New release: Haarvöl’s “Horizons of Suspended Zones”

At the end of the 1990s, Hakim Bey wrote a book about the then-emerging possibility of the virtual. With the lucidity for which he is known, he recognized at the time that the virtual was nothing more than a new avenue for the expansion of capitalism. He introduced the concept of temporary autonomous zones as a kind of Foucauldian heterotopia— spaces that existed only for as long as they could evade capture. Today’s reality reflects a radical intensification of what Bey was referring to in the 1990s. Temporalities have changed completely. We are now almost overwhelmed by an incessant pursuit of instantaneity, accompanied by the mounting impatience it inevitably breeds.

The temporalities of sound, therefore, are naturally different too.

Time must be disobeyed.

The sounds of our autonomous zones aim to be the opposite of what technology offers us today: fascination and dazzle through excess — more buttons, more effects, louder… AI. These are bare sounds, defiantly rejecting the paraphernalia that surrounds them. They are simple yet perhaps carry the greatest complexity of all: turning their backs on spectacle and presenting themselves as they are: unmasked.

This work is the outcome of a series of studio sessions recorded during the summer and autumn of 2024. We followed an exploratory approach grounded in clearly defined premises and a pre-conceived compositional outline shaped by three key notions that are central to us: repetition, silence, and duration.

There is no post-production manipulation. What you hear is what was played. Inactual by conviction, this represents an utterly contemporary mode of being. These are sounds that seek to endure as a resistant, autonomous possibility — even if only fleetingly. Suspended between silences. Those marvelous, singular, sounds that Cage taught us to hear. They are there to last for as long as they can.

Composed and played by Fernando José Pereira and João Faria at the backyard studios. Haarvöl are Fernando José Pereira (sounds), João Faria (sounds), Rui Manuel Vieira (images).

Horizons of Suspended Zones is now available as a limited-release CD, stream of download from Crónica.

Haarvöl’s “Horizons of Suspended Zones” reviewed by African Paper

Mit “Horizons of Suspended Zones” veröffentlichen Haarvöl am 1. Juli ein neues Werk bei Crónica als CD und Download. Die beiden Musiker Fernando José Pereira und João Faria bewegen sich darauf bewusst abseits technischer Reizüberflutung. Statt Effektfülle oder Lautstärke setzen sie auf Reduktion, auf Wiederholung, auf Dauer und auf das, was zwischen den Klängen passiert. Die Aufnahmen entstanden im Sommer und Herbst vergangenen Jahres in konzentrierten Studiosessions. Alle Stücke folgen einer klar umrissenen Idee, wurden in Echtzeit eingespielt und im Anschluss nicht weiter bearbeitet. Was man hört, ist also genau das, was tatsächlich gespielt wurde in einem zeitlichen Verständnis, das sich dem Drang zur Sofortigkeit und Beschleunigung verweigert. Immer wieder tauchen in diesen Stücken rauschende, dröhnende Klangwellen auf, deren Klangfarbe entfernt an Schiffssirenen erinnert, jedoch nie statisch bleibt. Dazwischen: bimmelnde Akzente wie von Messingglocken, helle und dunkle Töne, sorgfältig austariert und einiges mehr.

Der Titel “Horizons of Suspended Zones” bezieht sich auf ein Buch von Hakim Bey, dessen Idee temporärer, nicht einholbarer Räume sich hier in klanglicher Form wiederfindet. Dazu und weiterführend heißt es beim Label: “At the end of the 1990s, Hakim Bey wrote a book about the then-emerging possibility of the virtual. With the lucidity for which he is known, he recognized at the time that the virtual was nothing more than a new avenue for the expansion of capitalism. He introduced the concept of temporary autonomous zones as a kind of Foucauldian heterotopia — spaces that existed only for as long as they could evade capture. Today’s reality reflects a radical intensification of what Bey was referring to in the 1990s. Temporalities have changed completely. We are now almost overwhelmed by an incessant pursuit of instantaneity, accompanied by the mounting impatience it inevitably breeds. The temporalities of sound, therefore, are naturally different too. Time must be disobeyed. The sounds of our autonomous zones aim to be the opposite of what technology offers us today: fascination and dazzle through excess — more buttons, more effects, louder… AI. These are bare sounds, defiantly rejecting the paraphernalia that surrounds them. They are simple yet perhaps carry the greatest complexity of all: turning their backs on spectacle and presenting themselves as they are: unmasked”. Das Artwork basiert auf Bildern von Rui Manuel Vieira, der ebenfalls als volles Mitglied der Gruppe gilt.
via African Paper

Ilia Belorukov’s “NRD DRM TWO 2022-2024” reviewed by Chain DLK

IliaBelorukov’s “NRDDRMTWO2022–2024” is not your average percussion album – it’s a sonic séance with a machine. Across thirteen tracks, this Russian-Serbian experimentalist transforms his NordDrum2 into a kaleidoscope of tempos, textures, and reverberant spaces, all on a strict one-step pattern that mutates over time. Think of it as minimalism caught in motion: a single rhythmic seed sprouting variants as tempo drifts.

Belorukov stumbled onto this method while pushing the Drum2’s six channels through tempo ranges and reverb algorithms; suddenly, a small tweak in delay or resonance made sounds bloom into entirely different creatures. Tracks are titled like schematics – “4.31, 4+5+6, 270–140” – but they’re anything but clinical. Instead, they reveal playful curiosity and sonic empathy, like birdwatching frequencies in their natural habitat.

And let’s be real: each track is a miniature adventure in acoustics. One moment you’re swimming in low-end rumble at 300 BPM, the next you’re plucking echoes at 50 BPM. Yet there’s no overthinking here – Belorukov recorded everything live, at the moment, no edits, just EQ and compression afterward. The result is elastic, alive, sometimes hypnotic, sometimes unnerving.

What surprises is how much emotive force this can hold. Vital Weekly noted you might feel nothing at first, but give it volume and space – and suddenly all these layers snap into focus: a texture-rich field that rewards patience. It’s sonic minimalism made maximal, not by adding elements, but by coaxing meaning from tiny shifts in repetition and space.

Belorukov isn’t just playing a drum synth; he’s conversing with it. His background – deep in improvisation, noise, electroacoustic work, saxophone, modular systems – feeds into this: he doesn’t impose patterns, he discovers them. “NRDDRMTWO” is part tribute to red Nord box and part field recording of an electronic creature evolving in real time.

In short, this CD is a quietly radical statement. It’s not flashy, but it is full of intent: each tempo shift morphs emotional terrain, each reverb change reshapes the room, and each track feels like a fragment of a larger exploration. Listen loud, and you’ll glimpse something that’s both machine-made and eerily organic – a dance of code and chance you didn’t know you needed.

Why it matters:
– Tempo as form – one-step pattern becomes polymorphic through speed.
– Space as ingredient – reverb isn’t decoration; it’s co-author.
– Live spontaneity – no edits, pure in-the-moment creation.
– Emotive minimalism – volume and patience reveal surprising depth.

If you’re tired of overproduced beatwork and crave something that breathes and evolves on its own terms, “NRDDRMTWO2022–2024” is your companion: a patient explorer of rhythm’s hidden architecture. Vito Camarretta

via Chain DLK

Ilia Belorukov’s “NRD DRM TWO 2022-2024” reviewed by African Paper

Mit “NRD DRM TWO 2022–2024″ veröffentlicht Ilia Belorukov bei Crónica eine neue Sammlung von Aufnahmen, die sich einem präzise gesetzten formalen Prinzip widmen: einem einstufigen Pattern mit variierendem Tempo, gespielt ausschließlich auf dem Nord Drum 2. Die Stücke entstanden in einem konzentrierten Arbeitsprozess zwischen 2022 und 2024, ohne nachträgliche Bearbeitung oder Schnitte. Lediglich minimale klangtechnische Eingriffe wie Kompression und Equalisierung kamen zum Einsatz.

Im Zentrum steht dabei weniger rhythmische Virtuosität als das feine Ausloten von Frequenzverhalten und räumlicher Tiefe. Vom Label heißt es: “The Nord Drum 2 has six channels, and in most scenarios, even one single channel gives a lot of sound to dive into the changing tempo’s routine. Besides that, this time Belorukov was concentrating on reverberation algorithms applied to the synthesiser’s sound. Creating artificial spaces made a huge impact on music and even a small addition of reverberation deeply transforms the sound. Adjusting parameters is an endless process, and he tried to simplify it to keep the idea of making music on the spot without overthinking. No edits or additional recordings were made. After the recording, some equalisation and compression were used to complete each piece.” Das Album erscheint als CD und zum Download.

via African Paper

Philippe Petit’s “A Divine Comedy” reviewed by The Sound Projector

Cover of the album "A Divine Comedy"

Impressive two-disc composition by Philippe Petit on A Divine Comedy (CRÓNICA 212-2024).

This Marseilles fellow has certainly come a long way since he started out as a DJ, radio presenter and zine publisher in the 1980s, even eclipsing his later label ventures for experimental electronica such as Pandemonium RDZ and BiP_Hop. This one is an ambitious project reflecting his studies at the CNRR Conservatoire, his mastery of multi-channel presentation and acousmatic spatialisation, and general use of modular synths. Yes, he’s taking on the classic works of Dante, covering everything from the Inferno to Purgatory and Paradise, a theme also highly popular with visual artists…not just Gustave Doré, but the English painter and book-maker Tom Philips, who nearly bankrupted his accounts producing his lavish art book version, and the maverick cartoonist Gary Panter who produced remarkable visual and literary statements when he cast his own cyber-punk character Jimbo as an unlikely hero to re-enact these epic voyages into the unknown.

Of course our man Petit is well aware of all such histories, and takes pains to distance himself from them to some extent; he does not want to adhere too closely to the original text of Dante, nor to tell a story, but rather to follow the precepts of Expressionism and see how far he can get riding on the back of that wild tiger. To put it another way, he wants his sumptuous sounds to “project subjectivity”, and “deform reality”, in order to produce highly emotional responses in the audience – sentiments likely to be endorsed by 20th-century painters such as Kirchner, Munch, Kandinsky, and Marc. Petit is also well-informed about the history of formal electro-acoustic experiments, and refers specifically to Divine Comédie, en epic work composed I think around 1971-72 by two titans of the genre, Bernard Parmegiani and François Bayle. (I’m surprised not to have heard of this meisterwerk sooner, but it only came out on CD in 1995, and was recently put onto four vinyl LPs by Recollection GRM.) Philippe Petit does not dismiss these grand masters out of hand, but his perception is that they were aiming for a sort of “soundtrack” of the afterlife, acting like Walter Murch providing sound design for an imaginary 1970s cinema project of Coppola that never existed.

Interestingly, it seems Franz Liszt has proven the better template for Petit’s purposes, proposing a “symphony” form based on the main stations of the arduous journey which Dante and Virgil must undertake. Petit also went back to Doré, building up a library of sounds and tones by using his imaginative powers to devise “musical pigments” from what he could see. At all times, the aim has been to keep things dynamic, a music in constant motion; perhaps it’s the danger of stasis, often associated with overly-literal illustrative techniques, that he was trying to avoid. Cases in point might be Le Livre Des Morts Égyptien or Apocalypse De Jean, both composed by Pierre Henry; no doubt they scrupulously honoured the truth of their sources, be they drawn from cartouches or New Testament texts, but somewhere they failed to ignite the passions we might associate with these very strong themes of the afterlife and the end of the world. Conversely, Philippe Petit – even though he gets a bit carried away with notions of “magic illusions” and “aural trickery”, as he attempts to convince us of the profound nature of his transformations – has turned in an exciting, powerful, and imaginative work. Those of a macabre bent (like myself) will no doubt savour the juicy, uncanny noises to be found on the Inferno disc, especially the vivid portrait of Lucifer, but there is also much to recommend on the more considered and atmospheric emanations for Purgatorio and Paradiso, where the audio pyrotechnics give way to restrained, focussed compositions of distilled intensity.

As a last word, I might remind the reader about Vidna Obmana and his Dante Trilogy, a 2001-2004 work that was reissued recently in Poland. The Belgian, lui, paid scant attention to the Dante texts, but did succeed in creating memorable dark ambient billows that were highly suited to the theme. From 2nd January 2024. Ed Pinsent

via The Sound Projector

Haarvöl’s “Horizons of Suspended Zones” reviewed by Vital Weekly

Among my favourite drone groups is Haarvöl, a trio of two musicians (José Pereira and João Faria) and Rui Manuel Vieira, who handles the visual side. I don’t know what that looks like, as I never saw them in concert (or looked on YouTube). Their latest album is inspired by a book by Hakim Bey from the late 1990s, “about the then-emerging possibility of the virtual. With the lucidity for which he is known, he recognised at the time that the virtual was nothing more than a new avenue for expanding capitalism. He introduced the concept of temporary autonomous zones as a kind of Foucauldian heterotopia — spaces that existed only for as long as they could evade capture.” Of course, things got way more radical than that; just look around you. The music here is the opposite of more of everything; it is less of everything. Six lengthy pieces, each about ten minutes of slow music, heavy on the ambience, drones and atmospherics. I hope I am not as attached to screens, buttons, and more of everything (except for reading books on my iPad), and I like slow and quiet music more than loud music, and Haarvöl tick all those boxes. It’s not to say each of these six pieces is just a few tones sustaining on end. Far from! Each piece is a multi-layered event of sustaining tones, but with shorter samples, voices, bell sounds and more melodic stuff, which makes this a delightful trip. I think I called their previous release ‘The Uncanny Organisation Of Timeless Time’ their best work to date, but I’d like to add ‘Horizons Of Suspended Zones’ as a contender. It is a highly varied disc of some abstract ambient, meeting more melodic touches. Excellent! (FdW)

via Vital Weekly

Ilia Belorukov’s “NRD DRM TWO 2022-2024” reviewed by Westzeit

Gänzlich dem Thema “Rhythmus” verpflichtet ist eine hochexperimentelle CD, der ILIA BELORUKOV den komplizierten Titel “NRD DRM TWO 2022-2024” (Crónica) gab. Jener lässt sich auflösen in “nord drum 2” – also ein Drumcomputer. Aber auch die Stücke tragen kryptische Namen: “7.20, 1+2+4+5, 50–100”, “7.44, 1+2+3+4+5+6, 400–300” oder “7.23, 1, 200–140” – ich vermute, das verschlüsselt die verwendeten Kanäle (ein nord drum 2 hat 6 davon), die eingestellten bpm-Werte und andere GeräteParameter. “Musik” kann man das wahrscheinlich eher nicht nennen, aber faszinierend ist es bei aller Abstraktion dennoch. Oft sucht man im stoischen Klopfen seinen eigenen Rhythmus und zählt sich verrückt. Anderes, “1.45, 1+3+5, 154–179” und “1.20, 1, 125–140” z.B., (unter)sucht den Punkt, an dem Rhythmus in Klang übergeht. Eine Einschlafhilfe für ADHS-geplagte TeilchenPhysiker? 4

via Westzeit

New release: J.L. Maire & Alfredo Costa Monteiro’s “L’Écoute Tactile”

J.L. Maire and Alfredo Costa Monteiro’s ongoing collaboration travels through sonic territories where two different but complementary approaches to sound and music production converge: the extended pure intonation and the exploration of timbre without fixed tones.

The recording in L’Écoute Tactile emerged from an improvisation session in September 2024 in Costa Monteiro’s studio. In this session, Maire used an extended scale of a bagpipe that the composer, “traditional botanist”, and music theorist Erv Wilson described in his works. Costa Monteiro contraposed electroacoustic devices that included springs, homemade motors, and oscillators. Despite the seemingly contradictory approaches, both musicians share the search for processes in which feedback from circuits and sound as resonance take central roles.

As the performance progresses, both sound spaces become mixed. The tuning of the modular synthesiser, which was at first precise, becomes progressively unstable. The electronically processes textures, on the verge of chaos, condense, little by little, into almost recognisable pitches. The space between the two musicians transforms from a pretension of encompassing a stable form and becomes, rather, a free search to which the act of listening contributes. The musician listens, hesitates, and proceeds in small steps through contact, as if in a type of tactile listening.

L’Écoute Tactile is now available to download or stream from Crónica.

Ilia Belorukov’s “NRD DRM TWO 2022-2024” reviewed by Anxious

Pierwsze wrażenie po zanurzeniu się w świat NRD DRM TWO 2022–2024 to fascynacja prostotą pomysłu i jednocześnie niebywała głębia brzmienia. Ilia Belorukov ogranicza się do jednego krokowego wzoru, zmieniając tempo niczym rytuał, w który wciąga słuchacza coraz bardziej. Nord Drum 2 okazuje się narzędziem nietuzinkowym: nawet pojedynczy głos elektronicznego bębna potrafi wytworzyć materię dźwiękową, w której można odkrywać za każdym razem coś innego. Przywołuje się tu (oczywiście nieco skojarzeniowe) echo Thunder Perfect Mind Nurse with Wound – jakby Stapleton kroił dźwięk ostrzem rozpuszczonym w snach, wyłaniając z chaosu obnażone, drżące krajobrazy, równie hipnotyczne, co bolesne w swojej onirycznej deformacji. 

Belorukov skupia uwagę na algorytmach pogłosu, dzięki którym każda uderzona membrana rozbrzmiewa nie tyle, że natychmiast, lecz także w zbudowanej przestrzeni. Słuchając, wyobrażałem sobie obszerną halę, gdzie metaliczne kikuty tonów odbijają się od ścian, tworząc lekkie echo przypominające ciche westchnienia. Ta sztuczna architektura, wprowadzana w mikrodawkach – od subtelnego „zabezpieczenia” muzyki do pełnego zalewu przestrzeni – daje poczucie istnienia gdzieś „pomiędzy”: ani czysto akustycznie, ani w całości cyfrowo.

Niezwykle pociągające jest tu podejście „bez cięć i dodatkowych nagrań”. Całość jawi się jako jedna, nieprzerwana sesja eksploracji – rejestracja momentu twórczego, w którym Belorukov reaguje na natychmiastowe impulsy i bez zastanowienia dostraja parametry. To uczucie autentyczności niesie ze sobą energię improwizacji, ale jednocześnie pokazuje, że minimalistyczna koncepcja może rodzić niezwykle bogate efekty. Gdy tempo przyspiesza, elektroniczne krople stają się kapiącą lawą; gdy zwalnia – tonie się w głębokim oceanie modulacji.

Najbardziej porywająca jest dla mnie część środkowa albumu, w której pogłos wybrzmiewa aż do granicy słyszalności, po czym gwałtownie kontrastuje z nagłym przytłumionym rytmem. W tych momentach czuję, jak ktoś powoli podchodzi i odsuwa zasłonę: odsłaniając nierówności powierzchni instrumentu, pozwala słyszeć każdy detal – mechanikę, drgania, najcichsze trzaski. To z kolei rodzi pytanie, gdzie kończy się konkretne uderzenie, a zaczyna rezonans przestrzeni tworzonej przez słuchacza w jego własnej głowie.

Choć NRD DRM TWO 2022–2024 trwa niecałą godzinę, w pamięci zostaje znacznie dłużej. Jest to nie tyle zestaw utworów, co zapis osobistej wyprawy w głąb możliwości urządzenia, wyjętego z codziennego kontekstu i pozwalającego odkryć nowe światy. Dla mnie ta płyta to nieustanne balansowanie na granicy kontrolowanego chaosu i czystej abstrakcji – jak podróż w ciemność z latarką, której sam żarnik staje się lampą prowadzącą przez niewiadome. Ta minimalna przecież forma ukazuje, jak daleko można przesunąć granice dźwięku, gdy pozostawi się przestrzeń dla nieprzewidywalności. Artur Mieczkowski

via Anxious