Eighty percent of the ocean floor is unmapped. Most bands can barely map a rehearsal room. Split Apex, naturally, choose the Mariana Trench.

With "Thoughts In 3D", the duo of Jussi Palmusaari and Peter Blundell deliver a vinyl debut that behaves less like an album and more like a deep-sea expedition log written under crushing pressure.

Palmusaari, who cut his teeth in Finland with Preesens in the late 90s and early 2000s, arrives in South London carrying a particular northern severity: guitar lines that feel chiseled rather than strummed. Blundell’s lineage runs through the angular, literate sprawl of Mosquitoes, and onward to Komare. His voice has that distinctly British quality of sounding observational and slightly detached even when the ground is splitting open beneath it. Together, they formed Split Apex in autumn 2024, rehearsed obsessively in Croydon, and apparently decided that subtlety was for people who enjoy breathable air.

Across five extended tracks, the record moves like a submersible lowering itself past sunlight.

“Peninsula” is the descent. Bass pulses like sonar. Guitar clangs and scrapes as if testing the hull integrity of the song itself. There’s a mechanical patience to it. You don’t get riffs; you get tectonic adjustments.

“Crux Machine” settles into something heavier, more sedimentary. A solitary guitar figure repeats with stubborn clarity while low-end loops throb underneath, like an engine that might be failing or might be achieving transcendence. It’s hard to tell. That ambiguity is part of the thrill.

On “Cast In Light”, the duo veer into what could be described as laboratory rock. If The Shadow Ring had abandoned literary introspection for surgical experimentation, this might be the result. Blundell’s vocal delivery sounds almost clinical, as if he’s documenting specimens rather than performing songs. Yet there’s tension in that restraint. You sense awe and dread occupying the same narrow corridor.

The title track, “Thoughts In 3D”, slithers rather than strides. Synth lines glow faintly, like bioluminescent organisms drifting just out of reach. The music feels dimensional not because it is busy, but because it has depth. Layers move independently, intersecting without resolving neatly. It refuses the easy climax.

“People, Nerves” completes the arc, rising toward the surface but carrying pressure scars. The guitars shimmer, the rhythm section tightens, and Blundell’s voice hovers between witness statement and existential report. The ascent is not triumphant. It is informed.

Reviews circulating online have pointed to the album’s balance between abrasion and atmosphere, its refusal to flatten intensity into mere noise. That assessment holds. What’s striking is the discipline. Split Apex do not indulge in chaos for its own sake. Every scrape, loop, and bass surge feels positioned with intent, as though the duo are charting coordinates rather than improvising freely.

The production keeps edges intact. Nothing is softened for comfort. The LP format suits it: five substantial tracks, each given space to breathe and to weigh on the listener. This is not background music. It insists on attention. It rewards patience.

If "Thoughts In 3D" has a central thesis, it is that pressure clarifies. Under enough weight, superficial gestures collapse. What remains is structure. Tone. Nerve.

Most bands write songs. Split Apex conduct sound pressure tests on the psyche and press the results to vinyl.

It turns out the ocean was not the dangerous part. The dangerous part is how calmly they guide you through it.

There are albums that revisit the past. And then there are albums that take the past apart with a jeweller’s screwdriver, lay its gears on a velvet cloth, and ask: "so, how exactly does this thing tick?"

With "Covers", released by Hallow Ground (H2509) on December 21st, 2025, CoH and Wladimir Schall offer not a tribute record, not a nostalgic mixtape, but something closer to a philosophical experiment pressed on vinyl.

Ivan Pavlov - known for decades as CoH, a restless explorer of digital signal, conceptual rigor and elegant reduction - has long treated sound as both sculpture and proposition. His earlier detours into homage (including his austere engagement with John Everall) already suggested that influence for him is less about admiration and more about interrogation. Schall, equally elusive, previously stretched Erik Satie’s "Vexations" into a looping temporal labyrinth. Neither artist is interested in faithful reproduction. They are interested in exposure.
And here, exposure is the operative word.

The seven pieces on "Covers" begin with piano material - but what begins as ivory soon becomes circuitry. The album opens with “Merry Xmas Mr Erik”, an oblique triangulation between Erik Satie and Ryuichi Sakamoto. It’s not a mash-up; it’s a slow dissolving of stylistic fingerprints. Satie’s dry wit and Sakamoto’s fragile lyricism are nudged into a shared acoustic twilight, where melody feels less like narrative and more like residue.

Elsewhere, a four-note cell associated with Sergei Rachmaninoff is inflated into a thick, hovering mass - like a Romantic ghost caught inside a server rack. The gesture is almost mischievous: what was once pianistic drama becomes a field of granular tension. Rachmaninoff’s emotive surge is rendered as a kind of architectural hum.

“Kohtakt” and “Okolo Kolokola” nod toward Soviet animation - particularly the 1978 short Kontakt and the cult series Nu, pogodi! - but instead of cartoonish exuberance, we encounter suspended atmospheres. Childhood memory here is neither sweet nor ironic; it is filtered, slowed, refracted. Like trying to recall a dream through frosted glass.

“SOII BLANC” revisits Pavlov’s own earlier work through the distant, hovering sensibility of Morton Feldman - that master of time stretched thin as tracing paper. The result is not imitation but displacement: tones seem to hesitate before existing, as if unsure whether memory deserves to solidify.

And then there is “Snowflakes”, a cover of something that never existed. A delicious paradox. A melody without ancestry. A wink at Immanuel Kant and the idea that meaning can emerge without semantic scaffolding. The track floats - light, crystalline, faintly absurd. It smiles without showing teeth.

If there is a unifying thread, it is the ambiguity of nostalgia. Not the syrupy variety, but the kind that tastes slightly metallic. The closing track, “Starost ne radost”, invokes a Russian proverb - old age is not joy - and the album indeed circles around that friction between tenderness and erosion. Joy and sadness are not opposites here; they are phase-shifted versions of the same waveform.

What makes "Covers" compelling is its refusal to romanticize memory. Pavlov and Schall treat recollection as unstable hardware. The “faults” of traditional instruments and compositions - those imperfections we often forgive because we love them - are not corrected. They are highlighted. Amplified. Turned into structural features.

This is electronic music with a scalpel: calm, exacting, faintly amused. It asks uncomfortable questions. What are we really hearing when we hear a “classic”? Where does authenticity reside - inside the score, the instrument, the ear, or the cultural myth wrapped around it?

As a limited art edition LP with handcrafted covers, the release reinforces the paradox: a tactile artifact dedicated to deconstructing tradition. Mastered by Andreas Lupo Lubich, the vinyl breathes with clarity; its quiet passages feel architectural rather than decorative.

In the end, "Covers" is not about covering songs. It is about uncovering mechanisms. About peeling varnish from melody. About placing memory under laboratory light and discovering that it flickers.

You don’t hum these tracks in the shower. You ponder them at 2 a.m., wondering whether the piano was ever innocent to begin with.

There is a particular kind of composer who does not simply write music but builds worlds and then invites you to get lost in them. With "Cartografía interior", his first solo release on empreintes DIGITALes (IMED 25200), Diego Bermudez Chamberland does precisely that: he drafts a private cosmogony and hands us the map - though not without erasing the legend first.

Composed between 2020 and 2023 and revised in 2025, this 44-minute acousmatic triptych draws inspiration from Scandinavian mythology as recounted in Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. But let’s be clear: this is not programmatic folklore with surround-sound Vikings. Bermudez Chamberland is not illustrating sagas; he is metabolizing them. The mythic scaffolding becomes an energetic principle rather than narrative content. Yggdrasil may hover in the background, yet what we encounter is less a tree than a network of forces.

Online responses to the album have often highlighted its sculptural quality - and rightly so. Bermudez Chamberland, trained at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and shaped by years of dialogue with figures such as Martin Bédard and Louis Dufort, approaches sound as a malleable substance. His studio becomes both laboratory and observatory. Field recordings of natural elements, instrumental gestures from collaborators, and a battery of synthesis techniques are fused into a fixed stereo medium that feels anything but static. The “2.0” format might suggest limitation; the listening experience suggests vertigo.

The opening movement, "Chronomundo", operates at a planetary scale. It unfolds like a slow rotation of cosmic matter, with dense textural strata that seem to drift across enormous distances. Spatial depth is not decorative here; it is structural. One senses tectonic shifts, orbital sweeps, the almost comical audacity of trying to sonify something as grand as cosmology. And yet, the piece resists bombast. Instead of thunderous clichés, we get evolving masses and microscopic fissures within them. Time feels stretched, elastic, as if the listener were perched somewhere between geological patience and stellar combustion.

If "Chronomundo" maps the macrocosm, "Destin // Trouble" zooms in on turbulence. The double slash in the title becomes audible as montage logic: call-and-response fragments, sudden anticipations, sonic behaviors that appear, scatter, regroup. Bermudez Chamberland personifies nature without anthropomorphizing it. Woody timbres sprout and dart; iterative flutters evoke insect wings clustering around a light source; storms accumulate not as Hollywood drama but as layered agitation. The movement is playful in its complexity - one can almost imagine the composer smiling while coaxing chaotic systems into temporary alliances.

What stands out is the music’s vitality. Reviews circulating online frequently note how alive the material feels, how it refuses to settle into static drones. Even when textures sustain, something is always mutating at the edges. Energy here is not merely volume or density; it is behavioral. Sounds behave like entities with impulses, hesitations, and collisions.

The final movement, "Punto maximal", turns inward - or downward - toward the infinitely small. If the first movement surveyed mythic vastness and the second dramatized conflict, this one examines intimacy. The microscopic becomes epic. Tiny iterative “points” punctuate the sonic field, suggesting cellular or particulate life. The humor, perhaps unintended, lies in the realization that the smallest gestures can feel as overwhelming as galaxies. Bermudez Chamberland treats the micro-world with the same grandeur he afforded the cosmic, collapsing scale into perception.

It is tempting to describe "Cartografía interior" as immersive, but that word has grown tired from overuse. What makes this work compelling is not immersion alone, but its elasticity of perspective. The composer revisited and revised the piece in 2025, reinserting materials, rebalancing energies - effectively bending his own past into the present. The album becomes a meditation on time not only thematically, but structurally. Past, present, and speculative future coexist in the studio’s layered memory.

There is also something tender beneath the mythological ambition. The project’s genesis traces back to youthful readings of Nordic lore, encouraged by a mother who nourished imagination with books. That detail matters. Beneath the sophisticated sound design and conceptual architecture lies a child enthralled by infinite worlds and cosmic trees. "Cartografía interior" is, in a sense, a grown-up answer to that early wonder.

And perhaps that is its quiet achievement: it reminds us that mythology was never about gods alone. It was about scale - about locating oneself between the titanic and the microscopic. Bermudez Chamberland does not give us a literal Valhalla or a faithful sonic Yggdrasil. He gives us thresholds, energies, morphologies. He gives us a universe that feels invented yet strangely familiar.

In the end, the “inner cartography” of the title is less about mapping territory than about mapping attention. The record suggests that every listener carries a cosmogony inside - vast, turbulent, teeming with unseen life. This album simply hands you the coordinates and says: explore.

"Kitbuilders are an electro duo from Cologne, Germany, made up of Ripley (vocals) and Benway (keyboards). Since 1997, they’ve blended Electro, New Wave, and IDM influences into a unique sound that helped shape the Electroclash and Electropunk scenes. Their music has appeared on respected labels such as Ersatz Audio, Breakin’ Records, and Play It Again Sam, and has earned airplay from influential DJs like John Peel and Laurent Garnier. Kitbuilders have performed at major festivals and renowned clubs across Europe and beyond, sharing their distinctive style with audiences worldwide."

The previous text was lifted verbatim from Kitbuilders' Bandcamp site. This is my first acquaintance with them, and they are probably much better known in Europe than the U.S. The CD came with a lot of promo material on paper, but music speaks louder than words, so let's dive in, shall we? First track, "Tenderness" sounds like typical beat-oriented electro, and Ripley's voice kind of reminds me of The Residents. "Dark Angels" is more experimental with effects-laden synths, an old-school beat, and lots of sonic manipulation. This could easily have been done in the '80s/ early '90s, and sounds it. "No Good (X Version)" reminds me of XEX, an '80s avant synth-pop outfit from New Jersey. The song is okay but goes on too long. The entirely instrumental "Slow Dance" makes use of oddly melodic synth arpeggios and could have been inspired by early 1970s Kraftwerk. "Follow Me (Concrete Version)" features a relentless beat, and aggressive bass. The vocals don't come in until about 1:20. Ripley's vocals on this one are reminiscent of Cosey Fanni Tutti (of Chris & Cosey) mixed with Lydia Lunch; darkly seductive with a touch of menace. "Get Your Glow On" is a rather happy instrumental tune, perhaps rave-fodder for the completely molly-dosed. "Poison Me" naturally takes on a more menacing tone. This track squarely fits in the Suicide-style No Wave genre. I think the verse is stronger than the chorus on this one but still pretty cool.

Overall I think 'Stupid Games' is really cool album, in spite of some tracks that seem to go on a bit too long, and these folks can pull it off live as well, as evidenced by their "Stupid Games" live video. (A lot of the music is sequenced and programmed but Ripley's vocals are obviously done live real time.) Both the CD and the aforementioned 7" vinyl are limited editions (100 copies for the CD, 40 for the 7" single), The CD also has a bonus remix of "Tenderness" not found digitally on their Bandcamp site. I think the retro artwork by David H. Sekulla / Yeti Popstar is great. (It's like something my synth-pop band Chemistry Set might have done back in the '80s.) I've added "Stupid Games" to my 'New Wave No Wave Next Wave' Spotify playlist, and "No Good" to my 'Electro-Q-shun' Spotify playlist. You should too.

There are albums that ask to be heard. And then there are albums that ask you to recalibrate your ears entirely. "Ecotonalities: No Other Home Than The In-Between" by Ludwig Berger belongs firmly to the second category. Released on -ous (OUS057) and conceived as the sonic centerpiece of Luxembourg’s pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, this LP proposes something radical: that territory itself is an orchestra, and that microphones are not passive witnesses but instruments awaiting performance.

Berger’s premise is disarmingly simple. He “plays” microphones by placing them where forces - water pressure, electromagnetic flux, vibrating steel, insect tremors - can activate them. The result is less a documentary of Luxembourg than a re-composition of its thresholds. The guiding concept is the ecotone: a transitional zone where ecosystems overlap and friction becomes fertile. In Berger’s hands, this ecological term becomes aesthetic method. Each track is a study in in-betweenness - between water and circuitry, wind and wing, earth and signal.

Online responses to the project have often noted its refusal of spectacle. Despite the impressive technological arsenal - hydrophones, geophones, electromagnetic sensors, even a laser Doppler vibrometer - the record avoids gadget fetishism. One does not hear “equipment”; one hears relationships. The hum of a data center leans into the murmur of a forest edge. A wind turbine’s rotation converses with avian movement. The grid and the field are not opposites but uneasy roommates.

Berger is no stranger to this kind of attentive listening. With degrees spanning electroacoustic composition, musicology, art history and literature, and a tenure at ETH Zurich investigating the sonic dimensions of landscapes from Japanese gardens to alpine glaciers, he has cultivated a practice that treats sound as spatial knowledge. His earlier "Bodies of Water" trilogy already suggested that environments sing in registers we rarely acknowledge. "Ecotonalities" extends that inquiry into a country often stereotyped through finance and infrastructure. Here, Luxembourg hums, trembles, pulses.

Side A begins with “Between Water and Circuitry”, where the artificial lake of Remerschen and the Enovos floating solar plant seem to share a common breath. Liquid resonance meets electrical shimmer. There is something almost comic in realizing that photovoltaic panels and rippling water can duet so convincingly. “Between Pressure and Grid” folds hydroelectric force into industrial tension; the piece feels tectonic, as though pylons and dams were clearing their throats.

“Between Wind and Wing” is perhaps the most lyrical segment. Field recordings from a wind farm intertwine with airborne life. The track does not romanticize either element; turbines do not become pastoral flutes. Instead, Berger allows their mechanical rotation to coexist with biophonic flutter, producing a choreography of air in motion. The wind is neither innocent nor guilty. It simply moves.

Side B ventures deeper into abstraction. “Between Earth and Signal” introduces subterranean vibrations and electromagnetic murmurings - an invisible duet of geology and infrastructure. Here the record becomes almost philosophical: what is “natural” when the soil itself carries cables? “Between Data and Field”, the longest piece, brings us to the data centers of Bissen and Kayl. The internal drones and external ambiences create a strangely meditative state. Reviews have highlighted how these passages resist dystopian cliché; instead of presenting digital infrastructure as an alien invader, Berger frames it as another habitat - inhabited not by birds or mammals, but by servers and signals. It is difficult not to smile at the idea that a rack of processors might be granted the dignity of a solo.

The album’s title, "No Other Home Than The In-Between", resonates beyond ecology. It suggests that modern existence itself unfolds in transitional zones: between analog and digital, extraction and preservation, image and sound. As a counterpoint to architecture’s visual dominance - particularly apt within the context of the Biennale - Berger insists on listening as critique. If buildings are typically photographed, here they are overheard.

There is also a subtle humor in the ambition of assembling an “orchestra of microphones”. One imagines them tuning up before rehearsal: hydrophones clearing their watery throats, electromagnetic sensors humming scales. Yet the joke gives way to something tender. Berger’s long-duration recordings - returning to sites across July, September, and February - suggest patience rather than conquest. He does not extract sounds; he negotiates with them.

Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and presented with understated graphic design by Pierre Vanni, the LP format reinforces the project’s physicality. You flip the record, just as you might shift perspective within a landscape. The act becomes spatial.

Ultimately, "Ecotonalities" does not argue that harmony reigns between infrastructure and ecosystem. It reveals tension, abrasion, coexistence. It listens for the seams. In doing so, Berger offers a modest but profound proposition: that attention itself is a form of architecture. And that perhaps our only viable dwelling place - ecological, political, sonic - is the threshold.