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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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emptyset, “ash” (Subtext, 2023)

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It has been a while since this duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas last surfaced, but they are back with a new EP to celebrate Subtext’s 50th release. Since releasing 2019’s Blossoms, the pair have been quite busy with other projects, as Purgas’s research played a crucial role in the release of The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969​-​1972 while Ginzburg has kept himself occupied with running a record label, releasing solo albums, and performing as part of “experimental supergroup” Osmium. 

Emptyset was never fully dormant, however, and Ginzburg and Purgas convened in Bristol this summer to shape their accumulated ideas into one of their most focused and singular releases in recent memory. It is also one of their most concise, as ash clocks in at an extremely lean 16-minutes. If this were any other project, that brevity would suggest a serious dearth of fresh ideas or compelling new material, but it is exactly the right length for a perfect distillation of emptyset’s viscerally spasmodic and pummeling percussion assaults.

Much like their Manchester peers Autechre, it is very easy to forget that James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas were ever interested in making beat-driven music aimed for the dancefloor, as they long ago plunged into an avant-garde rabbit hole of abstract deconstructionism, cutting edge sound design, and self-built instruments and have not looked back since. 

I bring up that origin for a reason, as understanding that ash was inspired by Bristol’s sound system culture is crucial to grasping the appeal of the duo’s current vision. In fact, I was initially underwhelmed by these songs, as I could not understand why Ginzburg in particular would want to regress to punishing, no-frills rhythm workouts after blowing me away with the droning immensity of his 2021 solo album crystallise, a frozen eye.

Eventually, however, I got around to listening to ash on headphones and everything immediately made sense again: this is not an EP intended for casual listening. The correct way to experience ash is to crank it up so loud that you can feel every seismic crunch, vibration, and throb. Once I had that revelation, ash immediately transformed into something considerably more brilliant and unique. 

This is absolutely not the place to look for great songcraft or killer beats, but it is probably one of the best releases around for those looking for precision-engineered brutality, masterfully harnessed spatialized sound, and intense physicality. Someone should commission a forward-thinking ballet company to choreograph a mind-blowing performance for one of these songs immediately.

Musically, ash-era emptyset shares a healthy amount of common ground with classic Godflesh, as the main ingredients are overloaded bass and a fondness for bludgeoning, mechanized repetition, but it would be closer to the mark to suggest that their primary influences are “convulsions” and “the futuristic battle scenes from the Terminator movies.” 

Some pieces certainly evoke robot tanks rolling over piles of crunching bones in a scorched and broken landscape more strongly than others (“embers” being the best example), but the differences between these six songs are less important than their common ground of shuddering waves of distorted bass, lurching rhythms, and slow-motion machine gun snares. Experiencing this album is a lot like getting thwacked in the head with six different baseball bats: they would certainly all have their own unique character, but the subtle differences between them would be unavoidably eclipsed by the force of the impact.

To my ears, the best moments are probably “cinder” (I half expected viscous trails of blood to start running down my walls when the opening fog of grinding and menacing dissonance appeared) or the title piece (“a giant sentient typewriter with malicious intent” meets “the space-time continuum warps, stretches, and tears during a fireworks display”), but every one of these pieces is an absolute banger. 

That is an impressive achievement in itself, obviously, but a full album of such uninterrupted bludgeoning would be absolutely exhausting and would quickly yield diminishing returns. To their everlasting credit, however, Purgas and Ginzburg understood the limitations of their vision and were wise enough to keep most of ash‘s violent, churning convulsions under three minutes: if there was ever an album that has earned the coveted “all killer, no filler” mantle, it is this one. Every single song makes a deep impact and the whole thing is over long before any numbness starts to set in.

In a 2017 interview, Ginzburg noted that he and Purgas leave “piles and heaps of detritus on the cutting room floor” and now I understand why: ash is the sort of perfect distillation that could have only been made by absolutely ruthless editors willing to throw away months of work and several albums worth of material to just to wind up with one great 16-minute EP.

Listen here.

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James Ginzburg, “crystallise, a frozen eye” (Subtext, 2021)

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This latest solo album from emptyset’s James Ginzburg completely blindsided me, as it feels like his two of his longtime fascinations have finally converged into one gloriously crushing and intense tour de force. In characteristically cerebral fashion, Ginzburg conceived of crystallise, a frozen eye as an acoustic counterpoint to emptyset’s artificial intelligence-driven Blossoms, but what he ultimately arrived at feels considerably less conceptual than most Subtext albums. Or maybe the concept just feels completely eclipsed by the churning intensity of the music. 

In any case, this album feels like the most natural direction in the world now that it exists, as Ginzburg essentially just combined emptyset’s viscerally seismic approach to sound design with his deep interest in more traditional and earthy sounds (his previous solo album wove together strains of Gaelic folk music, Iranian traditional music, and Indian classical music). 

Yet another “obvious in hindsight” move was Ginzburg’s leftfield decision to enlist devoted bass enthusiast/past collaborator Joker for the mastering role, ensuring that all of the songs pack some seriously house-shaking low-end heft. All of those seemingly disparate threads combine seamlessly to yield a work of almost elemental force that feels like the culminating achievement of Ginzburg’s career. This has to be one of the heaviest and most unconventional drone albums of all time.

The album opens with something resembling the chiming of an old grandfather clock, which presumably indicates that it is now time to be enveloped in a churning and heaving sea of massive, buzzing strings. In that regard, “light evaporates” is a resounding triumph as a statement of intent, as it feels like miles of viscerally rattling, thick metal cables tuned to the resonant frequency of the earth are being shaken by a strong wind. That immense, buzzing behemoth is reasonably representative of the album, but Ginzburg is impressively inventive at achieving a similar effect in varied and divergent ways. 

For example, “on obsidian expanse” sounds like Glenn Branca’s “Guitar Trio” if it had been written for an ensemble of cloned Ellen Fullmans (lots of buzzing, rattling strings, and droning unison notes). Unexpectedly, it ultimately transforms into an outro that feels like a psychedelic ancient palace ritual, but most other pieces undergo minimal transformation, as there is no real reason to evolve further when a piece is an absolute monster right from the first notes. 

In fact, all eleven songs are legitimately awe-inspiring to some degree and some feel downright revelatory. The most adventurous one is probably “the eyes behind,” which sounds like an orchestra trying to tune crystal instruments while broken glass rains down in slow motion and someone strangles a saxophone. However, the vaguely New Age-y “a gate left open disappeared” is an especially strange trip as well, as it sounds like an ’80s synth guy trying to simultaneously evoke a giant celestial harp and compose a sequel to Music for Eighteen Musicians. 

That said, my favorite pieces mostly come near the end of the album and there are quite a few of them: “border, dispersing” (an ancient war procession crossing a mountain pass), “twilight in pierced velvet” (three killer noise guitar bands churning up a roiling cacophony), and “outside, infinite” (Branca reimagined as Eastern-inspired desert psychedelia). Only the latter dips its toes in any attempt at melody, but that is basically just gilding the lily when nearly every damn song is an immense, heaving and oft-rapturous celebration of visceral textures and harmonically rich seismic thrum.

Samples can be found here.

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emptyset, “Blossoms” (Thrill Jockey, 2019)

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No one can predict which trends or innovations will shape or define the experimental music of the future, but emptyset’s latest bombshell certainly feels like a gloriously bracing vision of one possible path: Blossoms is an album “generated entirely from the output of a neural network-based artificial intelligence system.” While the duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas has always been extremely forward-thinking and experimentally minded, this is the first emptyset album where it seems like the pair has actually leapt several years ahead of everyone else rather than merely taking existing ideas to unexpected (and sometimes fascinating) extremes. 

That said, Blossoms is also a culmination of the same themes that have obsessed emptyset for years, as the source material comes from recent acoustic improvisations with materials like wood and metal as well as their backlog of more architecturally inspired recordings (though it all ultimately emerges in radically unrecognizable form). At its best, Blossoms sounds like little else that I have ever heard, evoking a kind of visceral, shape-shifting sci-fi nightmare.

Imagine, if you will, a world in which the Transformers are not a ham-fisted and painfully stupid big-budget movie franchise but are instead both very real and very terrifying. And that, rather than morphing into childish nonsense like boomboxes or trucks, they instead transform into amorphous and phantasmagoric Lovecraftian horrors made from liquid mercury. On pieces like the grinding and churning “Bloom,” Blossoms evokes exactly what I would expect such a half-organic/half-mechanized abomination to sound like. Then it goes one step further and seems to also warp and stretch both time and the fabric of reality. 

Needless to say, that is quite an impressive feat indeed, though it is not one that the artificial intelligence system can claim full credit for: the way the sounds unfold and interact is indeed gloriously radical and inhuman, but the seismic, world-shaking power is entirely due to the sound design wizardry of Ginzburg and Purgas. The importance of the latter cannot be understated, as composing an album in such a fashion has some significant limitations (much like those of chromatic, atonal, or noise music). 

Blossoms is an album that demands to be played loudly, as the sheer shuddering, explosive power makes the lack of conventional melodies, harmonies, or compositional arcs feel largely irrelevant. There are occasionally some moments where this album achieves a kind of alien beauty as well, but the more pervasive achievement is that it resembles some kind of massive metal organism in a constant state of awe-inspiring structural transformation.

That said, emptyset’s AI is far from a one-trick pony—it just happens to be exceptionally gifted at executing dazzling textural and dynamic feats, so those are the ones that initially stand out the most. In the opening “Petal,” for example, the grinding and squirming cybernetic onslaught provides a framework for a fluttering melodic fragment at the piece’s heart. The weirdly lovely “Pollen” returns to that same theme with even greater success, as its lilting and wilting snatch of melody feels simultaneously tender and encased in a prickly exoskeleton. 

The other highlights head in significantly divergent paths though. For example, “Blade” feels like a warm and quietly lovely drone piece adrift on heavy swells of buzzing metallic shimmer, while “Axil” eschews any warmth at all to converge into a lurching and shuffling groove that unpredictably collapses and reforms as it moves relentlessly forward. My favorite piece, however, is probably “Stem,” which slowly takes shape from deep subterranean throbs, then unexpectedly erupts into something that resembles a hallucinatory and time-stretched dance party for immense, wounded machines.

The closing “Clone” is a noteworthy piece as well, simultaneously illustrating both Blossoms‘ violent, unpredictable appeal and the one weakness that keeps emptyset from quite becoming one of my favorite projects. The piece begins as a pulsing organ-like chord that gets ingeniously stretched, distended, and deconstructed for a brief and wonderful passage, yet everything is quickly consumed by a massive cosmic buzz saw that grinds and obliterates all other sound. It has such a promising start, but it is summarily destroyed rather than being allowed to evolve into something more. 

That has always been the rub for emptyset: great ideas are regularly executed with brutal force and clarity, but their aesthetic begins and ends there. There are generally not “songs” or satisfying compositional arcs on emptyset albums, just cool experimental vamps that appear and simply run their course for a few minutes before making way for the next piece. Admittedly, much of that is due to conceptual- or gear-related constraints, but that does not make it any less of a real and valid issue.

Fortunately, Purgas and Ginzburg have found an ingenious way to transcend that shortcoming on Blossoms: just ratchet up the wonder and the elemental power until everything else is eclipsed. It feels weird to describe a solution that involved eighteen months of work with “an international network of programmers working at the cutting edge of sound synthesis” as a blunt solution to a complex problem, but the intricacy of the process ultimately resulted in a legitimately volcanic outcome. And a legitimately effective one. Blossoms is unquestionably a significant and bold leap forward in sound art, but it is equally remarkable in how it transforms the meticulous and the cerebral into something downright apocalyptic.

Samples can be found here.

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emptyset, “Skin” (Thrill Jockey, 2017)

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This latest EP is something of a daring experimental coda to this year’s excellent Borders, as studio wizards James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas attempt to translate their crushing, frequency-saturated onslaught into purely acoustic recording techniques. Obviously, there has been a lot of foreshadowing throughout the duo’s career hinting at this direction given emptyset’s longstanding fascination with architecture and natural resonance, but it was not until Borders that the essential missing piece was added to the formula: the viscerally biting snarl and rattle of a homemade zither. 

Given that Skin further constrains an already hyper-constrained vein of minimalism, this EP is primarily just for existing fans eager to see how well Ginzburg and Purgas handle pushing their vision to a seemingly self-sabotaging extreme, but a few of these simple variations survive the transformation with quite a lot of raw power intact.

Any serious discussion of Skin has to begin by noting that emptyset are willfully plunging into a stylistic cul de sac from which there is absolutely no escape without some considerable reinvention: Ginzburg and Purgas have taken minimalism so far that they have stripped away all melody, almost all rhythm, almost all harmony, and any possible kind of compositional arc. What remains is essentially just the textures and overtones that can be generated from reverberating metal strings and their surrounding acoustic environment. 

Naturally, this puts emptyset in similar territory to that of artists like Alvin Lucier and Ellen Fullman, but with a massive key difference: Purgas and Ginzburg have no interest in exploring the shifting, slowly evolving microtonal harmonies that giant buzzing strings can conjure up in a longform drone piece, opting to instead traffic in condensed and punchy displays of wall-shaking force. Skin sounds like what Fullman might have done if she had toured The Long String Instrument on bills with Motörhead for a few weeks and had bottles hurled at her head. 

The opening “Skin I” is the strongest distillation of that “punk minimalism” aesthetic, as it sounds like two people violently strumming the same one-note bass line on vibrantly buzzing and rattling strings. Initially, it is just a jangling textural assault, but gradually one of the strings is bent, creating some menacing-sounding harmonies. The real magic happens in the background, however, as a cloud of low-frequency tones slowly begins to shudder and distort while ghostly harmonics form unexpected patterns. It is a very cool and deceptively subtle trick that I suspect would be especially stunning in a live environment where I could actually feel the room and the air itself vibrate and transform as the undercurrent gathered power.

There is only so much that can be done with a homemade zither and a kick drum though, so the rest of this brief EP is devoted to exploring the limited spaces not already covered by “Skin I.” “Skin II” reprises the slow-motion bass drum pulse of its processor, but eschews the frenzied and kinetic strumming for a single, slowly repeating chord that gradually produces an oscillating haze of overtones. Unfortunately, the piece is under 3 minutes long, so it is more of a “check out this trick!” experience than an actual satisfying composition. “Eye I” is more a significant divergence for emptyset, as an obsessively strummed single chord is joined by ritualistic-sounding vocal chanting that eventually coheres into something that resembles a stomping and lurching occultist procession. 

The closing “Eye II” is unsurprisingly more of the same, but with more of a rolling feel. It blossoms into something a bit more than mere variation in its second half, however, as a sneaking quake of blown-out-sounding sizzle creeps into the lower frequencies. More than any other piece, “Eye II” highlights the fundamental difficulty with Skin: if listened to casually, this EP basically just sounds like someone endlessly strumming a single string for 20 minutes with some minor variations in attack and rhythm.Also, the songs seem to end rather suddenly and arbitrarily without particularly going anywhere new. 

That is not necessarily a terrible thing, as there is plenty of activity lurking beneath the surface, but Skin is definitely a release that demands both volume and active, focused attention from listeners in order to be enjoyable. In a live setting, both of those prerequisites are guaranteed and there is probably an accompanying seismic, multi-sensory component to boot, but a recording simply is not the optimal presentation for what emptyset are doing here. Unfortunately, a recording is the only way that most people will get to experience the duo’s unique approach to sound art.

Skin‘s degree of success is far more interesting than its limitations however, and I have to admire emptyset’s unwavering commitment to experimentation and ceaseless exploration. On purely musical terms, a release like this seems like a quixotic and questionable move after the wide release and creative breakthrough of Borders, but viewed on a purely artistic level, it is obvious that emptyset HAD to take this detour before they could start planning their next frontier to conquer. That is the essential caveat for Skin: it is not the next evolution from the pummeling tour de force of Borders, but rather an appealing amuse-bouche that captures Purgas and Ginzburg performing some modest feats of sonic prestidigitation without the safety net of their usual studio enhancements.

Listen here.

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emptyset, “Borders” (Thrill Jockey, 2017)

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Emptyset has always been a project that I felt weirdly guilty about not appreciating more, as they seemed like a more cerebral and mercilessly deconstructed twist on the UK’s industrial-damaged post-dance milieu of Raime, Haxan Cloak, and Demdike Stare. Also, I love James Ginzburg’s Subtext label. Unfortunately, all their songs sounded vaguely the same to me and I found all the praise for their architectural inspirations a bit mystifying. Yet still I kept optimistically buying each new album hoping for a masterpiece that never arrived. Thankfully, this debut release for Thrill Jockey finally makes everything click for me. 

The same general template as always is still in place (improbably dense, ribcage-rattling bass and a slow-motion kick drum pulse), but Ginzburg and Paul Purgas have now distilled it into a thing of truly bludgeoning elemental force: Borders absolutely explodes from my speakers. Also, the duo now wield a bass-heavy homemade “zither” to wonderfully visceral and snarling effect, which I did not see coming at all. I am officially now a convert.

I freely admit to being very late to the party in embracing emptyset, but there have always been some rather significant and mitigating “the emperor has no clothes” aspects to the duo that were somewhat difficult to get past. While I have not heard all of their releases, I have heard several of the major ones and Ginzburg and Purgas have a long history of avoiding anything resembling hooks, chord changes, melodies, propulsive rhythms, or songcraft. In fact, a remarkable number of emptyset pieces (particularly the ones on this album) are built upon the obsessive repetition of just one note. 

There is also an unwavering fixation on deep, slow-motion thuds for the rhythmic component. Occasionally, on pieces like “Descent,” emptyset open up with something resembling a relentlessly pummeling groove with multiple notes and rare ping-ponging snare-like drums. Even then, however, the duo lock into that groove to a mechanically rigid and relentless degree. In general, however, Borders is a feast of extreme bass worship, heavy industrial textures, and cutting edge sound design. To some degree, many these eleven songs are almost interchangeable, but not in a “this band has absolutely no ideas” way. Rather, each new piece sounds like yet another monomaniacal attempt to bulldoze me into dust. For the record, I am totally fine with endless variations upon that theme.

On paper, that might not sound especially compelling, but the sheer single-mindedness and absolutely crushing execution of Borders can be legitimately awe-inspiring, particularly when played at an appropriately high volume. In fact, I suspect the monolithic immensity of emptyset can probably only be fully captured live, though Borders seems to come as close as a mere recording can possibly come to replicating such viscerally seismic and all-consuming force. 

Also, the self-built zither was exactly the missing tool that emptyset needed for their mission, as its buzzing metallic snarl gives these pieces a real sense of violence that far transcends conceptual sound art. The zither is especially effective when it is strummed with punky urgency, as in “Speak” and “Dissolve.” Any attempt at maintaining forward momentum at all adds another yet layer of gratification. It is certainly not something that emptyset has explored much in the past.

I am most fascinated by emptyset’s core aesthetic though, as it dawned on me as I revisited some of their other albums that Ginzburg and Purgas were essentially applying a high-powered microscope to underground dance: they would essentially focus on small snippet of a groove, excise it, blow it up to rumbling and monstrous size, and then loop it. In that light, I now appreciate the “architecture” component of emptyset’s art a bit better, as their real magic is their ability to take a simple idea and absolutely overwhelm a space with their highly localized earthquake of oversaturated frequencies, rich overtones, and subterranean rumble. 

That, of course, makes perfect sense, as anyone who heard last year’s Paul Jebanasam and Roly Porter albums can attest that the Subtext milieu have a genius for explosive production values. They also have a tendency towards crystalline clarity, but emptyset bucks the trend, as Borders is quite an appealingly gritty and distorted affair. There truly is not anything else out there quite like this, as Borders feels half like old Raime and Haxan Cloak snippets that have been chiseled and jacked-up to brutal effect and half like a boozed-up Ellen Fullman album spoiling for a street fight. Borders is admittedly all force and density, but it is nearly impossible to imagine anyone else pulling off that feat any better than Ginzburg and Purgas do here.

Listen here.