I really enjoy splits because the contrast can also be part of the experience. It is also a good way to find people you otherwise would not have known about, which is the case for me here. Barrena is the work of Puerto Rican artist Jorge Castro, and I have known his work for a long, long time. Castro has been in the experimental scene since the 1990s, most notably as part of Cornucopia, as well as other projects including Clon, Origami Subtropika and DEFORMA. The nice thing about Castro’s work is that he is difficult to nail down. Some of his stuff is harsh noise, some of it is mellow ambient, but all of it is interesting. The label describes the project thus: “As Barrena, Castro turns harsh noise wall formations into a meditative experience where feedback, distortion and digital artifacts become elements for immersive listening rather than disruption.” I was not familiar with See Through Buildings, but this is the harsh noise wall project of Ben Rehling, who hails from Garden Grove, CA. Rehling previously recorded under the name Jennifer Wolski in the 1990s and as part of A Moth In The Wine and The Climate Refugees. The label describes this track as “representative of the carefully crafted, droney HNW that has become See Through Buildings’ signature sound.” Sounds like a good time, so let’s dive in and see how this all plays out.

We kick it off with Barrena and “Lament For Nuclear Winter.” This is a low, rumbling piece with plenty of static thrown in for good measure. The overall feel is like watching television static while riding in a boxcar on a freight train. . . . that you aren’t supposed to be on because you jumped on in the middle of the night. And why is this train going so fast? This conductor seems like a man on a mission. What is the cargo in this train anyway? The track subtly shifts over time, sometimes highlighting the rumble, and sometimes the static, but it is a pleasant listen.

On the other side, we have See Through Buildings and “Windows Reflect Dust,” which is a pummeling wall of noise that buries everything under a mountain of crunchy static. However, this is not the kind of wall of noise where the artist simply records the space between radio stations. Rather, there is a lot of subtlety if you give it a listen with headphones. Or maybe there isn’t and your mind adds stuff that isn’t there to make sense of the chaos. Either way, it is a good piece for those who like their noise incredibly harsh, but with some underlying complexity.

I appreciate that although this is harsh noise wall, it is not as static as some practitioners make it. There is a lot happening under the layers, and you sometimes have to dig deep to find it, but like the princess and the pea, it’s there if you can feel it. This is a solid release of harsh noise wall and well worth checking out. This album weighs in at around 48 minutes and is limited to 100 copies.

Eighty percent of the ocean floor is unmapped. Most bands can barely map a rehearsal room. Split Apex, naturally, choose the Mariana Trench.

With "Thoughts In 3D", the duo of Jussi Palmusaari and Peter Blundell deliver a vinyl debut that behaves less like an album and more like a deep-sea expedition log written under crushing pressure.

Palmusaari, who cut his teeth in Finland with Preesens in the late 90s and early 2000s, arrives in South London carrying a particular northern severity: guitar lines that feel chiseled rather than strummed. Blundell’s lineage runs through the angular, literate sprawl of Mosquitoes, and onward to Komare. His voice has that distinctly British quality of sounding observational and slightly detached even when the ground is splitting open beneath it. Together, they formed Split Apex in autumn 2024, rehearsed obsessively in Croydon, and apparently decided that subtlety was for people who enjoy breathable air.

Across five extended tracks, the record moves like a submersible lowering itself past sunlight.

“Peninsula” is the descent. Bass pulses like sonar. Guitar clangs and scrapes as if testing the hull integrity of the song itself. There’s a mechanical patience to it. You don’t get riffs; you get tectonic adjustments.

“Crux Machine” settles into something heavier, more sedimentary. A solitary guitar figure repeats with stubborn clarity while low-end loops throb underneath, like an engine that might be failing or might be achieving transcendence. It’s hard to tell. That ambiguity is part of the thrill.

On “Cast In Light”, the duo veer into what could be described as laboratory rock. If The Shadow Ring had abandoned literary introspection for surgical experimentation, this might be the result. Blundell’s vocal delivery sounds almost clinical, as if he’s documenting specimens rather than performing songs. Yet there’s tension in that restraint. You sense awe and dread occupying the same narrow corridor.

The title track, “Thoughts In 3D”, slithers rather than strides. Synth lines glow faintly, like bioluminescent organisms drifting just out of reach. The music feels dimensional not because it is busy, but because it has depth. Layers move independently, intersecting without resolving neatly. It refuses the easy climax.

“People, Nerves” completes the arc, rising toward the surface but carrying pressure scars. The guitars shimmer, the rhythm section tightens, and Blundell’s voice hovers between witness statement and existential report. The ascent is not triumphant. It is informed.

Reviews circulating online have pointed to the album’s balance between abrasion and atmosphere, its refusal to flatten intensity into mere noise. That assessment holds. What’s striking is the discipline. Split Apex do not indulge in chaos for its own sake. Every scrape, loop, and bass surge feels positioned with intent, as though the duo are charting coordinates rather than improvising freely.

The production keeps edges intact. Nothing is softened for comfort. The LP format suits it: five substantial tracks, each given space to breathe and to weigh on the listener. This is not background music. It insists on attention. It rewards patience.

If "Thoughts In 3D" has a central thesis, it is that pressure clarifies. Under enough weight, superficial gestures collapse. What remains is structure. Tone. Nerve.

Most bands write songs. Split Apex conduct sound pressure tests on the psyche and press the results to vinyl.

It turns out the ocean was not the dangerous part. The dangerous part is how calmly they guide you through it.

Luz González does not write tracks so much as she sets forces in motion and watches what survives. "Bi Gezur" unfolds like a compact but dense chapter in her ongoing investigation into bodies, friction, and unstable terrains, both physical and emotional. The sentence printed on the cover is not decorative poetry but a functional warning. These sounds will collide, merge, tear apart, and then calmly masquerade as landscape.

González’s background in sound art and electroacoustic composition is crucial, though never paraded like a diploma on the wall. Her music thinks with muscles rather than concepts. Rhythms arrive whipped and uneven, textures grind and smear, and distortion behaves less like an effect than like a condition of the air. Nothing here is ornamental. Each sound occupies space, pushes against it, tests its density. This is electronic music that understands its own weight.

The title, "Bi Gezur" - “two lies” in Basque - suggests misdirection, and the EP lives by that principle. Narrative gestures appear only to dissolve into abstraction, then re-emerge as something uncomfortably intimate. “Volverse paisaxe” opens the record by doing exactly that: becoming terrain, letting rhythm erode into contour. “Today Yesterday Tomorrow” toys with linear time until it buckles, while “Drawing Dinosaurs (Where can I hide my anger?)” channels tension into intricate, restless sound design that never quite releases its grip.

“Tsunami” hits without ceremony, a sudden compression of force rather than a dramatic build-up, followed by the brief, fragile suspension of “Óxido e flores”, which lasts just long enough to leave a bruise. The closing “Erreka” stretches out and earns its duration, drifting through industrial abrasion, submerged motion, and exposed vulnerability. González allows space to breathe without turning it into refuge. The sound keeps moving, alert, unsentimental.

"Bi Gezur" resists classification. It draws from experimental electronics, sound sculpture, and improvisational thinking without pledging loyalty to any single territory. What it offers instead is a physical listening experience, where anger, tenderness, and joy are treated as materials with texture and mass. This is not music that asks to be solved. It asks to be inhabited, even briefly, even at some cost. When it ends, the space it occupied feels altered, as if something passed through and left its trace.

"Industrial Overture" arrives with the subtlety of a dropped anvil, which is exactly the point. This 4CD box set does not attempt to rehabilitate Test Dept into polite cultural history. It restores them as a problem. A loud, metallic, politically inconvenient problem that still rattles the furniture four decades on.

Formed in early-80s London, Test Dept were never just a band. They were a collision point between music, performance art, direct action, and an unshakable suspicion toward power structures. Scrap metal, found percussion, tape loops, shouted texts, and an almost architectural sense of rhythm became tools not for atmosphere but for confrontation. If industrial music often flirted with dystopia as aesthetic, Test Dept insisted on dystopia as lived condition.

This box set, "Industrial Overture. Studio & Live Recordings 1982–1985", functions less like a retrospective and more like an excavation. Across forty tracks, it captures the group at their most volatile, before genre boundaries hardened and before “industrial” became a marketing tag rather than a warning label. The inclusion of "Strength Of Metal In Motion", originally a cassette-only release from 1983, is particularly telling. It sounds raw, underfed, and absolutely convinced of its own necessity. No polish, no distance, just impact and intent.

The early albums "Ecstasy Under Duress" and "Atonal & Hamburg", unavailable for decades, confirm how quickly Test Dept refined their language without softening it. These recordings are obsessed with labor, discipline, control, and resistance. Rhythms grind rather than groove. Repetition feels coercive. Silence, when it appears, is tactical. Even now, the material refuses nostalgia. It doesn’t want to be remembered fondly. It wants to be taken seriously.

Live recordings dominate much of the set, and rightly so. Test Dept were always a physical entity. Performances documented here from venues like Acklam Hall, Heaven, Arch 69, and later Atonal festivals reveal music that behaves differently in rooms filled with bodies. Pieces stretch, mutate, collapse, then reassemble under pressure. Tracks like “Shockwork”, “Gdask”, and “Efficiency” appear in multiple versions, not as redundancy but as evidence of function. These works adapt to context, acoustics, and political temperature.

The John Peel sessions included here are a reminder of how strange it was that this music ever reached mainstream radio. Stripped of visuals and volume, the material still transmits urgency. It also shows how tightly constructed these pieces actually were beneath the noise. Test Dept were not anti-structure. They were anti-complacency.

The previously unreleased studio material and demo versions offer further insight into process rather than myth. You hear ideas being tested, stressed, sometimes abandoned. It reinforces the sense that this was not an aesthetic pose but an ongoing experiment in how sound could operate socially.

Since resurfacing in the mid-2010s under the guidance of founding members Paul Jamrozy and Gray Cunnington, Test Dept have resisted the temptation to rebrand themselves as legacy artists. Signing with Artoffact and launching this archival series feels less like a victory lap and more like unfinished business. The remastering by Paul Lavigne is respectful without sterilizing the edges. The packaging, designed by Jamrozy with Stefan Alt, keeps the visual language functional and unsentimental.

The accompanying booklet, featuring an essay by Alexei Monroe, adds historical framing without draining the material of its bite. This is useful context, but the music does not rely on explanation. It still communicates directly, and not gently.

"Industrial Overture" ultimately confirms that Test Dept were not documenting an era so much as anticipating a recurring condition. Surveillance, austerity, mechanized labor, ideological exhaustion. None of this feels resolved. If anything, the box set lands uncomfortably close to the present.

This is not a box for casual listening or background ambiance. It demands time, volume, and a certain tolerance for being unsettled. Test Dept never asked to be liked. They asked to be heard. Unfortunately, they still are.

Plaster’s "Mainframe re_coded" arrives less like a nostalgic reissue and more like a controlled system reboot. The original "Mainframe", released in 2015 on Kvitnu, already carried the weight of a transition: it was the first Plaster album fully authored by Gianclaudio Hashem Moniri after Giuseppe Carlini’s departure, and it sounded like a project suddenly stripped of negotiation. What remained was pressure, focus, and a distinctly architectural approach to sound. Ten years later, "re_coded" does not soften that stance. If anything, it sharpens the edges and reorganizes the circuitry.

Moniri has always treated industrial and experimental electronics less as genres and more as working conditions. On "Mainframe", rhythm functioned like infrastructure: repetitive, oppressive, and necessary. In this remastered and expanded version, that logic becomes clearer. Tracks like “Unicore” and “Blade” hinge on obsessive loops that feel engineered rather than performed, while distortions are deployed with a kind of cold intentionality. Noise here is not chaos; it is calibration. The remaster emphasizes low-end density and spatial separation, making the album feel heavier without inflating it.

What stands out, especially in hindsight, is the album’s restraint. For music that lives in abrasive territories, "Mainframe" is remarkably disciplined. Gloomy atmospheres and corroded textures never spill into excess. Pieces like “Lucubra” and “Redshift” breathe in narrow corridors, maintaining tension through subtraction rather than overload. Valeria Svizzeri’s choral and lead vocal contributions add a human grain to the machinery, but they are treated as material rather than narrative. The voice is absorbed into the system, not elevated above it.

"Mainframe re_coded" expands this world without diluting it. The remixes by Franck Vigroux, Kaeba, and Agan are not decorative add-ons but structural reinterpretations. Vigroux’s version of “Terminal” in particular reframes the track’s severity, stretching it into something more volatile and unstable, while Kaeba’s take on “Blade” pushes the rhythmic logic toward a harsher, almost confrontational minimalism. The inclusion of live recordings and alternative mixes exposes the album’s physical dimension, reminding the listener that this music is built to test bodies as much as speakers.

There is also an unspoken narrative running beneath this release. The long delay, the collapse of earlier reissue plans, the stalled momentum of the pandemic era, and finally the successful crowdfunding campaign all feed into the album’s meaning. "Mainframe re_coded" is not just a revisiting of past material but a reclaiming of authorship and continuity. It insists on the relevance of a sound that never aimed to be timely in the first place.

Design and production details reinforce this sense of coherence. Richard Grant’s cover artwork mirrors the album’s logic: stark, functional, and suggestive of systems rather than stories. The CD edition, shorter out of necessity, feels more like a concentrated core, while the digital version allows the project to sprawl, loop back on itself, and expose its internal variations.

In the end, "Mainframe re_coded" does not ask to be rediscovered. It stands its ground, unapologetically dense and methodical, offering no comfort beyond the strange satisfaction of immersion. For longtime followers of Plaster, it clarifies a pivotal moment in the project’s evolution. For new listeners, it is a reminder that industrial music, when handled with precision and intent, can still feel dangerously alive.