"Pancake Moon" arrives with the quiet confidence of something that knows it doesn’t need to raise its voice. Michiko Ogawa, working between Berlin and California, makes music that behaves like breath and weather rather than statement. This is her second solo album, and it feels less like a sequel than a widening of the same circle, drawn more slowly, with steadier hands.

The record is built from a modest set of materials: piano, organ, synthesizer, sh, and field recordings captured in two very different landscapes. Berlin contributes its lived-in murmur, Joshua Tree its vast, indifferent openness. Ogawa doesn’t try to reconcile these places. She lets them coexist, slightly misaligned, like memories that refuse to be put in chronological order. The result is a soundworld where intimacy and distance keep trading places.

The opening piece, "ashimoto no uchuu", unfolds with a patience that borders on stubbornness. Soft keyboards hover, the Farfisa carries a faint, dusty nostalgia, and the sh stretches time until it becomes pliable. The music never announces a direction, yet it keeps moving, like walking in the dark with complete trust in the floor beneath your feet. There’s a sense of accumulation rather than development: sounds stack, thin out, return altered, as if replaying moments that almost happened. It’s not dramatic music, but it is emotionally loaded, the kind that sneaks up on you hours later while you’re doing something unrelated and inconvenient.

"Shizukana hikari" feels warmer, more grounded, though no less strange. The field recording from Joshua Tree introduces a different scale, a reminder that silence is never empty and space is never neutral. Ogawa’s playing here is restrained but assured. She allows dissonance and softness to coexist without resolution, which gives the piece a gentle tension. Nothing is smoothed over. Contradictions are not solved, just accepted, which is rarer than it should be.

Ogawa’s background in contemporary composition, improvisation, and sound art is audible, but never academic. Her interest seems less in technique and more in how sound occupies space, how it brushes against memory, how it alters the room you’re in without asking permission. The sh, in particular, acts like a temporal lens, bending perception and stretching moments until they lose their edges. It’s a sound that feels ancient and futuristic at the same time, which suits an album that refuses to settle anywhere comfortably.

There’s something quietly funny about how serious this music is without ever becoming heavy-handed. Two long tracks, minimal materials, no obvious hooks, and yet "Pancake Moon" remains deeply listenable. It doesn’t demand reverence. It invites attention, then leaves you alone with it. You can listen in the morning with the city leaking in through the windows, or at night when the world shrinks to the size of a room. It works either way, which feels intentional.

In the end, "Pancake Moon" doesn’t try to explain itself. It hovers. It glows faintly. It suggests that memory, place, and sound are less about accuracy than about touch. Like its title, it’s slightly surreal, faintly playful, and disarmingly sincere. A small moon, maybe, but close enough to matter.

"Some Kinda Way" is a record about taking the long route to yourself and then deciding that the detours were the point all along. Connor D’Netto doesn’t dramatize this process, which is refreshing, because the story behind the music already carries enough weight. Instead, he lets sound do the talking, looping, circling, occasionally stalling, and then moving forward again with a slightly crooked grin.

D’Netto is an Australian composer whose work often sits in that fertile overlap between contemporary composition and lived experience, where structure exists but never quite behaves. The pieces here revolve around saturation as both technique and metaphor. Instruments are layered until they stop feeling singular and start behaving like environments. Clarinet lines blur into themselves. The viola da gamba, already an instrument with a stubbornly physical presence, is stretched through delays and loops until it feels less historical and more bodily, almost vocal.

The title piece, split into three parts, takes a familiar minimalist premise and quietly undermines it. Yes, there’s an echo of Reich’s "New York Counterpoint" in the setup, but "Some Kinda Way" isn’t about urban propulsion or crisp geometry. It’s softer around the edges, more hesitant, more human. Musical ideas that once didn’t fit anywhere are dragged back into the light and given room to breathe. You can hear things being tested, reconsidered, accepted late but sincerely. The music doesn’t rush to justify itself. It lingers, like someone rereading old messages with new eyes.

The framing pieces, with titles nodding to tattoos, nails, piercings, function less as transitions and more as thresholds. They mark moments of decision, of marking the body or the self, quietly acknowledging that permanence and vulnerability often arrive together. "Feeling More Like", originally written earlier and revisited here, feels like the emotional core of the album. It revels in the viola da gamba’s quirks, not smoothing them out but amplifying them, as if to say that awkwardness can be a source of warmth rather than embarrassment.

There’s something gently funny about how earnest this record is without tipping into self-importance. It doesn’t ask for applause. It doesn’t posture. Even when the textures grow dense, the mood remains open, almost generous. Lawrence English’s mastering keeps everything tactile and close, preserving the sense that these sounds are being shaped by hands, breath, and patience rather than algorithms.

"Some Kinda Way" is not a coming-out record in the obvious sense. It’s closer to a reclamation ritual, built from leftovers, second thoughts, and ideas that once seemed inconvenient. The result is music that doesn’t insist on resolution. It suggests that becoming yourself is rarely a clean arc. It’s more like layering delays until the sound finally feels like home.

Black Rain has always sounded like a shortwave transmission picked up at the end of history, and "Obliteration Bliss" does nothing to correct that impression. If anything, it leans into it harder, calmly, with the confidence of someone who has been documenting collapse for decades and no longer feels the need to raise their voice.

Stuart Argabright’s trajectory is long and oddly coherent. From Ike Yard onward, his work has treated machines not as tools but as witnesses: exhausted, semi-sentient devices mumbling through the aftermath. On "Obliteration Bliss", released on Room40, that perspective feels fully internalized. This is not a record about apocalypse as spectacle. It’s about what keeps running after the spectacle is over. Appliances still speak. Automated voices still list groceries. Systems continue, out of habit, long after meaning has evacuated the building.

The album unfolds like a slow pan across abandoned infrastructures. Fragmented speech appears and dissolves, drifting between broken English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, not as multicultural gesture but as debris. Language here is malfunctioning code. Zanias’ voice, when it emerges, doesn’t dominate; it flickers, human but partially absorbed into the circuitry. Presence is never stable. Everything is already on its way out.

Musically, "Obliteration Bliss" sits in a carefully degraded zone between industrial, ambient, and post-techno drift. Rhythms surface briefly, then erode. Guitars scrape and shimmer like corroded metal under low light. Modular synths breathe and convulse rather than pulse. Tracks such as “Obliterine Silvergreen” and “Atomisieren” feel less composed than weathered, as if shaped by time, dust, and electrical interference rather than intention.

There is a strange serenity running through the album, hinted at in its title. Obliteration is not presented as violent climax but as condition. “All Snowflake Melt” and “Sacred Battlegrounds” pass quickly, almost modestly, while longer pieces like “50 Signs Of Rain : Xenotime” stretch into a kind of suspended vigilance. Nothing resolves. Nothing needs to. The recurring imagery of rain, ash, fog, and rivers suggests cycles that outlast human narratives, indifferent but not hostile.

“Black Mother Bardo”, with its added double bass, deepens the record’s sense of ritual and liminality. The reference to bardo, a transitional state, feels accurate. This is music that lives between systems, between cultures, between eras, between function and ruin. Lawrence English’s mix and mastering emphasize that in-betweenness, allowing details to blur without ever collapsing into mush. Sound here decays with dignity.

"Obliteration Bliss" does not try to shock, reassure, or explain. It documents. It lingers. It listens to machines talking to themselves and finds, against better judgment, something almost tender there. This is not comfort listening, but it is strangely intimate. Black Rain continues to map a world where everything is failing softly, and somehow still glowing.

Luz González does not write tracks so much as she sets forces in motion and watches what survives. "Bi Gezur" unfolds like a compact but dense chapter in her ongoing investigation into bodies, friction, and unstable terrains, both physical and emotional. The sentence printed on the cover is not decorative poetry but a functional warning. These sounds will collide, merge, tear apart, and then calmly masquerade as landscape.

González’s background in sound art and electroacoustic composition is crucial, though never paraded like a diploma on the wall. Her music thinks with muscles rather than concepts. Rhythms arrive whipped and uneven, textures grind and smear, and distortion behaves less like an effect than like a condition of the air. Nothing here is ornamental. Each sound occupies space, pushes against it, tests its density. This is electronic music that understands its own weight.

The title, "Bi Gezur" - “two lies” in Basque - suggests misdirection, and the EP lives by that principle. Narrative gestures appear only to dissolve into abstraction, then re-emerge as something uncomfortably intimate. “Volverse paisaxe” opens the record by doing exactly that: becoming terrain, letting rhythm erode into contour. “Today Yesterday Tomorrow” toys with linear time until it buckles, while “Drawing Dinosaurs (Where can I hide my anger?)” channels tension into intricate, restless sound design that never quite releases its grip.

“Tsunami” hits without ceremony, a sudden compression of force rather than a dramatic build-up, followed by the brief, fragile suspension of “Óxido e flores”, which lasts just long enough to leave a bruise. The closing “Erreka” stretches out and earns its duration, drifting through industrial abrasion, submerged motion, and exposed vulnerability. González allows space to breathe without turning it into refuge. The sound keeps moving, alert, unsentimental.

"Bi Gezur" resists classification. It draws from experimental electronics, sound sculpture, and improvisational thinking without pledging loyalty to any single territory. What it offers instead is a physical listening experience, where anger, tenderness, and joy are treated as materials with texture and mass. This is not music that asks to be solved. It asks to be inhabited, even briefly, even at some cost. When it ends, the space it occupied feels altered, as if something passed through and left its trace.

This EP does not introduce itself. It grabs you by the collar, mutters something in three languages, and drags you into a poorly lit room where repetition is law and volume is a physical condition. "Dééfait" is not interested in charm, balance, or your long-term wellbeing. It is interested in trance. Everything else is optional.

Formed in 2023 and already steeped in sweat and basement acoustics, Dééfait operates somewhere between krautrock’s obsessive forward motion, noise rock’s abrasion, and a kind of decaying psychedelia that smells faintly of ritual smoke and damp concrete. The lineup matters here. Two guitars that don’t negotiate, a bass that thickens the air rather than outlining it, drums that push relentlessly without ever quite settling, and Ric Lara’s voice, which doesn’t sing so much as inhabit multiple states of urgency at once.

The EP unfolds as six extended incantations. These are not songs in the traditional sense. There are no hooks waiting to rescue you, no choruses waving from a safe distance. Instead, each track behaves like a loop under pressure, stretching and deforming until something gives. What breaks is usually avoiding discomfort.

"We Love Each Other So Much That We Won’t Belong To Any Species Anymore" opens the record with a title that already sounds like a manifesto scribbled during a sleepless night. The track itself moves like a collective vow, desire and violence braided together. Love here is not sentimental. It’s corrosive, ecstatic, and oddly tender in its refusal to stay within recognizable forms.

"Molokh" sinks deeper, chewing on sacrifice and chemical imagery with a slow, punishing patience. The guitars feel less like riffs and more like surfaces being scraped. "BONDBONDBOND" tightens the focus, voices tangling and untangling in a sensual spiral that keeps slipping into compulsion. It’s uncomfortable in a deliberate way, like watching something you’re not sure you’re supposed to witness.

On the B-side, "Comatose Big Sun" drags heat and lethargy into the same space, while "Al’Ether" detonates whatever restraint was left. This is where Dééfait sounds closest to a live animal. Rhythms convulse, guitars surge, and the whole thing threatens to collapse under its own momentum, but never quite does. It’s exhausting. It’s effective.

The closer, "Wow! Ferreri Cooked For Us", ends the EP with a dark grin. Words are chewed, spat out, reprocessed. It feels like satire performed with clenched teeth. If this is humor, it’s the kind that laughs while the room is still on fire.

Recorded in a deliberately raw, DIY context and mixed without attempting to civilize it, the sound captures the band’s physical impact rather than polishing it into something respectable. References float around easily, from proto-punk savagery to krautrock repetition and noise extremism, but the EP never feels derivative. It feels inhabited.

Dééfait makes music like a ceremony without doctrine. Masks are inverted, roles dissolve, and repetition becomes both weapon and refuge. This debut doesn’t explain itself, doesn’t justify its intensity, and doesn’t care if you’re ready. It simply insists. And once it’s done, you’re left slightly disoriented, a bit drained, and strangely alert. Which, in this case, counts as success.