There is something reassuringly unreasonable about Earth Logoff. While much contemporary electronic music seems intent on polishing every transient until it could be used as a dental instrument, the Berlin duo prefer to make their machines sound as though they have developed several incompatible personalities and are refusing medication. "Torments & Temptations", their third release, expands the project's peculiar mixture of industrial abrasion, speedcore impulses, mutant techno and noisecore with an unexpectedly broad assortment of samples, from brass-band eruptions to brittle 8-bit fragments. The result is a kind of mechanical carnival in which the attractions are operated by faulty wiring and the amusement-park staff appear to have joined a militant percussion ensemble. It is unruly, frequently funny and considerably more disciplined than its surface behaviour might suggest.

Earth Logoff is the project of RBRT and Sanaa, both formerly involved with the Berlin noise-rock group Antihairball. Their musical vocabulary has moved a considerable distance from conventional band arrangements. RBRT works with a self-programmed controller, sampling and electronic devices, while Sanaa supplies the physical force of analogue drums. The duo describe their music as a form of apocalyptic dance music, which is a reasonably accurate description provided one imagines the apocalypse taking place in a basement club where the sound system has been assembled from industrial scrap. Their previous releases, "Fungym" (2019) and "Tritium" (2022), established an interest in strange rhythmic structures, abrasive electronics and an almost cartoonish approach to sonic destruction. The present album develops those elements while introducing Sanaa's voice more prominently, adding a human presence to music that often seems to be arguing with its own circuitry.

The opening "dronose" sets the tone through a collision of electronic disturbance and rhythmic insistence. There is little interest in establishing a stable groove and then politely maintaining it for the benefit of dancers who have paid good money for predictable entertainment. Instead, the beat behaves like a machine with a loose connection: it catches, accelerates, stumbles and resumes with an almost irritating determination. The industrial components are rough-edged, but the arrangement has an eccentric sense of proportion, allowing abrupt changes and unexpected details to interrupt the forward motion. The track's short duration is important. Earth Logoff understand that chaos becomes less effective when it is allowed to explain itself for too long.

"Eilat" and "farad" continue this unstable relationship between rhythm and abrasion. The former suggests a peculiar kind of dance-floor functionality, with electronic patterns and percussive elements pushing against one another rather than settling into a conventional hierarchy. "farad" takes the electricity metaphor rather literally, with a title borrowed from the unit of electrical capacitance. One can imagine the duo enjoying the thought of a musical system that stores energy only to discharge it at inconvenient moments. Their arrangements frequently create the impression of several musical ideas attempting to occupy the same space, with no clear agreement about who has priority. Yet there is an underlying precision to the construction. The drums may sound unruly, but Sanaa's playing is remarkably controlled, negotiating abrupt changes and irregular time signatures without sacrificing the physical impact.

"labiacs" brings Sanaa's voice into the picture, and the effect is particularly revealing. The vocal presence does not soften the music or provide the reassuring melodic centre that a more conventional producer might have introduced. Instead, it adds another layer of human unpredictability to an already unstable environment. The voice can sound confrontational, playful or deliberately absurd, while the instrumental backing continues its electronic misbehaviour. The contrast is central to the album's appeal: the machinery seems to be malfunctioning, but the people operating it are clearly having a rather good time. There is even a distinctly impudent sense of humour in the way the track treats the conventions of industrial music, refusing to take its own aggression entirely seriously.

"boredub", the fifth track, offers a title that hints at dub's spaciousness while suggesting that the musicians may have become impatient with the genre's more meditative habits. Earth Logoff are not particularly interested in giving the listener time to contemplate the spiritual significance of a delayed snare. Their use of repetition is more abrasive, with rhythmic elements and electronic fragments producing a kind of distorted dance music that keeps changing its mind about what it wants to be. The track provides a useful transition into the second half, where the album becomes even more unpredictable.

"shove it" makes its intentions fairly clear without requiring an elaborate programme note. The title is an appropriately blunt gesture, and the music follows suit, combining forceful percussion with the duo's familiar taste for sudden changes in texture. "ugli igli" is another highlight, its deliberately awkward title matching the music's appetite for odd rhythmic turns and distorted electronic colours. The brass-like blasts and crude digital sounds contribute to the impression of a musical environment assembled from incompatible parts. Yet these elements are not simply thrown together for the sake of novelty. Their placement creates a peculiar sense of momentum, as though the music were constantly discovering new ways to trip over itself while somehow managing to keep moving.

The final stretch, represented by "strumpf" and "umpf" in the supplied tracklist, maintains the album's refusal to settle into a single mood. The rhythmic structures remain forceful, but their relationship with noise and electronic detail keeps shifting. There is something almost physical about the way the percussion occupies the foreground, while RBRT's electronics continually distort the surrounding space. The resulting music is danceable in the same way that navigating a badly maintained staircase can be an exercise in athletic coordination: possible, certainly, but not recommended without a little preparation. The duo's sense of humour is particularly effective here because it never neutralises the music's intensity. The absurdity and the aggression coexist, each making the other more convincing.

What makes "Torments & Temptations" interesting is the way it balances programmed control with the unpredictability of live performance. RBRT's self-built electronic system provides a broad range of sounds, from abrasive industrial textures to almost toy-like digital patterns, while Sanaa's drumming gives the music a muscular, physical dimension. Her vocal contributions further complicate the picture, preventing the project from becoming a purely mechanical exercise. The duo's history in noise rock is still audible in their disregard for conventional musical polish, but their present approach is more rhythmically adventurous and less dependent on the familiar dynamics of a guitar-based band. The result occupies an eccentric territory between industrial, techno, noisecore and a particularly deranged form of experimental pop.

Kitchen Leg Records is a fitting home for this sort of activity. The Berlin-based cassette label has developed a catalogue that favours independent, idiosyncratic music, often with a strong affinity for no wave, experimental rock, noise and eccentric pop. Its releases tend to value personality over stylistic respectability, and Earth Logoff fit that ethos rather neatly. The cassette format also suits the project's deliberately rough character: there is something appropriate about hearing such an unruly collection of sounds through a medium that has its own history of mechanical imperfections and occasional acts of betrayal.

For all its abrasive tendencies, "Torments & Temptations" is not simply an exercise in sonic punishment. Its most appealing quality is the sense of play that runs through the music. Earth Logoff understand that industrial noise does not have to spend every minute impersonating the soundtrack to a collapsing factory. It can be grotesque, rhythmic, absurd and even mischievously entertaining. Their music may depict a world in which technology has gone rogue, but the humans remain firmly in charge of the entertainment budget. In an age when digital systems increasingly promise to make everything seamless, efficient and frictionless, there is something oddly liberating about a record that celebrates malfunction as a creative resource. "Torments & Temptations" makes a persuasive case for the dance floor as a place where disorder can be organised, briefly, into something resembling joy. The building may be on fire, but at least the drums are still working.

Metamorphosis is usually presented as a rather dramatic business: caterpillars become butterflies, gods turn into animals, and unfortunate mortals discover that offending the wrong deity can have consequences considerably worse than a parking ticket. For Michel Mazza and Jeff Düngfelder, however, transformation is a quieter, more gradual affair. Their third collaboration as OdNu + Ümlaut, "Metamorphoses", takes the form of a single sixty-minute composition in which sounds continually change their function, identity and surroundings. A guitar phrase becomes a distant recollection; a rhythmic figure briefly suggests a more conventional musical structure before dissolving; electronic tones acquire an almost physical presence. The album's central idea is therefore expressed through its actual construction: music that does not merely describe change, but makes change its principal organising principle.

The partnership has developed considerably since "Abandoned Spaces" (2024), where the two musicians combined processed guitars, bass lines, drums and delicate electronic details in a collection of interconnected pieces. "Mitochondria Johatsu" (2025) extended their shared vocabulary, moving further into abstraction while retaining a melodic sensibility. Here, the individual tracks have disappeared altogether. The decision to work with one uninterrupted composition is significant because it changes the listener's relationship with the material. There are no titles to suggest a succession of separate destinations, no convenient pauses in which to check whether the washing machine has finished. Instead, the music establishes its own internal chronology, allowing ideas to return in altered circumstances and making transitions as important as the sounds themselves.

The creative process began with Düngfelder constructing a broad foundation from tape loops, electronics and processed material. Mazza then entered this environment with electric and MIDI guitar, clarinet, electronics and effects, responding to its possibilities through improvisation. The distinction between these two stages is not always perceptible in the finished recording, which is precisely the point. Rather than presenting a familiar arrangement of accompaniment and soloist, "Metamorphoses" creates a musical environment in which the contributions continually affect one another. The guitar does not simply decorate an electronic backdrop, while the loops do not function as a passive support system. Both become part of a circulating network of gestures, repetitions and transformations.

Their respective backgrounds make this approach particularly coherent. Buenos Aires-born Michel Mazza, who works as OdNu, has released more than twenty albums and developed a sound based on processed guitar, small recurring melodies, synthesised textures and field recordings. His parallel work in film editing, sound design and music composition has clearly informed his attention to atmosphere and the cinematic potential of apparently modest musical details. Jeff Düngfelder's Ümlaut project is more closely associated with minimal electroacoustic composition, tape manipulation, field recordings and the relationship between silence and sound. His work often treats environmental material as something to be recollected and rearranged rather than merely documented. Their shared experience of New York City, followed by their relocation to the countryside north of the metropolis, also provides an interesting biographical backdrop to music that frequently moves between organic impressions and electronically constructed spaces.

The opening establishes a vocabulary of small sounds and tentative melodic gestures. Water-like noises and clicks emerge alongside a recurring guitar figure, while soft electronic layers gradually establish a sense of depth. The music does not announce itself with the sort of grand introductory gesture that would make a film trailer editor particularly happy. Instead, it begins almost incidentally, as though the listener has entered a room where something has already been happening for some time. A restrained rhythmic pulse briefly appears, then gives way to warbling tones, piano-like sounds and fragments that hover somewhere between melody and texture. These elements are recognisable enough to provide orientation, but never remain in place for long.

One of the composition's most engaging qualities is its ability to introduce rhythm without allowing it to become the governing principle. Percussive sounds surface at intervals, sometimes suggesting a beat, sometimes merely adding a momentary sense of movement. They are subsequently withdrawn, leaving the melodic and textural material to reorganise itself. This gives the piece an unusual elasticity. It can momentarily approach ambient jazz, drift towards electroacoustic abstraction, or hint at a more conventional electronic composition, only to abandon the suggestion before it becomes a settled identity. There is a certain mischievousness in this behaviour. Just when the listener thinks they have worked out what kind of music they are hearing, the musicians quietly rearrange the furniture.

The central portion contains some of the album's most striking episodes. Around the twenty-minute mark, reversed percussion and resonant piano-like figures introduce a slightly more mysterious atmosphere. A brighter melodic passage subsequently emerges, offering one of the composition's rare moments of unmistakable uplift. It is followed by environmental sounds and rustling textures that are incorporated into the musical fabric rather than presented as documentary interruptions. Later, a darker melodic fragment and processed, harp-like tones alter the emotional temperature again. These changes are not organised around conventional climaxes. Instead, the music accumulates small moments of contrast, allowing one atmosphere to contaminate the next. The effect is less like watching a story unfold than observing a series of images whose edges have begun to overlap.

Mazza's melodic instincts are particularly important in preventing the composition from becoming an exercise in atmospheric suspension. Even when the guitar is heavily processed, its phrasing retains a sense of human gesture. Brief melodic figures appear, disappear and return in modified form, providing a thread that connects otherwise disparate sections. His clarinet contribution is absorbed into the broader electronic palette, adding another possible source of timbre without demanding attention as a featured instrument. Düngfelder, meanwhile, gives the composition much of its structural continuity through loops and recurring sonic details. His approach allows repetition to function as a form of memory: something recognisable returns, but its surroundings have changed sufficiently to make it feel different.

The album's later passages become more spacious and occasionally more rhythmic. Guitars reappear against sustained electronic layers, with wind-like tones and heavily reverberated sounds giving the music an almost architectural depth. Gradually introduced drums and hi-hats briefly create a more defined pulse, while another melodic passage brings a welcome degree of brightness. Yet the apparent stability never lasts. Guitar effects become rougher, delayed sounds trail away into the mix, and the environmental material gradually assumes greater importance. Water returns in the closing stretch, recalling the opening while avoiding the neatness of a perfectly symmetrical ending. The composition eventually settles into sustained tones, bells and fading electronic details, with its final gestures suggesting continuation rather than resolution.

There is a potential danger in music of this kind: the hour-long format can easily become an excuse for simply accumulating agreeable textures until the available storage space runs out. "Metamorphoses" largely avoids that trap because its changes are not merely ornamental. The recurring melodic material, subtle rhythmic interventions and carefully placed environmental sounds provide a sense of development, even when the music remains deliberately understated. It also benefits from the fact that both musicians have established individual practices capable of supporting this kind of extended collaboration. Their shared language is not based on erasing every difference, but on allowing those differences to become useful components of a larger process.

The album's title inevitably invites philosophical associations, but its transformation is not especially interested in grand declarations about the nature of existence. It is more convincing when considered at the level of sound itself. A melody changes meaning according to its surroundings; a recording of water can become percussion, atmosphere or memory; an electronic pulse can briefly resemble something organic. These transformations are modest, sometimes almost imperceptible, yet they alter the listener's sense of what is happening. The artwork by Düngfelder, with its overlapping translucent forms, offers a visual counterpart to this method without needing to illustrate every musical development.

"Metamorphoses" ultimately rewards attention through accumulation rather than spectacle. Its sixty minutes contain enough changes to prevent the experience from becoming static, but the musicians resist the temptation to make every new idea announce its arrival with a fanfare. This is music that understands the value of letting an idea become familiar before quietly changing its circumstances. There is no need for a caterpillar to explain the mechanics of its transformation, and Mazza and Düngfelder wisely avoid doing so. They simply allow the sounds to alter, multiply, recede and return, until the listener realises that the landscape encountered at the beginning has become something else. The process is patient, occasionally playful and quietly absorbing, with the added advantage that nobody needs to emerge from a chrysalis at the end.

Desire gets a disproportionate amount of cultural attention. It has inspired operas, pop songs, bad decisions, excellent novels and an alarming number of messages sent after midnight. What happens afterwards receives considerably less publicity. Once the fever subsides, the object of longing loses its supernatural powers, and the emotional machinery that kept us moving begins to wind down, we are left with fatigue, uncertainty and the rather inconvenient task of living with ourselves. French musician and performer Marie Delprat makes this aftermath the subject of "What Remains After Desire", a three-track EP whose brief duration conceals a surprisingly substantial set of questions. Its electronic pop inhabits the territory between intimacy and estrangement, drawing on Baroque music, synthetic voices, bass synthesizers and minimal rhythmic structures to investigate the unstable relationship between feeling and its representation.

Delprat's background helps explain why this combination feels considered rather than decorative. Trained in recorder and early music at the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles and the Bern University of the Arts, she subsequently moved away from the relative certainties of structured musical systems towards improvisation, composition and performance. Her work has since explored the intersections of electronic sound, theatrical identity and the visual arts. The solo album "Life Is Sick", released on Unvague in 2023, established a practice attentive to literary and psychological material, while her project "Ethereal Realms – all fiction is metaphor" (2024) drew on Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" to develop a symbolic figure through which questions of identity and difference could be approached. Selected for the SHAPE+ platform in 2025, Delprat has continued to explore these concerns through hybrid performance formats, including her audiovisual collaboration with Tom Lane, "I Dreamt of Fire". On the present EP, her classical education supplies a particularly useful point of departure: Baroque music understood not as a museum exhibit, but as an art of making emotions legible through elaborate forms.

The comparison with pop is more revealing than it might initially appear. Both the Baroque aria and the contemporary song can concentrate an extravagant emotional situation into a relatively short span, using repetition, ornament and a carefully shaped vocal line to make an experience feel immediate. Delprat takes this principle into electronic territory, where the voice can be intimate and artificial at once. Synthetic layering complicates the familiar association between a human voice and a stable, knowable identity. What sounds personal may also be constructed; what feels fragile may owe its effect to meticulous technical decisions. The artifice does not necessarily diminish the emotion. It exposes the strange fact that emotional expression has always depended on some kind of staging, whether that means an operatic costume, a microphone, an autotuned vocal or the carefully rehearsed declaration that one is absolutely fine.

"Haboob" opens with a title referring to a powerful dust storm, and the music seems to take its cue from the instability of such a phenomenon. Inspired by the writing of Ariana Reines, Delprat considers exposure as both danger and an opportunity for transformation. The track's compact two-minute form does not attempt a literal sonic depiction of wind or sand. Instead, its electronic textures and vocal elements create an impression of vulnerability under pressure, a sensation of being caught in forces that cannot be controlled simply by naming them. There is an interesting contradiction here: the music is carefully shaped, yet its atmosphere suggests a loss of control. That tension makes the piece more compelling than an uncomplicated meditation on fragility. The storm is not merely an obstacle to be endured; it alters the conditions under which survival becomes possible.

The short duration also gives "Haboob" a quality of concentrated exposure. It arrives, establishes its emotional climate and withdraws before the listener can settle comfortably into it. There is no grand catharsis, no cinematic scene in which the clouds part at precisely the right moment. Delprat seems more interested in the moment when the self can no longer maintain its usual protective arrangements. Vulnerability, in this setting, becomes a form of attention: an awareness of one's surroundings and limitations rather than a performance of helplessness. It is a quietly political idea, especially in a culture that routinely treats invulnerability as proof of competence and exhaustion as a personal failure.

"Dust in my veins" turns towards fatigue, drawing on philosopher Éric Fiat's reflections on weariness as a consequence of caring, creating and participating fully in life. The title supplies a pleasingly uneasy image. Dust suggests what accumulates when movement slows, but veins imply circulation, vitality and the stubborn continuation of biological processes. The body is simultaneously depleted and alive, with no neat boundary between the two conditions. Delprat's electronic treatment reinforces this friction, placing the voice within a synthetic environment that can feel both supportive and oppressive. The resulting atmosphere is not simply mournful. There is energy in the music, but it seems to be energy spent rather than freshly generated, like the last electrical flicker of a device that has been left running long after everyone has gone home.

The subject could easily invite a familiar romanticisation of burnout, that fashionable idea that exhaustion is evidence of having lived more intensely than everyone else. Delprat's approach is subtler. Weariness emerges as the cost of involvement, and the possibility of recovery depends on recognising that cost rather than turning it into a badge of honour. The track's relationship between organic voice and electronic manipulation gives this idea a musical dimension: the voice remains expressive while being fractured and reshaped by the technology surrounding it. Its vulnerability is therefore neither wholly natural nor entirely simulated. It occupies the uneasy space where actual feeling meets the means by which feeling becomes audible. The title's dust is not just the residue of something finished. It is also part of the substance through which life continues.

With "Yous", Delprat approaches identity through the poetry of Kae Tempest, whose work frequently examines the self as something mutable, contradictory and shaped by relationships. The pluralised title is an effective little disturbance. A single self would be easier to catalogue, introduce at parties and maintain across social media accounts. Several selves complicate the administrative process. Yet the track treats this multiplicity as a condition of human connection rather than a defect requiring correction. Its longer running time, three minutes and forty-three seconds, allows the EP to move towards a more sustained consideration of voice, intimacy and transformation. Layers of synthetic sound create an environment in which the voice can seem to multiply, blur or slip away from any singular identity.

The emotional implication is not that identity is meaningless, but that it is continually negotiated. We change according to circumstance, encounter and memory, and the person we recognise as ourselves is partly assembled from these successive versions. Delprat's electronic treatment makes this fluidity audible without reducing it to a tidy conceptual illustration. The voice is at once a means of communication and a sound object, something that can reach another person while remaining difficult to pin down. There is tenderness in this ambiguity, although it is not the soft-focus tenderness of a reassuring conclusion. Connection requires a willingness to encounter people whose identities cannot be reduced to a convenient summary, including the versions of ourselves that we might prefer to disown.

Across its three pieces, "What Remains After Desire" is united by a concern with the distance between an emotion and the form through which it becomes perceptible. Delprat's Baroque inheritance matters here because ornament and structure are not simply historical references; they offer a way to think about how feeling is shaped, intensified and sometimes concealed. Her electronic palette introduces a further complication, making the voice feel both bodily and manufactured. Noémi Büchi's mixing and Maurizio Borgna's mastering help define the recorded space in which these elements interact, while Delprat retains a strong sense of authorship through her writing and production.

At just over eight minutes, the EP is too brief to exhaust its subject, but that brevity is appropriate to music concerned with what survives an intense experience. These tracks do not offer three stages of a therapeutic programme, complete with a worksheet and a certificate of emotional resilience. Instead, they leave their questions partially open. What remains after desire may be fatigue, but fatigue can testify to care; exposure can be frightening, but it may also loosen the defences that prevent contact; the self may change repeatedly without losing its capacity for intimacy. Delprat's achievement lies in allowing these ideas to inhabit the music without forcing every sound to behave like a philosophical footnote. The result is a delicate, sometimes disquieting piece of electronic avant-pop, in which artificial voices carry recognisably human uncertainties. Desire may be an excellent publicist, but Delprat gives the aftermath a voice of its own.

There is something wonderfully unsettling about the Ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument whose gliding tones can sound like a human voice remembering a language it never learned. Created by Maurice Martenot in 1928, it emerged from an era when electricity still carried the promise of genuinely alien musical possibilities. Nearly a century later, it remains capable of making the familiar world seem faintly supernatural. On "Nebulage", Nathalie Forget and Gilles Aubry put this peculiar instrument into conversation with its own digital double, creating six improvisations in which physical performance and computer modelling continually blur the distinction between an original and its imitation. The result is a shifting, occasionally disquieting sound world in which electronic signals seem to acquire their own forms of life, as if the machinery had begun dreaming while its operators were briefly distracted.

The duo's name, Kr-Krr, already suggests a small collision between language and noise: a syllable trying to emerge from static, perhaps, or a frog with an unfortunate electrical problem. That impression fits the music rather well. Forget plays the Ondes Martenot, while Aubry works with computer and modular synthesizer, using a virtual reconstruction of the instrument developed through physical modelling in Max/MSP. The software can reproduce aspects of the Ondes' characteristic sound while also stretching its possibilities beyond the behaviour of the physical instrument. The two performers therefore share a common sonic vocabulary without necessarily speaking the same dialect. One works through the tactile decisions of a player; the other can manipulate the instrument's electronic identity at a more fundamental level.

Forget is exceptionally well placed to explore this relationship. A leading exponent of the Ondes Martenot, she studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, where she received its highest distinction for the instrument, and has performed with major orchestras and conductors across the international classical circuit. Her repertoire encompasses composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Edgar Varèse, Arthur Honegger and Tristan Murail, while her collaborations also extend into improvisation and rock, including work connected with Faust and Radiohead. Since 2016, she has taught the Ondes Martenot at the Paris Conservatoire. Aubry approaches the same territory from a different direction: a sound artist and musician associated with Berlin's noise collective MONNO, he works with field recordings, computer programming and electronic manipulation, across music, installation, film and radio. His broader practice is concerned with how sound acquires meaning through technology, environment and cultural context. Their meeting feels less like a stylistic compromise than a productive collision between two distinct ways of thinking electronically.

The opening "Acousmatic Frog" introduces an atmosphere in which the biological and the synthetic become difficult to separate. Its title suggests an animal heard without being seen, a useful description of music that invites the imagination to identify sources while withholding enough information to make identification unreliable. Chirps, wavering tones and unstable textures suggest a world populated by creatures whose anatomy might consist of sine waves and electrical components. The effect is playful without becoming whimsical, and eerie without resorting to the predictable vocabulary of horror sound design. There is no need for a soundtrack composer to add a sudden bass impact and announce that something terrible is approaching. The sounds themselves are strange enough, particularly when they appear to imitate one another without quite agreeing on the rules.

Then comes "Cross voltage", the album's twenty-two-minute centre of gravity. Its extended duration allows the duo to explore the tension between sustained tones and abrupt changes, between passages of near-stasis and sudden surges of activity. The Ondes Martenot's gliding pitches and expressive vibrato can suggest breath, vocalisation or the cry of an animal, but Aubry's digital counterpart unsettles these associations. A sound may appear to have a physical source, only to become more abstract as its electronic properties are altered. Conversely, an unfamiliar texture can acquire a curiously organic quality through the way it bends, trembles or interacts with another sound. The music repeatedly moves across this boundary, resisting the comfort of knowing whether one is listening to an instrument, an imitation or something that has emerged from the friction between them.

This is where "Nebulage" becomes more than a demonstration of the Ondes Martenot's distinctive timbre. The virtual instrument is not simply a convenient substitute for an expensive piece of historical equipment, and the physical instrument is not merely a nostalgic object being preserved for future generations of electronic-music enthusiasts. Their coexistence raises a more interesting question: how much of an instrument's identity resides in its material construction, and how much can survive transformation into software? A digital reconstruction can preserve recognisable features while opening new possibilities for distortion and control. Meanwhile, the physical instrument brings the irregularities of touch and performance, the small decisions that make a gesture feel immediate. Neither side has a monopoly on authenticity. The music gains its character from the uncertainty between them.

"Radio animal" shifts attention towards the suggestion of distant transmissions and biological calls. Its title evokes a creature communicating across an invisible network, or a radio receiver that has accidentally tuned into a form of life previously omitted from the scientific literature. Aubry's experience with sound processing and experimental electronics makes this territory particularly appropriate, while Forget's instrument provides an expressive counterweight to the more abstract electronic textures. Their interaction creates a sense of communication without a stable message. Sounds answer one another, overlap and break apart, but the listener is left to imagine what, if anything, is being exchanged. This is music that encourages a little imaginative paranoia, though preferably the harmless kind involving extraterrestrial frogs rather than one's neighbours.

"Blissement" continues the album's exploration of unstable sonic identities. The music's improvisational character is important here: its developments feel discovered through interaction rather than imposed according to a predetermined dramatic plan. A delicate texture may persist long enough to establish an expectation, then be interrupted by a more jagged gesture that changes the perceived scale of the surrounding sound. These contrasts give the album a sense of movement without requiring conventional rhythmic propulsion. Listening becomes an exercise in following relationships as they form and dissolve, with the ear continually adjusting its sense of what belongs together.

On "Boreal Control", the language of systems and environments becomes particularly suggestive. The title might imply an attempt to manage an inhospitable landscape, perhaps through some remote scientific station where the equipment has begun reporting weather conditions that do not exist. The music's abstract, spatial character supports such imaginary narratives without insisting on any single interpretation. The sounds seem to inhabit a place with its own rules, although those rules remain difficult to establish. One of the album's strengths is that it can suggest an environment without reducing the listening experience to a sequence of cinematic illustrations. Its textures are evocative, but they retain enough independence to be heard as sound in its own right.

The closing "Microbells" provides a particularly meaningful conclusion through its engagement with Olivier Messiaen. The piece revisits the soaring melody associated with the Ondes Martenot in his "Quatuor pour la fin du temps" ("Quartet for the End of Time"), a work composed during the Second World War and premiered in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. Messiaen's music gives the instrument a history that is inseparable from its capacity for extraordinary lyrical expression. In Kr-Krr's hands, that melodic inheritance emerges through a more diffuse electronic atmosphere, suspended between recognition and transformation. The melody retains its emotional resonance, yet its surroundings make it feel as though it has travelled a considerable distance from its original setting. What was once a distinctly human gesture now appears to arrive through a medium whose origins and destination are uncertain.

This final encounter with Messiaen also gives the album's technological experiment a broader historical dimension. The Ondes Martenot was once a symbol of modernity, an instrument capable of extending musical expression beyond the limitations of conventional acoustic design. Today, its virtual reconstruction allows the same sonic vocabulary to be re-examined through a different set of possibilities. The future has not simply replaced the past; it has returned to it, borrowed its voice and altered its accent. The closing tribute captures that circular movement particularly well, making the old melody feel both remembered and newly unfamiliar.

There are moments when the album's abstract language may test listeners who prefer more clearly articulated musical structures. The long middle piece, in particular, demands patience, and the movement between delicacy and jagged activity does not always provide an obvious narrative thread. Yet the absence of conventional signposts is central to the experience. "Nebulage" asks the listener to attend to changes in texture, timbre and perceived source, rather than wait for a melody or beat to explain what should happen next. It rewards curiosity more than passive absorption, although it can also be enjoyed as an unusually vivid collection of electronic apparitions.

Released by Sirr Records, "Nebulage" is a compelling debut for Kr-Krr because its central idea generates genuine musical consequences. The dialogue between the physical Ondes Martenot and its digital reconstruction creates uncertainty, but also a surprising degree of expressive freedom. Forget and Aubry do not merely place two technologies side by side; they explore what becomes possible when each changes the way the other is heard. The resulting music occupies a shifting territory between instrumental performance, electroacoustic improvisation and electronic abstraction, with occasional flashes of lyrical beauty emerging from its more unsettling passages.

Ultimately, "Nebulage" leaves the impression of a communication system that has developed an independent imagination. Its signals seem to contain traces of voices, animals and distant environments, although none can be confidently identified. The Ondes Martenot breathes, the software answers, and somewhere between them a third presence begins to take shape. Whether this is a creature, a memory or simply electricity becoming unusually eloquent is left unresolved. The sensible response is to keep listening, preferably without attempting to contact the authorities.

A traffic signal changes. Someone crosses the street. An air conditioner hums away with the dedication of a civil servant approaching retirement. Cars pass, footsteps accumulate, machinery grumbles, and conversations dissolve into the general babble of urban existence. Most of us experience this as background noise, occasionally interrupted by a particularly obnoxious motorist. On "Repeating Town", however, these ordinary events become the entire musical vocabulary. Across seven tracks, Nonturn constructs a quietly propulsive electronic work from recordings made in and around Koenji, Tokyo, without using conventional instruments. The city supplies the raw material; editing supplies the composition.

Nonturn is the project of Nozom Yoneda, a Kanazawa-born composer based in Tokyo whose professional work spans film, television and commercial scoring alongside experimental music. He began releasing music in the British drum'n'bass scene in 2004 before gradually developing a sampling-based practice that places environmental recordings at its centre. His earlier Audiobulb releases, "Territory" (2018) and "Jellybeans" (2023), mark different stages in this exploration. "Territory" was constructed from environmental recordings made across Tokyo, while "Jellybeans" drew on extensive sound-library material. The new album returns to the physical city, but approaches it through a more tightly defined compositional framework. Rather than attempting to reproduce the experience of walking through a particular neighbourhood, Yoneda extracts sounds from their original circumstances and gives them new musical responsibilities.

The crucial decision is to organise all seven tracks around a tempo of 96 beats per minute. This provides a common temporal structure without forcing the music into the familiar architecture of dance-floor electronics. There is no obligatory four-on-the-floor kick drum, no synthesised bass line announcing that the weekend has officially begun. Instead, the rhythm emerges from the peculiar properties of recorded reality. A footstep can become a percussive accent; a mechanical hum can supply a sustained tonal layer; a signal or fragment of speech can acquire the function of a repeating motif. Once these sounds are cut, repositioned and layered, their original identities become less important than the relationships they establish.

This is where "Repeating Town" moves beyond the familiar appeal of field recordings. The simple act of capturing interesting noises can certainly produce compelling sound art, but a collection of unusual sounds is not automatically a composition. Yoneda's achievement lies in the grammar he develops from them. His material retains the roughness and irregularity of the environment, yet the fixed pulse gives it a sense of direction. Repetition becomes a means of discovering order without pretending that the world is naturally tidy. The music is neither a documentary soundtrack nor an ambient postcard of Tokyo. It is an alternative version of the city, one assembled according to rules that make its everyday activities audible in a new way.

The opening "Indicate" establishes this approach through the interplay of small sonic events and the album's measured rhythmic flow. The title suggests a signal, an instruction or a prompt to move, and the piece fits a work in which sounds acquire significance through their placement. "Atonement" continues the process, while "Repetition" makes the governing principle explicit. Yet repetition here is not simply the duplication of a sound until everyone involved has lost the will to object. Each recurrence changes the context in which a fragment is heard. What initially registers as a mechanical detail can become a rhythmic anchor; what seems incidental can gradually assume the importance of a musical phrase. Familiarity alters perception, and the repeated sound becomes different without necessarily changing very much at all.

"Stagnant" introduces an especially suggestive title into a record whose underlying pulse never stops. The apparent contradiction is productive: movement and inertia can coexist, just as a person can remain physically stationary while the city carries on around them. A constant tempo does not guarantee forward motion in the conventional dramatic sense. Instead, it establishes a stable reference against which small changes become more noticeable. The album's rhythm resembles the experience of travelling through a familiar district, where the route remains broadly predictable but the details never repeat in precisely the same way. There is a quiet tension between the regularity of the musical grid and the accidental character of the sounds placed upon it.

With "Fathom", the listener is invited to consider how much can be extracted from material that initially seems mundane. Yoneda's process depends on selection, but also on a willingness to let the recordings resist their original meanings. A sound can retain some trace of its source without continuing to function as evidence of a specific event. In this respect, the album occupies an interesting position between musique concrète and post-club electronics. It inherits the former's interest in treating recorded sound as compositional material, while borrowing from club culture an awareness of pulse, repetition and continuity. Neither tradition entirely explains the result. The music has a physical rhythmic presence, but its source material refuses the clean, predictable surfaces usually associated with electronic dance production.

"Disrupt" suggests a disturbance in the established pattern, although the album's deeper interest is not in manufacturing dramatic breakdowns for their own sake. Its organising principle remains consistent, allowing irregularities and changes of density to register against the shared tempo. The music can suggest a city in motion without resorting to a cinematic montage of sirens, horns and exaggerated urban menace. There is no need to make Tokyo sound like a dystopian metropolis whose inhabitants have been sentenced to perpetual overtime. The everyday is strange enough already, provided it receives a little attention.

The closing "Perpetual", the longest track at six minutes and forty-five seconds, gives the album a fitting final perspective. Its title points towards continuation rather than resolution, reinforcing the impression that the seven tracks form parts of a larger process. Each piece can be heard individually, but the common tempo allows them to connect as a continuous environment. This is more than a technical convenience: it suggests a city whose separate locations and activities participate in a shared temporal structure. The listener moves from one arrangement to the next while the pulse persists, much as urban life continues regardless of whether we happen to be paying attention.

Yoneda's visual work extends this way of thinking beyond sound. The cover uses one of his close-up photographs of Tokyo's surfaces, focusing on details such as walls, textures and peeling paint. Seen from a distance, these belong to a recognisable urban environment; framed tightly enough, they become abstract arrangements of colour and form. The method mirrors the music. In both cases, the city is not simply represented but broken down into components whose relationships can be reconsidered. The photographs suggest that abstraction is not necessarily something imposed on reality from outside. Sometimes it begins by looking, or listening, more closely than ordinary habits encourage.

The accompanying video project takes the idea further. Yoneda recorded footage at the same time as capturing the sounds, then developed a custom Ableton-to-video application, A2MVE, to reconstruct the footage according to the arrangement of the musical session. As sounds overlap, the image divides; when the music repeats, the corresponding visual material repeats too. The footage itself remains real, while artificial intelligence helped design editing rules and extend the process to a level of complexity that would be impractical to assemble manually. This is a thoughtful application of technology: not an attempt to manufacture a synthetic city, but a way of making the relationship between recorded sound, editing and visual perception more explicit. The software effectively turns the arrangement into a set of instructions for looking.

There is something quietly subversive about this project. Contemporary urban life is saturated with sounds that are functional before they are aesthetic. Signals tell us when to cross, machines keep buildings operating, footsteps carry people towards their destinations, and passing conversations vanish before we can make sense of them. We are trained to interpret these events quickly and move on. Yoneda interrupts that process by giving the sounds a different purpose. The signal no longer needs to direct a pedestrian; the machine no longer needs to perform its practical duty. Each becomes part of a composition whose meaning depends on how it relates to everything else.

The result is not necessarily music that makes one long to dance, although its pulse provides a gentle bodily invitation. Nor is it ambient music in the sense of a passive backdrop intended to make a room feel sophisticated while somebody chooses a takeaway. "Repeating Town" asks for active listening, but it does not demand solemn concentration. Its pleasures come from noticing how the pieces fit together, how an apparently unmusical sound can acquire a recognisable role, and how the fixed tempo allows disparate recordings to coexist. The concept is rigorous, yet the music remains approachable because its raw materials belong to experiences most listeners already know.

There are limits to the approach. A consistent tempo and a shared sampling method inevitably impose a degree of uniformity, and listeners looking for strong melodic development or dramatic structural contrasts may find the album's restrained progression too even. The same process that produces coherence can also soften the distinctions between individual tracks. But this tension is intrinsic to the project: Yoneda is not trying to create seven unrelated showcases of technique. He is examining the repetitions that bind a place together, and the continuity of the music is part of the argument.

"Repeating Town" ultimately demonstrates that the boundary between noise and music is less stable than everyday listening assumes. The city does not need to be made beautiful through sentimental orchestration, nor does its sound have to be preserved untouched to retain documentary value. Yoneda takes the middle route, editing reality until its ordinary details reveal another order. The work is precise without feeling sterile, rhythmic without surrendering to conventional club formulas, and experimental without treating obscurity as a badge of honour.

After listening, the most noticeable change may occur outside the album. A crossing signal, the rhythm of someone walking, a ventilation unit rattling above a shop: these sounds may briefly seem less like interruptions and more like parts of an arrangement nobody has quite finished composing. The city has not suddenly become more musical. The listener has simply acquired a different way of hearing it. Given how much noise modern life produces, that is a rather useful skill to take home.