With "F A I D R O S", Jonas Rosén doesn’t so much release an album as he opens a pressure hatch and lets vacuum rush in. Two long-form pieces, minimal information, maximum gravity. No choruses, no handrails. Just sound drifting, orbiting, occasionally threatening to implode.
If you come here expecting the scorched abrasion of Senza Testa, you might initially think Rosén has gone soft. He hasn’t. He’s gone cold. This is not the noise of impact, but of distance: throbbing arpeggios that pulse like malfunctioning satellites, bass frequencies so low they feel less heard than "suspected", and chords that hover with the calm menace of something ancient and indifferent. Think early kosmische lineage - yes, Tangerine Dream, yes, Schulze - but stripped of romantic stargazing. This is space without astronauts. No heroic narratives, just systems humming because they must.

What makes "F A I D R O S" compelling is its restraint. Rosén understands that in this terrain, excess is the enemy. The analog synths are allowed to breathe, to misbehave slightly, to reveal their circuitry like exposed nerves. The music unfolds slowly, with the patience of deep time. Motifs emerge, threaten to coalesce into something recognizable, then dissolve again, as if embarrassed by the idea of form. It’s less about progression than persistence: sound as a condition rather than a story.

There’s also something quietly radical in how this album exists. Limited vinyl, multiple cassette versions, even a Eurorack module that lets you physically touch the DNA of the record. This isn’t merch; it’s an extension of the work. Rosén’s long-standing DIY ethos isn’t a slogan here, but a methodology. He doesn’t just compose music - he builds the ecosystem it lives in. The fact that mastering is handled by Stefan Betke (Pole) feels less like a prestige move and more like a nod between craftsmen who understand the beauty of controlled instability.

Despite its cosmic framing, "F A I D R O S" is oddly intimate. Dedicated to Rosén’s father, it carries a subdued emotional charge, never stated, never dramatized. Mourning here is not loud; it’s gravitational. You feel it in the way sounds linger, in how silence is treated not as absence but as a loaded space between events. This is music that doesn’t ask for your attention - it waits for it. And if you’re distracted, it will simply continue without you.

Is it funny? Only in the driest possible sense: the joke is that something this minimal, this stubbornly unyielding, can still feel alive. That two tracks, each longer than some people’s attention spans, can say more by refusing to explain themselves. "F A I D R O S" doesn’t promise transcendence. It offers duration, density, and the quiet thrill of being very small in a very large sonic void.
End transmission, indeed.

IKI’s "Body" does not ask to be listened to so much as inhabited. It is an album that breathes, sweats, twitches, occasionally forgets what it was doing, then remembers - like a living organism caught mid-thought. Built entirely from voices, and proudly so, "Body" refuses the cosmetic surgery of heavy processing in favor of exposed skin: cracks, saliva, friction, pulse. If most contemporary vocal music tries to sound superhuman, IKI insist on sounding unmistakably human, and sometimes inconveniently so.

For more than a decade, this Nordic vocal collective has treated the voice less as a vehicle for melody and more as a full-body instrument, a nervous system with lungs attached. Here, that philosophy tightens into something almost anatomical. Tracks like “Run”, “Walk”, “Dance”, and “Float” aren’t metaphors; they’re instructions, tempos mapped directly onto muscle memory. You don’t so much hear them as feel your own body quietly syncing up, like an internal metronome realizing it’s been off all day. The recurring “Circuit” motifs act as pressure points - short, ritualistic pauses that reset the flow - circling an unsettling question that lingers longer than the notes themselves: what remains when the body stops performing its most basic task?

There’s something faintly humorous, too, in the album’s seriousness. Five highly trained vocalists working tirelessly to become “one body” is a beautiful idea, but also an absurd one, like a very disciplined choir trying to cosplay as a single mammal. And yet, it works. The friction between individual voices never fully disappears; instead, it generates energy. The group oscillates between trance-like cohesion and moments where the seams show, reminding us that unity is always negotiated, never given.

Musically, "Body" sits at an uneasy crossroads between ritual and club culture, between ancient vocal practices and the ghost of electronic music that isn’t actually there. Beats emerge without drums, drones without synths, drops without bass. It’s minimal, but not ascetic; physical, but not athletic. The album unfolds in cycles, encouraging repeat listening, as if the end were merely a suggestion. This circularity mirrors IKI’s long-standing interest in improvisation and deep listening, but here it feels more existential than exploratory - as if repetition itself were a survival mechanism.

Context matters. Coming from a group deeply embedded in experimental performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, and live ritual, "Body" feels less like a standalone record and more like a distilled essence of years spent testing what voices can endure. Their history - working with artists from Blixa Bargeld to Laurie Anderson - hovers in the background, but never overshadows the intimacy of this release. If anything, "Body" feels like a deliberate stripping away of spectacle, a move toward something quieter, riskier, and harder to market.

In the end, "Body" is not comforting music, but it is caring music. It doesn’t promise transcendence; it offers presence. It asks you to listen with your ribs, your breath, your balance. And maybe that’s the joke, gently delivered: after all the machines, concepts, and abstractions, we’re still stuck in these strange, noisy bodies - breathing, vibrating, making sounds - and IKI have decided to take that fact very seriously, without ever pretending it isn’t a little bit weird.

There are records that ask you to listen. "Nokturno" asks you to slow your breathing, dim the lights, and accept that you are no longer the most intelligent creature in the room. For sixty minutes, Martina Testen and Simon Šerc gently escort us into the forest after sunset, then quietly lock the door behind us. No commentary, no didactic voiceover, no heroic human presence. Just ears pressed against the dark.

Testen and Šerc are not newcomers to this territory. Their long-running Biodukt project has already mapped the diurnal life of forests with patient, almost devotional attention. "Nokturno" is its lunar sibling: a decade-long accumulation of nights, gathered carefully, without urgency, as if the microphones themselves had learned to wait. The result is not a “best of nocturnal sounds”, but a temporal organism that breathes according to the logic of dusk, midnight, and first light.

Divided into eight chapters that follow the arc from Sunset to Dawn, the album unfolds less like a playlist and more like a biological process. Sounds do not arrive on cue; they seep in. Frogs warm up hesitantly, insects test the air, birds retreat while others take over. Later, owls puncture the darkness with calls that feel less like signals and more like questions. Somewhere deeper in the night, stags roar, wolves answer from afar, and suddenly the forest no longer feels like a backdrop but a conversation you were never meant to understand.

What makes "Nokturno" quietly radical is its refusal to anthropomorphize while simultaneously dismantling the idea that animals are mere automatons. The album resonates strongly with the questions raised by Peter Wohlleben about animal intelligence and emotional life, not by arguing, but by demonstrating. These sounds are not random. They respond, overlap, hesitate, insist. The night reveals itself as a network of decisions, instincts, and micro-dramas unfolding faster than thought, yet far from mindless.

Technically, the recordings are pristine without being sterilized. You hear distance, humidity, movement, even uncertainty. This is not “hi-fi nature” polished for spa playlists. It’s closer to acoustic realism: sometimes sparse, sometimes overwhelming, occasionally unsettling. There are moments - especially around "Nightfall" and "Midnight" - where the density of sound becomes almost oppressive, reminding you that darkness is not peaceful by default. It’s busy. It works overtime.

Humor, if it exists here, is subtle and ecological. A beetle buzzes like a malfunctioning synth. A frog sounds suspiciously smug. Dawn arrives not with transcendence but with a kind of collective clearing of throats, as if the forest itself needs coffee. And yet, the cumulative effect is deeply moving. By the time "Dawn" fades out, you don’t feel like you’ve listened to an album - you feel like you’ve survived the night without electricity.

"Nokturno" doesn’t shout about environmental urgency, but it doesn’t need to. Its politics are embedded in attention. By presenting nocturnal life as complex, intelligent, and fragile, Testen and Šerc quietly remind us what disappears when habitats vanish: not just sounds, but entire systems of thought that do not belong to us. This is not escapism. It’s recalibration.

Put simply: "Nokturno" is a record that doesn’t want your opinion. It wants your presence. And if, after listening, you step outside at night and suddenly hear more than before - congratulations. The forest has updated your firmware.

There are records that tell you something, and others that simply sit next to you and start breathing - irregularly, sometimes too close for comfort. "tri-n-os" belongs stubbornly to the second category. Anton Lambert and Thanos Polymeneas Liontiris don’t narrate grief, don’t aestheticize lament, don’t frame sorrow in quotation marks. They let it loop, feedback, short-circuit. They let it misbehave.

The title already gives the game away: it stems from the ancient Greek word θρνος meaning lament, wail, mourn, but it shold be also considered as sound, as drone, as an ancient vibration that predates melody and survives language. This is not mourning as catharsis; it’s mourning as system error, as a recursive process that keeps returning slightly altered, like a memory you didn’t invite back but that knows the door code. The music unfolds as an unstable ecology of drones, eroded field recordings, and feedback structures that feel less performed than coaxed into existence.

Lambert and Polymeneas Liontiris work inside a triadic tension: two humans and a machine that refuses to stay obedient. Live processing, feedback-augmented instruments (the halldorophone is practically a character here), and cybernetic principles form a nervous system where sound listens to itself, reacts, decays, and mutates. The machine isn’t an effect; it’s a collaborator with mood swings. Sometimes it sulks. Sometimes it screams. Sometimes it remembers something the performers were trying to forget.

Tracks don’t develop so much as wobble into being. Drones stretch and fray, feedback blooms and collapses, field recordings flicker like damaged photographs found in a drawer you didn’t know you had. There’s a physicality to the sound - not muscular, but visceral, like pressure changes before a storm. Listening feels less like following a path and more like standing inside a resonant cavity while the walls subtly rearrange themselves.

If there’s humor here, it’s the dry, existential kind: the absurdity of trying to control systems designed to resist control. A title like "a drunk man’s next step" feels less metaphorical than documentary. You can hear the imbalance, the lurch forward, the unavoidable stumble. Elsewhere, repetition becomes ritual, then erosion; what starts as structure slowly forgets why it was built in the first place.

Both artists bring deep research into the room - cybernetics, generative systems, machine listening - but nothing smells of academia. The concepts dissolve into sound, into instability, into a music that refuses to resolve neatly. This is improvisation not as freedom, but as exposure: to failure, to fragility, to the uncomfortable autonomy of the systems we build and then have to live with.

"tri-n-os" doesn’t console. It doesn’t guide you toward acceptance. It lingers in the aftermath, where memory hums like electrical noise and silence is never quite empty. It’s a record that asks for patience and good speakers - and maybe a willingness to sit with things that don’t get better, only different. A lament that doesn’t end, but keeps listening to itself, wondering what remains when the sound finally lets go.

There is something stubbornly nocturnal about "Ships That Pass in the Night". Not just “best enjoyed in the dark” nocturnal, but the kind that insists you dim the room, lower your expectations of clarity, and accept that whatever is about to happen will only half-explain itself. Bewider - alias Piernicola Di Muro, a figure more accustomed to shaping emotions for the cinema than stepping into the spotlight - builds an album that behaves like a series of near-misses: patterns align, glances are exchanged, then everything politely drifts apart again. No climax, no reunion, just the echo of what might have been.

Di Muro’s background as a film composer and mix engineer is evident, but not in a bombastic, cinematic way. This isn’t soundtrack music begging for images; it’s more like the negative space between scenes, the part where the camera lingers too long on an empty street. The electronic sequences are angular, restrained, often slightly aloof, intersecting briefly before choosing solitude over commitment. Melodies don’t so much develop as they hesitate, circle, and then think better of it. It’s music that understands the poetry of restraint - and also knows when to quietly disappear before overstaying its welcome.

There’s a particular elegance in how "Ships That Pass in the Night" handles loneliness. It’s not tragic, and certainly not melodramatic. This is loneliness with good posture. The tracks feel like conversations overheard through walls: recognizable human warmth filtered through circuitry, softened by distance. The electronic textures are clean but never sterile, shaped with the precision of someone who knows exactly how much space a sound needs to breathe - and when it’s better left alone. If this album were a drive, it wouldn’t be a dramatic escape down an endless highway, but a calm, late-night journey where the headlights briefly illuminate other drivers before everyone continues on their separate routes.

What makes the record quietly compelling is its refusal to force meaning. Di Muro doesn’t insist on narrative resolution; instead, he trusts the listener to sit with ambiguity. The Longfellow reference in the title isn’t decorative - it’s structural. Each track behaves like one of those passing ships, exchanging signals just long enough to acknowledge mutual existence. In an era obsessed with constant connection, "Ships That Pass in the Night" gently suggests that fleeting encounters can be enough, and that not every trajectory needs to converge.

Ultimately, this is a record about motion without destination, connection without possession. Bewider doesn’t shout, doesn’t dazzle, doesn’t beg for attention. He lets the music move at its own pace, confident that those who are listening closely will catch the glow as it slips past. It’s a quiet album, yes - but it’s the kind of quiet that stays with you, like headlights in the rearview mirror, fading slowly, stubbornly memorable.