Some records arrive like arguments. Others arrive like weather. "azel", the new LP by Anouck Genthon, feels like the latter: a slow atmospheric shift that you only recognize as transformation once you are already inside it.

Released by Sbire Records (SBR017), "azel" consists of a single 22-minute piece whose title refers to a “violin tune”, yet the word carries deeper sediment. Between 2008 and 2012, Genthon conducted ethnomusicological research in Niger, immersing herself in Tuareg musical traditions. At the center of that experience was the anzad, a one-string bowed instrument traditionally played by women. Its tone - at once fragile, nasal, unwavering - lodged itself in her auditory memory. Years later, that memory resurfaced not as citation, but as metamorphosis.

Online commentary has often emphasized the album’s striking austerity. There are no decorative gestures, no folkloric reenactments, no ethnographic display case. What Genthon offers instead is a process of internal translation: from field recording to personal resonance, from archive to living sound. She composes not by imitating the anzad, but by letting its ghost recalibrate her violin technique - bow pressure, microtonal inflections, the pacing of breath. The result is music that feels both ancient and newly invented, as if the instrument were remembering something it never directly learned.

The piece unfolds in patient arcs. At first, the violin seems to search - hovering tones, granular textures, pitches that lean slightly off center. Genthon’s background in experimental and electroacoustic contexts (including collaborations with Lionel Marchetti and the Insub. collective) is palpable here: she treats sound less as melody and more as material. Each note is tested for density, friction, afterglow. Silence is not absence but contour.

Yet there is nothing clinical about "azel". If anything, it is disarmingly intimate. The timbral palette often narrows to a filament, a single vibrating line that feels exposed to the air. Reviews circulating online have pointed out how the music resists climax; instead of building toward a summit, it deepens into itself. Listening becomes less about anticipation and more about attunement. One begins to notice the grain of the bow, the microscopic fluctuations of pitch, the way a sustained tone can feel like a held breath in a vast landscape.

Genthon’s trajectory - from ethnomusicologist to performer-composer - is crucial here. She is not an artist who “borrows” from tradition; she interrogates her own position within it. Her 2012 book on Tuareg music already suggested a sensitivity to the political and aesthetic dimensions of transmission. On "azel", that reflection turns inward. The question seems to be: what does it mean to carry another culture’s sound within your own instrument without reducing it to ornament?

The answer, in this case, is time. Genthon allows the piece to evolve like a memory resurfacing in layers. There are moments when the violin’s tone roughens, becoming almost vocal, almost cracked. Elsewhere, it thins into a reedy thread that could, in a different context, pass for electronic feedback. But everything here is acoustic, recorded in June 2024 between Poschiavo and Le Richoud, and later shaped in collaboration with Lionel Marchetti. The production does not polish away the instrument’s edges; it frames them.

Genthon’s broader practice - sound walks, collective improvisation, large ensembles - often foregrounds listening as a shared responsibility. Here, alone with her violin, she extends that ethic to the listener. The piece asks: can you inhabit a sound long enough for it to change you? Can you accept that continuity is not linear, but cyclical - coming back in order to move forward?

By the end of "azel", nothing has “happened” in the conventional sense. No fireworks. No virtuosic display. And yet the air feels altered, subtly re-tuned. The violin has traced a lineage without drawing borders around it. It has spoken softly, but with conviction.
Sometimes the most radical gesture is not to amplify, but to listen more closely.

There is something gloriously unreasonable about gathering one hundred electric guitars and asking them to behave like the sea. And yet that is precisely what Gilles Laval has done with "100 Guitares sur un Bateau Ivre", released by Cuneiform Records (Rune 535). If this sounds like an avant-garde stunt, it isn’t - at least not only that. It is a pedagogical experiment, a social sculpture, an environmental lament, and a love letter to the electric guitar, all disguised as a maritime hallucination.

The title tips its hat to Arthur Rimbaud’s feverish 1871 poem "Le Bateau ivre", that adolescent masterpiece in which a vessel slips its moorings and dissolves into sensory overload. Laval takes Rimbaud not as a narrative blueprint but as a current - an undertow of revolt, freedom, and ecstatic derangement. The result is not a literal soundtrack to the poem, but a seven-part immersion in what it feels like to read it: colors colliding, surfaces dissolving, beauty shading into menace.

Listeners familiar with Laval’s orbit will know that this is not a sudden infatuation with excess. He has long been an instigator of large-scale guitar happenings across Europe, placing audiences at the center of four stages while he and his co-conductors steer a flotilla of players - students, amateurs, professionals - through music specifically conceived for mass participation. In that sense, the album documents not just compositions, but a process: months of rehearsal, distributed leadership, and the delicate democracy of shared sound. Laval was also a catalyst behind Fred Frith’s 100-guitar project "Impur", and he has performed with Rhys Chatham, whose own multi-guitar works stretched minimalism until it shimmered like heat above asphalt. Those precedents hover here, but Laval’s sea has its own tides.

The opening “De Ses Longs Cheveux Bleus” unfurls like a horizon slowly coming into focus. What could have been an impenetrable wall of strings instead breathes in layers: sustained tones (helped along by eBows and prepared guitars), granular textures, sudden flares of harmonic light. Reviews circulating online often point out the paradox at the heart of the work - how something so potentially overwhelming becomes unexpectedly transparent. Laval avoids bombast; he prefers slow tectonics. When density arrives, it is tidal rather than explosive.

“Embellie” and “Roches” explore contrasting states of the marine psyche. The former glints with cautious optimism, guitars chiming in overlapping figures that feel like sunlight fractured on water. The latter is more geological - hard edges, percussive scrapes, clusters that suggest submerged cliffs and the quiet violence of erosion. Laval’s ear for timbre keeps the ensemble from turning monochrome; he treats the electric guitar as ecosystem rather than instrument.

There is, too, a political undertow. Laval has spoken openly about overfishing and the brutality of bottom trawling, and one hears in the darker passages a kind of submerged protest. This is not program music with didactic signposts, but the unease is palpable. The sea is both playground and graveyard. That tension culminates in “Unsaved”, a wordless elegy for migrants lost at sea. The hundred guitars here do not rage; they hover. Sustains blur into a collective exhale, as if the instrument most associated with individual heroics has chosen, for once, to kneel.

It would be easy to frame "100 Guitares sur un Bateau Ivre" as a spectacle translated to disc, but that undersells its intimacy. Even in recorded form, you sense the smiles Laval describes - the mutual support required to make such a project cohere. Built into the score are varying levels of complexity, allowing novices and veterans to coexist. That inclusiveness is not cosmetic. The electric guitar, often sidelined in symphonic institutions, becomes here a democratic orchestra: one hundred different biographies braided into a single, shifting body.

And yes, there is humor in the premise. One imagines the logistical emails alone: “Dear 97 guitarists, please remember rehearsal six of eight”. Yet the joke, if there is one, is on our expectations. Instead of chaos, we get attentiveness; instead of indulgence, restraint. Laval’s “drunken boat” does not capsize under its own ambition. It drifts, dives, resurfaces - sometimes luminous, sometimes troubled, always alert.
Rimbaud wrote of a vessel that longed for dissolution in breakers and fire. Laval, by contrast, seems committed to navigation. The future may be stormy - climate anxiety, political regression, oceans less known than the moon - yet here are one hundred players choosing to listen to one another. In that act alone there is rebellion.

The sea, after all, is not only depth and danger. It is also resonance. And on this voyage, resonance becomes a form of hope.

Some techno records want to move your body. "Through" wants to interrogate your nervous system.

Giuseppe Sciretti, operating as Nigh/T\mare, has never treated the dance floor as a neutral environment. Since his early releases in 2017 and subsequent work across labels orbiting the darker fringes of industrial and atmospheric techno, he has built a vocabulary steeped in tension. Not decorative darkness. Structural darkness. On "Through", his first full-length for Forbidden Teachings, that vocabulary is refined into something heavier, slower to dissolve, and more introspective.

The album unfolds across ten tracks, pressed on double 12" and extended digitally, and it feels deliberately paced. The title piece, “Through”, establishes the terrain: cavernous low-end pressure, distant metallic textures, and a pulse that feels less like a beat and more like a heartbeat under strain. Sciretti’s sound design is meticulous. Every reverb tail seems placed to widen the psychological frame rather than simply thicken the mix.

“The Succession of Things” expands the scope. Its structure is patient, almost ritualistic. Layers accumulate gradually, then recede, as if demonstrating impermanence in real time. This is techno that understands erosion. Nothing remains static for long. Even the most insistent patterns seem aware that they will eventually collapse into silence.

There is a personal undercurrent here that aligns with Sciretti’s broader artistic approach. He has often described his music as a conduit for processing anxiety, stress, and emotional turbulence. On “Mental Breakdown” and “A Lack of Caress,” that intention becomes audible. The rhythms maintain functional clarity, but the atmospheres are raw, frayed at the edges. The tracks do not dramatize pain; they inhabit it.

“Flagellum” and “Beyond the River” lean toward the more physical dimension of his sound. The percussion strikes with controlled force, the basslines carve clean arcs through the spectrum. Yet even at their most driving, these tracks avoid becoming blunt tools. There is always a sense of space, of depth beneath the surface aggression.

“Arise” and “Rising” suggest motion, but not necessarily ascent. They feel like attempts to stand upright under pressure. Sciretti’s production resists cheap catharsis. He does not provide an obvious drop to release tension. Instead, he sustains it, reshapes it, and occasionally lets it fracture into unexpected harmonics.

The digital bonus track, “Resilience”, functions as a subdued epilogue. It does not offer triumph. It offers endurance. The textures are slightly warmer, the atmosphere marginally less oppressive, but the overall mood remains contemplative. Survival, in this context, is not glamorous. It is ongoing.

Technically, "Through" showcases a producer in full control of his sonic identity. The kicks are dense without overpowering. The high frequencies cut without becoming brittle. The balance between industrial grit and lush ambience is carefully maintained. Sciretti understands how to make space feel inhabited rather than empty.

What distinguishes this album from generic dark techno is its emotional specificity. The mood is not an aesthetic pose. It feels earned. The tracks move through despair and fatigue, yes, but also through persistence. The album’s central question, whether the self can transcend its shaping forces, remains unresolved. That ambiguity becomes its strength.

Electronic music loves a concept. Cowboys, deserts, duels at sunset. Usually it is just artwork and a press release wearing a hat. With Supercinema 06, Deluka actually commits to the bit.

This 12" marks Part 1 of a five-EP narrative titled The Journey of the Minstrel, a serialized Western in which music replaces gunfire and the saloon becomes a dance floor. It sounds theatrical on paper. On wax, it becomes something more restrained and deliberate. Francesco De Luca, the Italian DJ and producer behind the Deluka alias and founder of Berlin’s No Signal Records, understands pacing. He does not rush the story. He builds it.

“Libra” opens the record with calibrated equilibrium. The groove is steady but not inert, pivoting around a bassline that feels measured rather than aggressive. Deluka’s production leans toward hypnotic repetition, yet small percussive shifts keep the track in motion. If this is the arrival of the minstrel in town, he is not bursting through the saloon doors. He is assessing the room.

“Secret (Vision II)” stretches out over eight minutes, and here Deluka’s Berlin education becomes audible. The arrangement unfolds patiently, layering filtered synth motifs and subtly evolving textures. There is a cinematic undertow, but it is not melodramatic. The tension simmers instead of exploding. The track seems to ask whether anticipation might be more powerful than climax. It often is.

“Detroit State of Mind” tips its hat to lineage without turning into homage. The rhythmic framework carries a certain Motor City discipline, crisp hi-hats, assertive low-end architecture, yet Deluka keeps his tonal palette warmer than strict revivalism would allow. It is less about imitation and more about dialogue. The desert myth meets industrial backbone.

“Plastic Emotion”, the closing piece, expands the scope. At nearly nine minutes, it feels like the EP’s emotional thesis. Synth lines glide in elongated arcs, at once sleek and slightly melancholic. The track breathes in long phrases, inviting immersion rather than immediate reaction. If the minstrel’s songs are meant to capture the village’s attention, this is the moment when they begin to believe him.

Deluka’s signature lies in his balance between groove and atmosphere. His textures are polished without becoming sterile, rhythmic without being blunt. There is an almost architectural sense of space in these tracks. Elements are placed with intention, leaving air between them. Nothing feels accidental.

The broader narrative promised by the forthcoming installments, duels, dances, revenge, legacy, suggests escalation. This first chapter, however, opts for groundwork. It introduces tone and tension, establishing a sonic landscape where story and club functionality coexist. The concept could have been kitsch. Instead, it becomes a framing device for disciplined, immersive production.

Released on Supercinema in both vinyl and digital formats, Supercinema 06 feels designed for environments that appreciate patience. It rewards sustained listening as much as physical movement. In a climate where tracks often shout for immediate attention, Deluka chooses controlled magnetism.

The minstrel has arrived. He is not waving a flag. He is tuning his instrument, letting the first notes drift into the room. The duel can wait. The journey has just begun.

There was a time when electro did not ask for permission. It arrived in black vinyl, smelling faintly of smoke machines and futurism, and assumed your body would comply. "Essentiels" revisits that era without embalming it.

Michi Bormann, operating under the Latex and Steril aliases, has long occupied a specific corridor of European electronic music: sleek, slightly perverse, rhythmically insistent. Through releases on Muller Records and earlier outings on labels such as Gigolo and Lasergun, he carved out a sound that balanced cold machinery with nightclub pulse. This compilation gathers what are described as the “best tracks”, newly mastered and processed, which in practice means the chrome has been polished without removing the fingerprints.

The Latex material dominates the first stretch of the album, and it becomes clear quickly that Bormann understood the architecture of the dance floor. “Life on Earth” and “Latex Gloves” hinge on taut basslines and crisp, almost surgical drum programming. There is a precision here that avoids sterility. The grooves feel engineered but not inert. Repetition becomes propulsion rather than redundancy.

Titles like “Bio Metric” and “Remote Control” underline Bormann’s fascination with technology as both aesthetic and metaphor. These tracks carry the minimal discipline of classic electro while flirting with the decadent edge of early 2000s European club culture. Synth lines glide with a certain aerodynamic arrogance, never bloated, always streamlined. When melodies appear, they are functional, almost coded, as if designed to unlock muscle memory rather than sentiment.

“Rain in the Night” and “Love” reveal another facet. Beneath the rigid frameworks, there is a faint romantic undercurrent, though it is filtered through circuitry. Emotion is present, but it is expressed through modulation rather than confession. Bormann rarely indulges in overt drama. He prefers suggestion.

The repetition of “Remote Control” in two versions is not redundancy but a reminder of how elastic these structures are. Small shifts in processing alter the atmosphere significantly. The new mastering lends added depth and clarity, emphasizing low-end punch while sharpening the metallic edges. The tracks feel revitalized rather than refurbished.

The Steril selections close the compilation with a darker shade. “Grey”, “Orbital Bombardement”, and “White Dressed Domina” move closer to industrial territory. The rhythms hit harder, the textures feel more abrasive. Where Latex tends toward polished seduction, Steril leans into confrontation. Yet even here, the dance impulse remains intact. This is severity you can move to.

What makes "Essentiels" more than a nostalgic exercise is its coherence. Despite being drawn from different periods and aliases, the tracks share a distinct sonic identity. Bormann’s sense of economy stands out. He does not overcrowd his arrangements. Each element earns its position. The space between sounds becomes as important as the sounds themselves.

In the current landscape of hyper-saturated electronic releases, this compilation feels almost instructive. It demonstrates how minimal components, when assembled with conviction, can generate lasting impact. No excessive layering. No ornamental clutter. Just rhythm, tone, and a clear understanding of tension.

The limited vinyl edition underscores the record’s physical roots. These tracks were built for speakers that move air, for rooms that amplify bass into communal experience. Yet they also withstand solitary listening, revealing structural finesse beneath the surface sheen.

"Essentiels" does not attempt to rewrite history. It reframes it with sharper edges and renewed weight. The future that these tracks once imagined may have arrived in slightly altered form, but the pulse remains persuasive. Some machines age poorly. These still function, humming steadily, waiting for the next body on the floor.