German native Malte Steiner, now living and creating in Aalborg, Denmark has been making electronic music with his Notstandskomitee project since 1991. As you might well imagine, Steiner has amassed an impressive discography, of which 2023's 'The Doomsday Layout' is the latest. On this instrumental album, somewhere between IDM and Industrial, Steiner conducts various experiments with his custom software, to find alternative ways of sequencing and controlling sound with stochastic algorithms and Neuronal Networks. All of these tracks were originally created between 2009-2023.

Being unfamiliar with the artist's past works, I delved a bit into Notstandskomitee's previous albums available for preview on Bandcamp. (Gotta love Bandcamp for this feature.) Interestingly, Notstandskomitee collaborated with Thomas Meier-Goldau's THX 1971 project (reviewed here previously by me) on the 2021 'Elektrofusion' album, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise since they're both in Aalborg. The one commonality shared by previous Notstandskomitee albums and most of the tracks on them is the rhythmic component which figures strongly in Steiner's compositions. These rhythms are usually elaborate and complex, with an intriguing variety of sounds, both crunchy and quirky, not just the usual array of percussion. With few exceptions, the rhythm of a track seems to be more important than the melody in these compositions.

That being said, 'The Doomsday Layout' opens with a simple but bold repetitive melodic theme on "The Writing On The Wall" with an experimental rhythm track that supports rather than dominates. "Umspannerwerk" is a nod to krautrock if I ever heard one; steadily minimal but very cool. By the time we get to "Expertensystems" I'm realizing that Steiner is giving his compositions more room to breathe sounding less claustrophobic than in the past. While "Threat Actor" had some interesting sounds, the sort of stilted rhythm left me cold. Much better (and longer) was "Rules Replacing Trust" with a more engaging rhythm and upbeat synthetic bits. The martial rhythm of "The Logic Of War" sounds like Lego robots on the march (if you could imagine such a thing) and "They Work On Something" could be busy nanobots. In an album full of unusual tracks, "Alarmierende Zustande" stands out as one of the weirdest. "Separatorenfleisch" has the hallmarks of a vintage video game. Of the remaining tracks, some are more interesting than others, but if you've gotten this far and stuck with it, then you probably already have some affinity with this album. I highly doubt you will get all you can out of it in a single listening session, so the replay factor is high on 'The Doomsday Layout.' That this album goes against the grain of most electronic music made these days is a big plus.

Glen Whitehead is an accomplished trumpet player from Colorado Springs, Colorado, exploring improvisational phenomena, interactive communication and environmental collaboration between living cultures, technologies and the natural world. Utilizing field recordings from Colorado, France, Greece, Hawaii, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey, and Wyoming along with some electronics as background/environment, Whitehead seeks to tell an encompassing narrative of 'Pale Blue,' the nickname of planet earth, the orb we live on.

First I have to say, solo trumpet can be a very lonely, melancholy instrument. One listen to the theme from "La Strada" and you know it's true. This is often the case on 'Pale Blue,' an album of seven tracks with trumpet set in a variety of environments. Beginning with the title track, Whitehead's trumpet riffs off a brief theme set in a watery, droney ambience. "Dawn of the Din" is howling wind with trumpet squeaks and squawks that gives way to twittering birds and similar frequency electronics when the trumpet begins sounding more trumpet-like. It all ends appropriately in a thunderstorm. "M(aias)aura" has one of the most interesting sonic environments on the album, and Whitehead's trumpet technique is different here than most of his other playing. This track is frenetic and just darn strange. "Dreaming at a Distance" seems to have an ocean background and the multi-tracked trumpets sound drunken and sad. The environment changes later on to something more buzzy and industrial, yet with birds. Huh? "Wilderness of Mirrors" also features Mert Gunal on ney (Turkish flue) which adds a bit of the exotic in a cricket-filled night. The trumpet sound is all low-end, like some Tibetan horn, or sick cows. When that gets mixed with adhan (Islamic call to prayer) things really get strange. Dr. Colin McAllister is featured playing electric and classical guitar on "Pila del Ángel" and Whitehead's contribution on trumpet begins with squeaky higher timbres that sound a boiling tea kettle whistle. This is interspersed with a more normal sounding trumpet/classical guitar duet and a ghostly vocal choir.

It ends on "4 Wai" with Glen's trumpet butting up against a cosmic dreamwall of sonic ambience which is almost the best piece on the album. The main problem I have with 'Pale Blue' is that more often than not, the trumpet sounds separate from the field recording/electronic environments it resides in. I would have preferred a more integrated approach, perhaps even some Jon Hassell techniques where the trumpet sound was electronically modified to suit the environment, but that is seldom the case on 'Pale Blue.' An interesting album that has its moments.

It has been a long, long times since I've heard from Philip Blackburn, but that doesn't mean he's been inactive. Blackburn is a British-American composer and environmental sound artist, President of Neuma Records (since 2020), former director of Innova Recordings, film-maker, writer, record producer, and designer. 'Ordo,' his latest release is a multifaceted 2-CD album of 13 tracks selected from more than four decades of his experimental work. Not easily classifiable, Blackburn's compositions explore explore counterpoint as conversation theory, and the expressive potential of acoustic phenomena. The thirteen tracks are as thought-provokingly smooth as they are crunchy- constantly evolving, daringly melodic, and textured with layers that shift like the weather.

Beginning with "Weft Sutra," the vibe is flavored Indian with a hint of the psychedelic. Title track "Ordo" carries forth that motif yet with a solo voice that sounds liturgical (Latin) and underpinned with complex drone. Instrumental improvisation (veena) carries a good deal of the weight here in a composition that is almost lighter than air. "The Song Of The Earth" sounds like a windchime piece with abstract melodicism. The description of "The Sound of a Going in the Tops of the Mulbery Trees" is as challenging as its title. The composer's intent was a fantasy on the imagined soundworld of the Underground Railroad as it passed through Ohio before the Civil War. What you will hear is vibraphone mixed with neoclassical strings, flute and piano in varying amounts, although the strings tend to be dominant. The playing shifts over time from somewhat passive to highly active. If I didn't read the composer's notes, I would have no clue this had anything to do with the Underground Railroad, but it does stand well on its own. It is hard to tell how much of this was improvised and how much was written/composed. "Lilacs and Lightning" is a brief piano piece with prerecorded sounds created on a Virtual Rhythmicon- a Cowell-Theremin invention that uses ratios of the harmonic series as well as pitch. "Albi" is music composed for string quartet in 1981, based on the form around the eight Rasa or or moods found in Indian classical music. It is the longest and most serious sounding piece of music on CD1.

Moving to CD2, it opens with "A Cambridge Musick," a quite avant garde neoclassical piece that is a tribute to Blackburn's college musical friends. The piece is intended to convey the pre-performace interplay between the players in a sort of rehearsal environment. Instruments range from harpsichord to percussion, recorder, voice (spoken), strings, and more. A lot of this is playful and fun, I think with the intent of the performers having a good time. "Over Again" begins with some struck bell tones but the bulk of this track is a narrative of First Lieutenant Warren Ward, a World War II glider pilot from Madison, Minnesota describing his task of delivering ammunition to Allied force on the beaches during Normandy Landing, June 4, 1944. While interesting from a historical standpoint, one listen may be all you need. "More Fools Than Wise" begins by sounding like dueling tugboats or other ship horns in the harbor, and with the avant garde female voice singing mostly nonsense syllables, it is indeed a strange piece. "Sonata Homophobia" sounds somewhat like you might think; manipulated samples and sound bites of anti-gay rants but with music that turns calm and almost pastoral in the second half. "Unearthing" is a chaotic piece of spoken word and instruments mashed-up through the blender of aural insanity. This piece was meant for listening under headphones but I'm afraid I wasn't that brave. "Stuck" is supposed to be a loving homage to NPR's "Car Talk" radio show but although there was a lot of crazy sounds in it, I heard little of Tom and Ray Magliozzi. Finally, we end with "Air,Air:Canary; New Ground," a piece for solo clarinet and piano. The piano doesn't come in until the secod half, but the piece as a whole is engaging.

As you can probably tell, this is quite a diverse album of recordings. Like me, I don't think everyone will love everything here but for the neoclassical/avant garde enthusiast there is ample material of interest.

I was unfamiliar with these two artists, but digitalsakura hails from Hamburg Germany and has a ton of releases on Bandcamp. They state that "the sprouts of digitalsakura were planted on January 29, 2019, since then this beautiful tree, a symbol of life and death, transience and frailty of being, blooms and envelops the whole world with petals of experimental art." Thlaaflaa has only a few releases listed, and has a previous collaboration with digitalsakura, but otherwise I couldn't find much about this act. All we know is that it is on Inner Demons, so it will be interesting. Let's get into it.

Erase Yourself is a sparse analog atmospheric track. It flows smoothly and has a nice, ominous atmosphere that would be quite at home in a dystopian sci-fi film. Really well done.

Codebreaker blends the ethereal synth lines with a glitchy, broken beat that provides an interesting juxtaposition between the two styles. Think Autechre meets the Orb with some crackling noise thrown in for good measure.

Overall, this is a nice collaboration and the result is truly lovely. Very well done and well worth checking out if you need to take a break from the harsh noise wall that Inner Demons is known for.

The third release in a row of Phil Klampe's Homogenized Terrestrials project, and the only one of the three that isn't on his Terrestrial Records label. This one is a limited edition of 100 CDs on the Somnimage label, hosting such other artists as seah, Rapoon, Adi Newton/The Anti Group, Allan Zane, and others. Instead of strange names, tracks are identified by numbers - "Vibration 1" through "Vibration 9" in eight tracks with Vibration 5 curiously absent. As for description, perhaps Mr. Klampe said it best - "Over the course of a few decades, individuals have secretly entered Teslas apartment and made recordings with a device referred to as the quantum envelope collector. This device is capable of extracting vibrations stored within objects and creating a representation of the events and sounds that remained and continue to remain long after Teslas death. Next comes the task of interpreting these sounds. Do they represent actual sounds that occurred, recreated to the best of our ability with current technology? Or are these coded sounds that must be deciphered further to see or hear what they really say? Some have speculated that these are recordings of actual alien communication, and that Tesla himself was of alien origin. What exactly are these vibrations extracted from Teslas apartment?" That kind of sounds like the voiceover intro of a "Tesla's Apartment" episode of 'Ancient Aliens' and I can imagine Giorgio Tsoukalos, Tok Thompson and Travis Taylor debating the finer points of the sounds on this CD and what they could possibly allude to. The bottom line though is that the tracks (or vibrations) are generally intense and even somewhat unpleasant at times. It is as if Tesla's ghost is conducting experiments in a medium not yet known to humanity. While the idea of that may seem intellectually stimulating and perhaps even emotionally romantic, the actuality is somewhat unpleasant in the over-all. While "Vibration 1" eases you into this realm with a non-threatening environment, "Vibration 2" is a lot colder metallic alien habitat. This seems to be a soundscape of "things" (machines, devices, indescribable constructs) rather than people or places. What humanity there is seems to have an outside role, and maybe there is none here, only AI, which might be a fitting conclusion. I have my favorite passages from 'vibrations recovered from Tesla's apartment' (I really resonated with "Vibration 7") but the overwhelming feeling I experienced was more of a "stranger in a strange land" feeling. Noise enthusiasts may find much of this scintillating.