MUSIC

Chicago-based composer, improviser, multi-media artist and underground legend, Rob Mazurek, joins forces with modular-synth maestro and light magician, Alberto Novello for a blacklight invocation that hurls us out into new and uncharted sound-dimensions.Born of a chance encounter, Alberto Novello and Rob Mazurek's improvised collaboration, Sun Eaters, was recorded in a single afternoon at Dobialab, an experimental artist run space in Northern Italy. Alberto provided a loose rhythmic and timbral bedrock over which Rob Mazurek sketched and weaved delicate harmonies with trumpets, adding atmosphere with bells and sampler.Sun Eaters is a dizzying space ritual, a totally out exercise in telepathic collaboration and psychedelic sound.

Emily A. Sprague’s Cloud Time is an improvised ambient document of her long-awaited debut tour of Japan, recorded in autumn 2024. Compiled from over eight hours of live material captured in venues across the country, the album reflects a dialogue between performer, place, and moment, presented with no additional mixing and only minimal edits. Originally conceived as a journey rather than a traditional concert tour, Sprague approached each performance as an open exchange with her surroundings, redesigning her live setup to allow for real-time responsiveness and spontaneity. The result is a series of distinct, site-specific sound pieces shaped by intuition and environmental influence. Rather than follow a chronological order, the seven long-form tracks are sequenced to convey a narrative flow that mirrors the emotional arc of a full live set. Tracks like ‘Nagoya’, ‘Tokyo 1’, and the ten-minute ‘Matsumoto’ gently pulse with layered synthesis, embodying an ambient mode rooted in the ethos of kankyō ongaku and deep listening traditions. Cloud Time invites listeners into a reflective space where sound becomes a means of connection, stillness, and surrender—an offering from Sprague’s deeply personal and healing encounter with time, place, and presence.

Beirut-via-Berlin polymath Raed Yassin summons the supernatural thru a modular synth and spectra of strategies derived from Terry Riley’s minimalism, Suicide’s no wave rock freedom, and synth-pop structures. A strong follow-up to his ambitious ‘Phantom Orchestra’ side with Rabih Beaini - one side panoramic melodrama, to one side turbulent helical spiral.

Issued to coincide with Yassin’s debut London exhibition of the same name, ‘Eternal Ghost’ is the latest iteration of his decades-long artistic thrust toward consolidating improvised and composed musics. Concrète yet ephemeral, minimal yet majestic, the results diverge and contrast in their outlooks and formations with a guile that has served Yassin well thus far, from a memorable 2009 solo debut of illbient collage for Annihaya Records, to jams with Alan Bishop & AMM as part of “A” Trio, and in Praed/Praed Orchestra!, and most the centre of a complex maelstrom for Morphine Records.

Perhaps unusually ‘Eternal Ghost’ frames Yassin mostly solo and left to his own devices for one of their most intimate, if widescreen, expressions of self. ‘A Spectre of a Stranger’ creeps crepuscular with modular synth evoking onset of night before his synth leads tear at the sky in Riley-esque ribbons layered with wholehearted wail in a compelling forward tilt. The B-side ‘Eternal Ghost’ also charges the metaphysical thru synthetic means with its initial lift of saccading arps knotting into panel-beaten industrial pulse and epic pop vox vamps that switch from fourth world optimism to more ragged no wave dystopia, or the other side of the same wave?