■ Genres: Experimental / Field Recordings / Drone ■ Rating: 7.7/10 ■ Favorite track: “it’s the thinnest and brittlest of veils”
► This infuses the stillness of drone music with a striking sense of urgency. Beneath the steady, immersive hum lies a pulse of tension — like an inaudible clock ticking. The radio fragments never resolve into clarity, instead hovering like lost messages from a distant crisis. Subtle oscillations and tonal shifts widen the atmosphere, giving the impression of scanning an unknown horizon for signals of meaning or safety.
► That is unsettling in the most effective way. We find ourselves looking for an impossible dialogue between innate human fragility and the concrete crudeness of productive slavery. We move in an aural landscape where beauty and despair coexist, perfectly capturing the existential ambiguity of a world on edge.
■ The A. O.: The track from “J’Peux” that we prefer is “tea tide pool”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Matt Robert McLennan: “tea tide pool” was the first track we laid down and it is completely improvised around a guitar refrain that I play repeatedly and, somewhat obstinately, outside of the metre of what the percussion and bass were doing. On this track, you can really hear us calibrating our sound and finding our roles – which I don’t think is at all a bad thing. It’s a fairly optimistic track despite the dark tonalities.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Silence About To Break” that we prefer is “Stardust Cluster”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► The Earl of Dean: Interestingly this was the first track I actually released publicly albeit after getting some feedback from some fellow Edinburgh based artists Tayus and Last Post Society who gave me the confidence to make my music public and just roll with it. The track was me initially thinking id like to create a spacey ambient track and once I got the individual parts across my suite of synths and an inkling on how I’d piece the recording together I just went for it recording live .through my mixer into Ableton before mastering in Bandlab. I think I did 3 takes before I was happy with the track . Bear in mind I’d been playing about with my synths as a novice from September 2024 understanding the functionality and what I could extract sound wise from each of them. Painful at times but great fun!
■ Genres: Electroacoustic / Experimental ■ Rating: 6.5/10 ■ Favorite track: “CANTO PER LA TERRA DI CANAAN”
► This track consists of four movements, blending modern sound design with echoes of Middle Eastern sonorities. What emerges is a space where tradition and abstraction intertwine. Fragments of modal melodies, resonant strings and woodwinds appear through layers of electronic processing, forming a tapestry that feels both ancient and futuristic.
■ Genres: Experimental / Lo-Fi / Electronic ■ Rating: 6.4/10 ■ Favorite track: “und die ganze welt sang mit mir (thank_you)”
► This is the first section of a sonic journey into the author’s past. (thank_you) deals with childhood experienced through a new awareness. Music succeeds in evoking the innocence and mystery of early perception, suggesting the imperfections of remembering. The piece captures the raw emotional texture of infancy: curiosity, vulnerability, wonder.
“Each song is thoughtfully made for a variable in Euler’s Identity and feels like its own carved out imaginary space. Notes trickle and dance through time to create moments that straddle the line between chaos and order, never quite settling in, always fluid in their direction and motion. The mood is peaceful and consciousness sparked into a wakeful state to appreciate the cloudy soundscapes with transient sounds of, at times, sharp contrast and fizzing, and at times, tranquil winds blowing. The album culminates in slow brain rattling pulsations”.
► When you use too many ingredients, the risk is that you don’t feel anything. This doesn’t happen here. The meeting between different elements and styles (electronic, jazz, post-rock) is both fluid and jagged, spacious and constricting. We find ourselves drunk on a drifting boat, but alive and curious. A really noteworthy work.
► We are driven by a steady 60ish bpm kick, grounding the piece with a slow, heartbeat-like pulse. From this minimal foundation, glitch elements gradually emerge weaving themselves into the spacious soundscape. The pacing is deliberate, allowing each new detail to settle and reshape the mood without breaking the flow. This creates an attractive ambiguity.
► This is truly moving. The fragmented use of a choir sample creates an interplay between voices and strings with a deeply melancholic consistency, like tears streaming through fractured memories. That’s a poignant reminder of impermanence of things.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Absent” that we prefer is “Chloral Suicide”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Paul Padilla: I was messing around on a Moog Subharmonicon, a fun and chaotic semi-modular synthesizer. Once I got the sequence that’s heard in the track, I decided to record it, which I did, while haphazardly patching a lot of random parameters to each other. That’s where a lot of the stutters and detuned notes come from. After I had the recording on my computer, I manipulated it in a few different directions and layered the results. The final track became an interflow of the original recording with its mangled counterparts. I still don’t even really know what key it’s in.
answering some questions. We have already observed his electronic / noise / experimental / industrial work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “Refractions” that we prefer is “Refraction 4”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►EIII: A little over a year ago, I was recording underwater sounds in the river that runs through the city where I live. The bubbling of the water, the trapped air released by my steps, and the occasional jet ski or motorboat formed the foundation of the piece. Later, I added layers of synths to build on that.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Materia Vibrante” that we prefer is “Mundus Imaginalis”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Susana López: Both Materia Vibrante (the album) and Mundus Imaginalis are products of a very particular period in my life, a period marked by an existential crisis. It’s almost as if all the tracks could be combined into a single piece, sharing a common emotional core, instrumentation, and mental state. Mundus Imaginalis is inspired by that intermediate dimension that connects the intelligible with the sensible: the imaginary world, where vision and vibration merge, according to Henry Corbin and Ibn Arabi. The most notable feature of this track is that it is made almost entirely with my “sonic triangle”, a sound object that I built several years ago. It is the physical element that initiates the vibration.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Nocturnal Reverie” that we prefer is “Sewer Sea”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Risbo Tazeg: I wanted to create an album that could be a film soundtrack but without being connected to an actual film. I wanted it to be really evocative, to have strong – but abstract – narrative components. Sewer sea in particular involves improvisation sessions. I started with one layer of synth, and made a 10 minutes long drone-like track. I had no plan in mind, just wanted to play. I then added a 10 minutes layer of cello on top of this drone. Listened to the whole and got rid of some parts of the cello. I did the same with another synth, listened, carved. I repeated the whole process several times with several synths, with the cello and another string instrument. There has been quite a lot of editing and I don’t think there is anything left from the first 2 layers but somehow the structure that emerges organically from the first few improvised sessions is still there. The rest of the album has been planned a bit more in advance, but for Sewer Sea I would just play, observe the outcome, edit, repeat. Layering and carving.
► That’s a raw, immersive descent into chaos and texture. Harsh, distorted layers clash and dissolve. Metallic screeches, glitchy fragments and pulsing static collide in a soundscape that feels unstable yet intentional—like a broken machine struggling to breathe.
► These sounds show a very peculiar tension. Layers of deep, resonant and/or dissonant tones draw a haunting soundscape that feels both unsettling and strangely inviting. Fractured textures ripple across the surface like distant storms, keeping the listener locked in a mesmerizing cage.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Breath. Play.” that we prefer is “Inner Peace Collapse Straight Ahead”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Eleonora Kampe: This track was an independent mover in the plot. It presented itself as a result of mistakes in the mix that I didn’t undo. I liked how it sounded both threatening and gentle – it became an outro to the album, reminding me of the passing nature of all things.
► This track reimagines the mechanical movement of an elevator as a vehicle for sonic exploration. Creaks, hums, chimes and shifting cables create a hypnotic rhythm, evoking a strangely meditative ascent through industrial space. The piece resists any musical notation, instead inviting to find music – whatever it may be – in the most hidden places.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Studies Made on a Typewriter” that we prefer is “Drawing 4’33””. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Ryan Hooper: Inspired by a piece of typewriter art by Anni Albers, Studies Made on the Typewriter explores the typewriter as both a physical object and a conceptual tool – one that interacts with texts in varied ways and acts as a marker of place. It becomes a conduit for capturing diaristic traces, like etchings across different environments.
Drawing 4’33” draws directly from the ideas of Brian Eno and John Cage. Eno described ambient music as something that shapes the atmosphere of a room – like lighting or wallpaper – while Cage famously asserted that absolute silence doesn’t exist, inviting listeners to consider all sound as potential music. This piece plays with both concepts: an ambient cut-up blending Eno’s aesthetic with Cage’s conceptual challenge of 4’33”.
this is not music for airports still silent partially unsighted wallpapering the skull feedback loops between recorder and microphone never heard or felt a performance of 4’33″ like this
At the time of recording, I was listening to Indian Soundies by Moniek Darge & Graham Lambkin, and I think some of that influence seeped into the process. The track is structured in two halves: the first built around a processed field recording of local church bells – a specific, locational sound that situates the listener. The second half features the sound of someone drawing – a quiet, intimate gesture that hints at how experiences are stored and later expressed. In this case, the memory of place is reinterpreted through an invisible drawing.
► Try this if you want to surf on fractured rhythms and distorted urgency. Layers of erratic synths and jarring percussive bursts mimic a nervous system on edge, creating an atmosphere both chaotic and hypnotic. Subtle modulations and ghostly textures surface just long enough to vanish, heightening the sense of unease.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Low Endings” that we prefer is “Eyes Inside”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Devin Sarno: There is an overarching theme across this E.P. of exploring crescendos. “Eyes Inside” is very much that: a slow and very tense build. Around the 4 minute mark the piece begins to expand and bloom. In some ways it is an homage to Glenn Branca. Some of his early symphonic pieces (like No. 3 or No. 6) have stayed with me even after all these years. I always loved the unrelenting force he created through the use of multiple instruments driving in unison. I tried to pay respect to this approach in my own way: with one (layered) bass guitar.
■ The A. O.: Can you tell us how the track “I remained a stranger to the birds“ came to light?
►Toby: This track came about following work we did on “Kolmar Park”; Wayne and i decided to continue working together, and expand this project to EP length (at the suggestion of Past Inside the Present label head Zach Frizzell). I really loved Wayne’s approach with his guitar playing, so we decided i should return to my field recording sources and from this came a set that i felt really worked together and flowed well from the first track. Wayne then worked his magic and made it into a full piece.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Boredom And Other Evil Spirits” that we prefer is “Solitary Happy Hour”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Catapult Elpam: So this track is the oldest one on the record. It came about from playing around with some textures and the guitar itself. Sonically the whole arrangement is rather simple then complex with subtle variations every now and again. I remember playing a vinyl record and placing the needle on the label not instead of the grooves. The result was this really cool scratchy rhythmic texture that goes in the background. I always like to sample and experiment with really weird and unusual sounds, reverse them, stretch them etc. Towards the end of the track, the rhythmical section switches to this galloping beat, which is actually the hooves of a galloping horse used as the rhythm.
► This is a clear example of a combination of sounds that goes beyond their simple sum. In other words, sonic interactions *really* generate emergent properties in this case. This approach leads you to a visceral experience—haunting, immersive, and unnervingly intimate—pulling your head into a spectral world shaped by decay.
■ The A. O.: Can you tell us how “Becquerel”cameto light?
► Fletina:I was reading about the French physicist Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel and his discovery of ‘The Photovoltaic Effect’ while I was experimenting with some recent field recordings of mine, and without me being particularly conscious of it – I was soundtracking the story of Becquerel’s early struggles and his eventual scientific breakthrough in my own head, and trying to sculpt sounds to match my vision, so the whole thing happened in a symbiotic kind of way. I wanted to make it a longform album-length piece to reflect the time and patience it must have took for Becquerel to make his discovery, while also keeping everything pretty vague and open to interpretation… Through abstract sonic experimentation with room tones and various field recordings I found that I had created a vaguely dark and confined atmosphere that suited the theme of the release. The sound artist Anne-F Jacques described it as ”simultaneously full of sound but with a kind of hollow open space in the middle”. Given how abstract and ambiguous the piece (and my work in general) is – it’s pretty difficult to talk about, but the whole thing makes sense in my own head…
► This music seems to come directly from Lovecraft’s pen. There is an eerie sense of presence and unease. The track unfolds hypnotically, blurring the line between wait and dread. Whether we like it or not, we are forced to descend into the darkest recesses of our conscience.
answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic / dark ambient / experimental work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “Anachoreisis” that we prefer is “Flooding”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Auditor: My functional memory was hijacked many years ago. I imagine I was probably teaching myself to play a Gymnopedie or Gnossienne and listening to them on repeat. I have a sampler, an SP-404. I likely fed it things that were then abstractly regurgitated and reassembled by hand and heart.
► Abstract concreteness? Yes, please. Although its elements come from the so-called “real world” in its materiality, concrete music is one of the most abstract art forms ever. Where notes often resonate emotionally, the noises of a typewriter leave the listener with the need to find a key to meaning. But: does a key always exist? Do we always have to go through a door?
■ The A. O.: The track from “A Crooked Stick” that we prefer is “Ceterus Paribus“. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► House Of Quiet: That particular track was born out of a feeling to add gradually to a simple framework without overwhelming elements. A single looped chord fed by prepared guitar, radio static, staggered delays and predominantly clean work.
■ The A. O.: The track from “gateway” that we prefer is “how to get away“. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Passage: “How to get away” is the only song on the album that was recorded in separate sections. The first of the two sections has the only original sound on the album that doesn’t come from a guitar or a synthesizer, instead, what you’re hearing is a music box being played very slowly through a pedalboard. In an earlier version of the track, there was a short acoustic song during the intro, and the track was called “waves” in reference to one of the lyrics. Like the rest of the tracks, I came up with the final title while uploading the album to bandcamp. The title “how to get away” represents, at least for me, the existential dread of living under the American regime.
■ Genres: Field Recordings, Experimental, Post-rock ■ Rating: 7.0/10 ■ Favorite track: “I remained a stranger to the birds“
► We live in this hypertrophic world. Is there still room for the beauty of little things? This is an empty question, typical of this late-capitalist era where you have to thank for your crumbs. But these 20 minutes are a meaningful exception. Here really “less is more”, here peace simply exists.
► The synths pass through us, the harmony is fluid, amniotic. But everything is filtered through an opaque lens, which gives the sound a trembling subsoil, as if you were waiting for a restless time. As if you don’t want to leave the present.
► Okay, now we’re mesmerized. The circular advance of the synth phrase has completely captivated us. The starting Baba O’Riley subtle urgency slowly melts into the entrance of the pads. The result is highly uplifiting. Take your time and enjoy.
► The horizontal amplitude of granular noise is remarkable. The din faces a fully tonal harmonic development by the pads. The result is that you can choose your favorite shade of grey while you are listening.
► The rythmic construction and the guitar phrase are mesmerized hypnotically. The use of space is interesting and helps not to flatten listening. The subtle variations of the two key elements and the alternating use of silences cleverly sweeps away any static.
■ Genres: Drone, Ambient, Dark Ambient, Experimental ■ Rating: 6.6/10 ■ Favorite track: “how to get away“
► We are alone in the middle of the storm. Resistance is useless, surrender is sweet. So let us fall to infinity, disperse without guilt or hope, into oblivion.
► That’s something interesting and rare. In a world that desensitizes us every day, where our tolerance threshold is getting higher and higher, this crowd of voices makes us feel like a fish tipping over on a boat dock. It distresses us in this anesthetized time.
■ Genres: Ambient, Experimental, Soundscapes ■ Rating: 8.4/10 ■ Favorite track: “Symphonic Descent into the Beast’s Lair“
► This work, in all its nuances, is truly remarkable. The natural sounds, often trivialized in this genre and its derivations, are concretely functional to the development of the soundscape this time. Despite the sound complexity, the production of the album is perfectly blended.
► Here it comes something really abstract. There is this dark drone going on with minimal variations, like something deeply inevitable. This is what the background noise of our lives might sound like. Silence is lost. Harmony, if it ever was, is over.
► There is a guitar and a beautiful repeated ninth chord, suitable – in its harmonic indeterminacy – to adapt to the emotional state of the listener. A desert at sunset lies before our eyes. We must cross it, whether we like it or not. Distant noises will accompany us on the way.
This is not music: it’s a mirror. You try to look for something and you get nothing but yourself. So, since we do not know you listener, here is our review: _____________________________
► In the midst of dark drones echoes, synhts phrases burst in. That’s intriguing because it emerges as an act of rebellion against the swamp that surrounds us. We can stand, somehow.
► We are in Eliot’s “Waste Land”. There is no matter, nothing can be seen. The echo of a sacred chant rises and falls on the first three deegres of a major scale, like a lifeline in a desert of ice. Does salvation exist?
► Listening gravitates around a distant kick drum. As much the synths create an underlying tension, this pulsing core offers a safe haven. The harmonic use of bichords is cleverly elusive. The Doric mode reflects, in its resolutions, the search for relief from background noise.
► You may recognize Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1. In this reinterpretation of the masterpiece, lulling nostalgia seems to founder in a maelstrom of torment. What could have been when hope was still alive is gone. It is a brilliant aural rendition of a surrender.
► There is something really significant about the use of space. Panning acquires the dignity of a real creative tool. The choice of samples is skillful and, at times, moving; their deconstruction is simply masterful.
► It is not easy-listening, but – seriously – who cares about trivial music? Once you go down the rabbit hole you are hit by storms of gems and cascades of light, as well as shrapnels of blatant absurdity. You can either rise or get stuck.
