Posts Tagged ‘Ambient’

A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers – Towers of Silence

Posted: 19 May 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Lay Bare Recordings – 9th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

One may be inclined to jest that a release like this should carry a warning – but the joke falls flat when technically, it does: the notes which accompany the release on Bandcamp sets the scene for the debut EP from Dutch experimentalists of A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers thus:

Whilst most drone-metal outfits focus on creating atmosphere by composing ambient compositions with tremendous power and volume, the Lighthouse Keepers use more traditional doom/sludge metal as a starting point and explore its differences and similarities with genres such as free jazz, raga, noise and classical minimalism.

Elsewhere, they’re described as sounding like ‘a disturbed lovechild of OM, Sumac, Swans, Miles Davis, and Pandit Pran Nath, combining lengthy improvisations with ear-shattering explosions of intensity’. How could a lovechild of that lot be anything but disturbed?

And so it is that we enter by way of ‘The Massacre of Flour’, a title of which conjures images of a bloodbath in a bakery. What is sounds like is…. nothing short of wild. Its seven minutes leads the listener through a series of conjoined segments, arriving in a crazed blast of shrieking noise, a frenzied cacophony of feedback and squealing sax before lunging into a thick, sludge riff, which in turn yields to a slow, almost ambient drone passage with mystical swirls which rise like desert mirages. Each is gripping itself, and the transition to the next takes place almost imperceptibly: one moment you’re here, then, somehow, you’re there, in a completely different scene with no recollection of how you came to be here – rather like the way scenes change in dreams. And suddenly, the hazy serenity is torn asunder, lurching into a tectonic rift from which burst larval torture resembling Swans circa the Young God EP. It’s absolutely fucking brutal, the sound of pain, distilled and amplified

‘I Fuck People’, the shortest song on the EP, goes in hard on the avant-jazz noise chaos, forming a heavy undulation of bleats and shrieks by way of a backdrop to savage, ravaged, demonic vocals. It’s the sound of purgatorial torment. But all of this is simply a prelude to the main event, the nine-minute ‘Towers of Silence’, on which they really flex all of their muscles. Easing in gently with some abstract desert folk with hints of Eastern esotericism, it’s a slow, gradual build. There’s something meditative, spiritual in the vocals, until things begin to get twisted, mangled, and tangled. There’s anguish, there’s tension, and unease grows… breathe. But ululations which begin soothingly grow tense, and things spiral to a hypnotic cathedral of sound.

Towers of Silence may only contain three tracks with a combined duration of just over twenty minutes, but its range and intensity are something to behold. It’s drone metal, but not as we know it.

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break_fold – Tracker EP

Posted: 8 May 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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1st May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Since debuting in 2017 under the break_fold moniker after some time away from music to concentrate his energy on the demands of adult life, Tim Hann has maintained a steady flow of output – not exactly a tempestuous spate, but with the release of an EP or an album every year or two, he’s built a respectable body of work. And over the course of these releases, the break_fold sound has evolved – again, not at rapid pace, whereby one release is a huge departure from its predecessor, but the music he’s making now has developed significantly when compared to the sparse glitchtronica of 07_07_15 – 13_04_16 and 27_05_17 – 21_01_18.

Hann continues to mine his memories and experiences for inspiration, serving to document his life through sonic abstractions, an aural memoir of sorts. The Tracker EP is a counterpart to its predecessor, The Planner EP, as he explains:

“The Tracker EP is a reference to my Dad, who gave himself nicknames that others in the family then started using,” Tim explains. “‘Tracker’ is a reference to his persona when on holiday or away from work. If we were on holiday and were trying to find a place of interest, he’d be in Tracker mode. Planner is when my Dad was at work.”

Families are strange, but it’s only as one grows older, and when one takes a step back to reflect on formative experiences that it becomes apparent just how strange. As a child, you assume your family life, and your parents, are normal, and that every other household is the same, at least more or less. Over time, you come to consider the things some of your friends’ households do are weird. And they probably are. Mealtime rituals, Easter, Christmas traditions… but it’s likely not until later, after leaving home and starting your own family that you begin to analyse your own upbringing, and to compare the relationship you had with your parents growing up to the one you have with your own children.

I’m often startled by just how close to their parents a lot of my friends are, and how much time they spend with them. But then, they also stayed close to their parents geographically, living just a few streets away, with their parents providing child care and doing school runs several days a week. And that to me seems strange. I’ve no issues with my parents, but my main aspiration growing up was to attain independence and live my life in my own way.

As the accompanying notes add, ‘across the EP, break_fold ties together nods to family sayings, misheard phrases, and the small but defining details of growing up in the North East of England in the 1990s… for Hann, both Planner and Tracker serve as time capsules; deeply personal yet universally resonant snapshots of childhood, family dynamics and regional identity’.

In this context, the details matter. None of the inspiration is rendered explicit on Tracker: instead, what we get is a sonic articulation of all of this. And it works. You may not take away the intended interpretation, but that’s both the beauty and the downside of a project like this: it’s as much about the listener’s experience and input as the artist’s.

‘Pet’ amalgamates an almost club-friendly dance sound with a trawling, trudging grind of a foundation, while ‘Climbing Flowers’ pairs soft synth washes that hover between Krautrock, ambient, and prog, with flickering, fluttering beats, low in the mix, fading like memories around the midpoint. ‘Workie Ticket’ – a term I first learned on my thirtieth birthday in a pub in Conwy, Wales, where, having climbed Conwy mountain, I had a bowl of chips and a pint of Mordue Workie Ticket – brewed in North Shields. While the meaning and use of the phrase seems varied, it’s most definitely a North-East thing. There’s a trance-dance vibe to ‘Carrying On’, although the bass and overlaid guitar are more post-rock, and what we get, ultimately, is a hybrid.

The Tracker EP doesn’t sound confused as much as a work that’s deeply immersed in the process of processing, bringing together disparate elements in order to sift through an array of stuff. ‘This Concept of Sharing’ is upbeat, light, accessible, even danceable, but there’s a sense of something darker beneath the surface, and this emerges on the final track, ‘Every Penny’s a Prisoner’, which swerves and bends and twists and warps, but all along rides a pulsating groove pinned in place with a whipcrack snare.

It’s hard to place The Tracker EP. As much as its ambient, there are harder dance elements in the mix. But for all its surging buoyancy, there’s a tinge of sadness beneath, and the complex twist of inner conflict and uncertainty. On the surface, The Tracker EP sees break_fold bursting out in a bloom of elation, but there are currents beneath which are deep, and darker, perhaps revealing far more than is ever rendered explicit.

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Kreng – Wormhole

Posted: 5 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Miasmah – 7th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

“What does a trip towards another world sound like? We’re about to find out. The master of tension, melancholy, and the deranged is back after a long period working in the worlds of theatre and cinema. Last seen on Miasmah with the grief stricken The Summoner, Kreng now returns with Wormhole, following closer in the footsteps of the cult classics L’Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu and Grimoire.”

This is how we’re introduced to the first new album from Kreng in a decade, and Wormhole is appropriately titled. Immediately, the listener is drawn into a hinterland of suspense and ominous tension, a path beset by ever thickening trees and a creeping mist. You feel an urge to retreat, but as early as the second composition, the dark, jittery ‘Nachtzweet’, with dank creaking sounds and dissonant piano notes which are the pure quintessence of ‘eerie’, you find you’re incapable of turning back. The only way is forward, further into the forest – it doesn’t seem to be enchanted, but something isn’t right either: something is lurking, and it feels menacing, sinister, dangerous. Your heart’s in your mouth, and you’re no longer in control of your decisions and all you can do is creep onwards, down the wormhole, riven with trepidation.

It’s like the soundtrack to a film, but it’s hard to imagine that the visuals could be anywhere near as unsettling as this accompaniment. In the same way that films are rarely as scary as books, because films render and thus create boundaries when it comes to expressing The Terrible Thing, the monster, the ghost, the object of fear, the mind’s capacity to experience fear goes far beyond the visual. As such, a strong soundtrack has the capacity to heighten the fear factor of a movie. But the soundtrack alone, when the only visuals are those conjured in the mind’s eye… the scope is without boundaries. And these compositions distil the very essence of fear, of dread.

Many of the titles offer little by way of clues as to their meaning, or the scenes they would accompany if this were a film. ‘Cepheid’ is an American molecular diagnostics company, and what’s so scary about that? You may well ask. It also happens to be a pulsating star, which changes not only in brightness, but also diameter and temperature, too, which is in keeping with the space journey theme of the album’s title and other tracks, such as ‘Vacuum’.

The piano-led ‘Entropy’ is a soaring choral work, albeit one that elicits thoughts of death and afterlife. And if ‘To Yield’ is soothing, and allows the listener time and space to recover their breath and the heart to return to a more normal rate, the aforementioned ‘Vacuum’ is five and a half minutes of suffocating fear, and ‘Donker’ is an extended exercise in orientation-twisting, brain-bending torture.

In places conventionally ‘filmic’, with strings and piano taking the lead, there are extended passages of creeping dark ambience, the sonic origins of which are unclear, adding to the unease of the pieces – because so much fear stems from the unknown, the unseen, the inexplicable. Sounds of unknown and inexplicable origin are inherently disturbing: if you know that wail is from an owl, you can compartmentalise it, accept that it’s an owl, and move on. When you don’t know what that haunting sound it… it gives you the willies.

Wormhole is creepy, unsettling. It chills more than it thrills, and instils a deep discomfort. Close your eyes and breathe slowly. Feel the fear. Embrace it.

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Trowser Carrier + Fern – Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road

Posted: 1 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 1st May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Trowser Carrier – formerly of Leeds and now of Värmland, Sweden – is a genre unto himself, being, to my knowledge the sole exponent of polite harsh noise on the planet. And if that seems like an oxymoron, that’s entirely the point: 2013’s A Flower for My Hoonoo (reissued in expanded form in 2023) offered up musings on cups of tea and tablecloths and all manner of English manners against backdrops of raw, skull-shattering abrasive noise.

For this release (I won’t suggest, as music journos so often do, that it’s long-awaited, as I doubt more than five people have noticed the time between Trowser Carrier releases), TC has paired up with fellow Värmland resident Fern (whose error was released by Dret Skivor a couple of years ago).

The compositions are considerably longer than on the previous releases by either artist, with Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road containing four new compositions, each four to nine minutes in length, plus a thirteen-minute remix courtesy of horse funeral.

It’s the title track which lifts the curtain on this characteristically quirky set, and it seems that Fern’s input has tempered the harsh noise of Trowser Carrier, replacing blanket distortion and abrasion with muffled, exploratory, experimental electronica, which swims casually between space-age weirdness, semi-ambient Krautrock, and sci-fi drones reminiscent of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. TC’s vocals are low in the mix and masked and mangled by distortion and a host of other effects, barely discernible and wholly indecipherable amidst layers of reverb and tremolo. It all sound quite polite and considerate in the delivery, though.

‘Lovely show pillows’ is a work of dank, dark ambience which is unnerving, unsettling. The lyrics are completely beyond unravelling, the voice serving more as another instrument in the slow swirl of sound, but the title speaks for itself, as is also the case on ‘Nearly clean? No really clean!’ a slow drift of cloudlike ambience with submerged vocals which likely references a TV advert from the 80s or perhaps early 90s, the specifics of which elude me. It sounds like a disjointed message beaming in via satellite from a space mission circa 1970, crackling through space and time against a backdrop of whale song. Maybe I need to clean my ears: perhaps they’re only nearly clean. But then a barrage of noise like a thunder storm breaking hits with the arrival of ‘The smell of a lawn at dawn’. This is, of course, peak absurdism, and precisely what one would expect from the label, and in particular Trowser Carrier, whose objective is essentially to take the piss out of harsh noise and power electronics and industrial ambient and all the rest, while exploiting the form with a commendable aptitude.

Horse funeral’s remix of ‘TC + Fern’ appears to meld down the album in its entirety to a single seething morass of undifferentiated slow-moving sonic gloop. Here, any vocals are boiled down and simmered to mere bubbles in a broiling broth, and the track eventually evaporates to nothing.

What to make of this? Well, it’s not designed to meet conventional musical standards. Quite the opposite, in fact. But Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road sees Trowser Carrier + Fern belongs to a territory all of its own, dismantling the tropes and forms of the genres to which the album belongs. It would be commercial suicide if commercial potential was an issue. As it is, it’s simply a magnificent example of obstinate perversity – and good noise.

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Russell Haswell – Let it Go

Posted: 28 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Editions Mego – 1st May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

With absolutely no referencing of that animated Disney movie, the textual contextualisation for Russell Haswell’s latest sonic assault echoes what I’ve been saying – and writing – for some time now. I feel a small sense of elation… but equally a certain tiredness. I’m 50. And while no doubt global history is essentially a tale of innovation and destruction in equal measure, the last quarter of a century has felt truly hellish, as if the exponential pace of progress has run in parallel with an ever-accelerating desire to wipe ourselves as a species from the face of the planet.

It has been twenty-five years since the seismic events of 2001—when twin towers collapsed under terrorist attack and Coventry’s sonic insurgent Russell Haswell launched his inaugural salvo on the original Mego label with Live Salvage 1997–2000. The intervening era has delivered unrelenting turbulence: protracted wars, institutional corruption, a global pandemic, the resurgence of fascist currents, rampant media distortion, and omnipresent surveillance. For Haswell, a lifelong admirer of 1970s and 1980s dystopian cinema, the verdict is unequivocal: “Science Fiction is now!”

It’s hard to argue that the moment in which we find ourselves has all the hallmarks of every dystopian fiction ever imagined rolled into one unimaginable fusion, and that we are inching closer by the second to the end of days.

Haswell has long used sound to articulate the horrors of the 21st century, both as a solo artist and in collaboration, notably bringing additional layers of abrasion to Consumer Electronics, and while the accompanying notes detail quite extensively the equipment used, the influences, and the creative aims of Let it Go, my focus here is more on what it actually sounds like and the listening experience.

The first few seconds of the first track, ‘Exit Downwards’ are innocuous enough: a drone, nondescript, smooth – but within seconds its rent with shuddering glitches, squelches, and discordant clanks, not to mention the stammering thud of a particularly sharp kick drum. And over the course of seven minutes, it pumps and pounds blasts and bleeps like a circuit in meltdown. It’s pretty tense stuff, and descents, tension, and anxiety are recurrent themes not only in the titles, but in the formations of the compositions themselves.

‘Fall 3’ and ‘Fall 2’ follow the theme of descent, and manifest as wibbly collage works, while ‘The anxieties of our time’ is fairly straightforward in its implications and manifests as a head-swimming, dizzying panic attack, a meltdown in musical form, the crackling industrial glitch monster that is ‘Stress Testing’ functions on numerous levels. As much as the phrase relates specifically to financial, economic, and societal systems, there is also the stress test as it relates to the effects of physical activity on the heart, and, by association, it feels like an implicit hint of the stress we as individuals find ourselves subject to on a daily basis: how far can we – individually, and collectively – be pushed under the late capitalist model? At this moment in time, it seems like we’re close to finding out. And through swooshing sweeps and rippling fractures in sonic fabrics which twist and flare, Russell Haswell renders an aural replication of the overwhelming experience of life right now.

In comparison to some of Haswell’s releases, Let it Go is not particularly noisy or abrasive, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less intense. Even the ambient hums of ‘Curated narrative’ bring a hovering tension which is difficult to step away from.

Christmas is a difficult time for many, and while there’s no indication of what inspired ‘Thu 25 Dec 2025’, it buzzes and throbs for a relentless six and three quarter minutes like an angry hornet, trapped in a greenhouse which is slowly collapsing in on itself. The final track, the thirteen-minute ‘There’s always a bit of light somewhere’ seems to offer a thin ray of hope in its title, but the fine metallic scrapes and glistening edges which intertwine ominously and with no discernible form are far from comforting, and you find yourself on edge, sensing darkness visible and encroaching from all sides. Yes, There’s always a bit of light somewhere, but that somewhere isn’t here.

Let it Go is varied, exploratorily, and an artistic success, but it’s by no means the easiest listen. And for that, I say ‘good’. Embrace the challenge.

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TSR2 – Transmission

Posted: 20 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Wormhole World – 20th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Given the diminishing number of grassroots venue and the changing nature of live music consumption – whereby the masses flock to £60+ arena shows, and are happy to pay £20 or more to see a third-rate tribute act while swilling £8 pints and yammering away loudly to their mates for the entire evening, with barely one ear on the music, it’s small wonder acts who are new and / or more niche struggle to get bookings. And without taking your music to a new audience through live shows, if you can’t afford PR to plug your music to radio stations and the like, how are artists ever to break through the algorithmic recommendations and reach people? This is even more of a challenge for experimental electronic acts, as most small venues are more likely to showcase ‘bands’ or guitar-based music in the main, unless they’re doing something that’s promotable as ‘electropop’ or similar.

It’s thanks to the EMOM (Electronic Music Open Mic) network, and, in particular, the EMOM nights in York, hosted by North Facing Garden at The Fulford Arms – one if the most accommodating venues there is, who don’t only welcome weird and experimental shit, but have sound engineers who are up to the job of facilitating the kind of noise the acts who play such events are striving for, that I’ve caught TSR2 live on numerous occasions. These nights don’t only host bedroom explorers just starting out, but acts with respectable recording careers who simply can’t get a foothold on the regular gig circuit. And TSR2 certainly have quite a recording career already.

A yin / yang / pro / con of the EMOM format is that each performer gets just fifteen minutes, which is great by way of a showcase, a taster, and also great if you’re not digging it as no act is on long enough for it to get boring, but of you are digging it, or the music itself requires a more expansive set…

Transmission is TSR2 serving a more expansive set, with ten tracks and a running time in the region of an hour. It’s their second release on Lancashire label Wormhole World, following Birdstrike! in 2024, and it brings full-spectrum bleeps, churn, and imaginative abstraction, and the first composition – which is also the title track – brings all of this simultaneously, with space-age heavy drone given structure by some industrial strength beats which hit hard.

There’s ambient abstraction and swirling spaciness in abundance, all the oscillations and layers bouncing back and forth off one another, skittering and surging, with moments which elicit the essence of R2D2, others which are more like wading through long grass while struggling to find the path.

Muffled samples merge with the delirious digital meltdown that is ‘Modern Life’ and while it does have me briefly contemplating ‘Darker Avenues’, samples float and echo around the darker ambient spaces of ‘The Salt Marsh’. The ten-minute ‘Sewer Lawyer Logic’ is a dark, detailed exploration which ventures into dank sonic territories, and ‘Some Of You Had Better Go Home’ wanders between the terrains of Krautrock and Industrial – specifically at the point where Chris and Cosey make their departure to spawn techno.

Transmission evokes the atmosphere of space travel – but more in the sense we imagine than of the latest vanity loop around the moon – and laser-squirting sci-fi explorations. It’s a varied album, which presents shades of both light and darkness and ever-shifting moods.

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Abel Autopsy – uunder

Posted: 6 April 2026 in Reviews, Albums
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20th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

With his debut release, Abel Autopsy makes his ambition clear, announcing that uunder is envisioned as a journey within a three-part series, with the next two releases in the series being overr and outt, and promising ‘dark, melancholic, shapeshifting worlds that slide between light and shadow’. Although the inconsistency of the double letters on this first release from those projected to follow disturbs my sense of necessary balance, I can close my mind to it while opening my ears and concentrating on the music.

The nine tracks take the form of layered, atmospheric synth-dominated compositions, and Abel Autopsy sets out the context for these thereal works, which evoke haunting (super)natural landscapes by electronic means.

“This started in my youth – pulling apart various musical instruments (battery powered) while in the woods of Appalachia. There was an eerie, ethereal vibe almost like something ‘other’ in the wilderness with me. That permeates through all of the songs and is woven in the mental tapestry throughout. This album is an exercise in capturing that – the balance between light and shadow, feeling another ‘presence’ with you that is not entirely from here.”

The vocals on ‘ghostride’ are muffled, indistinct, the words – if there actually are any – indecipherable, serving more as another instrument than anything else. The pieces are bold, sweeping, cinematic, the ambient tendencies given form by solid mechanised beats which are up in the mix. ‘unfound’ and ‘gates’ land in the space between later Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails, the latter also spinning in dance tropes and the haunting monasterial sounds of Enigma music.

He is very partial to the big thunderclap blast when making a change in key or tempo, or simply stepping up the drama – perhaps excessively so, as there are moments when things do feel a bit formulaic – something compounded by the comparative uniformity of the track durations, which are all within the range of 3:01 and 3:37 (three of the nine have a run time of 3:37).

‘mycenae’ tweaks the template to accentuate the contrasts between light and dark and thanks to a super-full, extra-low bass, goes darker than anywhere else on the album, and the crackling static which fizzes through the introduction of the heavier, more distorted ‘nihill’, which concludes the set, brings a sense of decay and a doomy finality.

There are some neat ideas spread across uunder, and the execution is similarly neat, with a clear attention to detail. More variety, particularly in terms of tempo and dynamics would likely create greater impact, but it’s a promising start, and it will be interesting to see how Abel Autopsy evolves over the next instalments of the trilogy.

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Rayan Haïdar – Cities burn as we dream of a return

Posted: 26 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dragon’s Eye Recordings – 20th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The sad fact is that many of us have become somewhat numbed by the endless live rolling news of war in recent years. It’s easy to do when smoke and rubble and statistics are standard. In some ways, COVID – or more specifically, the media coverage of the pandemic – prepared us for it, by keeping us in isolation with only the TV and Internet to connect us to the outside world. As the numbers kept ticking up, as the number of deaths grew, so did our panic, but equally, so did our sense of distance. Unless we had directly lost a friend or relative, it wasn’t quite real.

And now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the genocide in Gaza – it’s not a war – and its escalation to surrounding areas, plus in recent weeks Iran and the whole middle east exploding, our shock and alarm gradually becomes mutes by overexposure and – worse – for many, a lack of concern over something that’s so distant. There’s annoyance at rising prices, particularly of fuel, but little more: people go about their lives as normal and don’t give too much thought to what life must be like for the people living in these places – or how it must be to have friends and family in constant fear for their lives, what it must be like for those who have fled to witness the scenes and the news reports, and likely see a huge disparity between the versions.

Cities burn as we dream of a return gives pause for thought and to reflect on these things. He’s a Beirut-born, Paris-based multi-instrumentalist, and the album is described as ‘a profound meditation on displacement, longing, and the impossible distance between memory and its aftermath’.

As the accompanying notes detail, ‘The album began as home recordings in 2024 — fragments inspired by Beirut and the quiet melancholy that had always permeated Haïdar’s childhood place. Shortly after beginning work, the aggression against Lebanon escalated, and Haïdar found themselves in the surreal position of documenting their relationship to home while watching that same place be destroyed from afar. The recordings became inseparable from the violence unfolding in real time, each track absorbing the grief and anger of witnessing loved ones continually hurt with no ability to intervene.

‘As Haïdar entered 2025, they continued recording, carrying more grief and anger than when they had begun. What emerged is not simply an album about a place, but about the way we carry our homes and the people we love within us—how they become part of our interior landscape regardless of physical distance or destruction.’

In context, what’s perhaps surprising about Cities burn as we dream of a return is just how gentle it is. Each piece takes the form of a masterfully spun cloud of abstract ambience, the layers and textures twisting and merging and separating, a constant flux, as distant samples echo through the mists.

The tone does, however, shift somewhat as the album progresses. Although indistinct, the samples appear to convey a narrative of increasing anxiety, as do the titles. The title track’s serenity is broken by the sound of panicked voices, while ‘On people we once met and places we once saw’ is imbued with a heavy air of melancholy beneath its soft flow. With it comes the realisation that many of those people and many of those places either no longer exist, or are otherwise altered beyond recognition. Everything changes, everyone changes, but the difference between growth and progress over time, and absolute destruction is beyond compare.

‘At dusk, looking down’ draws the album to a close with an achingly haunting atmosphere and a sense of loss that’s difficult to define but nevertheless inescapable. The album’s six pieces are subtle, gentle, and comparatively sparse, and much of the emotion they convey is indirect and implied. Cities burn as we dream of a return is nuanced and contemplative, and quietly moving.

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alka / Andrew Brenza – My Old Man (A Meditation On Impermanence)

Posted: 13 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 27th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Mortality Tables’ Impermanence Project continues apace, this time with a nine-minute work by alka, with spoken word by Andrew Brenza. This piece uses a 1979 / 80 cassette recording of Mortality Tables founder Mat Smith singing Marie Lloyd’s music hall song ‘My Old Man (Said Follow The Van)’ with his late father, James.

As Bryan Michael (alka) writes, ‘I felt there was a parallel between the rent collector-avoiding moonlight flits that inspired ‘My Old Man (Said Follow The Van)’ and the fleeting, ever mutable nature of life. I also like the idea of moments being captured within magnetic fields – a cassette, in this instance – which can then be re-played. To me, they’re like ghosts of memories.

Given just how fragile those magnetic fields are – prone to deterioration and even erasure – while the very tape itself is liable to stretching, warping, being chewed in the heads and rendered unplayable, or even snapping, it feels as if the medium of the source material is, in itself, an encapsulation of impermanence. Even supposedly permanent records are always at risk of ceasing to be.

And, indeed, such a simple recording, likely made for fun in the moment without a view to posterity, absolutely captures the essence of impermanence; James is no longer with us, but his voice lives on here, while the voice of Mat as a child is a reminder that childhood, too, is but a stage, and one which is, in the scheme of life, but brief.

Initially, the sound is so quiet that one may even think there is nothing but silence, but gradually, soft, gently pulsating synth tones fade in. The instrumentation is sparse, ethereal, cloud-like, while the voices drift amidst a soft, dreamy haze, very much creating the effect of the ‘ghosts of memories’ of which alka speaks. It isn’t until the final three minutes that Brenza’s spoken word contribution begins, reflecting on impermanence and mortality, and ‘the way I started to dress like my father once, after his death, because it made me feel close..’

The different elements are drawn together in an almost alchemic fashion, to produce a work which is not lugubrious, but wistful and contemplative.

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Listen: ‘Carrying On’ by break_fold

Posted: 19 February 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Ambient electronic producer break_fold has announced his forthcoming EP Tracker, and shares its lead single ‘Carrying On’. Set for release on 1st May via analog horizons in partnership with Launchpad+ / EMI North, Tracker continues Tim Hann’s deeply personal exploration of family, memory and identity through immersive and innovative sound design.

Built on cyclical synth motifs, undulating low frequencies and delicately splintered percussive elements, new single ‘Carrying On’ captures the emotional push and pull of childhood mischief and reconciliation. Playful and melodic, the track unfolds gradually in movements that range from shimmering calm to distorted tension, before eventually finding resolution once more; mirroring the rhythms of sibling life.

“’Carrying On’ is a reference to what my parents used to say to me and my brother when we were getting a bit hard to handle when we were kids,” explains Tim. “It’s a phrase that has stuck with me from a really formative age. The structure of the song represents the cycle of me and my brother playing together; from playing well, to being told off, to playing well together again. I was thinking about when my brother and I used to play and how it started out fun and invariably sometimes got out of hand. My parents would step in, calm things down, and then it would start all over again.”

Throughout the track, glitchy ambient textures and delicate arpeggiated themes are offset by moments of grit and disruption, reinforcing break_fold’s gift for translating personal history into dynamic electronic compositions.

Listen here:

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Tracker serves as a companion piece to break_fold’s previous EP release Planner. Where Planner reflected Tim’s father’s work-focused alter-ego, Tracker turns to another of his Dad’s self-appointed nicknames: “The Tracker EP is a reference to my Dad, who gave himself nicknames that others in the family then started using,” Tim explains. “‘Tracker’ is a reference to his persona when on holiday or away from work. If we were on holiday and were trying to find a place of interest, he’d be in Tracker mode. Planner is when my Dad was at work.” As with ‘Carrying On’ and previous single ‘Pet’, across the EP break_fold ties together nods to family sayings, misheard phrases, and the small but defining details of growing up in the North East of England in the 1990s.

For Tim, both Planner and Tracker serve as time capsules; deeply personal yet universally resonant snapshots of childhood, family dynamics and regional identity. Operating from his Bradford studio, break_fold has steadily carved out a distinctive space within the UK’s underground electronic landscape since debuting in 2017. With three albums and several EP releases already under his belt, the Hartlepool-raised producer’s work balances what he describes as “pessimism and optimism in equal measure.” Support from BBC 6 Music and tastemaker outlets has marked him as one of the North’s most compelling ambient electronic voices. Tracker is out 1st May 2026 via analog horizons & Launchpad+ / EMI North

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break_fold - press shot four

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