There is something appropriately mischievous about calling this record "A Distracted God". Beatriz Ferreyra has spent more than six decades treating sound as if it were a substance capable of escaping whatever container humans have designed for it, and these three pieces suggest that the gods of electroacoustic music may indeed have misplaced the instruction manual. Born in Córdoba in 1937 and based in France since the early 1960s, Ferreyra studied with Nadia Boulanger before entering the orbit of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. She later worked at the GRM, participated in the development of the "Solfège de l'objet sonore", taught electroacoustic techniques and eventually pursued an independent practice in which tape, instruments, computers, memory, spirituality and sheer sonic curiosity could coexist without asking permission from one another.

"A Distracted God" is consequently not an attempt to summarise that career, nor does it behave like a museum display in which three carefully labelled relics sit behind glass. Its three works, spanning 1976 to the later decades of Ferreyra's practice, make a rather more provocative point: the technology changes, but the ear remains recognisably the same. Earlier writing on her music has repeatedly noted precisely this peculiar continuity, with works separated by decades retaining a common fluidity and an ability to make sounds seem simultaneously physical and strangely unplaceable.

"Souffle d'un Petit Dieu Distrait" is the obvious gateway into this universe. Originally realised in the late 1980s and subsequently revisited, the piece moves through a dense constellation of electronic events, with sounds appearing, multiplying, retreating and crossing the stereo field rather than obediently lining up like soldiers waiting for inspection. There is an almost biological quality to the motion: things seem to grow, mutate, collide and disappear before the ear has quite decided what they are. Descriptions of the piece have emphasised its unusually active spatial movement and its mixture of tiny sonic details with broader, more enveloping masses.

What makes it particularly striking today is that it doesn't sound like a reconstruction of “the future” imagined by the 1980s. It sounds as though the future has simply continued without bothering to announce itself. There are crystalline fragments, electronic traces, granular disturbances and sudden shifts of perspective, but little sense of technological exhibitionism. Ferreyra is not showing us what machines can do. She is showing us how easily the ear can be fooled into believing that machines, insects, weather systems, distant transmissions and miniature planets might all belong to the same family.

Then comes "Tierra Quebrada", dating from 1976 and written for violin and fixed electroacoustic sound. Commissioned for the A.C.I.C. in France, the work was premiered in Paris by violinist Manuel Enriques, and its very premise already creates a useful tension: the recognisable physical gesture of a violin placed inside an environment that refuses to remain recognisable.

Here Ferreyra allows friction to become structure. The violin doesn't simply float above an electronic backdrop, nor does the tape behave like a polite contemporary-music accompaniment waiting for its soloist to finish. Bow, scrape, attack and resonance encounter altered sonic matter, producing contrasts between something bodily and something apparently disembodied. At times the music seems almost geological, as if the title were less metaphor than instruction: the ground has fractured, and the violin is trying to discover whether the pieces still belong to the same planet.

This is also where the age of the work becomes audible, but not necessarily as a defect. There is tape grain, physical roughness and a certain resistance in the materials that contemporary digital production often spends considerable effort pretending to possess. Ferreyra doesn't need to manufacture “organic” imperfection because the machinery has already supplied it. The result is less polished than tactile, and that tactility gives the piece a curious sense of danger.

"Sourires d'Automne" closes the record with only four minutes at its disposal, which is roughly the amount of time Ferreyra needs to remind us that brevity does not oblige a sound to behave. The piece belongs to her later exploration of fixed electronic sound and was composed for a festival context in Brussels, originally for Francis Dhomont's 80th birthday. Here the materials feel more concentrated, more elusive and perhaps more sinister. Instead of developing a large architecture, Ferreyra seems to open a small trapdoor in the floor and invite the listener to inspect whatever is moving underneath.

That sense of scale is central to "A Distracted God". Ferreyra's music repeatedly makes the microscopic feel enormous and the enormous feel intimate. A tiny change in texture can acquire the weight of an event; a broad electronic mass can suddenly reveal itself as a collection of minute particles. Earlier commentators have noted how her compositions can operate simultaneously at micro and macro levels, while maintaining a remarkably strong internal flow despite their lack of conventional musical signposts.

This is perhaps why the record feels less “experimental” than perceptual. The word experimental suggests that something is being tested, as though the composer were standing beside a laboratory bench with a clipboard. Ferreyra seems to have little interest in such bureaucracy. Her concern is what happens when sound is allowed to become unstable without becoming meaningless. Tape can become memory; a violin can become landscape; an electronic pulse can acquire something resembling weather. The source material matters, but its identity is never allowed to become a prison.

There is also a quiet philosophical dimension here. Ferreyra's work has long been associated with spirituality, alchemy, Kabbalah and the transformation of matter, but these references are most useful when understood not as decorative mysticism but as ways of thinking about change. A sound is never quite what it was a moment before. It can be stretched, layered, displaced, broken apart and recombined until its origin becomes irrelevant. In that sense, her musique concrète is not really about concrete things at all. It is about the strange moment when the familiar loses its passport.

And perhaps that is where the title finally makes sense. The distracted god is not necessarily an absent god. It may simply be one who has stopped paying attention to the categories humans invented for sound. Ferreyra's music does something similar. It refuses the tidy distinctions between analogue and digital, natural and artificial, instrument and environment, composition and accident. Her career has moved through technologies that were once futuristic and are now archaeological, yet the central question remains stubbornly contemporary: how much reality can be extracted from a sound before it stops being merely a sound?

"A Distracted God" offers no tidy answer. Thankfully. Answers are terribly overrated, particularly in experimental music, where they tend to arrive wearing black turtlenecks and carrying a press release. What Ferreyra offers instead is a listening space in which sounds can remain strange, physical, comic, threatening, beautiful and unresolved.

Six decades into a career devoted to reshaping the audible world, she still seems less interested in conquering sound than in letting it misbehave. That may be the most convincing kind of modernity there is.

Christian Prommer has spent enough time moving between jazz, broken beat, techno and club music to make genre boundaries look less like walls than badly maintained suggestions. As a member of Fauna Flash and Trüby Trio, through Voom:Voom with Peter Kruder, and later with Drumlesson, he has repeatedly taken electronic music apart and rebuilt it with musicians who know that rhythm is not simply something you put underneath a tune. "Rhythmique Nocturne", his first solo album in more than a decade, continues that practice without sounding like a retrospective exercise. Instead, it feels like the work of somebody who has accumulated three decades of musical habits and finally decided to let them all talk at once, preferably after midnight.

The central idea is deceptively simple: make the acoustic instrument behave badly. Prommer begins with piano, drums, percussion, strings, cello and Rhodes, then subjects them to electronic procedures, amplification, preparation, sampling and rhythmic displacement until their conventional identities start becoming negotiable. The opening title track is almost a manifesto in miniature. A prepared upright piano is struck, scraped and dampened until its wooden body begins supplying percussion as much as harmony, while a restrained TB-303 pulse lurks underneath. The result does not sound like someone demonstrating what can be done to a piano. It sounds like a pianist who has discovered that the furniture has opinions.

That physical approach is one of the album’s greatest strengths. “Black Mamba” pushes the prepared piano through distortion and pedals, turning its familiar tonal organisation into something more ambiguous and abrasive. “Dark Matter” is built around live congas and drums while synthesizers gradually increase the pressure without ever quite exploding. The latter is particularly effective because Prommer understands that restraint is not the absence of energy. Sometimes the most convincing way to make a track feel dangerous is to keep refusing it the obvious climax. The kick drum waits, the synths mutate, the percussion insists, and the whole thing develops the slightly sinister patience of an animal that has noticed you are carrying food.

Prommer’s biography makes this balance between rhythmic instinct and studio construction less surprising. Born in Munich in 1969, he emerged from Germany’s early-1990s electronic scene and helped establish the jazz-inflected, broken-beat side of Compost’s catalogue through Fauna Flash and Trüby Trio. His later Drumlesson project famously reworked techno and house repertoire with an acoustic jazz ensemble, reversing the usual direction of adaptation. Rather than taking jazz and adding electronic decoration, he repeatedly asks what happens when the physicality of a jazz ensemble is allowed to invade electronic music. "Rhythmique Nocturne" sounds like a mature continuation of that question rather than another attempt to prove that genres can coexist.

“Night Society” may be the album’s most elaborate demonstration of the method. Its electronic skeleton grows out of a Juno-60 idea reinterpreted through prepared piano, then expands into eighteen strings, harmonium, cello, Mini-Moog and percussion. What could easily have become expensive-sounding wallpaper instead retains a sense of rhythmic purpose. The strings do not simply announce that this is now the sophisticated part of the record. They become another moving component inside the groove. This is where Prommer’s experience as both drummer and producer becomes especially useful: arrangement is treated as something kinetic. Every new layer has to alter the motion of the piece, not merely increase its budget.

The vocal tracks provide another kind of contrast. “I Am Falling (Falling Deep)” places Carl Justin inside a murky mixture of trip-hop, acid bass and jazz harmony, while “Struck”, featuring Leona Berlin, slows the pulse into a darker, more spacious piece in which Fender Rhodes, strings, bass and voice occupy a surprisingly smoky territory. Neither track feels bolted on to provide the album with a conventional song format. The voices become additional textures with personalities, capable of making the machinery feel suddenly intimate. “I Lost Myself in the Music”, closing the album, takes that intimacy even further, keeping the drums at a distance and allowing a soft arpeggio and vocals to suggest that the dancefloor can occasionally produce something resembling private reflection. The sentiment is potentially dangerous territory, since electronic music has already supplied humanity with enough opportunities to become embarrassingly sincere. Prommer gets away with it because the arrangement remains understated.

“Tryin’ Times” is perhaps the most politically charged piece, but its interest lies less in its message than in the act of musical memory behind it. Prommer takes Roberta Flack’s 1969 recording and reconstructs it through looping, fragmentation and a contemporary jazz-rave framework, with Justine Hoerwarth providing the vocal presence and Mosés Yoofee adding piano. The track connects protest soul to club culture without pretending that the two belong to identical historical circumstances. The inherited song remains recognisable as a source of emotional and political weight, while the production turns that inheritance into something restless rather than reverential. There is an important distinction here: Prommer is not polishing an old message for contemporary consumption; he is testing whether its urgency can survive a different rhythmic body.

Then there is “Algorhythmic”, which offers perhaps the clearest glimpse of Prommer the sound designer. Built from a chain of arpeggiators and chord resonators, with archival recordings of drummer Billy Hart incorporated into the structure, it sets programmed processes against minute human variations. The interesting part is not the familiar fantasy of “man versus machine”, which has been exhausted by approximately seventeen million electronic-music press releases. It is the opposite: the machine becomes interesting because the human material prevents its repetitions from remaining perfectly obedient. Rhythm becomes a negotiation between prediction and interruption.

“Spiral” takes this principle to an almost absurd degree, constructing its harmonic and textural material from a single cymbal. It is a wonderfully Prommer-like conceit because the source is so limited while the resulting field is not. Attack becomes tone, decay becomes atmosphere, metallic resonance becomes rhythmic information. The piece demonstrates that sampling can be more than collecting objects from the outside world. It can mean taking one physical event apart until its hidden components become an entire vocabulary. There is a small philosophical pleasure in that: nothing needs to be added if you have listened closely enough to what was already there.

“Bosss”, the tribute to Joe Zawinul, brings another strand of Prommer’s musical history into focus. Recorded live with Kelvin Sholar on piano and Rhodes, it carries the looseness of fusion without reproducing its period mannerisms. Zawinul is less a stylistic template here than a reminder of what happens when electronic thinking, improvisation and rhythmic sophistication are allowed to occupy the same room. Prommer’s own career has repeatedly operated in precisely that territory, from his work with electronic groups to Drumlesson and collaborations across jazz and dance music. His skill is not really in making unlike things resemble one another. It is in discovering which underlying principles they already share.

The album’s real achievement, then, is not that it successfully combines jazz, house, techno, trip-hop, soul and experimental electronics. That description sounds impressive until one remembers that modern music has been combining everything with everything for decades, often with the enthusiasm of a supermarket blender. "Rhythmique Nocturne" is more convincing because the connections are physical. A piano can become percussion. A cymbal can become harmony. A string section can function rhythmically. A drum recording can destabilise an algorithm. A sample from the past can become a contemporary gesture rather than a museum label. Prommer understands these relationships from the inside, as a drummer, producer and arranger who has spent years moving between rooms that supposedly belong to different musical tribes.

There is consequently very little sense of genre tourism here. The album does not visit jazz, techno or deep house as exotic neighbourhoods before returning home. These languages have clearly been part of Prommer’s musical vocabulary for years, and he uses them with the relaxed confidence of someone who no longer needs to explain why they belong together. The result is tactile without being fetishistic, sophisticated without becoming precious, and dance-oriented without treating the listener as a pair of legs requiring instructions. "Rhythmique Nocturne" ultimately proposes something rather more interesting than a fusion of styles: it suggests that rhythm itself can be a meeting place, provided we stop insisting on checking everyone’s passport at the door.

There is something almost suspiciously appropriate about bringing "Echoes" back in 2026. Alexander Kowalski’s debut appeared on Kanzleramt in 2001, at the point when Berlin techno was already acquiring a mythology large enough to become a nuisance, and its original artwork carried a sentence about fragments from the past following us into the future. Twenty-five years later, the line has acquired the uncomfortable accuracy of a fortune cookie written by someone who happened to understand electronic music. Yet "Echoes" does not return merely because it is old enough to qualify for anniversary treatment. Its particular combination of pressure, atmosphere and melodic darkness still has a pulse, and the new remaster makes that pulse easier to examine without polishing away the fingerprints.

Kowalski’s background matters here. Born in Greifswald in 1978 and raised in Berlin, he encountered techno during the city’s early-1990s transformation and emerged from the late-decade Tresor environment under the DisX3 alias before establishing himself through Kanzleramt. His first live performances and early hardware productions belong to a period when electronic music still involved a gratifying amount of physical negotiation with machines. "Echoes" was assembled from synthesizers, samplers and a Roland TR-909, developed through live jams and shaped through an analogue mixing desk and external effects. That method explains much of the album’s character. It is not simply that the tracks sound “analogue”, a word that has become almost meaningless after years of being applied to anything with a knob on it. There is a sense of decisions being made in real time, with sounds pushed into one another until they acquire weight, friction and consequence.

The opening “Voices” is a revealing piece of misdirection. At just under three minutes in the remastered edition, it establishes an atmosphere before "Echoes" really begins behaving like an album built for the club. “Oxygen” then introduces the deeper physicality of Kowalski’s method, while the title track settles into a denser, more propulsive territory in which the rhythm is never merely keeping time. The bass has mass, the upper frequencies keep worrying at its edges, and the melodic material is understated enough to avoid becoming sentimental. Kowalski’s great trick is that he understands melody as pressure rather than decoration. A synth line does not necessarily need to sing; sometimes it only needs to remain there long enough for the body to notice that it has become emotionally significant.

“Delicious” and “Hearing Is Believing” make that principle particularly apparent. Both have the sturdy, rolling construction expected from techno, but neither behaves like a collection of anonymous tools waiting for a DJ to provide them with a personality. There is detail in the surfaces, little shifts in emphasis and tonal colour that prevent repetition from becoming merely repetitive. The dub influence is important, too. Bass and space are treated as active compositional elements, while effects do not simply decorate the beat but alter the perceived dimensions of the room around it. This helps explain why the original album could function in a club without being exhausted by the club. You can imagine the physical setting, but the tracks retain enough internal activity to survive when the strobes are switched off and someone has to confront the terrible consequences of domestic lighting.

“Ratio” and “Patterns Of Hope” push the rhythmic side harder, with the latter especially suggesting how much Kowalski could extract from relatively economical materials. The title sounds almost indecently optimistic for early-2000s techno, yet the music does not offer easy consolation. Hope here is something mechanical and persistent, a pattern that continues because repetition itself can become a form of stubbornness. That gives the album some of its emotional depth. Its darkness is not theatrical misery, and its warmth is not softness. These tracks understand that a dancefloor can accommodate rather complicated feelings without requiring everybody to stop dancing and discuss them.

The later sequence becomes increasingly interesting precisely because it refuses to maintain a single level of intensity. “Debut (Lost Soul-Mix)” loosens the grip, “Sequential” compresses the architecture into a shorter burst, and “Silence Of Thoughts” returns to a more substantial rhythmic body. Then comes “My Dear”, whose longer duration and lower-energy profile offer something close to a comedown without turning the album into an afterthought. The digital anniversary edition also adds a remastered “Echoes (Dub Mix)”, which makes sense as an appendix because it exposes the album’s underlying logic from another angle: remove some of the obvious narrative cues and the machinery of bass, repetition and spatial manipulation becomes even more conspicuous.

What the 2026 remaster changes, then, is less interesting than what it refuses to change. The stated intention is greater depth, clarity and precision while preserving the original character, and that distinction matters. There is always a danger with remastering techno from this period that improved definition becomes a polite way of sanding off its physical roughness. "Echoes" benefits instead from hearing its layers more clearly while retaining the slightly murky relationship between machine precision and human intervention. The sounds are cleaner, but the album has not suddenly acquired a spotless personality. It still feels made rather than manufactured.

That may be the most persuasive reason to revisit "Echoes" now. The record belongs unmistakably to the period that produced it, but it does not depend entirely on nostalgia for its effect. Kowalski was already interested in the contradiction at the heart of techno: music constructed from rigid sequences that can nevertheless feel alive, repetitive structures that produce variation, machines that become expressive only because somebody keeps making imperfect choices about what they should do next. His later career would move through further forms of techno, house, melody and electronic experimentation, while Cycles Music now provides a home from which he can reconsider parts of that history on his own terms. The album therefore returns with an odd double perspective: it is both the beginning of a career and a reminder that beginnings rarely stay where we leave them.

Twenty-five years have done nothing to make "Echoes" sound young, which is probably healthier than the alternative. It sounds like a record from 2001 because it carries the technological assumptions, rhythmic vocabulary and nocturnal atmosphere of that moment. But it also demonstrates why some period-specific music survives without needing to pretend it predicted everything that came afterwards. The machines have changed, the software has multiplied, the clubs have become historical monuments in their own right, and apparently even techno now gets anniversary editions with respectable archival intentions. Yet the basic proposition remains wonderfully simple: put a kick drum in motion, give the bass enough room to become physical, introduce a few carefully chosen disturbances, and see what remains in the listener after the sequence stops. In Kowalski’s case, quite a lot.

Some collaborations are built around contrast: one musician brings this, the other brings that, and somewhere in the middle they negotiate a musical treaty. Fax and Braulio Lam seem to have taken the more difficult route. After three records and six years of working together, their individual contributions on "Mixed Signals III" have become so thoroughly entangled that trying to separate them would feel slightly impolite. This is not quite a dialogue between electronic musician and guitarist, nor a meeting between machine and wood. It is closer to two people having spent enough time listening to one another that the distinction between who is saying what has ceased to matter.

The history is worth remembering. Fax, the alias of Rubén Alonso Tamayo, has been an important figure in Mexican electronic music for more than two decades, first through Static Discos, the Tijuana label he co-founded, and later through his own Facade Electronics imprint. His catalogue stretches from minimal techno toward increasingly spacious forms of ambient and sound design. Braulio Lam comes from the Tijuana-San Diego border scene and has worked as a guitarist in rock, jazz and electronic contexts since 2013. He describes himself primarily as a guitarist rather than an electronic musician, a distinction that becomes particularly revealing here. "Mixed Signals III" does not use the guitar as a quaint acoustic object placed inside an electronic environment. It lets the guitar alter what the electronic environment can mean.

“Lowside” makes the change immediately apparent. The guitar is unusually exposed, its tone carrying enough warmth and grain to resist being absorbed into the surrounding electronics. But nothing here resembles a conventional acoustic performance. Notes are stretched, repeated, processed and allowed to become part of a larger field in which synth tones and environmental traces appear at carefully judged distances. The music is quiet without being empty. There is always something happening around the edges, although the record has the good manners not to point at every detail with a fluorescent marker.

This is where the third instalment differs subtly from its predecessors. The first "Mixed Signals" had a more grounded physicality, with muted rhythmic impulses and guitar moving through synthetic textures; "Mixed Signals II" opened the frame considerably, favouring field recordings, drones and a more overtly cinematic sense of scale. The new album does not simply reverse that expansion and return home. Instead, it brings the large spaces closer to the body. The horizon has not disappeared. It has simply stopped shouting from several kilometres away.

“Aki” is particularly effective in this respect. Its guitar figures have something almost folk-like about their simplicity, but the surrounding sound refuses to let that simplicity settle into nostalgia. Synthesised tones drift in and out, sometimes reinforcing the guitar's melodic contour, sometimes making it seem as though the melody is being remembered from another room. There is a faint tension between the recognisable and the elusive. You can follow the guitar, but you cannot quite predict where its surroundings will take it.

The title "Mixed Signals" has always been apt, but the ambiguity here is less about confusion than coexistence. Guitar and synthesis frequently occupy different kinds of space without being placed into opposition. A processed tone may behave like an extension of the guitar; a guitar resonance may sound almost electronic. The ear keeps trying to assign responsibility, only to discover that responsibility has apparently been outsourced to a committee of timbre. It is a very efficient way of making collaboration audible without turning collaboration into a spectacle.

“Serifa”, the shortest piece, brings the relationship into especially sharp focus. The guitar and synthesizer seem to move toward one another rather than simply occupying the same arrangement, and the piece acquires a gentle sense of reciprocity. There is melodic material here, but it is never allowed to become a tune in the conventional sense. Instead it becomes a path through which the two sound sources can recognise one another. The restraint is important. A less patient production might have added a beat, enlarged the harmonic field or introduced some dramatic swell to underline the emotional significance. Fax and Lam wisely leave the emotional intelligence in the textures.

The final “400D” is more spacious again, and its title brings an almost photographic association to a record whose cover was also created by Lam. That seems fitting. Lam's background as a photographer is not merely biographical decoration: "Mixed Signals III" often behaves like a sequence of carefully framed images, except that the camera has been replaced by a microphone and the depth of field is determined by reverb, frequency and duration. Sounds appear sharply in the foreground while others remain just beyond focus. The music does not describe a landscape so much as determine how much of one can be seen at any given moment.

There is a particularly appealing quality to the way the album handles silence. It never treats quietness as a grand spiritual statement. Silence is simply another compositional material, allowing one sound to retain its shape before another arrives. Lawrence English's mastering at Negative Space preserves that spaciousness without turning it into glossy audiophile wallpaper. The details remain present, but they are not polished into sterility. There is still dust on the surface, which is exactly where a record like this needs it.

The border between Tijuana and Mexicali, where the two musicians work, inevitably forms part of the album's context, but the music does not need to turn geography into postcard symbolism. Its sense of place is quieter and more convincing. It resides in the particular grain of the guitar, the measured electronic processes, the feeling of distance between sounds and the awareness that two musicians can work across a physical space without making separation itself into a dramatic theme. The border is there as lived geography rather than decorative mythology.

What makes "Mixed Signals III" satisfying as the conclusion to the trilogy is therefore not a grand summation. It is the increased confidence of the relationship. The musicians have reached the point where they can leave more things unresolved because they know exactly how much weight an unresolved sound can carry. “Lowside” establishes the ground, “Aki” lets melody breathe inside it, “Serifa” brings the two voices closest together, and “400D” leaves the frame open again. Four tracks, roughly twenty-six minutes, and not a single unnecessary drum roll announcing the significance of the occasion.

Six years after the first volume, the mixed signals have become remarkably clear about one thing: neither Fax nor Braulio Lam needs to dominate the other. The music works because authorship has become less important than attention. One sound leaves room for another, the other alters it, and the resulting third thing belongs to neither musician completely. Perhaps that is what a successful long-term collaboration eventually becomes: not two voices speaking simultaneously, but a strange new voice neither of them could have produced alone.

The trilogy closes, then, without slamming a door. It simply lets the last resonance remain in the room a little longer than strictly necessary. Human beings are usually in such a hurry to call things finished. These two seem to understand that a good ending is sometimes just the point at which nobody feels compelled to add anything else.

There are records that use experimentalism as a promise of freedom, and there are records that use it as an excuse for not having decided what they are doing. "Clock In, Clock Out" belongs to a more interesting category: music in which the rules are quite clearly there, but their main purpose seems to be making ordinary musical behaviour increasingly difficult. Musica Mosaica, the Brussels duo of Xavier García Bardón and Emmanuel Gonay, have been developing this peculiar sensibility for years, following their 2021 7-inch on Les Disques Lexi with an album that feels less like a collection of compositions than a collection of situations. Their materials are often tiny, dry, percussive and strangely precise, yet the relationships between them remain sufficiently unstable to make each piece feel as though it might suddenly acquire a different set of physical laws.

The title is already a small joke about the relationship between music and time. To clock in and clock out is to surrender time to measurement, routine and labour, while music traditionally promises the opposite: duration that becomes subjective, elastic, occasionally even useless. Musica Mosaica place the two ideas in the same apparatus and then start tampering with the clock. Their metronomic principles do not simply impose a common pulse; they generate divergences, overlaps and little conflicts between simultaneous temporalities. The result is rhythmic music without the comforting implication that rhythm has necessarily been hired to keep everyone together.

“Interlocking” establishes this immediately. Its sounds are sharply delineated, almost touchable, with percussive electronic figures and acoustic elements appearing less as parts of a conventional arrangement than as objects being placed beside one another. The piece has an odd mechanical elegance, but there is nothing particularly efficient about the machine. It clicks, hesitates, repeats, veers sideways. One of the more intriguing details is the use of material derived from the E-mu Emulator II's “Loon Garden” sample, a fragment with its own strange history through 1980s electronic music and 808 State. Here, however, nostalgia is almost beside the point. The old digital residue becomes raw material, stripped of its original context and made to participate in a much stranger little economy.

“Codex Sybaris” makes the record's archaeological quality more apparent without becoming retro music. There are sounds here that seem to belong simultaneously to obsolete electronics, percussion practice, laboratory equipment and some imaginary instrument whose manufacturer went bankrupt before writing the manual. This is one reason the album is so difficult to place historically. The FM timbres can suggest early electronic music, yet their treatment avoids the warm nostalgia usually attached to vintage synthesis. The sounds are too exposed, too matter-of-fact. They do not arrive wearing period costume. They simply sit there, behaving oddly.

Then “Tempistica Metronomica” begins multiplying the problem. Its glassy, sliding gestures seem to have rhythm without quite behaving rhythmically, as if several clocks had been instructed to measure different phenomena and had subsequently decided that coordination was an optional feature. This is where Musica Mosaica's method becomes audible rather than theoretical. A constraint is established, but the constraint does not dictate the result. It produces circumstances in which sounds can react to one another. The distinction matters. A composition based on rigid processes can become predictable; here, the process is sufficiently narrow to make every deviation conspicuous.

“Concaténations” is perhaps the most mischievous piece in this respect. Its percussive figures suggest an ensemble of objects rather than instruments, with a peculiar resonance that makes one think of bottles, small pieces of metal, primitive machinery and electronic ghosts all attempting to join the same conversation. Yet the track never becomes cute. That is an important achievement because this kind of miniature sound theatre can very easily collapse into the sonic equivalent of a whimsical museum display. Musica Mosaica keep the materials austere enough that their strangeness remains slightly uncomfortable.

The five pieces were composed between 2022 and 2025 and recorded across several Brussels locations, with Eitan Efrat, Laszlo Umbreit and Iris García Bardón contributing to the project, Umbreit also handling the mix. This is significant because "Clock In, Clock Out" sounds unusually conscious of the difference between collecting sounds and composing with them. The musicians seem to preserve the individuality of their materials rather than melting everything into an undifferentiated electronic surface. There is very little of the fashionable fog that experimental electronics sometimes uses to disguise its own construction. Instead, things are left naked enough for us to hear their edges, their repetitions, their collisions and their sudden disappearances.

The final “Endnotes” complicates the record retrospectively. Its slower, more archaic-sounding elements introduce acoustic and historical associations that were largely concealed beneath the synthetic surfaces of the preceding tracks. Suddenly the album's peculiar objects seem less like products of a particular technology and more like pieces of a much older problem: how to organise sound, duration and repetition without turning them into obedient servants. The effect is not a revelation so much as a shift in perspective. After four tracks of apparently artificial behaviour, the distinction between old and new, acoustic and electronic, composed and found begins to look rather less stable than it did at the beginning.

This is also where the album's scientific vocabulary becomes useful, provided one does not take it too literally. Musica Mosaica are not making laboratory music in the sense of producing demonstrations of a predetermined theory. Their achievement is closer to constructing conditions in which musical consequences become difficult to predict. Their accumulated sound materials function almost like a peculiar collection of specimens, but the interesting thing is what happens when those specimens are forced into proximity. The compositions are therefore neither pure improvisations nor rigidly fixed constructions. They are controlled circumstances with room for accidents, which may be one of the few forms of control genuinely worth having.

The cover drawing by John Merlin from 1950 adds another deliciously inappropriate temporal layer, especially alongside a record that concerns itself so insistently with clocks, obsolete electronics and manufactured systems. Even the physical object seems unwilling to settle on one historical moment. And then there is the instruction that the LP should be played at 45 RPM, which is the sort of practical information that immediately makes the modern listener suspect that there must be a trap. There isn't, presumably. But after listening to "Clock In, Clock Out", suspicion feels like a perfectly reasonable listening method.

At barely twenty-one minutes, the album is over before its mechanisms have had time to become familiar. That brevity is crucial. Musica Mosaica do not explain their procedures through repetition, and they wisely avoid turning their sonic experiments into demonstrations that the audience is expected to admire on schedule. Five pieces arrive, establish their peculiar circumstances, interfere with one another indirectly, and disappear. The record leaves behind not a grand theory of sound but a more modest and much more useful disturbance: the feeling that rhythm, technology, history and even musical "objects" are considerably less fixed than we habitually pretend.

Perhaps that is the real joke hidden inside "Clock In, Clock Out". We spend our lives inventing devices for measuring time, then spend our leisure listening to people trying to escape the measurements. Musica Mosaica simply clock in, dismantle the clock, and clock out again before anyone from Human Resources notices.