The Hollow Chord

Where shadows echo in song and silence becomes sacred.

[thehollowchord]

Lebanon Hanover — Asylum Lullabies

Lebanon Hanover have always operated on their own terms, and Asylum Lullabies makes no concessions to accessibility. The album opens with "Pagan Ways" — abrasive, sparse, a warning to the unprepared. From there, the duo deposits eight tracks of baffling variety before disappearing back to whatever dimensional plane they inhabit.

"Sleep" arrives with an infectious beat and hypnotic synths, Larissa Iceglass murmuring "let's go back to bed" on the edge of slumber. "Frosty Life" belongs to William Maybelline, his deep sonorous dirge trickling slowly like melting ice in a grim deep winter. "Waiting List" cuts angular and uptempo — Iceglass reflecting grimly on needing therapy while still on the waiting list, over an electro beat that ends too fast.

"My Love" is the one that will follow you home — a phenomenally catchy dark 80s pop ballad, the kind Lebanon Hanover seem to write by accident. Asylum Lullabies closes in "Parrots," a crazed obsessive outburst that bookends "Pagan Ways" perfectly.

Released July 9, 2025 via Fabrika Records. Outstanding.

[thehollowchord]

Fields Ohio — A Ghostly Band of Doubts

Fields Ohio move through decades the way a restless traveler moves through time zones — lingering just long enough to absorb the local atmosphere before slipping forward again. Their new album A Ghostly Band of Doubts is a kind of archive of the recent past, assembled with the care of someone who believes nothing worth loving should be allowed to disappear.

The opening tracks arrive in ukulele and what the duo calls an "Enigma beat" — a cycle that pulls the older listener back to 1990 while remaining fully aware it is 2026. "Half Gods" shifts from classic hip-hop to something heavier, then dissolves into 90s trance. "One Who Looked Up At the Sky" layers trip-hop, faux disco orchestration, and drum 'n' bass into a single track without any of it feeling forced.

A Ghostly Band of Doubts by Fields Ohio

The title cut fills with evaporated voices — restless ghosts, the past always present. The album's titles carry a gentle melancholy, the feeling of discarded dreams and imagined futures. The closer "Sun Was Out and the Trees Were Like Great Bonfires Against Grey Distant Fields" gallops out like a victorious Western gunslinger, unafraid and already gone.

A Ghostly Band of Doubts is out now on Bandcamp.

[thehollowchord]

Iranian Voices: Music as Valve, Music as Resistance

Three Iranian musicians, scattered across Vienna, Prague, and the diaspora, speak about what it means to make experimental music when the country you carry inside you is under siege. The feature, published by A Closer Listen, gathers Mona Matbou Riahi, Pouya Pour-Amin, and Arash Ghasemi — each working at the intersection of improvisation, electronics, and a cultural inheritance that refuses to stay quiet.

Matbou Riahi, a clarinetist who trained in Tehran and Vienna, describes music as “a valve to liberation.” Her work with ECM Records and producer Manfred Eicher has shaped a practice built on fluidity — no genres, only motion. Pour-Amin, now based in Norway through a Safemuse residency, speaks of the freedom that distance allows: his recent work directly confronts Islamic theocracy in ways that would have been impossible inside Iran. Ghasemi, whose solo album Ahvaz (2025) maps memory and landscape through electric guitar, describes his tracks as “sonar notes — signals perceived from near and far.”

All three carry the weight of a country experiencing what Pour-Amin calls “one of the deepest periods of disappointment and desperation in recent history.” The music they make holds that weight without collapsing under it.

Ahvaz by Arash Ghasemi

Prison Episodes by Pouya Pour-Amin

[thehollowchord]

Haiku Salut & Meg Morley — The Lost Score: New Music for a Vanished World

A silent film from 1930 gets a new voice, and the voice it gets is stranger and more honest than the one it was born with. The Lost Score pairs Haiku Salut — the Swedish trio known for their percussive intricacy — with Melbourne jazz pianist Meg Morley, writing fresh accompaniment for “People on Sunday,” a German film whose original classical score could never have known what was coming.

The film itself is a puzzle: ordinary people filling leisure hours, boating, flirting, smoking. Viewed now, that carefree surface carries the weight of everything that followed. Haiku Salut and Morley hear that weight and write it in.

“What About Tomorrow?” opens with synth that already feels like a question the 1930 score never thought to ask. Morley turns tender mid-piece, as if offering an elegy for the women on screen. “Needle Drop” is the trio at their sharpest — percussion interlocking, Morley’s keys pushing the whole thing forward. “Toxic” arrives like a confession, the mid-section drums pausing and restarting, the tension building through silence as much as sound.

The Lost Score by Haiku Salut & Meg Morley

“You Made Sunday” closes the album in a cavalcade of brass, the widest emotional moment in a record full of them. The original score occupied a narrow range. This one refuses that constraint.

[thehollowchord]

Hey Elbow – FLOCK: Everything Is Still Blue

The cover is blue. The Bandcamp page is blue. The vinyl is blue. The sound is blue. Swedish trio Hey Elbow released FLOCK at the spring equinox, and it arrives as a 40-minute suite — one continuous piece, meant to be played whole, the way weather moves through a place.

The album opens as a lumbering, slow-swinging thing, halfway between modern composition and drone, the baseline for what becomes a rollercoaster. Percussion enters around the ten-minute mark and transforms the march into something tribal, something that shifts the project into rock. Onomatopoeic vocals follow, the singer's voice either leading the music or melding into it — the uncertainty is the point. Hey Elbow pulls any individual thread and finds only more threads.

Big brass sends the music skyward at the halfway point. The midsection reduces to taps and breaths, a peaceful pause before the second side opens into a new drone, more soothing than the first. Julia Ringdahl sings of growing leaves and awakening around the 26-minute mark, channeling something close to This Mortal Coil. Then the singer steps out, brass gives way to drums, and a synth melody conjures a maypole. A jumble of closing vocals — low choir and looped female voice — completes the suite.

The album was recorded with improvisors invited to add unpredictable textures after the initial sessions. The idea of the music as "porous" means this version exists only here, in these grooves. Hey Elbow is more interested in where the music takes them than where they take the music.

FLOCK by Hey Elbow

[thehollowchord]

Nene H – Second Skin: The Body Reclaimed

The cover says everything before a single track loads. Nene H stands with her back to the camera, turned away from whatever came before — a posture of departure, of having already moved on. Second Skin is a breakup album that refuses the usual grief spiral. It arrives as something harder and more interesting: a document of becoming.

The album pulses with industrial weight, most viscerally on "Cradle," the lead single that opens like a Nitzer Ebb transmission — drums hammering, vocals fragmenting into syllables before expanding into full phrases. It is the kind of track that owns a club floor at 2am, and Nene H knows it. "Promises, promises" follows with an angular swerve, restless and inebriated in its momentum.

The arc across the full album moves from the advancing drone of "Where was I" — voice looped into curtains of sound, dissolving into near-silence — through the techno-industrial assault of "Back to Beste" and the tribal percussion of "Deliverance." By the time "The Castle" closes things out, the artist has grown into something self-contained. The machine does not wind down. It stays on its feet.

Nene H keeps her voice at the edges throughout, a reminder of the human embedded inside the industrial architecture. In the rubble of a relationship, the cold becomes a resource. Second Skin is the natural skin — the real one, finally exposed.

Second Skin by Nene H

[thehollowchord]

Neurosis Return from the Dark: An Undying Love for a Burning World

Ten years of silence, and then the earth cracks open. Neurosis dropped An Undying Love for a Burning World on March 20, 2026 — a surprise release, covert and sudden, the way a fault line moves. The Bay Area legends describe it plainly: "This was now or never."

The album arrives with a new voice in the fold. Aaron Turner — the force behind SUMAC and ISIS — steps in on guitar and vocals, filling a space left when co-founder Scott Kelly departed in 2019. Turner's presence feels less like a replacement and more like a convergence. Steve Von Till puts it simply: his energy matches theirs perfectly, as if he was always meant to be there. Turner calls it an honor to join a band that shaped his entire understanding of what music could carry.

Eight tracks move through the album like tectonic plates — slow, immense, inevitable. "We Are Torn Wide Open" opens with voices alone, a declaration stripped of metaphor. "First Red Rays" and "In the Waiting Hours" carry Turner's earliest contributions to the writing, fed through what drummer Jason Roeder calls the Neurosis meat grinder, where individual ideas get chewed into something collective and feral. "Last Light" closes at nearly 17 minutes, the longest exhale on record.

Recorded at Studio Litho in Seattle and mixed in three days at Antisleep Audio in Oakland, the album holds the urgency of people who understand mortality is no longer abstract. The band plays their first show in seven years at the Fire in the Mountains festival on Blackfeet Nation lands in Montana — heavy music as ceremony, as it always was.

An Undying Love For A Burning World by Neurosis

[thehollowchord]

Cracksinthereal – “Dagaz”: Ten Minutes of Controlled Collapse

New Orleans-based anonymous project Cracksinthereal opens Alef: A Velvet Shard of Broken Nights End with “Dagaz,” a ten-minute single that moves through more territory than most albums manage. The track blends noise rock, dark ambient, IDM, and Romantic-era orchestral influence — a combination that sounds unwieldy on paper and completely coherent in practice.

It opens in a buzzing, murmuring solemnity before brass enters with something like early-morning ambition. Strings build and swell, cinematic and precise. Around the seven-minute mark the whole thing shifts into a gentler folk character — glistening keys, acoustic textures, a brief exhale — before feverish rhythms and haze pull it back under. The final minutes settle into lush orchestral calm, everything resolved without being explained.

“Dagaz” is the first look at a project that clearly has a lot to say and the patience to say it slowly. Worth the full runtime.

[thehollowchord]

Peak Flow – “Repetition”: The Loop That Drains You

Doncaster siblings James and Jools Rollings make music as Peak Flow, and “Repetition” — dropped on Friday the 13th, because of course — wastes no time announcing itself. The track starts at full speed, thundering rhythms and screaming synths arriving in the chorus without warning, vocals smooth even as the lyrics map the slow erosion of a relationship stuck on repeat. The guitar grounds everything in warmth while the electronics push outward into something harder and more urgent.

The black-and-white video underscores the theme: no control, no exit, the same argument cycling back around. Peak Flow have a particular gift for the knife’s edge between darkness and a hook you can’t shake — “Repetition” lands exactly there, danceable and bleak in equal measure. The lads are building a sound that’s distinctly their own, and this single makes a strong case for where they’re headed.

[thehollowchord]

Zabus – Avoidance Moon: Consciousness Under Siege

Jeremy Moore runs Saccharine Underground out of Washington D.C., and Avoidance Moon — the seventh Zabus full-length, out February 24 — arrives at a moment when the city itself feels occupied. The album channels that pressure without becoming a document of it. Moore shifts between male, female, and non-binary lyrical voices across the record, treating identity as a site of ongoing conflict rather than a fixed position. The “Moon” in the title maps a state of consciousness, not a place.

The production leans hard into vintage equipment and its imperfections — deliberate, unhinged, immediate. Melodies veer off-axis. Song structures resist resolution. “Burst Oppression” moves with the coiled energy of someone who has already decided to act. Moore’s earlier Zabus records processed grief after his father’s death; this one processes rage at a world moving backward. The two feelings share a frequency.

Moore also runs Bell Barrow, a noise and free jazz project, and Zero Swann, a deathrock/psych-noise vehicle. Avoidance Moon draws from all of it — the gothic romanticism of Zabus, the improvisational chaos of Bell Barrow, the raw guitar violence of Zero Swann — and funnels it into something that holds together as a statement.

[thehollowchord]

Blue Depths: Dobrawa Czocher's State of Matter

There is a particular shade of blue that belongs to the sea when you first move near it — not the postcard blue of tourism, but the living, shifting blue of a life rearranged around water. Dobrawa Czocher's State of Matter (FatCat/130701, March 27) lives inside that color entirely.

The Polish cellist's second LP draws from a move to the coast, and the album's opening single "Blue" makes the geography literal: Czocher stands in a house whose walls reveal themselves to be blue, gazing out at a brightening sky that meets the sea in the final frame. She walks the shore. The blue above joins the blue below. It is an image of arrival — of a house becoming a home, of a self finding its coordinates.

"Phoenix" follows — a track Czocher describes as "a symbolic moment of rising from the ashes, a moment of standing in one's own power." The album holds two "Monologues" and a "Letter from the Soul," titles that suggest an interior correspondence, a self writing to itself across the distance of change. "Letter" carries swirling strings that read as intimations of melancholy, that other, internal blue. "Sirens" moves differently — Czocher occupying both roles simultaneously, the danger and the one drawn toward it.

The album expands her palette beyond strings alone, bringing the feel of a small orchestra to what remain intimate works. The closing "Goodbye" holds darkness without resolution, an open sea rather than a harbor. The final shade is the listener's to interpret: cerulean, midnight, sky. Where one hue ends, another begins.

State of Matter by Dobrawa Czocher

State of Matter arrives March 27 on FatCat Records / 130701.

[thehollowchord]

The Ears Have It: Big Ears 2026 Descends on Knoxville

Knoxville, Tennessee holds its breath every spring. The Big Ears festival — four days, hundreds of artists, a city given over entirely to the strange and the searching — returns March 26–29, 2026, and this year's lineup reads like a fever dream assembled by someone who has listened to everything and forgotten nothing.

John Zorn anchors the whole affair with twelve performances across two days at the Bijou Theatre. The Masada quartet, a rare duo set with Laurie Anderson, and a performance of the legendary game piece Cobra — featuring Wendy Eisenberg, John Medeski, Ikue Mori, and Ches Smith among others — make Zorn's residency alone worth the pilgrimage. All three parts of Mathieu Amalric's documentary Zorn (2023) screen alongside.

The jazz programming runs deep and wide. SML — the improvising quintet riding high on last year's How You Been — holds a three-night residency. Guitarist Gregory Uhlmann also presents his new album Extra Stars and appears in multiple configurations, including as a sideman for Perfume Genius. Roscoe Mitchell and Tyshawn Sorey share a stage. Pat Metheny and John Scofield represent the tradition; Mary Halvorson and Jeff Parker push past it.

How You Been by SML

The ambient and electronic corner glows with particular warmth. Julianna Barwick — whose loop-based vocal architecture has long been a touchstone — performs solo and in duo with harpist Mary Lattimore. The two recently released Tragic Magic together, and the prospect of hearing it live inside a festival venue feels like a gift. Pan American and Kramer, who collaborated on last year's Interior of an Edifice Under the Sea, perform both together and separately. Flying Lotus closes Saturday night with the blistering Big Mama EP, all restless energy and refusal to settle.

Interior of an Edifice Under the Sea by Pan American & Kramer

Modern composition arrives in force. Wild Up takes on Julius Eastman's hypnotic Femenine and Arthur Russell's long-unheard 24 to 24 Music. Sō Percussion and Caroline Shaw join for Ringdown. Polish pianist Hania Rani moves between her solo electronic project Chilling Bambino and a set with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. The Knoxville Jazz Orchestra performs Nels Cline's Lovers.

The experimental rock slate holds Deerhoof — gleefully unclassifiable as ever — alongside Dirty Three's violin-guitar-drums roar, and Bill Orcutt in two configurations: solo, and with his new trio Orcutt Shelley Miller, featuring Ethan Miller and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth. Thurston Moore and Shabaka Hutchings share a duo set that promises both deep listening and raw nerve.

Orcutt Shelley Miller

Welsh guitarist Gwenifer Raymond — whose "Welsh Primitive" synthesis of acoustic guitar and banjo earned a spot on A Closer Listen's Top 20 of 2025 — brings her haunting Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark to the stage. Robert Plant's Saving Grace, with vocalist Suzi Dian, arrives fully immersed in modal folk and Appalachian spirituals. Alan Sparhawk of Low joins Trampled by Turtles for a set born from decades of friendship and deepened by grief.

Big Ears has always been a festival that trusts its audience to follow the music wherever it leads. The 2026 edition makes that ask more urgently than ever — and the answer, from the looks of this lineup, is everywhere at once.

Big Ears Festival runs March 26–29, 2026 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Full schedule at bigearsfestival.org.

[thehollowchord]

Xylitol's Blumenfantasie: Jungle's Infinite Possibility, Revisited

There is a particular kind of music that arrived in the UK between 1992 and 1995 and then, in the cultural memory, got filed away under a name that did it no favors: "intelligent drum & bass." The label implied a hierarchy, a separation of the beautiful from the aggressive, the elevated from the raw. What it actually described was something far less tidy — a moment when cosmic ambition and rave energy occupied the same dancefloor, when LTJ Bukem and Dillinja and Foul Play all existed in the same ecosystem, when breakbeats chopped into hyperkinetic cubist rearrangements could carry the weight of Vangelis and Philip Glass and Ryuichi Sakamoto without anyone finding that strange.

Catherine Backhouse, recording as Xylitol, understands that moment with the clarity of someone who has spent real time inside it. Her second album, Blumenfantasie, arrives March 20 on Planet Mu, and it pays tribute to that '92–95 window with a precision that somehow avoids feeling like a museum piece. The trick, as Bandcamp Daily's Joe Muggs observes, is that Backhouse grasps two things about her inspirations: those rave records already contained whole histories of exploratory music, sampled and folded into their structures; and the sense of psychedelic possibility that cheap music tech enabled then has never been exhausted.

Blumenfantasie by Xylitol

The album opens with "Chromophoria" (featuring Sculpture), and from there it moves through the full palette of the era it loves: huge sub bass tones, endlessly sustained chords, sparkling chimes occupying the space between breakbeats. The short interludes "Tilted Arc" and "Halo" swerve into haunted ambient and a clockwork-sounding take on grime. "Mirjana" drops the tempo to sound exactly like a great jungle record played at 33 RPM — a slowed-down dream of a dream.

The album closes with "Falling," a soulful house-music-vocal-sampling track that arrives as a kind of devastation. The whole record builds toward it without announcing that it's building toward anything. That's the architecture of the best rave music: you feel the structure only after you've already been moved by it.

Backhouse's approach — using only elements that could have come from the original era — paradoxically makes the record feel less referential, more like a new expression of her own feelings and ideas. The hints of minimalist composition, of movie soundtracks, of early synth music, were already there in those '90s jungle records. She's just allowing them to become more or less explicit as tracks ebb and flow. The mechanisms of cosmic jungle, like any folk form, remain viable. Blumenfantasie is the proof.

Source: Bandcamp Daily

[thehollowchord]

Gardens of Sound: Spring's Modern Composition Bloom

Spring arrives in the music world before it arrives anywhere else. While the ground outside holds its breath, composers are already releasing the season — in ivory keys, in cello layers, in the slow unfurl of strings across a room that smells like rain. The spring 2026 modern composition slate is dense with life, and much of it carries a quiet urgency: a field full of collaboration, of tribute, of artists reaching toward each other across disciplines and distances.

Marta Sanchez wrote the first pieces for For the Space You Left in a remote cabin, deep in winter. The album's opening single, "Frost Bloom," arrived in February — perfectly timed with the snow — and the full record, out April 17 on Out of Your Head, draws the listener out of that isolation alongside the composer. The prepared piano compositions carry a crystalline weight, each note placed with the care of someone who has spent time alone with silence.

For the Space You Left by Marta Sanchez

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart last collaborated on Stewart's 2025 album When the Distance Is Blue. Their new offering, BODY SOUND (International Anthem, March 20), enhances viola, cello, and violin with tape and voice. The improvisational approach — even the color of the vinyl — pays tribute to Yoko Ono. Track titles arrive in pairs, split by a vertical bar: "dawn | pulse," "laundry | blood," "fog | mirror." The duality feels deliberate, two states held in the same breath.

BODY SOUND by Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart

Violeta Vicci and Bruno Bavota team up on Be Human (Bigo & Twigetti, May 8), a celebration of human connection and what the artists describe as their immediate alchemy. The record glows with warmth — piano and strings moving together like two people finishing each other's sentences. Also on Bigo & Twigetti, Cécile Lacharme's Dérives arrives April 29, its snowy cover concealing the shape of a large dove if you look long enough. The music is similarly graceful, active at the border between seasons.

Be Human by Violeta Vicci & Bruno Bavota

Poppy Ackroyd's Liminal (One Little Independent, June 5) tricks the ear: every sound on the record — including what the listener perceives as beats — comes from piano and violin alone. Tom Newell's video for "The Unknown" makes the dust visible, dancing in the light.

John Luther Adams's Horizon (Cold Blue Music, April 17) draws from Australian landscapes. The extended work is patient and sedate — the kind of music that asks you to wait for the sunrise, to notice the shift from yellow to orange. Two movements, each running over twenty minutes, each titled after a different kind of horizon: visible, true.

Horizon by John Luther Adams

Alarm Will Sound marks its twentieth year with Lift (March 20), a record that includes startling takes on The Shaggs and Boards of Canada alongside original compositions. The ensemble's willingness to move between the reverent and the irreverent — to treat a Boards of Canada track with the same seriousness as a new commission — says something about how they understand the continuum of music.

Lift by Alarm Will Sound and Alan Pierson

The Metropolis Ensemble, Erik Hall, and Sandbox Percussion take on Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato (Western Vinyl, April 3). Those who know Hall's solo piano version will find this ensemble reading expansive by comparison — more points of entry, more voices in the room, the same hypnotic architecture made suddenly communal.

Canto Ostinato by Metropolis Ensemble, Erik Hall, Sandbox Percussion

LEITER's Piano Day: Places compilation (March 27) gathers contributions from Felicia Atkinson, Viktor Orri Árnason, and others, each piece named for a location — a harbor, a bay, a far north. The 88th day of the year has its own music now.

Piano Day: Places by LEITER

Elsewhere: Sanaya Ardeshir (also known as electronic producer Sandunes) explores female kinship and Buddhist teachings on Hand of Thought (Karigar, March 27). Snorri Hallgrimsson's Nowhere Sessions arrives May 8 on Deutsche Grammophon, recorded in an isolated Icelandic cabin surrounded by lakes and lava. Thomas Stone's The Shunned Path adds contrabassoon and electronics to timpani, creating a mysterious allure that earns its title.

The Shunned Path by Thomas Stone

The season's selections, taken together, read like a map of human connection drawn in sound. Collaboration runs through nearly every release. Tribute runs through many more. These are records made by people who wanted to reach someone — a listener, a collaborator, a composer long gone. Spring, it turns out, is the right time for that.

Source: A Closer Listen

[thehollowchord]

Colleen — Libres antes del final: Swimming Back to the Self

The ocean blue vinyl is an invitation before the needle even drops. Libres antes del final — "Free before the end" — is Colleen's most literal album, and perhaps her most transformative. Cécile Schott, who has recorded as Colleen for over two decades, loved the beach as a child. As an adult, she developed a water phobia that kept her out of the sea for more than thirty years. Finally confronting that fear, she hired an open water teacher and learned to swim again. The album chronicles that journey.

The story is literal and metaphorical at once: the importance of a first step, the desire to leave fear behind, the plunge into the great unknown. After the first few strokes, it becomes easier; after the first few weeks, a habit; eventually the sea becomes part of the being, the being part of the sea. The tracks personify this transformation — the ebb, the flow, the peak, the trough, the dive, the stroke, the peace. Look closely at the cover: there lies the swimmer, no shore in sight.

Libres antes del final by Colleen

Opening track "Mis armas se habían caído al suelo" ("My weapons had fallen to the floor") is a declaration of vulnerability — a brief ambient piece, tender and exposed, ending in the rush of a wave. Then "Puertas de mi cuerpo" ("Gates of my body") takes that first step. The synth is active, pulsating, multi-layered, a stand-in for the sea. Warmth and embrace become apparent once the patterns grow more predictable — though like the waves, they are never fully predictable. New patterns emerge as stereo effects imitate the movement of the Mediterranean.

The high-pitched notes of "Antidoto" arrive as a surprise, quickly balanced by the lower register, like sun sparkling on waves offset by the underwater muting of sound. The swimmer is now in the water. In "Aguas abiertas" ("Open waters"), the longest track, she leaves the shore behind, heading past the breakers and out to sea. Vulnerability remains, offset by trust. The piece best recreates the swimmer's trance: a suspension of worry, a oneness with the water.

The title track is sedate at the start, excited at the end — a microcosm of Colleen's experience. She has taken the plunge many times, and while turbulence may surround her, her heart stays calm, because inside it is the sea. Pablo Neruda wrote: "I need the sea because it teaches me / I don't know if it's music or awareness." Libres antes del final answers that question: it is both.

[thehollowchord]

Rutger Zuydervelt — Bodies of Water: The Sea as Score

Water has always been the most musical of elements — and Rutger Zuydervelt, the Dutch composer who records as Machinefabriek, has spent a career proving it. His latest release, Bodies of Water (music for a performance by Iván Pérez / Dance Theatre Heidelberg), arrives alongside a companion piece, Fog / Drops, and together they form one of the most immersive water-based recordings of a year already rich with them.

The performance divides into three sections — liquid, ice, and gas — and the music follows that arc from ambience into the electronic. Natural ocean sounds filter through as both backdrop and instrument, while the dancers demonstrate incredible flow through set designs that imitate the sea. The relationship between humans and water is the investigation; the music, especially in its most turbulent stages, gets the body moving, a reminder that we are mostly water reacting to water.

Bodies of Water by Rutger Zuydervelt

The two albums reward back-to-back listening. Bodies of Water stays largely in the ambient phase for most of its runtime, shifting only when it arrives at "Gas." The organ of opening piece "Dark Waters" sounds like the prelude to a church service, invoking Genesis 1:2 — the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters. "Submerge" contains some of the set's most hydrophonic sounds, drone swallowing melody, leaving a vast and mysterious void. In "Utopian Seas," water flows and boats rock, hulls caked with barnacles and salt, every high-pitched creak a siren with hand outstretched.

"Crushing Waves" dives deeper, into the heart of the sea where sound is muffled and light is muted — reminiscent of Machinefabriek's earlier, more shrouded works, where danger lurks around every corner. Then "Gas" arrives as the album's peak: a powerful pulse emerging from a gaseous drone, moving front and center, drums entering at the three-minute mark, bass tones and synthesizer raising the water table meter by meter.

The companion Fog / Drops balances the occasion with a strong electronic pulse. Two twenty-minute pieces that didn't make the final cut appear here as a sister album. "Fog" begins with wind blowing across the sea, patient and expectant, rhythms unveiled only at 5:23. "Drops" uses piano notes to imitate droplets that accelerate and accumulate, attracting clocklike chimes before a percussive transition builds in intensity until its eventual dissolution.

Fog / Drops by Rutger Zuydervelt

Both releases are available now on Bandcamp.

[thehollowchord]

Zora Lucent — Vestige: A World That Coils and Strikes

Zora Lucent's third album arrives like a transmission from somewhere just past the edge of the known — eleven tracks in twenty-seven minutes, each one a compressed world. Vestige, due March 19 via Bandcamp, carries the Berlin-based composer and vocalist deeper into fractured industrialism, away from the alt-pop gestures of her earlier work and toward something more dangerous, more deliberate.

The album's architecture is dense and precise. "Eye of the Other (Motherbeat)" opens with an Asian melody before splintering into light through a prism — stereo separation and speaker-to-speaker travel already apparent in the pristine mastering. The tempo doubles in the final seconds before the track collapses, giving way to the first of three tiny interludes, whispered and intimate. "Come Closer," beckons one of Lucent's layered voices, while her other voices frolic and soar.

By the second interlude, the record has gone fully industrial — dark chords decorated with stuttered drums and vowels. When Lucent speaks of "coiling" in the following piece, the word lands as the perfect description for the whole album: every moment, something seems ready to strike. That coiled tension makes the sudden vulnerability of "Undressing the Spirits" all the more arresting. "How can we hold on to hope?" she asks, and the question deepens everything that came before.

"Molten Mirror" is the album's signature moment, its impact doubled by the emotional space Lucent has built around it. She confronts an unknown subject with the unavoidable "Are you hearing me? Are you seeing me?" — the military beat beneath her voice another expression of newfound power. The object of her question diminishes under the repeated shouts. A third interlude follows, offering space for reflection before the pounding "Gold, Weave Through" releases the tension in a surge of savage percussion.

The closing tracks turn inward and outward simultaneously. "New Dawn (Vestige)" reveals itself as the title track in a sedate exhale, while "Prayer Sung Backwards (Epilogue)" suggests a spiritual current running beneath the whole record. Mentor Katarina Gryvul is a clear influence, though Lucent has her own distinct and dangerous sound — one that treats the voice as both instrument and weapon, chopped and layered until it becomes something elemental.

Vestige by Zora Lucent

Vestige releases March 19, 2026. Available on Bandcamp.