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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a wonderfully mischievous ambiguity in the title "Holzweg". In German, it refers literally to a path through the woods, but figuratively it means taking the wrong path, following a mistaken idea, ending up somewhere you did not intend to go. Forest Factory, the duo of Welsh improvising vocalist and sound artist Elvin Brandhi and Austrian composer and instrument-builder Andreas Trobollowitsch, seem to understand both meanings perfectly. "Holzweg" is made with wood, branches, mechanical turntables, voices and samplers, but it also sounds as if the two musicians have deliberately abandoned the sensible road signs of contemporary experimental music. No GPS, no reassuring arrows, no little voice announcing that you have reached your destination. Just keep walking.

That is not entirely surprising given the backgrounds involved. Brandhi has spent much of her career turning field recordings, tapes, vinyl, instruments and voice into unstable rhythmic structures, while her nomadic practice has taken her through an unusually wide network of collaborations and artistic communities. Trobollowitsch, meanwhile, has developed a body of work around prepared and self-built instruments, modified objects, plants, rotation, vibration, feedback and the relationship between sound, movement and physical space. Put them together and the distinction between instrument, object and environment starts to become rather inconvenient, which is precisely where "Holzweg" becomes interesting.

The album was assembled from recordings made in Naples, Yogyakarta and during the duo's 2024 Japanese tour, so its geography is not merely decorative information in the press sheet. The different locations become part of the record's unstable identity. Rather than attempting to disguise these shifts beneath a uniform studio finish, Forest Factory seem to let the material retain its different densities and temperatures. The result feels less like a conventional collection of compositions than an assortment of specimens brought back from several expeditions, then placed on the same laboratory table to see which ones start moving.

"TIKTIKTIK" immediately establishes this logic. Repetition here does not mean the comforting predictability of a beat; it feels closer to a mechanical process discovering its own rhythm. "METAL" introduces a harder, more abrasive physicality, while "NAKAMA PIETURA" and "ST TSEROF" suggest that Forest Factory have little interest in explaining exactly where one sound comes from. Their titles behave almost like found objects themselves: fragments of language whose meanings remain partially concealed, leaving the ear to perform its own archaeological work.

The most revealing title may be "FOREST LOST". If the album's name promises a path, this is where the signpost finally falls over. The forest is not presented as some postcard-friendly reservoir of organic beauty, full of birds chirping politely while humans contemplate their spiritual renewal. This is a forest understood through friction, rotation, impact and amplification. Wood becomes percussion, surface, obstacle and resonant body. The supposedly natural is subjected to machinery, while the machinery itself begins to behave like something biological. Forest and factory stop being opposites.

That tension is central to the record. There is something almost comic about the basic premise: two experimental musicians build turntables for pieces of wood and branches, then use them to make an album. Civilization spent several centuries developing increasingly sophisticated machines, and eventually somebody looked at a branch and thought, reasonably enough, “this could use a turntable”. Yet the apparent absurdity conceals a serious investigation into how sound is produced. The handmade mechanisms make physical cause and sonic consequence unusually close. You can sense the object being manipulated rather than simply hearing the polished result.

Brandhi's voice is crucial because it prevents the music from becoming an overly tasteful exercise in material-based electroacoustics. Her vocal presence can function as language, rhythm, noise or sudden human interruption, and her long-standing interest in dismantling conventional syntax makes her particularly suited to a project in which objects themselves seem to be speaking in an unfamiliar grammar. When the voice appears against the brittle mechanical textures, it does not necessarily clarify them. It becomes another piece of matter.

Trobollowitsch's contribution works in the opposite direction without actually opposing Brandhi. His practice has consistently treated sound as something physical and spatial, with self-developed instruments and modified everyday materials providing the mechanisms through which composition can happen. "Holzweg" therefore feels less like a meeting between “electronic music” and “acoustic music” than an attempt to make that distinction increasingly useless. A wooden plate can become an oscillator; a branch can become a percussionist; a human voice can become circuitry; a sampler can preserve the memory of something that was never intended to be musical in the first place.

"POPPU" and "TWIST" push the record into more animated territory, while "WOULDCHUCK" has the slightly mischievous quality of something whose internal logic you suspect you are almost understanding before it changes direction. "KASA" is another reminder that these pieces are not simply exercises in abrasion. There is space here, too, and an awareness of silence, resonance and duration. The final "RE-ROTATION SUN" provides a suitably circular conclusion, as if the machine has completed one revolution only to discover that the forest has not moved anywhere at all.

The ten pieces are short enough to avoid turning the project into an academic demonstration of how interesting wood can be. This matters. "Holzweg" is experimental, but it does not seem particularly interested in proving its experimental credentials. Its charm comes from the fact that the underlying mechanisms remain audible without becoming the whole point. There is humour in the clatter, sensuality in the vibration, menace in the metallic edges and something almost primitive in the repeated gestures. The record continually oscillates between deliberate construction and the possibility of accident.

That balance also explains why the album fits so naturally with ato.archives, the Tokyo-based label and archive whose catalogue moves through experimental, electroacoustic and sound-art practices. "Holzweg" has the quality of an artefact that could have been dug out of an imaginary archive devoted to machines that never quite became machines. It documents a peculiar musical technology, but also a way of thinking about collaboration, geography and material.

Ultimately, Forest Factory do not make the forest sound beautiful. They make it sound problematic, which is much more interesting. Nature here is neither pristine sanctuary nor convenient sample library. It scratches, rotates, splinters, loops and interferes. Technology does not conquer it, and neither does the human performer. The three simply get in each other's way until something musical emerges.

And perhaps that is the real joke hidden inside "Holzweg". Being on the wrong path is usually considered an error, but in experimental music it can be the beginning of a method. Forest Factory understand that getting lost is sometimes the only way to discover that the map was rather boring in the first place.