Pink Siifu - 2025 - Black'!Antique

 

Self-released – none  520.55MB FLAC

BLACK’!ANTIQUE begins by making an apparent contradiction feel inevitable. An antique is valued because it has survived time, retaining evidence of where it has been, who handled it and what vanished around it. Pink Siifu’s music is almost violently contemporary, filled with overloaded digital production, distorted voices, trap drums, noise, ghettotech, jazz, soul fragments and sudden switches that can make one song feel like several broadcasts colliding. Yet his subject is permanence. The album asks how Black art, family memory, regional sound and personal style can continue without becoming frozen museum pieces. Siifu does not preserve tradition beneath glass. He throws it into the present and listens for what remains indestructible.

The black-and-white cover establishes this tension through restraint. Siifu sits alone inside a mostly empty room, dressed in black, holding a small stack of objects or papers while an open doorway reveals an ordinary kitchen beyond him. The image is sparse enough to resemble an archival photograph discovered decades later, but nothing about it feels nostalgic. He is not surrounded by trophies, expensive furnishings or exaggerated signs of success. The room itself becomes a container awaiting history. The antique is not an object placed beside him. It is the person, the accumulated memory and the body of work still being made.

At seventy-seven minutes, the album deliberately refuses the compact efficiency expected of modern streaming releases. Siifu has described himself as an “album baby,” someone who still believes the individual pieces should create a complete experience. BLACK’!ANTIQUE rewards that scale because its abundance is part of the argument. Guests, producers and styles continually enter, but the record does not feel like an industry compilation built from remotely submitted verses. It resembles a family reunion occurring across several rooms, with conversations overlapping, old songs playing through walls and younger voices transforming inherited language before anyone can declare it sacred.

The opening title track and “ALIVE & DIRECT’!” establish the record at its most abrasive. Huge electronic drones, shouted vocals and unstable low frequencies make the music feel as though it is being forced through damaged speakers during a public emergency. Siifu’s voice does not sit cleanly above the production. It is another distressed signal inside it, sometimes half-buried, sometimes fighting toward the surface. This connects the album to the noise-punk violence of NEGRO, but the aggression now feels less isolated. Elheist, Apollo Rome, Ss.Sylver and the enormous production teams turn each track into a social disturbance rather than one man’s breakdown.

“1:1[FKDUP.BEZEL]” makes the album’s “one of one” philosophy physical. Conquest Tony Phillips constructs a beat that mutates beneath Siifu, Bbymutha and Elheist, moving between trap pressure and brightly warped electronic bounce. The title suggests an expensive object whose framing has been damaged, yet damage is what guarantees individuality. A factory-perfect bezel can be reproduced; the scarred one carries history. Siifu repeatedly treats distortion this way. It is not an effect used to make music fashionably abrasive. It is evidence that sound has passed through particular people, equipment, cities and emotional conditions.

The first section continually moves between assault and play. “V12’!HML’!” carries loose, rubbery motion, while “[Sacrifice]BonAppétit” gathers Mother MaryGold, B L A C K I E and Ho99o9 into a compressed collision of industrial rap, punk energy and bodily menace. Siifu’s albums are sometimes described as genreless, but that can make their construction sound arbitrary. He is not avoiding categories because he lacks commitment to any tradition. He knows several traditions well enough to let them argue. Southern rap, noise, funk, free jazz and punk are not paints blended into one neutral color. Their differences remain audible.

“SCREW4LIFE’! RIPJALEN’!” provides the album’s first major emotional opening. Its slowed, stretched movement invokes DJ Screw’s transformation of time while carrying a private memorial for Jalen. Voices drift into one another as though memory itself were being chopped and screwed, returning with altered pitch and emotional weight. The track gradually changes shape instead of remaining a straightforward tribute. Grief can be mournful, celebratory, narcotic and frightening within the same hour; Siifu lets those states coexist.

“WHOUWITHHO+,” produced with Kal Banx, converts menace into a concise Southern rap interrogation. The question in the title is social before it is threatening: Who are your people? Who stands behind you? Who shares your history, loyalty and danger? This question runs beneath the entire album. Siifu’s individuality is never imagined as isolation. Being “one of one” means carrying a community so specifically that nobody else could reproduce the result.

The record’s middle opens into longer, more breathable compositions. “TRANSLATION’!,” “Girls Fall Out Tha Sky,” “PSA’!” and “U.ALREADY’!” permit collaborators to reshape the atmosphere rather than merely decorate it. Turich Benjy, 454, Jaas, Vayda, PRJR and Pearl De Luna enter as inhabitants of the album’s world. “Girls Fall Out Tha Sky” moves with dreamlike looseness, allowing voices to appear and dissolve inside layered production. “PSA’!” turns the idea of a public-service announcement into something intimate and strangely unstable. The music may address everyone, but it sounds transmitted from a private frequency.

“FACECARD,” featuring HiTech and a crowded vocal cast, draws ghettotech’s fast bodily pulse into the album’s larger historical argument. A face card is identity functioning as currency: reputation, attractiveness and social presence condensed into something instantly readable. Siifu complicates that clarity by surrounding the voices with rapid motion. Identity may open doors, but it must continually prove itself within new rooms.

The late sequence becomes increasingly reflective. “OUTSIDE’!” and “SleepAtTheWheel’!” are brief transitional spaces, but their placement matters. After the packed middle, they feel like stepping out of a crowded house and suddenly hearing the night. “LAST ONE ALIVE’!” returns to Siifu’s cracked, weary vocal presence over soul and jazz textures that seem retrieved from damaged memory. Survival is not treated as victory without cost. To become the last antique standing means carrying the absence of everything that did not survive beside you.

The closing “BLACKWATER’!” gathers the album’s themes into an unusually peaceful final environment. Guitar, water and Siifu’s drifting voice create enough calm for Big Rube’s baritone to enter with the authority of ancestral narration. His concluding statement presents Black originality not as a marketing category but as something divinely irreducible, its value continuing to rise because imitation cannot reproduce the life that made it. The antique metaphor finally becomes clear: age is not valuable by itself. Value comes from endurance, singular construction and the stories held inside the surviving material.

BLACK’!ANTIQUE is intentionally excessive, occasionally uneven and packed with more ideas than some tracks can completely resolve. That roughness is inseparable from its power. A perfectly streamlined version would contradict the album’s belief in residue, community and lived specificity. Siifu does not polish away the seams between collaborators or force every experiment into one approved shape. He treats the album as a house large enough for noise, children, memorials, arguments, dancing, exhaustion and prophecy.

Its achievement is not simply that Pink Siifu can move among many genres. Plenty of artists can demonstrate versatility. Siifu makes those movements reveal one continuous person. The shriek buried beneath distortion, the Southern drawl riding a club rhythm, the half-sung recollection floating over guitar and the quiet listener receiving Big Rube’s closing sermon all belong to the same life. BLACK’!ANTIQUE preserves that life without making it stand still. It is an heirloom still being used, scratched at the edges, passed among friends and made more valuable by every new mark.

PBK & C. Reider - 2009 - Discorporate

Impulsy Stetoskopu – 017  201.22MB FLAC

Discorporate is a collaboration built from delayed arrival. Phillip B. Klingler and C. Reider had exchanged sounds for years, yet the finished record did not emerge through one concentrated session or a neat schedule of reciprocal deadlines. Their first documented collision appeared back in 1997, when Reider reworked PBK material for “Slow Seed (Heat-Island Effect Mix)” on Headmix. Further source recordings crossed between them, PBK completed his transformations relatively quickly, and Reider held the corresponding material until the work felt possible. More than a decade after the relationship began, a parcel unexpectedly arrived containing the completed master. The delay is not incidental history surrounding the music. It is embedded in the album’s atmosphere. Discorporate sounds like matter that has spent years outside its original body, slowly forgetting the identity of the person who produced it.

The title means to become bodiless, to leave physical form or exist without one. That process describes electronic collaboration with unusual precision. Each artist first produces a sound through some concrete action, instrument, machine, room or recording medium. The source is then detached from that event and sent elsewhere. Once received, it can be filtered, layered, stretched, shortened, reversed or combined with materials its maker never imagined. The sound survives, but its original body is gone. By the time it reaches the finished album, ownership has become wonderfully unstable. PBK’s tracks contain C. Reider without sounding simply like C. Reider, while Reider’s pieces contain PBK after PBK’s gestures have been absorbed into another compositional nervous system.

This is not collaboration through simultaneous performance. The artists do not negotiate in real time, watch each other’s hands or respond to immediate physical cues. Their conversation happens through files and accumulated decisions. One person sends a fragment into absence; the other receives it later and constructs an answer that may radically alter the question. That distance creates a peculiar intimacy. Each composer is allowed inside the other’s sound before the material has been protected by final arrangement. What is exchanged is not a completed track waiting for decoration, but vulnerable matter awaiting another person’s interpretation.

PBK described the result as a new form of twenty-first-century psychedelic drone space music, and the phrase catches the album’s expansive character without reducing it to passive ambience. Psychedelia here does not require rock instrumentation, backward guitars or colorful period references. It occurs through destabilized scale. A faint sound can appear immense once its source has been removed, while a broad drone may contract until it resembles activity occurring inside electrical tissue. Familiar distinctions between foreground and background repeatedly soften. One listens not to objects placed inside a stable environment, but to an environment continually manufacturing and dissolving its own objects.

The first piece establishes this condition slowly enough that the listener can feel ordinary dimensions slipping away. PBK’s treatment of Reider’s source material produces a wide field whose apparent calm is filled with minor turbulence. Tones hang in space, but they are not motionless. Their edges vibrate, darken and admit submerged textures that may have begun as entirely different sounds. PBK has long described his own early work through dense hovering structures and small changes revealed by sustained attention. Here that approach becomes a means of entering another artist’s material. He does not force Reider’s sources to announce what they were. He allows them to lose their biographies and become weather.

The untitled sequence is essential. A descriptive title could tell the listener to imagine machinery, astronomy, dreams or ruined architecture. Numbering leaves the sounds without narrative passports. They move across the album according to texture and pressure rather than literary instruction. This strengthens the collaborative ambiguity because no verbal concept returns the material to one author’s private mythology. The pieces are simply successive states of discorporation.

Reider’s second and third tracks form a compact pair after the broad opening. His compositional method has involved taking raw sources and repeatedly isolating their most suggestive qualities through editing, filtration, equalization and pitch shifting, accumulating many small decisions before assembling the result. That patience can be heard in the sense that every sound has been examined from several sides before being admitted. The second piece feels less like a panorama than a chamber of altered surfaces, while the shorter third track concentrates the material further, almost as though one detail from the previous environment has been enlarged until its internal grain becomes the entire composition.

The contrast between the artists is real but never clean enough to support a simple alternating portrait. PBK often works spontaneously, attempting to thwart his own expectations and allow abstract structures to emerge without predetermined style. Reider’s process is slower and more explicitly sculptural, treating recorded material as something to be cut, filtered and joined through prolonged examination. Yet each is working with the other person’s source. PBK’s spontaneity reacts to Reider’s raw matter; Reider’s patience investigates PBK’s often volatile textures. Their differences become filters through which the partner is heard.

The fourth track returns to PBK and opens another long region, but the album has already taught the ear not to expect a restoration of its beginning. Drone on Discorporate is not a static genre marker. It is the audible consequence of several events being suspended long enough to merge. Layers drift together, produce interference and gradually become one composite presence. The music can feel cosmic because the apparent space is so large, but it also feels strangely domestic and handmade. These are not pristine digital nebulae generated to illustrate infinity. The surfaces retain friction, blur and traces of handling.

That combination gives the album warmth despite its disembodied premise. Electronic abstraction is often described as cold because identifiable human gesture has been removed. Discorporate suggests something more complicated. Bodily identity disappears, yet relationship remains. Every processed sound is evidence that one person listened closely to something another person made. Care survives detachment. The artists may no longer be recognizable through conventional instrumental signatures, but attention becomes their human presence.

The fifth piece, the longest of Reider’s contributions, makes this especially clear. It does not hurry through the supplied material in search of dramatic contrast. Sounds are allowed to coexist long enough for new affinities to form. A low field may hold several sharper events without functioning merely as background; a filtered fragment can hover between noise and tone until the distinction stops mattering. Reider’s composition resembles an ecosystem created from transplanted species. The sources entered from elsewhere, but their behavior has adapted to the new environment.

The short sixth piece works as a final narrowing before PBK’s closing track. Its placement prevents the album from becoming an uninterrupted sequence of similarly scaled drones. Discorporate breathes through changes in duration, density and apparent distance. The shorter works act like apertures opening inside the longer pieces, revealing that the album’s vast spaces are assembled from extremely small decisions. A few minutes can reorganize the memory of the eight-minute field preceding it.

PBK’s seventh track completes the exchange without attempting to reunite the material with its origins. The album does not end by revealing which sounds belonged to whom or by staging a final duet in which both identities become separately visible. Instead, the source-swapping method reaches its logical conclusion. The closing space belongs to PBK as composer, to Reider as source-maker, to both as correspondents and finally to neither once the sound enters the listener’s room. Discorporation is complete when the material can continue without requiring knowledge of the body from which it came.

The cover expresses this beautifully. A pale artificial face emerges through blue-gray vapor, its eyes sharply present while the rest of its form appears to be dissolving. It may be a mask, mannequin, doll, spirit or digitally altered human image. The expression is peaceful enough to avoid straightforward horror, yet its serenity is unsettling because the face seems to possess consciousness without flesh. Smoke passes both behind and across it, making it difficult to tell whether the figure is entering visibility or leaving it.

That ambiguity mirrors the music’s treatment of authorship. We can identify PBK and C. Reider on the cover and in the credits, just as we can identify eyes, nose and mouth in the image. Yet the deeper one enters, the less stable those identities become. Source and composer overlap without becoming interchangeable. The album does not erase difference through a bland collaborative compromise. It allows difference to survive as an invisible force shaping matter from within.

Impulsy Stetoskopu’s handmade edition of 120 copies gave this bodiless music a deliberately fragile body. The label’s envelopes, inserts and small editions often transformed experimental recordings into pieces of correspondence, which is especially appropriate here. Discorporate began through exchange and delay, then entered the world as another object intended to travel between hands. The physical disc temporarily fixed a process built from migration.

Its later digital reappearance adds another chapter. C. Reider returned the album to circulation in 2019, explaining the long gestation and identifying who transformed each set of sources. PBK issued another archival edition through Bandcamp in 2026. Track lengths differ by a second or two between these versions, and the visual credits are presented slightly differently, small reminders that an archive does not preserve one eternally fixed body. Every edition is another incarnation through which the same music passes.

The record’s quiet power lies in refusing to make collaboration sound heroic. There is no grand summit where two masters combine strengths and become louder than either could alone. The achievement is more subtle. Each artist makes room for the other by surrendering control over what his source recordings will mean. The finished pieces show that loss of control need not lead to chaos. It can produce an identity that neither participant could have designed in isolation.

Discorporate is psychedelic because it alters the perceived boundaries of things. It is drone because duration allows that alteration to become physically convincing. It is space music because the sounds construct distances no microphone originally recorded. Most of all, it is correspondence music, created through patience, unfinished obligation and the faith that material sent away may eventually return carrying a life of its own.

The face on the cover never completely vanishes. The eyes remain visible through the vapor, just as each artist remains faintly perceptible within the other’s work. Discorporation does not mean annihilation. The body is lost, but influence continues moving. A sound crosses years, formats and compositional identities, finally arriving in another room where nobody can say with certainty whose breath is disturbing the air.

 

Otay..onii - 2024 - 信仰看見了我看見了它 True Faith Ain't Blind

 

WV Sorcerer Productions – WV101  181.55MB FLAC

The English title True Faith Ain’t Blind sounds like a declaration: genuine belief does not require ignorance, denial or closed eyes. The Chinese title, 信仰看見了我看見了它, rearranges that relationship more strangely. Faith saw me; I saw it. Belief is no longer something passively possessed by the singer. It is an active presence capable of looking back. The album lives inside that mutual recognition, eight stark performances in which voice and piano confront one another until neither can remain simple accompaniment. There are no electronic fogs, orchestral disguises or walls of processed noise. Otay:onii stands with the two instruments most capable of exposing her: the human throat and a large mechanism of wood, wire, felt and metal.

The cover stages this removal of protection. A figure pulls fabric away from the head, revealing one fiercely direct eye beneath a structure that could be clothing, costume, bandage or shed skin. Black crocheted material forms an irregular net across the torso. Along the left edge, the Chinese title descends vertically beside the small English instruction “UNFUCK THE PREPARED WORLD.” The image does not show a calm acoustic artist retiring from theatrical extremity. It shows somebody caught during transformation, partly uncovered but not domesticated. The equipment has been reduced, not the danger.

Otay:onii’s previous records often made production itself feel psychological. Voices passed through fractured electronics, ritual percussion, industrial pressure and unstable spatial effects, creating environments where identity could multiply or disappear. True Faith Ain’t Blind asks what remains when those environments are removed. The answer is not a purified singer-songwriter core waiting beneath experimental decoration. Her bare voice is already an ensemble of wounded characters, operatic projections, folk inflections, animal sounds, whispers and cries whose physical strain becomes part of the composition. The piano is equally resistant to gentleness. It can accompany, contradict, threaten, stumble, or erupt into clusters that make the instrument’s internal metalwork audible.

“Unfuck” opens as both command and impossible therapy. The Chinese subtitle 屈直膝關節 refers to bending and straightening the knee joint, an almost clinical description of movement attached to a violently informal English word. To unfuck something is not merely to repair it. It is to reverse damage whose history may be impossible to erase. The knee bends, extends, bears weight and allows the body to rise after collapse. Otay:onii approaches the piano with a similar physical understanding. Chords are struck rather than delicately placed, while her voice moves between controlled melodic shape and sounds that seem pulled from the body before language has fully organized them.

This is acoustic music, but it does not accept the conventional acoustic promise of warmth, intimacy or authenticity. A piano is a tremendous percussion machine. Pressing one key sends a hammer toward a stretched wire; pressing many keys violently creates an interior storm of colliding resonance. Otay:onii has joked that this can reasonably be called metal music because she is striking keys connected to large metal mechanics. The joke reveals the album’s method. She does not abandon heaviness. She locates it inside supposedly respectable instrumentation.

“Rickshaw Boy” is the album’s longest and most openly narrative piece. Its central image is the bent back, the body deformed by labor, grief and the effort to hide tears. Yet the lyrics continually answer curvature with lifting: raising the head, going home, touching the heart, continuing to dream. Dreaming becomes living, living becomes loving, and loving returns to dreaming. This repetition is not a motivational slogan pasted over suffering. It describes survival as a circular practice that must be continually restarted.

The piano gives that circle physical weight. Rather than offering a comfortable harmonic road home, it can make every step feel contested. The voice carries weariness without becoming merely fragile. Otay:onii sings as someone who understands that vulnerability may require enormous muscular effort. The track’s final tenderness, the idea of waking beside another person and ironing out the hunch in their back, converts care into bodily work. Love cannot erase what bent the spine, but it can place hands upon the damage without looking away.

“Good Fool” and “Intentions and Emotions” revisit earlier material in acoustic forms, but they do not behave like bonus unplugged versions. Removed from their previous production, the songs reveal how much of Otay:onii’s compositional identity was already contained in her phrasing and piano movement. “Good Fool” holds beauty and foolishness inside one invented figure, while the latter song turns apparent freedom into another form of captivity. “Isn’t it funny the wings are your shackles?” is one of the record’s central questions. The very thing identifying a creature as capable of flight may become the object that prevents ordinary movement.

This contradiction runs through the album’s idea of faith. Belief can liberate, but it can also become a structure through which somebody else controls the believer. Love can restore a damaged person, but it can also produce attachment to the source of damage. Freedom can open the sky, then demand constant flight. Otay:onii does not resolve these contradictions through doctrine. She places them inside the body and listens to how the voice changes while carrying them.

“They Said That’s FREEDOM and I Laughed” is the album’s most explosively unstable performance. The title already refuses the offered definition. Someone has presented a condition as freedom; the response is laughter rather than agreement. That laughter could be joyous, contemptuous, disbelieving or close to hysteria. The piano moves with a dark improvisational force, sometimes recalling free jazz more than classical song accompaniment. Chord clusters create constriction while abrupt openings give the voice space to turn theatrical excess into direct emotional information.

Otay:onii’s singing repeatedly crosses the line where trained technique is expected to remain beautiful. Clean notes can sound painful; screams can possess exact pitch and structure. Opera is not invoked as a museum tradition of perfected projection but as a method for making a solitary body fill architectural space. Chinese folk elements enter not as decorative markers of heritage but through phrasing, melodic turns and an understanding of song as something transmitted bodily across generations. The traditions collide without becoming a polite fusion category.

“They Said That’s FRIENDSHIP and I Mourned” answers laughter with grief. At only a little over two minutes, it is the album’s smallest chamber, but its emotional scale is immense. Friendship is named by others, then experienced by the singer as absence. Calls go unanswered. Seasons fail to arrive properly. The moon becomes an object stared at long enough for fortune itself to seem temporary. The piece recognizes that language can be socially assigned while the actual relationship underneath it has already died.

The paired titles reveal how public words can conceal private reality. Freedom may describe restriction. Friendship may describe abandonment. Faith may be presented as blindness even when genuine faith requires looking directly at what hurts. Otay:onii keeps returning words to the body, testing whether they remain true when spoken under pressure.

“You Do” begins through anxious conditional questions: what happens if morning light reveals greater coldness, if a smile becomes sharper, if a murdered god shouts back? The answers arrive as commands and affirmations: stand up, puncture, shine, burn. The language is fragmented and sometimes cryptic, but its physical intention is unmistakable. Rising is not graceful. Light must pierce. Survival has an abrasive edge.

The album’s final bonus track, “Brave New World,” is an appropriately suspicious conclusion. The phrase promises a transformed society but carries the history of utopias that become systems of conditioning and control. True Faith Ain’t Blind has spent its length questioning every prepared definition offered by the world: freedom, friendship, beauty, strength, tradition and faith itself. A genuinely new world cannot merely replace one vocabulary of obedience with another.

The performances were recorded live, and that decision gives the record its breathing architecture. Piano and voice share one unfolding time. They cannot be endlessly corrected into separate perfection. Otay:onii may hesitate, strike too hard, allow a tone to fracture or let silence remain longer than conventional arrangement would permit. These are not failures left behind for authenticity. They are evidence that the composition is being physically discovered while performed.

Recording engineer Rabih Beaini preserves enough dryness and proximity for the room to feel present without becoming decorative ambience. The listener hears a person negotiating with an instrument rather than a voice pasted over a piano part. Rashad Becker’s mastering maintains the sharp contrasts between fragile passages and sudden percussive force. The quiet sections do not feel weak, and the loud ones retain shape rather than collapsing into generalized impact.

The album was created after Otay:onii’s move to Berlin, during a period in which she has described needing clarity and trying to determine her place within a new society. That context explains the reduction without turning every track into autobiography. The record asks a formal question with personal consequences: what is the core of this music when production is removed? The answer includes migration, grief, tradition and damaged relationships, but it also includes the practical pleasure of hitting a piano and discovering that one body can generate an enormous world.

The cover’s act of uncovering therefore does not reveal a final stable identity. Beneath one layer is another arrangement of fabric, hair, netting, skin and shadow. True Faith Ain’t Blind does not claim that stripping music down makes the artist transparent. Reduction creates new mysteries. With fewer sounds, every breath, impact and pause carries more possible meaning.

This is an album about endurance without the polished language of triumph. Its people remain bent, abandoned, skeptical and confused. They laugh at false freedom, mourn false friendship and keep touching their hearts so that dreaming may continue. Faith does not protect them from pain by refusing to see it. Faith sees them inside the pain, and they recognize it there.

The prepared world expects acoustic music to be softer, opera to be elevated, folk tradition to be preserved, metal to be amplified and faith to supply certainty. Otay:onii unfucks that arrangement. She turns the piano into struck metal, the trained voice into exposed flesh, tradition into active inquiry and faith into an eye staring back. Nothing here is blind. Everything is listening.

Mattin/Taku Sugimoto/Yasuo Totsuka - 2004 - Training Thoughts

 

W.M.O./r – w.m.o/r09  167.25MB FLAC

Training Thoughts begins with the noise of a train and immediately makes the usual question of authorship difficult. The train was not booked as a fourth musician. It has no name on the cover, did not arrive carrying an instrument and presumably remained indifferent to the concert taking place beside its route. Yet for long stretches it is the largest, clearest and most physically impressive sound on the recording. Its low mechanical moan enters the room from outside, rolls across the microphones and withdraws according to a timetable that Taku Sugimoto, Yasuo Totsuka and Mattin do not control. The musicians respond by refusing to compete. Instead of constructing a separate musical world strong enough to exclude the neighborhood, they allow the neighborhood to become the principal material. The result is not merely a quiet improvisation with picturesque environmental sound in the background. It is a reorganization of foreground and background so complete that the listener eventually becomes unsure which event is accompanying which.

The title is beautifully exact. A “train of thought” normally describes the internal movement connecting one idea to another. Training Thoughts makes that metaphor physical, placing thought beside an actual railway whose arrivals repeatedly interrupt, redirect and perhaps generate the performance. The added “ing” can also suggest thoughts undergoing training: attention being disciplined, habits of listening corrected, the mind taught not to discard everything that conventional music identifies as interference. The album does not ask the environment to become musical through decorative interpretation. It asks whether the category of music was the obstacle preventing us from hearing the environment clearly in the first place.

Recorded at Enban near Koenji Station in Tokyo, the performance belongs to a period when a number of Japanese improvisers were investigating extremely reduced activity, long silences and the social behavior produced by quiet sound. Taku Sugimoto had moved far from the busier free-improvised playing of his earlier years toward a practice in which a single guitar note could carry the structural importance normally assigned to an entire solo. Mattin was deeply engaged with this reductionist field but never entered it as a neutral stylist. His computer feedback retained the possibility of sudden violence, and his developing ideas about improvisation questioned whether musicians truly became free simply by replacing conventional musical language with a new set of refined underground habits. Yasuo Totsuka, the least publicly documented participant, sits between these visible poles with another laptop, contributing to a trio whose apparent inactivity is actually a continuous negotiation over responsibility.

Mattin later remembered that the first deliberate sound from the performers did not occur until approximately twenty minutes into the concert. That decision changes the meaning of everything preceding it. Twenty minutes is long enough for an audience to stop treating silence as an introduction and begin wondering whether the concert has already started, whether equipment has failed, or whether waiting itself has become the event. In ordinary performance etiquette, musicians accept responsibility for filling time while the audience accepts responsibility for remaining attentive. Training Thoughts leaves both duties exposed. If nobody plays, what exactly has the audience paid attention to? The trains, the room, clothing, breath, nervous movements, electrical systems and the collective pressure of people trying not to disturb one another all become audible.

This is not silence in the literal sense. The recording is crowded from its first second. Railway vibration enters with a scale no laptop or softly touched guitar needs to imitate. Distant traffic and room tone form layers whose complexity would be difficult to compose intentionally. Small human noises become sharp because the musicians have removed the masking blanket of continuous performance. The album therefore reverses the conventional relationship between musical richness and activity. Less deliberate production creates more perceptible information.

Sugimoto’s guitar notes arrive under impossible pressure. After such an extended wait, one note cannot behave casually. It does not enter an empty field but a field the listener has already learned to regard as complete. The guitar risks seeming unnecessary, even intrusive. Mattin recalled being overwhelmed by Sugimoto’s second note and deciding that the recording deserved release because of it. That response says much about the kind of listening the concert produced. The note’s importance does not come from harmonic complexity, speed or instrumental difficulty. It comes from placement, timbre, timing and the accumulated awareness surrounding it. Every preceding minute prepares the ear to recognize the smallest intentional vibration as an enormous ethical decision.

Ethical is not too grand a word here. In most improvisation, playing is treated as participation and silence as restraint. Training Thoughts complicates that assumption. Producing sound can become a way of claiming territory, demanding attention and imposing one’s personality upon a shared situation. Remaining quiet may create space for others, but it can also become an aesthetic posture through which the musician displays exquisite sensitivity. The trio must continually judge whether playing will deepen the situation or merely announce that a professional performer remains present. Silence offers no escape from ego if everyone recognizes it as the approved language of the scene.

This tension separates the album from ambient music designed to merge gently with its surroundings. Training Thoughts is not comfortable wallpaper. Its quietness creates vigilance. Mattin’s laptop is capable of computer feedback that may erupt without the gradual preparation supplied by instrumental gesture. Even when no explosion occurs, that possibility remains active. A guitarist visibly lifts a hand before striking a string; digital sound can arrive with almost no readable warning. The laptop becomes a concealed opening through which the entire dynamic range of the concert could be overturned.

That latent danger gives the hour its nervous system. The listener does not simply relax into trains and room ambience because the situation has taught us that any tiny change may matter. A laptop sound can resemble part of the environment until its electronic edge reveals itself. An environmental sound can appear electronically generated until its movement through the room exposes an external source. The distinction between found and performed material keeps dissolving.

Totsuka and Mattin’s computers further complicate authorship because laptops can record, amplify and return sounds already present in the venue. A performer may appear to produce a train when he is actually replaying or feeding back the train the room supplied moments earlier. Mattin has described using the computer’s internal microphone to pick up surrounding sounds and play them through speakers, making the venue increasingly conscious of itself. Under those conditions, the musician becomes less an originator than a switch controlling when the environment hears its own reflection.

This does not eliminate hierarchy. Mattin remained the person deciding when to activate the file or raise the microphone input. The audience’s involuntary cough, chair movement or whispered comment could become artistic material without that person having chosen to perform. Training Thoughts exposes this inequality rather than pretending technology creates democratic participation automatically. Everyone in the room contributes sound, but only certain people are credited, recorded and positioned to decide which contributions return through amplification.

The album consequently turns the audience into an instrument while making that transformation uncomfortable. Quiet concerts generate distinctive social discipline. Listeners become conscious of swallowing, breathing, shifting weight and opening doors. A movement considered meaningless outside the concert can become the loudest event inside it. This awareness may produce communal concentration, but it can also resemble surveillance. Everyone monitors everyone else, and embarrassment becomes one of the forces shaping sound.

The train alone escapes this pressure. It does not lower its volume out of respect for Sugimoto’s guitar and does not wait for a suitably delicate entrance. It follows infrastructure, labor and urban scheduling rather than concert etiquette. Its indifference is liberating. The train demonstrates that the world continues operating outside the tiny cultural ritual occurring at Enban. Musicians may cultivate exquisite attention, but steel, electricity, commuters and public transportation do not require the improvisers’ permission to enter the recording.

This gives Training Thoughts a social reality often absent from recordings of minimal music. Silence can create the illusion of a protected chamber separated from ordinary production, traffic and work. Here the railway keeps puncturing that illusion. Tokyo cannot be excluded from the concert merely because the performers wish to investigate subtle sound. The city’s infrastructure becomes the largest instrument, and its regular return reminds the listener that experimental music occupies real estate inside an economic and technological system.

The cover photograph extends this condition without romanticizing it. Three molded chairs, blue, red and blue, sit empty behind a large window or glass partition. The room looks like a waiting area, station interior or institutional corridor emptied between arrivals. Reflections blur the boundary between the photographed space and whatever stands outside the glass. Nothing visibly happens, yet the picture is full of expectation. Chairs exist for bodies not currently present; windows frame activity occurring elsewhere; architecture waits for use.

The three chairs inevitably suggest the trio, but they also deny the standard image of musical identity. There are no portraits, instruments or dramatic performance photographs. The musicians are represented by empty places. Their most appropriate visual equivalent is not the heroic creator but a seat left available within an environment already functioning without them. The red chair at the center provides the only strong color contrast, though even that difference feels modest rather than symbolic. Three positions, three listeners, three temporary occupants.

One continuous track is essential to the work. Separate titles or index points would transform environmental changes into compositions and encourage the listener to interpret each entrance as a new authored section. The uninterrupted sixty-five minutes preserve the event’s uncertainty. We cannot skip directly to the “important” guitar note without destroying the duration that made it important. Waiting is not dead space surrounding the material. Waiting is the material that gives every later decision its scale.

This makes the album demanding in a way unrelated to loudness or complexity. It asks listeners to surrender the usual efficiency of recorded consumption. A train passes; perhaps nothing identifiable happens for several minutes; another small sound appears. The impatient listener may conclude that the album contains almost nothing. The attentive listener discovers that “almost nothing” is an unstable category crowded with mechanical, architectural and social detail.

The recording quality contributes to this uncertainty. Taku Unami’s mastering does not artificially separate the trio from the room or enlarge the instrumental gestures into conventional foreground events. The environmental field remains sufficiently present that listening becomes an act of continual source confusion. The disc behaves partly as concert document and partly as field recording, without allowing either category to govern completely.

The release on Mattin’s w.m.o/r label also matters. Mattin’s practice has consistently challenged ownership, copyright and the idea that improvised sound should be treated as the protected property of isolated creative individuals. Training Thoughts contains a perfect practical argument against the fantasy of pure authorship. Who owns the train? Who composed the room tone? Does the person replaying an audience sound become its author? Does Sugimoto’s note belong only to Sugimoto when its force depends upon twenty minutes created collectively by architecture, machinery and restrained bodies?

These questions do not make the musicians irrelevant. Their restraint creates the conditions under which everything else becomes perceptible. The trio’s accomplishment lies partly in refusing to claim all available attention and partly in accepting the risk that the resulting recording may seem to contain more railway than recognizable performance. This is a rare artistic courage. Many conceptual works announce the demotion of the artist while carefully ensuring that the artist remains the most interesting presence. Training Thoughts allows the outside world to win.

Yet the trio does not disappear completely. Sugimoto’s notes, Totsuka’s interventions and Mattin’s laptop activity enter as distinct forms of intelligence, infiltrating the environment rather than covering it. “Infiltration” is more accurate than accompaniment. The performers do not decorate the train or improvise illustrative responses to urban sound. They place small foreign materials inside an existing system and observe how perception changes around them.

The album’s finest moments may occur when it is impossible to determine whether that change came from a musician. Once the ear has been trained, every sound seems potentially intentional. The hum acquires structure; the train seems timed; a faint scrape feels composed. This is not because the world has magically become music, but because attention has become suspicious of its own classifications.

Training Thoughts belongs to the history of lowercase and reductionist improvisation, but it also quietly criticizes those categories. A genre can rapidly turn radical silence into another recognizable aesthetic, complete with approved venues, performers, gestures and audiences trained to admire restraint. Mattin’s unpredictable electronics and interest in context prevent the music from becoming a shrine to tasteful quietness. The point is not that soft sound is superior to loud sound. The point is that every situation contains relations of power, expectation and habit that sound can expose.

The record remains startling because it captures three musicians allowing those relations to become more audible than their personalities. It contains guitar and computers, but also public transport, architecture, involuntary movement, anticipation and the social labor of listening. Its hour does not transport us away from the world. It returns the world with its volume relationships rearranged.

By the conclusion, the train no longer feels like an interruption. The musicians no longer feel like the unquestioned center. The room has become an ensemble whose members do not share intentions, techniques or even awareness that they are performing together. A railway system, three improvisers, an audience, a recorder and a future listener occupy one unstable composition.

Anyone who attended the Enban performance or knows more about Yasuo Totsuka’s role and equipment is invited to add detail. The surviving documentation tells us who was credited and where the recording occurred, but the album’s deeper history lives in the room: who moved, who waited, how the trains felt through the walls, and whether anyone present understood that the background was quietly taking over the concert.

Training Thoughts does not teach us to hear silence. It teaches us that silence was never there. Thought passes like a train through structures already vibrating, carrying people and materials whose destinations remain hidden. The musicians wait beside the tracks, place a few sounds into the passing world and discover that listening itself has begun to move.

Saturn and the Sun - 2018 - In Love With the Extreme

iDEAL Recordings – iDEAL169  

In Love With the Extreme does not begin at maximum intensity. It begins by withholding the mechanism that will eventually control the listener. The title piece first appears as a dense electronic atmosphere, a slowly shifting field of buzz, friction and low-frequency pressure whose edges are difficult to locate. Something rhythmic seems to exist beneath it, but the rhythm is initially too submerged to function as a beat. Gradually, a kick drum becomes perceptible, not entering dramatically from outside but rising from underneath the noise as though it had been operating miles below the surface all along. By the time the pulse is unmistakable, Saturn and the Sun have already altered the listener’s sense of scale. The music has not transformed from noise into techno. It has revealed that techno was buried inside the noise.

That delayed recognition defines the album. Joachim Nordwall and Henrik Rylander do not treat noise and rhythm as opposing materials that must be fused through clever production. They understand pulse as one of noise’s possible internal conditions. A distorted mass can contain repetition; a drone can behave like a long rhythmic cycle; a kick drum can become so overloaded that it ceases to mark time and begins altering the apparent dimensions of the room. The duo’s achievement lies in allowing those identities to remain unstable. One listens to a beat, then realizes one is listening to pressure. One listens to static, then discovers that it is moving in cycles.

The album was recorded in 2017, while Nordwall and Rylander were still connected through The Skull Defekts, the Gothenburg group in which they had worked together since the mid-2000s. By the time In Love With the Extreme appeared in September 2018, The Skull Defekts had ended. The record consequently occupies an unusual threshold. It is not a posthumous continuation of that band’s ritual rock language, nor is it an entirely new beginning between unfamiliar collaborators. It captures two musicians removing guitars, ensemble interplay and recognizable rock architecture until only their shared fascination with repetition, physical vibration and altered mental states remains.

Saturn and the Sun is a wonderfully disproportionate name for a duo. The Sun is immediate, radiant and apparently central; Saturn is distant, slow, cold and surrounded by visible rings made from debris. One represents overwhelming presence, the other discipline, orbit and duration. The music contains both principles. Its frequencies can be glaring enough to feel solar, but its structures move with Saturnian patience. Nothing is permitted to arrive quickly merely because an immediate impact would be easier. The tracks accumulate pressure through rotation, returning again and again until repetition begins changing the consciousness receiving it.

The title In Love With the Extreme is similarly more complicated than a simple declaration of enthusiasm for loud or abrasive sound. “Extreme” can describe a measurable outer limit, the point beyond which a system cannot continue operating normally. To become romantically attached to that point is to prefer instability over comfort, to return willingly to conditions where control may fail. Nordwall and Rylander do not merely endure the threshold. They construct music around the desire to remain there.

The cover presents that desire as a bodily entanglement. A black-clothed figure crouches among branches, undergrowth and tangled material, the face almost completely obscured. The hands appear to be handling something within the thicket, but the image refuses to clarify whether the person is trapped, hiding, working or participating in a private rite. Green and gray vegetation blurs the foreground, making the photograph seem partially viewed through surveillance, camouflage or damaged memory. The gothic lettering supplies ceremonial severity, yet the scene itself is earthy, awkward and close to the ground. Extremity does not occur on a heroic mountaintop. It takes place in the weeds.

That visual combination of concealment and bodily involvement suits Henrik Rylander’s wider relationship with images. His professional work as a forensic photographer and his parallel activity as a conceptual and sound artist place documentation beside disturbance. A forensic photograph is supposed to make material evidence legible, but this cover does the opposite. It withholds the decisive detail. The viewer receives a body, a location and an activity without the information required to identify what has happened. Saturn and the Sun create sound through the same strategy. Effects are audible, but their causes remain concealed.

The opening title track is the album’s most complete statement of this method. Its nearly twelve minutes move from viscous electronics into a subterranean rhythmic formation without offering a clean transitional point. The kick is less a drum than a periodic disturbance in the ground. Higher frequencies scrape against it, while broad clouds of distortion prevent the beat from becoming a stable dance-floor guide. The body may follow the pulse, but the mind remains uncertain about the environment containing it.

This is techno deprived of its social lighting. There is no polished club, no visible performer manipulating a crowd and no promise that collective movement will produce release. Rhythm functions as compulsion. The listener locks onto it because the surrounding field is too unstable to provide another reference point. The beat offers orientation, then uses that dependence to pull the body deeper into the recording.

“Saturn War Chant” makes the ritual dimension explicit. The title imagines battle music belonging not to an earthly nation but to an immense slow-moving planet. A conventional war chant gathers bodies, synchronizes emotion and transforms fear into group momentum. Saturn’s version would operate at another scale, its repetitions measured in long orbits rather than marching tempo. The track reduces that impossible idea into seven minutes of bruised bass, corroded pulse and electronic abrasion.

Its aggression is heavy rather than fast. Distorted low frequencies move with the stubbornness of something too massive to accelerate quickly. The music does not charge forward. It advances by making retreat seem impossible. Higher electronic signals gather around the bass like sparks, radio interference or metallic insects, but the central force remains slow and gravitational.

The word “chant” is significant because chanting transforms repetition into collective intention. A phrase repeated once is information; repeated dozens of times, it can become belief, hypnosis or bodily regulation. Saturn and the Sun remove the literal words while preserving that function. The recurring electronic shape does not tell the listener what to believe. It creates the mental condition in which belief might become possible.

“Cross the Line” occupies another eleven-minute expanse, but its tension is sharper and more exposed. The title identifies the moment at which a boundary ceases to protect the person approaching it. Crossing a line may be liberation, trespass, commitment or irreversible error. The track never explains which meaning applies. Instead, it makes the boundary audible through a relationship between thin, high-frequency stress and disturbed sub-bass.

The upper register can feel almost antiseptic, a narrow electrical pressure suspended above the listener, while the low material moves beneath it with less visible force. Together they create the sensation of passing through a charged threshold. There is no dramatic explosion announcing that the crossing has occurred. The listener simply notices that the previous side is no longer accessible.

This restraint connects the duo to the severe rhythmic electronics of Mika Vainio without reducing the track to imitation. Nordwall had worked with Vainio, and the album appeared after Vainio’s death, so the resemblance carries emotional as well as formal weight. Yet Saturn and the Sun remain dirtier, more tangled and less committed to the solitary perfection of each impact. Their signals seem to struggle against accumulated material, as though every pulse must pass through brush, rust and damaged wiring before reaching the speakers.

“Cross the Line” also reveals how deliberately the duo uses monotony. The word is often treated as criticism, implying an absence of ideas. Here monotony becomes a tool for stripping away superficial demand. When the listener stops waiting for a new section, attention moves inward. Tiny alterations in frequency and density become immense. The music teaches perception through deprivation, refusing novelty until the supposedly unchanging surface begins exposing constant motion.

“Pleasure Is Relief” closes the album with its most psychologically revealing title. Pleasure is usually defined positively, as the presence of enjoyment. Calling pleasure “relief” proposes a darker mechanism: pleasure is the temporary cessation of pressure, pain, fear or craving. The enjoyable state has no independent existence. It is recognized only because something intolerable briefly stops.

This principle governs extreme music. The harshness creates its own baseline, and any reduction in density can feel euphoric. A frequency disappears, the bass loosens or a small opening enters the texture, and the listener experiences release disproportionate to the actual change. Saturn and the Sun do not need to introduce melody or softness. They manipulate pressure until less pressure becomes pleasure.

The closing track’s charred pulse and damaged electronics make relief inseparable from the conditions that created the need for it. The listener cannot obtain release without first entering discomfort. This circularity gives the album an almost addictive structure. Extremity produces tension; tension makes relief pleasurable; pleasure encourages a return to extremity. The title track’s declaration of love is therefore not metaphorical. It describes a feedback system.

The duo’s background helps explain why this feedback feels both musical and confrontational. Nordwall has spent decades moving among noise, drone, experimental electronics, improvisation and label curation through iDEAL Recordings. Rylander came through the physical attack of Union Carbide Productions, conceptual sound art, percussion and image-making. The Skull Defekts gave them a shared laboratory for repetitive rock, but Saturn and the Sun eliminates the buffer of a full group. Their exchange becomes starker. One action introduces pressure; the other recognizes how long it should remain.

The influence of 1960s minimalism is audible not through academic refinement but through faith in recurrence. Early techno contributes the conviction that machine rhythm can reorganize bodily time. Ritual music contributes the understanding that repetition is social and psychological before it is decorative. Noise supplies damaged texture and uncertainty. None of these elements is quoted cleanly. They have been heated together until their historical labels begin melting away.

This makes In Love With the Extreme feel simultaneously primitive and technological. Its rhythms suggest drums without needing drums; its electronic tones suggest fire, metal and weather without imitating any of them. The machines are contemporary, but the behavior being pursued is ancient: gather around a recurring pulse, surrender ordinary time and allow vibration to change the group’s internal state.

There is no obvious group present on the recording, only two operators and an imagined listener. Yet the record remains intensely communal because rhythm presumes another body capable of receiving it. Even heard alone, the tracks construct a social space. The kick drum becomes a signal sent through the floor. Distortion fills the air shared by speaker and listener. The album does not ask whether the listener wishes to participate. Hearing is participation.

The original white vinyl provides a striking physical contradiction. White suggests blankness, cleanliness and neutrality, while the music is stained, heavy and almost tar-like. The limited hand-numbered edition also turns a mass-produced format into an individually marked object. Each copy belongs to the same sequence but carries a different number, just as each repetition within the music belongs to one pattern while arriving inside slightly altered conditions.

In Love With the Extreme is concise enough to avoid exhausting its method. Four tracks, two per side, create a complete progression from hidden pulse to ritual gravity, boundary crossing and the final recognition that pleasure may simply be pressure interrupted. The album does not attempt to display every possibility within the duo’s equipment. It establishes one severe environment and studies how several forms of repetition behave inside it.

Its extremity lies less in loudness than commitment. Nordwall and Rylander remain with sounds long after more conventional composition would have introduced contrast, resolution or emotional explanation. They trust recurrence enough to let it expose the listener’s impatience, physical response and changing threshold of perception. The music does not travel toward transcendence. It drills downward until transcendence and compulsion become difficult to distinguish.

By the end, the crouching figure on the cover appears less trapped than occupied. The branches, cables and dark clothing form one temporary nervous system. Saturn continues its immense rotation; the Sun continues producing intolerable light; the beat remains buried beneath the surface. Pleasure arrives when the pressure shifts, then disappears as the system begins another orbit.

Stanislav Tolkachev - 2009 - Takecare CDr

 

~taqueOT – # tot 001a  26.31MB FLAC

Takecare occupies barely five minutes, yet it feels less like a minor single than a sealed philosophical capsule from the early Stanislav Tolkachev universe. The physical edition is almost aggressively small: a business-card CDr placed inside a miniature handmade book, its brown cardboard cover interrupted only by a black cloth spine and the vertically embossed words STANISLAV TOLKACHEV TAKECARE. Nothing on the exterior resembles conventional techno packaging. There is no club photograph, futurist diagram, dramatic typography or promise of dance-floor effectiveness. The object resembles a private notebook, an archival file or a volume removed from a library whose other books have disappeared. The music inside is equally concentrated. One short piece must contain the entire release, with no B-side, remix or supporting track available to explain what it means.

The title initially sounds gentle. “Take care” can be a farewell, an expression of affection offered when two people separate. It can also be an instruction issued before danger: be careful, remain alert, protect yourself. Written as one word, Takecare becomes less conversational and more like the name of a procedure, institution or condition. Care has been converted from an intimate human action into a compact label. Tolkachev’s music repeatedly lives inside this ambiguity, where concern and warning occupy the same phrase. Later titles such as Why Are You So Frightened, Sometimes Everything Is Wrong, When You Are Not at Home, Be Careful and Nobody Dies and There Is No Cure would continue treating ordinary sentences as openings into anxiety. Takecare is an early, miniature version of that emotional language.

The piece begins with a spoken passage from Серебряные головы, or Silver Heads, an intellectually severe Russian-language film whose scientific and existential atmosphere provides more than decorative cinematic mystery. Tolkachev does not use speech merely to make the track sound ominous before the beat arrives. The voice places human thought inside a machine composition, establishing a tension between ideas that require language and sensations that exceed it. Once spoken words enter recorded music, they become rhythmic and textural objects even for listeners who cannot understand them. Cadence, breath, age, recording quality and emotional pressure communicate alongside literal meaning. The sample carries the density of another era and another medium, like a strip of celluloid inserted into an electronic circuit.

This use of Soviet and post-Soviet film material would recur in Tolkachev’s work, but here it feels especially intimate because the release provides no broader album around it. The speaker is not one voice among many. She stands at the threshold of the only composition, framing everything that follows. Her presence makes the track resemble an answer to a question the listener has only partially heard. The electronics do not translate the speech. They continue thinking by other means.

Tolkachev’s early techno was already distinguished by its refusal to behave like a dependable functional tool. He understood four-on-the-floor rhythm, Detroit repetition and the architecture of the club, but his tracks often seemed to approach that architecture from a slightly displaced angle. Patterns leaned against one another instead of fitting perfectly. Tonal figures could feel melancholy, anxious or strangely illuminated without settling into ordinary melody. Percussive details operated as independent thoughts rather than as decoration around a kick drum. Even when the pulse remained stable, the surrounding information made stability feel provisional.

Takecare condenses that method until every sound appears to carry more responsibility than its size should allow. Five minutes leave little room for the gradual scenic construction found in longer techno records, yet Tolkachev does not respond by making the track blunt or immediately demonstrative. The spoken opening creates reflection before propulsion. Electronic material then enters not as a clean break from language but as an extension of its unresolved mood. The composition feels like thought becoming circuitry.

His music has often been called psychedelic, though not because it reproduces the decorative language of psychedelic rock. Tolkachev’s psychedelia lies in unstable perception. A repeating figure can seem to change despite remaining structurally similar. One sound may occupy several emotional roles at once: alarm, melody, machinery and memory. Rhythmic elements can make the body move while their tonal surroundings make the mind question where that movement is leading. Takecare creates this effect in compressed form. It does not take the listener on a long journey outward. It changes the dimensions of one small room.

The business-card format strengthens that contradiction. A business card normally reduces a person to usable information: name, occupation, telephone number, address. It exists to make future contact efficient. This disc occupies roughly the same physical dimensions but carries something impractical and psychologically ambiguous. Instead of explaining who Stanislav Tolkachev is, it opens a five-minute uncertainty. The medium promises identification; the music resists it.

There is also a wonderful disproportion between the object’s physical smallness and the historical size Tolkachev’s music would later acquire. In 2009 he was already an experienced producer, but he had not yet become the internationally recognized figure associated with Semantica, M_Rec, MORD, Token, Modularz and major European techno institutions. Much of his catalog circulated digitally or through obscure labels, with no suggestion that listeners should rank one track according to the prestige of its publisher. Takecare appeared through a tiny Ukrainian operation as a numbered handmade artifact, almost hidden at the edge of an already underground discography.

That context suits Tolkachev because his work has never sounded designed around career hierarchy. The same attention can appear on an obscure file, limited CDr or established vinyl label. His music does not announce that certain ideas have been reserved for important releases. Every piece may contain an essential fragment of the larger language. Takecare demonstrates this beautifully. Its brevity and scarcity do not make it a sketch awaiting completion elsewhere. It is a complete small form.

The cover’s resemblance to a handmade book also places the recording beside Tolkachev’s parallel life as a photographer and visual artist. He began working seriously with film photography in the early 2000s, using medium-format cameras, darkroom processes and later alternative printing techniques. Those practices depend upon patience, physical materials and the acceptance that reproduction will never be entirely neutral. Paper, chemistry, exposure and handling alter the image. Takecare’s packaging belongs to the same world of tactile decisions. The uneven warmth of cardboard and the pressure of embossed lettering offer information that a digital thumbnail cannot fully carry.

This relationship between sound and photography helps clarify Tolkachev’s techno. His tracks often resemble images developed in a darkroom rather than structures assembled from perfectly clean digital components. Shapes emerge through grain. Details remain partially concealed. Contrast becomes expressive, and darkness contains information rather than simple absence. Takecare is a tiny sonic print whose spoken source and electronic body appear to have been exposed together, one image bleeding into the other.

The label name ~taqueOT adds another layer of coded obscurity. Its styling looks like damaged text, an unfamiliar technical command or a word retrieved from corrupted storage. The catalog number # tot 001a identifies Takecare as an opening gesture, but the “a” makes even the first item appear to have an alternate or companion state. The release feels cataloged before the listener understands what institution is doing the cataloging. This is administration transformed into private art.

The title’s idea of care becomes more interesting when applied to preservation. A five-minute track could easily have disappeared with an obsolete website, failed drive or lost box of tiny CDrs. To take care of the music means maintaining the object, transferring its contents and retaining enough information that the recording does not become an anonymous file. The FLAC archive preserves the audio, while photographs preserve the handmade exterior. Neither replaces the physical disc, but together they keep the edition from collapsing into a line in a discography.

Care also describes the attention required by the piece itself. Techno is frequently evaluated according to immediate utility: how effectively a track enters a mix, changes a dance floor or sustains momentum. Takecare asks for another type of use. The spoken passage slows the listener’s approach, and the limited duration prevents the electronic section from becoming a long functional environment. The track is closer to a concentrated encounter than a tool. It arrives, changes the air and ends before familiarity can neutralize it.

This does not make it anti-club music. Tolkachev’s deepest strength is his ability to preserve bodily logic while allowing intellectual and emotional instability to remain active. Rhythm and reflection do not have to be opposing categories. Repetition can move the body while creating enough internal space for the mind to drift toward questions the track never answers. The sample from Silver Heads does not make the composition “serious,” as though pure electronic sound would otherwise lack thought. It reveals the thought already hidden within repetition.

Tolkachev has described his influences as extending from Detroit and Birmingham techno into Cage, Riley, Reich, Subotnick and Raymond Scott. Takecare makes sense within that broad lineage. Detroit contributes the belief that machine music can carry human feeling without imitating traditional performance. Minimalism contributes the understanding that repetition changes perception. Experimental electronics contributes the willingness to let timbre, instability and process become subjects in themselves. Film contributes another consciousness, a recorded human presence entering from outside the track’s immediate time.

Yet Takecare never sounds like a résumé of influences. It is too small, personal and peculiar for that. Its significance lies in how naturally these histories have already become part of Tolkachev’s thinking. He does not place avant-garde procedure on top of techno to make it academically respectable. Nor does he use Detroit as a set of nostalgic surface markers. The forms have been absorbed until they behave like instincts.

In 2009, the same ~taqueOT label also issued Tolkachev’s experimental Grain material, and the two releases reveal a moment when his catalog could move between club structure, beatless study and handcrafted physical presentation without treating those activities as separate careers. A melodic idea from Grain would later return within When You Are Not at Home, demonstrating that his archive is not a line of abandoned experiments but a reservoir whose elements may reappear years afterward. Takecare belongs to that reservoir even if its exact materials were not recycled. It establishes the habit of placing spoken philosophical material beside electronic composition, a relationship that would remain important in later work.

The recording’s single-track form also removes the listener’s usual ability to compare. There is no second piece demonstrating range, no weaker track making the primary one appear stronger, and no sequence through which a broader concept becomes obvious. Takecare must stand alone, like one photograph removed from a larger series. The absence of context produces intensity. We look longer because there is nowhere else to move.

That isolation is central to the emotional character of much Tolkachev music. His work can fill a large club, yet it frequently feels as though it originates from one person alone with machines, images and thoughts that cannot be explained directly. The dance floor receives the signal collectively, but its emotional content remains private. Takecare preserves that paradox in its purest form: a tiny numbered object designed to circulate among strangers, carrying a voice from a film into an electronic composition made by an artist in Dnipro, then continuing outward through collectors and digital archives.

The title finally begins to sound less like a farewell than an instruction attached to the object itself. Take care of this. Take care while entering it. Take care because thought, memory and machinery are more fragile than their repetition suggests. The phrase offers concern while acknowledging danger.

Five minutes later, the small disc has finished. The cardboard book can be closed, the black cloth spine returned to a shelf, and the spoken voice sent back into silence. Nothing monumental has been declared. Yet an entire artistic philosophy is present in miniature: electronic music as thought, repetition as unstable memory, packaging as physical evidence, obscurity as freedom, and care as the labor that allows a fragile signal to survive.

Rehberg & Bauer - 2001 - Passt

Touch – TO:45  260.74MB FLAC

 Passt begins with a man screaming an introduction as though Peter Rehberg and Ramon Bauer are about to descend upon an arena with dancers, brass sections and a catalogue of beloved hits. The voice is absurdly overheated, a carnival barker trying to inflate two seated laptop performers into a funk-soul spectacular. Then the machines answer with tiny clicks, clipped signals and microscopic digital debris. The mismatch is one of the album’s governing jokes. Rehberg and Bauer were working at a moment when the laptop had begun acquiring the status once held by the electric guitar, yet its stage language remained hilariously poor. A guitarist could leap, grimace and raise an instrument above his head. Two people staring into computers offered almost no visible proof that anything was occurring. Passt turns that apparent inadequacy into theater. The introduction promises spectacle, and the duo responds by making the spectacle happen inside the signal.

This was the third and final installment in Rehberg and Bauer’s Touch trilogy after Faßt and ballt. The earlier records had helped establish an approach built from digital errors, software malfunctions, clipped data, feedback and sounds that appeared to exist because a computer had failed to reproduce audio cleanly. By 2001, however, that once-disruptive vocabulary was already becoming a recognized genre. Glitch had acquired techniques, audiences and expectations. Errors could now be produced on command, arranged decoratively and sold as a new kind of surface elegance. Passt arrives at the exact point when yesterday’s malfunction is becoming today’s preset. Its aggression comes partly from the duo’s refusal to remain safely identified with the movement they had helped create.

The title can be translated loosely as “fits,” “suits,” or “works,” which makes it an elegant piece of Viennese deadpan. Almost nothing here fits comfortably. The record moves between digital pinpricks, low-frequency convulsions, aquatic pops, metallic fragmentation, near-rhythms and full eruptions whose density seems capable of damaging the system producing them. Yet the materials fit in another sense because Rehberg and Bauer have learned how to organize incompatibility. Their work does not sound like random errors left unattended. Every burst, silence and sudden change of scale has been edited into an unusually taut thirty-three-minute progression. Passt refuses a stable genre while demonstrating that refusal itself can possess exact form.

The source material came from three Australian performances: the What Is Music? presentation at Sydney’s Big Day Out, a Melbourne appearance at Revolver, and another Sydney concert at the Palladium. This setting matters. Rehberg and Bauer’s computer improvisation did not develop solely inside a protected electroacoustic studio or a small European art space whose audience already knew how to behave. One performance occurred within the immense cultural machinery of a summer rock festival. Somewhere nearby were crowds expecting bands, songs, drums, amplifiers and visible physical labor. The duo’s digital activity entered that environment as an alien proposition. The question “What Is Music?” was not academic decoration. Listeners could hear the computers producing pressure, rhythm and excitement while still wondering whether what they were witnessing qualified as performance at all.

Passt does not preserve those concerts as untouched documents. Most of the material was cut, rearranged and transformed in Vienna between March 2000 and April 2001. Live improvisation became raw matter for another composition performed retrospectively through editing. The audience heard one event; the CD creates another. This prevents the album from fitting neatly into either live documentation or studio construction. It contains rooms, crowds and the unpredictable force of public performance, but those elements have passed through a year of reconsideration. Rehberg and Bauer respond to their former selves after the original urgency has ended, cutting open decisions that had once been irreversible.

“Finga” is divided into three indexed sections, beginning with the emcee’s delirious announcement before moving through small electronic ticks and increasingly violent digital formations. The music initially seems almost underpowered beside the introduction, but this imbalance is strategic. Tiny sounds establish a low threshold, teaching the listener to lean inward before the first major eruption. Minimal bleeps gather into a heavy repeating motion that resembles an engine, an outboard motor or artillery heard through damaged communications equipment. Rhythm does not arrive through a recognizable drum machine. It condenses from interference until the noise begins moving with collective purpose.

That transformation captures the duo’s connection to techno without making Passt a techno record. Mego emerged partly from Vienna’s dance-music culture, and Rehberg and Bauer never treated rhythm as an enemy of experimentation. Their pulses retain an awareness of the club even when they are too unstable, abrasive or asymmetrical to serve a conventional dance floor. The body keeps receiving invitations that the music immediately complicates. A bass throb begins establishing a groove, then an interruption removes the ground beneath it. A rapid loop suggests propulsion before being shredded into unrelated fragments. Dance music’s promise of reliable recurrence becomes a practical joke conducted at high volume.

“Sunday” is comparatively spacious, but its space never feels restful. Soft pulses and wet electronic clicks appear within a field whose emptiness makes every detail strangely exposed. The title suggests leisure, closure or the quiet day after public excess, yet the duo does not provide recovery. Their quieter sounds behave like equipment continuing to operate after workers have left the building. Small signals communicate with nobody. Low bass arrives as pressure without a visible source. The track is gentler only according to volume; psychologically it may be the album’s most isolated section.

Rehberg and Bauer understood that digital noise could become monotonous if every moment insisted upon destruction. Passt gains force by continually changing the listener’s threshold. After a dense passage, a nearly empty space makes a click feel enormous. After several minutes of restraint, a rough burst seems to tear a physical hole through the recording. The album’s brevity intensifies this dynamic. Nothing is allowed to remain long enough to become a comfortable signature. Even recognizable Rehberg and Bauer textures are subjected to interruption before they can harden into style.

“Nixnull” gives the album its most explicit language of absence. “Nix” and “null” both suggest nothing, zero, cancellation or data without content. Yet the piece is not silent. It reveals how crowded technological nothingness can be. Every supposedly empty channel carries hiss, residual current, compression, memory and electrical instability. Digital silence is a numerical instruction, not the absence of machinery. Rehberg and Bauer listen beneath that instruction and recover the activity that technical systems are designed to conceal.

This interest in residue connects Passt to the larger Mego philosophy. Computers were not neutral containers waiting to reproduce musical ideas transparently. They were instruments with particular failures, processing artifacts and hidden behaviors. Software could stutter, overload or return an unintended value; those events were not necessarily obstacles between composer and desired result. They might be the most revealing moments the system produced. The radical step was not simply using mistakes as sound. It was abandoning the assumption that the musician already knew which outcomes deserved to be called correct.

By the time Passt appeared, imitation had complicated that discovery. Once listeners recognized the sound of digital failure, producers could manufacture the sign of malfunction without allowing anything genuinely unpredictable to occur. Glitch risked becoming a polished image of technical danger, the sonic equivalent of a perfectly designed crack printed onto a new surface. Passt answers by increasing its physical force and narrative volatility. The duo do not linger over each exquisite error like collectors displaying rare insects. They weaponize the entire collection and keep it moving.

“Revolver” occupies more than half the record, divided into seven CD indices but derived from a continuous live performance. The title refers to the Melbourne venue, yet it also describes the music’s rotating mechanism. Fragments return, chambers align, pressure accumulates and the whole apparatus appears to fire in repeated cycles. Unlike the heavily reconstructed earlier movements, “Revolver” retains the danger of an event developing before an audience with no later opportunity to redirect its immediate course.

The section begins within recognizably glitch-derived terrain, but it keeps climbing through levels of density until those genre coordinates become useless. Rapid loops form temporary structures; static snaps across the stereo field; low pulses push from underneath while higher frequencies scatter like metal filings. The improvisation’s achievement lies not merely in becoming louder. Each increase in intensity alters the internal proportions. What had sounded like a central rhythm becomes one minor component inside a larger mechanical swarm.

Halfway through, a speed-metal guitar figure enters and pans excitedly across the field. Its arrival is both ridiculous and completely convincing. The laptop musicians suddenly summon the most exaggerated emblem of physical rock performance, but the guitar is no longer securely attached to a guitarist, band or song. It has become another unruly data object. Rehberg and Bauer do not use metal as ironic decoration placed above refined computer music. The riff meets electronics at the shared point where repetition, distortion and excess become bodily pleasure.

This moment completes the joke begun by the emcee. Passt opened with the duo being introduced as entertainers of impossible magnitude. “Revolver” eventually produces its own mutated arena-rock climax, but the guitar has been captured inside a system that refuses stable performance identity. The laptop has swallowed the guitar rather than replacing it. Digital abstraction and physical rock theater discover that they were never as separate as their audiences imagined.

The cover photograph by Jon Wozencroft shows clusters of pale blue thorned forms, enlarged until they hover between botanical detail, microscopic organisms and defensive machinery. Their repeated structures resemble the album’s sound: many small points forming larger rounded bodies, beautiful at a distance and hazardous upon contact. The cold blue field is interrupted by the title in orange-red, a small heat source inside a landscape of spikes. Even the barcode remains visible at the upper edge, reminding us that this alien object is also a standardized commercial product designed to pass through scanners without difficulty.

Touch’s presentation gives Passt a visual stillness almost completely absent from the audio. The image does not illustrate speed, violence or computers. It provides a surface upon which those associations can accumulate slowly. The thorn clusters also suggest a problem of scale central to the record. Is the listener looking at one large organism or hundreds of tiny structures? Are we hearing one composition or thirteen tracks, three concerts or four movements, live improvisation or studio construction? Every answer remains simultaneously useful and incomplete.

Passt succeeds because it understands that electronic innovation does not survive by protecting a once-new sound from contamination. It survives by placing that sound under renewed pressure. Rehberg and Bauer could have continued refining elegant digital mistakes and remained exemplary figures within glitch. Instead, they made an album that mocks its own stage presentation, subjects live material to aggressive reconstruction, invites rhythm to form and collapse, and finally allows a metal guitar to charge through the circuitry like an animal escaping its cage.

The record is only thirty-three minutes long, but it feels complete because every section performs a necessary structural task. “Finga” inflates and punctures spectacle. “Sunday” reveals the unease inside reduced activity. “Nixnull” discovers matter inside supposed nothingness. “Revolver” returns the whole method to live risk and drives it toward overload. The trilogy closes not by perfecting the language Faßt helped establish, but by showing how quickly perfection would turn that language into another prison.

More than two decades later, the laptop is so ordinary that its former novelty can be difficult to reconstruct. Computers now mediate nearly every phase of music, from composition and performance to mastering, distribution and listening. Passt preserves the point when bringing one onstage could still destabilize the audience’s understanding of musical labor. Yet the album does not survive merely as a historical demonstration of early software sound. Its editing, pacing, humor and brute physicality remain effective after the technology has lost its futuristic aura.

The machines no longer seem exotic, but the decisions do. Rehberg and Bauer keep refusing the easiest identity available to them, making computer music that remembers techno, noise, metal, comedy and the public awkwardness of performance without settling permanently into any one. Passt fits because it does not belong. It closes a trilogy by leaving the circuitry open, still sparking, still vulnerable to whatever incompatible material might enter next.