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.

There is a slightly paradoxical ambition at the heart of Lua Jungck’s "chase". It is music made for the dance floor, but it is not especially interested in making the dance floor comfortable. The bass is heavy, the rhythms are fractured, the textures frequently seem to have been dragged through several incompatible machines, and even the moments of apparent melody retain a certain nervousness. This is club music that remembers that bodies are complicated things.

The four tracks of "chase" arrive from a very specific understanding of what a club can be. For Jungck, the dance floor is not merely a location where electronically generated sounds are played at an antisocial volume while humans perform increasingly elaborate negotiations with their own footwear. It is a collective space, historically bound up with queer visibility, gathering and the possibility of being temporarily released from the private self. Her own early experiences of Zurich’s club and rave culture remain important to the EP, but "chase" does not sound nostalgic. It sounds as though those memories have been fed back into the present and subjected to pressure.

That distinction matters because nostalgia tends to polish the past. Jungck does the opposite. She roughens it.

Her musical background helps explain why. A producer, DJ, sound artist and mixing/mastering engineer, she moves between club-oriented electronics and improvised music rather than treating them as separate professions. Her first EP, "girlfluxx", appeared in 2024, while her collaborative work includes GRIDSLOP with Arthur Hnatek and Jules Martinet and OMNIVORE with Silvan Jeger and Vera Baumann. She has also worked in film and theatre and founded the Zurich concert series livelovelava. Her practice therefore sits somewhere between composition, engineering and live experimentation, which may explain why "chase" feels unusually attentive to the behaviour of sound itself.

"liquid plant" begins with a wonderfully appropriate sense of physical instability. The title suggests organic growth, but the music is anything but pastoral. Sub-bass provides the gravitational field while fractured rhythmic elements flicker around it. Jungck does not simply pile textures onto the low end. She leaves enough negative space for the bass to behave like architecture. You do not merely hear it; you become aware of the room in which it is happening.

This is one of the EP’s most effective qualities. Space is treated as an active musical element. Silence and absence are not gaps waiting to be filled, but part of the rhythmic design. The result is heavy without becoming congested. In a genre where producers can occasionally mistake “more bass” for a complete artistic philosophy, this restraint is surprisingly significant.

"lizard" introduces a more elusive kind of movement. Its rhythms seem to change shape while remaining locked into the physical logic of bass music. There is something reptilian about the track, although fortunately not in the embarrassing sense of requiring a man in a rubber suit to crawl across the dance floor. Its energy is low-slung, twitchy and watchful. Sounds appear almost as reactions to one another rather than as fixed layers arranged in advance.

Jungck’s treatment of rhythm is especially interesting because she refuses to let the beat become a cage. The music can sit in half-time, then suddenly acquire a more driving electro impulse, only to pull back again. These shifts create a tension between bodily certainty and perceptual uncertainty. Your body understands what to do before your head has worked out why.

That tension reaches a particularly compelling form in "transients&transition", whose title could almost be read as the EP’s technical manifesto. A transient is a brief event, the sharp edge of a sound, while transition implies movement between states. Jungck is interested in both. Her tracks are full of tiny attacks, clicks, fragments and bursts that provide definition to much larger masses of sound. The music is therefore built not only from sustained bass and atmosphere, but from the fleeting details that make those larger structures perceptible.

The title also hints at something more human. We are transient creatures, forever transitioning between versions of ourselves. The club has historically been one of the places where that instability can become visible rather than something to be concealed. You can arrive alone and leave surrounded by strangers; you can spend several hours becoming someone slightly different without having to write a mission statement about it.

"sleep cache" provides the most intriguing conclusion because its title combines bodily exhaustion with digital memory. Sleep is involuntary, private and physical. A cache is temporary storage, something a machine keeps around because it might need it again. The phrase sounds almost like an accidental diagnosis of contemporary existence: the body wants to shut down while the machine politely insists on retaining everything.

The music inhabits that contradiction. It is less concerned with forward propulsion than with suspended states, with bass and texture continuing to circulate after the urgency of the dance floor has partially dissolved. Yet the track never becomes ambient in the conventional sense. Its rhythms remain encoded beneath the surface. Even when the music seems to be slowing down, some part of it is still moving.
That is perhaps the central achievement of "chase". Jungck understands that club music does not have to choose between physicality and introspection. A sub-frequency can be intellectually suggestive. A syncopated rhythm can carry an emotional memory. A texture can function simultaneously as atmosphere and architecture.

There is a political dimension to this without the music ever turning into a pamphlet. The record’s underlying defence of collective space feels increasingly pointed in an era when social experience is routinely filtered through individualised interfaces. Algorithms are extraordinarily good at predicting what one person might want next. They are considerably less competent at reproducing the strange chemistry of several hundred people occupying the same room, responding to the same bass frequency at approximately the same time.

Jungck does not romanticise that chemistry. The music itself contains fragmentation, abrasion and moments of disorientation. That is important. Community here is not presented as perfect harmony. It is the coexistence of different bodies, reactions and intensities. The beat provides a common framework without requiring everybody to become identical.

This is also where her sound-engineering sensibility becomes useful. "chase" is meticulously controlled, but it does not feel sterilised. The distinction is crucial. Precision is used to create room for instability rather than to eliminate it. Bass hits with purpose; transients have consequences; textures occupy carefully judged positions. Yet the music retains the sense that something could go wrong, or perhaps more accurately, that something unexpected might happen.

The EP's four tracks therefore function less like four separate songs than like different states of the same environment. "liquid plant" establishes the physical terrain, "lizard" introduces movement and nervous energy, "transients&transition" turns attention toward the microscopic details of change, and "sleep cache" leaves us in the residue of the experience. There is progression, but not the kind dictated by verse, chorus and climax. It is a progression of bodily and perceptual states.

And the title "chase" is revealing in that respect. What exactly is being chased? The obvious answer might be the next beat, the next rush of bass, the remembered freedom of an early rave. But the EP seems more interested in chasing a condition that cannot be permanently possessed. Freedom arrives, briefly becomes physical, and then disappears. You can remember it, reconstruct it, make music from it, but you cannot store it like a file.

Perhaps that is why these tracks feel simultaneously grounded and restless. They are trying to recreate something that only exists while people are actually there.

The dance floor, in Jungck’s hands, becomes neither escapism nor utopian fantasy. It is a temporary technology for being together. The bass gives everyone something in common; the fractures remind us that nobody experiences it in quite the same way.

"chase" does not resolve that contradiction. It wisely refuses to. Instead, it keeps the pressure on, four tracks of deep frequencies, broken rhythms and unstable textures asking a fairly simple question in increasingly elaborate sonic language: what happens when the things that connect us are also the things that make us different?

For a club record, that is an unusually thoughtful question. Fortunately, Jungck knows better than to answer it with a speech. She answers with bass.

A house is supposed to keep things out; skin is supposed to keep things in. Clemens Posch’s debut as House of Skin seems determined to sabotage both functions. Sounds leak through the walls, rhythms lose their structural integrity, voices become difficult to identify, and the distinction between an acoustic recording and a digital fabrication gradually becomes as useful as asking whether a dream was recorded with a microphone.

"house of skin" is, in fact, less a collection of electronic compositions than a study in permeability. Recorded and produced between 2022 and 2025, the nine tracks move through dub, experimental pop, trip-hop, leftfield electronics and damaged-sounding digital textures without ever settling comfortably inside any of them. Posch, a Vienna-based musician whose earlier work grew out of songwriting and production, has taken the rather sensible approach of stripping pop down to its nervous system and then allowing the nervous system to misbehave. The result is rhythmically alert but rarely straightforward, strangely intimate while often sounding as though it has been transmitted from somewhere with unreliable reception.

The opening "U Turn" announces the method with almost comic economy: a single drum-brush hit becomes the seed from which an entire piece grows. Filtered, rearranged and repeated, that microscopic gesture gradually establishes a rhythmic environment for a pitched vocal mantra that keeps appearing and receding. It is an excellent introduction because it immediately undermines the assumption that musical abundance requires lots of material. Posch can make one tiny physical event carry an entire architecture. Human beings spent centuries inventing increasingly complicated instruments, only to discover that one brush hitting one drum was apparently enough.

"Stretchin" extends the experiment into dub territory. Loops wobble, the rhythm seems to lean slightly sideways, and the voice begins to become more legible without ever becoming entirely trustworthy. The recurring sense of something trying to find its position is important to the album as a whole. These vocals do not behave like conventional lead vocals. They seem to be searching for the body from which they were separated, occasionally emerging from processing as recognisable speech before sinking back into texture.

That tension becomes more pronounced on "Never Quite", where trip-hop shadows and jazz-inflected fragments produce one of the album’s most compelling grooves. The title is almost an instruction manual: the music continually approaches recognisable form without quite arriving there. A beat starts behaving like a song, a melodic gesture hints at a hook, a voice threatens to communicate something clearly, and then Posch shifts the floor beneath it. This is music with a persistent allergy to completion.

"Light of all Light" takes a more dramatic turn. Its industrial residue and ghost-pop contours suggest an alternate universe in which a pop song has survived a fairly serious technological accident. The melodic elements remain, but they have been rubbed against rougher surfaces until their edges become ambiguous. It is perhaps the closest the album comes to conventional song architecture, yet even here Posch refuses the comfort of a clean chorus or an obvious emotional release.

Then comes "New Physics", whose title could easily belong to an undergraduate science-fiction club, but whose two-minute duration is far more mischievous. Its obscure electronic bleeps gradually assemble themselves into a memorable lead figure. The track behaves like an interlude while secretly becoming one of the album’s little structural hinges. This is one of Posch’s strengths: he understands that a sound does not need to announce itself as a “main theme” in order to lodge itself in the listener’s head.

"Bubbles" initially appears almost playful, a small bop floating on an apparently innocent surface. But its repeated image of bubbles that never burst turns the lightness into something claustrophobic. The contradiction is effective because the song never becomes conventionally sinister. Instead, it creates the peculiar anxiety of being trapped inside something soft. There is a recognisable contemporary nightmare lurking here: the feeling that your environment is perfectly functional while you have somehow lost control of it. Like discovering that your phone has disappeared, except the phone is your entire sense of reality.

The album’s most wonderfully crooked piece of archaeology is "Most Heartless Grave". The track had to be reconstructed from a messy MP3 because the supposed originals had vanished. That fact is more than a production anecdote. It becomes part of the composition’s meaning. The damaged file is not merely a defective copy of something better; it becomes the surviving body of something that no longer exists. The reference to John Cage, treated with a suitably tacky dose of self-awareness, turns the whole episode into a necromantic joke about lost data and artistic resurrection.

There is something beautifully appropriate about this. Contemporary music is surrounded by enormous quantities of supposedly permanent material, yet digital preservation is often a fantasy. Files disappear, drives fail, links rot, formats become unreadable. The cloud, despite its reassuringly fluffy name, is essentially a graveyard with excellent marketing. Posch turns that fragility into musical material. The imperfect MP3 becomes an artefact rather than an inconvenience.

"Vis a Vis" slows everything down again. Its dub pulse is reduced almost to the point of skeletal movement, while the texture grows increasingly grainy. The effect is introspective without becoming sentimental. This is one of the album’s quieter achievements: it creates intimacy through deterioration. Instead of polishing the sound until it becomes pristine, Posch lets abrasion become part of its emotional vocabulary.

And then there is "Clé from 5 to 7", whose title points toward Agnès Varda’s "Cléo from 5 to 7", the 1962 film in which a young singer waits for the result of a medical examination that may radically alter her understanding of her life. The film is structured around suspended time, and Posch’s brief closing piece seems to understand that premise instinctively. Two hours can contain an entire existential crisis; two and a half minutes can contain a remarkably large amount of musical uncertainty.

That reference also clarifies something about "house of skin". The album is obsessed with duration, but not in the conventional sense of long-form experimental music. Posch stretches tiny events. A drum hit becomes a composition. A damaged file becomes a memory. A vocal fragment becomes a character without a stable body. A loop ceases to be repetition and becomes a way of examining the same moment from slightly different angles.

His influences are visible without becoming a catalogue. There are traces of the experimental electronic tradition associated with Warp, the oblique rhythmic logic of artists such as Lolina, the collage mentality of outsider electronics and the haunted vocal processing found in contemporary leftfield music. But Posch's real achievement is that these references never seem to sit on top of the music as badges of taste. They have been digested. The result feels informed without feeling reverential, which is considerably harder than it sounds.

There is also an unusually physical quality to the album. Despite its reliance on digital tools, "house of skin" rarely feels weightless. Bass frequencies, distorted loops, scraped textures and unstable voices seem to occupy actual space. The record repeatedly suggests a body being translated into electronic information and then attempting to return. That makes the title increasingly persuasive: the “skin” is not merely a metaphor for the surface of the music. It is the membrane through which everything passes.

Posch’s real subject, then, may be transformation itself. Not the grandiose kind involving spiritual enlightenment and orchestral crescendos, but the smaller transformations that happen when a sound is copied, filtered, slowed, repeated or damaged. His music pays attention to what remains after something has been altered. A clean original is less interesting than its residue.

That is why "house of skin" feels oddly alive. Its rhythms are constructed, but they breathe. Its vocals are processed, yet they often feel more vulnerable than conventional singing. Its digital surfaces are artificial, but the imperfections make them tactile. Nothing quite stays where it was put.

A house normally gives us coordinates: here is the room, here is the door, here is the wall, and here is the neighbour who has decided that 2:17 a.m. is an excellent time to practise bass guitar. House of Skin offers none of that stability. Its rooms keep changing dimensions. Its walls are loops. Its windows are glitches. Its occupants are fragments of voices and half-recognisable rhythms.

The strange thing is that this instability never feels homeless. Posch has built a place precisely out of uncertainty.

And perhaps that is what "house of skin" finally proposes: that identity is not a fixed structure protecting an essential self, but a surface constantly being stretched, recorded, copied, distorted and rewritten. The house survives not because nothing changes inside it, but because change is the only thing holding it together.

There is a delicious absurdity in the idea behind Jake Muir’s "Pareidolia": take the most atmospheric fragments from hundreds of death-metal and black-metal records, remove most of the things that would normally identify them as metal, slow them down until their bones become difficult to recognise, and then ask the listener to believe that something heavy is still happening. It sounds like an elaborate prank on genre taxonomy. It turns out to be considerably more serious than that.

The title provides the key. Pareidolia is the tendency to discover recognisable forms in random patterns: faces in clouds, animals in stains, divine apparitions in burnt toast, presumably Satan in an unfortunate patch of bathroom mould. Muir applies the same perceptual trick to sound. He wants us to hear metal where the obvious evidence of metal has largely disappeared. The riffs are no longer riffs in any conventional sense, the vocals have been reduced to spectral matter, the guitars become geological formations, and rhythm frequently evaporates altogether. Yet the music retains an unmistakable sense of menace.

Muir is particularly well suited to this kind of forensic listening. The Los Angeles-based artist, DJ and field recordist has built much of his practice around found sound and the transformation of material whose original context is gradually obscured. His previous work has moved through such unlikely territories as church bells and vintage erotic-film soundtracks, while "Talisman", his 2022 collaboration with Evan Caminiti, helped push him toward processing guitar and reconsidering his longstanding relationship with rock music. "Pareidolia" feels like the logical consequence of that investigation: less a tribute to metal than an archaeological excavation of the places where metal stops behaving like metal.

This distinction matters. Muir is not sampling the spectacular bits. There are no heroic solos here, no blast-beat fireworks, no growled declarations demanding that somebody open the gates of hell immediately. Instead, he has gone after the margins: introductions, interludes, atmospheric passages, sustained guitar textures and other moments that metal listeners may regard as connective tissue. By isolating them, he discovers that the supposedly secondary material was carrying an enormous amount of the genre’s emotional architecture all along.

"Beithir" establishes the method with a certain slyness. What might once have functioned as a prelude becomes the event itself. Guitar-derived textures stretch beyond their original proportions, losing the reassuring coordinates of song form. The sound is heavy without having to demonstrate heaviness. "Necrotic Mist" continues the process, with its title practically doing some of the listener's interpretive work in advance. The music itself is more ambiguous: something seems to be emerging from the murk, but every attempt to identify it makes it dissolve further.

Then comes "Unholy Apparitions", where Muir's sense of sonic misdirection becomes particularly effective. Foley-like noises, distorted vocal residues and unstable textures seem to occupy different layers of reality. Nothing quite announces its source. Instead of asking “What am I hearing?”, the track encourages the more irrational question “What does this sound resemble?” That small psychological shift is precisely where pareidolia begins.

"Oblivion" is among the album’s most convincing demonstrations of Muir’s central argument. Its slow-moving, doom-laden weight has the physical presence associated with extreme metal, but without the aggression normally required to communicate it. The piece does not attack. It looms. This is an important distinction, because "Pareidolia" repeatedly suggests that volume and heaviness are not synonymous. A sound can be enormous while remaining almost motionless. It can feel oppressive without actually becoming loud.

This is where the album brushes against dark ambient, drone and the more experimental descendants of industrial music. Comparisons with Lustmord are understandable, particularly because both artists understand that darkness can be constructed through scale, resonance and subtraction rather than through sheer sonic violence. But Muir's particular achievement is to retain a peculiar metallic tension inside those otherwise ambient structures. The guitars may have been chemically processed beyond recognition, yet something of their original threat survives.

"Each Uisge" makes the transformation almost beautiful. High-pitched guitar fragments rise over choral-like pads, while small vocal disturbances appear and vanish before they can become language. The title refers to a water spirit from Scottish folklore, and the music has an appropriately unstable quality: attractive enough to approach, strange enough to make approaching it seem like a questionable life decision.

"Celestial Visions" offers one of the album's more luminous passages, although Muir never allows brightness to become comfort. This is not ambient music designed to improve the user's morning routine, increase productivity or help them discover their inner chakras while answering emails. Its moments of beauty remain contaminated by the material from which they were extracted. The celestial is never entirely separated from the necrotic.

That tension becomes especially potent on "Anima". Here the decelerated metal vocabulary seems to acquire an almost sensual quality. Heavy guitar residues and metallic clatter are transformed into something slower, warmer and strangely intimate. It is a reminder that Muir's work has never been particularly interested in keeping genres in their assigned emotional departments. Eroticism can coexist with decay; tenderness can emerge from distortion; a black-metal guitar can become almost voluptuous once somebody stops insisting that it behave like a black-metal guitar.

The closing "Cathedral of Decay" gathers these contradictions rather beautifully. Its title sounds like something that should be printed in Gothic lettering on a shirt sold by a man who has not seen daylight since 1997, but the music itself is much more elusive. The “cathedral” is not a building so much as a spatial effect, constructed from resonance and distance. And “decay” is not simply horror. It is transformation, the gradual loss of a thing's original identity until another form becomes possible.

This is perhaps what separates "Pareidolia" from a clever sampling exercise. Muir is not simply demonstrating that metal contains ambient music. He is asking what remains of a genre once its recognisable gestures have been stripped away. If you remove the drums, the growls, the riff structures, the theatrical aggression and the cultural uniforms, can the underlying emotional substance survive?

His answer is an unexpectedly confident yes.

In fact, the album suggests something more provocative: perhaps some of metal's most powerful qualities were never located in its loudness at all. They were in its fascination with vastness, dread, ritual, repetition, altered states and sounds that seem to come from somewhere older and less hospitable than ordinary human life. Once those qualities are isolated, they do not necessarily need distortion pedals or a drummer with a personal vendetta against silence.

Muir's real sleight of hand, then, is not turning metal into ambient music. It is making us reconsider how little metal actually needs in order to remain metal.

"Pareidolia" leaves behind a strange residue, like finding an ancient symbol in a patch of moss and then becoming mildly concerned that the moss has noticed you. The original records are mostly invisible. Their identities have been blurred, stretched, liquefied and rearranged. Yet their emotional fingerprints remain.

Heavy music, Muir discovers, does not necessarily require impact. Sometimes all it needs is the suspicion that something enormous is hiding inside the fog.

There is a strange irony in calling an album "Destructive Arts" when its real purpose is preservation. Studiogegner’s first album under this title was born from the death of Anita Petersen, a storyteller with whom Sebastian Spöhr worked for several years, and from recordings made before her death for a project that was never completed. What survives is therefore not destruction in the straightforward sense, but the debris left behind after something has disappeared: a voice, some texts, a handful of musical ideas, and the stubborn human impulse to arrange these fragments into something that can still be heard.

It is an unusually intimate origin for an electronic record, although Studiogegner is hardly a newcomer to electronic sound. Born Sebastian Spöhr, he has been producing music, radio plays and sound design for years, with an early fascination for the possibilities opened by synthesizers and the electronic explosion of the 1990s. His work has moved through ambient, techno, sound design and more contemplative forms of electronic music, while his later studies in sound and music production at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences helped turn what had been an obsessive studio practice into a profession. He has also maintained a healthy suspicion of genre categories, regarding sound itself as the more useful territory. That instinct serves "Destructive Arts" particularly well.

The crucial element, however, is Petersen’s voice. The recordings originated in connection with an exhibition by artist Reinhold Geyer, for which Petersen had spent more than a year selecting texts to accompany the paintings. After her death, Spöhr returned to those recordings and began constructing music around them. Some pieces were abandoned, others rebuilt from the ground up. The result is not a conventional spoken-word album and certainly not merely an electronic soundtrack to literary fragments. It is closer to a dialogue across an impossible distance.

The choice of Günter Kunert is especially appropriate. One of the major German writers to emerge from the post-war East, Kunert worked across poetry, prose, satire, essays, radio plays and other forms, developing a style in which irony, melancholy, absurdity and distrust of simplistic ideas of progress could coexist. His own biography was marked by the fractures of German history: born in Berlin in 1929, prevented from pursuing normal schooling under Nazi racial laws because his mother was Jewish, initially supported by Bertolt Brecht, and increasingly critical of the East German state before leaving the GDR in 1979. His writing is therefore particularly well suited to music concerned with disappearance, memory and transformation. Kunert rarely needed monsters when ordinary reality was already behaving strangely enough.

That strangeness becomes audible immediately in "Das tÄglich verschüttete Glück". The title itself carries the peculiar Kunertian ability to make an apparently simple observation sound faintly accusatory. Spöhr surrounds Petersen's spoken presence with electronic architecture that is warm rather than aggressive, allowing the words to retain their individuality while giving them a second, less literal environment. The rhythm does not illustrate the text so much as establish another layer of thought beneath it.

"Nachricht" is more compact and pointed. There is something almost perversely modern about hearing a literary “message” delivered through electronic production, as though a piece of analogue human communication had been sent through several decades of technological history before arriving at its destination. Yet the track never becomes a gimmick. The voice remains recognisably human, imperfect and finite, while the machinery around it suggests continuity, repetition and systems that do not share our mortality.

"Wie ich ein Fisch wurde" brings the album's absurdist dimension closer to the surface. Kunert's imagination often had a talent for turning an ordinary premise slightly sideways until reality became more revealing rather than less. Spöhr responds without over-explaining the joke. The electronic backdrop creates a gently surreal frame, allowing the spoken narrative to retain its peculiar logic instead of converting it into some overdecorated “cinematic” spectacle. This restraint matters. When the text is strange, the music does not need to wear a clown nose.

Then comes "Mondnacht", the shortest track and arguably the most important piece in the album's history. Spöhr has explained that this work helped him gain admission to his sound and music production studies in 2016, eventually leading to the degree he completed in 2021. It is tempting to hear it simply as an early milestone, but within "Destructive Arts" it assumes another meaning. The piece belongs simultaneously to the past life of the project, to Petersen's memory, and to Spöhr's own development as an artist. A small track becomes a hinge between biography and vocation.

The title "Vorschlag" sounds almost bureaucratic, which is probably one of its charms. There is something quintessentially Kunert about putting an apparently harmless administrative word next to material capable of opening much larger questions. Spöhr's production maintains that tension. His beats are generally firm and his synthesizers often generous in texture, but the literary material keeps disturbing any temptation to settle into pure electronic comfort.

"Befreiung" naturally invites the largest word in the room: liberation. But the album's context makes that concept considerably less simple than its title suggests. Death is an absolute liberation only in the brutally literal sense that there is no longer anyone around to experience it. For those left behind, it is the opposite: an accumulation of absence. The track therefore gains weight from the contradiction between its title and the circumstances that produced it. What is being freed here may instead be the recorded voice, removed from its original purpose and given another existence.

"Ins Morgenland" moves toward a more overtly imaginative space, and here the combination of Kunert's literary absurdity and Spöhr's electronic sensibility becomes particularly convincing. There is a faintly fairy-tale quality, but not the reassuring kind where everybody learns a lesson and the woodland creatures organise a celebratory buffet. The destination feels uncertain, perhaps deliberately so. “Tomorrow” and the “Orient” become less geographical locations than mental directions.

The closing "Die Aufgabe" is consequently an apt ending. The word can mean both a task and an act of giving something up, and that double meaning hangs over the entire album. Spöhr was given an unfinished artistic task by circumstances that nobody could have planned: to decide what to do with recordings that had suddenly become documents of someone who was no longer there. Completing the original DVD project was impossible. Creating this album was not. The task changed because the person at its centre had disappeared.

This is where "Destructive Arts" becomes more than a memorial record. It is a study in what happens when artistic material survives its original intention. The exhibition is gone. The planned DVD never appeared. Some musical pieces were discarded. Petersen herself is absent. Kunert died in 2019. And yet voices, words and sounds continue to move through the machinery of recording. The archive, that supposedly dead warehouse of the past, starts behaving like a living organism.

Musically, the album does not attempt to disguise its electronic origins behind artificial solemnity. There are beats, synth textures, bass-heavy passages and recognisable track structures. One contemporary assessment similarly noted the contrast between Spöhr's relatively conventional electronic architecture and the fantastic or absurd literary material placed inside it. That contrast is precisely what makes the record work. The music gives the words a pulse, while the words prevent the pulse from becoming merely functional.

And there is something quietly moving about the fact that Petersen's voice is not treated as a sacred relic. It is processed, framed, repeated and placed inside new structures. In other words, she continues to participate. This is not a museum case containing the sound of a dead person behind glass. It is an act of recontextualisation, which is much riskier and much more alive.

The title therefore turns back on itself. "Destructive Arts" begins with destruction, but its real subject is transformation. Things disappear, yes. People die, projects remain unfinished, intentions become obsolete. But sound has an irritating habit of refusing to behave like a grave. It can preserve a voice without pretending that preservation restores the person. It can take something that belonged to yesterday and make it audible in a different tomorrow.

Spöhr's achievement is to understand that grief does not necessarily need a grand monument. Sometimes it needs a synthesizer, a microphone, eight short pieces and enough patience to listen again to a voice that hurts.

That is what makes "Destructive Arts" quietly powerful. It does not defeat loss. Nothing so convenient happens. It simply gives the remains somewhere to go.