There is a small contradiction hiding inside the title "Volatile Poem". A poem usually implies something deliberately shaped, while volatility suggests a form that cannot quite be trusted to remain where it was put. I’A’V understand the contradiction perfectly. Their debut is built from songs, but the songs keep shedding their skins; it contains voices, cello and flute, but none of these instruments is allowed to remain entirely itself. The result is music that seems to hover between composition and dissolution, as if someone had written a song on a piece of ice and then become curious about what happens next.

I’A’V emerged from an invitation made by gnration in Braga to Inês Malheiro, who brought together Arianna Casellas and Violeta Azevedo for a residency that first produced "Volatile Poem". The three musicians arrived with considerably different backgrounds. Malheiro has developed a practice in which the voice is treated as raw material as much as a means of communication, moving between composition, improvisation, performance and sound work. Casellas works across music and interdisciplinary practice, with cello and an interest in the folklore and cultural residues of the places she has inhabited. Azevedo moves between composition and improvisation, particularly through the dialogue between transverse flute and electronics. Their meeting therefore does not feel like the assembly of three musicians looking for a common genre. It feels more like three established vocabularies being forced to negotiate a new grammar.

That negotiation is immediately apparent in “Echoes”. The voice appears neither as conventional singing nor as pure abstraction. It remains recognisably human, but its surroundings make its identity unstable. Electronic tones flicker around it, while the instrumental elements seem to occupy an uncertain distance. The piece establishes one of the album’s most effective tricks: whenever the music approaches something resembling a song, it slightly alters the conditions under which the song can exist.

“Air Particles” expands that idea. The title could almost be mistaken for a piece of New Age packaging, but the music is considerably less polite. Flute and cello provide organic contours while electronics introduce brittle edges, suspended tones and interruptions. The instruments do not simply accompany one another. They seem to be listening through different physical laws. The flute breathes; the cello pulls sound through the strings; the electronic layer behaves as though breathing were an optional feature.

This makes Violeta Azevedo’s flute particularly important. It does not function merely as the delicate acoustic counterweight to Malheiro’s voice and the cello. Its breathiness becomes a reminder that even the most fragile sound has a body behind it. Casellas’s cello supplies another kind of resistance, its strings bringing friction, grain and gravity into a record otherwise capable of becoming almost weightless. Against them, Malheiro’s voice can move from intimate presence to something fractured, multiplied or electronically transformed. The three materials consequently keep correcting one another.

The nearly ten-minute “Caminha” is where the album’s architecture becomes most apparent. Rather than behaving like an extended song in the conventional sense, it unfolds through changes of density and perception. There are moments when the music seems remarkably exposed, followed by passages in which processing gathers around the performers until their identities become difficult to separate. The transition is never presented as a spectacular special effect. It happens almost conversationally, which makes the transformation more unsettling. One moment you hear a person singing; a few minutes later you seem to be hearing the memory of a person singing.

Then comes “Rents Are High Again And I Can't Touch The Sky”, lasting just twenty-five seconds. Its title is almost hilariously mundane compared with the metaphysical atmosphere surrounding it. It also introduces an important crack in the album’s otherwise ethereal surface. Rent is high. The sky remains inaccessible. Even experimental music, apparently, has to pay attention to the housing market eventually.

The miniature “Flame Distortion” continues this disruption, while “Waterfall” provides one of the album’s more substantial passages. Here the title suggests movement, but not necessarily the picturesque kind. The sound seems to pour rather than proceed, with textures continually changing shape without settling into a stable hierarchy. What is particularly effective is the refusal to make abstraction synonymous with coldness. There is still a physical quality to the music, especially in the interaction between the acoustic instruments and the voice.

That balance may be the album’s central achievement. "Volatile Poem" is certainly experimental, but its experimentation is not based on rejecting song. The original presentation of the project explicitly grew from an investigation into what a song might be, with Malheiro, Casellas and Azevedo working with voices, flute, cello and whatever else emerged during the process. The 2024 gnration presentation already described the project as an attempt to examine the form and beauty of song, while allowing improvisation and fragmentation into the composition.

Consequently, “Scream Study” is an especially revealing title. It treats one of the most primal human vocal actions as an object for investigation. A scream can express pain, anger, fear, pleasure, protest or simply the sudden realisation that somebody has put pineapple on pizza. I’A’V are interested in what remains when that expressive impulse becomes musical material. The piece does not need to settle on one emotional meaning. It can examine the sound itself, its pressure and its grain, without pretending that abstraction has somehow made the human element disappear.

“Everyone Should Be Loud”, at twenty-two seconds, is another tiny act of sabotage. After so much careful attention to nuance, silence and gradation, the title sounds almost like a political slogan issued by a particularly eccentric town council. Yet it fits the record’s interest in collective presence. These three musicians are constantly negotiating volume, density and space, and the album repeatedly suggests that listening together does not mean becoming identical.

That becomes crucial in the closing “I’m Here”, an eleven-and-a-half-minute piece that feels less like a finale than a sustained declaration of presence. The phrase is simple, almost embarrassingly so. But after an album spent so much time fragmenting voices and transforming instrumental identities, presence itself becomes meaningful. “I’m here” is not necessarily a statement of stability. It can also mean: I am still here despite everything that has happened to the sound around me.

This is where the title "Volatile Poem" finally makes sense. Volatility is not merely an aesthetic preference. It is the condition under which the three artists communicate. Their music does not resolve difference by smoothing it away. Instead, cello, flute, voice and electronics remain recognisable enough to retain their personalities while constantly disturbing one another’s boundaries.

The album’s physical format adds another amusing contradiction. The first edition on Sucata Tapes is a limited cassette release, with each copy accompanied by a unique 3D-printed I’A’V logo and random bits of sequins or glitter. It is difficult to imagine a better material joke for music that spends thirty-eight minutes refusing to stay materially stable: a fragile cassette containing sounds that are themselves continually mutating, dressed up with tiny pieces of celebratory debris. Experimental music occasionally remembers that it is allowed to have fun.

There is also a distinctly Portuguese context to the project, although "Volatile Poem" never turns regional identity into decoration. All three musicians are deeply connected to the contemporary Portuguese experimental scene, and the project itself grew out of gnration’s Radiografia programme, which was designed to foreground emerging composers and practices in Braga. The residency gave the trio a specific institutional starting point, but the music quickly outgrows that context.

What remains after repeated listening is not a particular melody or electronic trick, but a sensation of continual negotiation. The album is constantly deciding how much of itself should be exposed and how much should be obscured. Its most beautiful passages are often those in which the answer remains unresolved: a flute breath interrupted by electronics, a cello phrase disappearing into processing, a voice suddenly becoming texture and then returning as a person.

There is something almost tender about that instability. "Volatile Poem" does not treat transformation as a way of escaping humanity. Quite the opposite. It keeps returning to the body: breath, voice, strings, resonance, vibration. The electronic elements may distort these things, but they cannot completely erase their origins.

I’A’V therefore make a record about becoming something else without quite becoming unrecognisable. Its songs do not break apart because composition has failed. They break apart because the three musicians have discovered that fragmentation can be another form of togetherness. The poem is volatile precisely because it is alive, and "Volatile Poem" is at its most convincing when it lets that life remain slightly out of control.

According to his Discogs page, Charles Lareau hails from Green Bay, Wisconsin and is now based in Hangzhou, China. I was unfamiliar with his work, but the liner notes credits Lareau with "tapes and electronics," so I had some sense of what I was getting myself into. These tracks were recorded in 2021 & 2022 in Shanghai, China. Let's dive in and see what we have here.

We open with "aixst00," which is gritty machine noise. Imagine running a two-stroke engine though a series of effects and you get a sense of what you are in for. "Transistor" is heavily processed warbling static and analogue tones. I like the rawness of this and there is a minimalism here that is engaging. Finally, "algosphere" keeps the minimalism going with a lot of drone and ambience. If you are looking for atmosphere, this is where you will find it.

Flipping the tape over, we begin with "0II0I," which is an interesting mix of field recordings of singing and music buried under a wall of tape hiss and other noises. "Airwaves" is a short piece that brings some noise, with a repetitive static crunch and high-pitched radio noises. Finally, we close it off with "trajectory," which at 13:06 is the longest track on the release. The track kicks off with a static blast, but then quickly relaxes with some peaceful drone. This has the feel of being done in real time with one take, as there are sudden shifts at times. This settles into a heavily distorted drone piece that constantly evolves and shifts over time. Bits of static hiss come along for the ride and then vanish, tapes sounds like they are getting eaten for a brief moment, and suddenly it is over.

This is one of those nebulous releases that are a bit difficult to categorize. It is noisy, but not really noise. A bit too noisy to be ambient though. But it is very well done and a nice listen. Lareau manages to keep everything interesting by not getting too bogged down in formula. If you like tape experimentation with a lot of processing, this will be up your alley. Well worth checking out. This release weighs in at around 40 minutes.

The Discogs entry for this artist has several aliases, including: 69, Destroy Date, E.J. Vodka, Edward Giles, and Unknown Hierarchy. Edward Giles is a member of +DOG+, among many others. Now let's talk a bit about the title for a moment. "Food Desert Created By Neighborhood Gentrification" is a real thing, so although many completely disregard noise, I figure any attention we can get to such issues is worthwhile. The liner notes state that "WALLMART "Food Desert" is a new fifteen plus HNW track about an old subject. While the need for commercial property starts to diminish as retail shopping goes online. Many smaller "brick & mortar stores" have suffered the impact of the "big box" model of retail. The seemingly lower prices are never offset by the loss of local businesses that have shuttered their doors as commercial property developers continue to buy up neglected, underutilized land to create "food deserts" that lower income shoppers cannot access or afford." I have personally seen such food deserts in my work, so all I can say is "preach, brother." As for Wallmart? No bonus points for figuring out what we are in for here, so let's get past the geriatric greeter and see what the people in the blue vests have on sale today.

As you may have figured out based on the name and the fact that it's being released by Inner Demons Records, this is some heavy harsh noise wall. Over fifteen and a half minutes, the track grinds and stutters away in a cacophony of electronic noise. There is a lot going on in the track with a nice bass undercurrent to keep everything grounded. At the end, it cuts out to some hum and a brief news report about a store closure.

Overall, this is some nice wall of noise with a socially conscious point that one would be hard pressed to oppose. I am not the biggest fan of harsh noise wall (I prefer the "everything including the kitchen sink" variety of noise), but I found this to be engaging. This album weighs in at just over 15 minutes.

I previously reviewed Gensai Hasegawa’s “Life and Death in the Quarantines” and enjoyed it, so I was interested to hear how he would sound in a collaboration. Hasegawa hails from Tokyo Japan, and began producing music at the age of 50 after aa long career as a systems engineer. I could not find much about Miko because my Japanese is limited to what I have learned from manga and anime. From what I could gather, she focuses on voice and piano. So with only my knowledge of Hasegawa’s work and a host of mystery guests, let’s dive in.

We open up with “The City Wears a Folk Hat,” which has more participants than a bad rap track from the 90s. The participants include: Miko, (Sebaebi), (Ripuchuwan), (Ikemen Tomozo), (Wan), (Opu), (Kabochan), (Oshin), (Kuwati), (Shachiku Baba), (Roa), (EAPAI), (Rei), (Rikuto), (Momo) and Gensai Hasegawa. We open with a guy yelling, then other random noises added into the mix. There are people making vocalizations and other noises with their voice. Add to this some stringed instruments and flutes, and you have an odd composition. Imagine a person beatboxing and then making slurping sounds and animal noises. There is some spoken word, but I know very little Japanese, so I am no help here. This is weird and not likely to be everyone's cup of tea, but it is certainly interesting. “The City's Light” closes out the album and is a complete departure from the mellowness of the prior track. This is solely the work of Gensai Hasegawa and it lays down some harsh noise wall with plenty of static, bits of analog tones, and some line noise added in for good measure. Overall, this is a nice wall.

In short, if anyone came here to get mellow, the first track may do the trick. If you came to get some heavy noise blasts, the second track will do the trick. It's weird, but interesting. If you like some of the stranger stuff on Public Eyesore Records, this is worth checking out. This album weighs in at around 17 minutes.

I’m sure that by now you are familiar with Dan Fox, the hardest working man in noise. He records under a host of names, including This is What I Hear When You Talk, Fail, and Loss, to begin with, as well as being the driving force behind Inner Demons Records. Fail is nice, harsh noise, so let’s dive in and see what this sounds like live.

This album consists of one 16 minute track, "Live at Denver Noise Fest 2026." It kicks off a bit subdued, with some slight crackling, but then kicks into a bit noisier section. This track runs like a roller coaster, alternating with soothing noise and harshness. There are moments of high pitched squeals and analog noises and other moments of low seismic rumbles. There are quiet moments where it almost feels like it is ending, only to suddenly blast the listener with harsh noise. There is a lot going on here, so if you like your noise with a lot of variety, this is definitely one to check out. This also solidifies the fact that if you ever have a chance to see any of Fox's projects live, it will be well worth your while.