“Fiction” arrives like the second half of a sentence someone started whispering in a warehouse and then forgot to finish aloud. JOIX continues the conceptual split begun with "Science": where that earlier chapter felt like matter under pressure - dense, almost unwilling - this one loosens its collar. Same DNA, different weather system.

Deep techno is often treated like a monastic discipline: repetition, restraint, and the quiet belief that emotion is something you filter out with EQ. Here, JOIX ignores that memo. Not by becoming sentimental, but by letting light leak through the seams. The result is not “happy techno” (thankfully, no one survives that concept intact), but something more unstable: brightness that still remembers the dark it came from.

“Lion’s Gate Portal” opens the EP like a door that probably shouldn’t have been opened without checking the manual first. The percussion is minimal but insistent, a kind of architectural scaffolding for those fanfare-like synth gestures that feel almost ceremonial, as if the track is welcoming you into a space that already knows more about you than you do. It’s spacious, but not empty - space here behaves like a listening entity.

“Furtur 2” plays with the idea of motion and mythology, a wordplay that nods toward countercultural road myths while dragging them through a modern acid bath. The synth lines feel performed rather than programmed, jittering with that slightly human instability that refuses to sit still in quantization grids. It swerves between propulsion and suspension, like a vehicle that briefly forgets which century it belongs to.

“Birth Machine” tightens the emotional focus. A warm bassline does most of the heavy lifting, while percussion accumulates like sediment. There’s a sense of inevitability here, but not in a mechanical sense - more like watching something organic decide to become structured. The lead voice that eventually emerges doesn’t dominate; it declares presence without asking permission. Subtle authority, no shouting required.

Closing track “Bitter Sweet Dream” refuses the polite habit of ending things neatly. It folds motifs back into themselves, stitching earlier ideas into a continuous flow that avoids obvious breakdowns. It doesn’t resolve so much as persist, which is usually more honest anyway. Dreams rarely conclude; they just get interrupted by daylight.

Across the EP, the stated absence of presets or AI reads less like a manifesto and more like a constraint the music quietly absorbs. Whether or not anyone notices the absence is almost irrelevant - the sound carries a tactile imperfection that suggests hands, not templates. In an era obsessed with outsourcing friction, JOIX keeps friction as part of the instrument.

What emerges is not a binary of "Science vs Fiction" but a continuum: compression and release, density and air, instruction and imagination. If "Science" was the system trying to explain itself, "Fiction" is the system starting to hallucinate - carefully, deliberately, and with surprisingly good rhythm.

There are albums that politely invite listeners into their world. "Begging For Coins" kicks the door open, tracks mud across the carpet, points at the cracks in the walls, and demands to know why everyone is pretending not to notice them.

This is the latest dispatch from Barcoder, the politically charged side project of James Church, a figure well known within industrial and dark electronic circles through projects such as Lucidstatic and Pandora's Black Box. Across two decades, Church has established himself as an artist capable of balancing aggression with meticulous production, crafting music that hits with the force of a hammer while retaining the precision of a scalpel. Under the Barcoder banner, however, subtlety is often less important than urgency.

"Begging For Coins" gathers material that did not make it onto previous releases, but describing it as a collection of leftovers would be profoundly misleading. If anything, the album reveals another side of the project's identity. Rather than feeling like discarded fragments, these fifteen tracks form a coherent portrait of frustration, disillusionment, and resistance in an era where outrage has become both a commodity and a form of entertainment.

Musically, the album occupies a fertile intersection between industrial music, rhythmic noise, cybernetic body music, and electronic aggression. Church constructs tracks from distorted percussion, corrosive synth lines, fractured samples, and machine-like grooves that seem engineered for both movement and confrontation. The production is dense but purposeful. Every metallic impact, every distorted pulse, every layer of electronic abrasion contributes to an atmosphere of perpetual pressure.

What separates Barcoder from countless industrial projects content to recycle genre conventions is the project's engagement with contemporary anxieties. These songs are deeply concerned with communication, power, alienation, and the increasingly strange relationship between human beings and the systems that mediate their lives. Social media platforms, political tribalism, corporate influence, public outrage, and economic precarity haunt the record like invisible architecture.

The opening sequence establishes this immediately. Tracks such as "Buried Alive", "Dental Plan" and "152S" present a world in which information circulates endlessly while understanding becomes increasingly scarce. Church's perspective is often confrontational, occasionally provocative, and sometimes deliberately uncomfortable. Whether listeners agree with every sentiment is almost beside the point. The album's strength lies less in providing answers than in capturing a pervasive sense of societal exhaustion.

The guest collaborators add valuable dimensions without diluting the project's identity. Angel Of Violence brings a raw vocal presence that amplifies the album's themes of labor, frustration, and personal erosion. Illuminator contributes additional textures that deepen the sonic density, while Krate's appearances introduce subtle variations in pacing and atmosphere. Throughout, Church remains the gravitational center, holding together material that could otherwise fragment under its own intensity.

One of the album's recurring themes is the tension between agency and helplessness. Again and again, the songs depict individuals confronting systems that appear indifferent, opaque, or actively hostile. Yet "Begging For Coins" never collapses into pure nihilism. Anger, after all, is often evidence that someone still believes change remains possible. Cynicism tends to be quieter. This record is many things, but quiet is not one of them.

There is also a curious humanity beneath the machinery. Tracks such as "You Could Have" and "Muddy Boots And Leather Hands" reveal moments of vulnerability hiding beneath the layers of distortion. The album understands that political frustration and personal disappointment often emerge from the same source: the painful gap between what exists and what might have been.

The sequencing contributes significantly to the listening experience. Rather than building toward a single climax, the record unfolds like a series of confrontations with different aspects of contemporary life. Economic anxiety, social fragmentation, cultural spectacle, technological mediation, and institutional distrust all appear as recurring motifs. By the time "No Access" closes the album, one feels less as though a story has ended than as though another chapter of an ongoing struggle has been documented.

The album often seems to recognize the absurdity of the systems it critiques. There is something almost surreal about a civilization capable of extraordinary technological achievements while simultaneously arguing with strangers online at three in the morning about things nobody will remember next week. Church appears acutely aware of this contradiction.

Ultimately, "Begging For Coins" succeeds because it transforms frustration into momentum. Rather than merely documenting dissatisfaction, it channels it into a barrage of rhythm, texture, and confrontation. The result is not always comfortable, nor is it intended to be. Comfort rarely changes minds. It mostly sells mattresses.

What Barcoder offers instead is a reminder that industrial music remains uniquely suited to documenting the psychological landscape of modern life. The machines have become more sophisticated, the networks more pervasive, and the distractions more efficient, but the fundamental questions remain stubbornly unresolved. "Begging For Coins" stares directly at that reality and responds with fifteen tracks of controlled electronic defiance.

Most improvised music asks listeners to abandon expectations. Re-Ghoster Extended's "Dreaming With The Lights On" goes one step further: it asks listeners to abandon orientation. Up, down, foreground, background, cause, effect, instrument, noise, intention, accident. Everything remains visible, yet nothing stays obedient. It is less like entering a composition than stepping into a room where the furniture has quietly negotiated new laws of physics while nobody was looking.

The ensemble behind this remarkable recording is hardly lacking in adventurous credentials. Swiss percussionist and composer Nicolas Field, long active at the intersection of improvisation, contemporary composition, and electronic experimentation, joins forces with pianist Thomas Florin, tape manipulator Jérôme Noetinger, vocal provocateur Fritz Welch, and trumpet explorer Nate Wooley. Each musician has spent years challenging the conventional behaviour of their chosen instrument. Together, they create a collective intelligence that often feels less like a band than a temporary ecosystem.

Recorded live at Geneva's Archipel Festival, the album captures a performance that thrives on instability. Yet instability should not be mistaken for chaos. There is a crucial difference. Chaos merely collapses; this music continuously reorganizes itself. Sounds emerge, collide, mutate, vanish, and reappear in altered forms, as though the performance were engaged in a constant process of self-editing.

The title piece occupies almost an entire side of the record and serves as an ideal entry point into the group's peculiar logic. Percussion appears not as rhythmic foundation but as a source of kinetic suggestion. Piano gestures arrive as fragments of architecture, briefly erecting structures that electronics immediately begin to erode. Noetinger's tape manipulations introduce a strange temporal elasticity, allowing sounds to feel simultaneously present and remembered. Meanwhile, Wooley's trumpet and Welch's voice drift through the texture like visitors from neighbouring realities who forgot to bring identification.

One of the album's greatest strengths lies in its treatment of improvisation. Many free-improvised recordings celebrate spontaneity as an end in itself. Re-Ghoster Extended appears more interested in what spontaneity can reveal. The musicians listen with extraordinary attentiveness, responding not only to what is being played but to what is implied, suggested, or momentarily imagined. The result is a form of collective dreaming conducted in broad daylight.

"Soon Blind" deepens this sensation. The title suggests loss of perception, yet the music seems to generate additional senses. Tiny sonic events acquire disproportionate significance. A scrape, a breath, a metallic resonance, a distorted vocal fragment: each becomes a clue in a mystery that refuses to provide a solution. Listening feels oddly similar to watching clouds. Patterns emerge. Narratives suggest themselves. Then everything changes shape before certainty can arrive.

The shorter closing piece, "Extended Impressions", functions almost like a series of afterimages. Rather than offering resolution, it leaves traces. Fragments linger in memory long after they have disappeared from the speakers. One begins to realize that the album's real subject may not be sound itself, but perception: how we organize experience, and how fragile those organizing systems actually are.

Humour also plays an important role, albeit a subtle one. Experimental music is often accused of taking itself too seriously, as though every squeak carried the burden of explaining the universe. Re-Ghoster Extended avoids this trap. Beneath the complexity lies a playful spirit. The musicians seem genuinely curious about what might happen if sounds are allowed to misbehave. The performance occasionally feels like a laboratory run by highly intelligent pranksters who have replaced the instruction manual with a collection of riddles.

The group's history helps explain this chemistry. Since its formation, Re-Ghoster has steadily expanded its language, moving from trio configurations into larger electroacoustic networks while maintaining an unusual balance between compositional frameworks and improvisational freedom. The addition of figures such as Wooley and Welch has not simply enlarged the ensemble; it has multiplied the possible trajectories available within each performance.

What ultimately makes "Dreaming With The Lights On" so compelling is its refusal to separate imagination from materiality. The album never retreats into abstraction for its own sake. Every strange texture, every unstable gesture, every unexpected collision remains tactile. One can almost feel the surfaces of the sounds: rough, elastic, metallic, porous, occasionally absurd.

The title proves unexpectedly accurate. This is indeed dream music, but not the soft-focus variety. These dreams occur under full illumination. Everything is exposed, every mechanism visible, every mutation happening in plain sight. Yet the mystery remains intact. The lights are on, the room is familiar, and somehow the walls have started breathing.

There is a particular kind of darkness that belongs neither to horror nor to sadness. It is the darkness of memory when it refuses to leave. Not dramatic enough to become a tragedy, not distant enough to become a lesson. DELREI's "Wicked Wicked Ways" inhabits precisely that territory: a twilight landscape where desire and regret continue their endless dance, stepping on each other's feet while pretending to be in love.

Behind the project is Italian musician Alessandro Mercanzin, who has steadily developed a distinctive aesthetic that draws from post-punk, darkwave, Americana, and cinematic atmospheres without fully settling into any of them. His music often feels suspended between geographical and emotional coordinates, as if the European imagination were dreaming of the American frontier through the lens of a sleepless night. On this three-track EP, that vision becomes more focused and more confident.

The presence of Collin Hegna, known for his work with the legendary Portland collective Wovenhand, proves particularly significant. His voice carries a weathered gravity that perfectly suits these songs. Rather than dominating the material, he inhabits it like a ghost returning to a familiar house, recognizing every room yet feeling slightly unsettled by the passage of time.

The title track opens the EP with a slow-burning meditation on toxic attraction. Mercanzin avoids the temptation to portray emotional dysfunction as glamorous. Instead, the song captures the uncomfortable coexistence of fascination and self-preservation. The arrangement moves with deliberate restraint, allowing guitars, bass, and synthesizers to create an atmosphere that feels simultaneously intimate and expansive. One can almost picture a horizon at dusk, beautiful enough to admire, dangerous enough to avoid. Human beings, naturally, tend to walk straight toward it.

What distinguishes DELREI from many contemporary darkwave projects is his understanding of space. These songs are not overcrowded with effects or nostalgic references. Every instrument appears carefully placed, as if the silence surrounding the notes were as important as the notes themselves. The result is music that breathes. It lingers rather than rushes.

The brief instrumental interlude "In Darkness" functions as more than a transition. Lasting little more than a minute, it serves as a corridor between worlds. Rather than developing into a full composition, it presents a fragment, a glimpse through a partially opened door. Such restraint is refreshing in an era where every idea is expected to justify its existence through maximum exposure. Sometimes mystery remains the most effective special effect.

The EP reaches its emotional center with "Give Your Heart to Me". Here the themes of attachment, dependency, and surrender acquire an almost ceremonial quality. The inclusion of a spoken passage inspired by an ancient hymn introduces an unexpected spiritual dimension. What could have remained a simple tale of doomed romance becomes something broader: a reflection on the rituals through which human beings seek comfort, meaning, and protection, even when walking willingly into situations they know may wound them.

Throughout the record, one senses an artist increasingly comfortable with ambiguity. There are traces of post-punk's emotional austerity, dark Americana's expansive horizons, and dreamlike cinematic textures, yet none of these influences become dominant. Mercanzin assembles them into a language of his own, one that feels less concerned with genre than with mood.

At barely nine minutes in length, "Wicked Wicked Ways" could easily be dismissed as a minor release. That would be a mistake. Some works function not as destinations but as signposts, revealing the direction an artist intends to travel. This EP suggests that DELREI is refining a world rather than merely writing songs: a world populated by restless hearts, empty roads, half-remembered promises, and shadows that seem surprisingly reluctant to disappear.

The most compelling aspect of "Wicked Wicked Ways" is that it never treats darkness as an aesthetic accessory. Instead, it approaches it as a condition of human experience, one that can be unsettling, seductive, illuminating, and occasionally absurd all at once. Much like memory itself, the songs refuse to stay where they are placed. They follow the listener home.

For nearly twenty years, PRAED have occupied a peculiar and fascinating territory: a place where street music, electronic experimentation, improvisation, and cultural memory collide without ever agreeing on who is in charge. Listening to their work has often felt like wandering through a city whose map keeps redrawing itself. With "Al Wahem" ("The Illusion"), the duo distills that long journey into one of its most focused and compelling statements.

At the heart of PRAED are Raed Yassin and Paed Conca, whose partnership has consistently challenged assumptions about both experimental music and tradition. Since forming in Beirut in 2006, they have treated Egyptian shaabi not as a genre to imitate but as a living reservoir of rhythmic ideas, melodic fragments, humor, distortion, and social energy. Many artists preserve traditions. PRAED prefers to take them apart, scatter the pieces across the floor, and discover whether the fragments might assemble themselves into something unexpected.

The title "Al Wahem" proves remarkably apt. This is an album fascinated by perception. Not in an abstract academic sense, but in a physical one. Throughout its four extended pieces, sounds repeatedly refuse to reveal their origins. A phrase seems electronic until it suddenly feels human. A rhythmic pattern appears mechanical before exposing an organic pulse beneath it. Clarinets masquerade as machines; machines imitate breathing creatures. The listener spends much of the record trying to identify what exactly is happening, which turns out to be precisely the point.

The opening title track establishes this unstable reality with impressive confidence. Rhythm acts as the album's gravitational force, but PRAED understands that gravity becomes more interesting when things occasionally escape it. Layers accumulate patiently. Patterns multiply. Small motifs branch into larger structures. Rather than building toward a conventional climax, the music behaves like a living organism discovering new limbs as it moves.

One of the album's greatest strengths is its relationship with repetition. Many musicians use repetition as reassurance. PRAED uses it as a form of controlled disorientation. Familiar figures return altered, relocated, or viewed from unfamiliar angles. The effect resembles walking through a neighborhood where every street appears recognizable, yet somehow none of them lead where memory insists they should.

Conca's clarinet remains one of the project's secret weapons. In lesser hands, the instrument might function as an exotic counterpoint to electronic textures. Here it becomes a shape-shifter. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes abrasive, sometimes nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding circuitry, it constantly destabilizes the listener's expectations. Meanwhile, Yassin's synthesizers and samples create environments that feel simultaneously crowded and elusive, like overhearing multiple conversations through the open windows of a moving train.

The expanded cast of collaborators enriches the album without diluting its identity. Guest vocalist Mayssa Jallad brings a human warmth that briefly emerges from the machinery like a distant signal. The string arrangements add depth without lapsing into grandeur, while the dual-drum approach generates an irresistible sense of propulsion. Throughout the record, percussion functions less as accompaniment than as architecture.

Particularly impressive is how PRAED balances complexity and accessibility. Experimental music often suffers from the mistaken belief that difficulty is inherently meaningful. "Al Wahem" avoids that trap. Its structures are intricate, certainly, but they remain rooted in movement. Even at its most abstract, the music never forgets the body. One can analyze it for hours or simply surrender to the groove. Both approaches are rewarded.

The album's middle sections are especially striking because they create a curious sensation of expanding space. New layers seem to reveal hidden chambers within the music itself. Rather than becoming denser, the compositions become deeper. Listening feels less like progressing through time than descending through successive floors of a building whose architecture remains perpetually unfinished.

What emerges over the course of the record is a meditation on instability. Cultural identities shift. Genres mutate. Technologies blur distinctions between human and machine. Memories distort. Traditions evolve. PRAED embraces these uncertainties rather than attempting to resolve them. The illusion suggested by the title is not merely musical. It may be the notion that any cultural form can remain fixed for long.

There is a subtle political dimension here as well, though it never arrives as a slogan. The album's continual reshaping of inherited materials suggests that tradition is strongest when allowed to move rather than fossilize. In PRAED's hands, cultural memory becomes something active, restless, and occasionally mischievous.

By the time "Assarab" closes the record, one realizes that "Al Wahem" has quietly achieved something unusual. It has transformed ambiguity into momentum. The album never settles into certainty, yet it never loses direction. Like a mirage that somehow keeps walking beside you, it remains simultaneously tangible and elusive.

In an era where algorithms tirelessly sort music into increasingly precise categories, PRAED continues to demonstrate the pleasures of refusing classification. "Al Wahem" is not a fusion of genres so much as a dismantling of their borders. The result is hypnotic, playful, disorienting, and deeply alive: music that keeps moving the furniture around while you're still inside the room. And somehow, the room keeps getting bigger.