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DISPLACES represents Fabris' most personal musical journey to date, inspired by the concept of hyperobjects and cartographic practices. The album sculpts a high-dimensional phased time-space composed of concrete materials and digital archetypes in a state of constant displacement. It delves into the symbolic and philosophical realms of mapping as one of the greatest sense-making mechanisms for life, in dialogue with object-oriented environments, superimposition and non-locality applied to cosmic, temporal, and emotional memory.

The sonic ecosystem expands on the image of navigating a path through a set of places, from the microcosm of quanta to the macro force of dark matter, from underwater depths to overland terrains, encapsulating the cyclical flow between birth and death, both in ecological and anthropological sense. The intersection of these shifting states is explored through the extensive processing of the langspil, Iceland's only traditional instrument, intertwined with manipulated field recordings of biophonies and geophonies captured across Icelandic and Venetian territories. These recordings form the backdrop for a meditative process that relocate familiar objects into unfamiliar realms, reflecting on the transformative power of self-reflection while encapsulating the fragmentation and entanglement found in nature and the human state. The record plunges the listener into a disconcerting and physical soundscape, as a “ghostly spectrality that comes in and out of phase with normalized human spacetime,” evoking sensations of suffocation and release as each layer continuously unfolds the palimpsest of the enclosed labyrinth.

“Extraction of the I” embodies a subatomic reaction—erupting as a molecular force that rises, only to re-submerge with a solitary exhale underwater. In this mutated dark space, beluga whales breathe into "Xanadu Phasing," creating a pulsating tension that releases only to unveil a frozen landscape.

In “Barricading the Ice Sheets” the glacial material morphs into a liquid tunnel of digital artifacts, building a wall of noise that shatters into scattered fragments of ice, resembling bird calls from another world.

A moment of stasis is offered with the appearance of an asymmetrical loop in Monolith I, evoking a primitive rite before an unknown force emerges.

The physical intensity of subsonic material in "A Quake in Being" interrupts the hieratic tone, detuning into polluted sonic matter sourced from relics of the First World War in the Venetian Prealps. The geography of this place reconciles with the original homeland in "The Map is the Territory," blending negative space with anthropogenic elements and exploited sounds of the langspil.

The burning density of "Wolf-Rayet" projects into the void, echoing the residual sounds of a local church as relics of fossilized religions. Wolf tones are the remains in Monolith II, introducing the final track, "Topography of Extinction," where evolving psilocin textures invite the listener to uncover deeper layers of meaning and dislocation.

Thomas Peter debuts on Hallow Ground with »changing bodies,« an album inspired by the resonance and reaction of objects with and to sound. The Swiss composer and sound artist has worked with sounds generated with various materials, field recordings, and an array of analogue and digital synthesizers to create five ever-shifting pieces full of twists and turns in which even silence plays a significant role. Peter composed and recorded the album over the course of four years in an inherently physical process, led by both his intuition and his perception—what you hear on »changing bodies« is an artist intently listening to the material world around him.

Peter laid the foundation for »changing bodies« by making field recordings wherever he went, whether in closed rooms, cities, or rural environments, while also recording organic-sounding material with different synthesizers as well as working with objects made of wood, stone, or metal. »I viewed all these sounds as a kind of language that I was trying to understand,« he says. »I paid close attention to differences between sounds in motion, rhythmic patterns, and dense textures.« He further describes this as an inherently corporeal endeavour, quite literally becoming all ears and internalising the different sounds.

This process of concretion led to one of abstraction when Peter translated the source material and its psycho-physical reverberations into new musical structures. He applied repetition, densification, and recombination to unlock their true potential. Across its five tracks, the album sets literally unheard-of sounds into motion, creating intricate dynamics without ever overwhelming its listeners. »changing bodies« was born out of listening intently and physically.
It is recommended to listen to it in the exact same way.

Athens-based percussionist and sound artist Yorgos Stavridis makes a stark, physical debut for Heat Crimes with »Solo Percussion«, a set of one-take improvisations that approach percussion as a field of friction between body, objects, space, and sound. Working with membranes, metals, found objects, and feedback systems, Stavridis foregrounds timbre, texture, and spatial presence, collapsing distinctions between instrument, environment, and recording apparatus.

Microphones and speakers are treated as unstable instruments in their own right, introducing opaqueness, resistance, and feedback into the performative chain. Scrapes, low-end pressure, brittle metallic chatter, and sudden bursts of resonance emerge through close bodily engagement with surfaces and materials, each piece documenting a specific configuration of objects, gestures, and acoustic conditions. Performed and recorded live, »Solo Percussion« captures sound in its most contingent state; situational, physical, and irreducibly present. Eschewing narrative, pulse, or formal development, the record sits squarely in Heat Crimes’ lineage of process-led, uncompromising sonic research, where listening becomes an active, tactile act and sound itself is the primary event.

This release represents the musical union of two friends who, despite the distance, have always found in music the place where they stay close. This EP is the proof that when the connection is real, sound becomes common ground - a space to share moments, ideas, and energy beyond geography.

Both artists have been devoted to physical formats from the very beginning, especially vinyl. They have always been record collectors, and that passion shapes the intention behind this project: a work conceived with the depth, respect, and materiality that only vinyl can convey. This EP is more than music; it is a cultural object that preserves a way of understanding techno.

Creatively, Truncate and Pushmann set out to merge their sonic identities. The result is an EP charged with strength, built for the dancefloor, and defined by a clear aesthetic: raw energy, firm rhythm, and a contemporary reading of hardgroove and jackin. These are intense, direct tracks - the kind that emerge when two visions complement each other effortlessly.

In a scene often driven by speed and overstimulation, this release stands out for its authenticity. It is fast, funky techno, yes, but crafted with soul, intention, and emotional depth. It does not chase trends; it delivers groove, substance, and a recognisable sonic character from the first bar.

Inspired by rave culture and the pure roots of hardgroove, this EP offers a journey that blends functionality, sensitivity, and force. A project that reinforces LILA's philosophy: preserving the essence of techno and supporting those who create it with passion.

Repress Orange Vinyl

Endlich können die Millionen Fans von "Stranger Things" ihre Leidenschaft für ihre Lieblingsserie durch den Kauf von physischen Produkten (vor allem LPs, aber auch CDs und sogar Kassetten, eine Anspielung auf die 80er Jahre als zentrales Thema der Serie) zum Ausdruck bringen! Noch mehr als in den vorherigen Staffeln spielt die Musik eine wichtige Rolle in der Erzählung, insbesondere das Kate-Bush-Phänomen "Running up that hill", das natürlich im Soundtrack enthalten ist, sowie "Pass The Dutchie" von Musical Youth und "You Spin Me Round" von Dead or Alive, die in den ersten Episoden sehr auffällig waren. Supererwartetes Kultprodukt: Vorbestellungsstart am 1. Juli, wenn die zweite Hälfte von Staffel 4 startet. Enfin les millions de fans de "Stranger Things" vont pouvoir matérialiser leur passion pour leur série préférée en achetant en physique (surtout le LP, mais aussi le CD et même la cassette, clin d'oeil aux 80's thème central de la série) ! Plus encore que pour les saisons précédentes la musique joue un role prépondérant dans la narration avec en particulier le phénomène Kate Bush « Running up that hill » évidemment présent sur la BOF ainsi que Pass The Dutchie de Musical Youth, You Spin Me Round de Dead or Alive très remarqués dans les premiers épisodes. Produit culte super attendu : lancement de précommande à ne pas manquer pour le 1er juillet, date de lancement de la 2e partie de la saison 4.

On her debut LP 'Memoria', songwriter/producer Lilian Mikorey aka PILLBERT contemplates themes of identity and belonging, hardships and heartbreak in her signature blend of bendy folk guitars, field recordings and intimate vocals.
Moving to London from Munich, not yet 20 years old, Mikorey realized she was leaving her home behind for good. The subsequent state of being lost and alone in a place too temporary to start building the foundation for a new one led her to question the concept of home itself.
Is it friends? Family? A house?
"I started collecting objects, bones, sticks, stones and kept them close", she says, as to create a cosmos traveling with her.
"I was tracing the actual feeling of being home to the point where I built a dreamhouse in my head, as an idea, just to evoke that feeling." Soon enough she would learn that yielding to the yearning of actually going to that house, must be an inevitably sad experience.
A photo she took on a family visit to East-Munich became a reference and starting point for Memoria. It was a small house in her neighbourhood, the windows lit as dusk sets in. To Mikorey, it looked haunting, radiating warmth but somehow looking abandoned at the some time.
"I wanted to make music that sounds like this photo"
She started recording the sounds of the objects she had gathered and of her surroundings, building an archive and sonic material to work with.
From her mid-teens she had learned to produce with Ableton and now she picked up the guitar, too, learning it autodidactically by playing around, creating sounds.
At some point in the process, she realized it's okay to be lost for a while and by enduring the feeling, there's room for something new to grow, far off from any general idea of what home should mean.

The album, over the course of 10 tracks, traces these three phases of building a home in your head, realizing it's not a remedy, nor forever and coming to terms with it. You've grown in the process and the album is a guiding light for everyone who strives to do so, too.

On »Empty Room,« David Granström works with slow transformations, cyclical and isometric patterns as well as just intonation as a way to create harmonic stability, allowing his long-form pieces to develop their own unique temporal and spatial qualities. A prolific figure in Stockholm’s experimental drone scene and a collaborator of Hallow Ground label mates Maria W Horn and Mats Erlandsson, the Swedish composer navigates through moments of quietude and crushing volume on these five tracks. Sonically and atmospherically, the pieces on »Empty Room« simultaneously call to mind Fennesz’s most meditative work or the physical experience of seeing Sunn O))) live, blending guitar recordings and synthesised sounds with forceful effects similar to those of Mario Díaz de Leon’s Oneirogen project while still being as moving and delicate as Alessandro Cortini’s solo work. The album is marked by melodies and harmonies that are the product of a peculiar working process that turned the composer into an intent listener collaborating with, rather than simply using technology.

Having been invited by the self-organising artist group The Non Existent Center for a residency to Ställbergs Gruva, a defunct iron ore mine in Sweden’s Bergslagen region, Granström took his guitar as a starting point for his compositional work that heavily relies on real-time sound synthesis. »I seldomly use the instrument as a sound source in the final compositions and rather transcribe and orchestrate the harmonic structures using sound synthesis,« he explains. »On this album however, I chose to include the actual recordings of the guitar in order to extend the spectra between non-referential synthetic sounds and embodied referential sounds.« Working with precise tunings in order to blend the timbre of the synthesis with the harmonic structures of the composition, he created composite sound objects in which the harmonic elements blend into each other.

Through the re-amplification of synthetic musical materials from the inside of the abandoned mine, his original compositions were enriched with site-specific sound qualities before he further refined them in a singular working process. Granström works with algorithmic and generative processes, using the SuperCollider programming environment and thus blurring the lines between generative and creative forms of composition. »One of the things that I like about this way of working is that it creates a distance between myself as a composer and myself as a listener of the music that is produced entirely by the system,« he says. Granström’s technologically aided eschewing of the conventions of composing doesn’t make the end result any less personal, however. By listening again and again to the newly generated output, Granström simply took on a different role in the process of finalising the music, with the technology and the sounds becoming his co-authors.

By creating systems that generate music, he gains a new perspective on (musical) time, says Granström. »There doesn't have to be a fixed length to the music at all,« he explains. »And by writing music with this in mind, my focus tends to shift towards writing cyclical structures that gradually change and transform over time.« Simple parts, in other words, that emerge as the five complex wholes that form »Empty Room,« a record that itself seems to take on different forms with every new listen.

Zeitkratzer director Reinhold Friedl and his ensemble present new compositions, grounded on Domenico Scarlatti's piano sonata F-minor K.466. Commissioned by the dance company Rubato and dedicated to Mario Bertoncini (1932-2019).

Little is known about Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). His music is, so to speak, left to its own devices: free, cheeky, playful, sonorous, surprising. Harmonically strolling again and again into unforeseen regions, the ear leads, not the theory; and also the fingers get their right: playful and haptic it goes. Scarlatti explained, "since nature has given me ten fingers and my instrument provides employment for all, I see no reason why I should not use all ten of them."

Freedom, friction and listening pleasure instead of convention: "He knew quite well that he had disregarded all the rules of composition in his piano pieces, but asked whether his deviation from the rules offended the ear? He believes there is almost no other rule than that of not offending the only sense whose object is music - the ear."

Reinhold Friedl applied this principle and composed the music for a choreography by dance company Rubato. Dance music drawn from Scarlatti, who was so inspired by dance music. The material of the piano sonata F-minor K.466 is twisted anew in all its richness, shifted back and forth, declined, frozen, noisified, sound structures extracted, floating. Those who know the sonata, will more than smell it’s shadows. Dedicated to Mario Bertoncini (Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza) who was particularly fond of K.466, on which all the music presented here is grounded.

"Wild flowers", Barbara Zubers had once called Scarlatti's music. Let them bloom.

Valby Vokalgruppe was initiated in 2008 by Anja Jacobsen, the Danish collective’s current line-cup is completed by Lil Lacy, Sonja LaBianca, Cæcilie Trier and Laura Marie Madsen. The group has written and performed a large number of cross-aesthetic pieces over the years, including an album Bah New Era released in 2012 on Eget Værelse.

Sharpened to its core, the group dives deep into rhythmical architectures built almost solely from the voice - think Platonic solids reimagined as sound objects. Think trance without electronics. These new compositions are compressed, sparkling forms — vocal geometries that spin, collide, and dissolve through repetition. From inside the circle: radical precision, soft dissonance, and playful intuition guide the way. The group explores the voice not as melody alone, but as material — vibrating, modulating, refracting.

Solids For Voices transcends into deep concentration calling for a clear state of mind, in recognition of an increasingly fragmented and incoherent reality. Valby Vokalgruppe endeavours a total absorption into the voice, the rhythm and the trance.

'Total Spook' mixtape is Artetetra's homage to the forgotten cassette and CD culture of mass-distributed commercial Halloween sound effects, horror tales, and spooky music productions across the eighties and nineties.
Mainly produced in the U.S. these objects featured some of the famous names of the entertainment and commercial industry such as Prince's Dr. Fink (yes, that synth master), Elvira, the Mistress of the Dark and Hallmark as well as unknown and anonymous creatives and artists. In these tracks engineers, musicians and producers arguably had carte blanche in experimenting with extreme samples and vocal manipulation, time-based effects, extended techniques, spooky sound fonts and stock sound effects developing their unique ideas around the sound ambience of the Halloween and horror imagery's campy cliches.
After digging around 30 hours of material gathered from dedicated YouTube channels and playlists such as the ones created by 'Beetlemuse' and 'Caleb Jones', I have compiled a 100' mixtape showcasing some of the most endearing, weird and experimental sound designs long forgotten in the vaporware-like consumer culture of the '80s and ‘90s.

Recorded in Switzerland and mastered in Madrid, on Deságua Mello blends classical harp training with experimental techniques, creating a rich sonic journey that pushes the boundaries of the instrument. Brazilian harpist and composer Marina Mello presents Deságua, her solo debut released by the Peruvian label Buh Records. Based in Zurich, Mello has developed a unique and expressive approach to the harp, combining her classical training with a deep exploration of the instrument's sonic possibilities. Deságua is the result of this process: an intimate and expansive work that traverses sonic landscapes rich in contrast and texture. In the artist's own words, this album is a synthesis of material developed through her musical practice. The title refers to the Portuguese word that describes the moment a river flows into the sea. This concept guides the album's sonic narrative, in which each piece functions as a tributary flowing into an immersive and unexpected listening experience. From bittersweet whale-like sounds to destructive, unsettling, and shattering noise provocations, she explores, senses, and transcends the musical boundaries of her instrument. The album presents a wide range of sounds and styles, yet maintains a strong internal coherence through its technical and conceptual exploration of the harp. Mello performs on both lever and pedal harps, employing a range of non-traditional techniques: preparing the instrument with objects, using guitar effects pedals, detuning the strings, and using close mic recording to capture the subtlest sounds and the shifts that lie between them. The result is a collection of pieces that move between the melodic and the dissonant. Deságua does not shy away from repetition, noise, or raw textures. Instead, it embraces them fully, situating the album at the crossroads of contemporary music, improvisation, and electronic experimentation.

Skin/Glove is the second LP by Belgian musician Mathieu Serruys, following the release of his B.A.A.D.M. debut On Germaine Dulac back in 2014. Compiled over the course of a fortnight, the record features material recorded over the past five years: creaks of ice buckling under heat, thick hums like nauseating headaches, plumes of evaporated organ hymns, frostbitten crackles of dying tape loops. These disparate sources are unified by the pervasive corrosion of pain and time, which presses into the surface of every sonic object. Melodies splinter under the strain of being pulled apart; drones tremble under the gathering gravity of fatigue; dissonances flicker like candles on the brink of extinguishment. Yet despite the emotional density of the material itself, the process of composition provides a route toward comprehending how these sounds and experiences are connected. Skin/Glove reads as a constellatory map of adversity and grief, beautifully coalesced through the cathartic distance of retrospect, haunted by the sibilant whispers of distinct memories in dialogue, latticed by lesions that fatefully and poignantly intersect.

Clear Vinyl. Mit ihrem Debüt The Empty Space Between A Seamount And Shock Headed Julia hinterließen The Black Cat's Eye 2023 ein bemerkenswertes Echo in der Szene - ein energetisches und atmosphärisches Werk, das Psychedelic- und Postrock-Elemente auf einzigartige Weise vereinte und schnell vergriffen war. Nun, zweieinhalb Jahre später, präsentiert das Frankfurter Quintett sein neues Album Decrypting Dreams Of Weird Animals And Strange Objects. Auch diesmal lotet die Band die Grenzbereiche zwischen Psychedelic-, Kraut- und Post-Rock aus. Die Musik oszilliert zwischen hypnotischem Drive, verträumten Gitarrenflächen und dynamischen Spannungsbögen. Das Album umfasst sechs Songs, deren Spannweite von fünf- bis zehnminütigen Klangreisen reicht. Neu ist, dass diesmal zwei Bandmitglieder Kompositionen beisteuerten: Neben Gitarrist und Bandgründer Christian Blaser stammt die Hälfte des Materials von Bassist Jens Cappel. Sein kraftvoller, direkter Stil ergänzt Blasers atmosphärischen Ansatz ideal. Blaser: ,Auf dem Debütalbum stammten alle Stücke von mir. Als Gründer der Band lag mein Fokus zunächst darauf, eine musikalische Vision und Richtung vorzugeben. Jens war zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch nicht so in die kreativen Prozesse eingebunden, obwohl er ein außerordentlich talentierter und umtriebiger Musiker ist. Er veröffentlicht regelmäßig großartige neue Musik auf den Bandcamp-Seiten seiner eigenen Projekte, zum Beispiel The Black Black Paint. Als es dann an das Schreiben neuer Songs für das zweite Album ging, brachte Jens einige wirklich tolle Demos mit ein." Stilistisch verbindet das Album, wie schon der Vorgänger, klassische 70er-Einflüsse mit zeitgenössischer Rockmusik - man hört Anklänge an Can, Motorpsycho, Neu!, Indie- und Stonerrock, aber auch an David Gilmours Gitarrenästhetik. Die Musik ist instrumental, einzig im finalen Stück ,The Magic Balloon" übernimmt Jens Cappel den Gesang. Ähnlich rätselhaft wie bei der ersten Platte klingt der Albumtitel: Decrypting Dreams Of Weird Animals And Strange Objects. Blaser erklärt: ,Der Titel ist inspiriert von einem faszinierenden Aspekt der US-amerikanischen TV-Serie Westworld. Dort werden humanoiden Robotern Gefühle und Träume einprogrammiert. Doch weil diese Androiden dadurch immer menschlicher werden, geraten sie außer Kontrolle - die Programmierer suchen daraufhin den Fehler in den von ihnen geschriebenen Quellcodes, analysieren die künstlichen Gefühle, Gedanken und Träume mithilfe ihrer Computerprogramme. Übertragen auf unsere Realität ist der Titel durchaus ironisch gemeint. Unsere moderne Technik vermittelt den Eindruck, wir könnten jeden Bereich unseres Lebens vollständig steuern. Selbstoptimierung und die Kapitalisierung des eigenen Ichs werden zum obersten Prinzip. Eine trügerische Illusion, denn wir sind nur winzige Teile eines größeren, für uns unergründlichen Ganzen. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellt sich die Frage: Was kann Kunst zu unserer Wahrnehmung der Welt beitragen? Welche Bedeutung hat es, sich mit musikalischen Mitteln auszudrücken? Durch Technik, Mathematik, Physik und reine Vernunft kommen wir dem Wunder des Lebens und dem Sinn unserer Existenz nicht wirklich näher. Was uns bleibt, ist das Ritual, die Beschwörung, die Ekstase. Musik, Tanz, Malerei, Geschichten - sie offenbaren für kurze Momente den wahren Kern des Lebens, richten unser Verhältnis dazu neu aus und verbinden uns mit dem Universum." Aufgenommen hat die Band wieder im Tonstudio Bieber in Offenbach am Main. Oli Rüger, Studiobetreiber und selbst Musiker, hat langjährige Erfahrung mit dem Aufnehmen von Gitarrenbands. Innerhalb von drei Tagen spielte die Band die Basic Tracks live ein, anschließend ergänzten sie diese durch Overdubs. Rüger war auch als Co-Produzent beteiligt. Cappel: ,Oli hat das richtige Händchen für die perfekte Balance zwischen rohen, heftigen und filigranen Sounds, ohne gleichzeitig den Blick für das große Ganze zu verlieren." Das Werk wurde final von Krautrock-Legende Eroc gemastert - eine passende Wahl für eine Band, die sich nicht nur als Erben der 70er sieht, sondern diese Tradition aktiv in die Gegenwart weiterdenkt. Das monochrome Cover-Artwork unterstreicht eindrucksvoll die dunkle Atmosphäre der Musik. Es verdeutlicht den konzeptionellen Ansatz der Band, Musik nicht nur als Klang, sondern als Raum, Konzept und visionäre Erzählform zu begreifen. Das Titelbild - eine scheinbar endlose Spirale, Symbol für DNA-Strukturen und Ewigkeit - wurde vom italienischen Grafiker Daniele Stochino entworfen. Die Innenseite des Gatefolds verbindet dieses Motiv mit einer Illustration des in Berlin lebenden Grafikers und Musikers Max Emil Hurlebaus. Durch farbige Akzente eröffnet sie kontrastreich neue Perspektiven.

Developed over three years across residencies, tours, and periods of deep listening, “Your Whistle Tells of Landscape” finds Australian sound artist Alexandra Spence continuing her investigations into the perceptual entanglements of sound, place, memory, and imagination. Like much of the artist’s work, it unfolds at the liminal edge between the real and the imagined — between what is heard and what is remembered.

Composed from a constellation of materials gathered across sites and seasons — snowscapes recorded in Vancouver, insect choruses from a Sydney backyard, ceramic fragments unearthed while mudlarking with tinysound — it renders an intimate cartography of experience: one shaped equally by ecological resonance and internal drift. Each piece traces a kind of imaginary geography, where sonic ephemera become proxies for topography, weather, or myth.

The album is informed by time spent at EMS (Stockholm) and MESS (Melbourne), where Spence deepened her engagement with microtonality and tuned feedback systems, and by dialogues with sympathetic artists such as Tashi Wada and Patrick Farmer. Sound materials were sourced from Serge Modular systems, a custom lyre built by Tim Wall, amplified objects, handmade electronics, and Spence’s own field recordings captured within rockpools, beneath sand, and among a flock of sheep in the French Pyrenees. On “Magenta,” a collaboration with Delphine Dora, the domestic and mythic intertwine, as layers of voice, environmental recordings, and Halldorophone feedback drift in and out of one another like overlapping weather systems.

Despite its diverse material palette, the album resists spectacle or accumulation. Instead, it moves with a quiet sense of continuity and a rich interiority — less a sequence of compositions than a set of situated attunements. Across its duration, sounds seem to murmur, glint, or hover right at the edge of presence, invoking a listening practice that is as much about orientation as it is about reception. These are pieces not simply about place, but of place — etched with the grains of time, vibration, and breath.

Steve Hauschildt returns after 6 years with a new album titled Aeropsia. After a transcontinental relocation from the US to Tbilisi, Georgia, the electronic composer emerges from a personal and global transformation to explore themes of perceptual distortion, disconnection, and renewal.

Aeropsia (which roughly translates as “seeing the air”) refers to a visual phenomenon in which objects appear to float or shimmer, often due to changes in pressure, perception, atmospheric shifts or neurological disturbance. This becomes a metaphor for the liminality that informs the record: blurry visions, dreamlike displacements, and the fragile membrane separating what is seen from what is felt.

In the years since his last solo release, Hauschildt’s world has been marked by relocation and a growing sense of global turbulence. These experiences became the raw material for a work that navigates institutional haze and uncertainty itself. The result is music that employs decay as method, structure as entropy, and mutation as expression.

While Aeropsia remains subjective in its vision, Hauschildt invited two previous collaborators to expand the album’s gravitational pull. Cellist Lia Kohl, who previously performed on Nonlin, returns and brings a tactile warmth to select tracks, while guitarist Michael Vallera threads spectral harmonics into the mix. The album’s electronic foundation and its tactile elements meet in a state of luminous suspension to navigate the shifting in physical and psychological terrain.

»Chitin« captures Berlin-based duo Narval (Peter Strickmann and Evgenija Wassilew) in a series of recordings made during a 2025 residency in the village of Schöppingen, Münsterland. Known for their use of everyday objects, self-built wind and percussion instruments, feedback systems, and small-scale electronics, Narval treat the performance space itself as a collaborator. In Schöppingen, this meant farmhouses, a parish church, a sculptor’s studio, and surrounding cornfields — each site imprinting its acoustics and atmosphere onto the performances. The result is a set of recordings where birds, insects, and ambient traces of rural life seep into the music, blurring the boundary between intentional gesture and environmental chance.

The title refers to chitin: the hard-yet-flexible material that forms insect shells, fungal walls, and crustacean exoskeletons. Like tape or rural matter, it is at once protective and permeable, tactile and intimate — qualities mirrored in the album’s sound world. By working with a deliberately limited palette of tools, Narval allow small sonic details to accumulate into shifting durations, giving each piece the strange, layered texture of surfaces both organic and mechanical. Chitin offers a portrait of site-specific listening where the line between instrument and environment continually dissolves.

Peter Strickmann – objects, smartphone, ceramophone, cornfield, iron bar Evgenija Wassilew – AM radio, prepared Stylophone, feedback, smartphone, Bastl Kastle, iron bar Recorded by Peter Strickmann and Evgenija Wassilew Mastered by Jacob Calland

Off The Record (faitiche 39), the new album by French collagist Roméo Poirier, is an amusing romp through the discarded history of recording studios. It contains fourteen miniatures based on accidental recordings of studio talk, revealing things that were never meant for the public: we hear instructions from studio staff, scraps of talk between musicians, or just microphones being adjusted, as well as false notes, false starts: everyone stops. Start again: 1, 2, 3, 4!

Poirier’s approach recalls Accumulation, an artform practiced by Arman, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri that involved piling up everyday items into assemblages. The objects themselves often remained unaltered, the artistic gesture consisting in the careful curating of a distinctive selection. Poirier’s audio collages explore similar terrain. The fourteen pieces on Off the Record combine more than a thousand found sounds from studio archives into complex miniatures. The audio content of these outtakes is twisted, stretched, cut, reassembled, slowed down and accelerated. Voices cut into a microgroove, from a very old recording, intertwine with digital voices gleaned from YouTube. All of them in dialogue, engaging the listener with the impression of being part of a new music group.

Poirier uses the mundane routine of setting up before the actual recording gets underway to tell a universal story about working in a recording studio. And he manages something few achieve, transforming specialist knowledge into a narrative whose beauty goes far beyond its immediate subject. It speaks to everyone, because the story is told in a musical language that is open and accessible, evoking magical images reminiscent of Oz – a world consisting less of events than of camp hallucinations, captured in grainy black-and-white photographs. En passant, Poirier shows us how the notion of material accumulation can produce great art.

Written and produced by Roméo Poirier, mastered by Stephan Mathieu, photos by Roméo Poirier, graphic design by Tim Tetzner.

Since 2006, listeners have been curious about the origin of the label name Italians Do It Better. Some say it's an homage to Italo Disco, others guess it's related to ancestry, but in fact it's a nod to the iconic T-shirt Madonna wears in the "Papa Don't Preach" video circa 1986.
Fast forward to a world pandemic... To encourage creativity & lift spirits, Italians Do It Better President, Megan Louise asked every artist “If you could cover your favourite Madonna song…What would it be?”

As a tribute to their label muse & the impact Madonna’s music has had on the world around us, Italians Do It Better are sharing a compilation of covers simply titled “Italians Do It Better”. One of the tracks (“Lucky Star” by Club Intl) is even produced by Max Kamins, the son of Mark Kamins, the New York DJ who helped break Madonna in the early 1980's. From the experience he says “Dance music was the soundtrack of my early childhood. Working on "Lucky Star" reconnected me not only to my father, but also reminded me that a good song is timeless".

Executive produced by Johnny Jewel, the compilation is a passport to 20 covers from the bedrooms of 19 artists across 10 different countries.

Marja Ahti is a Swedish artist living in Turku, Finland. She works with found sounds, objects and electronics, creating auditory assemblages that reveal a profound sensitivity to sound’s tactile potential. This new record sees her palette expand to include more recognisable acoustic instrumentation, albeit working in collaboration with musicians who are already reconfiguring how those instruments can sound.

Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth has its roots in a tape piece presented at Lampo in Chicago. Ahti then started working with Isak Hedtjärn (clarinet), Ryan Packard (percussion) and My Hellgren (cello) at the electronic music studios (EMS) in Stockholm. Incorporating recordings from those sessions, Ahti presented a new iteration of the work at the Seventh Edition Festival for Other Music in February 2024 with the trio performing live on stage whilst Ahti helmed the mixing desk, spatialising a specially made tape part through the INA GRM’s Acousmonium speaker orchestra. The piece has since gone through several further iterations before arriving at the version we have here on the LP's B-side where immense bass pressure and high frequency tones buffer restless amplified breath and scrape that folds over itself with extraordinary dynamics and subterranean activity before giving way to gorgeous resonant forms and passages of ritual purpose and sheer, unmistakeable beauty.

The A-side is Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth’s gentle double. Still Life with Poppies, Mirror and Two Clouds offers a companion reconfiguration of Ahti’s resynthesised percussion sustain and the same recordings of Hedtjärn and Hellgren from EMS, but here they’re nestled in a sonic landscape of calm and restraint that gives them a wholly other character. Ahti also draws on older recordings she’d made of Sholto Dobie’s diy pipe organs and uses these to create repeating patterns and flourishes of sliding pitches that emerge unexpected out of cycling passages of Ahti’s clear struck metal, destabilising electronic interventions and minimal piano figures.

Marja Ahti: “I’ve been fascinated with the kind of elemental quality the sounds I'm using have such as airy sounds or earthy, wooden sounds. These qualities can also be found in wind instruments and percussion and the musicians I worked with on Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth are really good at enhancing these qualities in their playing. I wanted to have this connection between found sounds, field recordings, or pre-recorded sounds, objects, and material, and see where these sounds might meet each other, and hopefully blend is a natural way without a divide between instrumental music, or acoustic music, or electronic music. But also, when you bring in people they come with their personalities and their ideas which is also energizing and brings surprising things into the collaboration that I couldn't come up with myself. I was really interested in making this a proper collaboration and not just coming up with the piece and giving it to them. We had the sessions at EMS where we could share ideas and Isak, Ryan and My could bring in their own ideas. Making recordings there gave me time to process these ideas and to also approach them in the same way that I would work with any other sound.”

The Vestige is the first fruit of a new intergenerational collaboration between Giuseppe Ielasi, a quietly prolific key contributor to the European experimental music scene for over twenty years, and Jack Sheen, a young composer-conductor-sound artist from Manchester whose recent projects have seen him moving seamlessly from enigmatic chamber music composition and installations to conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Their materials and working methods differ significantly, with Ielasi having focussed for many years on electro-acoustic techniques alongside his ongoing commitment to the guitar, and Sheen primarily composing for traditional instruments. More important, though, is what they share: a fascination with what Sheen calls “mysterious, liminal musical material,” using irregular repetition and cyclical forms to create structures at once alive with activity and almost static, as well as a rigorous exploration of spatial diffusion and the interaction of sound event and environment. Working individually with a library of acoustic instrument sounds from Sheen’s recent projects and Ielasi’s guitar, the pair eventually met for several days at Ielasi’s home studio in Monza, sculpting the fourteen pieces that make up The Vestige. Like Ielasi and Sheen’s solo works, the record shows an exquisite attention to details of sequencing and pacing, the sound palette and compositional approach consistent throughout while each piece asserts its own identity. The twenty-five seconds of the opening piece serve as an entrée into the record’s distinctive world of sound: repeated chirps fluctuate in volume as they move across the stereo spectrum, woven between strangled snatches of string glissando against a backdrop of percussive ticks, long tones, and white noise. Across the remaining thirteen pieces, Ielasi and Sheen sketch further dimensions of the ambiguous space, where distinctions between pitch and noise, repetition and irregularity, electronic and acoustic remain pointedly unclear. As the record’s title suggests, the origins of the sounds we hear have become remote: while at moments we get flashes of timbres and attacks that could come from wind instruments, bowed strings, or prepared guitar, these remain vestigial traces, glimpsed through a veil of shifting white noise textures. These textures are themselves difficult to trace, suggesting artefacts of the recording process, electronic synthesis, amplified room sound, rubbed instruments or objects. The Vestige shows an unusual degree of attention to frequency range as a compositional tool, something it shares with the hyper-subtle variations of Ielasi’s electroacoustic works and the deliberately ‘unbalanced’ midrange-heavy ensemble of Sheen’s Sub. Here, movement between episodes is as much about adding or removing a frequency band as it is about changes in density, harmonic content, or instrumental texture. Tracks are marked by the sudden appearance of subbass or exaggeration of high frequencies in otherwise similar material, contributing to our sense that these fourteen pieces are like different views on a scene that we can never quite see clearly. While calling up a range of past music, from the early works of Rolf Julius to Simha Arom’s recordings of layered polyrhythms embedded in the background sounds of central African villages to the temporal distortions and layered hiss of DJ Screw, the alluring and disconcerting world of The Vestige is entirely its own.