An antenna is supposed to receive something: a voice, a message, a fragment of information travelling through the air in search of a destination. Steve Bates seems less interested in what might be waiting at the other end than in the peculiar things that happen during reception. His second solo album for Constellation, "An Infinite Antenna", is a collection of twelve transmissions in which melodies emerge from interference, rhythms lose their footing, and fragments of the outside world are absorbed into an electronic language that refuses to stay in one place. The result is simultaneously more approachable and more elusive than his previous album for the label, "All The Things That Happen" (2022). There is more room for melody, more variation in instrumentation and a noticeably stronger sense of movement, but clarity remains a relative concept. The signal is improving; the message, naturally, is still a little suspicious.

Bates has an unusually productive relationship with the spaces between different artistic territories. A Montréal-based sound artist, musician, curator and researcher, he emerged from the anarcho-punk and post-hardcore communities of the Canadian Prairies, playing in bands including XOXO and Bulletproof Nothing. In 1998, he founded Winnipeg's Send + Receive festival, an important platform for experimental music and sound art that he directed for seven years. After moving to Montréal in 2005, he became Sound Coordinator at Concordia University's Hexagram, while developing a practice encompassing radio art, installations, field recordings, tape composition and collaborative work. He also runs The Dim Coast with artist jake moore, a publishing and curatorial platform for experimental music and sound art. His interests extend well beyond the usual concerns of electronic composition, encompassing communication systems, feedback, political and social structures, the experience of particular places and the sometimes unreliable workings of auditory perception. In other words, Bates has spent a long time thinking about what happens when information travels, breaks down or gets mistaken for something else. This album sounds like a rather convincing practical demonstration.

The contrast with "All The Things That Happen" is instructive. That 2022 release was built largely around the self-imposed limitations of a Casio SK-1 and computer, producing a concentrated body of abrasive, unstable ambient music. Here, Bates opens the doors to a wider collection of instruments and techniques: leftfield synthesizers, electric guitar, deconstructed drum machines, field recordings, no-input mixing and layers of radiostatic distortion. The expanded palette does not mean that he has abandoned the discipline of reduction. Quite the opposite: the twelve pieces are relatively concise, often lasting between two and four minutes, and the artist has spoken of wanting to retain something of punk's sense of duration rather than allowing every idea to develop into an extended ambient excursion. The influence of his musical beginnings is therefore audible not only in the distorted bass and broken rhythms, but also in the economy of the arrangements. There is a certain pleasure in hearing an artist who loves expansive drone music nevertheless resist the temptation to turn every passing thought into a twenty-minute event.

The material was gathered between 2023 and 2025, including recordings made during residencies and site-specific projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, Greece and Saskatchewan. The cover photograph comes from Sarajevo, but the album is not a conventional collection of musical postcards. Instead, these recordings become components in a larger process of association, their original contexts gradually obscured by processing, layering and juxtaposition. Bates has described the underlying idea as something akin to slowly scanning a radio dial: not searching for one particular station, but allowing the ear to encounter unexpected fragments along the way. This gives the album an unusual coherence. Its pieces are distinct enough to function individually, yet their recurring timbres and shifting undercurrents create the impression of one continuous environment being examined from different angles.

The opening "Pink pink pink pink…pink pink" establishes this peculiar geography with glistening, slightly dissonant synthesizer tones. Its short duration gives it the quality of an unfinished thought, a delicate electronic construction that seems to dissolve almost as soon as it becomes recognisable. "Green as a ghost" darkens the atmosphere, introducing a deeper rumble, static interference and broken rhythmic gestures before piano chords briefly emerge towards the end. The transition is characteristic of Bates' approach: rather than developing a conventional theme, he allows one sound to alter the conditions under which the next can be heard. The pieces behave less like separate compositions than successive changes in atmospheric pressure.

"Battles and sieges and street trees" is particularly effective in its combination of low-end resonance and delicate melodic detail. Treated guitar and synthesizer fragments appear like small reflections caught in a murky surface, while the underlying field-recording textures suggest a much larger environment. There is a subtle tension between the title's suggestion of conflict and the almost contemplative quality of the music. The juxtaposition is not entirely comfortable, which is probably the point. Bates has a knack for making seemingly unrelated elements occupy the same acoustic space without forcing them into an obvious narrative.

The post-hardcore inheritance becomes more apparent in "Waste, songs of the world" and "Easier sad than done". Distorted bass, abrasive drum samples and fractured rhythmic patterns introduce a physicality that prevents the album from drifting into purely decorative ambient territory. Yet these are not straightforward exercises in electronic nostalgia. The rhythms are too unstable, the textures too contaminated, and the melodic fragments too elusive to provide the familiar satisfaction of a conventional rock arrangement. Bates seems to have retained the impulse to make noise, while becoming increasingly interested in what can happen after the noise has been taken apart. One could imagine the younger punk version of the artist approving of the distortion, although perhaps wondering why the drums have become so difficult to count.

"Mountain scene" and "Swiss apartment layouts" continue to shift the perspective, the former suggesting a more open, atmospheric space, the latter offering another of the album's curious titles. Bates has a talent for names that sound like fragments extracted from a notebook, an archive or a conversation overheard in passing. They are evocative without being explanatory, and often introduce a strange contrast with the music itself. "Decades of river widths" is another case in point: its title suggests an attempt to measure something that is constantly changing, while the sound seems to resist any stable point of reference. The music's recurring patterns provide a sense of continuity, but the details are in perpetual motion.

At just 1:45, "Disaster loans" is one of the album's shortest pieces and among its more overtly abrasive moments. Its distorted electronic bass and restless percussion have something of a miniature punk eruption about them, although the eruption has apparently taken place inside a malfunctioning radio. "Corporate activity, ancient shipwrecks" stretches the atmosphere again, combining suggestive low-frequency material with a more spacious, almost cinematic sense of suspension. The titles throughout the album invite associations with history, economics, geography and the detritus of human activity. They could easily belong to an eccentric researcher's filing system, although the music is considerably more interesting than any filing system has a right to be.

Then comes "Lettre d’amour à Fly Pan Am", a title that acknowledges the Montréal experimental rock group whose work has long occupied an interesting position between post-rock, noise and fractured song structures. Its presence feels appropriate within an album that repeatedly negotiates the relationship between abstract sound and the memory of more immediate musical forms. The piece does not simply imitate a recognisable style; rather, it belongs to the same general territory of restless construction, where melody and distortion are allowed to coexist without either becoming the unquestioned authority.

The closing "Swamps and factories" is the album's longest piece, and perhaps its most recognisable connection to the darker, more sustained sound of "All The Things That Happen". A dissonant, shimmering drone gradually establishes itself, its surface animated by subtle changes in texture and density. It feels like a return to familiar ground, but not quite a return to the same place. The preceding eleven pieces have widened the album's vocabulary, making this final stretch seem less like a destination than another possible frequency among many. There is no grand resolution, only the gradual persistence of sound after the more obvious signals have faded.

What makes "An Infinite Antenna" particularly engaging is the way Bates manages to reconcile two apparently contradictory impulses. On one hand, he is interested in the microscopic behaviour of sound: the grain of a recording, a tiny melodic fragment, the irregular pulse of a broken rhythm, the residue left behind by a process of transformation. On the other, his compositions evoke environments much larger than their individual components. A few seconds of distorted guitar can suggest an entire landscape; a low-frequency rumble can become a memory of industrial activity; a brief electronic figure can feel like a message arriving from a place that no longer exists. His sound art background is evident in this sensitivity to context and perception, but the album never feels like an academic exercise disguised as music. There is too much humour in its titles, too much physical energy in its rougher passages, and too much affection for the accidental pleasures of listening.

The record's diversity is also its strength. Some listeners may find the constant shifts in atmosphere less immersive than the more focused approach of its predecessor, while others will appreciate the additional melodic detail and the compactness of the arrangements. The transitions occasionally leave individual pieces feeling like glimpses rather than fully developed statements, but this is largely consistent with the album's underlying concept. Bates is not trying to build twelve self-contained worlds. He is collecting fragments from a much wider territory and allowing their connections to emerge through repetition, contrast and proximity.

Ultimately, "An Infinite Antenna" is a record about listening as an active, uncertain process. Its sounds are never entirely detached from the world, but neither are they straightforward representations of it. They arrive filtered through memory, technology, geography and personal history, carrying traces of places and experiences without revealing everything about their origins. Bates' punk background supplies the necessary impatience, his sound-art practice the curiosity, and his compositional instincts the ability to make these disparate impulses hold together. The album's title may promise an endless capacity for reception, but its real achievement lies in the selective intelligence of its transmissions. There is plenty of noise in the air already; the trick, as Bates demonstrates, is to discover which fragments deserve our attention.

There is something quietly unsettling about returning to a place that has not changed nearly as much as the person remembering it. The landscape may still be there, the hills and industrial scars apparently holding their ground, but the past has meanwhile been busy rearranging the furniture inside one's head. "Minnets Långa Kedjor" (roughly, "The Long Chains of Memory") takes this discrepancy as its point of departure, turning a shared geographical and personal history into an hour-long exercise in electroacoustic recollection. For Mats Erlandsson and Gus Loxbo, this is not merely a first recorded collaboration, but the public emergence of a musical relationship that has been developing for more than 25 years. Some friendships produce photographs, others produce music that sounds as though it has been unearthed from beneath an abandoned mine.

Both musicians have deep roots in Sweden's experimental and improvised music scenes. Erlandsson is a composer and sound artist associated with Stockholm's drone community, working with sustained tones, synthesis, field recordings and extensive tape processing. His catalogue includes "Gyttjans Topografi" (2023), while his wider practice moves between solo work and collaborations, often exploring the unstable border between acoustic material and its electronic mutation. Loxbo, meanwhile, is an experienced double bassist whose work includes the groups Pombo and Silence Blossoms. His solo album "Trådknaster" (2021), recorded by Erlandsson, offered a concentrated study of the instrument's less conventional possibilities, exposing the grain, friction and physical peculiarities of the double bass without relying on overdubs. Their familiarity is therefore not simply biographical: each has spent years helping the other reconsider what music can be, and what it might become when conventional instrumental roles are left at the door.

The album draws on their shared upbringing in Bergslagen, a historical mining region in central Sweden. This background is not used as a picturesque postcard or an invitation to indulge in nostalgic folklore. Rather, it supplies a loose network of associations: geographical memories, imagined histories, fragments of atmosphere and the peculiar emotional residue of places inhabited long ago. The original musical impulses were captured in a two-day session at Stockholm's Elektronmusikstudion, with Erlandsson on guitars and electronics and Loxbo on double bass. What emerged was then subjected to a substantial process of editing, arrangement, amplification and transformation, involving digital processing and analogue tape. The result is neither a straightforward document of improvisation nor a conventional studio composition. It occupies an intriguing middle ground, where spontaneous gestures are treated as raw matter and memory itself becomes a kind of editing tool.

That distinction matters. The music often feels as if it is being recalled rather than performed in the present tense. Sustained guitar tones and zither figures hover above the bass, which can sound like an enormous subterranean mechanism operating at a speed entirely indifferent to human urgency. Sometimes Loxbo's playing is recognisably instrumental; elsewhere, the double bass becomes a source of abrasive textures, granular scrapes and distorted low-frequency pressure. Erlandsson's processing does not simply decorate these sounds. It changes their apparent scale, distance and material identity, making it difficult to tell where an instrument ends and the surrounding acoustic environment begins. The listener is left with a landscape whose features keep shifting whenever one tries to identify them.

The opening "Dom gick upp på berget" establishes the album's measured approach, while "Trollkarlsklint" expands the vocabulary into something more imposing. Its extended duration allows the bass to move from scratchy, almost tactile gestures towards a much heavier presence, with the music gradually approaching the weight and slow-motion intensity of doom metal. The comparison is not merely a matter of volume or distortion. There is a similar fascination with duration, with the physical sensation of sound being held in place until it begins to exert pressure. Yet the piece does not settle into a recognisable metal structure. Its mass seems to emerge organically from the interaction, as though a geological formation had decided to make itself heard.

Elsewhere, the atmosphere becomes more elusive. "I Kopparkammaren" and "Flor" offer shorter episodes within the album's broader temporal architecture, while "HÄng blommor om halsen" moves towards a more subdued and suspended register. Erlandsson's sustained guitar tones and Loxbo's distant bass resonances create a strange intimacy, one that is less concerned with melodic development than with the gradual alteration of perspective. The music seems to withdraw from the listener, although its low frequencies remain stubbornly present. It is a useful reminder that quietness in drone music is not necessarily the absence of intensity. Sometimes the most unsettling thing in a room is the sound coming from the next one.

The title track brings the album's contrasting materials into particularly vivid contact. Delicate zither tones coexist with massive electric-guitar weight, a combination that might look absurd on paper but feels entirely natural within this musical environment. There is no attempt to reconcile fragility and heaviness; they are allowed to occupy the same space, like two incompatible memories that have somehow survived in the same mind. "Fallens dag" continues the slow, immersive approach, while "Hur långt har du kvar att gå?" introduces bells and additional accents from Daniel M Karlsson. Their delicate interventions add a further layer of detail before the bass returns with considerable force. The contrast is striking without becoming theatrical: the music has no need to wave its arms around to make its point.

Maria W Horn's narration adds another human dimension to the record. Rather than turning the pieces into conventional songs or supplying a literal narrative, her presence contributes to the sense of recollection and distance that runs throughout the album. The titles themselves suggest fragments of a larger, inaccessible story: climbing a hill, entering a copper chamber, hanging flowers around one's neck, asking how far one has left to walk. These are evocative images, but they resist being assembled into a neat sequence. The album is not a soundtrack to a journey with a clearly marked destination. It is closer to the experience of remembering a dream in which every location seems familiar, although none can be placed with certainty.

The final pair, "I askan" and "I symmetrisk skymning", brings the collection towards its conclusion without offering anything resembling a definitive resolution. The music retains its capacity to hover between recognisable instrumental gestures and transformed sound, between the intimate and the monumental. Even when the textures become more imposing, there is an underlying sense of restraint. Erlandsson's studio work is particularly effective in this respect: the transformations are extensive, but rarely feel like demonstrations of technical cleverness. They serve the material rather than demanding applause for themselves. This is a welcome attitude in experimental music, where the temptation to make every processing decision sound like a major philosophical discovery can occasionally become exhausting.

The production also highlights the unusual balance between the two musicians. Erlandsson's guitars, zither, percussion and analogue and digital synthesis provide a broad range of tonal environments, but Loxbo's double bass remains the album's physical anchor. Its low register can be ominous, its upper textures abrasive, and its occasional distortions almost unrecognisable. Yet the instrument never becomes a mere provider of cinematic menace. There is a sense of listening and response beneath the processing, a shared musical instinct that no amount of studio manipulation could manufacture from scratch. The additional contributions from Karlsson and Horn enrich the picture without disturbing the central relationship.

"Minnets Långa Kedjor" is a patient, carefully assembled work, and its 68-minute duration is part of its character rather than an endurance test imposed for experimental credibility. It asks for attention, certainly, but does not demand that every minute be treated as a revelation. Its strongest passages emerge through accumulation: a sustained note acquiring weight, a rough bass texture becoming almost environmental, a fragile detail suddenly illuminating an otherwise opaque stretch of sound. The combination of free improvisation, electroacoustic drone and doom-metal gravity is compelling precisely because none of these elements is allowed to dominate the others.

Ultimately, the album's most affecting quality lies in the way it treats memory as something active and imperfect. Erlandsson and Loxbo do not attempt to reconstruct their shared past in musical form, nor do they offer a nostalgic portrait of the place that shaped them. Instead, they take the impressions left behind and subject them to a process of distortion, magnification and reconsideration. The past becomes neither a safe refuge nor a reliable archive, but a substance that can still be handled, altered and heard from different angles. These long chains may bind the two musicians to a common origin, but they also provide enough slack for the music to wander somewhere unexpected. A fine achievement, and proof that sometimes the most productive way to revisit home is to make it sound like a place you have never quite been before.

The word "capacity" can suggest a container, a limit, or the amount of something a person is able to hold. Billy Gomberg’s new album seems interested in all three meanings, though its nine pieces are less concerned with filling space than with discovering what space can contain. Sound is treated as a material with edges, weight and a certain capacity for surprise: tones emerge, flicker, break apart and settle into unexpected relationships. The music is abstract, but not remote; delicate, but not timid. It has the curious quality of a landscape seen through a window that has been cracked in just the right place.

Gomberg has spent more than two decades developing a practice that brings together synthesis, digital processing, acoustic recordings and improvisation. His work has appeared on labels including Students of Decay and Dinzu Artefacts, while his self-released recordings have documented a continuing exploration of modular synthesis and electroacoustic composition. He is also active in the collaborative project Fraufraulein with Anne Guthrie, whose work similarly considers how manipulated sound can retain a sense of physical origin. Gomberg’s musical activity has long been accompanied by photography, and his 2025 exhibition "Several Paths Together" at Indexical Gallery in Santa Cruz made that parallel practice especially visible.

"capacity" is his first proper album in four years, although the interval has hardly been a period of inactivity. Recent releases and performances have continued to explore long-form improvisation, recording and sound as a means of relating to places and experiences. Here, however, Gomberg chooses a more concise format. The nine tracks occupy just over thirty-four minutes, with most pieces lasting between three and five minutes. This is a meaningful shift for a musician whose work has often allowed sounds to develop at considerable length. Instead of asking the listener to settle into a single expansive environment, the album presents a sequence of small sonic situations, each with its own internal weather.

The opening "zero of" establishes the album’s delicate balance between movement and suspension. Its electronic textures possess a faintly unstable quality, as though the sound were being assembled from particles that have not quite agreed to remain in the same place. There is a gentle luminosity to the piece, but it is not the polished, frictionless glow sometimes associated with ambient electronics. Small irregularities keep appearing at the edges, interrupting the apparent calm. The result feels less like a pristine digital environment than a room illuminated by shifting light, where the furniture seems to change shape whenever one looks away.

"rose and nameless" moves through a more subdued register, its title suggesting a relationship between something recognisable and something that has resisted identification. The music seems to occupy that same uncertain space. Its tones are intimate, yet their origins remain difficult to pin down; the listener can sense the presence of a gesture without being able to say exactly what produced it. Gomberg’s approach to synthesis is particularly effective here because the technology never becomes the subject. The sounds do not announce their modular credentials, nor do they demand admiration for the machinery behind them. They simply behave in ways that feel emotionally and physically suggestive.

That distinction matters. Experimental electronic music can sometimes become fascinated with the devices that produce it, turning the studio into a kind of sonic showroom where every strange effect must be accompanied by a demonstration of the equipment responsible. Gomberg seems more interested in the expressive consequences of those sounds. The electronic details are present, but they are not presented as trophies. Instead, they function like marks on a surface: traces of activity that acquire meaning through their placement and relation to everything around them.

"sky in buckets version" offers one of the album’s more intriguing titles, evoking an image that is both absurd and oddly tangible. Its music seems to work through a similar tension between the expansive and the contained. The sounds have an open, airy quality, yet the composition remains compact, allowing fleeting gestures to appear and disappear without being stretched into extended demonstrations of atmosphere. There is a sense of motion, but not necessarily of travel. The piece seems to move by changing its perspective rather than its location.

"use thousand waves" introduces another variation on the album’s central concerns. Its title suggests multiplicity, but Gomberg avoids turning the music into a grand illustration of water or movement. Instead, the piece feels like an accumulation of small changes, each one altering the perception of what came before. This is one of the record’s most appealing qualities: it encourages close attention without making a spectacle of its own intricacy. The listener is not asked to solve a puzzle. There is no hidden message waiting to be uncovered by someone with a notebook, a magnifying glass and an alarming amount of free time. The pleasure lies in noticing how the sound changes while remaining recognisably itself.

"locals" brings the album’s interest in physical geography into sharper focus. Gomberg’s recordings draw on locations in San Francisco and Tokyo, while the work also acknowledges the Indigenous territories associated with the places where the material was gathered. The music does not function as a conventional field-recording document, however. Rather than offering a recognisable sound postcard, it absorbs environmental material into an abstract language. Place becomes less a subject to be represented than a set of conditions that shape the recording: distance, texture, movement, and the particular way sound occupies a space.

The shorter "dusk at the center" seems to turn inward. Its duration gives it the quality of a passing moment, a small pause within the album’s sequence. Gomberg’s music often works through the interplay of detail and stillness, and this piece is a particularly effective example of how little needs to happen for a sound to become compelling. The music does not need to swell or resolve in order to establish a sense of presence. It simply allows its materials to remain exposed long enough for their subtleties to become apparent.

"one from october" has the feeling of a fragment preserved from a particular time, though its title does not insist on a specific narrative. The piece seems to suggest memory without turning it into sentimentality. There is no attempt to recreate a past moment in full, only to retain something of its texture. This is where Gomberg’s photographic practice becomes especially relevant. His images and his music share an interest in what can be revealed by looking or listening closely, and in the possibility that a fragment may carry more emotional information than a complete account. The accompanying eight-page booklet of black-and-white photographs is therefore not merely an attractive extra for the vinyl edition. It extends the album’s visual and sonic inquiry into landscape, detail and the experience of noticing.

The title track, "overflows", appears near the end of the sequence, and its name offers a useful counterpoint to the album’s generally restrained scale. Capacity is not simply a matter of holding more; it can also involve reaching the point at which a container no longer contains what has been placed inside it. Gomberg’s music seems to understand that excess need not mean volume or density. Sometimes it is the accumulation of small gestures, each one adding a little more emotional or spatial information until the composition begins to feel larger than its duration. The closing "group buy tong" then brings the record to an end without making a grand announcement of completion. Its compact form leaves the listener with the impression of a thought that has been allowed to stop rather than forced to conclude.

Taylor Deupree’s mastering is an apt fit for this material. His work at 12k has long been associated with an attentive approach to detail and spatial definition, and "capacity" benefits from that sensitivity. The album’s textures retain their fine edges without becoming brittle, while the quieter elements are given enough presence to register as more than background decoration. The sound is intimate, but not artificially close; the music feels as though it occupies a space that the listener can approach without being invited to dominate.

There are echoes of artists such as Microstoria and Josh Mason in Gomberg’s use of glitch, fractured electronic gestures and unstable textures, but the album does not rely on those associations to establish its identity. Its strongest moments emerge from a more personal relationship between sound and place. The music seems to understand geography not as a collection of coordinates, but as an accumulation of experiences: the physical environment, the memory of being somewhere, the emotional associations attached to a particular moment. That gives "capacity" a quiet human quality, even when its sounds are abstract enough to resist conventional description.

The record is also refreshingly uninterested in making ambient music synonymous with relaxation. Its beauty is not always smooth, and its stillness is rarely absolute. Small disturbances remain present throughout, like the faint crackle of a thought that refuses to disappear. The music can be soothing, but it does not promise to make the listener more efficient, more serene or better prepared for the next round of administrative nonsense. It asks for attention rather than offering escape.

In the end, "capacity" is an album about the amount of meaning that can reside in a small gesture. Gomberg’s nine pieces do not attempt to overwhelm the listener with scale or duration. They work through suggestion, detail and the careful placement of sound, allowing the smallest shifts to acquire a surprising weight. It is a record that rewards patience without demanding solemnity, and one whose beauty comes not from an absence of disturbance but from the way disturbance becomes part of the whole. A modest container, perhaps, but one with a rather remarkable ability to hold the world.

Being misunderstood is exhausting. Being misunderstood repeatedly, while also having to explain why you are being misunderstood, can become an almost full-time occupation. J. Quimby’s "The Invisible", the latest release under the Rhins name, approaches this predicament without attempting to translate it into a reassuringly legible musical narrative. Instead, it makes a virtue of the very things that conventional communication tends to reject: repetition, overload, interruption, disorientation and the refusal to settle into a recognisable pattern. This is not ambient music designed to help the listener find their happy place. In fact, the happy place appears to have been evacuated, its furniture thrown out of the window and the windows themselves replaced with malfunctioning synthesizers.

The album was conceived during a period of upheaval, as Quimby was moving house and navigating other changes in life. That instability is reflected in the music's construction, but the significance of "The Invisible" reaches beyond the familiar association between personal turmoil and noisy electronics. Its central concern is the frustration of trying to communicate in a neurotypical world, where the expectations and conventions of interaction can make one's own experience difficult to express. Quimby describes the music as a form of communication in itself, one that does not depend on verbal explanation. The distinction is important: this is not simply an album about distress, nor is its intensity offered as a spectacle for curious outsiders. It is an attempt to establish a language on its own terms, even when that language is abrasive, fragmented or difficult to follow.

Rhins is the project of Scottish sound artist and composer J. Quimby, whose earlier releases have appeared through labels including Tombed Visions and Aurora Borealis. The new project also reconnects with a more aggressive musical past, particularly Quimby's involvement in Take A Worm For A Walk Week and Remember Remember, as well as the collaborative performance work with artist Iona Kewney under the Knights of the Invisible name. Those experiences help explain the unusual combination of force and ethereality found here. The music draws on the physical impact of noise and distortion, but also on the more delicate vocal and string-based sensibilities developed through theatrical and performance contexts. The result is not a compromise between two approaches so much as an attempt to make them coexist without smoothing away their differences. Quimby's previous Rhins release, "The Burnout", had already explored suffocating electronic textures; "The Invisible" pushes that vocabulary into a more personal and deliberately unstable territory.

The method is as significant as the subject. Rather than beginning with finished compositions and gradually dismantling them, Quimby starts from improvisation, allowing analogue synthesizers to develop into extended passages before subjecting the material to a process of destruction, subtraction and reconstruction. It is a compositional approach that resembles the repeated application and removal of paint, except that the canvas is sound and the paint occasionally appears to be industrial waste. The resulting pieces retain traces of their original gestures, but those gestures are buried beneath layers of distortion, overlapping tones and recurring patterns. What might initially seem chaotic gradually acquires an internal organisation. Not necessarily a comfortable one, admittedly, but comfort is hardly the album's principal concern.

"Iona" establishes the terms with considerable force. Thick, overlapping synthesizer tones accumulate into a dense mass, with distortion giving the sustained notes a rough, almost physical surface. There is a sense of something attempting to emerge through the pressure, although the music never provides a clean passage out. Its title gives the opening a personal dimension, particularly given the album's dedication to Iona Jane Kewney, whose artwork also accompanies the release. The connection between the dedication and the sound is not something that needs to be decoded; the piece is sufficiently affecting without turning into a puzzle about biography.

"Knights of the Invisible" introduces a different kind of presence. The additional vocals of Emily Quimby bring a human element into the electronic turbulence, but these are not conventional vocal performances in search of a melody or a lyrical message. The voice appears as texture, gesture and atmosphere, at times suggesting a ritual whose words have been deliberately withheld. A more discernible rhythmic movement eventually takes shape, giving the piece a sense of forward motion without making it any less uncanny. There are echoes of the slow-building dread associated with older horror cinema, particularly the synthetic unease of 1970s and 1980s soundtracks, but the music avoids becoming a nostalgic exercise in analogue spookiness. No haunted house has ever sounded quite so poorly equipped to deal with its own electrical system.

The subsequent "Black Regent" and "Self Interrupted" maintain the album's uneasy momentum. The former works through layered drones and shifting electronic pressure, allowing its darker textures to develop without resorting to obvious climactic gestures. The latter feels more abrupt and fractured, its title almost functioning as a description of the listening experience: just as one begins to follow a particular sonic direction, something intervenes. This is not accidental awkwardness. Interruption is part of the album's grammar, and the repeated disruption of expectation becomes one of its most effective compositional tools.

"Electric Woods" offers a more spacious environment, though its apparent openness should not be mistaken for tranquillity. The synth textures have a more enveloping quality, creating an atmosphere that is simultaneously inviting and suspicious. There is something almost organic in the way the layers develop, but the sense of nature suggested by the title is far removed from the pastoral conventions of ambient music. These woods are electrically charged, and the trees probably have a better grasp of circuit diagrams than the average visitor. "Spectrum Collectors", meanwhile, introduces more restless movement through repeating electronic figures and shifting layers. Its patterns seem to gather momentum, only to become absorbed into the surrounding density. The effect is less that of a conventional build-up than of an unstable system repeatedly trying to establish equilibrium.

The closing "Waiting for the Sea Eagle" is particularly revealing. Its softer passages and more open melodic contours suggest the possibility of release, perhaps even the calm that the album has repeatedly seemed to seek. Yet the tension does not disappear. As the piece develops, the more abrasive elements return, disrupting the apparent resolution. The title evokes an act of waiting, but the music offers no guarantee that the awaited arrival will make anything better. The sea eagle may be magnificent, but it is apparently running late.

Across these seven compositions, Quimby works with a strikingly physical understanding of electronic sound. The synthesizers are not merely instruments for creating atmospheric backgrounds; they become extensions of bodily and emotional gestures, repeating, swelling, colliding and withdrawing. The wordless voices are equally important. They suggest the presence of communication without submitting to the assumption that communication must always take the form of intelligible speech. This is where the album's relationship with neurodivergent experience becomes most meaningful. Its refusal to conform to conventional structures is not presented as a decorative aesthetic choice, but as part of a broader struggle over whose modes of expression are recognised and whose are routinely treated as inconvenient noise.

That said, "The Invisible" does not require the listener to approach it as a document or an explanatory statement. Its musical language has enough substance to withstand repeated listening independently of the context provided by the artist. Indeed, the album's most interesting quality is the tension between its raw origins and the considerable care involved in shaping the final result. The improvisations may begin without a predetermined architecture, but the reconstruction is anything but careless. Lawrence English's mastering preserves the density and force of the material while giving its overlapping layers a coherent presence. The music remains difficult, but it is not indiscriminate.

There is also something quietly radical in the decision to make an album whose title refers to invisibility and whose contents insist on being heard. The invisible is not necessarily absent; sometimes it is simply overlooked, misread or denied the space required to become perceptible. Quimby responds by turning that condition into sound, not by making it easier to consume, but by refusing to dilute its contradictions. "The Invisible" can be oppressive, disorienting and occasionally exhausting, yet its intensity is never empty. It gives form to an experience that resists easy explanation, and it does so without pretending that music can magically solve the problems of communication.

Perhaps that is the album's most affecting achievement. It does not ask to be understood through the usual channels, nor does it offer a reassuring conclusion in which all the noise eventually makes sense. It simply insists on its own presence. In a world that often mistakes unfamiliar expression for an absence of meaning, that insistence is worth hearing.

There is a particular kind of nostalgia that has very little to do with wanting to return to the past. It is closer to remembering how it felt to encounter something for the first time, before familiarity made it manageable, before the things that once seemed impossibly vast became neatly filed away in the mental archive. Bruno Silva’s latest album as Ondness seems to inhabit precisely that peculiar territory. "I Can Only Put So Much Into a Song" looks back towards the music that helped shape his formative years, but it doesn't behave like a retrospective, a tribute compilation or an exercise in recreating some supposedly glorious period of independent music. Instead, it approaches memory as an unstable substance, something that can be stretched, distorted, submerged and occasionally mistaken for something else.

Silva is hardly a newcomer to the business of making sounds misbehave. The Lisbon-based musician has been active since the mid-2000s, developing a remarkably varied practice through Ondness, Serpente and several collaborative projects. While Serpente has often explored more physical, rhythmically adventurous territory, Ondness has provided a space for a different kind of electronic imagination, one interested in the transformation of samples, fragments, melodic suggestions and sonic debris into something that feels both familiar and strangely displaced. Silva is also involved in Portugal's musical infrastructure as a programmer and producer at Espaço das Damas, and his work has appeared on labels including Discrepant, Holuzam, Ecstatic and Where To Now?. His musical vocabulary has never been particularly keen on respecting borders, and this album finds him turning towards guitars without abandoning the electronic sensibility that has informed much of his previous output.

The references behind the record are unusually revealing. Iran's "The Moon Boys", The Microphones' "It Was Hot, We Stayed In The Water", Fennesz's "Endless Summer" and the sprawling, communal aesthetics of the New Weird America underground form a loose constellation around Silva's memories of adolescence and early adulthood. There is also a persistent black metal shadow, less a matter of genre imitation than a source of emotional pressure. These are not simply names dropped to establish the artist's alternative credentials, nor does the album sound like a checklist of influences assembled by someone who has spent too much time browsing old record collections. Rather, they suggest a period when guitar music, homemade experimentation, noise, folk, electronics and extreme music could coexist without anyone feeling obliged to explain the arrangement to a genre classification committee.

The opening "Tevens" immediately establishes the album's unsettled character. Guitar tones expand into thick, reverberant masses, while the vocal presence seems to emerge from somewhere behind the instrumental surface. There is a recognisable shoegaze ancestry in the way sound accumulates and obscures its own details, but the result is more shadowy than blissful. The guitars don't so much invite the listener to disappear into them as suggest that something might be waiting on the other side of the distortion. "Vento Gelo Valentine" deepens that impression, its heavy chords and ghostly vocal gestures carrying an almost ceremonial quality. The song feels as though it has been transmitted from a distant gathering whose participants have long since forgotten what they were celebrating.

One of the album's most appealing qualities is its refusal to let this atmosphere become monotonous. Silva understands that a dense sonic environment needs occasional openings, and he introduces them with a lightness that prevents the music from becoming trapped in its own fog. "Celesting" and "Blisser" provide different degrees of movement and melodic definition, the latter introducing a more clearly electronic pulse into the guitar-led material. Its small, nimble synth gestures don't dismantle the surrounding haze; they simply give it something to move around. There is a quiet pleasure in this juxtaposition, as if a modest piece of digital machinery had wandered into an overgrown garden and decided to stay.

The album's shorter pieces also contribute to its unusual sense of proportion. None of the nine tracks is especially long, and the entire record lasts just under half an hour. That brevity is significant. Rather than stretching its ideas into extended atmospheric exercises, Silva works with compact forms that feel like recollections surfacing briefly before slipping away again. The titles " (muito pouco)" and "(quase nada)", which translate roughly as 'very little' and 'almost nothing', seem to acknowledge the limits of what can be retained or communicated. They are small interruptions, but they also point towards the album's central concern: how much of an experience can actually survive its conversion into music? The answer, perhaps, is not very much. But the fragments that remain can be remarkably evocative.

"Glideness" offers another subtle shift in perspective, its textures moving between melodic suggestion and blurred abstraction. There is a looseness here that recalls the more exploratory corners of early-2000s independent music, when the distinction between a song, a recording experiment and an unfinished idea could be pleasantly difficult to establish. Silva does not attempt to polish away that uncertainty. His production allows sounds to retain their rough edges, while the mastering by Carlos Nascimento gives the material a coherent presence without sanding down its more unruly details. The result is intimate but not fragile, with distortion functioning less as an aggressive gesture than as a means of making the music feel physically close.

Then comes "Megadawn II", a title that inevitably invites comparison with Silva's earlier "Megadawn", released in 2022. Here, however, the electronic elements are not simply a continuation of the producer's previous experiments. They become part of the album's broader recollection of a musical past in which the supposedly incompatible could sit comfortably together. Beneath its celestial surface, the track contains a restless rhythmic undercurrent, a reminder that Silva's interest in electronic construction has not been suspended in favour of guitar nostalgia. The closing "Tevais" returns to the album's opening atmosphere, with another substantial wall of guitar sound and an elusive vocal presence. Its position creates a circular impression, although not quite the comforting symmetry of a journey completed. It is more like finding oneself back at a familiar location and discovering that the place has changed, or that one's memory of it was never entirely accurate.

The album's title comes from Farrah Abraham's "My Teenage Dream Ended", a record whose strange collision of celebrity confession, synthetic pop and emotional dislocation makes it an unexpectedly fitting reference point. It also introduces a wry little contradiction: Silva may claim that there is only so much he can put into a song, but the nine pieces here suggest that the limitations of the form are precisely what make it interesting. A song cannot preserve an entire adolescence, reconstruct every first encounter with music or settle the complicated business of becoming an adult. It can, however, hold a few distorted impressions, a half-remembered melody, a particular shade of melancholy or the sensation of hearing something that seems to belong simultaneously to yesterday and tomorrow.

That is where "I Can Only Put So Much Into a Song" finds its emotional weight. Its nostalgia is not particularly sentimental, and it avoids the familiar trap of treating youth as an irretrievable paradise populated exclusively by excellent records and questionable haircuts. The past is present here as a collection of imperfect impressions, some warm, others abrasive, all subject to the distortions of time. Silva's achievement is to make those impressions audible without turning them into a museum display. The music remains open-ended, occasionally opaque and quietly restless, allowing its influences to dissolve into a personal language rather than arranging them behind glass.

There is something touching about an album that accepts the inadequacy of songs while continuing to make them. Perhaps that is the whole point: music cannot contain everything, but it can preserve the outline of something that would otherwise disappear. And sometimes an outline, especially one drawn with this much distortion, says considerably more than a complete picture.