It's a while that Astro Chicken label and his main project Hyboid didn't release music but, luckily, the wait is over. Recorded entirely with vintage synthesizers and vintage effects, "Terrör Of The Üniverse" is the latest album by Sebastian Hubert a.k.a. Hyboid. Released as a luxurious double album containing twelve new tracks, "Terrör Of The Üniverse" show Sebastian's main passions: synthesizers and 70s/80s electronic music. If the old albums sounded like a space travel soundtrack, the new album is also showing a certain influence coming from old library music and soundtracks. Records that now labels like Private Records are reissuing: check Gerhard Heinz "Library Music", Sergio Ferraresi "Horizons Vol. 7 Galaxi" and Michael Bundt "Dreamdancer" releases. Playing around with fantasy and irony, Hyboid is teasing us convincing the listener to follow him through his journey where we can see "Toxic Avenger vs. Marshmallow Man", the "Leather Queen of the Amazons", the "Cosmo Speedrun", the "Kingdom of the Laser Dwarves" or the "High-Gloss Üniverse" while hearing the "Lament for My Eta Carinae". Even if we are called to feel "Terrör Of The Üniverse", this is an universe I gladly visited. The album is available as double vinyl set, black or violet with poster, you can purchase/check it here: https://hyboid.bandcamp.com/album/terr-r-of-the-niverse-2x12-limited-purple-vinyl-edition-a1-poster-mp3-download and if the next Friday you're in Berlin, you could check Hyboid live at an event organized by Janis Nowacki, boss of Private Records. Sebastian will open the night for 70s/80s Cosmic Disco legends Wunderwerke a.k.a. Supersempfft a.k.a. Roboterwerke and Schaltkreis Wassermann.

Francis Mallari, Elliot Berthault, Maxime Gendre, Simon Dubourg here are the name of the confirmation of the undoubted fact that WAVE is a French stuff in the present time. The synth bass, the guitar, and the effects warping the voice are the pillars of this Ep which drags us slowly in a humid and stinky night in the slums of Paris searching for a gig of the same band and then to get lost like an early movie of Luc Besson, Subway. It's not rare in wave music that the music itself is the perfect soundtrack to tell about it. Rendez-Vous has the energy, the skills, the rage, the elegance to tell again about the soul of Fad Gadget and so to sacrifice on the shrine of the god of post-punk their talent. The track which struck: Euroshima is brilliant lively and dirty as the Wave must be.

My better-late-than-never journey into the discography of Pram continues with their second reissue on Medical Records: 1994's Helium. This time around, the deluxe reissue is on yellow wax. Like the previous reissue (The Stars Are So Big, The Earth Is So Small, Stay As You Are) there has been no remaster. Again as before, it's a welcome decision, for music exuding a similarly dynamic, low-fi mixture of mild aloofness, humour and instrumental experimentation.

'Gravity' seems to begin the album in a similar vein to The Stars Are So Big..., with a tense atmosphere somewhat analogous to that of its opener 'Loco'. There's clearer audio this time, which brings out and bumps up across the spectrum the rapid drumming and dramatic, quick motifs of the keys. Between them wavers a similarly climactic, fraught cello line that eventually descends into pulsing lows and upper squeals.

But with the second number, 'Dancing on a Star', the band find a much more satisfying balance between accessible songwriting and odd, exploratory experimentation. The strange, rather improbable mix of sounds makes plausible the idea of many different potential versions of the song; of a kind of arbitrariness. Yet at the same time, these individual elements really complement one another surprisingly well. The thin bubbles of the ascending bassline, the bold and varied synth play ranging from Radiophonic Workshop-esque spacey wobbles and bloops (an MS-20 perhaps? I'm no expert) to the stop-start tinkling of miniature bells; the characteristically restless drumming; Rosie Cuckson's usual bashful, dreamy vocals. Overall, it's bewildering, but also captivatingly energetic and warm. The other outstanding songs are 'My Father the Clown', with its uneasy waltz and smokey, beatless, instrumental final section; the handsome, protracted, jazzy "Blue" and the closer "Shadows", which blends verses of synthesised traditional folk with a fidgeting, instrumental chorus of metallic rhythms, brass and synth.

In the liner notes to the vinyl reissue of The Stars Are So Big, Cuckson recalls that the music of the band was "democratic" in the sense of representing every member's individual interests to the point of compromise, with nobody completely satisfied at the end. This explanation undoubtedly applies to Helium as well. It's the sound of multiple interpretations and interests wrestling over the songs' themes. The result is ambiguity; like the kind associated with shoegaze, only expressed in complex, ineffable, proggy nuance rather than an arresting overload of output. The fabulously queasy 'Little Angel, Little Monkey', which resembles some demented, speedy descendant of lounge lizard music, is the most impressive example of this.

In spite of all the supposed tension, there's something about the predominantly gentle, wry messiness of this unpredictable, ambitious and lovely music that convinces me the band were probably having a great deal of fun.

The Art to make Music and to make it interesting is a job that Avant! Records knows very well. This music work of the post-punk due from Vancouver gives a perfect demonstration of the cure and skill of this label. The music of KOBAN is an hidden black pearl in the memories of the audience which still is yearning for punk-wave soundscapes. Smoothly ready to be a sound track for SM acts Abject Obsession flows in the stream of an eternal memento of vinyl and distorted guitar, pulsing bass and weird french voices seized and flogged by harsh synths. What is amazing for a terminal wave-lover like me is how this proposal so traditional and sadistically observant of the punk-wave rules is never boring and it thrives perfectly in its eerie garden.

A paroxysm got defined as an uncontrollable outburst, but also as the acme of a pathological process. In the (dim) light of such a definition, the twelve tracks of the third album by Italian producer Fabrizio Matrone aka Matter for the Ukranian imprint Kvitnu, which keeps on moving towards more and more interesting sonic directions under the baton of Kotra and Zavoloka, sounds paroxysmal. Whether a track focuses on viscerally industrial-driven mechanical pulsations ("Depth", "Pressure", "Column", "Surge") or gets wisely channeled towards more abstract territories and beatless movements ("Exsolution", "Stone" or the final "Ash", which sounds like the logical end of a series of repeated combustions), each moment of "Paroxysmal" enucleates a moment or a sound which seems to exacerbate both the electric dispersion of rhythmical patterns and the gradual annihilation of the collapsing buildings, laying on smashed frequencies and deranged tones. Even though it could be considered logically related to his previous act "Biorhexistasy", "Paroxysmal" could reasonably be considered a further step in the explorations of harsh atonal territories by Matter, who wisely digs them by shattered swarms, noisy resonances, piercing beats and other sonic strategies. Some of them could vaguely resemble stuff like Celluloid Mata, Synapscape or Klangstabil, but speaking, in general, they manage to amplify the bipolarity between a constant aural tension and an astounding attention to detail, which makes it sound less rough than you could expect.