The Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus - 2020 - Songs Of Yearning

Occultation Recordings – LOGOS7E4072

Yearning is not simply wanting something absent. It is the strange proof that a person can remain connected to what cannot presently be touched, explained or recovered. Songs of Yearning makes that condition into devotional music without pretending devotion has removed doubt. Its bells, cello, acoustic strings, restrained electronics, percussion and multilingual voices seem to gather inside an abandoned place of worship where the walls remember ceremonies after the congregation has gone. The album is more concentrated than its companion Nocturnes, but concentration does not make it easier to decode. These twelve pieces form a deliberate passage from “Avatars” to “Prayer,” tracing a search through images, saints, evening rites, paradise, falling and belonging until yearning itself begins to resemble a form of prayer.

“Avatars” establishes the album’s pace through a slowly repeated chord, low percussion and cello that seems to carry the weight of something older than the recording. The title suggests visible forms taken by an invisible presence, which is also how the group uses sound. A bell is not merely atmospheric; it marks distance, summons attention and divides ordinary time from another kind. “Celestine” follows as a small illumination, then “Kontaktion (for St Maria Skobtsova)” gives the spiritual language a human body. Maria Skobtsova was not a saint of withdrawal but an Orthodox nun who sheltered persecuted Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris and died at Ravensbrück. Remembering her prevents the album’s sacred imagery from floating away into beautiful vagueness. Compassion here must become action, even when action ends in sacrifice. The music does not dramatize her life. It offers a brief space in which memory can remain active.

“Ave Maria,” “Vespers” and “Paradise” form the album’s most recognizably liturgical region, although none behaves like a conventional church performance. Voices remain vulnerable rather than monumental, and the arrangements leave silence around each element instead of building toward ceremonial grandeur. “Vespers” belongs to evening, the point when daylight weakens and the day’s unfinished thoughts become more audible. “Paradise” is similarly restrained. It does not sound like arrival at a flawless destination, but like paradise remembered through the conditions of exile. That distance is essential to the record. Beauty appears repeatedly, yet it is never possessed. It remains something glimpsed through music, language and memory, close enough to awaken desire but too large to be held in place.

The second half begins with “Beginnings,” quietly overturning chronological order. A beginning can occur after years of experience, after loss, or after someone realizes that the life already underway must be entered differently. The title piece condenses the album’s emotional center into less than three minutes, with yearning carried not as theatrical agony but as a persistent inward orientation. “Falling” then appears in a brief, fractured form, far removed from the six-minute descent heard on Nocturnes. Placed here, it resembles a sudden failure of language or faith, an interruption that is over before the listener can stabilize it. “Miserere” responds not with an explanation but with the ancient request for mercy. The transition is small, yet it contains an entire spiritual movement: the fall occurs, and the first useful word afterward is not self-defense but mercy.

“Belonging/O Nata Lux” becomes the album’s largest chamber, joining the human need for a place within the world to a Latin hymn addressed to light born from light. Belonging is therefore expanded beyond membership in a nation, church, family or cultural group. It becomes the hope that a separated life might still participate in something whole. The album’s six languages strengthen this idea because understanding does not arrive uniformly. A listener may comprehend one voice literally and another only through breath, rhythm and emotional temperature. Difference is not eliminated to create communion; it is carried into communion. The concluding “Prayer” strips that hope down to its simplest form. After the icons, translations, historical memory and layered arrangements, prayer remains an act performed without proof that an answer will arrive in the expected language.

Songs of Yearning does not use religious imagery to manufacture mystery around itself. Its mystery comes from recognizing that faith, grief, beauty and memory cannot be completely separated in lived experience. A person may doubt while praying, mourn while hearing beauty, or feel abandoned while continuing to address the invisible. The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus allows those conditions to remain together without forcing them into a reassuring conclusion. Nocturnes wandered through the unstable architecture of dreams; this album stands awake inside the same darkness and listens for a response. Yearning becomes valuable not because it guarantees that what has been lost will return, but because it keeps the heart facing toward what it still recognizes as worthy of love. 

Minami Deutsch - 2019 - Can't Get There

 

Höga Nord Rekords – HNRPIC010

Can’t Get There turns forward motion into a productive contradiction. Minami Deutsch build the title track upon a motorik rhythm that appears capable of traveling forever, yet its destination remains permanently beyond the next repetition. Bass and drums maintain the road with almost mechanical steadiness while guitars flash, scrape and bend above it, creating movement without conventional narrative progress. The band does not use repetition because it has run out of events. Repetition is the event: each completed circuit alters the listener’s sense of scale until seven minutes feels less like a song passing through time than a temporary transportation system operating inside it.

The title also quietly describes Minami Deutsch’s relationship with the German music that helped form them. Their name means “South Germany,” but they are a Japanese group working decades and thousands of miles from the original conditions surrounding Neu!, Can and the broader experimental culture usually filed under krautrock. They cannot literally return to that historical place, nor do they need to. “Can’t Get There” preserves the physical usefulness of the motorik pulse while allowing Kyotaro Miula’s guitar and sound collage to become increasingly untethered from revivalism. The rhythm points straight ahead, but the surrounding music keeps slipping sideways into psychedelic glare, repeated fragments and small electrical disturbances. The unreachable destination becomes a source of freedom because the journey never has to resolve into imitation.

“Israeli Blues” changes the machinery without stopping it. Originally recorded by the obscure Michigan psychedelic group Index in 1968, the song is pulled from private-press American darkness and placed inside Minami Deutsch’s cleaner rhythmic frame. Their version feels less like a historical cover than two distant underground languages discovering that they share certain words. Guitar lines hang in the air with a bruised delicacy while the rhythm section creates a firmer floor beneath them, preserving the original’s haunted character without mimicking its homemade atmosphere. “Nishi No Jiku,” written by guitarist and vocalist Taku Idemoto, then opens the record further. Japanese vocals enter a thick cycling riff, giving the repetition an emotional center that feels simultaneously melancholy and propulsive. The music keeps driving, but the voice makes the distance being crossed feel personal.

The two closing remixes reveal that Minami Deutsch’s repetitions already contained electronic dance music in potential form. Mythologen strengthens the title track’s relationship with techno, replacing the live band’s road surface with a darker nocturnal grid while preserving its forward pull. Jamie Paton takes a less direct route, loosening the rhythm and bending familiar details into a stranger psychedelic environment where the original seems to be remembered through chemical fog. Neither version treats remixing as decoration added after the “real” music has finished. They expose alternative structures concealed inside the band recording, showing how one fixed pulse can support rock improvisation, electronic propulsion or disoriented after-hours drift.

This makes Can’t Get There unusually complete for a five-track EP. The three band performances establish movement, historical distance and the emotional possibilities of repetition; the remixes then dismantle and rebuild that movement from inside. The record never arrives because arrival would end its most valuable condition. Minami Deutsch understand the road not as empty space between meaningful locations, but as a place where perception reorganizes itself through duration. You begin by following the beat. Eventually the beat appears to be carrying you, and the destination that seemed absent has become the altered state produced by traveling toward it.

BJNilsen - 2018 - Focus Intensity Power

 

Moving Furniture Records – MFR061

Focus Intensity Power sounds like a set of instructions issued to the listener’s nervous system. Focus upon a tone until its edges become visible. Remain with it as intensity gathers without obvious movement. Discover power not in an explosion, but in the ability of a sound to occupy the room so completely that everything outside it temporarily loses importance. BJNilsen is widely associated with field recordings, weather, landscapes and the hidden acoustic life of cities, but here he removes the recognizable world almost entirely. Modular synthesizers, tone generators and laboratory test equipment become the environment. The machines do not imitate nature. They produce their own climate, architecture and uncertain forms of life.

“Beam Finder” begins with a low sustained pulse that seems simple only until prolonged attention reveals how many things are happening inside it. Pitch bends almost imperceptibly, faint electrical textures collect around the central frequency, and tiny disturbances change the apparent dimensions of the room. The title suggests an instrument locating a signal, but the beam may also be locating the listener. Fifteen minutes of exposure gradually recalibrates the ear until a crackle, wavering overtone or distant higher frequency acquires enormous significance. Nilsen does not guide the piece toward a dramatic destination. He creates a stable field and allows perception itself to become the moving part. By the end, what first resembled an industrial generator has developed depth, weather and a peculiar internal radiance.

“The Sound of Two Hands” introduces a more visibly mechanical society. A sustained organ-like tone is joined by clicks, pulses and small bouncing electronic figures, including a clocklike sequence that makes time feel measurable and strangely unreliable at once. The title quietly overturns the familiar riddle about the sound of one hand. Two hands may clap, but here they might also operate controls, connect cables or adjust oscillators whose responses exceed the operator’s intentions. “Flattened Space” compresses the album’s pressure into less than four minutes, producing a cavernous environment from materials that seem to have no physical location. Its title is another useful contradiction: the space may be flattened in theory, yet the sound keeps generating recesses, surfaces and distances. Nilsen’s machines become architectural tools, constructing rooms that exist only while electricity passes through them.

“Table of Hours” brings the relationship between measurement and experience closer to the surface. A table can organize time into clean divisions, but lived duration refuses to remain inside those boxes. Repeated tones stretch a few minutes into something broader and less countable, while darker currents move beneath them without announcing a beginning or end. This is where the album’s title becomes more than a declaration of force. Focus increases sensitivity, allowing low-level changes to feel consequential; intensity comes from sustained attention rather than volume; power is the capacity to alter time without changing the clock. The music rewards neither casual impatience nor academic decoding. It asks the listener to remain present long enough for apparently static material to disclose its motion.

“The Limits of Function” closes the record by allowing function to become unstable. Electronic instruments are designed to generate, measure and regulate signals, yet their usefulness here begins precisely where practical purpose ends. Nilsen takes equipment built for control and listens for the moment it starts producing ambiguity. Layers accumulate, a rhythmic loop emerges, and the machinery appears increasingly self-directed, not because it has literally become conscious but because its behavior can no longer be reduced to a single obvious task. The piece grows without becoming monumental, maintaining the album’s unusual balance of restraint and pressure until the final tones leave the listening room feeling subtly altered.

The five recordings originated as improvisations, and that fact is essential. Focus Intensity Power is not a demonstration of machines obeying a finished composition. It documents a human being learning what a particular collection of machines is prepared to reveal. Knobs, circuits, oscillators and measuring devices become collaborators whose narrow technical functions open into wide imaginative consequences. There may be no field recordings here, but Nilsen has not abandoned his practice of attentive listening. He has simply moved the expedition indoors. Instead of crossing a landscape with microphones, he enters the electrical landscape inside the equipment, following its currents until laboratory instruments begin generating places no map could contain.

Mats Gustafsson & Joachim Nordwall - 2021 - Shadows of Tomorrow b/w The Brain Produces Electrical Waves

 

Astral Spirits – AS167

A seven-inch record leaves almost no room for hesitation, which suits Mats Gustafsson and Joachim Nordwall perfectly. Shadows of Tomorrow b/w The Brain Produces Electrical Waves contains barely eight minutes of music, yet neither side feels like a sketch reduced to fit the format. Each is a sealed pressure chamber in which breath, reed, electrical current and low-frequency vibration are forced into immediate contact. Gustafsson and Nordwall have collaborated often enough to recognize one another’s reflexes, but familiarity has not made their music polite. It allows them to interrupt, crowd and provoke each other without losing the deeper conversation taking place beneath the surface damage.

“Shadows of Tomorrow” begins in a state of nervous incompletion. Gustafsson’s saxophone does not settle into a stable line; notes scatter, repeat, snag against one another and disappear into Nordwall’s thin static fields. The electronics occupy the tiny spaces between breaths rather than constructing a wall behind them, making silence feel contaminated before any sound fully arrives. Gustafsson’s phrases sometimes resemble messages transmitted too quickly for language to form, while Nordwall keeps changing the conditions through which those messages must travel. The title suggests a future already casting darkness backward upon the present. Nothing has happened yet, but its consequences can be felt pressing against the room.

“The Brain Produces Electrical Waves” turns that anxiety into heavier physical force. Synthetic bass frequencies establish a dark gravitational center while Gustafsson’s breath and reed noise arrive as wounded howls, low growls and compressed bursts of air. The distinction between biological and electronic sound begins to collapse. A saxophone is an acoustic object, yet it converts lungs, nerves and muscular pressure into vibration; Nordwall’s equipment begins with electrical signal but produces something that feels bodily, irritated and capable of panic. The title therefore describes more than neurological fact. The brain produces waves, machines produce waves, and this record traps both inside the same narrow groove until thought itself appears to have become audible as pressure.

The two sides operate like alternate states of one nervous system. “Shadows of Tomorrow” is alert, fragmented and scanning for danger; “The Brain Produces Electrical Waves” is the moment accumulated signals become an involuntary physical response. Neither piece allows enough time for a conventional development or resolution, but brevity intensifies their effect. The record ends while its frequencies still seem active, leaving a phantom vibration behind after the stylus would have lifted. Gustafsson and Nordwall do not merely place saxophone against electronics. They expose the electrical life already hidden inside breath and the troubled animal presence concealed inside circuitry. The result is small enough to hold in one hand and large enough to temporarily rewire the room.

Neon Leon - 2023 - 1979-84 Singles Collection

 

HoZac Records – HZR-224

1979–84 Singles Collection does not sound like a career being carefully developed across five orderly years. It sounds like Neon Leon repeatedly escaping whatever category has just begun closing around him. The eight songs move from filthy New York glam-punk through reggae space, hard-driving rock, melodic street poetry and early-1980s new wave without sanding those changes into a consistent album surface. That unevenness is the collection’s pulse. These were records made under different circumstances, in different cities and with changing musicians, each one trying to seize whatever possibility was available before the door moved again. HoZac’s compilation turns those scattered attempts into a compact autobiography whose continuity comes not from production style but from Leon’s voice, appetite and stubborn belief that rock and roll remained a living social force.

“Rock’n Roll Is Alive” begins with drums passing through a phaser and guitars arriving already half-destroyed, then converts its title into an announcement from inside the city rather than a nostalgic slogan. Leon and bassist Honi O’Rourke compress the atmosphere surrounding Max’s Kansas City, CBGB and the late-1970s downtown clubs into less than three minutes: danger, comedy, sexuality, aspiration and the conviction that a band could still invent its own social position through sheer presence. Leon was not observing that world from its edge. He had lived at the Chelsea Hotel, played alongside figures moving through the Dolls, Heartbreakers and Pure Hell constellations, and appeared in the 1977 film Punk Rock. Yet the song matters because it survives without requiring any of those stories. The history makes it richer, but the guitar sound and chorus do the actual work.

“Noh Time” immediately complicates the expected portrait. Its thinner, reggae-leaning construction creates more empty space around Leon, proving that his idea of New York rock was wider than a single fast guitar style. “Moving in the Right Direction” then restores forward pressure with the blunt optimism of somebody declaring progress partly to make it true, while “X-Rated” turns provocation into performance. Leon’s shout before the guitar break is funny, excessive and completely committed, the sort of moment that cannot be separated into sincerity and theater because rock and roll has always needed both. These songs understand persona not as dishonesty but as a tool for enlarging whatever the ordinary world has tried to reduce.

“Las Palmas (Chasing the Sun)” opens the collection’s geography beyond Manhattan, preparing the shift toward Leon’s European years. His version of “Heart of Stone” carries the famous presence of Mick Jagger, but its real interest lies in how little it resembles a polished celebrity encounter. Jagger’s contribution is brief, the recording is rough, and the entire performance feels closer to evidence from an unruly night than a calculated duet designed to establish legitimacy. Leon does not disappear beside the larger name. He drags a Rolling Stones song into his own damaged orbit, where friendship, unrealized record deals, backstage access and underground survival become impossible to separate. The mythology is there, but it arrives with scuffed shoes and loose wiring.

By “Girls, Guns & Money” and “Lock Up,” the surroundings have changed. Leon had moved back to Europe and settled in Sweden, where another group and another independent label allowed the story to continue after New York’s original punk moment had begun hardening into history. The later tracks are cleaner, more melodic and touched by the new-wave vocabulary of the early 1980s, but the personality remains gloriously resistant to respectability. “Girls, Guns & Money” turns its pulp title into an unexpectedly tuneful piece of street-level autobiography, while “Lock Up” closes the record with the sense that confinement is always one bad decision, hostile institution or unlucky turn away. The sound may have shifted, but Leon is still testing every apparent exit to see whether it leads somewhere useful.

That persistence is what makes this collection more than another excavation of a neglected punk figure. Neon Leon’s proximity to Johnny Thunders, Pure Hell, the Chelsea Hotel, Mick Taylor, Jagger and Keith Richards could easily swallow the music beneath a mountain of anecdote. Instead, these singles reveal somebody who kept making records after proximity failed to become security. He did not receive the clean ascent that rock history prefers, where one explosive single leads naturally toward a definitive album and permanent recognition. His route crossed countries, labels, friendships and scenes, leaving seven-inch records behind as proof of continued motion. 1979–84 Singles Collection gathers those proofs and lets them argue their own case: rock and roll was alive because people like Neon Leon continued making it even when the industry could not decide what to do with them.

Monolord - 2019 - No Comfort

Relapse Records – RR7430

 No Comfort is an album about searching for shelter inside music that refuses to pretend shelter exists. Monolord’s low frequencies arrive with enormous physical weight, but heaviness is not used as a curtain hiding thin ideas. The riffs make dread tangible. Bass, guitar and drums move together like one slow industrial body while Thomas Jäger’s distant, melodic voice describes religious doubt, environmental collapse, social isolation and the struggle to preserve some human attachment inside a damaged world. The title is therefore less a promise of misery than an honest description of the conditions under which the music must operate. Comfort cannot be assumed, so the band tries to build something usable from pressure, repetition and shared volume.

“The Bastard Son” enters with the certainty of a myth already controlling the people beneath it. The main riff is colossal, but Monolord continually alters its surroundings through rhythmic displacement, guitar layering and sudden openings in the density. Jäger’s vocals seem to float several feet above the instruments, giving the song the peculiar perspective of somebody narrating a disaster while being carried through it. “The Last Leaf” narrows the focus from apocalyptic authority to the final surviving evidence of life. Its guitars remain thick enough to distort the air, yet the song’s melancholy becomes increasingly melodic, allowing beauty to emerge without weakening the impact. Monolord understands that sorrow and weight reinforce one another when neither is exaggerated for spectacle.

“Larvae” makes the album’s internal development most visible. Clean guitar creates a fragile entrance before the full band begins widening the floor beneath it, moving between psychedelic suspension, slow tectonic rhythm and a final riff that seems to arrive from below the recording. The lyrics turn religious certainty and technological obedience into different versions of the same false security, but the song does not replace one doctrine with another. Its comfort comes from admitting uncertainty while continuing to move. Mika Häkki’s bass is especially important here. It does not merely double the guitar or make the record sound larger; it behaves like another gravitational layer, changing the emotional force of each passage whenever it enters or withdraws.

“Skywards” initially offers release through motion. Esben Willems gives the central groove a muscular unevenness, allowing the song to push forward without settling into an ordinary march. Jäger’s higher vocal register and expanding guitar lines create the feeling of rising, but the band never fully escapes the weight beneath them. That tension keeps the freedom from becoming decorative optimism. “Alone Together” then strips away much of the armor. Acoustic texture, pulsing bass and a mournful vocal melody reveal how vulnerable Monolord’s songs remain before distortion enlarges them. The title would acquire an accidental new meaning after 2019, but within the album it already describes a deeper modern condition: people occupying the same ruined landscape while remaining emotionally unreachable to one another.

The eleven-minute title track gathers every part of the record into one final slow disaster. Restrained passages leave individual notes exposed before the amplifiers return with greater consequence, proving that Monolord’s power depends as much upon withheld force as constant saturation. The words widen from personal mourning toward burning skies, bleeding oceans and mountains reduced to gravel, yet the song’s final need is still directed toward another person. That movement is crucial. The scale may be planetary, but the emotional unit remains intimate. Faced with destruction too large for one life to comprehend, the voice reaches for one remaining connection rather than a heroic solution.

No Comfort was also a change in how Monolord constructed their sound. Jäger developed the songs at home, then Häkki and Willems reshaped them through their own bass and drum parts, while the band recorded outside its rehearsal-room system for the first time. The resulting clarity does not domesticate their heaviness. It allows the internal machinery to be heard: the bass moving independently beneath the guitar, the drums changing a riff’s balance, and multiple guitar voices opening pathways through the mass. The album remains crushing, but crushing is only its outer dimension. Inside the volume is a record about disbelief, grief and damaged hope, made by three musicians who understand that sometimes music cannot provide comfort. It can only tell the truth loudly enough that nobody has to endure it alone.

Bäddat För Trubbel - 2012 - Värdighet

Punks Only – ISG31

 Värdighet means dignity, but Bäddat För Trubbel does not treat dignity as polished manners, professional success or the reward granted to somebody who has made all the approved decisions. Here it belongs to people who wake up tired, go to jobs they hate, drink when they should probably go home, lose arguments, repeat mistakes and still attempt to keep their heads raised. Fifteen songs pass in twenty-two minutes, most disappearing before two minutes have elapsed, yet their brevity never makes the lives inside them feel small. The band strips rock and roll down to the amount required for a verse, a sharp guitar figure, a chorus everybody can yell and one emotional truth that cannot wait until tomorrow.

“Måndag Morgon Eller Söndag Natt” places the album exactly where respectable schedules begin to blur. Monday morning may be arriving, or Sunday night may simply have continued too long; either way, obligation is already knocking while the body remains somewhere behind. The guitars move with bright, rough momentum, carrying blues and old rock-and-roll shapes at punk speed without turning either tradition into a museum exhibit. “Lika Dum” and “Nu Får Det Fan Vara Nog” follow with the satisfying directness of thoughts usually edited before being spoken aloud: still as stupid, now enough is enough. The words sound blunt because exhaustion has burned away the extra language, but strong melodies prevent the songs from becoming mere complaints barked over chords.

“Det Här Jobbet” gives work its proper emotional weight. A job occupies more than the paid hours; it enters sleep, posture, appetite, relationships and the private voice a person uses when deciding what they are worth. Bäddat För Trubbel writes from inside that pressure without converting working life into noble costume. The frustration is funny because everyday defeat often is funny, especially when the same absurdity returns every morning wearing a manager’s face. “Börjar Bli Van” makes adaptation sound less reassuring. Becoming accustomed to something can mean growing stronger, but it can also mean that an intolerable condition has successfully trained you to stop reacting. The band understands both meanings and fits the entire contradiction into seventy-six seconds.

The middle of the record widens from personal irritation into a rough philosophy of survival. “Fakta Och Nostalgi” recognizes how easily memory can polish away the grime, replacing what happened with the version people later find useful. “Vad Ska Jag Ta Mig Till,” “Härda Ut” and “Lösning Eller Problem” form a small sequence of uncertainty, endurance and suspicion toward anyone selling a clean answer. These are not heroic songs about conquering circumstances. They are songs about continuing while confused, broke, angry or embarrassed, which may require a more ordinary and durable courage. Even “Håll Din Jävla Käft” carries more social information than its title initially suggests. Sometimes silence is repression; sometimes refusing another person’s noise is the only boundary still available.

The title track finally defines dignity as something carried rather than awarded. It can survive humiliation because it does not depend upon appearing superior. “Håll Huvudet Högt” reduces that idea to fifty-four seconds, almost too brief to become encouragement before “Homeopati” punctures false remedies and easy consolations. The closing “BFT” is only thirty-seven seconds long, leaving the album without ceremony, as though the band has delivered everything necessary and sees no dignity in pretending otherwise. There is a confidence in that economy. Bäddat För Trubbel never mistakes seriousness for solemnity or working-class realism for grey punishment. The guitars remain danceable, the choruses remain generous and the humor keeps self-pity from controlling the room.

That combination is what makes Värdighet larger than its running time. Anger provides ignition, but recognition provides the lasting heat. The songs acknowledge that people can be bitter, jealous, tired, foolish and still deserving of respect; dignity is not the certificate received after eliminating every undignified part of oneself. The record moves quickly because these experiences are already familiar and require no elaborate introduction. A riff starts, the voice names the problem, the whole band pushes it into the open, and then another ordinary emergency arrives. Life has already made the bed for trouble. Bäddat För Trubbel climbs in with its boots on.

David Granström - 2019 - A Distant Color, Secluded

 

XKatedral – XK16

A distant color is already a paradox. Color normally announces itself through immediate visibility, while distance weakens it, and seclusion removes it from view altogether. David Granström builds this album inside that contradiction. Its synthesized tones are exact, carefully tuned and governed by repeating structures, yet the result does not feel clinical or diagrammatic. Chords appear as luminous objects suspended far beyond reach, approaching with such gradual changes of density that the listener may notice the surrounding space transforming before recognizing what has moved. The music does not illustrate an imaginary landscape. It creates the perceptual conditions under which distance, horizon, depth and color begin behaving like audible materials.

“The Other Side” serves as a brief crossing rather than a formal introduction. In a little over two minutes, clustered tones establish a harmonic world that seems complete even as it remains partially concealed. The piece feels less like entering a room than discovering that the room has always extended beyond the wall in front of you. “Approaching the Horizon” then begins testing the title’s impossible motion. A horizon can be approached indefinitely but never reached because it moves with the observer. Granström’s cycles operate similarly: each return seems to bring the listener closer to some central chord or final alignment, yet the apparent destination keeps reorganizing itself. Repetition generates movement without requiring the material to travel in a straight line.

“Plane at Infinity” enlarges this illusion of spatial music. In geometry, a plane at infinity allows parallel directions to meet beyond ordinary measurable space; Granström’s tones seem to pursue an equivalent acoustic condition. Separate harmonic strands rise, overlap and acquire shared overtones until the distinction between individual notes becomes less important than the larger field they produce together. The sound can be bright without becoming weightless. Deep frequencies hold the upper tones in place, giving the music a gravitational center while fine harmonic activity flickers across its surface. What appears minimal from a distance becomes crowded with internal motion when heard closely, as though a smooth block of color contains innumerable smaller shades that only emerge after the eyes have adjusted.

Granström constructed these pieces algorithmically, but the listener never needs to admire the machinery from outside. Rules, patterned cycles, chance operations and precise tuning function as hidden supports rather than the subject displayed in the foreground. This distinction matters because computer-generated music can easily become a demonstration of process, asking the audience to appreciate the intelligence of its design more than the experience of its sound. A Distant Color, Secluded reverses that relationship. The rigor exists to produce immersion. Its structures are exact enough to remain stable while perception becomes unstable, allowing the listener to lose track of which tones are actually changing and which only appear altered because something around them has shifted.

The twenty-five-minute “Waning Moon” occupies more than half the album and gradually absorbs everything preceding it. A waning moon diminishes visibly while remaining physically whole, and the piece repeatedly plays with this difference between appearance and existence. Harmonic masses brighten, thin, retreat and return in altered proportions, while low tones make the entire construction feel as though it is slowly rotating rather than progressing toward a climax. The long duration allows intensity to accumulate without conventional drama. Nothing needs to explode because sustained attention magnifies each change. A new overtone can open the music like a window; a slight darkening can make the same chord appear suddenly remote; a low-frequency arrival can alter the scale of everything above it.

There is something medieval in Granström’s use of proportion and tuning, but nothing antiquarian in the sound. He takes old principles concerning number, interval and recurring measure and places them inside real-time digital synthesis, connecting eras that are often treated as opposites. Medieval music could understand harmony as evidence of an underlying cosmic order; modern electronic composition can expose sound as measurable frequency, algorithm and electrical event. A Distant Color, Secluded permits both understandings to coexist. Its tones are mathematical relationships, but they are also sensory experiences capable of creating wonder before their construction is understood.

The title’s final word may be the most important. This distant color is secluded, not absent. The music suggests that entire perceptual worlds can exist nearby without becoming available until the listener adopts the right scale of attention. Granström does not drag those worlds into ordinary focus or explain their internal laws. He allows them to remain partially withdrawn, revealing enough structure for the ear to sense their size while preserving the distance that gives them power. By the end of “Waning Moon,” listening has changed from observing an object to remaining inside a field. The album has not carried us to the other side, the horizon or infinity. It has made those unreachable places briefly audible from here.

Alexander Lucas - 2022 - ST 2xLP

 

Subliminal Sounds – SUB-140-2LP

Alexander Lucas is not an album recorded in 2022 so much as a life the band never received permission to place on an album while it was happening. These twenty-two tracks collect the surviving evidence of a Nacka group active from 1969 to 1976, when Swedish heavy rock was still being invented in youth halls, rehearsal rooms and overdriven amplifiers rather than recognized as a historical movement. Only the self-financed 1973 single “Speed” backed with “Svarta Skogen” escaped at the time. Everything else remained scattered until this double LP allowed the group’s changing lineups, ambitions and rough recording circumstances to occupy one long physical object. The variations in fidelity are therefore not flaws requiring correction. They are changes in weather across seven years of a band repeatedly trying to make itself audible.

“Svarta Skogen” is the ideal opening because its forest is already darker and heavier than its two-and-a-half-minute running time suggests. Guitar, bass and drums move as a compact unit, with the riff carrying the blunt authority later associated with proto-metal while retaining the looseness of psychedelic hard rock. “Speed” pushes the same trio toward motion, its title functioning as both subject and command. Neither side sounds like musicians consciously designing a future genre. They sound like young players discovering that blues-based rock could be made harder, faster and less polite simply by increasing the pressure. Claes Alexander von Post’s guitar does not decorate the songs after their foundations are established. It acts as the foundation, rhythm engine and source of electrical instability at once, while Hans Olof Ekström and Benna Sörman prevent the recordings from becoming guitar demonstrations by keeping the whole machine bodily and immediate.

The surrounding material reveals that the single captured only one angle. “Race to Heaven,” “What Have You Done” and “You’re Gonna Die” compress dread, bravado and youthful mortality into direct hard-rock forms, while “Blow Auto” and the band’s quick attack on “Johnny B. Goode” show how closely early heavy music remained tied to old rock and roll. Their Chuck Berry cover is particularly revealing because it removes any illusion that heaviness arrived from nowhere. The original vocabulary is still visible, but Alexander Lucas drives it with louder amplification, heavier drums and the impatience of musicians whose audience expected the room to move. A second “Race to Heaven” and another version of “Speed” are not redundant archival padding. They show songs remaining unsettled, changing as the band’s personnel, equipment and understanding of its own force changed.

The second half stretches farther from the concise violence of the single. “Set Me Free,” “Poor Boy,” “Feel Me” and “Rape Me” allow riffs to remain active for five, six or nearly eight minutes, opening space for guitar leads, tempo changes and heavier psychedelic drift. “Poor Boy,” drawn from Stan Webb’s writing, connects Alexander Lucas to the British blues-rock language feeding so many European bands, yet the group’s version belongs to a colder and rougher social environment. “Feel Me” is especially important because duration becomes a tool rather than an indulgence. The band can stay inside a groove long enough for repetition to alter its emotional weight, shifting from swagger toward compulsion without requiring studio polish or elaborate progressive-rock architecture.

By “The Saint,” “Miss Angel,” “Coming Beside” and “Free to Ride,” the collection feels less like a single lost masterpiece than an accelerated history of one group attempting several possible futures. There are traces of blues rock, biker menace, psychedelia, early metal, boogie and the cleaner hard-rock songwriting that would become common later in the decade. The shifting sound prevents the familiar archival fantasy in which an obscure band is presented as perfectly formed and unfairly ignored. Alexander Lucas was formed, broken apart and formed again in public, through an extreme number of gigs and whatever recording opportunities became available. That incompleteness makes the music human. We hear ability developing alongside uncertainty, fashion changing around the players, and youthful confidence repeatedly outrunning the resources needed to preserve it properly.

The rare single may have provided the doorway through which this history was finally recovered, but the unreleased recordings make the doorway lead somewhere. They restore the band not as the owners of one expensive collector’s object but as working musicians who mattered to the long-haired teenagers standing in front of their amplifiers. The twenty-page booklet and deluxe pressing supply the photographs and chronology, yet the rough tapes carry another kind of documentation: fingers learning what distortion can support, drums forcing small rooms to behave like large ones, and songs surviving because somebody kept the recordings after their commercial purpose had apparently disappeared. Alexander Lucas does not rewrite heavy-rock history by claiming its secret center was hidden in Nacka. It makes that history larger, noisier and more truthful by returning one local current to the river that eventually carried the whole culture forward.

Fysick Forstran - 2023 - Rakenskapens Dag

Fördämning Arkiv – F-Arkiv 12

 Fysisk Fostran means physical training, while Räkenskapens Dag means the day of reckoning. Together they sound like instructions issued by some damaged institution: prepare the body because judgment is approaching. The music fulfills that threat without ever becoming orderly enough to resemble official discipline. Recorded live onto cassette in Stenungsund between 1980 and 1984, these eleven pieces combine primitive electronics, post-punk rhythm, industrial abrasion and a stubborn desire to rock even while the equipment appears to be malfunctioning. The rough fidelity is not merely an attractive layer of age. Tape overload, room noise and unstable balance preserve the sense that the musicians are discovering what the machines can do at almost the same instant we hear them doing it.

Stenungsund was an especially fitting place for this sound to emerge. The small west-coast town was dominated by power generation and petrochemical industry, an environment of pipes, tanks, artificial materials and machinery operating beyond the scale of ordinary human activity. Fysisk Fostran did not need to imagine an industrial landscape imported from Sheffield or Düsseldorf; one already occupied the horizon. Yet the group’s music never becomes a solemn documentary about factories. The players were young, bored and evidently unwilling to choose between experimental electronics and the basic pleasure of making a room move. That collision gives the recordings their personality. The machines hum and sputter, but somewhere inside them a garage band keeps kicking at the walls.

“Fiber” and “Jim F Gud” stretch beyond six minutes, giving the group enough time to turn rudimentary ideas into complete environments. Repeated bass, crude synthesizer patterns, drums and guitar do not progress through polished arrangements so much as accumulate grime, pressure and strange internal momentum. The performances can sound mechanical from a distance, but close listening reveals young musicians constantly pushing against the grid they have created. Rhythm slips, signals distort and apparently fixed patterns develop nervous movement. Instead of hiding those instabilities, the cassette makes them enormous. The music feels less programmed than trapped inside a program that has begun producing unauthorized behavior.

The shorter pieces expose the humor inside that pressure. “Ridandes Av Vissa Djur,” “Det Mystiska Talet E,” “Ett Oanständigt Förslag,” “Det Blodrika Djuret” and “Döda Lollos Mamma” carry titles that sound scientific, grotesque, adolescent and deliberately unhelpful all at once. Fysisk Fostran understood that experimentation did not require the musicians to behave like professors guarding an advanced theory. A song could be absurd, primitive or obnoxious and still lead somewhere genuinely strange. Their industrial music has dirt beneath its fingernails and laughter leaking through the ventilation system. It does not ask to be admired from a safe historical distance.

“3000 År Electro” places the future three millennia away while using technology that now sounds beautifully prehistoric. That gap is part of the pleasure. Early electronic equipment promised clean modernity, but in the hands of Fysisk Fostran it produces wobble, interference and unruly physical force. “Grannkött” and “Jim F Electro” extend the collision between body and circuitry, with the latter title transforming Jim from God into electricity. Sacred authority, technology and neighborhood flesh become interchangeable components within the band’s crooked private mythology. Nothing is explained because explanation would reduce the imaginative territory created by these half-serious names and damaged sounds.

The album also preserves a history that almost failed to exist materially. Several songs had been intended for a 1984 EP that survived only as four test pressings, while the remaining selections were rescued from equally scarce cassette recordings. Four decades later, the original sleeve stamp was used again, joining the recovered music to the physical gesture that had once announced it. Räkenskapens Dag therefore does more than uncover an obscure industrial group. It restores the scale at which underground culture was actually made: a few teenagers, a small town, cheap recording media, a nearly nonexistent record and enough belief to leave evidence behind. The day of reckoning finally arrived, but instead of judging the music, time revealed how alive its accidents had remained.

Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin - 2022 - Ghosted

 

Drag City – none

Ghosted is built from grooves that seem simple enough to memorize immediately, then become less explainable the longer they continue. Johan Berthling establishes short bass figures with the steadiness of a loop, Andreas Werliin subdivides the surrounding beat without disturbing its center, and Oren Ambarchi places guitar sounds above them that rarely resemble conventional rhythm or lead playing. The trio removes nearly every familiar sign of musical progress: no verse arrives, no solo steps forward to claim the foreground, and repetition is never broken merely to prove that change is possible. Instead, tiny adjustments accumulate until the groove appears to be standing still while the room around it slowly rotates. The title fits this elusive movement. Nothing disappears completely, but sounds repeatedly leave traces after their source has moved elsewhere.

“I” enters with unusual warmth. Berthling’s double bass and guest Christer Bothén’s donso n’goni create a bright, woody circular motion while Werliin works around them with shakers, rims and lightly placed percussion. Bothén’s presence connects the recording to the cross-cultural improvisational language he explored with Don Cherry, but the track never treats the West African instrument as an exotic color laid over an otherwise European foundation. It becomes part of the rhythmic engine. Ambarchi’s processed guitar hovers behind the strings like an organ heard through sunlight, then sends small flickering shapes across the surface. The piece is open, buoyant and patient, yet every musician is continually active. Stillness is created not by doing nothing, but by balancing several motions so precisely that none appears to disturb the whole.

“II” makes that balance more mechanical without losing its human grain. Berthling moves to electric bass and repeats a clipped figure with such consistency that it initially seems programmed, though the performance was created in real time. A deeper bass layer gives the track additional weight while Werliin makes its uneven meter feel completely natural, placing strokes around the pulse rather than announcing the complexity. Ambarchi’s guitar stretches into a thin bowed tone, less an object sitting above the rhythm than a vapor released from it. The musicians resist the temptation to enlarge the piece through force. Its fascination comes from how little each player needs to alter before the entire pattern feels different. One drum accent, harmonic or shift in guitar texture can briefly tilt the groove without knocking it from its orbit.

The nearly sixteen-minute “III” is the album’s deepest demonstration of repetition as collective listening. Berthling’s bass line keeps resetting its own momentum, moving forward and returning at once, while Werliin’s toms produce a second melodic shape beneath it. Ambarchi’s guitar arrives as shimmer, sustained light and rotating overtones, sometimes suggesting an organ or distant brass without settling into either identity. The duration changes the listener’s scale of attention. At first the bass pattern seems to be the fixed element and everything else the variation; eventually even that distinction weakens. Every return has been affected by what happened around it, and the supposedly unchanging center begins to feel alive with differences too small to register during ordinary listening. The trio does not build toward an ecstatic release because the trance is already complete. Going deeper becomes more important than going somewhere else.

“IV” loosens the mechanism. The earlier pieces are held together by highly concentrated rhythmic agreements, but the closing track allows those agreements to fade into a slow, dark suspension. Notes spread farther apart, the bass no longer seems responsible for maintaining a road beneath the music, and Ambarchi’s guitar becomes a soft stain of tone whose edges cannot be located. It functions as a coda, but not as a conventional resolution. The pulse has not reached a destination; it has lost its physical body and continued as atmosphere. After spending most of the album training the ear to detect minute changes inside repetition, the trio reveals that disappearance can also be rhythmic. A groove may stop while its internal timing remains active in the listener.

Ghosted achieves its power through restraint, but restraint here is not politeness or reduced ambition. It is the confidence to let one bass figure, one rotating guitar tone or one percussion pattern remain exposed long enough to disclose everything hidden inside it. Jazz, minimalism, African string traditions, dub weight and experimental electronics pass through the music without becoming separate stylistic exhibits. The three musicians use those languages to construct a shared method in which nobody leads for long and nobody disappears entirely. Each performance becomes a living agreement renewed from one measure to the next. The ghosts are not dead sounds returning from the past. They are the countless possible versions of the music that flicker around the version the trio chose to play.

Jakov Jakoulov - 2004 - Within Four Walls

 

Self Released – None

Within Four Walls feels less like an album title than a condition imposed upon the music. Four walls can provide shelter, privacy and concentration, but they can also confine, isolate and prevent the outside world from knowing what is occurring inside. Jakov Jakoulov understands both meanings. This self-released recording has survived almost completely outside the usual machinery of musical recognition, with no readily available catalog history, public track list or critical trail explaining what the listener is supposed to hear. The title has become strangely literal. The music exists inside its own room, and opening the recording is equivalent to discovering a door that was never marked from the street.

Jakoulov’s life had already passed through many such rooms before this album appeared. He was educated within the formidable institutions of Moscow, worked in theater, television and film, played for the Moscow State Philharmonic and conducted a choir of Orthodox monks. He then left the Soviet Union, moved through Europe and eventually established himself in Boston. Each environment carried its own language, discipline and historical pressure. Russian conservatory training, Orthodox resonance, Jewish and Armenian memory, Romani musical inheritance, European modernism and American academic composition did not enter his work as separate decorative influences. They became neighboring chambers within one larger structure, sometimes connected by open doors and sometimes divided by walls thick enough that only a vibration could pass between them.

This helps explain the emotional density suggested by even the simplest Jakoulov title. He does not approach tradition as a museum of styles available for quotation. A hymn, lament, dance or theatrical gesture arrives carrying the lives that once required it. Sacred music contains both faith and the history of those who prayed under dangerous circumstances. Romani melody contains motion, pleasure and survival, but also the knowledge of being repeatedly forced to move. Russian lyricism carries beauty alongside exile, authority and loss. These materials cannot be reduced to a tidy multicultural collage because they have already inhabited one another through the composer’s own history. Within four walls, their echoes overlap.

The album’s title also invites a theatrical reading. A stage is another bounded enclosure, a constructed room in which entrances, silences, distances and changes of light become meaningful. Jakoulov had spent years composing for dramatic productions, and that experience offers a useful way into his music. Musical ideas need not behave merely as themes to be developed according to formal procedure. They can enter like characters, occupy a portion of the room, interrupt one another, withdraw and leave consequences behind. A return may feel less like repetition than the reappearance of someone altered by what happened offstage. Silence becomes architectural. It is the unoccupied area into which the next presence may arrive.

Four walls also create acoustics. Every sound inside a room travels outward, meets a boundary and returns changed. The direct signal may be clear, but reflection introduces memory. A tone encounters what contains it, then comes back carrying evidence of that contact. This is an especially fitting image for a composer whose musical identity was formed through displacement. A person leaves one country, language or institution, yet those places continue reflecting within whatever is made afterward. The past is neither fully present nor truly absent. It returns as resonance, sometimes recognizable and sometimes transformed so completely that only its emotional pressure remains.

The record appeared during a fertile period in Jakoulov’s work. Around 2004 he was moving among ballet, sacred composition, concert music and pieces concerned with Armenian poetry and Romani history. Those neighboring works should not be mistaken for the contents of this undocumented album, but they reveal the larger weather surrounding it. The boundaries between theatrical, spiritual and concert music were unusually porous. A dance could carry grief; a sacred form could contain historical violence; an abstract chamber gesture could suddenly feel like a human voice addressing somebody who was no longer in the room. Within Four Walls belongs to this environment even when its precise place within it remains difficult to document.

That lack of documentation changes the listener’s responsibility. With a famous recording, interpretation arrives already furnished. Reviews, liner notes, interviews, biographies and accepted historical judgments crowd the room before the music begins. Here the listener enters almost alone. There is no critical furniture indicating where to sit or which passage should be treated as the masterpiece. The absence can initially feel like deprivation, but it also restores a form of direct encounter. The music has not been flattened into reputation. Whatever it communicates must cross the room without institutional assistance.

A private recording also carries another kind of intimacy. It may have been produced for performers, friends, supporters, prospective commissioners or the composer’s own need to preserve work that commercial labels had no mechanism to hold. Such objects often look minor beside officially distributed albums, yet they may reveal more about how musical life actually continues. Composers do not create only when an industry is prepared to document them. They write, perform, duplicate discs and place recordings into particular hands. The audience may begin as a few people separated by geography and time. Years later, one surviving copy can reopen the entire room.

This makes the album’s obscurity something more complicated than neglect. Neglect suggests that a recognized public failed to value an available object. Within Four Walls barely seems to have entered public visibility at all. It occupied the smaller circulation where music behaves like correspondence. Someone made the recording, someone kept it, someone eventually converted or preserved it, and another listener carried it into a new archive. Each transfer is a knock on the wall. The recording does not suddenly become famous, but its enclosure acquires another doorway.

Jakoulov’s career makes this disappearance especially striking. He is not an anonymous amateur represented by one mysterious homemade disc. His compositions have reached major performers, festivals and orchestras, and his work encompasses ballets, concertos, chamber pieces, choral music and decades of theater. Yet a substantial public career can coexist with enormous undocumented regions. Recognition illuminates selected works while leaving others in darkness, sometimes for no artistic reason at all. A commission receives a program note; a private disc becomes a filename. Both may contain years of experience, but only one enters searchable history.

Within Four Walls therefore asks us to consider where a piece of music lives when almost nobody writes about it. It lives first within the recording, then within the person who preserves it, and finally within every room where it is played. The walls are not destroyed when the album is shared. They multiply. Each listener supplies another enclosure, another acoustic and another private arrangement of memories through which Jakoulov’s music must pass. The same recording becomes a different interior wherever it lands.

Perhaps that is the deepest meaning available to an album whose documentary identity remains so resistant. Four walls can keep a world hidden, but they can also prevent it from being dispersed. They hold the echoes long enough for somebody else to find them. This recording survived not because the public catalog knew how to value it, but because one or more individuals refused to let it disappear. The room has remained closed for years, yet the air inside is not dead. Press play and the walls begin returning everything they remember.

Roll The Dice - 2017 - Born To Ruin

 

The New Black – RTD001

Born to Ruin treats ruin not as the spectacular moment when a structure collapses, but as a condition already present inside whatever is being built. The title suggests that failure, damage and disappearance are not interruptions arriving from outside; they are carried from birth, quietly shaping every movement toward the future. Malcolm Pardon and Peder Mannerfelt respond by stripping Roll the Dice nearly to its frame. Their earlier records could expand into broad cinematic landscapes, but these nine pieces are shorter, drier and more enclosed. Keyboards, electronics, percussion and saxophone appear with little decorative protection around them, leaving every impact exposed and every silence responsible for holding part of the structure upright.

“The Derailed” begins after the accident has seemingly already occurred. Its rhythm does not travel smoothly enough to suggest a train still following its intended line; it lurches through compressed percussion, low mechanical pressure and saxophone that seems caught between breath and alarm. Per “Ruskträsk” Johansson does not enter as a jazz soloist placed above electronic backing. His instrument is cut, repeated and crowded into the same machinery as everything else. A saxophone begins with lungs, saliva, muscle and vibrating reed, giving the album a bodily center even when processing makes that body difficult to locate. The electronics are severe, but they never become bloodless because breath keeps attempting to force a path through them.

“Under the Arches” finds one of the album’s few temporary shelters. Fading keyboard chords and isolated bass weight create a nocturnal enclosure beneath some imagined bridge or piece of abandoned infrastructure, but the space never becomes safe enough for rest. The arches carry the pressure above them while amplifying whatever occurs underneath. Small tones acquire long shadows, and the gaps between sounds begin feeling occupied by things that have not yet entered. “Inward Spiral” turns that architecture inside the body, tightening repeated figures until introspection resembles entrapment. Roll the Dice understands that a spiral can move continuously while remaining imprisoned around one center. Movement alone is not escape.

“Cannonball” is the album’s most blunt collision between mass and velocity. The title names an object whose purpose is fulfilled by destroying the place where its journey ends, and the music shares that sense of movement carrying ruin inside it. Percussion strikes with dry physical force while sustained tones scrape against the rhythm rather than softening it. Yet the piece is not simply aggressive. Its power comes from concentration. Pardon and Mannerfelt leave so little unnecessary material that each sound feels structurally dangerous, capable of changing the entire balance simply by entering. Their use of negative space resembles the silence around an old blues or early jazz recording, where limited means can make every foot stomp, breath and instrumental response feel enormous.

That connection to roots music is not expressed through borrowed chord progressions, period clothing or nostalgic recording effects. It survives in the relationship between repetition and necessity. Early blues could remain with one figure because the purpose was not to display endless compositional options; it was to inhabit a feeling until the repetition became testimony. Born to Ruin applies that logic to electronic sound. Patterns return because the situation has not been resolved. A pulse continues because the pressure producing it continues. The duo’s machines do not imitate historical music, but they recover something of its blunt emotional economy: use what is available, remove what is ornamental and make the remaining material carry more than it appears capable of holding.

The titles on the second half form a vocabulary of burial, false illumination and bodily restraint: “Potters Field,” “Bright Lights, Dark Heart,” “Coffin & Nails” and “Locked Hands.” A potter’s field receives people whose identities or resources have failed to secure a recognized place among the dead. “Bright Lights, Dark Heart” places public visibility beside private corruption, allowing electronic glare to sharpen rather than dispel the darkness. “Coffin & Nails” converts the familiar phrase about completing destruction back into physical objects, while “Locked Hands” makes restraint ambiguous. Hands may be imprisoned, joined together in solidarity, clenched in fear or held so tightly that neither person can release the other. The music leaves all of those possibilities active.

“Coffin & Nails” is especially effective because its stretched tones introduce grief without sentimentalizing it. Sounds resembling bowed strings or wounded brass gather around a restrained pulse, each one seeming to bend under pressure rather than float above it. “Locked Hands” then compresses the record’s anxiety into a tightening rhythmic system. Noise collects along the edges, the pulse becomes more urgent, and the piece appears to be closing its grip around the listener. Roll the Dice does not provide a dramatic eruption that would release the accumulated force. They understand that unresolved pressure can be more truthful than catharsis. Many systems do not explode when they become intolerable. They continue functioning.

The album appeared in 2017, and its atmosphere naturally absorbed a period in which political, technological and social instability seemed increasingly difficult to dismiss as temporary disturbance. Yet Born to Ruin never becomes a topical soundtrack whose meaning expires with one election or crisis. Its politics are embedded in the way the music treats power. Large structures remain mostly invisible, but their pressure can be heard in every confined rhythm, interrupted breath and incomplete escape. Individuals move through tunnels, burial grounds and systems of restraint without ever seeing the entire machine governing them. The record offers no speech explaining who is responsible because the sensation of living inside the structure has already become the argument.

“Broken in Time” closes by changing the meaning of the title one final time. Something broken in time may have been damaged at a particular historical moment, but it may also be trapped inside time, unable to continue or return. The piece is quieter and more openly mournful than much of what precedes it, allowing the album’s aggression to reveal the exhaustion underneath. Ruin is not only crushed stone, corrupted machinery or spectacular social collapse. It is also the gradual loss of possible futures, the feeling that every attempted movement has arrived too late. The music withdraws without repairing what has been exposed.

Born to Ruin is powerful because Roll the Dice refuses to make destruction grand. There are no luxurious panoramas of civilization burning and no heroic survivors standing beautifully among the wreckage. The album remains close to confined bodies, failing mechanisms and spaces where the light does not reach evenly. Its jazz and blues ancestry resides in that closeness, in sounds made urgent through limitation and in repetition that transforms pressure into witness. The duo removed much of its earlier orchestral scale and discovered something more severe underneath: music that does not depict ruin from a safe distance, but listens from inside while the walls are still standing.

Jacco Gardner - 2019 - Fading Cosmos

 

Full Time Hobby – FTH344S

Fading Cosmos begins with a disappearance occurring directly above us. The stars remain where they have always been, but artificial light increasingly prevents us from seeing them, creating the strange modern condition of being surrounded by an immense universe while living beneath a ceiling of our own illumination. Jacco Gardner turns that contradiction into two extended instrumental pieces where visibility is never complete. Synthesizers glow behind tape haze, acoustic instruments appear through electronic weather, and melodies briefly reveal themselves before sinking back into the larger field. The music does not reproduce outer space through familiar science-fiction effects. It restores the sensation that something immeasurably large exists just beyond the range of ordinary perception.

The title piece was inspired by conversations Gardner had with his brother about light pollution and the gradual disappearance of the night sky. That environmental concern does not become a lecture imposed upon the music. It determines the way the piece behaves. A repeating synthesizer pattern provides forward movement, but every new layer seems to make the destination more distant. Bass and percussion give the journey physical momentum while electric piano and processed guitar illuminate small regions around them, creating the feeling of traveling through an environment whose full dimensions can never be seen at once. The rhythm moves steadily, yet the music remains suspended between exploration and mourning.

This is where Gardner’s transition from baroque psychedelic songwriter to instrumental composer becomes especially productive. His earlier records often used voice, character and concise song structure to open imaginary rooms. Here he removes the narrator and allows the room to expand beyond architecture. Instruments no longer accompany a story; their changing relationships become the story. A bass line may function as gravity, a synthesizer sequence as navigation, and a tape-altered acoustic guitar as evidence of some organic life surviving inside the machinery. Without lyrics fixing the meaning in place, the listener becomes responsible for deciding whether the voyage is outward into the cosmos or inward through memory.

Gardner described these pieces as improvisations shaped by the blurred border between calculation and happy accident. That tension can be heard in the music’s unusual balance of precision and freedom. Sequenced synthesizers create patterns exact enough to feel automated, but the instruments played around them bend, hesitate and respond in real time. The machine establishes a course while the human performances continually change the weather encountered along it. Analogue tape complicates that relationship further, making electronically generated sounds wobble and breathe while acoustic instruments acquire the instability of transmissions arriving across enormous distance.

“Autumn in Lisbon” brings the scale back toward Earth without making the world feel less mysterious. Gardner wrote it after walking through Lisbon on a beautiful but stormy autumn day soon after moving there, when the city and his own future both seemed charged with change. The piece begins from that unstable brightness. Acoustic guitar and electric piano introduce warmer, more recognizable materials, but they are gradually surrounded by synthesizer movement and tape manipulation until the city appears partly remembered, partly imagined. Lisbon is not depicted through touristic details. It becomes an emotional geography of hills, old stone, sudden weather and streets whose direction is never as obvious as it first appears.

The two sides therefore approach transformation from opposite distances. “Fading Cosmos” looks outward toward a universe made invisible by human progress, while “Autumn in Lisbon” looks closely at one inhabited place until it begins revealing cosmic dimensions of its own. The first piece mourns what artificial light conceals; the second discovers mystery within the illuminated city. One searches for stars beyond the urban glow, while the other walks beneath that glow and notices that weather, architecture and uncertain personal change can still make ordinary reality feel unexplored.

Nicola Mauskovic’s percussion strengthens the physical life of both pieces. Gardner could easily have allowed the synthesizers to dominate and produced an elegant electronic voyage, but the drums and hand percussion keep returning the music to the body. Their rhythms connect kosmische electronics with spiritual jazz, acid folk and progressive rock without arranging those traditions into separate historical displays. The music feels discovered through playing rather than assembled to demonstrate Gardner’s knowledge of particular records. Influences from Popol Vuh, early Vangelis, Bo Hansson, Francis Bebey, Piero Umiliani, Silver Apples and early Pink Floyd may help describe the surrounding constellation, but Fading Cosmos never belongs completely to any one of those stars.

The physical instruments matter because Gardner manipulates them until the distinction between ancient and futuristic technology begins to weaken. Acoustic guitar and percussion are among humanity’s oldest tools for organizing sound, while sequencers and synthesizers suggest automated futures, yet analogue tape subjects both to the same chemical and mechanical instability. Everything can stretch, blur, reverse or decay. The future acquires age before it arrives, while older sounds become capable of describing environments that have never existed. Gardner’s studio does not function as a machine for perfect reproduction. It is a small observatory where signals are altered in order to reveal possibilities hidden inside them.

Simon Heyworth’s mastering preserves that mixture of intimacy and scale. The low frequencies create depth without flattening the fragile material above them, and the brighter electronic tones retain enough softness to feel luminous rather than clinical. This is essential to an EP concerned with visibility. Too much clarity would make the cosmos seem fully mapped; too much haze would reduce it to decorative dreaminess. The sound remains detailed while preserving distance, allowing every instrument to appear reachable and remote at the same time.

Fading Cosmos lasts only about fifteen minutes, but it feels complete because each side contains an entire passage from one state into another. Nothing returns unchanged. A rhythm gradually becomes landscape, a city becomes a psychic weather system, and instruments recorded inside a Lisbon studio begin suggesting distances no room could hold. The EP does not solve the loss of the visible night sky or promise that music can reverse human progress. It performs a smaller but still valuable act. It reminds the listener that wonder is partly a discipline of attention. The cosmos may be fading from view, but the capacity to look beyond the nearest light has not disappeared with it.

Dropdead- 1998 - ST

Armageddon Label – Armageddon 001

 Dropdead’s second self-titled album compresses eighteen songs into roughly seventeen minutes, but the brevity never feels playful, disposable or designed to demonstrate how quickly the band can perform. These songs are short because the subjects have already exceeded the available time for polite discussion. Exploitation, violence, hierarchy, alienation and the reduction of living beings into usable objects are not introduced as topics awaiting balanced debate. They arrive as emergencies. A riff establishes the pressure, Bob Otis forces the words through it, and the band exits before outrage can harden into another comfortable style of entertainment.

“Superior” opens with the central delusion beneath nearly every cruelty addressed afterward: the belief that one person, group or species has earned the right to dominate another. Dropdead does not dismantle that belief through a carefully extended argument. Brian Mastrobuono’s drums push forward before the guitar has fully secured the ground, Ben Barnett’s chords grind together melody and abrasion, Devon Cahill’s bass enlarges the physical impact, and Otis’s voice sounds as though language is being torn loose from the body required to carry it. The minute-long song establishes a moral and musical system in which every claim of superiority produces damage somewhere below it.

“Bitter Fruit,” “Those Who We Deny” and “Tied Down for Survival” continue without meaningful separation, turning the opening stretch into one accelerating statement. The songs have distinct riffs and rhythmic turns, but their proximity makes them feel causally connected. A poisonous idea takes root, unwanted lives are pushed outside recognition, and survival itself becomes a form of restraint. Dropdead’s politics are effective because they remain bodily. Oppression is not treated as a remote ideological diagram. It appears through hunger, captivity, physical danger, exhaustion and the psychological effort required to continue living beneath somebody else’s definition of worth.

The music had changed since the first album. The 1993 LP often attacked through an almost uninterrupted blur of thirty-four miniature detonations, while this record gives individual riffs slightly more room to register. That does not make it restrained. The Swedish hardcore influence is more pronounced, with guitar figures carrying the scorched forward motion of Anti Cimex, Mob 47 and related traditions, but Dropdead keeps disrupting the charge through odd breaks, sudden slower sections and brief pieces of melody that emerge without providing comfort. “Idiot Icon” and “Us and Them” reveal how memorable the band could become without weakening its impact. A melodic contour appears, but it arrives with broken glass embedded in it.

“The Enemy Within (Part Two)” gives the album an essential inward turn. Systems of cruelty depend upon institutions, wealth and force, but they also reproduce themselves within individuals through fear, obedience, prejudice and the desire to stand above somebody else. Dropdead refuses the easy fantasy that every enemy can be located outside the punk community, outside the self or inside a conveniently monstrous stranger. “Witch Hunt” follows by showing how quickly collective fear can search for a body upon which to unload itself. Together the songs suggest that resistance requires more than identifying obvious authority. It requires noticing when the methods of authority have entered one’s own behavior.

The original vinyl’s first side played from the center outward, forcing the listener to place the needle near the label and watch it travel toward the edge. That reversal was a small physical joke, but it also suited the album’s refusal of inherited direction. Records are supposed to begin outside and move inward; societies are supposed to organize themselves through domination, competition and exclusion; music is supposed to develop toward a satisfying payoff. Dropdead accepts none of those instructions as natural law. Even the first five hundred covers were printed black upon black, making the object disclose itself only through changed light and close handling. What initially looks blank contains information that ordinary viewing has failed to reveal.

“Nothing Less Than Lost,” “Stone” and “Spirit Lies Broken” expose the emotional cost beneath the political rage. Dropdead is sometimes described as though its only feeling were anger, but anger here often protects grief from becoming passive. The songs recognize what repeated exposure to cruelty can do to a person: sensitivity hardens, hope becomes dangerous, and moral exhaustion begins resembling indifference. “Dead Inside” and the twenty-four-second “Life Disease” reduce that condition to its ugliest endpoint. Living within a destructive culture can make life itself appear diseased, yet the album’s continued motion proves that the band has not accepted numbness as the final condition.

“One Inside One Hundred” and “I Will Stand” preserve the possibility of individual refusal without transforming it into heroic mythology. One person among a hundred remains physically outnumbered, socially vulnerable and capable of failure. Standing does not guarantee victory. It means refusing to let numerical weakness decide whether a position is true. Dropdead’s existence embodied that principle beyond the lyrics. The band toured through independent spaces, maintained animal-rights and broader social commitments, and created Armageddon Label as a home for this record rather than waiting for an established institution to approve it. The message was therefore carried not only by the songs but by the route through which the object entered the world.

“Justify Your Violence” identifies one of power’s oldest verbal technologies. Violence rarely presents itself as violence when practiced by those who benefit from it. It becomes necessity, defense, tradition, progress, business or the natural order. The title confronts that conversion directly, forcing justification back into view before the language surrounding it can make harm disappear. Dropdead’s own sonic violence creates a productive contradiction. The band uses overwhelming volume, speed and physical force not to glorify domination, but to interrupt the quieter normalized violence that society has trained people not to hear.

The closing “What Once Was Life” lasts more than two minutes, enormous by the scale established during the preceding sixteen. That extra duration changes the atmosphere immediately. After so many songs strike, speak and vanish, the finale remains among the consequences. The title looks backward toward something transformed beyond recognition: a living being reduced to a product, a person hollowed by survival, an ecosystem converted into property, or a culture whose declared progress has destroyed its ability to recognize life. The piece does not provide a clean resolution because the conditions described throughout the album have not been resolved. It simply allows the accumulated grief enough time to become visible beneath the speed.

The record’s self-title is appropriate because there is almost no insulating distance between the band, its beliefs and its sound. Dropdead does not construct an elaborate fictional world into which the politics can be safely placed. The name on the cover identifies both the people making the noise and the condition against which they are screaming. Eighteen songs become eighteen refusals to let cruelty remain abstract, respectable or hidden behind procedure. The album is over before many records would finish introducing themselves, but its duration is deceptive. The sound stops after seventeen minutes; the argument keeps moving outward.