Know your audience, know yourself. Introspect, or obsess – a strange loop come unfurled. A journey, a place, a time to face. Now gnawingly, no notes know – yet.
Featuring improvised clarinet.
Substak is the alias of Kostas Staikos, a sound artist based in Athens, Greece. His work moves through the deeper end of electronic music – drone ambient, space ambient, dub ambient, electronica and hypnotic minimalism – always shaped by a sense of inward movement. In Greek there is a verb, εμβαθύνω, meaning “to deepen”, and this perfectly captures the core of his practice: a continual descent into texture, resonance and the subterranean pulse of sound. For Kostas, Substak is less a name than a method – “sub” for low frequencies and introspective moods, “stak” from his own name. An abstract container for experiments, escapes and the slow building of a personal sonic language.
LR Friberg is a Swedish composer, mastering engineer and narrative artist whose work bridges sound and speculative fiction. Her music begins in mathematical processes – cellular automata generating evolving harmonic structures – and grows into immersive, emotionally driven ambient landscapes. Each piece functions as both music and world-building: sonic fragments of the ongoing fictional universe she writes, where light, place and connection shape atmosphere as much as melody. Her focus is precision, mood and storytelling through sound.
Though coming from different angles, Substak and LR share something essential: music as escape, experimentation and dialogue. Kostas describes collaboration as a natural way to trade ideas and deepen sound. LR finds that Kostas’ textures integrate flawlessly into her frameworks, opening spaces she wouldn’t reach alone. The admiration is mutual – LR is one of Kostas’ favorite artists to work with, and she sees every collaboration with him as an invitation into new terrain. Together, they create ambient that is both grounded and atmospheric, abstract and emotional – a meeting point where deep minimalism and narrative generativity merge into one evolving sound.
***
She’d been coming to the fjord every morning that week.
The city behind her stirred and hissed. Gulls shrieking over dumpsters, tram line clattering in rehearsal for rush hour. Bells rang out from the cathedral, mistimed and overlapping, like no one had agreed what hour it was anymore.
But out here, by the water, time did something else. It slowed. Not gently. More like a held breath. More like waiting.
Trine leaned against the railing, fingers curled around warm steel.
“I used to think peace would feel like sleep,” she said quietly, not looking up. “But it doesn’t. It feels like aftermath. Like the pressure that settles after the shattering stops.”
A silence answered. The kind that wasn’t empty, just unseen.
“I can track calm the way I used to track anomalies. There’s data in it. Repeating patterns. Subtle recursions. A kind of… harmonic delay. Not static. Not passive. Just a system cooling slowly, pretending it isn’t still under load.”
The wind shifted slightly, brushing the back of her neck. She didn’t shiver, but her breath caught, like someone had just stepped up behind her. Like something was about to speak.
“Stillness lies,” she said, lower now. “It tricks you into thinking nothing’s moving. But all the while, pressure builds. Currents gather.”
A ripple formed far down the fjord. Not wind. Not current. Too precise.
Trine watched it. Didn’t follow it with her eyes, just… marked it. Like you do with a noise in a dark house.
“Maybe that’s all there is now,” she said. “Residual motion. Echoes with memory. The shape left behind after a convergence.”
She closed her eyes. The world didn’t vanish.
But it did watch. Not hostile. Not kind. Just… observant.
“I don’t need the world to disappear anymore,” she whispered. “Just give me pause. Enough to decide if I still belong in it.”
She opened her eyes. Stayed still. Waited.
Then, finally, turned. Not with urgency. Not with fear. But like someone who knew she’d been seen, and didn’t need to run.
The city waited behind her.
And something else, just outside knowing, waited with it.
The train moved like breath held just below the surface. Its low hum vibrated through the bones of the carriage, steady and almost imperceptible. More rhythm than sound, more presence than noise. Outside, the world passed in dissolving layers.
Norway, then Sweden. But no hard border. Just a slow merging of landscape, a quiet shift in the light.
Forests, thick with pine rose like sleeping giants, then opened without warning into lakes, still, black, mirror-like. They caught the last threads of evening like secrets too soft to speak aloud. In the water, the sky folded back into itself, perfect and inverted. Hills floated upside-down. Trees had double roots. It was hard to tell what was reflection and what was real.
Now and then, a village blurred past. Red-painted houses. Green, damp gardens. Fences wrapped in ivy. Curtains drawn halfway closed, as if the dusk were something to be filtered rather than embraced. Smoke curled faintly from chimneys that looked too delicate for fire.
Golden light moved across the train windows. Not from inside, not from any lamp, but from the outside world gilding the glass. It cast halos where there should be none. The air inside the carriage thickened.
And then…
Chris blinked. A flash of confusion passed over his face like a short-circuited dream. His accent, all Texan resonance tempered by too many books and long thinking hours, rose into the stillness.
“Okay… how the hell did I end up here?”
His voice cut the silence but didn’t break it.
Fabian turned in his seat, slow, like someone coming up from underwater.
“I thought this was a dream,” he said quietly, mostly to himself. He rubbed his palms together absently. As if trying to verify the texture of the moment.
Across the aisle, Elin and Linn met eyes. It wasn’t recognition, it was confirmation. Something in them both said: “this again.”
Elin shrugged first. Small, almost imperceptible. Shoulders barely moved. Linn mirrored it, but hers was more calculated. A shrug that meant “I have no idea but I’ve already started parsing it.”
Chris let out a single half-laugh. Not humor. Friction.
“Well,” he said, glancing out the window, “I always wanted to see the fjords.”
Elin didn’t smile. She was still watching the landscape slide by.
“There are no fjords in Sweden,” she said dryly.
Linn turned to her. “What about Gullmarn?”
Elin frowned slightly. “Where even is that?”
“Bohuslän,” Linn said, the word folding easily into the quiet. “Never been there. But I know.”
Chris exhaled slowly and leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“Okay, enough. There should be a baseline to this. A rule. A reason. Something to pin it to. Why did it happen again?”
Elin looked around the carriage. Her gaze landed on the folded seats, the patterned upholstery, the soft overhead lighting that didn’t flicker. The soft sway of the train as it curved slightly left, following the contours of a lake she didn’t recognize.
“I’m home right now,” she said, carefully. “Or, obviously…” she paused, took in the unfamiliar timbre of the train “…not.”
Fabian leaned his head back, closed his eyes for a second, then opened them again.
“Maybe,” he said, slowly, “we’re being pulled together. By something.”
The sentence hung there. Unfinished, but trembling with implication.
All four of them fell quiet. Not a stunned silence. A listening one.
The train rolled on. Outside, the light kept folding over itself, oranges into purples, sky into lake into sky again. Inside, four people sat in the pulse of something too big to name. Each of them thinking the same thought, the same question, in slightly different words.
And somewhere deep in the hum of the rails, it almost felt like the question had already been asked.
Not to them.
But through them.
The Necrophile Hummingbird netlabel presents Mantra Wave by rADio eNd
“Trance music for tribal music lovers.”
This album is just a solo improvisation recorded at the Cave Haven (Foucherans) in 2022.
I would have enjoyed that someone upgraded or transformed it, but maybe it wasn’t necessary.
Sometimes the raw thread is the real fabric.
I coined the term “Mantra Wave” with this album but already in previous albums I was using it when talking about to keep the whole improvisation instead to reduce it to the essential.
I won’t define it here — you can sense it yourself.
Since my first steps with CorteX, I’ve been trying to create psycho-active music more inspiring than the usual standards.
Since the Yoshiwaku shamanoise tracks, I’ve focused on the power of repetition to carry the listener into trance.
Since Multiple Personality 3, with its overlong ritual tracks, we left behind the notion of “standard tracks” to explore durations usually found only in instrumental minimalism, serial music, or certain techno constellations.
Was rADio eNd simply listening to the Earth, amplifying her voice?
Turn off your brain.
Let the wave wake your soul.
I made the artwork without AI, but disliked it because it looked too much like something made by an AI.
So I asked an AI to update it as if it had been made by a human… Well… Then I only kept the statue to edit my artwork.
The circle closes.
Special thanks to the creator of the Longo dance for the Mbouiiiii!!!!! concept — a joyful reminder that one can free body and mind through vibration, breath, and surprise.
About healers, guides, and those who teach freedom
In France, more than ever, many people claim to heal everything with countless techniques, generally for money.
Some may offer better listening than doctors trapped in the machinery of big pharma — doctors who, despite their knowledge, can truly resolve only part of the world’s illnesses.
But many “healers” are only selling illusions, playing with people’s hopes, offering dependence instead of autonomy.
Fortunately, some too much rare ones genuinely take care.
They show not how to rely on them, but how to stand on one’s own feet.
They guide the person back to their own inner tools — until the guide is no longer needed.
This album is dedicated to those who do not heal minds and bodies, nor fix energies,
but who teach each person how to do it themselves…
and to all those who learn alone, quietly, without any master.
Ten years ago – another time. Simpler? Not really. Earlier, and with different players playing a different game. A new player at the time – Jazzaria – now marking its first decennial. May it see decades to come.
Featuring improvised clarinet.
Electronic reggae with vocals, tambourines, and guitars sets the tone for “La voz de la energía”, an album that fits seamlessly into the Pueblo Nuevo catalog thanks to its exploratory drive and sharp aesthetic vision. Here, glitch emerges as a kind of Jamaican spiritual force — deep rhythms and dense atmospheres converge with analog basslines that roar like rocket launches, a playful nod to Kraftwerk, bursts of jazz trumpet, modulated frequencies, and reversed beats.
Each track unfolds as an immersive experience where styles blur and intertwine — dub, breakbeat, glitch, among others — enriched by a vivid tapestry of samples that expand the listening field. The result is a diverse, restless, and consistently surprising sonic journey that keeps the listener attuned to the vibrant creative energy of Neosintetico.
Review by Felipe Baradit (@felipebaradit)
(Concón, Chile. November 2025)
Genre: Techno
Format: Digital files
License: CC: BY-NC-SA
Tracks:
1. Dance Practice
2. Moving Body To The Music
01 Sector 5 Scan
02 Cargo Ship Exchange
03 Solypsis Corps
04 Amokiantronics
Limited edition of 23 double floppy disks
Urbit Chaos was composed and recorded in June 2025 by Martine Chine.
Cover art: Romane Roche Roy
The Necrophile Hummingbird netlabel presents Altered Signal by Invisible Illusion.
“Mystical Post-Industrial Music for Experimental Music Lovers”
Sometime you need to go back to something more rough more free more spontaneous. This album was unplanned it just birth from one session using a lot my electric frequencies generator mix later with several field recordings. I chose to deal with my very outsider music voice on several tracks. And added a few of related single experiment to achieve them.
For the artwork I used a head paint by my great-grandfather and next I changed it for a portrait made in wax by him too, because in this album I dig the origin of my life and its singularity to understand why the lines between my monikers are tangling so much these days. I mean CorteX and Yoshiwaku as well as Invisible Illusion have no more any real difference… Perhaps it’s related to the longtime stuck with rADio eNd which was an attempt to eradicate all them.
My great-grandfather was an orthodox believer, he made a lot of icons is whole life during, but he was also studying hypnosis and magnetism already in the 1920s years, so I hope he understood before is death in 1978 that all churches are against spirituality. Religion is a plague, especially in Europe where so many people have been massacred during several centuries, just because of being different, or more human than these god’s bureaucrats, do I say, these mobsters addicted to power. My great-grandmother was organizing spiritism meetings at home. I’ve always seen them together till her death in 1981. My first years I thought he was very impressive despite being quite silent, like only watching the people and indeed later I learnt he was already dead before my birth. Now I’m running a museum with the handcraft and paints they did as well as my art. Because I enjoy self sabotage I wrote the handcraft room is still not open, but in reality it’s already set, so if you travel by france, feel very free to visit the place https://soloist.ai/atelierkol/musee-hors-norme
A shorter version of Makeshift Bandage is available on this album https://archive.org/details/Jeff_Sampson_Ed_End_Tian_Keng
Dedicated to those mediums who turn the signals they receive into music.
Searching – stumbling. Seeing – staring. Blankly – blinking. Blinding – blitzing. Being – buzzing. Feeling – futzing.
Featuring improvised piano.
‘Quirky & Perky’ is exactly that. It’s an eccentric, ebullient set of sounds from staccato synthesisers and old electronic toys, with quaint and peppy peculiarities, a modicum of metallic percussion and lots of bubbly, unconventional cheerfulness.
Toxic Chicken is the main solo project of the prolific but always inventive multimedia artist Kai Nobuko.
released November 2, 2025
Nenormalizm+ Noir
Recorded during the lockdown period, Animal Sintético is the result of an intensive exploration of a Novation Peak synthesizer, temporarily loaned by a friend.
The work unfolds through real-time recordings and modulations over the course of a week, with compositions built track by track and captured in single takes.
This release explores ambient and drone territories, progressing toward more rhythmic and percussive pieces at its conclusion.
Each track corresponds to a distinct synthetic textile material, evoking the idea that sonic filaments gain meaning through interconnection.
The title — born from a spontaneous joke about a faux fur coat — precisely reflects the EP’s aesthetic: artificial, textured, interwoven.
Animal Sintético is an exercise in material and conceptual synthesis, where instrumental limitation becomes language.
