There is a particular kind of freedom that comes with getting older: the gradual realisation that one no longer has to impress anybody, follow the latest musical fashion or pretend that every disappointment was secretly a valuable learning experience. Russ Tolman's "Stray" operates from something close to this position. Its ten songs move through country, folk, rock, soul and Americana with the unhurried confidence of a songwriter who has spent decades learning what to keep and what to discard. There are no elaborate gestures towards reinvention, no desperate attempts to sound younger, and mercifully few signs of an artist checking the charts before deciding which guitar to pick up. Instead, Tolman offers a collection of compact, carefully arranged songs populated by imperfect characters, unresolved relationships and the occasional glimmer of hard-earned optimism. The album's title might suggest someone who has lost their way, but these songs sound more like the work of someone who has finally stopped asking for directions.

Tolman's musical history stretches back to the late seventies, when he formed Suspects with Steve Wynn and Kendra Smith, before founding True West in 1980. The latter became associated with the Paisley Underground, the loose Los Angeles scene that brought together psychedelic guitar music, jangling melodies and a healthy disregard for the boundaries between garage rock, folk and country. True West developed a darker, more hypnotic approach than some of their contemporaries, releasing two albums and touring extensively, including a stint opening for R.E.M. during the "Fables of the Reconstruction" tour. Tolman left the band in 1985 to pursue a solo career, beginning with "Totem Poles and Glory Holes" (1986). Subsequent records such as "Down In Earthquake Town", "Goodbye Joe", "Road Movie" and "Sweet Spot" established him as a songwriter with a strong attachment to American roots traditions, though his work has never been especially interested in observing genre boundaries. Alongside recording, he has also been involved in label management and reissue production, a career trajectory suggesting that he has spent as much time preserving musical history as adding to it.

Seven years have passed since "Goodbye El Dorado", and "Stray" finds Tolman working with a small group of musicians whose contributions are fundamental to its character. Tom Heyman, known for his work with Chuck Prophet, Hiss Golden Messenger and Alejandro Escovedo, supplies guitar and pedal steel, bringing just the right amount of melodic ache to the arrangements. Mike Coykendall, whose credits include M. Ward and She & Him, handles drums and backing vocals, while San Francisco musician Rusty Miller contributes bass, piano and harmonies. Tolman has surrounded himself with players who understand the value of restraint. Their performances are lively without being showy, and the arrangements leave enough room for the songs to breathe. Nobody seems particularly interested in demonstrating how many instruments they can play before the next chorus arrives.

"Streets Of Denim", co-written with longtime associate Steve Wynn, is an effective opening statement. Its concise arrangement combines a country-rock foundation with a melodic immediacy that recalls the more accessible side of the Paisley Underground, while the guitar work adds a slightly weathered edge. There is a sense of looking back without becoming trapped in the exercise. The song's subject matter, concerned with memory and the uncertain significance of past encounters, fits Tolman's recurring interest in the way ordinary moments acquire emotional weight over time. It is a strong introduction to the album, and its brevity is part of its appeal: the song makes its point and leaves before anybody can start explaining what it all means.

"My Way Back" shifts towards soul, with a melodic sensibility that nods to Smokey Robinson and the Detroit tradition. The song's determination to recover lost emotional ground is familiar territory, but Tolman avoids turning it into a grand declaration of romantic desperation. There is something appealingly modest about its persistence, as if the narrator has accepted that reconciliation may require more patience than a dramatic gesture. The rhythm section keeps things moving, while the backing vocals lend the chorus a warmth that never becomes sugary. "Make It Fine" continues in a more reflective vein, its gentle country-rock arrangement allowing Tolman's vocal delivery to carry the emotional burden. His voice is not conventionally polished, and that is precisely why it works. It has the grain of someone who has accumulated a few stories and no longer feels obliged to make every one of them sound heroic.

"It's Because" introduces a little more guitar-driven energy, with Heyman's playing giving the song a welcome bite. The album's balance between roots music and rock becomes particularly effective here: the arrangement has enough momentum to avoid becoming overly contemplative, while the songwriting retains its preference for ambiguity over easy resolution. "Why Do We Fight" is one of the two outside compositions, written by k.d. lang and Laura Veirs for their 2016 collaboration with Neko Case, "case/lang/veirs". Tolman approaches it with an understated sense of gravity, allowing the song's questioning character to emerge without adding unnecessary drama. Its presence also broadens the album's emotional vocabulary, introducing a perspective that sits comfortably alongside Tolman's own writing.

The other cover, Arthur Alexander's "If It's Really Got To Be This Way", draws on a deeper strand of American soul and country songwriting. Alexander's compositions have often been interpreted by artists from very different musical backgrounds, and this particular choice suits Tolman's affection for songs in which heartbreak and resignation are inseparable. The performance avoids the temptation to imitate the original's historical setting. Instead, it becomes part of the album's own musical world, with the pedal steel and restrained rhythm section giving it a gently bruised character. It is a reminder that a good song does not require constant updating. Sometimes it simply needs another voice that understands what it is carrying.

The title track "Stray" is among the album's more introspective moments. Its position gives the record a centre of gravity, bringing together the themes of displacement, independence and emotional uncertainty that recur throughout the collection. Tolman's writing is at its best when it allows contradictions to remain unresolved. The characters in these songs are neither tragic heroes nor uncomplicated survivors; they are people who have made decisions, lived with the consequences and occasionally discovered that the alternative might not have been any better. "Our Love" moves into a softer, more affectionate register, while "Back To Yesterday" revisits the familiar pull of nostalgia. Yet the latter is not simply an invitation to romanticise the past. Tolman seems aware that memory has a habit of improving the lighting and quietly removing the less attractive furniture.

Closing with "Hello Rising Sun", the album leaves behind a relatively optimistic impression. Its title might suggest a conventional gesture towards renewal, but the song's understated character avoids any suggestion that the world has suddenly become a more cooperative place. The sun rises regardless of our personal circumstances, which is perhaps one of its more dependable qualities. The arrangement is warm and melodic, bringing the record to a close without manufacturing a grand finale. After thirty minutes spent among old attachments, second thoughts and uncertain destinations, a little daylight is welcome.

What makes "Stray" satisfying is its refusal to treat experience as something that must be converted into wisdom. Tolman's songs contain regret, affection, humour and resignation, but they rarely turn these emotions into slogans. The musical arrangements are equally economical. Heyman's pedal steel adds atmosphere without drowning the songs in country sentimentality; Coykendall's drumming provides movement without imposing unnecessary weight; Miller's piano and bass give the performances a comfortable sense of cohesion. The production allows the instruments to retain their character, favouring the intimacy of a well-rehearsed group over the immaculate surfaces of contemporary studio pop.

There is, admittedly, little here that will surprise listeners familiar with Tolman's previous work or the broader traditions from which he draws. The album's strengths lie elsewhere: in the quality of its melodies, the intelligence of its arrangements and the consistency of its songwriting. Its ten tracks last barely half an hour, but that compactness feels deliberate. Tolman has no interest in stretching a good idea until it becomes a lifestyle choice. "Stray" is a record made by someone who knows that a song can be complete without being definitive, and that growing older does not necessarily mean becoming more certain. Sometimes it simply means getting better at recognising which roads are worth taking, which people are worth keeping around and which arguments are best abandoned before the second verse. A little country twang helps, naturally.

There is something reassuringly unreasonable about Earth Logoff. While much contemporary electronic music seems intent on polishing every transient until it could be used as a dental instrument, the Berlin duo prefer to make their machines sound as though they have developed several incompatible personalities and are refusing medication. "Torments & Temptations", their third release, expands the project's peculiar mixture of industrial abrasion, speedcore impulses, mutant techno and noisecore with an unexpectedly broad assortment of samples, from brass-band eruptions to brittle 8-bit fragments. The result is a kind of mechanical carnival in which the attractions are operated by faulty wiring and the amusement-park staff appear to have joined a militant percussion ensemble. It is unruly, frequently funny and considerably more disciplined than its surface behaviour might suggest.

Earth Logoff is the project of RBRT and Sanaa, both formerly involved with the Berlin noise-rock group Antihairball. Their musical vocabulary has moved a considerable distance from conventional band arrangements. RBRT works with a self-programmed controller, sampling and electronic devices, while Sanaa supplies the physical force of analogue drums. The duo describe their music as a form of apocalyptic dance music, which is a reasonably accurate description provided one imagines the apocalypse taking place in a basement club where the sound system has been assembled from industrial scrap. Their previous releases, "Fungym" (2019) and "Tritium" (2022), established an interest in strange rhythmic structures, abrasive electronics and an almost cartoonish approach to sonic destruction. The present album develops those elements while introducing Sanaa's voice more prominently, adding a human presence to music that often seems to be arguing with its own circuitry.

The opening "dronose" sets the tone through a collision of electronic disturbance and rhythmic insistence. There is little interest in establishing a stable groove and then politely maintaining it for the benefit of dancers who have paid good money for predictable entertainment. Instead, the beat behaves like a machine with a loose connection: it catches, accelerates, stumbles and resumes with an almost irritating determination. The industrial components are rough-edged, but the arrangement has an eccentric sense of proportion, allowing abrupt changes and unexpected details to interrupt the forward motion. The track's short duration is important. Earth Logoff understand that chaos becomes less effective when it is allowed to explain itself for too long.

"Eilat" and "farad" continue this unstable relationship between rhythm and abrasion. The former suggests a peculiar kind of dance-floor functionality, with electronic patterns and percussive elements pushing against one another rather than settling into a conventional hierarchy. "farad" takes the electricity metaphor rather literally, with a title borrowed from the unit of electrical capacitance. One can imagine the duo enjoying the thought of a musical system that stores energy only to discharge it at inconvenient moments. Their arrangements frequently create the impression of several musical ideas attempting to occupy the same space, with no clear agreement about who has priority. Yet there is an underlying precision to the construction. The drums may sound unruly, but Sanaa's playing is remarkably controlled, negotiating abrupt changes and irregular time signatures without sacrificing the physical impact.

"labiacs" brings Sanaa's voice into the picture, and the effect is particularly revealing. The vocal presence does not soften the music or provide the reassuring melodic centre that a more conventional producer might have introduced. Instead, it adds another layer of human unpredictability to an already unstable environment. The voice can sound confrontational, playful or deliberately absurd, while the instrumental backing continues its electronic misbehaviour. The contrast is central to the album's appeal: the machinery seems to be malfunctioning, but the people operating it are clearly having a rather good time. There is even a distinctly impudent sense of humour in the way the track treats the conventions of industrial music, refusing to take its own aggression entirely seriously.

"boredub", the fifth track, offers a title that hints at dub's spaciousness while suggesting that the musicians may have become impatient with the genre's more meditative habits. Earth Logoff are not particularly interested in giving the listener time to contemplate the spiritual significance of a delayed snare. Their use of repetition is more abrasive, with rhythmic elements and electronic fragments producing a kind of distorted dance music that keeps changing its mind about what it wants to be. The track provides a useful transition into the second half, where the album becomes even more unpredictable.

"shove it" makes its intentions fairly clear without requiring an elaborate programme note. The title is an appropriately blunt gesture, and the music follows suit, combining forceful percussion with the duo's familiar taste for sudden changes in texture. "ugli igli" is another highlight, its deliberately awkward title matching the music's appetite for odd rhythmic turns and distorted electronic colours. The brass-like blasts and crude digital sounds contribute to the impression of a musical environment assembled from incompatible parts. Yet these elements are not simply thrown together for the sake of novelty. Their placement creates a peculiar sense of momentum, as though the music were constantly discovering new ways to trip over itself while somehow managing to keep moving.

The final stretch, represented by "strumpf" and "umpf" in the supplied tracklist, maintains the album's refusal to settle into a single mood. The rhythmic structures remain forceful, but their relationship with noise and electronic detail keeps shifting. There is something almost physical about the way the percussion occupies the foreground, while RBRT's electronics continually distort the surrounding space. The resulting music is danceable in the same way that navigating a badly maintained staircase can be an exercise in athletic coordination: possible, certainly, but not recommended without a little preparation. The duo's sense of humour is particularly effective here because it never neutralises the music's intensity. The absurdity and the aggression coexist, each making the other more convincing.

What makes "Torments & Temptations" interesting is the way it balances programmed control with the unpredictability of live performance. RBRT's self-built electronic system provides a broad range of sounds, from abrasive industrial textures to almost toy-like digital patterns, while Sanaa's drumming gives the music a muscular, physical dimension. Her vocal contributions further complicate the picture, preventing the project from becoming a purely mechanical exercise. The duo's history in noise rock is still audible in their disregard for conventional musical polish, but their present approach is more rhythmically adventurous and less dependent on the familiar dynamics of a guitar-based band. The result occupies an eccentric territory between industrial, techno, noisecore and a particularly deranged form of experimental pop.

Kitchen Leg Records is a fitting home for this sort of activity. The Berlin-based cassette label has developed a catalogue that favours independent, idiosyncratic music, often with a strong affinity for no wave, experimental rock, noise and eccentric pop. Its releases tend to value personality over stylistic respectability, and Earth Logoff fit that ethos rather neatly. The cassette format also suits the project's deliberately rough character: there is something appropriate about hearing such an unruly collection of sounds through a medium that has its own history of mechanical imperfections and occasional acts of betrayal.

For all its abrasive tendencies, "Torments & Temptations" is not simply an exercise in sonic punishment. Its most appealing quality is the sense of play that runs through the music. Earth Logoff understand that industrial noise does not have to spend every minute impersonating the soundtrack to a collapsing factory. It can be grotesque, rhythmic, absurd and even mischievously entertaining. Their music may depict a world in which technology has gone rogue, but the humans remain firmly in charge of the entertainment budget. In an age when digital systems increasingly promise to make everything seamless, efficient and frictionless, there is something oddly liberating about a record that celebrates malfunction as a creative resource. "Torments & Temptations" makes a persuasive case for the dance floor as a place where disorder can be organised, briefly, into something resembling joy. The building may be on fire, but at least the drums are still working.

German band Felsenreich has been around since 1998, but unless you're from Europe or the U.K., chances are good that you never heard of them. They've released a bunch of albums since their inception and have played many gigs and festivals including Wave-Gotik-Treffen. While 'Motif und Tempo' is their sixth studio album, it certainly does not tell the whole story of Felsenreich. Their first couple of albums - 'Am Ende Der Zeit' (2001) and 'Tiefe' (2004) were reviewed here at Chain D.L.K., the latter positively, the former- not so much. Since I'm among those that have no prior familiarity with Felsenreich, I felt obliged to listen to those albums, plus some of their later work preceding 'Motif und Tempo.' The conclusion I came to is that Felsenreich was definitely an interesting gothic/darkwave band. (I emphasize the word "was.") I can't say that I loved every track on each album I heard but some of their work was absolutely excellent. Their change of style on 'Motif und Tempo' sends the band in a middle-of-the-road direction that I don't think is doing them any favors...at least not here in the U.S.

Felsenreich's sound used to be grand and dramatic. When female vocalist Romy Unger joined the band in 2006 (or 2007?) she enriched their sound for a good long period. She has a voice that leans classical/operatic, perfect for goth/darkwave. She left the band in 2021 or so, and I believe Felsenreich lost something in her departure. Even their more neofolk acoustic album, ‘Blumen' (2017) was richer for her participation. With Romy gone, that leaves the trio of Mathias Sohn ((keyboards, vocals, trumpet); Carsten Schaller (guitar, vocals) and Renato Wesley (vocal, acoustic guitar) to carry on. 'Motif und Tempo' is an album of ten tracks, eight sung in English and two in German. The opener, "Night Bound Train" sounds like it could have been done by any Euro synth-pop/alternative rock band. There is a barely audible female vocalist (Nathalie) singing on it in unison with Mathias or Renato (I have a hard time telling them apart) but she has nowhere near the presence Romy had. "I Will Tell You" is a bit more electro filled with melodic nostalgia but not dark in the least. "This Feeling" is another attempt to recapture the nostalgia of the past, beginning with the lyrics: "Do you remember the clubs? And the music? The spirit! The smell!! The feel. On the way..." This isn’t goth or darkwave. This is just alternative rock. It comes across somewhat like low-rent Bowie. (Nathalie's voice may be sort of buried in the mix.) I think the best thing about this track is Mathias's trumpet. Slowing things down with "The Fall," the song is melancholic and competent, but still not very dark. The first hint of gothiness comes in the up-tempo "Glorious Solution," reminiscent of Sisters of Mercy, but the song begs for a strong hook that never materializes. The first track in German, "Ein Hauch" follows with a sequenced synth rhythm and this one is pretty darn strong. (Dark music always seems to sound better in Deutsche.) "Island of Glory" proves that the drama isn't gone from Felsenreich with its martial theme, although I'm not sure what 'Island of Glory' they're talking about as the lyrics are more generic than specific. "Purpose of Roses" begins with a recitation before the sung lyrics, then moves back to recitation. This is another personally nostalgic number that likely only the band will truly understand. Another somewhat ordinary rock song, "I Get By" yawns by before the finale - "Uber uns der Himmel." It's somewhat dark and melancholic, but not a particularly strong ending.

There's no doubt these guys still have talent, but this mellowing out won't do them any favors over here, despite the album spending a fair amount of time in the top ten in the Deutsche Alternative Charts. When American audiences are looking for new dark music acts to follow, they want GOTH and DARKWAVE, not alternative rock bands that used to be that. The fact that they have a weak Spotify presence (70 monthly listeners), no Bandcamp site, and somewhat minimal YouTube presence isn't helping them. Being that they're on a pretty well-known dark music label, Danse Macabre, one would expect more.

Metamorphosis is usually presented as a rather dramatic business: caterpillars become butterflies, gods turn into animals, and unfortunate mortals discover that offending the wrong deity can have consequences considerably worse than a parking ticket. For Michel Mazza and Jeff Düngfelder, however, transformation is a quieter, more gradual affair. Their third collaboration as OdNu + Ümlaut, "Metamorphoses", takes the form of a single sixty-minute composition in which sounds continually change their function, identity and surroundings. A guitar phrase becomes a distant recollection; a rhythmic figure briefly suggests a more conventional musical structure before dissolving; electronic tones acquire an almost physical presence. The album's central idea is therefore expressed through its actual construction: music that does not merely describe change, but makes change its principal organising principle.

The partnership has developed considerably since "Abandoned Spaces" (2024), where the two musicians combined processed guitars, bass lines, drums and delicate electronic details in a collection of interconnected pieces. "Mitochondria Johatsu" (2025) extended their shared vocabulary, moving further into abstraction while retaining a melodic sensibility. Here, the individual tracks have disappeared altogether. The decision to work with one uninterrupted composition is significant because it changes the listener's relationship with the material. There are no titles to suggest a succession of separate destinations, no convenient pauses in which to check whether the washing machine has finished. Instead, the music establishes its own internal chronology, allowing ideas to return in altered circumstances and making transitions as important as the sounds themselves.

The creative process began with Düngfelder constructing a broad foundation from tape loops, electronics and processed material. Mazza then entered this environment with electric and MIDI guitar, clarinet, electronics and effects, responding to its possibilities through improvisation. The distinction between these two stages is not always perceptible in the finished recording, which is precisely the point. Rather than presenting a familiar arrangement of accompaniment and soloist, "Metamorphoses" creates a musical environment in which the contributions continually affect one another. The guitar does not simply decorate an electronic backdrop, while the loops do not function as a passive support system. Both become part of a circulating network of gestures, repetitions and transformations.

Their respective backgrounds make this approach particularly coherent. Buenos Aires-born Michel Mazza, who works as OdNu, has released more than twenty albums and developed a sound based on processed guitar, small recurring melodies, synthesised textures and field recordings. His parallel work in film editing, sound design and music composition has clearly informed his attention to atmosphere and the cinematic potential of apparently modest musical details. Jeff Düngfelder's Ümlaut project is more closely associated with minimal electroacoustic composition, tape manipulation, field recordings and the relationship between silence and sound. His work often treats environmental material as something to be recollected and rearranged rather than merely documented. Their shared experience of New York City, followed by their relocation to the countryside north of the metropolis, also provides an interesting biographical backdrop to music that frequently moves between organic impressions and electronically constructed spaces.

The opening establishes a vocabulary of small sounds and tentative melodic gestures. Water-like noises and clicks emerge alongside a recurring guitar figure, while soft electronic layers gradually establish a sense of depth. The music does not announce itself with the sort of grand introductory gesture that would make a film trailer editor particularly happy. Instead, it begins almost incidentally, as though the listener has entered a room where something has already been happening for some time. A restrained rhythmic pulse briefly appears, then gives way to warbling tones, piano-like sounds and fragments that hover somewhere between melody and texture. These elements are recognisable enough to provide orientation, but never remain in place for long.

One of the composition's most engaging qualities is its ability to introduce rhythm without allowing it to become the governing principle. Percussive sounds surface at intervals, sometimes suggesting a beat, sometimes merely adding a momentary sense of movement. They are subsequently withdrawn, leaving the melodic and textural material to reorganise itself. This gives the piece an unusual elasticity. It can momentarily approach ambient jazz, drift towards electroacoustic abstraction, or hint at a more conventional electronic composition, only to abandon the suggestion before it becomes a settled identity. There is a certain mischievousness in this behaviour. Just when the listener thinks they have worked out what kind of music they are hearing, the musicians quietly rearrange the furniture.

The central portion contains some of the album's most striking episodes. Around the twenty-minute mark, reversed percussion and resonant piano-like figures introduce a slightly more mysterious atmosphere. A brighter melodic passage subsequently emerges, offering one of the composition's rare moments of unmistakable uplift. It is followed by environmental sounds and rustling textures that are incorporated into the musical fabric rather than presented as documentary interruptions. Later, a darker melodic fragment and processed, harp-like tones alter the emotional temperature again. These changes are not organised around conventional climaxes. Instead, the music accumulates small moments of contrast, allowing one atmosphere to contaminate the next. The effect is less like watching a story unfold than observing a series of images whose edges have begun to overlap.

Mazza's melodic instincts are particularly important in preventing the composition from becoming an exercise in atmospheric suspension. Even when the guitar is heavily processed, its phrasing retains a sense of human gesture. Brief melodic figures appear, disappear and return in modified form, providing a thread that connects otherwise disparate sections. His clarinet contribution is absorbed into the broader electronic palette, adding another possible source of timbre without demanding attention as a featured instrument. Düngfelder, meanwhile, gives the composition much of its structural continuity through loops and recurring sonic details. His approach allows repetition to function as a form of memory: something recognisable returns, but its surroundings have changed sufficiently to make it feel different.

The album's later passages become more spacious and occasionally more rhythmic. Guitars reappear against sustained electronic layers, with wind-like tones and heavily reverberated sounds giving the music an almost architectural depth. Gradually introduced drums and hi-hats briefly create a more defined pulse, while another melodic passage brings a welcome degree of brightness. Yet the apparent stability never lasts. Guitar effects become rougher, delayed sounds trail away into the mix, and the environmental material gradually assumes greater importance. Water returns in the closing stretch, recalling the opening while avoiding the neatness of a perfectly symmetrical ending. The composition eventually settles into sustained tones, bells and fading electronic details, with its final gestures suggesting continuation rather than resolution.

There is a potential danger in music of this kind: the hour-long format can easily become an excuse for simply accumulating agreeable textures until the available storage space runs out. "Metamorphoses" largely avoids that trap because its changes are not merely ornamental. The recurring melodic material, subtle rhythmic interventions and carefully placed environmental sounds provide a sense of development, even when the music remains deliberately understated. It also benefits from the fact that both musicians have established individual practices capable of supporting this kind of extended collaboration. Their shared language is not based on erasing every difference, but on allowing those differences to become useful components of a larger process.

The album's title inevitably invites philosophical associations, but its transformation is not especially interested in grand declarations about the nature of existence. It is more convincing when considered at the level of sound itself. A melody changes meaning according to its surroundings; a recording of water can become percussion, atmosphere or memory; an electronic pulse can briefly resemble something organic. These transformations are modest, sometimes almost imperceptible, yet they alter the listener's sense of what is happening. The artwork by Düngfelder, with its overlapping translucent forms, offers a visual counterpart to this method without needing to illustrate every musical development.

"Metamorphoses" ultimately rewards attention through accumulation rather than spectacle. Its sixty minutes contain enough changes to prevent the experience from becoming static, but the musicians resist the temptation to make every new idea announce its arrival with a fanfare. This is music that understands the value of letting an idea become familiar before quietly changing its circumstances. There is no need for a caterpillar to explain the mechanics of its transformation, and Mazza and Düngfelder wisely avoid doing so. They simply allow the sounds to alter, multiply, recede and return, until the listener realises that the landscape encountered at the beginning has become something else. The process is patient, occasionally playful and quietly absorbing, with the added advantage that nobody needs to emerge from a chrysalis at the end.

The countryside has an image problem. In popular culture, it tends to arrive pre-packaged with acoustic guitars, wholesome sunsets, sentimental memories and a suspiciously high number of people who look as though they have never had to deal with a blocked drain. J.WLSN and Liam Keenan have little interest in this postcard version of rural life. On "Country/The Country", their shared recollections of Western Sydney and the more distant regions of New South Wales emerge through distorted guitars, modular synthesis, cassette loops and the patient accumulation of sound. This is a landscape in which the horizon has lost some of its definition, the past refuses to stay in its allotted decade, and even suburbia can acquire the solemnity of an ancient geological formation.

The album grew out of a recording session in October 2024 at Lost Sound, the Marrickville studio of their friend David Akerman. At the time, both musicians were working as art and music curators at a major Sydney art museum, while maintaining their own musical practices. Their collaboration had been postponed for long enough to become one of those projects that friends keep mentioning until somebody finally books a room. The session became an opportunity to explore their overlapping experiences of places inhabited during different periods of their lives. J.WLSN handles a Make Noise modular system, a Pulsar-23 and cassette loops, while Keenan contributes Bass VI, a 335 guitar and effects. Lawrence English subsequently provided additional treatments, mixing and mastering, helping situate the recording within the carefully considered sonic world of Room40.

The title is a small but productive ambiguity. "Country" might suggest a genre, although anyone expecting twang, tidy choruses or a lyrical account of heartbreak beside a pickup truck should probably check their assumptions at the door. "The Country" points instead towards territory: land, distance, habitation and the peculiar ways in which a place persists in the imagination after its immediate details have changed. The slash between the two terms acts almost like a border on a map, separating two ideas that the music continually allows to bleed together. For these musicians, geography is neither neutral scenery nor a collection of picturesque views. It is something absorbed over time, carried around in the body and recalled imperfectly. Their music approaches this inheritance obliquely, through textures that seem to retain the pressure of their origins without offering a documentary account of them.

The opening "Teflon Blues" occupies nearly twenty-one minutes, a generous stretch of time in which the guitar's identity gradually becomes less certain. Keenan's string work is processed and softened at the edges, while electronic layers and repeating fragments accumulate around it. The blues in the title is less a recognisable musical form than a residue: a suggestion of something once expressive, perhaps even songlike, that has been left out in the weather. The sound has a curious, worn surface, as though a familiar tune had been recovered from a box of old photographs stored in a damp shed. Yet the music avoids the obvious drama of decay. It proceeds by small alterations in density, tone and emphasis, allowing the listener to notice how a sound changes character when it has been encountered repeatedly. A guitar note can begin as a gesture and end up resembling a distant landmark, while the surrounding electronics blur the distinction between foreground and background.

There is a quiet intelligence in this refusal to hurry. Long-form music can occasionally mistake duration for profundity, as though a track becomes automatically more meaningful once it has outlasted an average television episode. Here, the extended form has a clearer purpose. Repetition provides a framework in which memory can work: details return, but their significance shifts according to what has happened in the meantime. The recording feels less like a performance advancing towards a destination than a mind circling a place it cannot quite describe. There is no need for a dramatic climax, because the subject itself is the gradual transformation of perception.

"The Power of Emptiness", at more than twelve minutes, makes the album's central paradox more explicit. Emptiness is not an absence of material; it is a condition that allows material to become perceptible. The guitar tones are suspended in an atmosphere of electronic haze, with noise and resonance subtly reshaping their contours. What might initially seem spacious acquires weight through the pressure of its own lingering sounds. The title could easily have introduced a solemn lecture on metaphysics, complete with a lecturer wearing an expensive black shirt, but the piece is more persuasive than that. Its spaciousness is physical and audible. There is room for tones to breathe, but also for them to be swallowed, obscured or reduced to traces. Silence, in this setting, is less an empty room than the room's capacity to remember what has been inside it.

Then comes "Planned Obsolescence", a brief interruption of just over a minute. Its title brings industrial cynicism into a sequence otherwise preoccupied with slow time and geographical memory. The phrase usually describes the deliberate shortening of a product's useful life, the sort of business philosophy that ensures your perfectly functional appliance will eventually become an expensive paperweight. Placed here, it introduces a wry counterpoint to the album's concern with duration. Sounds are allowed to persist, degrade and change, but the modern world is organised around replacing things before they have finished telling us anything. The track's brevity makes it feel like a small crack in the album's temporal fabric, a reminder that the landscapes we remember are also subject to development, demolition and the relentless logic of the new.

"Suburban Dopamine" stretches out over fifteen minutes, and its title brings the record closer to the environments that often escape the romantic vocabulary of landscape music. Suburbia is neither pristine wilderness nor the city centre's theatrical density. It is a world of repetitive streets, scattered commercial zones, familiar journeys and modest domestic routines. For many people, it is also where childhood actually happened, rather than where childhood is retrospectively staged in glossy advertising. The music reflects this less glamorous familiarity through loops and gradual shifts in texture. Repetition suggests routine, but the surrounding guitar and electronic layers prevent it from settling into mere mechanical sameness. Small changes acquire disproportionate importance, much as a road travelled hundreds of times can suddenly appear different under a change of light or after a building has disappeared.

There is something affecting about the way the piece allows suburban space to become strange without turning it into a horror film. Its atmosphere is neither idyllic nor overtly threatening. Instead, it hints at the oddness concealed inside ordinary surroundings, where places can be emotionally charged without possessing any obvious beauty. A shopping strip, an empty field beside a road or a row of houses seen from a moving car can become inseparable from a particular period of life. The music seems to understand that nostalgia does not always need a beautiful object. Sometimes it attaches itself to the most unremarkable things, which is unfortunate for anyone attempting to explain their feelings at a dinner party.

The closing "Teflon Blues (edit)" compresses the opening piece into a little over five minutes. Its return changes the meaning of what came before. Rather than functioning as a simple bonus version, it offers a different experience of the same material: what was initially allowed to spread across an extended duration is now encountered as a more concentrated fragment. The edit inevitably sacrifices some of the slow accumulation that gives the longer version its character, but that compression is revealing in itself. Memory rarely preserves an event in its original proportions. It extracts a few details, discards others and constructs a version that can be carried around. The shorter "Teflon Blues" feels like such a recollection, a partial image of something whose full dimensions remain beyond reach.

Keenan's wider practice makes this collaboration particularly apt. The Gomeroi guitarist and curator has explored the possibilities of extended guitar techniques and improvised sound, including a 2024 Room40 collaboration with David Grubbs. J.WLSN, meanwhile, has pursued a musical practice attentive to the relationship between sound, perception and time. Their work together benefits from the difference between the two instrumental approaches: the guitar provides a human, tactile point of reference, while modular electronics and tape loops introduce repetition, instability and a sense of duration that is not necessarily governed by conventional musical development. Neither side dominates. Instead, the instruments become difficult to separate from the environments they appear to evoke.

That sense of place deserves a qualification. "Country/The Country" does not attempt to reproduce the Australian landscape through literal field recordings or a collection of recognisable environmental sounds. Its geography is interpretive, shaped by the musicians' histories and the friction between remembered terrain and present perception. The album's broad, blurred surfaces could evoke rural plains, distant hills or suburban sprawl, but they do not insist on a single picture. This openness is one of its strengths, although listeners looking for strong melodic signposts or sharply differentiated movements may find the material deliberately elusive. Its changes are often incremental, and its emotional vocabulary is built from tone, repetition and the interaction of sounds rather than conventional dramatic gestures.

The result is an album that treats memory as a process of editing, distortion and return. The past is neither restored nor neatly archived; it is continually revised by the person doing the remembering. In the hands of J.WLSN and Liam Keenan, guitars become weathered objects, loops behave like habitual routes, and electronic resonance gives ordinary spaces an unfamiliar scale. "Country/The Country" is not a musical travel guide, and it offers no guarantee that revisiting one's origins will lead to enlightenment. Sometimes the old place looks different, sometimes the road is still there, and sometimes all that remains is a sound that refuses to explain itself. That may be the most honest kind of country music: a record less concerned with where home is than with the strange, persistent ways in which home continues to sound.