Cycling Vol 2 begins with “Cycle 7,” not a new introduction. Mac Blackout does not restart the numbering, restate the concept, or pretend that the listener has entered an unrelated album. The first six cycles established the mechanism; these six continue turning it. Together, the two volumes form a twelve-part document of an injured body converting physical therapy into electronic composition.
The underlying process remains wonderfully literal. During the winter of 2026, Blackout returned to an old stationary bicycle as therapy for a damaged knee. He built a wooden rack for synthesizer modules, fixed it to the handlebars, and began recording while riding. The initial electronic layers for each piece were created during repeated five-to-six-minute sessions, with Blackout adding interwoven sequences and adjusting frequencies while his legs remained in motion. Later the same day, he returned to the recordings with saxophones, flutes, bells, and shakers, allowing breath and hand percussion to respond to the machinery produced during the morning ride.
Cycling Vol 1 introduced that invention. Cycling Vol 2 reveals what happens after the invention becomes a practice.
All six pieces here remain within a narrow band of duration. “Cycle 7” lasts 5:13, “Cycle 8” 5:46, “Cycle 9” 5:04, “Cycle 10” 5:40, “Cycle 11” 5:50, and “Cycle 12” 4:51. The entire album runs 32:24, and only fifty-nine seconds separate its shortest and longest pieces. Those proportions are not the result of radio programming or conventional songwriting. They preserve the approximate duration of the rides from which the initial layers emerged.
Volume 1 briefly interrupted that pattern with the much shorter “Cycle 3.” Volume 2 does not. Once “Cycle 7” begins, the listener enters six nearly equal rotations, each long enough for repetition to become an environment but short enough to retain the urgency of a body actively working.
This gives the second album a more regular pulse even before any individual synthesizer pattern is considered. The track list resembles an exercise log: six efforts, similar in duration, completed one after another. Yet the music is not reduced to data. The consistency allows attention to move away from dramatic differences in length and toward the smaller changes occurring inside each ride.
The numbered titles contribute to this openness. Blackout does not call one piece “Recovery,” another “Pain,” and another “Forward Motion.” He refuses to tell the listener which emotional image should be attached to each session. “Cycle 7” identifies sequence and process, but not interpretation. The music can therefore remain physically specific without becoming narratively confined.
A descriptive title can behave like a picture frame, directing the eye toward one approved subject. A number offers less guidance. The listener must notice changes in density, movement, pressure, breath, and space without being assured that any one of them represents a predetermined scene.
“Cycle 7” enters as continuation. Its number contains the six previous pieces even when they are not being played. The larger work has already accumulated history, and this track begins from the knowledge that the bicycle, rack, modules, mixer, instruments, knee, and daily ritual have all been used before.
That distinction matters because an improvised method changes through repetition. The first attempt includes discovery of the apparatus itself. By the seventh cycle, the apparatus has begun to disappear into bodily memory. Hands learn where controls are located. The rider becomes more capable of manipulating sound without interrupting physical movement. Decisions may occur sooner because the practical questions have already been answered.
The machine is becoming familiar, but familiarity does not guarantee sameness. A body does not arrive at physical therapy in precisely the same condition each morning. Pain, sleep, confidence, impatience, stiffness, improvement, weather, and mood alter the session before the first pedal turns. The synthesizer may repeat accurately, but the person operating it is never an exact repeat.
“Cycle 8,” the second-longest piece on the album, expands that daily negotiation. Five minutes and forty-six seconds is not an enormous duration within experimental music, but it is long enough for a repeating figure to stop feeling like an isolated musical phrase and begin behaving like a condition. The listener is no longer waiting for a verse or chorus. Attention adjusts to recurrence.
Repetition in this music is not a failure to provide new information. It changes the scale at which information is perceived. When large events become less frequent, smaller events become more legible. A new wind phrase, altered frequency, shifted emphasis, added bell, or change in texture can feel enormous because the surrounding structure has taught the ear what continuity sounds like.
Cycling Vol 2 therefore asks for a kind of listening related to physical rehabilitation. Progress may not arrive as one spectacular transformation. It may appear as slightly greater range, reduced pain, increased confidence, an extra minute, or a movement that no longer requires conscious negotiation. Small changes become meaningful because they occur within repeated conditions.
“Cycle 9” crosses the five-minute line by only four seconds, making it the album’s closest expression of the central unit. It also became one of the first selections from the project to travel independently through experimental radio, where it could be removed from the numbered sequence and heard among unrelated artists.
That separation tests the strength of the individual cycle. Within the album, “Cycle 9” is part of an accumulating ritual. On radio, it becomes a single mysterious object entering between other recordings. The title still announces that something preceded it and something may follow, but the absent cycles become imagined rather than heard.
This is appropriate for a project concerned with bodily routine. We usually encounter only fragments of another person’s recovery. We see someone walking on one particular day, hear about an appointment, notice an improvement, or witness a setback. The countless private repetitions producing that moment remain invisible.
“Cycle 10” sits near the center of Volume 2 and has already been identified by one early listener as a spacey meeting of neo-Krautrock motion, synthesizers, and horn. That description points toward the musical territory created by Blackout’s process without fully containing it.
The association with motorik music makes immediate sense. The bicycle and the steady electronic pattern both generate forward sensation through repetition. Yet a stationary bicycle complicates the familiar mythology of the open road. There is propulsion without geographical travel. The imagined landscape moves while the room remains fixed.
This may be why space imagery also feels natural. A spacecraft can appear motionless from inside while crossing unimaginable distance. Instruments hum, systems repeat, bodies remain enclosed, and movement is understood through readouts or changes in the view. Cycling Vol 2 often creates that same possibility: a person stays in one room while frequencies construct distance around him.
The saxophone and flute prevent the electronic sequences from becoming perfectly sealed environments. Each wind note contains a separate physical cycle. Air is drawn into the lungs, held or directed, forced through an instrument, shaped by tongue and fingers, and released into the room. The breath cannot be copied with the exact mechanical consistency of a programmed sequence.
That difference is not a contest between cold technology and warm humanity. Both parts of the recording are human actions conducted through tools. The synthesizer also responds to touch, intuition, timing, and physical condition. The horn also involves metal, keys, valves, acoustic design, and learned technique. Cycling places two systems beside one another and lets their different tolerances become audible.
“Cycle 11,” at 5:50, is the longest of all six pieces. The additional seconds do not turn it into an epic finale. Its scale remains faithful to the ride. This modest refusal of grandeur is central to the project. Blackout does not inflate the later numbers merely because the sequence is nearing completion.
A twelve-part cycle could easily be organized as an ascent, with each track becoming longer, louder, denser, or more triumphant until the final piece declares victory over injury. Real recovery rarely behaves so obediently. Improvement may occur beside pain. Confidence may be followed by caution. The body does not respect album sequencing.
By keeping the sessions close in length, Blackout resists converting rehabilitation into a heroic montage. The listener is given work rather than a miracle. Pedaling continues. Frequencies are adjusted. Another layer is recorded. The evening brings saxophone or flute. Tomorrow the process begins again.
The rawness of the recordings preserves that labor. Blackout mixed the project spontaneously through a Tascam Model 12 without using a computer or digital audio workstation, and he left the results largely uncut. This limits the possibility of rebuilding the performance afterward into an idealized version of what should have happened.
A digital workstation can separate composition from consequence. Timing can be corrected, sections replaced, gestures copied, unwanted sounds removed, and an improvised performance gradually transformed into something that never occurred in continuous time. None of those methods is inherently dishonest, but they would weaken the particular meaning of Cycling.
Here the event matters because the artist was occupied by several tasks simultaneously. He was riding for therapy, listening to repeating patterns, manipulating synthesizer controls, judging the condition of his knee, deciding when to add another sequence, and recording the result. Small imperfections are evidence that these activities shared one body.
“Cycle 12” is the shortest piece on Volume 2, ending at 4:51. Rather than finishing with the longest or most ceremonially complete ride, the album stops nine seconds before its five-minute center. The ending feels appropriately practical. A session is complete when the body or music reaches its stopping point, not when a theory of endings has been satisfied.
The title also closes the numbering without claiming that cycling itself is finished. “Cycle 12” is the final recorded piece in this pair of albums, but no final bicycle rotation can exist. Each turn leads into another. Recovery continues outside the recording, and the mechanisms used to create the album remain capable of producing more sound.
This makes Volume 2 both an ending and proof of continuation. The twelve pieces form a complete released work, while the method they document remains open. Another injury, morning, instrument, rack, route, body, or artist could produce a different set of cycles without repeating this one.
Blackout’s statement “Human Creation. No AI” appears prominently in the album credits. Within this project, the phrase carries particular weight because the music has such a detailed bodily provenance. The listener is told where the patterns came from: an injured knee, repeated rides, hands manipulating physical modules, lungs moving air through saxophones and flutes, percussion struck in a room, and spontaneous decisions preserved rather than reconstructed after the fact.
Yet the album is not hostile to machinery. It is saturated with machinery. The stationary bicycle, synthesizer modules, cables, mixer, recorder, microphones, and instruments all extend the artist’s physical abilities. The human and machine are not enemies here. They form a temporary organism whose purpose is simultaneously therapeutic and creative.
The meaningful distinction is between automation replacing the event and technology participating in it. Blackout’s machines do not eliminate the need for presence. They make presence audible. The synthesizer rack attached to the handlebars demands that he occupy the exact point where exercise, composition, and instrument control meet.
Cycling Vol 2 also clarifies how far Blackout’s instrumental practice has traveled from the compact garage-punk forms associated with Functional Blackouts, Daily Void, Mickey, and the Mac Blackout Band. The velocity and do-it-yourself instinct remain, but they have been redirected. A distorted punk song once compressed energy into two or three minutes; these cycles sustain it through electronics, improvisation, and repeated bodily action.
The punk continuity lies less in the sound than in the construction. Identify what is needed. Build it yourself. Refuse the assumption that specialized institutions must approve the apparatus. Use the available room. Record while the idea is alive. Allow the method to remain visible in the finished work.
The handmade rack is therefore as important as any individual synthesizer. It is an act of practical imagination, a small sculpture that changes the relationship among body, instrument, and furniture. The bicycle was designed for exercise. The modules were designed for electronic sound. The rack creates a third purpose neither object possessed alone.
Volume 1 contains the excitement of recognizing that possibility. Volume 2 contains the deeper satisfaction of returning to it until the possibility becomes a language.
That is the quiet achievement of the second record. Novelty fades, but attention remains. The listener no longer needs to be surprised that someone recorded electronic improvisations while riding a therapy bicycle. The concept has done its introductory work. What remains is the music and the daily discipline that produced it.
Six more rides.
Six more evenings of breath answering voltage.
A knee measuring recovery while a recorder measures time.
The bicycle goes nowhere.
The practice moves forward.
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