Snuffo’s Embrace The Arts arrives like a manifesto disguised as an LP, the kind of record that knows exactly what it wants yet behaves as if it stumbled into the room by coincidence. Benedikt Schmidt has been orbiting the fringes of club culture and experimental performance for years, sometimes as Snuffo, sometimes as half of Snuff Crew, sometimes as a novelist, sometimes as Cellarkalt’s wandering phantom. He seems constitutionally incapable of doing just one thing at a time, so it is almost touching that this album insists on a single radiant instruction: take art seriously because it is one of the few things that still takes you seriously in return.

The music itself feels like a diary kept during a heatwave, a stretch of Mallorca summer where machines sweat as much as people do. Schmidt recorded live in the studio, which here translates into a sense of breath and twitch and occasional lovely clumsiness. The ten tracks have that “I trusted my instincts before my brain even woke up” energy that often marks his best work. Pursuit of Happiness opens the circle with a playful tightness, the kind of track that smiles crookedly while pacing around the room. Escapist stretches out like a shadow at sunset, holding both melancholy and mischief in the same beat. Cosmic Intervention is more ascensional, a little cosmic disco, a little bunker techno, the sort of thing that could soundtrack a midnight revelation or a 4 a.m. mistake.

Even the shorter pieces feel like miniature sculptures. Dry Spell (Hang In There) sounds like someone knocking politely on the door of their own subconscious. Every Now and Then is all vapor trail and hesitation, a slow-motion pulse that refuses to resolve. And Rituals brings a low-burning momentum, as if the machines are performing their own rite and Schmidt is just there to keep the candles from tipping.

What sets the album apart is the way it wears its artistic convictions without becoming preachy. The tracks are playful, occasionally rough at the edges, unashamedly direct. They speak of doubt, stubbornness, imagination, and the impossible hope that art might still nudge the world sideways when nothing else seems to. Dissent in particular carries this spirit like a torch, a fizzing pulse wrapped in grit and gentle threat. Whims and Balm close the record with a sense of earned tenderness, small gestures offered after the storm.

Embrace The Arts is ultimately a snapshot of an artist who has spent decades learning that invention cannot be forced but it can be cultivated, like a stubborn plant that grows out of concrete simply because it damn well feels like it. Schmidt listens to his machines until they speak back, and what they tell him here is that joy and doubt and resistance can coexist inside a kick drum.