There is something almost perversely physical about "Sustained". Fabian Altstötter, the Berlin-based musician behind Jungstötter, builds his third album around the human breath, but refuses to turn that idea into some tasteful wellness metaphor. Breathing here is effort, interruption, desire, exhaustion: the sound of a body trying to remain present while everything around it seems determined to become noise.

Compared with the denser architecture of "Love Is" and "One Star", "Sustained" is remarkably reduced. Piano, strings, harmonica, electronics and abrasive fragments occupy a narrow but intensely expressive space, while Altstötter's voice moves through it with an unusual mixture of distance and immediacy. Sometimes it sounds barely attached to the body producing it; elsewhere it suddenly becomes almost startlingly melodic. The contrast gives the songs their peculiar tension. Nothing is quite comfortable, including the beautiful parts.

The opening "Overturn" establishes the album's language through repetition and disruption, its rhythmic pattern constantly threatening to lose its balance. "Sunk" then sinks into something more intimate, where piano and harmonica seem to rub against one another like two memories that cannot quite agree. On "That Noise", disturbance becomes almost a character in itself, while "Tell This Lover" and "Loud Fingers" reveal how effectively Altstötter can let conventional songcraft emerge from the wreckage.

The remarkable thing is that "Sustained" never mistakes fragility for gentleness. Its quiet moments can be more unsettling than its eruptions. Noise scratches at melodies; melodies retreat rather than resolve; instruments seem to breathe, hesitate and occasionally lose patience. Even "Again", featuring Ronja's spectral vocals, feels less like a duet than two separate bodies briefly discovering that they occupy the same atmosphere.

Altstötter's lyrics are similarly resistant to tidy interpretation. They move through love, exhaustion, desire, alienation and bodily sensation using images that feel half-remembered rather than explained. "Seaweed", "Consume Me" and "Elastic (Avenue)" are particularly good examples of this strange poetic elasticity: concrete images become psychological states without ever settling into symbolism with an instruction manual attached.

There is also something quietly political beneath the romanticism. Altstötter describes the album through the idea of a communal body, sustained by many people breathing alongside one another. That notion gives the record an emotional dimension beyond private melancholy. The “I” is repeatedly invaded by other voices, other hands, other breaths. Even solitude becomes relational.

This may explain why the album feels intimate without becoming confessional. "Sustained" is not interested in handing the listener a diary and asking for sympathy. It creates a fragile acoustic organism and lets us hear it struggling to remain alive. The music contracts, expands, scratches, pauses and starts again.

Human beings have spent centuries trying to make suffering sound profound. Altstötter takes the more difficult route: he makes it sound ordinary, physical and occasionally beautiful.

Then he lets it breathe.

An ear is a rather indiscreet creature. It cannot close its eyes, look away or politely pretend not to have noticed something. It collects voices, footsteps, machines, weather, fragments of conversation and noises whose meaning may only become apparent decades later. "L’oreille Voleuse", the extraordinary collaboration between Brunhild Ferrari, Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke, begins with precisely this idea: sound as something accidentally stolen from the world and subsequently kept as a memory.

Brunhild Ferrari is hardly a newcomer to this particular form of acoustic kleptomania. After working with Pierre Schaeffer at the ORTF's research department, she developed her own practice in electroacoustic composition and radio art, while also spending four decades alongside Luc Ferrari and later becoming one of the principal guardians of his extensive archive. Her approach has always been less about constructing an artificial sonic universe than remaining alert to the one already happening around us. "L’oreille Voleuse" gathers recordings accumulated over many years, mostly on magnetic tape, and turns them into a twenty-minute composition in which memory refuses to behave chronologically.

The original version is wonderfully disorientating. Sounds appear without announcing their origins: voices emerge from somewhere inside the texture, environmental noises pass across the stereo field, mechanical hums and sudden disturbances interrupt one another, while occasional musical gestures seem to materialise from the surrounding debris. There is a sense of travelling without ever being given a map. The piece does not ask us to identify every sound. In fact, doing so would rather miss the point. These are not exhibits in a sonic museum. They are memories whose labels have fallen off.

Ferrari's connection with Luc Ferrari (they were partners in life and sometimes in art) inevitably hovers over the project, particularly his "Presque rien" works, where apparently insignificant environmental details could become the substance of a composition. But "L’oreille Voleuse" is not an exercise in historical reconstruction. The recordings are treated as living material, with all the ambiguity that implies. What was once simply heard becomes something remembered, and what is remembered is never quite identical to what actually happened.
Then the second side changes the rules.

Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke take the original material and perform it anew, recorded live at La Muse en Circuit in Paris in October 2025. Their version is not a respectful dusting-off of Ferrari's archive. It is more like entering somebody else's dream and moving the furniture around. Certain sounds disappear, others become more prominent, new textures are introduced, and the relationship between foreground and background is constantly renegotiated.

Ishibashi, whose work moves freely between experimental music, improvisation, songwriting and film composition, and O’Rourke, whose career has wandered through contemporary composition, electronic music, rock, improvisation and production with almost unreasonable persistence, are particularly well suited to this task. Neither approaches the source material as something that must remain untouched. They listen for possibilities.

The result is darker and more unstable than the original, with electronics and instrumental sounds creating new pressure around Ferrari's recordings. Yet the intervention never feels like an attempt to improve the source. That distinction is crucial. The duo does not correct the archive; they activate it.

This makes the two versions fascinating when heard together. The first is a collection of memories assembled by their owner. The second is what happens when those memories are handed to other ears. Suddenly the same fragments acquire different emotional temperatures. A voice that seemed incidental can become ominous; a mechanical sound can acquire rhythm; an apparently empty stretch can suddenly feel charged with expectation.

The title therefore works on several levels. The ear is “thieving” because it takes without permission, but there is nothing particularly criminal about the act. Listening itself is a form of involuntary collecting. We carry around sounds we never consciously decided to remember: the noise of a particular room, an engine heard at night, a voice from a distant apartment, rain against a window whose location we have forgotten. Eventually these fragments become part of the internal furniture.

There is something quietly moving about hearing Ferrari reopen this archive at this stage of her life. The project does not romanticise memory or pretend that preservation means keeping everything unchanged. Quite the opposite: "L’oreille Voleuse" suggests that a sound becomes alive again only when someone is willing to disturb it.

That is why the Ishibashi/O’Rourke version is so important. It demonstrates that an archive is not necessarily a cemetery. It can be a playground, provided one is careful with the ghosts, and there are plenty of them here.

What makes the record remarkable is its refusal to separate composition from listening. Ferrari listens to the world, records it, remembers it and rearranges it; Ishibashi and O’Rourke listen to that rearrangement and produce another. The listener then enters the chain, hearing both versions and inevitably constructing a third in the imagination.

Nobody owns the final piece. The ear has already stolen it.

There are places where ambient music makes sense almost before the first note is played. La Rosa, a former Benedictine monastery and church in Tucson transformed into a concert venue in 2025, is one of them. On December 6, 2025, Steve Roach entered this unusual space for a two-hour performance that now arrives as "LA ROSA – Live in Tucson, 2025", a two-CD document of an artist reaching an intriguing point in the fourth decade of his live career. The setting matters, but not simply because “ambient music in a former monastery” is the sort of sentence that practically writes its own press release. The architecture gives Roach's music somewhere to resonate beyond the speakers.

Few electronic musicians have spent as long investigating the relationship between sound, space and altered perception. Since "Structures From Silence" in 1984 and "Dreamtime Return" in 1988, Roach has developed several intertwined languages: deep ambient, sequencer-driven electronic music, tribal and trance-inflected material, and an increasingly sophisticated fascination with environmental sound. "LA ROSA" brings these strands together without making them feel like exhibits in a museum of Steve Roach. This is not a retrospective with convenient labels attached. It is a living sequence in which different periods of his work begin to recognise one another.

The opening “Spirals of Yearning” occupies more than thirty-six minutes, and that duration immediately establishes the rules. Roach is not interested in getting anywhere quickly. Slowly evolving harmonies, spacious electronic textures and carefully articulated sequencer patterns create a sense of motion without conventional progression. The music seems to expand sideways rather than forwards, as though someone had removed the walls from a composition and left the architecture exposed.

Then “Born of Darkness” changes the temperature. The fujara, a remarkably large overtone flute, introduces an organic, almost archaic voice into Roach's electronic environment, while percussion and electronic resonance create an uneasy meeting between primordial and futuristic sound. It is one of the album's strengths that these elements never feel like exotic decorations. They belong to the same vocabulary. Roach has spent decades making acoustic instruments and environmental recordings coexist with synthesizers without allowing either side to become merely illustrative.

“Desert Solitude” returns to a more spacious register, and here the Tucson connection becomes especially palpable. Nocturnal ambience and natural sounds are not simply inserted as documentary evidence of the surrounding landscape; they dissolve the boundary between the physical location and the imagined one. A coyote can suddenly seem like part of the electronic composition, which is probably the only sensible career move for a coyote.

The second disc opens with “Prometheus Returns / The Continent”, bringing greater rhythmic definition into the picture. Sequencers become more prominent, patterns interlock and the music acquires a subterranean momentum. This is the side of Roach that connects him to the wider history of Berlin School electronics, but his approach is rarely merely retro. The sequencer is not a machine for demonstrating technical nostalgia. It becomes a pulse around which harmonic and textural events can orbit.

“Songlines / Otherworld” is perhaps the most obvious bridge between Roach's electronic and organic vocabularies. Its roots reach back to "Dreamtime Return", the 1988 landmark that emerged from his engagement with the Australian landscape and Aboriginal musical traditions. The didgeridoo becomes an important presence, but the performance does not simply reproduce the old album's mythology. Decades later, the material has acquired another layer: memory itself.

That sense of accumulated time is one of the reasons "LA ROSA" succeeds. Roach is not trying to sound young, contemporary or fashionable. Thankfully. There are enough electronic musicians desperately trying to convince us that a new sequencer preset constitutes a cultural event. Roach instead sounds like someone who has spent forty years learning exactly how little needs to happen for something to become immersive.

“Magnificent Gallery / Circular Ceremony” and “Bliss Current” continue this balancing act between pulse and suspension. The music can become surprisingly propulsive before dissolving back into spacious harmonic fields. “This Moment of Today” then strips the momentum down, preparing the ground for the final threshold: “Structures From Silence”.

Ending with that piece is almost impossibly loaded. The original 1984 album remains one of the foundational works of ambient music, built around sustained, slowly breathing harmonies and a radical willingness to let silence become part of the composition. Yet hearing the piece here is not simply a trip back to 1984. The intervening decades are audible. The composer performing it is no longer the young synthesizer enthusiast who discovered how far a single chord could travel. He is someone who has spent a lifetime refining the same question.

What happens when electronic sound stops behaving like machinery and starts behaving like breath?

"LA ROSA" never answers this directly. It does something more convincing: it keeps demonstrating the question.

The lack of post-production overdubs or edits is significant. What we hear is a performance constructed and mixed by Roach from the stage, preserving the continuous movement of the evening rather than manufacturing a cleaner studio object afterwards. There are therefore moments where the music feels slightly vulnerable, where transitions retain the physicality of performance rather than the suspicious perfection of a carefully assembled album. That vulnerability suits the material. Ambient music is often accused of being too immaculate, too frictionless, too determined to make the listener comfortable. Roach allows the concert to remain a concert.

The result is not really about escape, either. It is about attention. The deeper one listens, the more distinctions begin to dissolve: electronic and acoustic, ancient and futuristic, rhythm and stillness, composition and environment. The sacred character of La Rosa becomes less a religious statement than a condition of listening. For two hours, the venue becomes a resonating chamber for memories that belong partly to Roach, partly to the audience and partly to the music itself.

When the final applause arrives after “Structures From Silence”, it feels less like the end of a concert than the moment when a dream remembers that it has a waking world outside it.

For an artist whose career has been built on extending time, that is perhaps the most appropriate conclusion.

The remarkable thing about "LA ROSA" is not that Steve Roach still sounds like Steve Roach.

It is that, after more than forty years, he still seems capable of discovering new rooms inside the same sound.

There is something fitting about naming an album "AGATE". An agate is not made in a hurry. It accumulates, layer after layer, until pressure and time turn geological patience into something unexpectedly beautiful. Meitei's latest work operates according to much the same principle. "AGATE", released by KITCHEN. LABEL, revisits the musical world of his "Kofu" trilogy, but it does not behave like an archive or a collection of deluxe revisions. These are pieces that have spent years being played, reconsidered, dismantled and rebuilt.

For Meitei, whose work has long revolved around what he calls “lost Japanese moods”, the past has never been a museum exhibit. His music has drawn on folklore, theatre, cinema, old recordings and cultural memory, filtering them through sampling and contemporary electronic production. "AGATE" pushes that approach further by treating his own previous compositions as material that can continue to change. Five years of performing "Kofu" around Japan, Europe and Asia have altered their pacing, density and internal balance, and those experiences are now embedded in the new versions.

“HAO”, the previously unreleased opening piece, establishes the album's atmosphere immediately: fragments appear as though they have travelled through several decades before reaching the listener, with percussion, voices and electronic textures occupying an uncertain space between ceremony and dream. It is not “traditional Japanese music”, nor does it pretend to reconstruct some authentic historical soundscape. Meitei's Japan is imagined, remembered and technologically distorted. The past arrives already covered in dust, static and fingerprints.

That distinction has always been central to his work. Earlier releases such as "Komachi" and "Kofu" found a strange equilibrium between ancient cultural references and contemporary beat-making, sometimes bringing together traditional instruments, field recordings, sampling and techniques associated with producers far removed from Japanese folk traditions. "AGATE" sounds less like a new discovery than the result of someone returning to a familiar landscape after several years and noticing that the landscape has changed.

“SHIN-OIRAN” and “SHIN-SADAYAKKO” are particularly revealing. Their source material belongs to "Kofu", yet the prefix “SHIN”, meaning new or renewed, is almost a manifesto: these are not simply old tracks wearing new clothes. Their rhythms have greater physical presence, while samples and voices seem more weathered, compressed and unstable. The melodies can emerge with surprising clarity before being swallowed again by texture. It is music that keeps one foot in ceremony and the other on a sampler pad.

“SHIN-WAROSOKU” deepens that sensation, allowing repetition to become almost ritualistic without ever becoming predictable. Meitei understands that a loop is not necessarily a closed circle. Tiny alterations in timbre, reverberation and density can make the same gesture feel different every time it returns. The listener begins to recognise the pattern while simultaneously losing confidence about where it is going.

“KYUGEKI” takes the cinematic dimension further, drawing on material connected with Japanese film imagery. There is something wonderfully ghostly about Meitei's approach to such references: he does not reproduce a soundtrack so much as suggest that one has been left playing somewhere in another room. His samples feel detached from their original context, but never entirely severed from it.

Then comes “SHIN-OIRAN II”, the album's longest piece at nearly eleven minutes, and perhaps its clearest demonstration of Meitei's patience. Rather than building towards an obvious climax, it allows layers to accumulate and recede. Percussion, fragments of voice and electronic haze occupy different depths, creating a sensation of movement without conventional narrative progression. The track seems to breathe rather than develop.

This is where the agate metaphor becomes more than clever packaging.

The album's layers do not merely decorate one another. They contain traces of previous states. You can hear the original "Kofu" material underneath the new treatment, just as mineral bands remain visible inside a stone. The pleasure comes from sensing both versions simultaneously: what the piece was and what years of performance have made it become.

“SHIN-EDOGAWARANPO” closes the album in appropriately elusive fashion. The music feels more fragmented here, with distortion and degraded textures becoming almost tactile. Rather than ending with resolution, it leaves behind the impression of a cultural memory that cannot quite be recovered intact. And perhaps that is the point.

Meitei's “lost Japanese moods” were never really about recovering a lost Japan. They are about imagining how cultural memory survives when the original context has disappeared. "AGATE" extends that idea inward: now even Meitei's own music has become something that can be remembered, altered and rediscovered. There is a quiet irony in this. The artist has spent years constructing music from fragments of the past, only to discover that his own compositions have themselves become fragments requiring excavation. Human beings apparently cannot leave anything alone, even their own music. Fortunately, in this case, the interference has produced something worthwhile.

The result is a record of unusual maturity. "AGATE" is less immediately concerned with conjuring a mysterious historical Japan than with examining how sounds acquire age, meaning and emotional residue. Its rhythms are stronger than on some of Meitei's more ambient work, but its real fascination remains textural: voices fade into static, percussion becomes almost visual, melodies emerge like half-remembered phrases, and electronic processing gives old references unfamiliar shadows.

What makes the album particularly fascinating is that it does not confuse nostalgia with truth. The past here is beautiful precisely because it is incomplete. Meitei does not polish away the cracks; he lets them become part of the image.

If "Kofu" looked through a window towards a vanished world, "AGATE" feels more like holding an old object in your hand and discovering that its surface contains several histories at once. The music has been played, altered, performed, remembered and played again until the original and the new can no longer be cleanly separated.

That is not restoration. It is sediment. And after enough pressure, sediment becomes stone.

There is a particular kind of electronic music that understands repetition not as a command to stay still, but as an invitation to look closer. "Circle of Perseverance", the first release on Retina.it's new Ashes Imprint, belongs firmly to that category. Composed in 2024 and largely generated through a self-built modular synthesizer, the six tracks move through minimalism, krautrock drift, ambient suspension and fragments of IDM, but never settle comfortably inside any of them.

For Lino Monaco and Nicola Buono, modular synthesis is hardly a recent fascination. The Pompei-based duo has been exploring electronic sound since the 1990s, with a particular devotion to analogue instruments and increasingly elaborate modular systems, including instruments built by Buono himself. Their history includes releases for Hefty, Mousike Lab, Flatmate/Störung and Glacial Movements, as well as collaborations and performances alongside figures ranging from Kraftwerk to Matmos and Noto. This background matters because "Circle of Perseverance" does not sound like two musicians discovering that modular synthesizers can make strange noises. Humanity has already endured enough of those records.

Instead, the six pieces demonstrate a remarkable ability to impose shape on instability. “Ellipse” begins with a restrained rhythmic figure whose components gradually reveal themselves, while “Stratum” develops a more subterranean atmosphere, its pulses and textures moving with the patience of geological processes. The music rarely announces its changes. It allows them to accumulate until the listener suddenly realises that the original pattern has become something else.

The title track is the clearest statement of the method. A rhythmic cell returns repeatedly, but each recurrence seems slightly displaced, altered or expanded. The effect is hypnotic without becoming inert. This is repetition as investigation: the same object is examined from different angles until familiarity begins producing uncertainty.

“The Wedge” introduces a sharper sense of movement, while “Seven Doors” stretches the temporal perspective further, balancing a subdued pulse against drifting electronic textures. There is a quiet intelligence in the way Retina.it resist the temptation to fill every available space. Silence and near-silence become structural elements, allowing tiny changes in timbre to acquire disproportionate significance.

“The Signal” closes the sequence with perhaps its most elusive gesture. The track feels less like a conclusion than the fading remainder of a process that could continue indefinitely. That is appropriate for an album concerned with cycles rather than destinations.

The beauty of "Circle of Perseverance" lies precisely in this refusal to confuse complexity with activity. The modular system may be unstable and reactive, but the music is not chaotic. Retina.it have spent decades learning how to turn electronic unpredictability into compositional material, and here the machine becomes neither master nor servant. It behaves more like a collaborator with a peculiar personality and absolutely no interest in explaining itself.

There is also something distinctly Vesuvian about the record's patience. Not in any literal folkloric sense, but in its sense of pressure concealed beneath a seemingly calm surface. These sounds simmer rather than explode. The rhythms keep circulating, the textures mutate almost imperceptibly, and the listener is gradually drawn into a space where five minutes can feel both substantial and strangely brief.
"Circle of Perseverance" is therefore an album about movement disguised as stasis. Its patterns return, but they never come back quite the same. The circle is not a prison; it is a method of seeing.

And perhaps perseverance is simply what happens when curiosity refuses to get bored.