An antenna is supposed to receive something: a voice, a message, a fragment of information travelling through the air in search of a destination. Steve Bates seems less interested in what might be waiting at the other end than in the peculiar things that happen during reception. His second solo album for Constellation, "An Infinite Antenna", is a collection of twelve transmissions in which melodies emerge from interference, rhythms lose their footing, and fragments of the outside world are absorbed into an electronic language that refuses to stay in one place. The result is simultaneously more approachable and more elusive than his previous album for the label, "All The Things That Happen" (2022). There is more room for melody, more variation in instrumentation and a noticeably stronger sense of movement, but clarity remains a relative concept. The signal is improving; the message, naturally, is still a little suspicious.

Bates has an unusually productive relationship with the spaces between different artistic territories. A Montréal-based sound artist, musician, curator and researcher, he emerged from the anarcho-punk and post-hardcore communities of the Canadian Prairies, playing in bands including XOXO and Bulletproof Nothing. In 1998, he founded Winnipeg's Send + Receive festival, an important platform for experimental music and sound art that he directed for seven years. After moving to Montréal in 2005, he became Sound Coordinator at Concordia University's Hexagram, while developing a practice encompassing radio art, installations, field recordings, tape composition and collaborative work. He also runs The Dim Coast with artist jake moore, a publishing and curatorial platform for experimental music and sound art. His interests extend well beyond the usual concerns of electronic composition, encompassing communication systems, feedback, political and social structures, the experience of particular places and the sometimes unreliable workings of auditory perception. In other words, Bates has spent a long time thinking about what happens when information travels, breaks down or gets mistaken for something else. This album sounds like a rather convincing practical demonstration.

The contrast with "All The Things That Happen" is instructive. That 2022 release was built largely around the self-imposed limitations of a Casio SK-1 and computer, producing a concentrated body of abrasive, unstable ambient music. Here, Bates opens the doors to a wider collection of instruments and techniques: leftfield synthesizers, electric guitar, deconstructed drum machines, field recordings, no-input mixing and layers of radiostatic distortion. The expanded palette does not mean that he has abandoned the discipline of reduction. Quite the opposite: the twelve pieces are relatively concise, often lasting between two and four minutes, and the artist has spoken of wanting to retain something of punk's sense of duration rather than allowing every idea to develop into an extended ambient excursion. The influence of his musical beginnings is therefore audible not only in the distorted bass and broken rhythms, but also in the economy of the arrangements. There is a certain pleasure in hearing an artist who loves expansive drone music nevertheless resist the temptation to turn every passing thought into a twenty-minute event.

The material was gathered between 2023 and 2025, including recordings made during residencies and site-specific projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, Greece and Saskatchewan. The cover photograph comes from Sarajevo, but the album is not a conventional collection of musical postcards. Instead, these recordings become components in a larger process of association, their original contexts gradually obscured by processing, layering and juxtaposition. Bates has described the underlying idea as something akin to slowly scanning a radio dial: not searching for one particular station, but allowing the ear to encounter unexpected fragments along the way. This gives the album an unusual coherence. Its pieces are distinct enough to function individually, yet their recurring timbres and shifting undercurrents create the impression of one continuous environment being examined from different angles.

The opening "Pink pink pink pink…pink pink" establishes this peculiar geography with glistening, slightly dissonant synthesizer tones. Its short duration gives it the quality of an unfinished thought, a delicate electronic construction that seems to dissolve almost as soon as it becomes recognisable. "Green as a ghost" darkens the atmosphere, introducing a deeper rumble, static interference and broken rhythmic gestures before piano chords briefly emerge towards the end. The transition is characteristic of Bates' approach: rather than developing a conventional theme, he allows one sound to alter the conditions under which the next can be heard. The pieces behave less like separate compositions than successive changes in atmospheric pressure.

"Battles and sieges and street trees" is particularly effective in its combination of low-end resonance and delicate melodic detail. Treated guitar and synthesizer fragments appear like small reflections caught in a murky surface, while the underlying field-recording textures suggest a much larger environment. There is a subtle tension between the title's suggestion of conflict and the almost contemplative quality of the music. The juxtaposition is not entirely comfortable, which is probably the point. Bates has a knack for making seemingly unrelated elements occupy the same acoustic space without forcing them into an obvious narrative.

The post-hardcore inheritance becomes more apparent in "Waste, songs of the world" and "Easier sad than done". Distorted bass, abrasive drum samples and fractured rhythmic patterns introduce a physicality that prevents the album from drifting into purely decorative ambient territory. Yet these are not straightforward exercises in electronic nostalgia. The rhythms are too unstable, the textures too contaminated, and the melodic fragments too elusive to provide the familiar satisfaction of a conventional rock arrangement. Bates seems to have retained the impulse to make noise, while becoming increasingly interested in what can happen after the noise has been taken apart. One could imagine the younger punk version of the artist approving of the distortion, although perhaps wondering why the drums have become so difficult to count.

"Mountain scene" and "Swiss apartment layouts" continue to shift the perspective, the former suggesting a more open, atmospheric space, the latter offering another of the album's curious titles. Bates has a talent for names that sound like fragments extracted from a notebook, an archive or a conversation overheard in passing. They are evocative without being explanatory, and often introduce a strange contrast with the music itself. "Decades of river widths" is another case in point: its title suggests an attempt to measure something that is constantly changing, while the sound seems to resist any stable point of reference. The music's recurring patterns provide a sense of continuity, but the details are in perpetual motion.

At just 1:45, "Disaster loans" is one of the album's shortest pieces and among its more overtly abrasive moments. Its distorted electronic bass and restless percussion have something of a miniature punk eruption about them, although the eruption has apparently taken place inside a malfunctioning radio. "Corporate activity, ancient shipwrecks" stretches the atmosphere again, combining suggestive low-frequency material with a more spacious, almost cinematic sense of suspension. The titles throughout the album invite associations with history, economics, geography and the detritus of human activity. They could easily belong to an eccentric researcher's filing system, although the music is considerably more interesting than any filing system has a right to be.

Then comes "Lettre d’amour à Fly Pan Am", a title that acknowledges the Montréal experimental rock group whose work has long occupied an interesting position between post-rock, noise and fractured song structures. Its presence feels appropriate within an album that repeatedly negotiates the relationship between abstract sound and the memory of more immediate musical forms. The piece does not simply imitate a recognisable style; rather, it belongs to the same general territory of restless construction, where melody and distortion are allowed to coexist without either becoming the unquestioned authority.

The closing "Swamps and factories" is the album's longest piece, and perhaps its most recognisable connection to the darker, more sustained sound of "All The Things That Happen". A dissonant, shimmering drone gradually establishes itself, its surface animated by subtle changes in texture and density. It feels like a return to familiar ground, but not quite a return to the same place. The preceding eleven pieces have widened the album's vocabulary, making this final stretch seem less like a destination than another possible frequency among many. There is no grand resolution, only the gradual persistence of sound after the more obvious signals have faded.

What makes "An Infinite Antenna" particularly engaging is the way Bates manages to reconcile two apparently contradictory impulses. On one hand, he is interested in the microscopic behaviour of sound: the grain of a recording, a tiny melodic fragment, the irregular pulse of a broken rhythm, the residue left behind by a process of transformation. On the other, his compositions evoke environments much larger than their individual components. A few seconds of distorted guitar can suggest an entire landscape; a low-frequency rumble can become a memory of industrial activity; a brief electronic figure can feel like a message arriving from a place that no longer exists. His sound art background is evident in this sensitivity to context and perception, but the album never feels like an academic exercise disguised as music. There is too much humour in its titles, too much physical energy in its rougher passages, and too much affection for the accidental pleasures of listening.

The record's diversity is also its strength. Some listeners may find the constant shifts in atmosphere less immersive than the more focused approach of its predecessor, while others will appreciate the additional melodic detail and the compactness of the arrangements. The transitions occasionally leave individual pieces feeling like glimpses rather than fully developed statements, but this is largely consistent with the album's underlying concept. Bates is not trying to build twelve self-contained worlds. He is collecting fragments from a much wider territory and allowing their connections to emerge through repetition, contrast and proximity.

Ultimately, "An Infinite Antenna" is a record about listening as an active, uncertain process. Its sounds are never entirely detached from the world, but neither are they straightforward representations of it. They arrive filtered through memory, technology, geography and personal history, carrying traces of places and experiences without revealing everything about their origins. Bates' punk background supplies the necessary impatience, his sound-art practice the curiosity, and his compositional instincts the ability to make these disparate impulses hold together. The album's title may promise an endless capacity for reception, but its real achievement lies in the selective intelligence of its transmissions. There is plenty of noise in the air already; the trick, as Bates demonstrates, is to discover which fragments deserve our attention.

There is something quietly unsettling about returning to a place that has not changed nearly as much as the person remembering it. The landscape may still be there, the hills and industrial scars apparently holding their ground, but the past has meanwhile been busy rearranging the furniture inside one's head. "Minnets Långa Kedjor" (roughly, "The Long Chains of Memory") takes this discrepancy as its point of departure, turning a shared geographical and personal history into an hour-long exercise in electroacoustic recollection. For Mats Erlandsson and Gus Loxbo, this is not merely a first recorded collaboration, but the public emergence of a musical relationship that has been developing for more than 25 years. Some friendships produce photographs, others produce music that sounds as though it has been unearthed from beneath an abandoned mine.

Both musicians have deep roots in Sweden's experimental and improvised music scenes. Erlandsson is a composer and sound artist associated with Stockholm's drone community, working with sustained tones, synthesis, field recordings and extensive tape processing. His catalogue includes "Gyttjans Topografi" (2023), while his wider practice moves between solo work and collaborations, often exploring the unstable border between acoustic material and its electronic mutation. Loxbo, meanwhile, is an experienced double bassist whose work includes the groups Pombo and Silence Blossoms. His solo album "Trådknaster" (2021), recorded by Erlandsson, offered a concentrated study of the instrument's less conventional possibilities, exposing the grain, friction and physical peculiarities of the double bass without relying on overdubs. Their familiarity is therefore not simply biographical: each has spent years helping the other reconsider what music can be, and what it might become when conventional instrumental roles are left at the door.

The album draws on their shared upbringing in Bergslagen, a historical mining region in central Sweden. This background is not used as a picturesque postcard or an invitation to indulge in nostalgic folklore. Rather, it supplies a loose network of associations: geographical memories, imagined histories, fragments of atmosphere and the peculiar emotional residue of places inhabited long ago. The original musical impulses were captured in a two-day session at Stockholm's Elektronmusikstudion, with Erlandsson on guitars and electronics and Loxbo on double bass. What emerged was then subjected to a substantial process of editing, arrangement, amplification and transformation, involving digital processing and analogue tape. The result is neither a straightforward document of improvisation nor a conventional studio composition. It occupies an intriguing middle ground, where spontaneous gestures are treated as raw matter and memory itself becomes a kind of editing tool.

That distinction matters. The music often feels as if it is being recalled rather than performed in the present tense. Sustained guitar tones and zither figures hover above the bass, which can sound like an enormous subterranean mechanism operating at a speed entirely indifferent to human urgency. Sometimes Loxbo's playing is recognisably instrumental; elsewhere, the double bass becomes a source of abrasive textures, granular scrapes and distorted low-frequency pressure. Erlandsson's processing does not simply decorate these sounds. It changes their apparent scale, distance and material identity, making it difficult to tell where an instrument ends and the surrounding acoustic environment begins. The listener is left with a landscape whose features keep shifting whenever one tries to identify them.

The opening "Dom gick upp på berget" establishes the album's measured approach, while "Trollkarlsklint" expands the vocabulary into something more imposing. Its extended duration allows the bass to move from scratchy, almost tactile gestures towards a much heavier presence, with the music gradually approaching the weight and slow-motion intensity of doom metal. The comparison is not merely a matter of volume or distortion. There is a similar fascination with duration, with the physical sensation of sound being held in place until it begins to exert pressure. Yet the piece does not settle into a recognisable metal structure. Its mass seems to emerge organically from the interaction, as though a geological formation had decided to make itself heard.

Elsewhere, the atmosphere becomes more elusive. "I Kopparkammaren" and "Flor" offer shorter episodes within the album's broader temporal architecture, while "HÄng blommor om halsen" moves towards a more subdued and suspended register. Erlandsson's sustained guitar tones and Loxbo's distant bass resonances create a strange intimacy, one that is less concerned with melodic development than with the gradual alteration of perspective. The music seems to withdraw from the listener, although its low frequencies remain stubbornly present. It is a useful reminder that quietness in drone music is not necessarily the absence of intensity. Sometimes the most unsettling thing in a room is the sound coming from the next one.

The title track brings the album's contrasting materials into particularly vivid contact. Delicate zither tones coexist with massive electric-guitar weight, a combination that might look absurd on paper but feels entirely natural within this musical environment. There is no attempt to reconcile fragility and heaviness; they are allowed to occupy the same space, like two incompatible memories that have somehow survived in the same mind. "Fallens dag" continues the slow, immersive approach, while "Hur långt har du kvar att gå?" introduces bells and additional accents from Daniel M Karlsson. Their delicate interventions add a further layer of detail before the bass returns with considerable force. The contrast is striking without becoming theatrical: the music has no need to wave its arms around to make its point.

Maria W Horn's narration adds another human dimension to the record. Rather than turning the pieces into conventional songs or supplying a literal narrative, her presence contributes to the sense of recollection and distance that runs throughout the album. The titles themselves suggest fragments of a larger, inaccessible story: climbing a hill, entering a copper chamber, hanging flowers around one's neck, asking how far one has left to walk. These are evocative images, but they resist being assembled into a neat sequence. The album is not a soundtrack to a journey with a clearly marked destination. It is closer to the experience of remembering a dream in which every location seems familiar, although none can be placed with certainty.

The final pair, "I askan" and "I symmetrisk skymning", brings the collection towards its conclusion without offering anything resembling a definitive resolution. The music retains its capacity to hover between recognisable instrumental gestures and transformed sound, between the intimate and the monumental. Even when the textures become more imposing, there is an underlying sense of restraint. Erlandsson's studio work is particularly effective in this respect: the transformations are extensive, but rarely feel like demonstrations of technical cleverness. They serve the material rather than demanding applause for themselves. This is a welcome attitude in experimental music, where the temptation to make every processing decision sound like a major philosophical discovery can occasionally become exhausting.

The production also highlights the unusual balance between the two musicians. Erlandsson's guitars, zither, percussion and analogue and digital synthesis provide a broad range of tonal environments, but Loxbo's double bass remains the album's physical anchor. Its low register can be ominous, its upper textures abrasive, and its occasional distortions almost unrecognisable. Yet the instrument never becomes a mere provider of cinematic menace. There is a sense of listening and response beneath the processing, a shared musical instinct that no amount of studio manipulation could manufacture from scratch. The additional contributions from Karlsson and Horn enrich the picture without disturbing the central relationship.

"Minnets Långa Kedjor" is a patient, carefully assembled work, and its 68-minute duration is part of its character rather than an endurance test imposed for experimental credibility. It asks for attention, certainly, but does not demand that every minute be treated as a revelation. Its strongest passages emerge through accumulation: a sustained note acquiring weight, a rough bass texture becoming almost environmental, a fragile detail suddenly illuminating an otherwise opaque stretch of sound. The combination of free improvisation, electroacoustic drone and doom-metal gravity is compelling precisely because none of these elements is allowed to dominate the others.

Ultimately, the album's most affecting quality lies in the way it treats memory as something active and imperfect. Erlandsson and Loxbo do not attempt to reconstruct their shared past in musical form, nor do they offer a nostalgic portrait of the place that shaped them. Instead, they take the impressions left behind and subject them to a process of distortion, magnification and reconsideration. The past becomes neither a safe refuge nor a reliable archive, but a substance that can still be handled, altered and heard from different angles. These long chains may bind the two musicians to a common origin, but they also provide enough slack for the music to wander somewhere unexpected. A fine achievement, and proof that sometimes the most productive way to revisit home is to make it sound like a place you have never quite been before.

The word "capacity" can suggest a container, a limit, or the amount of something a person is able to hold. Billy Gomberg’s new album seems interested in all three meanings, though its nine pieces are less concerned with filling space than with discovering what space can contain. Sound is treated as a material with edges, weight and a certain capacity for surprise: tones emerge, flicker, break apart and settle into unexpected relationships. The music is abstract, but not remote; delicate, but not timid. It has the curious quality of a landscape seen through a window that has been cracked in just the right place.

Gomberg has spent more than two decades developing a practice that brings together synthesis, digital processing, acoustic recordings and improvisation. His work has appeared on labels including Students of Decay and Dinzu Artefacts, while his self-released recordings have documented a continuing exploration of modular synthesis and electroacoustic composition. He is also active in the collaborative project Fraufraulein with Anne Guthrie, whose work similarly considers how manipulated sound can retain a sense of physical origin. Gomberg’s musical activity has long been accompanied by photography, and his 2025 exhibition "Several Paths Together" at Indexical Gallery in Santa Cruz made that parallel practice especially visible.

"capacity" is his first proper album in four years, although the interval has hardly been a period of inactivity. Recent releases and performances have continued to explore long-form improvisation, recording and sound as a means of relating to places and experiences. Here, however, Gomberg chooses a more concise format. The nine tracks occupy just over thirty-four minutes, with most pieces lasting between three and five minutes. This is a meaningful shift for a musician whose work has often allowed sounds to develop at considerable length. Instead of asking the listener to settle into a single expansive environment, the album presents a sequence of small sonic situations, each with its own internal weather.

The opening "zero of" establishes the album’s delicate balance between movement and suspension. Its electronic textures possess a faintly unstable quality, as though the sound were being assembled from particles that have not quite agreed to remain in the same place. There is a gentle luminosity to the piece, but it is not the polished, frictionless glow sometimes associated with ambient electronics. Small irregularities keep appearing at the edges, interrupting the apparent calm. The result feels less like a pristine digital environment than a room illuminated by shifting light, where the furniture seems to change shape whenever one looks away.

"rose and nameless" moves through a more subdued register, its title suggesting a relationship between something recognisable and something that has resisted identification. The music seems to occupy that same uncertain space. Its tones are intimate, yet their origins remain difficult to pin down; the listener can sense the presence of a gesture without being able to say exactly what produced it. Gomberg’s approach to synthesis is particularly effective here because the technology never becomes the subject. The sounds do not announce their modular credentials, nor do they demand admiration for the machinery behind them. They simply behave in ways that feel emotionally and physically suggestive.

That distinction matters. Experimental electronic music can sometimes become fascinated with the devices that produce it, turning the studio into a kind of sonic showroom where every strange effect must be accompanied by a demonstration of the equipment responsible. Gomberg seems more interested in the expressive consequences of those sounds. The electronic details are present, but they are not presented as trophies. Instead, they function like marks on a surface: traces of activity that acquire meaning through their placement and relation to everything around them.

"sky in buckets version" offers one of the album’s more intriguing titles, evoking an image that is both absurd and oddly tangible. Its music seems to work through a similar tension between the expansive and the contained. The sounds have an open, airy quality, yet the composition remains compact, allowing fleeting gestures to appear and disappear without being stretched into extended demonstrations of atmosphere. There is a sense of motion, but not necessarily of travel. The piece seems to move by changing its perspective rather than its location.

"use thousand waves" introduces another variation on the album’s central concerns. Its title suggests multiplicity, but Gomberg avoids turning the music into a grand illustration of water or movement. Instead, the piece feels like an accumulation of small changes, each one altering the perception of what came before. This is one of the record’s most appealing qualities: it encourages close attention without making a spectacle of its own intricacy. The listener is not asked to solve a puzzle. There is no hidden message waiting to be uncovered by someone with a notebook, a magnifying glass and an alarming amount of free time. The pleasure lies in noticing how the sound changes while remaining recognisably itself.

"locals" brings the album’s interest in physical geography into sharper focus. Gomberg’s recordings draw on locations in San Francisco and Tokyo, while the work also acknowledges the Indigenous territories associated with the places where the material was gathered. The music does not function as a conventional field-recording document, however. Rather than offering a recognisable sound postcard, it absorbs environmental material into an abstract language. Place becomes less a subject to be represented than a set of conditions that shape the recording: distance, texture, movement, and the particular way sound occupies a space.

The shorter "dusk at the center" seems to turn inward. Its duration gives it the quality of a passing moment, a small pause within the album’s sequence. Gomberg’s music often works through the interplay of detail and stillness, and this piece is a particularly effective example of how little needs to happen for a sound to become compelling. The music does not need to swell or resolve in order to establish a sense of presence. It simply allows its materials to remain exposed long enough for their subtleties to become apparent.

"one from october" has the feeling of a fragment preserved from a particular time, though its title does not insist on a specific narrative. The piece seems to suggest memory without turning it into sentimentality. There is no attempt to recreate a past moment in full, only to retain something of its texture. This is where Gomberg’s photographic practice becomes especially relevant. His images and his music share an interest in what can be revealed by looking or listening closely, and in the possibility that a fragment may carry more emotional information than a complete account. The accompanying eight-page booklet of black-and-white photographs is therefore not merely an attractive extra for the vinyl edition. It extends the album’s visual and sonic inquiry into landscape, detail and the experience of noticing.

The title track, "overflows", appears near the end of the sequence, and its name offers a useful counterpoint to the album’s generally restrained scale. Capacity is not simply a matter of holding more; it can also involve reaching the point at which a container no longer contains what has been placed inside it. Gomberg’s music seems to understand that excess need not mean volume or density. Sometimes it is the accumulation of small gestures, each one adding a little more emotional or spatial information until the composition begins to feel larger than its duration. The closing "group buy tong" then brings the record to an end without making a grand announcement of completion. Its compact form leaves the listener with the impression of a thought that has been allowed to stop rather than forced to conclude.

Taylor Deupree’s mastering is an apt fit for this material. His work at 12k has long been associated with an attentive approach to detail and spatial definition, and "capacity" benefits from that sensitivity. The album’s textures retain their fine edges without becoming brittle, while the quieter elements are given enough presence to register as more than background decoration. The sound is intimate, but not artificially close; the music feels as though it occupies a space that the listener can approach without being invited to dominate.

There are echoes of artists such as Microstoria and Josh Mason in Gomberg’s use of glitch, fractured electronic gestures and unstable textures, but the album does not rely on those associations to establish its identity. Its strongest moments emerge from a more personal relationship between sound and place. The music seems to understand geography not as a collection of coordinates, but as an accumulation of experiences: the physical environment, the memory of being somewhere, the emotional associations attached to a particular moment. That gives "capacity" a quiet human quality, even when its sounds are abstract enough to resist conventional description.

The record is also refreshingly uninterested in making ambient music synonymous with relaxation. Its beauty is not always smooth, and its stillness is rarely absolute. Small disturbances remain present throughout, like the faint crackle of a thought that refuses to disappear. The music can be soothing, but it does not promise to make the listener more efficient, more serene or better prepared for the next round of administrative nonsense. It asks for attention rather than offering escape.

In the end, "capacity" is an album about the amount of meaning that can reside in a small gesture. Gomberg’s nine pieces do not attempt to overwhelm the listener with scale or duration. They work through suggestion, detail and the careful placement of sound, allowing the smallest shifts to acquire a surprising weight. It is a record that rewards patience without demanding solemnity, and one whose beauty comes not from an absence of disturbance but from the way disturbance becomes part of the whole. A modest container, perhaps, but one with a rather remarkable ability to hold the world.

There are bands that spend years trying to find their sound, and then there are bands that seem to have decided, almost immediately, that finding one would be a rather restrictive use of their time. Superføkk! belong firmly to the latter category. Their self-titled debut is a compact demonstration of musical restlessness, a three-track collision between free jazz, no-wave, noise rock, krautrock, electronics and whatever else happens to be within reach when the instruments start misbehaving. It is energetic, abrasive, frequently funny in its sheer disregard for decorum, and considerably more disciplined than its apparent lack of discipline might suggest.

The Norwegian quartet emerged in Bergen in autumn 2024, initially taking shape in a small studio at the Bergen Kjøtt cultural centre. The lineup brings together Victor Skullerud on drums, Eik Stavem on electric bass, Ole-Hellik Lobben-Seth on guitar and synthesizer, and August Ramstad on tenor and baritone saxophones, electronics and percussion. Within a remarkably short time, they developed a substantial live repertoire, played extensively around Bergen and won the 2025 Eggstock Festival, also receiving recognition from the Vill Vill Vest festival. Their debut was recorded at Duper Studio in November 2025, with Jørgen Træen responsible for mixing and mastering, Iver Sandøy producing, and artwork by Aksel Thorbjørnsen.

The band's name is unlikely to be mistaken for a delicate invitation to afternoon tea. In Norwegian, it carries a suitably irreverent punch, and the music follows through on the promise. Yet Superføkk! are not simply interested in making a racket for the pleasure of watching musical furniture collapse. Their approach is more curious than that: they take recognisable elements from different traditions and subject them to abrupt changes of direction, sudden accelerations and unexpected encounters. The result has something of the nervous intelligence of Black Midi, the rhythmic sophistication associated with Jaga Jazzist, the confrontational attitude of James Chance and the angular theatricality of no-wave. These comparisons provide useful coordinates, but the quartet's identity is less about assembling a convincing family tree than about making the branches collide.

The album's three compositions occupy almost exactly half an hour, which is enough time for the group to establish its methods without allowing the exercise to become an endurance test. "Grønn" opens proceedings with a restless interplay between saxophone, guitar and rhythm section. Rather than establishing a groove and then decorating it, the musicians seem to negotiate the rhythmic ground in real time, with accents appearing and disappearing as the instruments exchange ideas. The saxophone brings a sharp, sometimes almost abrasive melodic presence, while the guitar moves between jagged riffing and more fragmented gestures. Skullerud's drumming and Stavem's bass provide the necessary propulsion, although the rhythm never feels like a fixed platform. It behaves more like a moving target.

There is a distinctly physical quality to this music. Even when the arrangements become intricate, the quartet avoids the impression of musicians demonstrating their technical abilities to an imaginary examination board. The playing is tight, but it retains the nervous energy of something liable to go off course at any moment. That tension is central to the album's appeal. Superføkk! can sound almost danceable, then suddenly pull the floor away from beneath the listener's feet. The body is encouraged to move; the brain is advised not to become too attached to any particular time signature.

At twelve minutes, "River Igjennom" provides the album's most substantial opportunity for the group to explore its shifting dynamics. The longer duration allows ideas to develop, mutate and occasionally undermine themselves. The interplay between the saxophones and guitar becomes especially important here, with the electronic elements adding further instability to the ensemble's sound. The music moves through passages of concentrated rhythmic activity and more open, exploratory exchanges, avoiding the conventional progression from quiet introduction to explosive climax. Instead, its energy seems to circulate, gathering intensity and then redirecting it elsewhere. The result is less a journey with a clearly marked destination than a series of diversions undertaken by four people who have collectively misplaced the map and decided that this is probably an improvement.

The title "River Igjennom" suggests movement through something, and the composition has an appropriately fluid character, although its flow is anything but smooth. The musicians continually disturb the surface, producing a mixture of muscular rock energy and improvisational freedom. There are moments when the group approaches the jagged precision of experimental math rock, only to veer towards the more unruly territory of free jazz. The synthesizer and electronics prevent the music from settling into a purely instrumental rock format, while the saxophone avoids becoming a conventional jazz lead instrument. Every component seems willing to change its function whenever the opportunity arises.

"Piggeple" closes the record with another extended burst of activity, and it is arguably the track that brings the band's various tendencies into the sharpest focus. Its combination of driving rhythm, noisy textures and saxophone-led intensity creates an exhilarating sense of collective momentum. There is a strong punk sensibility beneath the musical complexity: not necessarily in the form of familiar chord structures or straightforward aggression, but in the conviction that music should be allowed to sound excessive, awkward and alive. The composition's energy is cathartic without becoming simplistic, and its danceable qualities are particularly striking. This is music that could easily turn a crowded room into a rather unconventional exercise in cardiovascular health.

The production deserves credit for preserving the rawness of the performances without allowing the individual instruments to disappear into a single indistinct mass. Jørgen Træen's work gives the record enough definition to make its rhythmic exchanges and instrumental details audible, while retaining the rough edges that are essential to the group's character. The three compositions also benefit from their contrasting proportions and internal development. There is no sense of a band padding out a debut with interchangeable material; each piece has a distinct role in the overall sequence, and the album's brevity makes its intensity all the more effective.

What makes Superføkk! particularly interesting is that their genre-hopping does not feel like an attempt to collect fashionable reference points. Free improvisation, krautrock, no-wave, jazz-rock and electronic experimentation are not presented as separate ingredients waiting to be mixed according to a recipe. They are treated as different ways of approaching rhythm, texture and collective interaction. The quartet's music is therefore eclectic without being indiscriminate. Its unpredictability comes from the way the musicians respond to one another, not from a desperate need to introduce a new stylistic surprise every thirty seconds.

There is also something refreshing about the decision to make a debut consisting of just three substantial pieces. In an era when albums can sometimes resemble playlists assembled by an indecisive committee, Superføkk! offer a coherent statement without insisting on unnecessary duration. The title is appropriately self-contained, too: no elaborate conceptual apparatus, no grandiose mythology, just the band's name and a record that gets on with the business of being itself.

Superføkk! are still a young group, and this first album captures the particular excitement of musicians discovering how far they can push a shared language. Its roughness is not a defect to be apologised for, but neither is it an excuse for careless playing. Beneath the racket there is considerable attention to detail, and beneath the technical dexterity there is a direct, almost mischievous desire to make people move. The quartet may not be especially interested in conventional genre boundaries, but they clearly understand the value of a good physical reaction. Sometimes the most persuasive argument for musical freedom is not a manifesto or a carefully constructed theoretical position. It is four musicians making an almighty noise, finding a groove where none was supposed to exist, and daring the audience to stand still.

Honey Ride Me A Goat have never seemed particularly concerned with making music that behaves itself. Their name sounds like the result of a pub conversation that went badly wrong, and their compositions tend to share that conversation's disregard for conventional manners. Yet there is more to this Kentish trio's peculiar universe than a taste for absurdity and instrumental demolition. "Horns & Hooves", their first full-length album for Cuneiform Records, finds them refining an approach built around the friction between tightly organised structures and spontaneous disruption. The addition of American saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi makes that friction even more productive, giving the band's familiar guitar-bass-drums combination a new dimension without turning it into a conventional jazz-rock outfit.

The history behind the record is a little unusual. Honey Ride Me A Goat were formed by school friends attending college in Canterbury in the early 2000s, united by a shared affection for Captain Beefheart, Black Sabbath and Soft Machine. They began playing live around 2005, releasing a self-titled EP in 2006, followed by a series of tapes and split releases. Much of this early material was gathered on "Udders", issued by Australia's Lexicon Devil in 2010. Their association with Canterbury's musical heritage became more concrete when they recorded an improvised session with Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper in 2008. The resulting material eventually appeared as "Goat Hopper" in 2013, after Hopper's death in 2009 had put an end to plans for further collaboration. The band continued to work with American avant-rock group Upsilon Acrux, including joint UK tours and a split release, before eventually entering a lengthy hiatus in 2020.

The new album was recorded in early 2020 and subsequently left unreleased for several years before finding its home at Cuneiform. This delayed arrival gives "Horns & Hooves" the slightly peculiar status of a document from a band that had already moved into a different chapter of its existence by the time the record reached listeners. It also captures a significant change in their sound. The earlier material was often characterised by furious, tightly packed jazz-punk, but here the group allows more direct compositional forms to develop, creating additional room for improvisation. The presence of Shiroishi is central to this evolution. Rather than being invited to provide occasional saxophone decoration, he becomes an integral part of the arrangements, contributing to the music's architecture as well as its more unrestrained passages.

Shiroishi is an especially appropriate collaborator. The Los Angeles-based saxophonist has developed an extensive body of work across free improvisation, experimental music, noise and punk, both as a solo artist and through numerous collaborations. His playing can move between abrasive blasts, lyrical phrases and extended textural explorations, and he has a particularly useful ability to inhabit music without simply taking it over. His experience with Upsilon Acrux also provides a direct link to HRMAG's own history. On "Horns & Hooves", the saxophone does not function as a guest soloist perched above the rhythm section; it becomes another unruly participant in the band's collective argument.

The album opens with "Meatpecker Suite", an eight-minute introduction to the quartet's peculiar sense of order. A jagged guitar figure establishes an angular framework, quickly joined by bass and drums, before the saxophone begins to complicate the arrangement. The music moves between clipped, repeated motifs and freer exchanges, with the instruments repeatedly threatening to pull the piece in different directions. There is a pleasingly physical quality to the performance, but the musicians are not simply chasing speed or volume. Their rhythmic interplay is too considered for that. Even when the arrangement becomes chaotic, one can sense the underlying framework holding everything together, like the structural beams of a building that has been designed by someone with a serious disagreement with right angles.

"Gooseflaps" takes a more compact route, relying on abrupt changes and tightly wound rhythmic gestures. Its short duration makes it feel almost like a concentrated burst of nervous energy, with guitar and saxophone trading sharp-edged phrases over a rhythm section that refuses to settle into predictable patterns. There is a trace of no-wave's confrontational economy here, but also a playful quality that prevents the music from becoming merely aggressive. The title, naturally, offers little assistance in interpreting the composition. One suspects that this is entirely intentional.

"Spacedocker" is one of the album's most immediately engaging pieces, combining a more recognisable rhythmic drive with the quartet's fondness for sudden structural detours. The guitar provides a stronger sense of direction, while the saxophone adds a wiry, restless counterpoint. The piece has something of the muscular precision associated with math rock, but it avoids the genre's more familiar displays of instrumental athleticism. There is no obvious desire to demonstrate how many subdivisions can be squeezed into a bar before the listener requests medical assistance. Instead, the musicians use rhythmic complexity as a means of generating tension and movement. The result is energetic, oddly catchy and just unpredictable enough to keep the floorboards nervous.

"Collyleg" brings the first half of the record to a close with another compact exercise in controlled disruption. Its short form gives the band little opportunity to settle into a single idea, and the music seems to enjoy the resulting instability. Yet the quartet's ability to make these abrupt transitions feel natural is one of its most persuasive qualities. Their compositions are not simply collections of unrelated riffs and improvisations; there is a clear sense of interaction between the different elements, even when the direction changes without warning.

The remaining four pieces on the full digital edition broaden the picture considerably. "Preposterous Proboscis / Tephra" makes the band's Beefheart inheritance particularly apparent, combining an eccentric, almost cartoonish central motif with a more volatile instrumental conversation. The composition moves between playful rhythmic patterns and noisier passages, allowing its absurdity to become part of the musical structure rather than an amusing distraction. "Flambé Gump" pushes further towards the abrasive end of the spectrum, with guitar and saxophone generating a particularly unruly texture. The performance has a rough, almost confrontational energy, but it remains sufficiently alert to dynamics to avoid becoming an undifferentiated wall of sound.

Then comes "Plappy", a welcome change of temperature. Michael Pike's piano introduces a more lyrical dimension, and the composition's comparatively measured pace reveals a side of the band that might otherwise remain concealed beneath the rhythmic commotion. There is a slightly melancholic quality to the piece, and its more direct melodic gestures provide a useful contrast to the album's harsher passages. It is not exactly a ballad, unless one imagines a ballad being performed by musicians who have just discovered that the piano has been left unattended in a room full of strange noises. Still, its presence is important: it demonstrates that the group can create atmosphere and melodic focus without abandoning its distinctive character.

The closing "Bedlams Bottom" returns to more turbulent territory, with discordant guitar work and increasingly free rhythmic activity bringing the record to an appropriately unsettled conclusion. The title suggests a place where things have gone badly wrong, and the music offers little evidence to the contrary. Shiroishi's saxophone is particularly effective in this context, moving between sharply defined gestures and more open-ended bursts of sound. The final impression is not one of resolution, but of a group that has discovered several new ways to make its own musical machinery malfunction.

What distinguishes "Horns & Hooves" from a great deal of contemporary instrumental experimentation is its attitude towards complexity. The band is clearly capable of intricate playing, but it does not confuse technical difficulty with artistic purpose. Its rhythmic frameworks are often built through repetition rather than conventional notation, leaving room for the musicians to alter, extend or destabilise them in performance. This gives the music a flexibility that is different from the tightly scripted intricacies of much math rock. The compositions can be precise without feeling rigid, and improvised without becoming shapeless. That balance is not easy to achieve, particularly when the instruments involved seem to have been selected partly for their ability to disagree with one another.

The production helps preserve this tension. The recordings, made at Big Jelly Studios and Delta Studios, have a raw but clearly defined sound, allowing the instrumental details to remain audible even when the music becomes particularly dense. Guitar, bass and drums retain their physical weight, while the saxophone is given enough space to contribute meaningfully rather than simply decorate the arrangements. The result feels immediate without sacrificing the distinctions between the different musical voices.

There is also a welcome absence of solemnity. Experimental rock can sometimes become so preoccupied with demonstrating its seriousness that it forgets music is supposed to be an enjoyable activity. Honey Ride Me A Goat understand that absurdity and sophistication are not mutually exclusive. Their compositions can be demanding, dissonant and rhythmically intricate, but they also possess a mischievous streak that keeps the whole enterprise from becoming an academic exercise. The band's humour is not merely a matter of ridiculous titles; it is embedded in the way the music continually upsets expectations, as though the musicians are quietly amused by the listener's attempts to anticipate what comes next.

"Horns & Hooves" is therefore more than a belated document of a group with an unusually long and fragmented history. It captures a band finding a new balance between its original instincts and the possibilities offered by an expanded lineup. Patrick Shiroishi's contribution is substantial, but the underlying personality remains unmistakably that of HRMAG: angular, unpredictable, rhythmically mischievous and cheerfully resistant to categorisation. The album may have taken several years to reach the public, but its music sounds anything but archival. It has the restless energy of something that has been waiting patiently for the right moment to cause trouble.