The second release in the Inner Tension Extra series, Nocturnal Shadows, is a collection of ambient and experimental works by Blazej Malinowski. Created as a deeply personal exploration of atmosphere, emotion and inner states, the album moves away from the dancefloor into more abstract and immersive territories. Nocturnal Shadows marks another side of Malinowski’s musical language – slower, darker and more introspective, where texture, space and silence become as important as the sound itself.
Two different points of view, sharing the same narrative. Moving through different perspectives, connected by an abstract and fragmented sounds, glitches, textures and small shifts that connect both sides
Music aged in time, resonating from the surface to the core through layers and sediments of stones – the strata. Four morning recording sessions with a separation between them of between three and ten months – a chronozone that will rest for a time and on which the next one will be added, thus forming the total of the six pieces of the album – becoming six strata. A slow-moving album that develops landscapes of subtle but continuous evolution, where we find layers of diverse nature created from different procedures, bathed in the calm waters of wabisabi, where melancholy, immensity, insignificance, the potential of the unemerged, coexistence and simplicity converge at the same time
Anatolian Weapons presents ‘Blue Root’, a collection of 9 ambient/downtempo tracks on his bandcamp page.
The nights in Hong Kong did not remain a secret for long. Word spread silently through the feline world, and the gatherings grew until the music no longer belonged to a single hidden basement. The cats had found something of their own. Their new destination became Macau. Long after midnight, when the casino floors fall silent and the roulette wheels come to rest, they emerge from hidden passages and forgotten service corridors to throw their own secret parties. The gaming tables become dance floors. The remixes played during these nights were all commissioned by the legendary feline Primadonna Disco Queen Beast (PDQB), reimagining tracks from the original Pussy Disco album. The most celebrated DJ cats perform with nothing but their claws, tracing the grooves like perfectly balanced styli. Their oversized ears become living loudspeakers, carrying every microscopic detail through the vast halls. Before dawn, the music fades. The cats disappear without a sound, leaving the roulette tables exactly as they found them. When the first employees arrive, there is no sign that anything happened during the night. Over the years, PDQB commissioned countless remixes of tracks from Pussy Disco. The eleven collected on this double vinyl were all played during the legendary Sunrise Sessions – the final hours before daybreak, when the parties reached their absolute peak. These are the remixes the cats returned to again and again, making them the undisputed classics of Macau’s underground feline nightlife.
Modern Apartments arrive on Dark Entries, with Light on Water, an LP featuring 8 cuts of instrumental cosmic-kosmische analog synth workouts. Modern Apartments is Ryan Ambridge, the musician and producer best known for his work with dark synth projects Linea Aspera and Lust Pattern. While both of those outlets lean towards the greyscale and robotic, Ambridge wanted to explore a more colorful palette with Modern Apartments, a livelier, looser sound. The medium of film plays a major role here; Ambridge works as a projectionist, screening archival prints of 35mm and 16mm films, and the textures and temporality of the medium fed directly into the Modern Apartments aesthetic. But it isn’t all blurry edges and fuzzy optimism on Light on Water. Says Ambridge, “Regular beats from old rhythm boxes and the sharp angles of post-punk found their way in. The contrasting imagery from those old film prints, of dense cities and open countryside, is reflected back in the dialog between looser sounds and rigid stylistic choices.” This tension shines through on tracks like album opener “Completely,” which pairs the icy minimalism of John Foxx with the meandering grooves of Cluster, or the eponymous “Light on Water” which leans even further into the sun-bleached vibes of Roedelius.
Music From Memory presents ‘Miraggi’, the debut release by Argento, a new project conceived by composer and producer David August. Written between Berlin and the Tuscan coast, the record unfolds as an imagined soundtrack to the Mediterranean, shaped by memory, longing and a profound connection to landscape. The earliest sketches emerged during extended periods spent along Italy’s Tyrrhenian coast, where the shifting light, vegetation and ever-changing presence of the sea became lasting creative impulses. At the same time, an immersion in Italian library music of the 1970s and ’80s quietly informed the project’s tonal language, while traces of jazz fusion and Balearic ambience surfaced not as direct references but as distant echoes. Built around a dialogue between synthesizers, electronics, acoustic percussion and environmental recordings, ‘Miraggi’ balances rhythmic movement with spacious, cinematic composition. During the recording process, August was joined by drummer and percussionist Lorenzo Setti, whose performances and co-writing became an integral part of the album’s evolving rhythmic language. Across extended improvisations and recording sessions, August and Setti gradually shaped a musical language that feels both deeply personal and quietly transportive, allowing atmosphere and place to become as important as melody or rhythm. The title ‘Miraggi’ (‘Mirages’) emerged organically, evoking a longing for something that remains just out of reach — something that cannot fully be grasped or lived. It suggests a suspended state between perception and imagination, akin to a hallucination or a dream. In this sense, ‘Miraggi’ reflects the project’s inner narrative: an imagined soundtrack shaped by desire, memory and the spiritual abundance of the Mediterranean Sea.
Y-3, the pioneering sports-fashion collaboration between Adidas and Yohji Yamamoto, has for three decades dwelled calmly within the “tensions of existence”. In conceiving the brand’s long-awaited return to runway format at Paris Fashion Week, these codes laid the groundwork leading up to the Spring/Summer 2025 season. Whilst the focus for runway is traditionally placed on garments, models, styling, environment, and the pageantry in between— it was crucial that music play an integral role in the conversation. Three seasons later, sound has informed creative direction from the very earliest phases of ideation. Commissioning all-original compositions has become a natural part of this ideology. The return to runway has invited the opportunity to define a new sonic palette for the brand, and beyond that, to usher in a new era of sound for Y-3 that echoes across music & culture. Following this ethos, and with a mandate to support obscure talent, Montreal duo Solitary Dancer have emerged as the first collaborators in shaping the intimate brand architecture of noise & feeling.
Anluminiu is the new project of Silent Strike, a Romanian electronic and film music composer.
Gūsū is a transcultural music project born from the confluence of two distinct artistic voices: Xueyan Chen and Nicolas Balmer. Together, they create a complex dialogue of sound that bridges the ancient and the modern, exploring the liminal spaces between tradition and experimentation. Gūsū returns with a second release, “Inhabiting Me” is their second release.
Anchorat is an 8 track album built from the first eight pieces of two separate releases published on Achordat. The project explores the idea of being “anchored” in a sea composed entirely of Achordat soundsfluid, shifting, and alive.
The same sonic relics used to generate the original tracks have been reworked, recontextualized, and set into motion once again. Rather than remaining fixed, these elements evolve, reflecting the organic nature of Achordat’s sound palette where tones are never static, but continuously transforming. This album is not just a reconstruction, but a re anchoring: a return to familiar material that reveals new forms through change, repetition, and time.
Danny Wolfers presents a brand new Smackos album as name-your-price on his bandcamp page. ‘Come for the Universe Stay for the Clowns’ is dedicated to the memory of Koen van Someren Gréve and includes nine synthetic hardcore ambient synth folk ballads.
Sun Electric — the legendary Berlin duo of Tom Thiel and Max Loderbauer — returns with Episodes, an enticing new album. While the pair has been active and creating over the years, Episodes marks their first album of original material in nearly 20 years. Now, with a renewed way of working together, they present fresh and captivating music on the Belgian De:tuned label, built from recordings made with the vintage 1960s Subharchord Synthesizer. Across 6 tracks, Sun Electric takes listeners on a strange yet wonderful journey through shifting moods and sonic textures, capturing their unmistakable sense of exploration and atmosphere.
Astral Industries presents a vinyl reissue of Robert Henke’s multifaceted concept album ‘Layering Buddha’. An erudite masterclass on sampling and composition, ‘Layering Buddha’ encapsulates the material process of metamorphosis and a well of nascent, ever-present potentialities. Originally released in 2006, ‘Layering Buddha’ began with a curious encounter with the ‘Buddha Machine’ – a pocket-sized, battery powered playback device that, over the past two decades, has quietly achieved a cult status around the world. Conceived by the Beijing-based group FM3 (Christiaan Virant, Zhang Jian), the machine takes inspiration from Tibetan Buddhist prayer boxes and consists of nine sound loop compositions of varying length, which can be toggled with a single switch. Due to low production cost and manufacturing imperfections, each Buddha Machine is unique, giving slight variations in sound, pitch and duration. Using a state of the art A/D converter Henke made high quality recordings from a single machine, providing the source material for the album. Through various processing and arrangement methods, new pieces emerged, most of them all deriving from a single source loop. The pieces were then set up on the computer as generative arrangements, living as continuously permutating structures that could theoretically go on forever – just as the loops do within the Buddha Machines…
Retro-futurist duo Group Modular presents the second release in its new 7inch series, powered by Confused Machines and Delights labels. On the new double-sider, Mule Driver and Markey Funk share their fascination with the late 20th century brutalist architecture and explore themes of geometric patterns, urbanistic utopia and its inevitable decay. “Hecker” is a dreamy yet uplifting short piece. Tirelessly building up in repetitive odd cycles, it portrays an imaginary time-lapse of a modern city’s perpetual development and renewal. On the flipside, slow and gentle “Sharon”, inspired by the sound of early 80s Bruton library, paints a melancholic and alienated picture of a late-night residential area.
‘Vibe Ride’ is the sixth release of Adam Rudolph’s Hu Vibrational project and marks his 60th release as a leader or co-leader. “With every record, the goal is to explore new creative territory,” explains Rudolph. Vibe Ride continues a deeper exploration of a trance-like groove and a conceptual framework known as Sonic Mandala. This album marks the most complete realization of that idea, partly due to the group’s experience touring beforehand. That time on the road helped to refine ideas and strengthen musical chemistry. The recording process unfolded organically—likely due to the long-standing collaboration within ensembles like Go: Organic Orchestra and Moving Pictures, where the musicians have developed a deep familiarity with the shared musical language.”
The album was composed in 2007 and done with Roland JX305 synthesizer + Yamaha W7-32 Poly synth/sequencer, with additional sampling in Sony Sound Forge, using real dialogues between cosmonauts in Earth orbit.
Caleidoscopio N. 2 was recorded in the ’70s at Meridiana Recording Studio, by Orchestra Sinfonica Di Roma directed by Gianluigi Gelmetti with flute solo by Daisy Lumini.
