Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Smag På Dig Selv – This Is Why We Lost

Posted: 17 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Stunt Records – 6th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Well, this is a conundrum. This Is Why We Lost is the second album by Danish trio Smag På Dig Selv is pitched as a work which ‘shatter[s] the boundaries of electronic music’, and was made with the ambition ‘to create music that can exist within a trance or club-oriented setting, while still carrying a strong melodic and narrative arc’. Only, the band lineup consists of two saxophonists and one drummer, while single cut ‘Vik’s Rawcore’ features vibraphonist Viktoria Søndergaard. No arguing that it’s an intriguing, even exciting proposition, but can it really ‘shatter the boundaries of electronic music’? Or does it instead take acoustic music into new territories?

I’ll admit that I’m not mad keen on conventional ‘club’ music – no doubt a revelation which will come as a shock to many – but then perhaps I’ve never been to any decent clubs. It may seem perverse that I like noise and drone but find bangin’ choonz insufferable. This Is Why We Lost is built on techno / electronic tropes with insistent beats and some throbbing basslines – the second half of the album’s first track, ‘Like A Word I Never Knew’ goes full drum ‘n’ bass… and sax. For atop the frenetic fills and frenzied rhythm, not to mention the pulsating bass – whatever instrument is responsible for that – there are some strong jazz currents.

‘Let’s Go!’ is a slab of lively Europop / EDM, while ‘Vik’s Rawcore’ is full-on HI-NRG stomper – albeit with a mellow breakdown in the mid-section which prefaces the inevitable build before the beat drops again.

There’s no question that this is technically (or techno-ichally, if I’m up for deploying a shit pun) accomplished and innovative, and while AI is insidiously creeping its way and hollowing out the arts at a devastating rate, it’s refreshing to find an act which turns the tables, instead using acoustic instruments to create sounds associated with electronic music. The fact musicians and artists in all fields are embracing AI is bewildering. Why? Just why? The creative process is what makes the work of creativity, learning new techniques and ways to articulate the contents of the mind via any given medium. When I write, as much as delving for words and scouring a Thesaurus may at times be painstaking, this is precisely what it’s all about. The fundamental purpose of art is to convey the complexities of the human condition. To remove the human element from the art is to remove its very heart and any sense of feeling. AI is not art, it’s entertainment plagiarised from all preceding art. Fuck that.

Smag På Dig Selv aren’t the only ones using conventional, acoustic instrumentation in unconventional ways: Jo Quail is very much striking forth in new territories in forging immensely powerful ‘(post-)rock’ music with solo cello (aided by effects and a loop pedal), but what they’re doing is rather different.

‘Ya Tal3een’, featuring Luna Ersahin is altogether different, a stirring, primal folk composition led by an immensely powerful vocal performance, is more reminiscent of the earthy works of Wardruna, evoking vast expanses of woodland and rugged mountains. Elsewhere, the title track manifests as a thick, textured drone, an ambient piece which forms shapes as it evolves, but sounds more like strings, organ, synths, than any of the instruments listed. There’s a fleeting moment of melody which reminds me of something else, too, but it eludes me. ‘Fitness Bro’ amuses with its hyperkinetic energy, the pulsating groove – topped with big sax action – evokes fast treadmills and rapid reps, pumping biceps and perspiration. It also call to mind that brief moment in the early 80s when post-punk acts embraced saxophone, extending the initiative of The Psychedelic Furs and Theatre of Hate.

‘Jeg Ved Ikke Hvad Jed Siger’ swings into dark hip-hop territory, and it’s cool, unlike the happy hardcore of ‘Hits 4 Kids Vol. 3000’, complete with whistles and samples. Just no. It may not be quite as bad as Scooter, but there really is no need for this.

And perhaps THIS is why we lost. The album has some strong moments – many, in fact and they’re solid, too, showcasing a rare creativity, and an approach to composition that’s postmodernism turned up eleven… or thereabouts. I’m personally very much on the fence with this one, since it’s 50% mind-blowing and 50% Europop mediocrity. It certainly has its moments, and will likely to appeal to most, at least at some time.

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Coaxial – Redux Media

Posted: 12 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 6th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It may be a ‘me’ issue that when an artist suddenly hits the world with a blunderbuss blast of output, I feel somewhat overwhelmed. There are some acts I know I like which I’ve simply avoided because of not knowing where to start. Overfaced is the word: a term I discovered perhaps in my early teens when presented with a large roast dinner. The sheer amount of food in front of me instantly killed my appetite, to the point that I felt queasy and, not knowing where to start, felt incapable of starting, meaning that I would fold before I’d barely consumed a forkful.

While I did manage to ease myself into The Fall after dipping a toe, I very much feel this way about the likes of Merzbow, among others, and, to a lesser extent, the Melvins – and the specific reason I come to them is because of their early 00s trilogy, when they cranked out The Maggot, The Crybaby, and The Bootlicker on top of one another. Ben Heal, aka Coaxial has truly splurged with his output this year, as Redux Trilogy is not even the total. My head swam. The prospect of listening to, and reviewing, three albums in one session, for one piece… No. Just no.

Having stepped back and broken things down to more bitesize chunks, I have come to Redux Media, which is in fact the second of the trilogy, first. This feels reasonable, since this is set of releases is sold as ‘a triptych of cassette releases conceived as a recombinatory system rather than linear statement’. I will return to the other releases in due course, but for now and content to dabble.

The seven tracks on Redux Media are soft, squelchy, electronic and experimental. ‘Onyaxial’ lifts the lid on the set with a bibbling, bubbling stroll that sits in the space between minimal techno and the pulsating grooves of Kraftwerk. It bends and warps a bit, and there’s some weird shit going on near the end as it battles with its own identity, but this is the very essence of this release – it’s about the exploratory, about swimming out of the lanes and venturing wherever the mood takes.

‘Tryxxial’ is mellow, an 80s drum machine sound plodding along while keyboard sounds trill along, mixing all shades of electronic action with no suggestion of a conclusion, and rightly, with the wonky babbling of ‘Peswyx’. ‘Pymediax’ wanders into eighties electropop, but without vocals, and it’s more DAF than Depeche Mode.

In the main, it’s entertaining, and despite the overarching connotations of seriousness, it’s quite good fun. Redux Media finds Ben Heal venturing every which way and drilling deep into different dimensions.

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Listen: ‘Det blev våra liv’ by Fågelle

Posted: 12 February 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Nordic experimentalist Fågelle returns with an album whose backdrop is the inland of Halland, a patchwork of forests and abandoned mills in southern Sweden – her most personal album yet. Bränn min jord (‘Burn my soil’) will be self-released on 27th February. Fågelle shares ‘Det blev våra liv’ today.

‘Det blev våra liv’ is a journey into Fågelle’s upbringing on the Swedish countryside. Built from a collage of old recordings from school hallways, samples from computer games, and hissing harmonium tones, the track unfolds as a meditation on growing up and accepting how things turned out.

Liam Amner’s hypnotic drums guide you through fragments of memory and rhythmic electro-pop. Lyrical choirs collide with warped electronic grooves, before resolving into the beating heart of a car driving by into the night.

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After years in Berlin and Gothenburg, Fågelle returned home — not out of nostalgia, but as an act of reclamation. She wanted to reconnect with the soil that shaped her and let something new grow from what had been left behind.

Bränn min jord (“Burn my soil”) grew from this process of renewal. Its title references the tradition of burning the ground to spark new life — a metaphor for the personal upheaval and rebuilding at the heart of the album. The music explores the tension of growing up somewhere you know you’ll have to leave, yet which keeps pulling you back. It speaks about identity, memory, and the hidden emotional landscapes of overlooked places.

Fågelle worked with local musicians, dancers, and communities to bring the region into the recordings. She captured dancer Nathalie Ruiz moving across forest floors and wooden stages; collaborated with Våxtorp and Sennan Brass Orchestra; and recorded Stefan Isebring’s self-built hurdy-gurdy and Lars Bylund’s singing and screaming. She also created a 24-hour “sound time capsule” in the communal hall of her small high school town, inviting locals to drop in and leave sonic traces in the album, and worked with EDM producer Samuel Reitmaier and local teenagers to capture the sounds of passing EPA cars, a uniquely Swedish rural subculture. Instrumental sessions took place at Folkhemmet, a forest studio in Unnaryd, with Petter Eriksson and drummer Liam Amner (Hey Elbow, Alice Boman).

Sonically, Bränn min jord blends organic and industrial textures — distorted guitars, brass, field recordings, and unguarded vocals. Atmospheric yet physical, it shifts between light and shadow, desolation and tenderness.

By integrating local musicians, dancers, and even the ambient life of small towns into the recordings, Bränn min jord reimagines how music can reflect and reshape the landscape it comes from and bridge the gap between folk tradition and contemporary sonic art.

Though rooted in Halland, the album reaches beyond, asking how places shape us, how memory lives in the land, and how returning — even when wrenching — can be a way of fully coming home.

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Watch: ‘A Broken Weekend’ by Look, Stranger! (A Northern Story)

Posted: 9 February 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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For the second single from their forthcoming debut EP, Look, Stranger! (the new musical project of Ian J Cole and Louisa Rose) have taken the unusual step of releasing a remix of the as-yet-unreleased lead track, ‘Broken’. Longer than the single version – which in itself is six minutes in duration – it replaces the sung vocals with a spoken narrative and dialogue – source undisclosed, but it’s quintessentially northern, to the extend you half expect Sean Bean to make a cameo with a “bastards!”

Despite the underlying electro instrumentation, the end result is quite different from its predecessor, ‘The Last Thing’, and, indeed, the rest of the EP. It’s indicative of an act not tied to formula and willing to mix things up – which gets the Aural Aggravation vote!

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Harry Christelis – Preserving Fictions

Posted: 8 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Clonmell Jazz Social – 13th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

1984 has never felt more relevant. In the early chapters, Winston is shown rewriting history, in the form of news articles – something which has become a defining feature of the Trump Administration of late. The quotation ‘The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command’ has been all over social media in recent weeks. Because we live in a time when a woman in her car calmly saying ‘I’m not mad’, or a medic shielding a woman from assault, can be murdered by the state, the event filmed and broadcast from many angles, and reported as being ‘domestic terrorists’. When news reportage becomes outlandish fiction, there’s a problem of unspeakable proportion. And so it’s become the objective of the media wings of governments – those of America, if Israel, of ours here in England – to preserve fictions and mask facts for their own propagandist, gaslighting ends.

Harry Christelis – whose latest offering features Christos Stylianides (trumpet/effects), Andrea Di Biase (bass/synth) and Dave Storey (drums) – is not seeking to propagate propaganda here, but simply to explore sonic territories, with a album of ‘post-jazz, ambient and folk-inflected improv’, which ‘captures a deep collective instinct – reflective, spontaneous, and richly atmospheric…’ Christelis explains that “in the creative process — as in life — there is never true certainty, never a ‘right way.’ These are simply fictions we hold onto. This realisation inspired the title Preserving Fictions: a reminder to stay present with whatever comes, grateful for each lesson, knowing that something new may be just around the corner, waiting to turn that on its head.”

The album launches with the longest track, the nine-minute ‘Blues of the Birds’, which is, at heart, an ebb-and-flow ambient composition… but then there’s clattering percussion and waves and wisps flittering skywards, before, around the mid-point, it settles into a smooth, strolling, settled feel. Nice. And all that.

The spontaneous nature of the way this album was created is perhaps one of the reasons behind the broad spectrum of the pieces which it comprises, and it’s worth noting that Miles Davis and Talk Talk are cited as central influences, in that they become more apparent once you’re aware of this fact, which roots what is, on first hearing, a nebulous, meandering work. Not that it isn’t nebulous or meandering, or that these are bad things, but there is a solid contextual framework in which these pieces sit.

The title of ‘A Sense of Parrot’ is laced with absurdity, but the sonic actuality is a composition which drifts serenely, underpinned by a strolling bass and some nicely loose-wristed percussion, while ‘Wood Dalling’ (named after the Norfolk village in which it was

composed) has something of a post-rock feel, a sepia-tinted nostalgia augmented with gentle woodwind. The percussion-led ‘Djembe’ is fundamentally self-explanatory, and one of the album’s most explicitly jazz pieces.

‘How old are you?’ is a phrase I’ve often used to disparage people – usually in the workplace – over petty or otherwise juvenile or irritating behaviour. Christelis’ piece by the same title doesn’t convey anywhere near the same sense of frustration at human behaviour, but with bowed low notes scraping beneath ambient undulations, while chirps and chatters of wildlife are just audible in the background behind ringing guitar notes and vast reverberations.

The compositions on Preserving Fictions are sedate, and take their time in unfurling, and it’s a welcome alternative to much of the wilder, more frenetic jazz-leaning releases which have come my way of late. It’s not that I dislike them – far from it – but in stressful times, something gentler and somewhat transportive is most welcome. Preserving Fictions fits the bill nicely.

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Ashley Reaks – Nature Reversed

Posted: 29 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Ashley Reaks is an artist who has very clear creative cycles, releasing, as standard, an album a year, and sometimes two, which make the fallow periods more conspicuous. This is not one of those fallow spells: Nature Reversed arrives just four (dark, cold, wet, gusty, wintery and generally depressing) months after At Night the World Belongs to Me, released at the end of September last year. And it marks something of a shift, and even ventures into the realms of what one might consider a ‘concept album’.

Reaks describes the album as ‘a stark, hallucinatory journey through the Yorkshire Dales and the inherited wounds of a father–son lineage. Mixing messed-up jazz fragments with rural, almost medieval folk textures, the album follows a narrator who must invert his own nature to survive the authoritarian “Old King” and then claw his way back to himself through wildness, shame, desire, and the raw, cyclical violence of the natural world.’ That’s a lot to unpack. If it was the plot for a novel, it would be a twisty-turny work, rich in allusion and haunting imagery – but likely jazz-free. But to compress all of this into nine songs and forty-five minutes… Ambitious would be one word for it.

The album’s first piece, ‘I Don’t Like The Old King’ does very much explore the expansive fields of folk, but through a proggy filter, performed with synths, and underpinned by a strolling bass – somewhat reminiscent of the Bauhaus song ‘Part of the Third Part’, at least at the start – and a beat that both shuffles and swings. It’s the bass that defines ‘We Forage in the Gutters’, going full Jah Wobble in its dubbiness. But at the same time, there’s a sparseness, an introspection which is different here. The elements we’ve come to expect from Reaks are all present and correct, but Nature Reversed takes those elements to another place, and it feels like the freneticism has been turned down in favour of a more focused approach.

As with everything Reaks releases, Nature Reversed is interesting… by which I mean it’s a collage of weirdness that draws together a host of disparate elements. Just as Reaks’ artworks are crazy collages, so his music is relentlessly unpredictable. ‘The Desire to Seduce Euphoria’ is perfectly representative: it brings together some moody, melancholic postpunk, with chiming, reverby guitar… there are some processed vocals and there’s some jazz in the mix… I say ‘some’, but the mid-section is a massive blast of horns, before it careens into a heavy prog synth workout What the fuck IS this? This is no criticism: Reaks relentlessly challenges the borders, and does his own thing.

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Nature Reversed gives us all of the conventional Reaks elements – but the wild jazz is dialled back significantly. He describes it as ‘cut-up jazz, awkward Eastern folk, medieval motifs, old ghosts, and new life pushing through ancient stone walls — music about inheritance, rebellion, and what survives when you break things wide open’, and so it’s no surprise that William Burroughs features in the list of inspirations, ‘ranging from ‘nature poet’ John Clare and William Burroughs to Rip Rig + Panic, Talk Talk, PJ Harvey, Robert Wyatt and Captain Beefheart, Nature Reversed fuses literature, music, and visual art into a chaotic, lyrical, and intimate landscape. Ultimately, it’s a meditation on survival, rebellion, and renewal — the feral life that surges when you break open your origins.’

As is always the case with Reaks’ work, Nature Reversed is a huge intertext, and it would be reasonable to describe him as a classic postmodernist, celebrating and revelling in multitudinous sources, plundering his influences and inspirations openly and emphatically. This feels more restrained, more contemplative, and lyrically there’s a proliferation of images drawn from nature – but then again, there’s no shortage of sharp-edged, darker stuff, as on ‘Picking on the Meat Membranes’, and ‘Swan in a Womb’ brings together post-punk grooving bass, sprawling jazz, glittering prog synths and vocal processing – and this is point of definition for Nature Reversed, really. It’s everything, all at once, but at a sedate pace. Don’t be fooled by the gentler, more introspective sound: Reaks stull pushes experimentalism to the absolute limits, and Nature Reversed is the singular sound of creative freedom.

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Cindytalk – Sunset And Forever

Posted: 20 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 30th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Cindytalk has been going almost literally forever, at least in terms of the life cycle of bands. A brief scan of my own archives reveals that the last time I wrote of Cindytalk was way back in 2013, covering A Life is Everywhere, released on the esteemed experimental label Editions Mego. The musical vehicle of Scottish musician Cinder, with an ever-shifting supporting cast, Cindytalk has been in a constant flux and perpetual evolution since the project’s formation in the early 80s – emerging from the post-punk scene and exploring every direction since, a career defined, as they put it, ‘by a continued process of disintegration and regeneration’. This is the very essence of the avant-garde, which was built on a manifesto that said that its function was to destroy the old to build the new. And implicit within that concept is the need to destroy its own creations in order to progress. Cindytalk has very much espoused that ethos over the course of the last forty years or more, with a career defined by perpetual reinvention.

Described in the press blurbage as ‘a labyrinthine opus, one that returns to the themes of the sacred and profane that have rippled through all of Cindytalk’s recordings’, Sunset And Forever opens with the eighteen-minute exploration which could reasonably be described as a (dark) ambient work. And it is dark. Spectral voices and spirits haunt every second of this unsettling drone-led work.

‘Labyrinthine opus’ is a fair description for an album which begins with a sprawling eighteen-and-a-half-minute ambient monolith, where falling objects cascade in caverns of reverb before slowly undulating drones gradually grow and turn. At times dense, at other more nebulous, around the mid-point, the scraping trickle of ‘embers of last leaves’ turns into a darker place, and is ruptured with percussive crashes and unpredictable extranea, while haunting voiced fade in and out through the swelling churn of abstract noise. This first piece, alone, feels like an album.

With seven tracks and a running time of around sixty-mine minutes, Sunset And Forever takes it time in exploring sonic contrasts, with graceful sweeps of watercolour synth washes underlaid with scratches and hisses and harder, uneven textures, the sonic equivalent of cobblestones underneath a velvet rug – or somesuch. Put another way, the soft and gentle is rendered uncomfortable by something altogether less soft or comfortable beneath, and hidden beneath a pleasant surface, and those hidden elements are reason to tread cautiously or risk twisting an ankle. It’s almost as if each track contains two compositions overlaid, a kind of collage or a palimpsest of a gentle ambient work and an altogether less gentle noise construction.

On ‘tower of the sun’, the dissonance and angularity rises to the fore to make for a skin-crawling ten minutes, while ‘my sister the wind’ screeches and scrapes, shards of drilling treble buffeted along by a train-track rumble.

The sound – and the meaning – of Sunset And Forever is forever just beyond grasp. For as much as the sounds and textures rub against one another and create discomfort, as a whole, it’s vague, indirect, hazy. It concludes open-ended, with questions unanswered and leaves a sense of uncertainty.

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Machinefabriek – Spelonk

Posted: 12 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Crónica – 20th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

As time passes, our tastes change. For some, they narrow and become more cemented, more deeply entrenched. There’s a broad acceptance that people become more conservative as they grow older – which may explain why, with our ageing population, we – that’s the western world – has become more in favour of conservative values, such as low tax and a belief that the past was a golden age in which hard work was rewarded, and of course, music was better. There is certainly more than a grain of truth in the boomer stereotype. And as a Gen X-er, I’ve observed people I grew up with, and /or have known for many years become set in their ways and their listening habits, locked in the 90s in their musical tastes, and becoming increasingly churlish about the youth of today and the like.

I consider myself fortunate to be surrounded by friends and acquaintances, both in real life and in the virtual world, who are deeply invested in new music. The fact I get sent new music of all kinds from around the globe is only half of the story, as it would be so easy to sweep vast swathes of it aside to listen to, and review, nothing but goth, contemporary iterations of post-punk and new wave, grunge, and reissues. In fact, I could devote my entire listening time and run a website dedicated to nothing but reissues and still be incredibly busy. It would probably garner a huge readership, too. But no: I am constantly encouraged to listen to new music, and the fact of the matter is that I thrive on it, and never fail to get a buzz from new discoveries. As such, since I began this journey as a music writer, my horizons have broadened beyond a range I would have ever imagined.

A measure of this is that my first encounter with the music of Rutger Zuydervelt, back in 2014, was marked by a most unimpressed four-star review, in which I said that Stay Tuned was ‘a bit of a drag’. While I don’t feel particularly inspired to revisit it now alongside my writing of this review, I feel I would likely have been more receptive to its longform minimalism now.

Spelonk is not quite as long in form – three compositions spanning a total of forty-two minutes, and sees Zuydervelt taking some time out from his dayjob to indulge in the act of creating for pleasure – or, perhaps, more accurately, creating out of the need to experience freedom, to feel that metaphorical – and perhaps literal – sigh of release.

As he explains, ‘Most of the music I make nowadays is commissioned for film, dance, or other projects. And I love it — it’s the best job in the world! — but sometimes I have to pull myself away from it, and make something purely for myself. My 2004 release Omval was one of these works, as is now Spelonk. These projects are always made in short bursts; once I start creating, things fall into place quickly, as if the ideas were (unknowingly) already there and just needed to get out of my system.

The three tracks that comprise Spelonk (simply titled I, II, III) are built with “hardware jams” that I recorded with my live setup. It’s all quite hands-on, with effects pedals, an oscillator, and electronic gadgets. The magic happens when combining different recordings, layering them, and hearing what happens. Listening is always a favorite moment in the process, with a welcome element of surprise. I guess it’s all about creating alien landscapes — alien also to me too — that are exciting to explore.’

‘Alien landscapes’ is a fair description of these sparse works, constructed with layers of ominous drone. On ‘Spelonk II’, there are chittering sounds which scratch like guitar string scraping against a fret, or perhaps a ragged bow dragging against a worn string, but by the same token, untranslatable voices come to mind. The drones are eerie, ethereal, and hang low like mist or dry ice: it’s not nor merely an example of dark ambient work – there is very much a 70s sci-fi feel to it, hints of BBC Radiophonic Workshop emerge between every surge and crackle as slow pulsations reverberate among the unsettling abstraction. Over the course of the track’s eighteen minutes, there is movement, evolution, and just past the midpoint, there is a shift, where trilling organ-like notes and digital bleeps emerge, evoking recordings from space travel, and, as rippling laser sounds begin to burst forth, vintage sci-fi movies and 70s TV.

There are moments of near silence as ‘Spelonk II’ drifts into ‘Spelonk III’, also eighteen minutes in duration. Here, clanks and bleeps bubble and bounce and echo erratically, unpredictably, over a backdrop of low hums and reverberations. The low-end vibrates subtly but perceptibly, and while the experience is not one which instils tension, the cave-like digital drips and sense of space, as well as darkness, is not relaxing. You find yourself looking around, wondering what’s around the corner, what’s in the shadows. And while there’s no grand reveal, no jump fright here, the second half of ‘Spelonk III’ grows increasingly murky and increasingly squelchy and unsettling.

Over the album’s duration, Spelonk grows in depth and darkness, becoming increasingly dark, strange, and unsettling. Rutger Zuydervelt makes a lot out of very little, to subtle but strong effect.

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Bell Barrow – Saltire

Posted: 7 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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16th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

2026 is certainly off to an interesting start: did anyone seriously have what looks quite feasibly the first move in World War 3 on their bingo card? Consequently, the level of noise has simply exploded. There is shock. There isn’t much awe, but there is bewilderment, there is panic, and infinite speculation. And infinite noise.

Thankfully, 2026 is already offering up some interesting noise on the musical front, and for my money, the most effective way to tune out all that other noise is by turning off the TV, putting the phone down – or better still, switch it off and leave it in another room – light some candles, pour a drink and listen – properly listen, and engage, with some new music.

Saltire may not be the most soothing soundtrack to push aside all of the external turbulence, an obvious balm to calm a psychological spasm. In fact, it’s pretty grim at times, a big blanket of darkness which drifts and envelops, riven with top-end trilling whistles and a host of wide-ranging elements, both sonic and stylistic, which clash hard. But relaxation isn’t necessarily what the Dr ordered. Sometimes, the best remedy is one that shocks the system to the extent that all the other shit is displaced.

The band say of the album, “Through a time-based, panoramic view of past, present and future, the album’s composition is a dissection of familial cyclical patterns of violence, abuse and addiction, and whether supernatural events or one’s own choices impact fate. Each track is a voice spanning multiple dimensions and time frames of reference. Is our eventual destruction predetermined and independent of will? Or can we control the course of events through determined pleas at salvation?”

Right now, it doesn’t seem that many of us have any control over anything, particularly global affairs, and while some aspects of history do seem to be repeating themselves, this moment in time feels like a huge rupture in the flow of modern history. And all we can do is watch as things unravel, and at pace. It’s terrifying, and anyone who isn’t scared is deluded or simply burying their heads in the sand. But taking time out to bury my head in the sand for the duration of an album is necessary. And clocking in at over seventy minutes, this is a decent slab of time to pursue this objective.

From the outset, Bell Barrow’s Saltire brings some uncomfortable noise. ‘Death Lullabye’ is dark, droney, unsettling and uneasy. In contrast, the frenetic noise rock explosion of ‘Breath of an Acrobat’ sits in the field of the wild angular noise of, say, Daughters, while at the same time introducing a frenzied jazz element, and propelled by black metal drumming, but with the treble cranked to the max. ‘Cor Orans’, too, is a frantic blast of lo-fi gothy metal. This is tempestuous stuff, and with the treble up in the mix, the sound slices the top off your head, while at the same time slamming you in the gut repeatedly with a lump of wood.

Wide-ranging would be one way of describing this expansive exploration, which ranges from drone and ambient to New Age, from prog to post-metal.

The seven-minute ‘Beyond the Labyrinth’ is quintessential weird darkness, warping, droning, while the nine-minute behemoth that is ‘Sybian Interval’ builds dense, billowing clouds of dark noise, rumbling, swirling, heavy, oppressive, but rent through with screams of treble and whines like a dentist’s drill, which are counterbalanced by soft, vaporous watercolour sweeps. ‘We Reek of Utopia’ arrives in a muffled package of irony before the squalling assault of the title track applies scissors to the brain in a wild explosion of jazz-metal discord served with a heavy helping of ‘what the actual?’ And this is good. This is healthy. Music should challenge. Art should challenge. Saltire challenges on many levels: there are no songs to speak of, and the pieces veer wildly in stylistic terms. ‘A Carrion Call Rings Out’ plunges into heavy industrial noise, and it hurts.

They do threaten ‘an obvious tension and release feel to the style’, and they deliver on that, although the tension is significantly greater than the release, proportionally speaking. Saltire offers no pause for reflection, no sigh of relief, no time to simply sit back and reflect: it swings between atmospheric states most unexpectedly, most dramatically. It’s hard work, but at the same time elevatitive and revelatory.

By no means an easy album, Saltire offers angularity – and some significant reward.

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Bell Barrow - Saltire - Cover Art

R. Schappert – Hellherz

Posted: 4 January 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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r-ecords – 19th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

A crackle of static washes in and obfuscates the murky bass and beats which begin to emerge. It’s a strange experience, like listening to a tune while under water. Over time, this shifts: hypnotic beats with clicking, cracking snares and low, thwocking bass drum sounds cut through the curtain of hiss which hangs like heavy rain. And so it is that ‘Waiting for nothing’, the first of the three compositions on R. Schappert’s Hellherz EP. It’s an intriguing piece, layered and unpredictable and multi-faceted.

In context of his bio, which informs us that ‘Roland Schappert pursues border crossings in the form of an “organic digitality” oscillating between melos, sound and rhythm’.

The EP’s accompanying notes are somewhat winding, kind of cryptic: ‘Where do we put all the words that held us captive? We put them in a bottle post and send them out into the open sea. Back on land, there is fluttering in the space of spaces. Corners and edges crumble away in tumultuous layers. Let us take the time that the melos urges us to take, let us entrust him with our voice.

Sensually coded sequences of notes disrupt the free flow of our thoughts. Cranes hop and counter common notions of progress. Hopping instead of marching. Jumping instead of stomping. Up into the sky. From 3/4 to 4/4 time and back again. With hissing and quiet humming. Do we like it better up here? Where do we come from, where are we flying to for the winter? No more getting lost: Wrap your words. Our hearts are light.’

It appears that much of this is cultivated around the EP’s centrepiece, ‘Wrap your words’, the credits for which draw my attention in a way which imbues me with a certain unease:

Lyrics by R. Schappert

Vocals: revised AI voice

AI’s ubiquity is cause for concern in itself, and the reasons for this are a thesis in themselves. But specifically, given the way AI trains itself, voluntarily feeding it words to recycle and regurgitate feels like an abandonment of artistic ownership. When William Burrroughs cut up existing texts in order to form new ones, he questioned the notion that anyone ‘owned’ words, contending that the act of writing was simply the selection and manipulation of words in differing sequences. But this is not the same challenge of ownership and methods of creativity, because the application of AI serves to remove the artist from the process, partially or even wholly. Moreover, while AI is being used for military and medical purposes (and fears over where that may lead again are another thesis worth of debate at least), in the day-to-day, AI for the everyman seems to be about creative applications. Personally, I would rather AI did my admin and cleaned the oven in order to give me more time for creative pursuits. The idea that an artist would delegate any part of their creative work to AI is something which I find truly bewildering. Yes, there are skills we may lack, but the joy of art, in any medium – is learning those skills, or collaborating with other creatives to fill those skills gaps. There are real people with real skills, and working with them and learning from them is how we grow as artists.

So, AI voice? Why? Why not find a vocalist? Why not even apply autotune to a real vocal if that’s the desired effect? The warbling, autotuned-sounding digital vocalisations sound pretty naff, if truth be told, and add little to a tune which clops and thuds along with some retro synth sounds hovering vaguely around a beat which stutters along in soft focus. But as I listen, the whole AI vocal thing gnaws at me: has AI been utilised, uncredited, to the instrumentation too? What can we trust, what can we believe now?

The title track draws the EP to a close, with some brooding, quavering organ sounds and glitchy beats and more static, returning things full-circle before an abrupt end. It’s atmospheric, and a shade unsettling, too.

It may be brief, but there are many layers to this. As a whole, Hellherz provides much to ponder.

AA

(Click image to link to audio)

r-ecords 06 art

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