There’s a special category of “side projects” that artists describe as a "break", a palate cleanser, a moment of relief from more demanding work. "Standard Cap" by Daniel Szwed belongs to that category in theory. In practice, it sounds like the kind of break where you go outside to clear your head and end up shouting at the sky.

Originally released in a tiny tape edition - because of course it was - this second solo outing now resurfaces in a more accessible format via Rope Worm, still carrying the residue of its initial intention: something immediate, unfiltered, almost inconveniently direct. Conceived during sessions for the more elaborate "Sun’s Mother", it functions less as a companion piece and more as a deliberate stripping-down, like removing insulation just to see what kind of noise leaks through.

The setup is deceptively simple: drums, synths, vocals. No conceptual overload, no decorative excess. And yet, from the opening moments of “Standard Cap 1”, it’s clear that restraint here doesn’t mean minimalism in the polite sense. It means pressure. Repetition locks in quickly, rhythms hammer rather than groove, and the synth layers grind against them with a stubborn, metallic persistence.

Szwed’s approach to structure feels almost willfully blunt. Each of the six tracks sits around the same duration, titled with an efficiency that borders on indifference. No narrative cues, no emotional signposting. Just iteration. But within that repetition, small instabilities emerge - shifts in texture, slight ruptures in rhythm, moments where the system seems to falter before reasserting itself. It’s not evolution so much as controlled erosion.

The industrial and noise elements aren’t deployed as aesthetic markers so much as working conditions. This isn’t “influenced by” anything in a referential way; it’s built from the same logic: friction, density, refusal. The drums feel physical, almost claustrophobic, while the synths oscillate between drone and abrasion. Vocals, when they appear, are less communicative than symptomatic - signals of strain rather than carriers of meaning.

There’s something oddly methodical about the whole thing. Despite its rawness, "Standard Cap" never collapses into chaos. It holds its form with a kind of stubborn discipline, as if Szwed is testing how much repetition and distortion a structure can withstand before it loses coherence. The answer, apparently, is quite a lot.

The production - handled by a certain Jessica at Where is the Studio, according to release notes - maintains that balance between immediacy and control. Nothing feels overly polished, but nothing feels accidental either. It’s rough by design, not by limitation.

As a “mind refresher”, this is almost comically intense. If this is what Szwed does to relax, one can only assume the main project operates somewhere near tectonic levels of pressure. But that’s precisely what gives "Standard Cap" its peculiar clarity. By removing layers of intention, it reveals a core impulse: to push sound until it resists, then keep going.

It’s not inviting. It doesn’t pretend to be. But it is focused, consistent, and strangely honest in its refusal to offer anything beyond its own internal logic.

Six tracks, minimal variation, maximum insistence. A break, apparently.

It helps, occasionally, when an album decides to hand you its inner logic in plain text. Not to simplify things - don’t worry, that would be too easy - but to confirm that what you’re hearing is, in fact, as tactile, messy, and quietly unsettling as it feels.

"Shrew" by Propan and Stina Stjern already suggested a world of bodies, substances, and slow transformations. The lyrics make it explicit: this is not abstraction. This is labor. This is ritual. This is the long choreography of hands doing things that stain.
“We lift carry cucumbers on our backs… it seeps into us, we seep into it”.

That line alone dismantles any safe distance between subject and material. The boundary dissolves early: the workers become the work, the process becomes identity. What initially sounds like domestic routine - washing vegetables, kneading dough, pressing fruit - gradually mutates into something more ambiguous. The gestures accumulate weight. Repetition becomes incantation.

Musically, that’s exactly what happens. Voices layer, thicken, lose their individuality, much like the bodies described in the text. In “Fern”, the slow build mirrors the preparation phase: gathering, washing, kneading. But nothing is innocent here. Even the pastoral imagery carries a faint unease. Grapes crushed underfoot, butter melting into surfaces, fluids seeping everywhere. It’s sensual, but not comfortably so. There’s always a hint that something is being transformed beyond recognition.

Then comes the pivot. The chicken, suddenly present, headless, dripping. Plucked. Reassembled into “feather knickers”, which is either dark humor or something more ritualistic, depending on how charitable you’re feeling. The album doesn’t clarify. It just keeps going.

“Maret” expands the scene into a collective act. Cooking becomes communal, almost ceremonial. Ingredients are coated, chopped, mixed into something that resembles a feast but behaves like a rite. “We assemble this night”, they say, as if time itself were an ingredient to be handled. The table is set with obsessive care - flowers, candles, glasses in different shapes - yet the atmosphere is unstable. Celebration and tension coexist without resolving.

The music follows suit. The density increases, the layering becomes more insistent, but never chaotic. There’s control in the repetition, a discipline that keeps the ritual from dissolving into noise. It’s not about explosion. It’s about sustained pressure.

And then “Sybil”, where the aftermath unfolds. Eating, drinking, talking - then silence. The ritual completes its cycle not with a climax, but with cleaning. Washing, rinsing, brushing away crumbs “from the minds and from time itself”. It’s almost absurdly literal and strangely profound at the same time. As if the entire event - this feast of bodies, labor, and shared space - must be erased to exist properly.

“We own this time. all time”.
A bold claim, delivered without emphasis, which makes it land harder. Ownership here isn’t about control. It’s about inhabiting the moment so fully that it temporarily suspends everything else.

The music mirrors this dissolution. By the end, the layers feel less constructed and more residual, like traces left after something has already happened. The final gesture - burning leftovers, pulling the plug, leaving - feels less like closure and more like withdrawal. The space empties, but something lingers.

What the lyrics clarify is that "Shrew" isn’t just exploring voice as sound, but voice as collective body, as laboring force, as something deeply entangled with material processes. The “shrew”, in this context, isn’t a stereotype to be reclaimed politely. It’s a figure that absorbs, transforms, and ultimately outlasts the structures meant to contain it.

The mixing and mastering by Lasse Marhaug keeps everything grounded in a thick, immersive field without smoothing over its roughness. Nothing feels decorative. Even the more beautiful passages carry a residue of something slightly off, slightly too physical to be comfortably aesthetic

Released by SusannaSonata, the album maintains its refusal to be easily categorized. With the textual layer fully visible, it becomes even clearer that this is less a collection of pieces and more a sustained enactment: preparation, gathering, consumption, erasure.
A cycle. Messy, repetitive, oddly precise.

And, against all odds, completely controlled.

Some records try to address history, which usually means polishing it into something digestible. "Chronicles from the Arab Cold War" refuses that courtesy. It doesn’t interpret events so much as stand uncomfortably close to them, like a witness who isn’t sure whether speaking will clarify anything or just make the silence heavier.

Behind Pharoah Chromium is Ghazi Barakat, a figure who has long treated sound as both archive and intervention. His earlier works already circled themes of displacement and memory, but here the approach tightens: fewer gestures, sharper edges, less distance between material and implication.

The album’s construction is deceptively simple. Flutes, EWI, rhythmic patterns that echo belly dance traditions, and - crucially - voices sourced from a 1970s Omani revolutionary record. That last element could easily slip into the realm of aestheticized politics, the kind that borrows history as texture. Barakat avoids that trap by letting the voices remain stubbornly themselves. They don’t blend seamlessly. They insist.

Side A opens with a strange, almost disarming clarity. The children’s voices - light, collective, carrying something that resembles hope without announcing it - interact with the instrumental layers in a way that feels suspended between eras. There’s a temporal dislocation at play: 1970s revolutionary chants reframed within a present marked by ongoing violence. The dedication to the children of Gaza is not expressed through documentary realism, but through a kind of fragile projection. Not what is, but what could still be imagined. It’s a risky move, bordering on naïve, and precisely for that reason it works.

Then the record turns.

Side B doesn’t escalate theatrically. It darkens. The tonal palette thickens, the rhythms feel heavier, less fluid. The voices shift from children to adults, and with them comes rhetoric, urgency, anger that no longer needs translation. The presence of Philipp Selalmazidis adds a metallic tension, lines that don’t so much accompany as press against the existing material, amplifying its unease.

What’s striking is how the album refuses resolution. There is no synthesis between innocence and anger, no comforting narrative arc. Instead, the two states coexist, uneasily, like parallel realities forced into the same acoustic space. The listener is left to navigate that tension without guidance, which is either a profound gesture of respect or a quiet abdication of responsibility. Possibly both.

There’s also an ethical precision in Barakat’s decision not to use direct recordings from current atrocities. In a cultural landscape increasingly comfortable with turning suffering into raw material, this restraint feels deliberate. The record doesn’t document. It resonates. It creates a space where listening becomes less about consuming information and more about acknowledging presence - past, present, unresolved.

Released by Discrepant, a label known for its interest in displaced sounds and fractured histories, "Chronicles from the Arab Cold War" fits into a catalog that often questions how music travels through time and context. Not everything lands cleanly. At times, the layering feels almost too careful, as if aware of its own weight. But perhaps that hesitation is part of the work. This is not music that wants to convince you. It wants you to remain aware of what cannot be resolved, what cannot be neatly framed.

Between innocence and anger, the record doesn’t choose. It holds both, and lets them interfere with each other.

It’s not comfortable listening. It shouldn’t be.

Silence, as it turns out, is rarely silent. It creaks, exhales, contracts, remembers. And if you sit still long enough - longer than most people are willing to - you start to notice that it has a temperament. "Haunted By Silence" by Danny McCarthy is built precisely on that uncomfortable realization: that absence is never empty, only unattended.

McCarthy has been working in the field of sound art and deep listening for decades, often orbiting installations, environments, and site-specific works rather than conventional “albums”. This piece, though released as a single 47-minute composition, carries that spatial DNA with it. It doesn’t behave like a recording. It behaves like a place you’re temporarily allowed to occupy, assuming you don’t start making noise and ruin everything.

The origin story matters here, and not just as a romantic backdrop. St. Mary’s Abbey in Glencairn - home to a Cistercian community where silence is not aesthetic but structural - provides both the conceptual and acoustic seed. McCarthy listens to the building the way some people listen to music: heating systems switching off, wood contracting, tiny fractures of sound appearing without warning. No rhythm, no pattern, no intention. Just events. And between them, something far more demanding than sound: attention.

The piece unfolds with a kind of severe patience. Field recordings and manipulated objects are arranged so sparingly that each gesture feels consequential, almost intrusive. Some sounds hover at the edge of perception, others cut through with surgical precision. There’s no narrative, no progression in the traditional sense. Instead, there’s a shifting field of presence and withdrawal, as if the work is constantly negotiating how much it should reveal.

At times, it borders on the perverse. You find yourself leaning in, waiting for something to happen, and when it does, it’s barely there. A click, a distant resonance, a texture that dissolves before you can name it. It’s the kind of listening experience that exposes how conditioned we are to expect reward, payoff, meaning neatly delivered. "Haunted By Silence" offers none of that. It offers proximity.

The influence of deep listening practices is evident, though never didactic. McCarthy doesn’t instruct you to listen differently. He simply removes the usual scaffolding and leaves you alone with your own perceptual habits. The result is mildly disorienting, occasionally frustrating, and, if you persist, unexpectedly absorbing.

There’s also a quiet dialogue with the accompanying texts - particularly the presence of David Toop, whose reflections on silence have long occupied a similar terrain. But the album doesn’t rely on theory to justify itself. It stands, or rather barely stands, on its own fragile acoustics.

Released by Farpoint Recordings, a label that has consistently documented work at the edges of audibility and intention, this album fits comfortably within a catalog that values attention over spectacle. The limited CD edition, with essays and photographic documentation, reinforces the sense that this is as much an object of contemplation as a piece of sound.

What "Haunted By Silence" ultimately does is strip listening down to something almost primitive. No hooks, no gestures toward accessibility, no concern for your patience threshold. It asks you to sit, to wait, to notice. Which, in a world engineered to prevent exactly that, feels less like an artistic choice and more like a quiet act of resistance.

It won’t fill a room. It will, however, change how the room feels once it’s gone.

There’s a certain type of album that promises contemplation and then delivers a politely blurred background for your next existential crisis. "Enticing" by Roman Leykam gets dangerously close to that territory, then quietly sidesteps it, as if aware that true stillness is less about comfort and more about what starts surfacing when nothing distracts you.

Leykam works in that porous space where guitar stops behaving like a guitar. Through analog and digital synth treatments, field recordings, and a patient dismantling of instrumental identity, he builds something that feels less composed than slowly exhaled. The fact that much of the material dates back to 2022 recordings gives the album a faint temporal dislocation, like memories processed long after the events themselves have lost their urgency.

“A Tireless Choir of Waves” opens with exactly the kind of title that dares you to roll your eyes. Resist the urge. The piece unfolds with a restrained insistence, layering tones that never quite resolve into harmony, more like parallel currents brushing against each other. It’s not oceanic in the clichéd ambient sense. It’s more like standing near water and realizing you’ve been listening to it for longer than you intended.

Across the record, Leykam avoids dramatic gestures with almost stubborn discipline. “A Touch of Bleakness” and “Fleeing Shadows” drift through minor tonalities that never collapse into despair, instead hovering in that ambiguous emotional register where melancholy feels observational rather than confessional. There’s no catharsis here, which is either a flaw or the entire point, depending on how much emotional closure you require from your music.

“Elation” briefly suggests a shift, but even here the brightness feels filtered, as if viewed through frosted glass. Any sense of uplift is tempered by a lingering hesitation, like someone who has learned not to trust sudden happiness. It’s a small, almost cruel detail, and it works.

Field recordings - subtly integrated, occasionally sourced by Jacqueline Leykam - appear less as documentary elements and more as spatial interruptions. They don’t locate you in a place so much as remind you that place is always slipping. “Myriads of Black Angels” and “Grey Unlimited Water Area” extend this ambiguity, stretching time until it becomes difficult to tell whether the music is evolving or simply persisting.

“Ponte Pantalon” introduces a faint architectural echo, a suggestion of Venice not as postcard but as acoustic residue: footsteps, water, stone, absence. It’s one of the few moments where the outside world feels momentarily legible before dissolving again into abstraction.
By the time “Environmental Sounds” and “The Leisure of a Dream” arrive, the album has thinned out into something almost transparent. The closing stretch - “Silent Beauty” and “City of Masks” - doesn’t conclude so much as fade into a state of suspended attention, as if ending would be too definitive a gesture for a record so invested in ambiguity.

Released by Frank Mark Arts, "Enticing" aligns itself with a lineage of ambient and electroacoustic work that treats sound less as narrative and more as environment. But unlike more decorative entries in the genre, it resists becoming purely ornamental. There’s a quiet insistence here, a refusal to be reduced to atmosphere alone.

It’s not an album that reaches out. It waits. And if you meet it halfway, it does something mildly inconvenient: it removes the illusion that stillness is empty. Instead, it reveals it as crowded, layered, and slightly unsettling.

Which, frankly, is a more honest kind of calm.