Reviewing "Through The Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping" is a curious assignment, because it is barely an album in the conventional sense. It is, instead, a journey through someone else's imagination, with Derek Jarman himself acting as both guide and unreliable cartographer. The music, if one insists on calling it that, is hidden inside the cadence of his voice, in the pauses between images, in the hypnotic rhythm of language refusing to behave like prose. Humanity has spent centuries arguing whether words or music came first. Jarman, characteristically, ignores the debate and simply lets them dissolve into one another.

Written in 1971 but only published decades later, this singular piece of narrative fiction feels less like an early work than a secret blueprint. Long before "Blue", before "Caravaggio", before becoming one of Britain's defining independent filmmakers and one of the most fearless artistic voices confronting the AIDS crisis, Jarman was already cultivating the same symbolic vocabulary that would come to define his cinema: colour as emotion, myth as autobiography, desire as geography, and dreams as political acts. His artistic life never respected the neat borders separating film, painting, literature, gardening or activism. Everything fed everything else, like roots exchanging nutrients beneath invisible soil.

The story follows the blind King Amethyst and his valet John across an imaginary America that resembles no actual map and every psychological landscape at once. Highways, deserts, emperors, sphinxes and roadside absurdities drift past like postcards mailed from the subconscious. The destination remains gloriously irrelevant. Every encounter feels simultaneously ancient and unmistakably modern, as though fairy tales had wandered into a supermarket parking lot after taking too much LSD.

Listening rather than reading alters the experience profoundly. Jarman's delivery avoids theatrical excess, remaining almost conversational, yet that restraint makes the surreal imagery even stranger. He never appears eager to convince the listener. He simply states impossible things with complete confidence, leaving your imagination to do the heavy lifting. It is an effective strategy. Reality, after all, has been performing increasingly implausible plot twists for years.

Cold Spring's vinyl edition also restores the material's physical dimension through reproductions of Jarman's handwritten pages and photographs by Michael Ginsborg, transforming what was once an elusive cassette release into something closer to an archival object. Rather than merely preserving history, the release reminds us how many artistic works spend decades quietly waiting for the right moment to become audible again.

What makes "Through The Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping" remarkable today is not simply its historical importance, but how contemporary its sensibility remains. The fragmented narrative, shifting identities and refusal of conventional storytelling anticipate artistic languages that would only become widespread decades later. Yet Jarman never sounds calculated or academically obscure. His surrealism retains the playful curiosity of someone genuinely fascinated by symbols rather than eager to weaponize them into intellectual puzzles.

This is certainly not background listening. It asks for patience, surrender and perhaps a willingness to become temporarily lost. Fortunately, getting lost is the entire point. The blind king often seems to perceive more clearly than those who can see, suggesting that orientation is less about eyesight than about attention. In an age obsessed with destinations, algorithms and certainty, Jarman quietly proposes another possibility: perhaps wandering is not failure but its own form of wisdom.

More than fifty years after it was written, "Through The Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping" still refuses to arrive anywhere definitive. It remains suspended between literature, performance, cinema and sound art, occupying a territory that belongs entirely to Derek Jarman. Few artists managed to make uncertainty feel this luminous. Fewer still could transform an aimless road trip into a myth that continues to unfold each time someone presses play.

There are albums that document performances, and others that document places. "Vents d'aether" somehow manages to do both while quietly suggesting that the distinction may be artificial. On this remarkable first collaboration between Jérôme Bouve and Delphine Dora, the true protagonist is neither the organ nor the harmonium, nor even the performers themselves. It is the invisible conversation between architecture, memory and air. After all, churches have been collecting echoes for centuries. It would be rude not to let them contribute.

Released by the consistently adventurous Hallow Ground, "Vents d'aether" originates from a deceptively simple idea. Bouve had long imagined recording the organs and harmoniums scattered across the churches of the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy, treating them not as interchangeable instruments but as unique acoustic organisms, each carrying its own history in wood, stone and metal. Finding Delphine Dora proved decisive. Few contemporary musicians possess her extraordinary sensitivity to improvisation, where technical mastery is always placed in service of intuition rather than display.

Over the past two decades, Dora has quietly become one of the most singular figures in the European experimental underground. Her prolific discography moves effortlessly between avant-folk, free improvisation, chamber minimalism, electroacoustic composition and dreamlike songcraft, always guided by a rare ability to preserve vulnerability without sacrificing formal sophistication. Whether working with piano, organ, voice or found sounds, she consistently treats music less as composition than as attentive listening made audible.

That philosophy permeates every moment of "Vents d'aether". The six pieces began as lengthy improvisations recorded inside various churches before being carefully shaped in the studio and enriched with field recordings by SA~RA. Yet "enriched" almost feels misleading. These environmental sounds never function as decorative ambience. They remain fully integrated musical elements, inseparable from the instruments themselves. Wind, distant movement, subtle resonances and environmental textures do not accompany the music. They are the music.

The monumental opening title piece immediately establishes the album's unusual temporal logic. Lasting nearly twenty minutes, "Vent d'Aether" unfolds with extraordinary patience. Harmonium drones breathe beneath slowly shifting organ harmonies while Dora's voice appears only occasionally, less as language than as another vibrating material within the acoustic field. One gradually stops distinguishing between intentional gesture and architectural resonance. Sound seems to emerge directly from the stones themselves.

This dissolution of boundaries reflects Bouve's broader artistic practice. His work frequently explores environmental recording, site-specific listening and the transformation of physical spaces into compositional partners. Here, his careful recording, editing and spatial sensibility become every bit as important as the instrumental performances. The churches themselves cease functioning as recording venues and become active collaborators.

Following the expansive opening, the shorter pieces reveal different facets of the project's delicate architecture. "Réville V" and the various "Le Vast" movements resemble intimate sketches rather than miniature compositions. Their brevity prevents contemplation from hardening into ritual. Instead, each fragment feels like discovering another room within the same ancient building, where light enters through slightly different windows and silence acquires subtly altered colours.

Perhaps the album's greatest achievement lies in its treatment of improvisation. Contemporary improvised music often celebrates spontaneity through abundance, filling every available moment with activity. Bouve and Dora pursue the opposite path. Their improvisations seem built from restraint, trusting hesitation as much as certainty. Every sustained chord appears carefully weighed against the acoustics surrounding it. Every silence feels deliberately inhabited rather than merely empty.

The field recordings supplied by SA~RA deepen this impression beautifully. Rather than announcing themselves as documentary material, they blur temporal perspectives, making it increasingly difficult to determine where present performance ends and accumulated memory begins. One has the curious sensation that previous centuries remain faintly audible beneath the contemporary recording, not through historical reconstruction but through resonance itself.

Lawrence English's mastering deserves particular recognition. As both mastering engineer and accomplished composer deeply invested in questions of acoustic perception, he preserves the extraordinary dynamic subtlety of these recordings without imposing artificial clarity. The result retains all the organic complexity of sound unfolding inside real architectural spaces. One almost feels the changing air pressure around individual notes.

The closing "Montfarville V", co-composed and performed by both artists, gently introduces church bells near its conclusion, completing the album with quiet inevitability rather than dramatic resolution. The bells do not signal an ending so much as remind us that these buildings continue existing beyond the recording session, continuing their patient dialogue with weather, time and anyone willing to listen.

There is something quietly radical about "Vents d'aether". In an age increasingly fascinated by limitless digital possibility, Bouve and Dora return to some of humanity's oldest technologies: air moving through pipes, fingers pressing keys, stone reflecting sound. The result never feels nostalgic. Instead, it suggests that genuine innovation sometimes begins by listening more carefully to what has always been present.

Ultimately, "Vents d'aether" is less concerned with producing beautiful sounds than with revealing how beauty already inhabits particular places, waiting for attentive collaborators to uncover it. Bouve and Dora do not impose meaning upon these churches. They enter respectfully, allow the buildings to speak in their own patient language, and leave us with an album that feels suspended somewhere between geography, memory and prayer. Not necessarily prayer in any religious sense, but in its oldest meaning: an act of sustained attention toward something larger than oneself. In increasingly distracted times, that may be the rarest form of devotion available.

There are musicians who spend entire careers trying to modernise ancient instruments. Jozef Van Wissem has always chosen a stranger and far more convincing route: he lets the ancient instrument quietly modernise us instead. For over three decades the Dutch composer and lutenist has treated the Renaissance and Baroque lute not as a museum relic but as an unsettling contemporary voice, capable of conversing with drones, electronics, industrial textures and minimalist repetition without ever sounding like an academic experiment. If anything, his black Baroque lute often feels less nostalgic than many brand-new synthesizers. Wood, it turns out, ages more gracefully than software.

"This Is My Blood" continues the singular path Van Wissem has refined across an extensive catalogue and numerous collaborations, most famously with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, whose partnership culminated in the Cannes Soundtrack Award-winning score for "Only Lovers Left Alive". His work for cinema, from "Nosferatu" to "Irma Vep", has consistently demonstrated his ability to treat music as architecture rather than accompaniment, allowing silence, resonance and repetition to shape emotional space with remarkable precision. That cinematic sensibility permeates this latest release, although its landscapes feel intensely inward.

The album opens and closes with two improvisations originally conceived for Joaquim Pujol's film "Maquina", creating a circular structure that immediately suggests journey rather than destination. "What The Eternal Beginning Is" emerges almost hesitantly from silence, each plucked string carrying extraordinary weight. The Colorado desert that inspired these recordings becomes less a geographical location than a psychological terrain, vast enough for thoughts to echo against themselves.

Long-form listening has become something of an endangered species. Contemporary culture politely suggests that profound experiences should preferably fit between two notifications. Van Wissem, characteristically indifferent to such practical advice, builds compositions that unfold according to their own internal respiration. Nothing here hurries toward resolution. Time stretches, folds back upon itself and occasionally seems to stop altogether.

The title "This Is My Blood" inevitably evokes religious imagery, yet Van Wissem has long occupied a fascinating space where Christian symbolism functions less as doctrine than as poetic vocabulary. His recurring themes of suffering, redemption, mortality and transcendence are presented with remarkable ambiguity. Rather than preaching belief, he investigates the emotional architecture these symbols have built across centuries. Even listeners untouched by religious traditions may find themselves responding to the ritualistic gravity embedded within these pieces.

The magnificent "Praise Shall Sound From Shore To Shore, Until The Sun Shall Rise And Set No More" demonstrates this perfectly. Its repeating lute figures gradually accumulate subtle electronic shadows until the distinction between acoustic performance and spectral resonance begins to dissolve. Minimal changes produce disproportionately powerful emotional shifts, a compositional strategy recalling both Renaissance counterpoint and twentieth-century minimalism without belonging entirely to either tradition.

Throughout the album Van Wissem balances opposites with extraordinary discipline. His Renaissance and Baroque lutes remain unmistakably physical, every string vibration retaining its tactile presence, while electronics quietly extend rather than overwhelm their natural resonance. Drones emerge like distant weather systems. Beats appear sparingly, never seeking rhythmic dominance but gently disturbing the otherwise timeless surface. Even darkness is handled with unusual restraint. Rather than embracing gothic excess, Van Wissem cultivates an atmosphere where melancholy becomes luminous rather than oppressive.

"Concerning Our Saviours Silence" and "How You Must Enter Into Suffering" continue this exploration with almost monastic concentration. Their titles suggest theological meditation, yet the music avoids solemnity. Instead, the repeated figures function almost like breathing exercises, encouraging attentive listening rather than passive consumption. Van Wissem understands that repetition is never simple duplication. Every return arrives slightly altered by memory, expectation and the listener's own shifting perception.

The album's emotional centre arrives with "Remission", the sole vocal piece. Van Wissem's understated delivery has always possessed an almost incantatory quality, neither traditionally expressive nor emotionally detached. Here his voice feels less like narrative than confession whispered across centuries. The lyrics, sparse and direct, reinforce the album's ongoing meditation on loss, endurance and fragile hope without succumbing to melodrama.

The closing pair, "All You Do All You Bare" and "What The Eternal End Is", complete the circle with remarkable elegance. The final track mirrors the opening composition without merely repeating it, suggesting that beginnings and endings are perhaps distinguished only by perspective. After nearly forty minutes, one realises that very little has happened in conventional musical terms. Yet internally, something has shifted. Van Wissem specialises in precisely this paradox: music that appears static while quietly reorganising one's sense of time.

There is considerable courage in making records like this today. They refuse easy categorisation, avoid fashionable production tricks and demand genuine attention from their audience. In exchange, they offer something increasingly uncommon: the possibility of contemplation without instruction, mystery without obscurity, and beauty without sentimentality.

"This Is My Blood" is not an album that seeks immediate affection. Like many sacred spaces, abandoned buildings or ancient texts, it reveals itself gradually to those willing to remain present. Jozef Van Wissem once again demonstrates that the lute is far from an obsolete instrument. In his hands it becomes a vessel through which centuries continue speaking to one another, reminding us that while technologies inevitably age, the human search for meaning remains stubbornly, beautifully unresolved.

There is a curious confidence in naming your debut after a red nose. It immediately suggests that solemnity will not be mistaken for seriousness. Jazz, after all, has spent decades proving that technical sophistication and playfulness are perfectly capable of sharing the same stage, although musicians occasionally forget this and audiences politely pretend not to notice. "Red Nose Hymn" understands that the best improvisation often carries a smile just beneath its concentration.

Led by Norwegian saxophonist Aksel Røed, the newly formed Røed Quartet arrives with a record that feels remarkably assured for a first outing. Conceived initially for a commissioned performance at the Tedansfestival in 2024, the ensemble has evolved into something far more organic than a temporary project. Alongside trumpeter and flugelhorn player Lyder Røed, bassist Ola Høyer, and Swedish drummer Cornelia Nilsson, Aksel has assembled a quartet whose greatest strength lies not in dazzling virtuosity, though there is plenty of that, but in the quality of their collective listening.

The album openly acknowledges its debt to the golden age of 1960s jazz, yet never lapses into historical reenactment. Echoes of the post-bop revolution inevitably emerge throughout the record. One occasionally hears the conversational elasticity of Wayne Shorter's classic quartets, the melodic generosity associated with Blue Note recordings, or the spacious lyricism that has long characterised Scandinavian jazz. Yet these influences remain exactly that: points of departure rather than destinations. The music consistently sounds like four contemporary musicians speaking their own language while remaining fluent in jazz history.

Aksel Røed himself has steadily become one of the more compelling voices within Norway's vibrant jazz scene, working across projects that comfortably blur the boundaries between straight-ahead improvisation, progressive rock and freer forms of expression. His playing combines muscular tenor phrasing with an unusually lyrical instinct, capable of moving from robust declarations to whispering introspection without ever sounding self-conscious. Throughout "Red Nose Hymn", he avoids the temptation to dominate proceedings, preferring instead to shape conversations that allow every member of the quartet equal narrative weight.

That democratic spirit becomes immediately apparent in the opening "One Half Step for Me (A Whole Step for My Brother)". Even its title hints at affectionate humour, transforming a simple intervallic joke into something unexpectedly warm. The piece unfolds through elegant thematic development before opening into improvisations that never feel like obligatory solo showcases. Each musician builds upon ideas left suspended by the previous voice, creating a genuine sense of dialogue rather than sequential monologues.

The beautifully titled "Fanfare for Judee" introduces another dimension altogether. Whether consciously invoking the fragile introspection of Judee Sill or simply sharing her emotional atmosphere, the composition balances ceremonial grandeur with remarkable tenderness. Lyder Røed's trumpet and flugelhorn deserve particular praise here. His tone possesses that increasingly rare combination of clarity and vulnerability, capable of singing without excessive sentimentality. Rather than soaring above the ensemble, his lines seem to emerge naturally from within its harmonic fabric.

The title track occupies the emotional centre of the record. "Red Nose Hymn" plays wonderfully with apparent contradictions. A hymn traditionally suggests reverence, while a red nose evokes clowns, absurdity or perhaps quiet embarrassment. The composition itself inhabits precisely that delicate territory where dignity and vulnerability coexist. There is something profoundly human in acknowledging that grace occasionally arrives wearing ridiculous shoes.

Behind the melodic accessibility lies sophisticated craftsmanship. The quartet consistently favours subtle rhythmic elasticity over overt complexity. Cornelia Nilsson's drumming exemplifies this philosophy beautifully. Rather than filling every available space with displays of technical prowess, she shapes momentum through texture, dynamics and impeccable timing. Her playing constantly reminds us that restraint is often the most demanding form of virtuosity.

Ola Høyer's bass provides the album's quiet gravitational centre. Whether anchoring harmonies or engaging in fluid counterpoint, his contribution remains essential without ever demanding attention for its own sake. Like excellent architecture, one notices its importance most clearly when imagining its absence.

"Between the Wish and the World" perhaps best encapsulates the quartet's aesthetic. The title alone suggests that familiar territory where aspiration collides with reality, and the music mirrors that emotional ambiguity through patient thematic development and understated harmonic shifts. It is jazz that trusts implication more than declaration, allowing listeners to inhabit emotional spaces rather than simply observe them.

The closing "Time to Go" resists grand finales or explosive climaxes. Instead, it departs with quiet confidence, leaving behind the satisfying impression of a conversation concluded naturally rather than artificially extended. That sense of proportion characterises the album as a whole. Nothing feels excessive. Every note appears to have earned its place.

Recorded by Vetle Junker and sensitively mixed and mastered by Arne Martin Nybo, the production captures the quartet with admirable transparency. The acoustic space remains open enough for every instrumental interaction to breathe, preserving both intimacy and immediacy. One almost forgets the presence of microphones altogether, always a reliable sign that recording has become invisible.

"Red Nose Hymn" ultimately succeeds because it refuses both nostalgia and novelty for their own sake. Instead, it embraces a more demanding ambition: making honest music within a tradition that remains very much alive. The quartet demonstrates that jazz history is not a museum to be preserved behind glass but a language still capable of generating fresh conversations.

In a cultural landscape increasingly obsessed with constant reinvention, there is something quietly refreshing about musicians who understand that originality often emerges not from rejecting the past, but from listening to it carefully enough to discover where its unfinished sentences might still lead. The Røed Quartet has taken an impressive first step along that path, reminding us that sometimes the most memorable hymns are those unafraid to carry a little laughter inside their reverence.

There is a peculiar freedom in releasing a single thirty-minute composition without fanfare, marketing machinery or elaborate mythology. It is almost an act of resistance. While algorithms impatiently demand constant novelty in bite-sized portions, Luca Formentini responds with "Angel Lost": one uninterrupted meditation that neither rushes nor apologises for its duration. It simply exists, inviting listeners to meet it halfway. As usual, humanity has perfected the art of shortening attention spans while simultaneously complaining that nothing feels meaningful anymore.

Following the emotionally charged "I Am Ghosts", "Angel Lost" does not present itself as a sequel so much as an afterimage. Some works exhaust their emotional material and close the door behind them. Others continue to echo long after completion, generating new questions from unresolved tensions. This piece belongs firmly to the latter category, emerging as what Formentini himself describes as one of those lingering resonances that refuse to disappear once the previous album has faded into silence.

Formentini has steadily carved a distinctive place within contemporary experimental electronics, combining modular synthesis, vintage analogue instruments and carefully sculpted guitar textures into works that rarely settle into comfortable genre definitions. While traces of ambient, electroacoustic composition, drone and kosmische music remain audible throughout his catalogue, reducing his output to any single label would feel misleading. His compositions behave less like environments than psychological states, constantly shifting between serenity and instability without fully embracing either.

That sense of ambiguity becomes the true subject of "Angel Lost". The "angel" of the title carries no theological baggage. Instead, it functions as a remarkably contemporary metaphor: a consciousness deprived of orientation, searching for vertical meaning inside an increasingly horizontal culture where every certainty immediately becomes another battlefield. It is an image that resonates without becoming didactic. Rather than arguing a philosophical position, Formentini allows sound itself to embody uncertainty.

Built from Yamaha CS50 synthesizer, modular electronics, Torso S4 sequencing and electric guitar, the piece unfolds with extraordinary patience. Layers emerge almost imperceptibly, harmonic relationships continuously adjusting themselves through subtle fluctuations rather than dramatic events. Robert Rich's mastering deserves particular mention here. Rich, himself one of the pioneers of immersive drone and psychoacoustic composition, preserves every microscopic detail while allowing the enormous dynamic space of the recording to remain intact. The result feels simultaneously intimate and immense, as though the music occupies both the listener's headphones and the architecture surrounding them.

Unlike many contemporary drone works that rely primarily on static immersion, "Angel Lost" possesses an internal dramatic arc. Movement happens beneath the surface. Harmonic centres drift gently before dissolving again, while fragments of electric guitar occasionally appear like distant human voices attempting communication across immense distances. One never encounters conventional melodies, yet melodic memory seems to hover just outside perception, creating an almost phantom-like emotional pull.

The album's greatest strength lies in its refusal to manipulate emotion directly. Formentini understands that transcendence cannot be manufactured through volume or excessive layering. Instead, he builds carefully balanced systems whose emotional weight emerges naturally from resonance itself. Frequencies interact like fragile negotiations rather than declarations. Every new overtone slightly alters the landscape, much as small personal doubts can quietly reshape entire belief systems.

There are moments where the piece recalls aspects of early electronic minimalism, while elsewhere it brushes against contemporary electroacoustic composition or the spacious atmospheres cultivated by artists associated with labels like Room40 or Touch. Yet none of these comparisons fully capture its identity. Formentini seems less interested in stylistic affiliation than in exploring perception itself, asking how sustained sound alters our relationship with time, memory and emotional balance.

What makes "Angel Lost" particularly compelling is that it never mistakes abstraction for emotional distance. Beneath its carefully controlled architecture lies unmistakable vulnerability. The lost angel becomes recognisable precisely because it never falls dramatically from heaven. Instead, it simply loses direction. That feels far more unsettling, and considerably more familiar. Most people do not experience life through catastrophic revelations. They drift. They adapt. They wake up one morning slightly further from themselves than they intended.

The composition mirrors that gradual displacement beautifully. Rather than resolving into triumphant catharsis or complete dissolution, it remains suspended in productive uncertainty until its final moments. The ending feels less like closure than a gentle release, as though the music simply continues somewhere beyond hearing, indifferent to whether anyone is still listening.

There is also quiet confidence in the decision to self-release such an uncompromising work. In an era where visibility often appears more important than substance, "Angel Lost" chooses the opposite route. It trusts that attentive listeners still exist. That may sound optimistic, perhaps even reckless, but occasionally art benefits from a little recklessness.

With "Angel Lost", Luca Formentini confirms that his work is becoming increasingly less concerned with constructing sonic landscapes than with revealing invisible emotional architectures. This is not music designed to distract from the noise of everyday life. It listens directly into that noise until hidden structures begin to emerge. Somewhere between collapse and transcendence, confusion and clarity, "Angel Lost" quietly reminds us that losing one's orientation is not necessarily the end of the journey. Sometimes it is simply the moment when genuine listening begins.