“XKatedral Anthology Series III” (XKatedral, 2026)
Stockholm’s impeccably curated and darkly drone-centric XKatedral label celebrates their ten-year anniversary with this third volume in their “series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by composers working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music.” As befits such an occasion, this latest collection focuses heavily on artists who have been involved with the label since its very beginnings (Kali Malone, Maria V. Horn, Mats Erlandsson, Daniel M Karlsson, David Granström, and Theodor Kentros), but there are also a couple of heavy hitters from outside that original circle (Jessica Ekomane and Stephen O’Malley). In short, this latest installment features yet another murderers’ row of some of the world’s most compelling and inventive contemporary composers, which is a damn impressive achievement for a project that first began as a DIY cassette label.
The album opens with a brief “compositional sketch” from Kali Malone that is essentially just a slow-motion descending melody, but it makes for a pretty effective introduction to the pleasures that follow, as it features septimal just intonation tuning, uneasy dissonances, and feels ragged and detuned into very cool and visceral way. The album soon begins kicking ass in earnest, however, as Maria W. Horn’s epic “Empyrean Flare” wields Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli technique to “animate four supersaw oscillators” and weave a smoldering and spacy nightmare of air raid siren-like howls. It feels like a harrowing cross between an exorcism and slowed-down footage of a burning futuristic city on a distant planet, which easily secures it the honor of being one of the album’s clear highlights.
To my ears, the album’s other stone-cold killer is Jessica Ekomane’s extremely unexpected and decade-old “To Whoever Shall Inherit The Earth,” which was apparently the first solo piece that she ever recorded. The first time that I heard it, I actually had to re-check the track list to convince myself that it was not the Stephen O’Malley piece, as it sounds like a gorgeously smoldering maelstrom of gently billowing and heaving guitar noise and ephemeral chord shapes. At its peak, it feels like a darkly pulsating psychedelic cloud streaked with flickers of shimmering light, which stylistically evokes a more sensuous incarnation of New Zealand’s understated guitar noise sorcerers Surface of The Earth. I’m tempted to say that it is a bummer that Ekomane never pursued that direction further, but I am huge fan of Multivocal’s “Solid of Revolution” so I have to reluctantly conclude that her instincts were sound.
The album’s actual O’Malley composition, “Smoking Mother,” is a synth piece composed during a 2018 Fribourg residency that evokes a desolate horizon of windblown sand dunes. He mentions that Popul Vuh was a major inspiration, which is apt as it calls to mind an imagined and uncharacteristically dark and distortion-frayed Popul Vuh score for something like Dune or The Sheltering Sky. Theodor Kentros’ 2025 piece “This Will Be My Last Piece For Organ” is perhaps an even more otherworldly sounding gem, as he played “clustered oscillators through resonant feedback to synthesize the fluctuating frequencies heard wandering through physical space when detuning an organ.” In less technical terms, it sounds like smeary and quaveringly discordant organ drones with shifting and unfamiliar harmonies and a quietly gathering storm of feedback.
The remaining pieces are similarly compelling and unusual in their own distinctive ways. For example, David Granström’s “Tesselation” combines floating and frayed ambiance with percussion spasms that throb, crackle, and scrape in wonderfully visceral fashion, while Daniel M Karlsson’s “Fault Lines” sounds like a massive ghost-summoning cosmic didgeridoo. Elsewhere, Matt Erlandsson’s “Att Böja Själarna” is essentially a slowly flanging drone with distorted edges, but there are some very cool spatial tricks lurking in the background, as smoldering and hissing textures lazily pan back and forth. Notably, that Erlandsson piece previously appeared on a hyper-limited 2021 Irrlicht boxed set in which four artists were invited to record ten-minute cassette loops, but I definitely was not one of the 15 people who managed to snap that one up.
While that particular piece does not rank among my favorite Erlandsson creations, it nonetheless highlights a crucial feature of this series that is easy to forget given the quality of the material: all of these pieces are stray tracks that might have otherwise fallen through the cracks, as they are the products of unique circumstances, aborted directions, and one-off experiments that never made the cut for a proper album for whatever reason. While some could admittedly pass for outtakes, it is also true that several of these orphaned pieces are legitimately great and simply did not fit anywhere else until now.
That aspect is a large part of why this series is so special, as it feels like a close-knit community came together to collectively assemble something great out of their own recontextualized odds and ends. It works because everyone involved is a serious artist with cool and unconventional ideas that are very likely to shape the future of drone and modern minimalist composition to come (if that sounds like mere hyperbole, check out how many pipe organ albums followed in the wake of Malone’s The Sacrificial Code). While this might not be the place to hear every artist’s finest work, it cumulatively feels like an excellent overview of drone-based music’s cutting edges, which is exactly why each new installment of this series feels like a major event.
Listen here.
