There are collaborations that make perfect sense on paper, collaborations that seem designed by an algorithm after being fed the words "legendary", "experimental" and "unlikely". Then there is "Strange City", which belongs to the more entertaining category of ideas that sound both completely inevitable and faintly illegal. Sun Ra and Merzbow.

One spent his life insisting that earthly categories were insufficient for understanding music, identity and existence. The other spent more than four decades demonstrating that earthly categories were also insufficient for understanding what constitutes an acceptable volume level. That they never actually met is, therefore, less a problem than an invitation to science fiction.

Originally issued by Cold Spring in 2016, "Strange City" now returns in an expanded 2CD edition that finally gathers material previously divided between the CD and LP editions. The new edition also adds “Granular Jazz Part 5”, originally made for Stuart Maconie's "Freak Zone" on BBC 6 Music. The result is roughly 104 minutes of music, which is enough time for several philosophical crises, one meal and at least two reconsiderations of your relationship with your neighbours.

The underlying concept is deceptively simple. Masami Akita, the Tokyo-based musician known as Merzbow, was given access to recordings from Sun Ra's archive, particularly material connected with "The Magic City" and "Strange Strings". Rather than presenting these recordings as sacred historical artefacts, he subjects them to his own vocabulary: distortion, feedback, electronic abrasion, loops, granular processing and vast accumulations of sound.

This is not a remix in the conventional sense. It is closer to archaeological vandalism. And I mean that as a compliment.

The opening of “Livid Sun Loop” is perhaps the best place to understand the operation. Fragments of Sun Ra's horns, drums and ensemble emerge sufficiently clearly to establish a recognisable musical past. Then Merzbow begins applying pressure. The original material is stretched, submerged, pulverised and periodically allowed to surface again, like something trapped underneath an industrial machine that has developed an interest in free jazz.

The crucial point is that Sun Ra does not completely disappear. That has been the source of some disagreement around the record since its original release. Some critics felt that Akita's noise overwhelms the source material to the point where the supposed collaboration becomes essentially another Merzbow record. Others have heard precisely the opposite phenomenon: Sun Ra's rhythmic and cosmic logic surviving underneath the violence, providing a hidden skeleton for the apparent chaos. Both interpretations contain some truth. But the ambiguity is exactly what makes "Strange City" work.

Sun Ra's music was never simply “jazz” in the tidy historical sense. His Arkestra could use swing, free improvisation, electronics, ritual, repetition and theatricality without asking permission from genre historians. His cosmic mythology was not merely eccentric decoration either. It gave him a way of imagining music as something capable of escaping the social and aesthetic limitations imposed upon it.
Merzbow's approach is similarly uncompromising, although his chosen vehicle is noise. So the real meeting point is not instrumentation.

It is "cosmology".

Sun Ra imagined music escaping Earth. Merzbow makes Earth itself sound as though it has malfunctioned.

“Livid Sun Loop” consequently feels less like jazz being covered in noise than like a recording being exposed to an entirely different physical environment. The horns are no longer simply horns. Percussion becomes rhythmic debris. Frequencies acquire mass. The music seems to stop obeying the ordinary relationship between foreground and background.

This is especially effective because Merzbow is not simply turning a knob marked "LOUD" and going home.

There is architecture underneath the brutality. The noise shifts in density and frequency. Rhythmic fragments recur. High frequencies sharpen the surface while lower registers provide weight. Layers accumulate and separate. After sufficient exposure, the ear begins to identify patterns inside what initially seemed like undifferentiated destruction. This phenomenon has been noted repeatedly in earlier assessments of the album: prolonged listening changes the listener's relationship with the noise, making its internal movement increasingly perceptible. In other words, Merzbow eventually teaches your ears to live in the disaster. Human civilisation has achieved stranger things, admittedly.

The first disc's second piece, “Granular Jazz Part 2”, pushes the relationship further. It is less concerned with the initial shock of impact and more interested in what happens after the original jazz material has been thoroughly contaminated. Sun Ra's presence becomes spectral rather than obvious, appearing through rhythmic suggestions, fragments of timbre and fleeting instrumental shapes.

This is where the title "Strange City" starts to feel particularly appropriate. A city is recognisable through patterns: roads, buildings, voices, traffic, repetition. Destroy those patterns and the city becomes noise. Yet even inside the noise, traces of the original organisation remain.
Merzbow does something similar to Sun Ra. He destroys the city without completely erasing its map.

The newly collected "Granular Jazz Parts 1–4" deepen this process. “Part 1” establishes a more gradual transformation, while “Part 3” becomes considerably more turbulent. “Part 4”, by contrast, is fascinating because it reduces the obvious violence and allows atmosphere to take over. Earlier criticism has recognised this relative restraint as one of the album's most striking moments.

It is tempting to call this the “quiet” section. That would be misleading.

Merzbow quiet is roughly equivalent to being trapped inside a malfunctioning aircraft engine that has recently discovered minimalism. But proportion matters. After enormous stretches of density, even a modest reduction in pressure becomes almost melodic. The ear recalibrates itself. Space acquires drama.

This is one of the album's most sophisticated characteristics: "volume is not its only weapon".

The newly restored sequence also makes more sense as a whole than the original split-format presentation. The 2016 edition had different music on CD and LP, partly because the extreme durations imposed practical limitations on vinyl mastering. This reissue removes that artificial division and allows the entire project to be heard as a single body. That matters.

"Strange City" is fundamentally about transformation over time. Its enormous durations are not an inconvenience to be overcome but part of the composition's physical logic. A three-minute version would be almost meaningless. The music needs time to become familiar enough for its internal relationships to reveal themselves. And this is where Sun Ra's presence becomes stranger. The longer you listen, the less useful it becomes to ask where Sun Ra ends and Merzbow begins.

At first, you hear a Sun Ra fragment being attacked by Merzbow. Then you hear Merzbow surrounding Sun Ra. Eventually you hear neither. You hear "Strange City".

That distinction is important because the record's greatest success is not preservation. It is transformation. Sun Ra is not being respectfully framed behind museum glass. He is being put through the machine. There is something beautifully appropriate about that. Sun Ra himself was a master of transformation, constantly reinventing his ensemble, his identity, his mythology and his conception of what music could contain. His archive is therefore being treated not as a mausoleum but as raw material. Even the historical gap becomes productive.

Sun Ra died in 1993. Merzbow's "Strange City" sessions took place in Tokyo in 2016. The two musicians belong to different generations, different scenes and radically different technological environments. Yet the album makes that distance feel less like an obstacle than an additional compositional layer.

Time becomes another effect pedal. The bonus “Granular Jazz Part 5”, brief at just two minutes, is almost comically short beside the other pieces. It works as a kind of epilogue, though its existence also reinforces the archival character of this edition. The main body is immense; the final fragment feels like one last transmission picked up from the wrong frequency.

That is perhaps the best way to understand "Strange City". Not as a collaboration between two musicians who never collaborated. Not even as a remix project.

But as a "conversation between two ideas about what sound can become".

Sun Ra supplies the extraterrestrial imagination, the rhythmic intelligence, the sense that jazz might be something much larger than its earthly genealogy.

Merzbow supplies the force necessary to make that imagination physically uncomfortable. One points toward Saturn. The other blows up the launchpad.

The astonishing thing is that the rocket still gets somewhere.

There are moments here when the jazz material is so thoroughly buried that one might reasonably wonder whether the Sun Ra connection has become merely conceptual. That criticism remains valid, particularly for listeners expecting a more balanced dialogue. Earlier reviews have disagreed sharply on precisely this question. But perhaps balance would have been the wrong objective. A balanced Sun Ra/Merzbow record would be considerably less interesting.

The imbalance is the event.

The source material survives not by remaining intact but by being damaged, displaced and forced into another language. That is why the occasional appearance of a horn, rhythm or vocal texture can feel almost miraculous. It is not nostalgia. It is evidence. Something was here. Something is still here. And it has been through hell.

"Strange City" is therefore a peculiar kind of archival release: one that does not merely preserve the past but subjects it to another future. Sun Ra's cosmic jazz is not reconstructed. It is reimagined through one of the most extreme sonic practices of the modern era.

The result is abrasive, excessive, occasionally absurd and frequently magnificent. It is also oddly moving. Not because Merzbow makes Sun Ra sound beautiful. Because, underneath all that electronic violence, Sun Ra still sounds like someone trying to get a message through. Perhaps that is the real collaboration. One musician sends a transmission from Saturn. Another fills the channel with static. And somehow, against all reasonable expectations, the message survives.

I actually had the chance to experience this strange beast in the flesh in Manchester in 2016, around the time the material was being presented live. I still remember the sheer physical impact of it. This wasn't simply something you listened to; it seemed to arrive as a weather system with a personal grudge. The room was being hit by wave after wave of noise, with Merzbow's machinery turning the remnants of Sun Ra's cosmic jazz into something vast, metallic and almost aggressively corporeal. I distinctly remember looking around and wondering whether everybody else was experiencing the same thing or whether my ears had already resigned from their employment. There were, inevitably, people joking about their ears bleeding, but the joke contained an uncomfortable amount of truth: the sound was so intense that hearing became a physical activity, something involving the entire body rather than just the supposedly convenient organs on either side of the head. It was awesome, ridiculous and slightly terrifying, which seems an entirely appropriate description of a Sun Ra/Merzbow encounter. Listening to Strange City again now, almost a decade later, brings back that sensation with surprising force. The record may be archival, but its impact remains stubbornly present tense.

Some records introduce themselves politely. [KAAARST] kicks the door with the body of a bass guitar, then apologizes by humming a strangely beautiful melody. Humanity, as usual, is perfectly capable of making elegance out of blunt force.

French bassist Antoine Ferris has been an active presence in Toulouse's adventurous improvised music scene through projects such as Baraque à Free, Megacoaster, Feràmia and Totun, developing a vocabulary that treats the electric bass as anything but a conventional low-end instrument. Across those ensembles, and through collaborations with composers and improvisers, he has cultivated an approach where electronics, hip-hop production aesthetics, noise, and free improvisation are not competing languages but different dialects of the same conversation. [KAAARST], his first solo statement, feels less like a debut than the moment when years of accumulated experiments finally found a coherent gravitational centre.

Calling this a bass album would be technically correct in the same way calling a volcano "warm geology" would also be technically correct. Ferris continuously dismantles the identity of his instrument. Strings become percussion, feedback becomes melody, contact microphones amplify microscopic gestures, effects pedals generate unstable rhythmic companions that behave almost like stubborn improvisers rather than obedient machines. At times he attacks the instrument with his fists, elsewhere with a butter knife, turning performance into a peculiar choreography where every object seems equally qualified to become a musical tool.

Yet despite all this apparent violence, [KAAARST] never settles for noise as spectacle. The abrasive textures are consistently shadowed by melancholy. There is an emotional hesitation beneath the distortion, as though every burst of sonic aggression immediately questions itself. The album lives inside that contradiction, finding tenderness in abrasion and vulnerability inside mechanical repetition.

The sequencing reinforces this fragmented emotional geography. The miniature opener "crush" barely has time to introduce itself before dissolving, while "strange party" assembles fractured grooves from unstable rhythmic cells that flirt with electronic music without ever surrendering to predictable structures. Pieces like "hount orbe" and "coume sourde" stretch improvisation into something almost geological, allowing feedback and resonance to evolve with patient inevitability. Even the provocatively titled "electronic dance music" seems to smile ironically at genre expectations: if anyone arrives expecting club anthems, they may discover instead that dancing can also happen inside one's nervous system.

Ferris' fascination with electronic production is especially compelling because it never attempts to disguise the physicality of performance. Sampling techniques borrowed from beat-making coexist with unmistakably tactile instrumental gestures. Every scrape, strike and accidental resonance preserves the memory of hands touching wood and metal. The electronics do not erase the performer; they magnify the traces of his presence until every imperfection acquires structural importance.

The collaborative moments provide welcome shifts in perspective without interrupting the album's identity. Natacha Kanga's contribution to "shame's coming" introduces a fragile vocal dimension that contrasts beautifully with Ferris' fragmented instrumental language, while Louie Z's Occitan singing on "la nèu" anchors the record in a sense of place and cultural memory. The use of an endangered regional language feels quietly significant: amid all the digital manipulation and sonic deconstruction, an ancient voice appears, reminding us that experimentation does not require abandoning history.

There are echoes throughout the record of artists who have expanded the vocabulary of the electric bass and electroacoustic improvisation, yet Ferris avoids sounding derivative. His references to industrial music, glitch aesthetics, hip-hop production and free improvisation remain ingredients rather than destinations. The album constantly resists becoming too comfortable within any single tradition, preferring instead to occupy the unstable terrain between them.

The title itself suggests rugged landscapes shaped over immense stretches of time, and that metaphor proves surprisingly apt. These pieces often feel eroded rather than constructed. Sounds emerge like exposed mineral layers, revealing hidden colours beneath rough surfaces. Even the shortest tracks function as sedimentary deposits, each preserving tiny sonic fossils that resonate long after they disappear.

For listeners accustomed to clearly defined genres, [KAAARST] may initially resemble an elaborate puzzle whose picture never appears on the box. That is precisely its strength. Ferris trusts curiosity more than certainty, inviting repeated listening rather than immediate comprehension. The album rewards attention to detail: the unstable pulse hiding beneath distortion, the unexpected lyricism surfacing through feedback, the rhythmic intelligence concealed inside apparent chaos.

In an era where software can simulate almost any instrumental gesture with alarming efficiency, Antoine Ferris reminds us that unpredictability remains profoundly human. Sometimes all it takes is a bass guitar, a handful of pedals, questionable kitchen utensils, and the willingness to let accidents become collaborators. The result is an album that feels simultaneously raw and meticulously considered, proving that even broken signals can carry remarkably honest messages.

There is a peculiar kind of ambition at work in this self titled album, the debut full-length under Dario Gatto’s bod kin alias. Not the ambition of scale, nor the grandiose urge to overwhelm through sheer volume. Rather, it is the ambition of someone attempting to build a machine from fragments while simultaneously documenting its collapse. A very human pastime, really: spending years assembling a structure only to discover that the cracks were part of the design all along.

Gatto, a Milan-based composer whose activities range from shoegaze-inflected electronics and live coding to electroacoustic composition, approaches sound here less as a sequence of events than as a field of unstable relationships. His academic background in contemporary composition is evident, yet "bod kin" never feels trapped inside the sterile glass cabinet where experimental music occasionally locks itself for safekeeping. Instead, these six tracks remain stubbornly alive, twitching, mutating and occasionally misbehaving.

The album’s conceptual core revolves around control and its inevitable failure. bod kin's own description speaks of attempting to harness an impossibly fluctuating sonic instinct, and that tension becomes audible from the opening moments. Beats appear as if assembled from damaged circuitry. Harmonic material emerges briefly through clouds of abrasion before being swallowed again by noise. Rhythms refuse stable footing. The music seems caught between architecture and erosion, as though every structure is being simultaneously designed and dismantled.

What makes this release particularly compelling is its refusal to choose between brutality and delicacy. Tracks like “fragile” and “fragment:passacaglia” suggest forms inherited from older musical traditions, but they arrive filtered through post-grime disintegration and industrial residue. The result is neither nostalgic nor futurist. It inhabits a strange middle ground where medieval ghosts, tracker software logic and broken bass frequencies appear to share the same cramped apartment.

The influence of the Dirtywave M8 tracker is more than a technical footnote. The album often feels composed from the inside of the machine itself, embracing the tracker’s grid-based mentality while constantly sabotaging its inherent rigidity. Sequences splinter into noisy cut-ups, abrupt edits become compositional gestures, and microscopic details acquire an almost disproportionate significance. Viewed from a distance, everything appears blurred; examined closely, every scratch and rupture acquires surgical sharpness.

Yet despite the album’s fascination with fragmentation, there is an emotional undercurrent running beneath the static. “cura:organo” in particular introduces a fleeting sense of vulnerability, as if some damaged sacred music had survived a catastrophic hard-drive failure. Even the closing “sctrr”, brief as it is, feels less like a conclusion than a transmission abruptly interrupted. Not because the story is unfinished, but because completion was never part of the project’s vocabulary.

There is a tendency among listeners to treat noise and power electronics as confrontational genres, forms of sonic hostility aimed at the audience. bod kin proposes something subtler. The aggression here is not directed outward. It is directed at certainty itself. Every texture challenges fixed interpretation. Every rhythm questions its own existence. Every moment seems aware that permanence is an illusion.

In that sense, the album functions almost as a musical essay on instability. Not an academic one, despite the intellectual framework surrounding it, but a deeply tactile and physical exploration of what happens when composition stops pretending that order can ever be complete. The album does not resolve its contradictions. It lives inside them.

For listeners seeking clean narratives, identifiable grooves or reassuring destinations, this record may feel like trying to read a map while someone continuously redraws the borders. For everyone else, this album offers a fascinating glimpse into a sound world where fragmentation becomes form, noise becomes language, and uncertainty becomes the only reliable guide. In an age obsessed with optimization and precision, there is something strangely refreshing about music that proudly admits it has no idea where it is going, yet somehow arrives exactly where it needs to be.

Irish folk music has spent the last decade wandering into stranger territories, but few records sound as though they were unearthed from beneath the floorboards of an abandoned chapel during a thunderstorm. "...And Take The Black Worm With Me", the remarkable solo work of Ian Lynch under his One Leg One Eye moniker, feels less like an album than a prolonged séance conducted with rusted instruments, decaying memories, and whatever spirits still linger in Dublin's forgotten industrial spaces.

Lynch is already known as a founding member of Lankum, a band that helped drag traditional Irish music away from tourist-pub nostalgia and into darker, more unsettling territory. Yet even listeners familiar with Lankum’s fascination for drone, repetition, and sonic abrasion may find themselves startled by the singular bleakness of this work. Critics frequently highlighted its ability to merge traditional song forms with immense walls of drone and blackened atmospherics, creating something simultaneously ancient and disturbingly contemporary.

The album opens with "Glistening, She Emerges", and immediately any expectation of conventional folk music is buried beneath layers of hurdy-gurdy resonance, uilleann pipe overtones, tape manipulations, and subterranean frequencies. The effect resembles entering a cave where someone has been singing continuously for centuries. Not singing for entertainment, mind you. Singing because stopping would awaken something unpleasant.

What makes "...And Take The Black Worm With Me" so compelling is its refusal to separate beauty from dread. Lynch understands that many old folk songs were never particularly interested in comforting anyone. Death, exile, ghosts, poverty, madness: these themes were not aesthetic accessories but daily realities. Rather than modernising traditional music, Lynch strips it back to its psychological core. Songs such as "Bold And Undaunted Youth" and "I'd Rather Be Tending My Sheep" feel suspended outside linear time, their melodies emerging through thick layers of echo and distortion like messages transmitted from a collapsing century.

The production by John Murphy deserves particular mention. Every drone seems alive. Every harmonic interaction vibrates with microscopic movement. The shruti box, concertina, field recordings, and tape textures form a continuously shifting environment where no sound remains stable for long. Even silence feels occupied. One gets the impression that the room itself is listening.

There is also something deeply physical about the album. Much contemporary drone music often ends up resembling architectural renderings: impressive structures that leave little emotional residue. Lynch's work is different. The frequencies feel bodily. They press against the chest. They resonate in the stomach. They occasionally produce the sensation that the building around you has developed opinions.

The contributions from Laurie Sue Shanaman and Ruth Clinton deepen the record's spectral character. Clinton's organ work in particular introduces a liturgical dimension that never fully resolves into either sacred or profane territory. The music exists somewhere between church, ruin, and dream.

What is perhaps most impressive is how personal the album feels despite its monumental scale. The field recordings captured in abandoned spaces, including the warehouse where Lynch's father once worked, infuse the music with a sense of inherited memory. The album becomes a dialogue between family history, Irish folklore, urban decay, and spiritual excavation. Several reviews noted how these environments seep directly into the atmosphere of the record, making place itself feel like an active participant.

The newly expanded Cold Spring edition, which adds the exclusive "Sympathetic Invertebrate Ritual", only reinforces the album's strange coherence. The title alone sounds like an occult ceremony accidentally approved by a local council committee. Yet within the context of this record, it feels perfectly natural.

If much contemporary folk seeks authenticity through preservation, "...And Take The Black Worm With Me" seeks it through transformation. Lynch treats tradition not as a museum object but as a living, mutating organism capable of absorbing drone music, black metal aesthetics, environmental sound, and existential unease without losing its essential character.

The result is one of those rare albums that feels simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic. It sounds like forgotten folklore being transmitted through damaged machinery. Like a ballad sung by a ghost operating heavy industrial equipment after the end of the world. And somehow, against all reasonable expectations, it is profoundly moving.

A harrowing, immersive, and strangely beautiful work that reminds us that beneath every folk tradition lies a darkness older than any nation, patiently waiting to sing again.

Originally released in 2010 via The Centrifuge and now revived by Undogmatisch, "The Die" sits in that slightly awkward historical pocket where digital production had already matured, but hadn’t yet been flattened by algorithmic sameness. You can hear it immediately: the textures are precise but not over-polished, the structures deliberate but not overly optimized for attention spans that barely exist anymore.

Magnani’s approach to electronic composition here feels almost architectural. Tracks like “PAIR” and “TRILUX” are built from clean, interlocking elements that suggest order without ever settling into predictability. There’s a faint electro pulse running through the record, but it’s constantly being nudged off-center by small disruptions, tonal shifts, rhythmic hesitations. It’s as if the music is testing its own balance, just to prove it doesn’t depend on stability.

“TWO BEASTS” and “OXIGENS” lean into a more kinetic energy, but even at their most propulsive, they resist becoming functional in the usual dancefloor sense. This isn’t music that wants to serve a crowd. It’s more interested in constructing a space and then quietly observing how you move inside it. Not exactly generous, but certainly consistent.

What makes this reissue worth your already overburdened attention is not nostalgia, but perspective. The additional remixes - produced by Magnani himself between 2010 and 2011 - don’t feel like afterthoughts. They act more like parallel drafts, alternate angles on the same set of ideas. You hear a producer circling his own material, testing elasticity, seeing how far a structure can be stretched before it loses coherence. Sometimes it nearly does. That’s part of the appeal.

There’s also a certain restraint throughout the record that feels almost unfashionable now. No excessive layering, no desperate need to fill every frequency. Space is allowed to exist, which in 2026 feels borderline radical. The tracks breathe, pause, reconsider. They don’t rush toward a payoff, which might frustrate anyone expecting immediate gratification. That sounds like a them problem.

Magnani’s broader trajectory - spanning experimental electronics and a steady, somewhat understated presence in the underground - makes "The Die" read less like an isolated statement and more like a foundational document. You can trace later tendencies in minimal electro and abstract techno back to this kind of thinking, even if no one is eager to admit it. Influence is rarely credited where it should be. Convenient, that.

In the end, this special edition doesn’t try to modernize the album. It doesn’t need to. If anything, it highlights how little the core ideas have aged. Precision, tension, and a mild distrust of obvious resolution still hold up. Annoyingly well, in fact.

So here it is again: not louder, not bigger, just quietly insisting on its place. You can ignore it, like most things that don’t shout. It won’t take it personally.