Writing about free improvisation is a peculiar exercise. On one hand, it’s music born in the moment, often allergic to tidy explanations. On the other, critics keep trying to pin it down with neat paragraphs, like botanists labeling a plant that refuses to stay still. "Et il y aura…" by the quartet Abdelnour / Loriot / Meier / Niggenkemper is exactly that kind of restless organism.

Released by Veto Records, the album documents a performance recorded in June 2024 at the Kunstraum Walcheturm in Zürich. The lineup reads like a small map of contemporary European improvisation: Christine Abdelnour on alto saxophone, Frantz Loriot on viola, David Meier working mainly with bass drum and objects, and Pascal Niggenkemper handling double bass and assorted objects. Four musicians who, over the years, have cultivated a reputation for exploring the fragile borderlands between sound, texture, and silence.

The structure is disarmingly simple: two long pieces. One stretches close to twenty minutes, the other expands beyond half an hour. No quick hits, no polite introductions. The quartet drops the listener directly into the slow mechanics of collective listening.

The first track, “De 0 à -0.67”, begins with a kind of cautious emergence. Small gestures appear like tentative footsteps in a dark room. Abdelnour’s alto saxophone does not behave like a conventional melodic lead; instead it breathes, whispers, occasionally scratches the air with thin lines of sound. Loriot’s viola answers with dry, almost skeletal textures, while Meier and Niggenkemper build a shifting terrain of percussive murmurs and low resonances. The music unfolds less like a conversation and more like a group of people exploring the same unfamiliar landscape from different directions.

There is something almost architectural in the way the quartet organizes space. The double bass often functions as a gravitational center, though Niggenkemper rarely settles into anything resembling a steady pulse. Meier’s bass drum and objects contribute a wide palette of muted impacts and metallic flickers, suggesting movement without ever locking into rhythm. The result is a field of tension that slowly stretches and contracts.

Christine Abdelnour, who has long been associated with the experimental scene in Berlin, brings a distinctive vocabulary to the session. Her approach to the alto sax often prioritizes breath, friction, and microtonal inflections over conventional phrasing. At times the instrument sounds less like a horn and more like a living creature testing the limits of its lungs. It’s an aesthetic that can feel austere, but it also gives the ensemble a strangely organic quality.

The title piece, “Et il y aura…”, extends this logic even further. If the first track sketches the terrain, the second wanders deeper into it. The music becomes more spacious, occasionally hovering on the edge of near-silence. Individual sounds appear, linger for a moment, and dissolve before they can solidify into patterns. Listening requires a certain patience, the same patience one might need when watching clouds rearrange themselves above a quiet field.

That said, the album does not always escape the common pitfalls of long-form free improvisation. Extended durations demand a strong internal narrative, and here the music occasionally circles familiar textural ideas without fully transforming them. Certain passages feel less like development and more like careful hovering. Admirable restraint, perhaps, but sometimes restraint borders on inertia.

Still, there are moments where the quartet achieves something quietly compelling. A fragile alignment of viola harmonics, distant bass resonance, and breathy saxophone can suddenly produce a fleeting sense of clarity, as if the ensemble briefly discovers a shared language before dispersing again. These flashes are subtle but rewarding for listeners willing to remain attentive.

Production-wise, the recording captures the acoustic intimacy of the Zürich space with impressive detail. The engineering by Philipp Schaufelberger allows every scrape, breath, and vibration to sit clearly within the stereo field, while the mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi preserves the music’s delicate dynamic range. In this kind of material, fidelity matters; the smallest sonic detail often carries the emotional weight.

In the end, "Et il y aura…" is not a record that tries to impress through dramatic gestures. It moves slowly, cautiously, sometimes almost stubbornly. For listeners deeply invested in contemporary improvisation, that slow exploration can feel meditative, even quietly beautiful. For others, the experience may resemble watching a very thoughtful conversation conducted in whispers.

Perhaps that is the point. Free improvisation often thrives in that ambiguous space where meaning is never entirely fixed. Sounds appear, interact, disappear. And somehow, out of these temporary constellations, a fragile sense of presence emerges.

Not a revelation, perhaps, but a carefully observed moment in the ongoing dialogue of experimental music. A patient listener may find themselves returning to it, if only to see what new shapes might surface in the quiet.

Reviewing a record born from grief always puts the critic in a slightly awkward position. You sit there judging textures, structures, pacing, while the artist is clearly dealing with something much more private and irreversible. Still, music eventually leaves the studio and enters the public world, and once it does, it has to stand on its own legs.

Ombrée, the project of French musician Guillaume Sonne, has been moving quietly through the experimental underground for some time. His work tends to orbit the edges of dark ambient, electroacoustic improvisation, and field recording practices, usually built from relatively simple means: guitars and bass run through amplifiers, tape machines, environmental recordings, and digital manipulation used more as a sculpting tool than as a central instrument. His aesthetic has always leaned toward atmosphere and slow, immersive development rather than sharp compositional drama.

With "Calvaire", released by I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free, the conceptual core is very explicit. The album emerged after the death of Sonne’s father on February 2, 2025. According to the artist, the tolling bells of the village church during his final farewell became the initial sonic impulse for the project. What follows is presented as a kind of musical meditation on the threshold between life and death, populated by natural omens: fox cries at night, worms in the soil, distant animal voices, fragments of the surrounding environment entering the composition like signals from a parallel layer of reality.

The instrumentation remains intentionally limited. Electric bass and guitar form the backbone, heavily processed through amplifiers, effects chains, and tape saturation. Field recordings and subtle digital treatments weave through the pieces, creating a hazy sonic environment that often feels more like a shifting landscape than a sequence of traditional tracks.

The opening piece, “Foie”, establishes this atmosphere with a slow, droning structure that gradually accumulates layers of distortion and low-frequency resonance. The sound feels physical, almost geological, though its development is extremely gradual. This patience can be immersive for listeners inclined toward meditative sound design, though it occasionally risks drifting into a kind of textural stasis where movement becomes difficult to perceive.

“Vers-cendre” introduces more environmental presence. The subtle intrusion of field recordings creates the sense of an external world bleeding into the music. Animal calls and distant rustling elements function less as narrative devices and more as symbolic textures. They contribute to the album’s central idea that death does not interrupt the ecosystem surrounding it. The forest keeps moving.

The shorter “Brûlé” provides one of the few moments where the record briefly sharpens its edges. Distorted layers rise and collapse in a more dynamic fashion, hinting at a rawer emotional core beneath the otherwise restrained pacing. Ironically, this fleeting intensity also highlights what the rest of the album occasionally lacks: contrast.

Throughout the remaining tracks, titles such as “D’illusions cadavériques” and “Transforme les souvenirs en monolithe” suggest a ceremonial or ritualistic framework. The music mirrors that tone, unfolding like a slow procession through dimly lit sonic spaces. Tape textures, amplifier hum, and environmental fragments create a sense of distance that fits the thematic focus on memory and absence.

Yet despite its thoughtful concept and carefully constructed atmosphere, "Calvaire" sometimes struggles to maintain a strong sense of progression. The sound design is competent and occasionally evocative, but several passages blur together, relying heavily on the same palette of drones and environmental murmurs. For listeners deeply invested in this corner of experimental ambient music, that consistency may feel immersive. For others, it may come across as somewhat predictable within a genre that already thrives on similar textures.

This does not mean the album lacks sincerity. On the contrary, the emotional motivation behind it is unmistakable. Sonne even notes that his father likely would have disliked this music, which adds a strange layer of honesty to the project. Rather than a sentimental tribute, the album feels more like a private ritual translated into sound, an attempt to process loss using the tools the artist happens to possess.

Ultimately, "Calvaire" sits in that middle ground where intention and atmosphere are clear, but the musical results remain uneven. It is a respectful, introspective work that occasionally produces striking sonic moments, yet it rarely pushes its materials far enough to become truly memorable within the broader experimental landscape.

Postscript: This review focuses exclusively on the artistic and sonic aspects of the release. The reviewer maintains a neutral position regarding any political messages or statements associated with the label I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free and does not intend to endorse or oppose them.

I was unfamiliar with this artist, but Tobias Meier hails from Zurich, Switzerland and has been releasing material for almost 20 years now. The label describes his work thus: “In his artistic practice, he researches condensation points and singularities where something emerges. Thereby he pursues a congruence between musical material, process of creation and content. . . . His current works in the form of solo performances, installations, texts, collaborations, or compositions for other artists make use of various media and often have a collage-like character.” This makes sense when the liner notes list the following sound sources: “Voice, bell, Pure Data, Casiotone, saxophone, field recordings, a piano in some rehearsal space, guitar, A Linear Thought, more voices, zither, more guitars, and samples of Im Wald.” Well, I’m a fan of collage, sound and otherwise, so let's peek over the universe’s shoulder and see what is reflected in the mirror.

We open with “Room Without a Floor.” After singing the title, the track brings in a lot of bells that are just out of sync with some drone underneath. This is like listening to a bell choir in an echo chamber. What keeps it interesting is that it is not simply echoes, but the bells are looped onto each other and the sounds become increasingly chaotic. I'm a percussionist, but this is still a hard track to listen to; definitely an exercise in endurance. Over time, the drone begins to take over, mitigating the harshness a bit. Over time, it slows down and becomes more mellow, like a record player coming to a stop. I suspect that this would be fun to see live. After a singing intro, “Almost Nothing” kicks into heavy drone with a hint of dissonance that sounds like a mix of synth and trumpet. This drone shifts almost perceptibly until it suddenly adds in what sounds like someone singing in the shower. “The Artist's Room” continues the shower and what sounds like a radio playing in the background. Someone begins playing a piano over this short slice of life. I enjoy field recording based work, so this is quite nice. “Today My Name Is” opens with heavily processed voice intoning "today my name is" over the shower from the previous track and adds a repetitive guitar line and unsettling spectral voices before settling into an actually sung song over guitar loops and other noises. This eventually resolves to a repeated singing of "I don't know what my name is anymore" repeated for several minutes without accompaniment. There is a lot going on in this track, and it is the most conventional song on the disc, although that is not saying much for readers of Chain D.L.K..

Meier describes this album in this way: “I believe it tells a personal story, but as one possible example of human experience, it can also be read as a singular window into something much more universal.” This is one of those discs that is hard to evaluate and rate, because simply sitting down and listening to it does not seem to be the goal of the artist. I get the sense that these compositions were meant for a very specific space or occasion, and this serves as the artifact of that space. I may not want to listen to it a lot, but I appreciate what Meier is doing and get the sense that seeing it is much better than only hearing it on the disc. If you want something that pushes the envelope of experimental music, this is certainly one to pick up. This album weighs in at around 42 minutes, which incidentally is also the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything.

Marc Benner has been in the noise scene for many years, so I was happy to see this disc in the stack that I would review. He is also known for his project Dead Shall Not Have Died In Vain, as well as being the driving force behind the Oxidation label. He has also begun to release music under his name that seems focused on field recordings. I had previously reviewed “At Times I Struggle to Be Pleasant” on Inner Demons under this moniker and I enjoyed the rawness of it, so I was interested to see how this one compared. The label describes his work thus: “Benner’s sound projects have used decayed media and processed field recordings to render textures of rust and hiss into audio that dissolves before coalescing for listening experiences that feel intimate and uncanny.” Sounds like a good time, so let’s dive in.

“False Beliefs” kicks it off with chaotic, processed field recordings. Clattering metal, overdriven microphone static, and a flute make for an interesting juxtaposition. Next up, “Shutdown” brings in more field recordings with some rhythmic pounding, like a washing machine off balance as someone shells walnuts in front of you. At almost 14 minutes, there is a lot for Benner to play with, and pretty much everything is grist for the field recording mill. Imagine going throughout your day with a microphone turned to maximum gain…. and you have a whole lot of scrap metal that needs to get hosed off and moved. “Interlude” mixes it up with a short track of ever-increasing static noise with radio broadcast snippets and bird noises thrown in. As an interlude, it is excellent and still stands on its own. This is, in some ways, the noisiest thing on the album, but also somehow the most cohesive. “Recovery” closes it down with a minimalist field recording composition that is like listening to one of the other tracks from the room next door with the door closed. The overall feel is subdued and almost peaceful.

Overall, this is firmly on the side of “experimental,” and those who enjoy field recording based music will appreciate this. If you are looking for more noisy stuff, this may not scratch that itch, but it is certainly an interesting listen. This album weighs in at around 31 minutes.

R4 has been around for a long time and I have really enjoyed his ability to merge ambience with noise. R4 is the work of one Barry Sheffel, who is also the man behind the Fusion Audio Recordings label. He had dropped off the face of the earth for a while, but he is back with a lot of new work, of which this is one. The label describes this simply as “Noise and quirky, leftfield electronics. Recorded in 2021. This is the second in series of mini CDRs.”

This disc consists of two tracks. We kick it off with “Traffik,” which is a short track of noise with a psychedelic feel. Lots of analogue noises and static, with a whimsical quality. It’s almost like he took honking cars and inserted them into road noise and theremin-like noises. “Two Point Seven Degrees Celcius” closes it out with a 17 minute track that really leans into the electronic noise with analog warbling, stuttering electronics, and shortwave radio transmission noises. There is a lot going on here that keeps it moving, and the music is layered in such a way as to continually build in both complexity and intensity. It ends quietly and deliberately, pulling you in, as it unravels in complexity to a static noise drone and then to quiet bass rumble. Nicely done.

This disc, along with his other recent output, such as “Rainmaker” on Inner Demons Records, show that R4 is in fine form and continues to produce noise music that is engaging and inventive. The 3 inch format really highlights R4’s work, with just enough length to construct a good track but not so long that it gets tiresome. Really solid noise. This album weighs in at just over 21 minutes and is limited to 15 copies, so get it while you can.