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Abul Mogard, “Quiet Pieces” (Soft Echoes, 2025)

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This latest album from Guido Zen’s Abul Mogard alter ego marks both the debut of his Soft Echoes label and an interesting detour from his usual working methods, as he reworked unreleased material from past projects and texturally enhanced it with sounds from his late uncle’s collection of classical 78s.

As far as I can tell, little of the actual music from those dusty shellac platters made it onto the album, but Mogard certainly worked wonders from that rich palette of hiss and crackle. The opening “Following a dream” is an especially strong example of that alchemy, as the dreamy melancholia of the central synth motif is quite lovely, but it is the cyclically crashing, slow-motion waves of static that provide both the rhythm and sense of raw elemental intensity.

The closing “Like a bird” achieves a similarly elemental feat, as its magic lies primarily in the way the way moody, groaning undercurrent steadily intensifies beneath the hazy minimalist sadness of its simple synth drones.The overall effect feels akin to experiencing a lonely dark red sunrise on a desolate moon that steadily intensifies until everything is consumed and obliterated by the inexorable expansion of that burning star’s death spasm. 

In between the immensity of those bookends, there are a couple fine examples of more traditional Mogard fare, as well as a more menacing and aquatic-sounding outlier. The latter is “Constantly slipping away,” which weaves together a dragging throb and a steadily intensifying roar of noise to evoke the glacial approach of a massive submarine creeping through the impenetrable darkness of the ocean floor. Elsewhere, “In a studded procession” feels like a subtly spacy elegy for a lost civilization that leaves a howling and snarling wake of blackened wreckage in its wake, while “Through whispers” initially resembles a shimmering celestial fog concealing a slow-motion orchestra before it intensifies into an engulfing roar.

The best moments of the album, such as “Following a dream,” achieve a dreamlike, hypnotic beauty akin to that of grayscale time-lapse footage of blooming flowers. That said, it admittedly took longer than usual for the full majesty of Quiet Pieces to hit me, as the de-emphasis on melody means that these songs do not reveal their full character through casual listening. That belatedly strikes me as an amusing bit of irony, as the only way to truly appreciate the textural richness and visceral intensity of these “quiet pieces” is to experience them at extreme volume or via headphones. Thankfully, I realized that eventually and now view this album as one of the stronger releases in Mogard’s discography, as almost every piece ultimately attains a wonderfully immersively slow-burning immensity from just a hyperminimal palette of bleary synth drones and surface noise from 78s. 

Listen here.

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My Cat Is An Alien/Talweg “The Secret of the Space Bubble / > Eternal Beyond > IV” (Opax/Elliptical Noise/Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers!, 2025)

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This latest opus from the Opalio brothers is a pair of single-sided art LPs devoted to two very different performances featuring the duo’s longtime collaborator Joëlle Vinciarelli (Talweg/La Morte Young). In classic Opalio fashion, The Secret of the Space Bubble was inspired by a vision that Roberto had of four astronauts performing in zero gravity. 

The lucky fourth astronaut in this case is Talweg’s other half (Eric Lombaert) and the combination of his virtuosic freeform drumming with Vinciarelli’s strangled flugelhorn partially steers things in a more Sun Ra-esque spaced-out free jazz direction than usual. There are, however, some other unique factors in play, as the Opalios exclusively used Vinciarelli’s collection of unusual and ancient instruments rather than their usual gear. Also, it was recorded using only two ambient mics to create a “vortex of sound” where all of the sounds and their reverberations were “centrifuged/blended together” to achieve the necessary “space bubble” effect.

Even by MCIAA standards, it is quite a challenging and far out affair, as the aforementioned space jazz uneasily coexists with folk horror flutes, shimmering chimes, an inventively repurposed clock, and wordless vocals that resemble a bizarre experimental opera. At its best, it sounds like an antique clock shop has become possessed by the spirit of an alien gamelan ensemble, which is a quite mesmerizing environment to find oneself in. I especially loved the jangling and echoing metal sounds on this one. In fact, they almost make me wish that the individual sounds could be handed off to a team like Holy Tongue & Shackleton to be anchored by a heavy dub bassline, but that kind of accessibility is simply not on the alien agenda.

The ensemble of intrepid psychonauts is reduced to a trio for the fourth installment of the decade-spanning “Eternal Beyond” collaboration, which draws its inspiration from both Georges Bataille’s philosophical writings and Tibetan Buddhism. Unsurprisingly, I could not begin to tell you how those forces ultimately shaped the direction of the piece, but the three artists did pare down their instrumental palette to just an “antique upright piano soundboard,” Vinciarelli’s trumpet, and the usual expected alientronics. 

Roberto’s wordless vocals again add an otherworldly operatic element to the performance, but the rest of the piece feels like massive, rusted metal strings being engulfed in a storm of electromagnetic interference. That is merely the appetizer though, as the whole cacophony soon gets sucked into a hissing and whooshing deep space maelstrom of trippy electronic bloops and gibbering extradimensional jungle sounds wrested from Joëlle’s aggressively misused trumpet.

Needless to say, it is quite an impressively intense and unhinged piece, which makes it a very fitting companion for The Secret of the Space Bubble despite the differing lineups. Given that, this double LP would make a very difficult and indulgent entry point for the curious, but longtime fans will understand that that is simply the price of admission for a synapse-frying experience like nothing else on earth. For those out there who have been wondering how much deeper into the uncharted outer limits of psychedelia the Opalios could possibly go, however, these two albums provide quite an emphatic answer.  

Listen here.       

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emptyset, “Dissever” (Thrill Jockey, 2025)

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This latest speaker-straining salvo from the duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas was fittingly debuted at the Tate Modern to accompany “a large-scale survey of the global history of art and technology” entitled Electronic Dreams. I say “fittingly” because Dissever both feels like a uniquely visceral and violent strain of high art and some kind of massive and menacing industrial installation. 

I suppose both of those things can be said about some previous emptyset albums as well, but this one is unquestionably more aggressively minimalist and driven by machine-like repetition. Notably, the conceptual inspiration behind that move was an interest in the intertwined evolutions of “cosmic rock, minimalism and electronic music” and late-20th century advances in production technology, so the duo went appropriately analog/retro with both their gear and recording techniques. 

The results are impressively visceral and brutalist, as each piece is essentially an inventive transformation of a single pulsing note into a heaving and hulking industrial juggernaut using a primitive array of dynamic effects. In fact, much of Dissever amusingly suggests either 1) the No Wave minimalism of Glenn Branca’s early ‘80s guitar orchestra work if he’d swapped out his guitars for heavy industrial machinery and a deep passion for sound system culture, or 2) one of Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument performances if she had come from a doom/sludge metal background (or at least a building demolition one). 

My personal highlight is the title piece, as it sounds like a blown-out and overloaded sound system suddenly became sentient and decided to vengefully wipe out the entire dancefloor with an onslaught of seismic bass waves and slashing metallic textures, but nearly every single song is a throbbing and sharp-edged masterpiece of harshly grinding textures, cool tricks with overtones and oscillations, and relentless, heaving physically. This is definitely a strong contender for my absolute favorite emptyset album to date, as Purgas and Ginzburg have conjured quite an immersive display of earth-shaking elemental power from just a handful of notes (and some expertly wielded early hardware).

Listen here. 

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Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, “Khadim” (Ndagga, 2025)

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It has been almost an entire decade since this project (or any project at all, really) last surfaced from dub-techno visionary Mark Ernestus, but I can think of few other artists who have played a more significant role in shaping my taste despite that lengthy hiatus (Rhythm & Sound, Chain Reaction, Maurizio, Basic Channel, and Hard Wax all loom quite large in my life). Notably, however, Ernestus’ previous mbalax-inspired recordings with Senegalese vocalist Mbene Diatta Seck and the Jeri-Jeri ensemble did not grab me as much as his other work, as it often seemed like Jeri-Jeri would have been just as compelling without his production expertise (albeit a bit less tight, crisply produced, and bass heavy). I like those earlier releases, of course, but they felt like a sharpening of an existing aesthetic rather than a fresh revelation. That said, Ndagga Rhythm Force is allegedly an absolutely killer live act, so maybe I would have been more enthusiastic in my appreciation if I had managed to catch them. In any case, I am definitely more enthusiastic now, as Ernestus’ vision has evolved considerably since 2016 and the first half of Khadim is on another level altogether. 

The big difference is that Ernestus and his collaborators have ditched their guitars and it now seems like these pieces were collaboratively built from the ground up rather than being a mere remixed version of Jeri-Jeri. While I have no idea if that is what actually happened, these new pieces have been distilled to an aggressively minimal palette of only vibrantly rolling & clattering sabar drum rhythms, Mbene Diatta Seck’s soulful and dubbed-up devotional vocals, and subtle, well-placed electronic enhancements from Ernestus. The most perfectly distilled and executed example of this new vision is “Dieuw Bakhul,” as Seck’s ghostly vocals share “a Wolof tale of treachery” over a lurching rhythm gorgeously enhanced by Ernestus’ frayed and stormy dub-techno chords. 

Elsewhere, the opening “Lamp Fall” is a more subtle stunner, as a rolling, off-kilter groove is unpredictably shaken by a series of deep bass depth charges while a quietly burbling synth motif works its way deeper and deeper into the drum rhythm. The rest of the EP is rounded out by the reggae-inspired title piece and the moody closer “Nimrat,” both of which feature the same great drumming and hazy reverb-trailed vocals as the other two pieces. Consequently, the only real caveat with Khadim is that the vamp-like nature of these pieces and the constrained sound palette give all four songs the feel of being variations on a single theme. I would not change a thing though, as the hyper-minimal nature of these pieces creates a vacuum that ensures that every single chord or dub effect is deeply felt and has plenty of room to breathe. 

Listen here.  

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loscil, “Lake Fire”

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Scott Morgan has been quietly and steadily releasing beautifully crafted and fog-veiled grayscale ambient-dub excursions for over a quarter century now so I was not expecting a huge creative leap forward this deep into the game, but Lake Fire may very well be the strongest loscil album of his career. Morgan’s breakthrough doesn’t sound like it came easily though, as this album was assembled from the reworked ruins of an aborted suite for electronics and ensemble (though one brooding and blackened piece from that suite (“Ash Clouds”) did manage to survive the culling). Notably, literal ash clouds were quite a significant inspiration this time around, as Lake Fire is something of an impressionistic road trip diary from a drive through the mountains of British Columbia while sky-blackening wildfires raged in the distance. In fact, the album cover is an actual photo of those smoke-obscured mountains that Morgan himself took from a rowboat on a lake.

Obviously, veiled & water-adjacent melancholy is nothing new for Morgan, but he brings a fresh intensity and an ingenious new approach to rhythm to his usual vision on pieces like the brilliant opener “Arrhythmia.” The insistent pulse of skipping loops suggests a malfunctioning amusement park wave machine that is furiously churning out waves of killer dub-techno fragments while its overworked pressure valves rhythmically vent bursts of steam. In fact, one of my favorite facets of this album is how masterfully Morgan creates rhythms with an unconventional palette of hisses, throbs, and subtle metallic textures rather than anything resembling a kick drum or cymbals.

The following “Bell Flame” works similar magic with skipping loops of ambient shimmer anchored by an insistently repeating bass motif, evoking a lonely early morning drive along a dramatic cliffside as the sunrise burns slowly away the last vestiges of morning mist. The album’s finest moment, however, is “Flutter,” which gorgeously combines a deep, dubby bass motif with blearily streaking, warped, and choppy chords. While the album admittedly ends with a bit of a lull (the final two ambient pieces), damn near everything before that point is pure (and almost impossibly wonderful) headphone bliss, as Morgan is truly without peer in weaving together vivid and richly detailed layers of alternately hissing, jangling, heaving, churning, billowing, and machine-like textures.        

Listen here.

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Olga Anna Markowska, “ISKRA” (Miasmah, 2025)

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This release is correctly billed as the debut solo album from this Polish composer & multi-instrumentalist, but Markowska previously surfaced back in 2024 with a similarly fine EP (Thrills) and has recorded music for various art installations and soundtracks over the years. Given that this is a Miasmah release, the prevailing mood is often a bit of a dark and wintry one, but Markowska’s vision is otherwise quite distinct from most of her labelmates. While the main thread here can be roughly classified as “haunted Eastern European folk music,” Markowska’s darker “early music” inspirations are nicely balanced by ambient warmth, avant-garde techniques, and admirably exacting attention to the more subtle pleasures of texture and sound design. 

The piece that first drew me to this album is admittedly a bit of an outlier, as “Train ride home” is a gorgeously rippling (if somber) zither reverie over a sensuous and increasingly prominent backdrop of bowed string drones. My favorite bit is the way the chiming notes of the central zither melody leave behind a lingering haze of ghostly harmonies, which is a cool trick that surfaces throughout the album in varying forms. Amusingly, part of me thinks “Train ride home” overstays its welcome a bit in devoting 7+ minutes to a single theme, but another part of me thinks that the sharpness of the zither attack, the subtle variations in the melody, and the glacially shifting harmonies of the lingering afterimages would be a killer start to a much longer durational piece.

Elsewhere, the following “Borderland” is the strongest of the more ambient pieces, as a looping, reverb-soaked piano melody unfolds over a beautifully shifting bed of languorous strings and an elusively pitched drone that sounds like a distressed and disintegrating tape loop about to give up the ghost. On the cheerier end of the spectrum, “Helix” is a wistful and lovely zither meditation bathed in warm ambiance, but most of the other highlights have a more elegiac vibe or one of corroded, hiss-soaked uneasiness. Apparently, these pieces span five years of recordings (2017-2022), which is a surprise given how beautifully they would function as a powerful and focused soundtrack for something like James Marsh’s macabre yet achingly beautiful and poetic Wisconsin Death Trip or one of Bill Morrison’s mesmerizing decomposed film fantasias. 

Listen here.

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Maria Somerville, “Luster” (4AD, 2025)

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It took six years, but Maria Somerville is finally back with another album, her first for the iconic 4AD. That is certainly a fitting home for Somerville, as Luster’s best moments favorably recall the label’s Ivo Watts-Russell golden age. In fact, the album description specifically (and aptly) invokes the lush romanticism of Ivo’s own shapeshifting This Mortal Coil project as a key reference point, but the resemblance is not exactly a stylistic one. Instead, Luster feels more like the kind of album that would have resulted if Julee Cruise had been backed by a revolving cast of ringers from classic 4AD acts like Cocteau Twins. I suppose Somerville’s greatest song (2019’s “Dreaming”) already evoked 4AD luminaries Tarnation quite beautifully, but Luster is considerably more “dreampop” in focus than its illustrious predecessor All My People.

While I do appreciate the many cool influences on display that one would rightfully expect from an artist with a long-running NTS show, Somerville’s greater allure lies in her knack for crafting absolutely gorgeous singles and Luster features quite an impressive run of them. For me, the heart of the album is the one-two punch of “Projections” and “Garden.”  Notably, the two pieces are quite similar in a complementary way: the former beautifully marries sensuously breathy vocals with a slow-motion guitar chug and a killer chorus hook, while the latter ascends to dreampop heaven with a more muscular, bass-driven groove and a beautifully understated maelstrom of swooning shoegaze guitar magic. There are also a couple of more eccentric pop detours lurking deeper into the album. My favorite is “Violet,” which masterfully combines a bouncy, static-gnawed drum machine groove with somnambulant yet spatially dynamic vocals and a killer unexpected crescendo of sculpted feedback snarl. Elsewhere, “Spring” weaves jangling and shuffling pop magic with woozy, billowing ambient shimmer and an autotuned final stretch that nods to the artier side of contemporary R&B. While hazy guitars, soft-focus synths, and reverb-swathed vocals admittedly often lead to diminishing returns for me in an album-sized dose, Luster happily features enough well-placed sharp textures and stylistic curveballs to mostly elude that trap and come across like an excellent and lovingly curated mixtape instead.

Listen here.

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Cross Record, “Crush Me” (Ba Da Bing, 2025)

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This latest release from Emily Cross’s long-running solo project is an absolute stunner that beautifully marries the intensity of prime Nina Nastasia with art-damaged slowcore melancholy and further ices that wonderful cake with viscerally wild eruptions of experimentalism. Fittingly, the album’s backstory is similarly colorful and compelling, as Cross has been working as a death doula in Dorset, England (her usual collaborator/Loma bandmate Dan Duszynski remains back in Texas) and a label interested in the album’s demos encouraged her to “push her imagination to the limits.”  

Cross gamely embraced that challenge and summoned an international cast of musicians for a two-week recording session in Germany. Unfortunately, the label’s enthusiasm unexpectedly dissipated and Cross was left with an uncharacteristically expensive album, disappearing collaborators, a mountain of isolated recordings, and no label, but the passions of Marcin Sulewski, Seth Manchester, and Ba Da Bing’s Ben Goldberg eventually helped shape that would-be disaster into a finished masterpiece. In fact, the transformation of these songs amusingly reminds me of the moment in The Wizard of Oz in which an already great black and white film suddenly blossomed into gloriously vivid technicolor.    

The result is a hauntingly beautiful and poetic album that feels like it is in a permanent state of collapse, as Cross’s hushed and intimate songs often sound like they are happening while The Rapture unfolds, burning planes fall from the sky, and the earth rips itself open. To my ears, the album’s glorious centerpiece is “Dorset Area of Natural Beauty,” which deceptively opens with a church organ improvisation mingled with raucous laughter before blossoming into one of the most achingly gorgeous and dreamlike songs that I have ever heard in my life. The rest of the album seesaws back and forth between melodic would-be hits like “Charred Grass” and weirdo experimentation like “Right Thing By Me,” but the unifying thread that holds everything together is an unwavering knack for brilliant arrangements, as Crush Me is an absolute feast of snarling strings, strangled feedback, collapsing beats, lush chords, unusual harmonies, and volcanic crescendos of blackened, gnarly distortion.  

Listen here.    

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Rrose x Polygonia, “Dermatology” (Eaux, 2024)

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This collaboration between Seth Horvitz’s Rrose alter ego & the Munich-based Lindsey Wang is a marriage made in heaven, as Wang’s dancefloor-driven beat mastery brings a sensuous physicality to Rrose’s lysergic forays into psychoacoustic phenomena. While I am quite fond of the opening “Ellipses,” it is almost instantly eclipsed by the three-song run of sleekly futuristic mindbombs that begins with “Stretcher,” which has the feel of an out-of-control train barreling through a series of violent electromagnetic squalls. 

There is plenty to love in the details as well, such as the endlessly morphing and lurching machine rhythm, the viscerally sharp cymbals, and the flanging acid-inspired bass patterns. Later, “Haima” revisits similar terrain with equally brilliant results, as it deceptively opens with a groove that sounds like the foundation for a brilliant Carter Tutti Void track, but intensifying waves of distortion suck it through a dimensional portal around the halfway point to transform it into an unstoppably heaving, throbbing, and burrowing juggernaut of sci-fi-damaged psychotropic brilliance. I especially loved how the disjointed panning percussion of the piece’s first half suddenly seemed amazing once a missing layer was dropped into place that made everything instantly feel like an integral part of a coherent whole. 

Elsewhere, the equally stellar “Inhaler” takes things in a more hypnotically droning direction, as a buzzing, shapeshifting, and rather viscous-sounding bass throb is propelled forward by an increasingly vibrant and complex rhythm through wave after wave of cool dubbed-out percussion flourishes and noise squalls. I believe I can safely say that Dermatology is my favorite release in either artists’ discography by a wide margin, as both are so obviously at the peak of their powers here that this album almost feels like it must have been sent been beamed back from a technologically and artistically advanced future that had distilled techno into mesmerizing, precision-engineered mindfucks completely purged of any unnecessary artifice or lulls in momentum.

Listen here.            

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Eliana Glass, “E” (Shelter Press, 2025)

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On its face, this smoldering debut from NYC-based jazz chanteuse Eliana Glass seems like quite an inspired outlier for the historically avant garde-minded Shelter Press, as the smoky, sensuous minimalism of these depressive torch songs resembles absolutely nothing else previously released on the label. I certainly cannot fault their instincts, however, as the allure of E is immediately obvious from the first notes. To my ears, these darkly beautiful piano and voice performances evoke the chills-down-my-spine intensity of the late, great Patty Waters (minus the more harrowing and extreme bits), but Glass’s vision was more explicitly inspired by Carla Bley, Annette Peacock, and Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (all of whom are covered here).

There are also some unexpectedly leftfield details revealed in the album’s description, such as a fondness for vintage analog effects, subtly hallucinatory contributions from her brother (sound artist brother Costa Colachis Glass), a piece inspired by conceptual artist Agnes Denes, and the involvement of Francis Harris (one half of deep house duo Frank & Tony). Notably, the Agnes Denes piece (“Human Dust”) is one of the album’s two stone-cold masterpieces, as Glass’s languorous reading of a matter-of-fact post-mortem accounting of an artist’s life is a powerfully haunting and darkly funny meditation on mortality (“achieved 1/10,000 of his dreams,” “was misunderstand 3800 times when it mattered,” “was loved by 17 people including his parents,” etc.). Notably, the album’s other stunner is one of Glass’s own songs (“Good Friends Call Me E”) and it is an absolute supernova, as she soulfully tosses off one perfect line after another (“I get over you like the last one”) over a gorgeously simmering and swinging backdrop from drummer Mike Gebhart and bassist Mike Rinne. The remainder of the album is compelling as well, unsurprisingly, but “Good Friends Call Me E” is the sort of piece that makes me want to run out into the streets to tackle random pedestrians and demand to know why they are not listening to it right now. 

Listen here.

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