your attention, but one that quietly earns it, track by track, texture by texture, decision by decision.

There’s a quiet provocation baked into "Free Time", and it’s not hidden in the track titles or the circuitry. It’s right there in the premise: two people, a handful of synthesizers, a salvaged computer, and the radical act of taking time that isn’t immediately monetised, optimised, or justified. Ov Pain - a project that has always preferred friction over polish - turn “free time” into both method and critique. Not leisure as lifestyle branding, but time briefly wrestled away from the machinery.

Tim (and collaborator) frame the record as improvised songwriting, which is a deceptively modest phrase. What’s actually happening is closer to political economy by other means. These tracks weren’t laboured over, weren’t reverse-engineered for relevance, weren’t subjected to the endless anxious revisions that contemporary productivity culture treats as virtue. They happened. Quickly. Cheaply. Intentionally. In an era where everything must prove its worth before it exists, "Free Time" insists on the opposite order.

Sonically, the album feels lived-in rather than constructed. Synthesizers breathe, stall, circle themselves. Patterns emerge not because they were designed to, but because hands kept moving. There’s a pleasant refusal of spectacle here: no big drops, no virtuosic posturing, no cinematic overstatement. Instead, long-form pieces like “Fascia” or “Slouching Toward Erehwon” unfold with a stubborn, almost domestic logic - the sound of attention sustained without urgency. If this is ambient-adjacent music, it’s the kind that notices the room it’s in.

The political charge isn’t shouted; it’s embedded. Titles like “Comparative Advantage” and “Pusillanimous” quietly smuggle economic and moral language into what otherwise sounds like patient electronic drift. It’s hard not to read this as a sideways glance at systems that reward speed, clarity, and dominance. Ov Pain seem more interested in what happens when you let things remain partially unresolved - musically and ethically. The music doesn’t rush to persuade you; it waits to see if you’re still listening.

There’s also a philosophical modesty at work. Improvisation here isn’t framed as transcendence or risk-taking heroism, but as a practical response to limited means. Low-rent studios, recycled tech, short windows of availability - these aren’t obstacles to overcome, they’re the conditions of possibility. The immediacy and economy Tim mentions don’t just describe how the album was made; they are the album. Form follows circumstance, and circumstance refuses to apologise.

Humour creeps in through understatement. “Well Defined Utter Oblivion” is a title that feels like a shrug directed at managerial language, while the music beneath it quietly unravels any notion of definition at all. Nothing here sounds sarcastic, but there’s a dry awareness that naming things doesn’t necessarily tame them - a useful reminder in times obsessed with labels, metrics, and outcomes.

The land acknowledgment at the end of the attached notes (explaining that "Ov Pain acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung & Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Eastern Nation as the owners and traditional custodians of the land on which this album was conceived and recorded") isn’t decorative, either. It reframes the idea of “free time” against histories where time, land, and sovereignty were anything but freely given. That tension lingers uncomfortably, as it should. "Free Time" isn’t escapist; it’s reflective. It recognises that even moments of creative freedom are situated, contingent, and politically charged.

In the end, Ov Pain offer a record that doesn’t argue so much as demonstrate. This is what happens, they seem to say, when you stop asking what something is for and start asking whether it needs to be. "Free Time" doesn’t promise liberation. It sketches a small, stubborn pause - and suggests that, under the right conditions, that might already be enough.

Some records arrive fully formed; others feel like they’ve been excavated. "Youran" belongs firmly to the second category. It doesn’t present itself so much as it emerges, carrying with it the acoustics of factories, churches, and long collective breaths. Joachim Badenhorst - long established as one of the most curious and shape-shifting figures in European improvised music - uses this project not to show range (that’s a given), but to test how fragile materials behave when placed in very large rooms.

Badenhorst’s background in free jazz and composition is only the starting point here. "Youran" feels less like an ensemble album and more like a controlled experiment in resonance and trust. Musicians from radically different traditions are brought together not to blend into a smooth hybrid, but to coexist slightly uncomfortably: Japanese taiko and koto sit beside church organ, brass, electronics, electric bass, and reeds that alternately murmur, ache, or refuse to behave. The result isn’t fusion; it’s proximity.

The origin story matters, because you can hear it. These pieces were born inside spaces that don’t forgive excess. A former margarine factory soaked in grease and ghosts, a medieval church with reverb measured in geological units - both demand restraint, patience, and a willingness to let sound decay on its own terms. Badenhorst wisely doesn’t try to bottle the three-hour performances wholesale. Instead, he compresses their emotional logic into shorter forms, then hands the material to Rutger Zuydervelt for further erosion. What comes out isn’t polished; it’s worn smooth by handling.

Tracks unfold like hesitant gestures rather than statements. Horns often appear as breath before pitch, percussion as texture before rhythm. The church organ looms not as a king of instruments, but as a slow-moving weather system. Electronics don’t dominate; they corrode gently, blurring edges, softening attacks, making sure nothing feels too stable. Even when a melody briefly surfaces, it behaves like a thought you don’t quite trust yet.

There’s something quietly physical about "Youran". Despite its celestial leanings, it’s anchored in weight - of air, of architecture, of bodies moving through space. Titles like “Pulverized Light” or “Live Up To The Weight” feel less poetic than diagnostic. This is music about carrying things: memory, doubt, attention. And yes, sometimes it creaks under the load, which is part of the point.

Badenhorst has always been interested in the porous boundary between composition and erosion, but here that interest turns inward. The album doesn’t aim for transcendence; it aims for holding - holding sounds together just long enough before they fall apart. It’s serious music, but not solemn. There are moments where it feels like the ensemble is collectively shrugging and saying, “Well, this is what happens if we stand here and listen”.

"Youran" - Japanese word for “cradle” - is an apt title. Not because the music comforts, but because it rocks gently between states: live and studio, sacred and industrial, structure and collapse. It doesn’t resolve uncertainty; it suspends it, carefully, and asks you to sit with the vibration. Not a dramatic invitation, not a manifesto - more like an open space where something fragile might grow, or quietly fail, and either outcome feels honest.

There’s a particular kind of patience built into "Hode Medio / Sakpata". Not the trendy, lifestyle kind of patience - the real one, the sort that accumulates dust, sweat, distance, and unanswered questions. This record doesn’t rush because it already knows where it’s going. It took twelve years to get here; what’s another six minutes per side?

Aukio Sound’s path to this release reads less like a career move and more like a slow ethnographic drift. Helsinki-based, but mentally unmoored from neat geographies, he approaches electronic music as both social glue and solitary chamber - something you share in a room, but also something you disappear into alone. That duality hums quietly beneath every layer of this 12", shaping its peculiar calm. You can hear it in the way the beats walk rather than run, and in how the space around them feels inhabited rather than empty.

The voice of John Follass is the gravitational center here, and it’s treated with uncommon respect. Recorded in Grand-Popo in single takes back in 2013, his vocals arrive without theatricality - warm, direct, human. They don’t perform possession; they suggest presence. There’s something almost conversational in their tone, as if the microphone just happened to be there while something more important was happening. Dub techno often buries voices in fog; here the fog listens back.

Musically, Aukio Sound avoids the usual dub techno trap of fetishizing reduction for its own sake. Yes, the arrangements are stripped, but they’re not skeletal. They breathe. The rhythms lean into repetition without flattening into hypnosis-by-force. Polyrhythms surface gently, informed by voodou traditions without being dressed up as “world music seasoning”. Field recordings flicker at the edges, not as postcards but as residue - traces of a place remembered imperfectly, like humidity on the skin long after you’ve changed clothes.

“Hode Medio” moves with a grounded assurance, its triplet pulse quietly nudging the body while the synths hover somewhere between wood and vapor. It feels both terrestrial and slightly untethered, like walking at night and realizing you’ve been thinking in circles without noticing. “Sakpata”, meanwhile, loosens the grip even further. Echo bends the voice into soft spirals, the beat continues forward unbothered, and suddenly you’re no longer sure whether you’re listening or being listened to.

What makes this release quietly compelling is its refusal to dramatize its own backstory. Yes, it spans continents. Yes, it folds ritual, techno, dub, and ethnographic curiosity into a small physical object. But it never announces these facts. Instead, it lets them sediment. The result is music that feels lived-in rather than conceptualized - shaped by attention, revision, and the willingness to let ideas age before deciding what they are.

"Hode Medio / Sakpata" isn’t about trance as spectacle. It’s about focus as relief. About finding a narrow channel through the noise and staying there long enough for something to happen. Not transcendence, not revelation - just a moment where thought stops tripping over itself. In a culture addicted to immediacy, that might be the most quietly radical gesture of all.

There’s something quietly defiant about "Susan Sleepwalking" resurfacing forty years later, freshly remastered and unapologetically nocturnal. Not a comeback engineered for algorithms, but a slow reappearance - like a familiar figure you spot at dusk and aren’t sure is real until they pass close enough to breathe. The Arms of Someone New never chased the spotlight in 1985, and the album still doesn’t beg for attention now. It simply waits, confident that the right ears will wander by.

Formed by Steve Jones and Mel Eberle in the college-town half-light of Champaign-Urbana, The Arms of Someone New occupied a peculiar space even back then: adjacent to post-punk, flirting with college rock, but fundamentally invested in mood rather than momentum. "Susan Sleepwalking" was their opening statement, and it sounds like one - tentative, intimate, and stubbornly interior. The songs don’t rush. They drift, circle, hesitate. If this were cinema, it would be all lingering shots and meaningful silences.

The 2025 remaster doesn’t try to modernize the record, and that’s its greatest strength. Instead, it sharpens what was already there: the glassy synths, the soft mechanical pulse of early drum machines, guitars that feel less strummed than exhaled. Tracks like “St. Catherine” and “The Fisherman” retain their fragile gravity, suspended between romantic longing and emotional reserve. Vocals arrive veiled, never quite center stage, as if privacy itself were part of the arrangement.

What becomes clearer with time - and with better resolution - is how deliberate the restraint always was. These songs aren’t unfinished; they’re underlit. “With Louise” and “Susan Slept Here” don’t tell stories so much as suggest the existence of one just outside the frame. The effect is quietly addictive. You lean in, not because the band demands it, but because they refuse to spell things out.

The second disc, packed with demos, alternates, and rarities, acts like a sketchbook left open on a desk. You hear ideas branching, looping back, sometimes collapsing. It’s less about uncovering “lost classics” than about understanding the band’s internal logic - how repetition, minimalism, and atmosphere were not limitations, but chosen tools. Even at their roughest, these pieces carry the same inward pull.

Then there’s "Susan Dreaming", the third disc, which could have easily felt like an unnecessary appendix. Instead, it reframes the album through a new lens. Jones and Eberle reprocess the original material into an ambient-leaning electronic landscape that feels less like revisionism and more like afterimage. The melodies dissolve, rhythms evaporate, and what remains is pure residue - emotional dust, gently rearranged. It’s not nostalgic; it’s reflective, like revisiting a place you once lived in but now only recognize by smell and light.

What’s striking, listening now, is how little "Susan Sleepwalking" has aged - or perhaps how unconcerned it is with time altogether. It doesn’t sound retro so much as sidestepped by history. In an era obsessed with maximalism and confession-as-content, its quiet opacity feels almost radical. This is music that trusts ambiguity, that believes understatement can carry weight, that understands melancholy doesn’t need to announce itself loudly to linger.

"Susan Sleepwalking" remains what it always was: a record for insomniacs, wanderers, and people who prefer the long way home. The remaster doesn’t rewrite its story; it simply lets it speak a little more clearly in the dark. And if you miss its meaning on first listen, don’t worry - it was never meant to be fully awake anyway.