From gnome-inspired computer music to dancing incandescent lightbulbs, dungeon synth soundtracks for imagined RPGs and apocalyptic drum solos, Daryl Worthington dives into early-Autumn’s cassette releases

If technology becomes media through imbrication in social relations, Tam Lin explores the human ramifications of that equation. In their music, social media is a visible actor in human experience, a trigger for anxiety, alienation and bolts of anger. Last year’s bluelightnospaceflattimewas a mix of twitching soundscapes and spoken word, a diaristic exploration of the emotional rollercoaster of online life. New album *Fizzy!,*released by Jollies,**takes the same theme into more song-based terrain, adding pounding beats and a more lyrical flow in their vocals. ‘World Of Appearances’ is slow-speed grime meets hall of cracked digital mirrors, doomy atmospherics and skittering hi-hats lurking around twisted pads. ‘Shadowboxing’ moves like fluctuating dopamine levels while ‘Fist Through The Frame (feat. Burchhha)’’s razor-edged rhymes and jagged beats suggest an eruption of algorithm induced outrage. The songs are tightly wound, yet there’s also a roving quality as intricate patterns of cracked synths and percussion stretch out from the claustrophobic lyrics, as though social media’s contradiction of connection and isolation is embodied in the tracks. There’s nuance in how Tam Lin deals with their subject, a vulnerable humanity beneath the music’s serrated edges. As online life creeps into offline, their songs track the marks it leaves.

A different topology of virtual space is explored on *The Pros And Cons Of Becoming A Computer,*a split by Hannah Bannanah and Sudden Spectrum on Bristol-based Liquid Library. According to the release notes, Bannanah’s side of this split emerged after she read Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace’s The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That Witnessed The Dawn Of The Metaverse, and then ventured into VR Chat. The tape explores the surreal nature of online spaces. An uncanny valley where flickers of spoken word emerge through lo-bit synths jousting with acoustic drums, slippery bass lines and odd croaking noises to give the impression of a Hörspiel from a future where the balance between on and offline has become disturbingly porous. The fidelities are all intriguingly out of whack, at points it sounds like damaged country music, Bannanah’s bizarre sonics landing like a lo-res hallucination.

Sudden Spectrum’s side takes a more tranquil slant. ‘In Real Life’ sees slaloming arpeggios dance around strangely rubbery bass notes and splatters of glitched speech, ‘Simpulation Reset’ sounds like a 16-bit interpretation of celestial shimmer. Elsewhere come lush yet fidgety slices of downtempo electronica, a playful strangeness residing beneath the music’s beautiful retro-futurist sheen. Both sides commune with virtual spaces as glitchy, juddering and prone to creepy malfunction, their music grappling with the offline ramifications of weird dream spaces made from code and wires.

Alongside a wide-ranging practice as a percussionist, instrument builder and media artist, Berlin-based Michael Vorfeld explores incandescent lamps as both a light and a sound generator, using various devices – switches, dimmers, flashers to control an assortment of lamps, and a web of microphones and pickups to bring out the acoustic side of these interactions. In 2005 he first performed a version of this Glühlampenmusik live in Berlin, a recording of which was released in 2010. This tape collects a new volume, recorded to mark the 20th anniversary of the first performance. Thanks to cinematic tropes the buzz and hum of a lightbulb is a pretty loaded sound, but Vorsfeld stretches it well beyond a signifier of eeriness. Opener ‘Lichte Wendel’ begins with flickering electrical currents which could come right out of a horror movie but things abruptly pivot, a low-end pulse and clinking glass congealing into off-kilter techno. It sets a pattern for the album; the tracks often feel like a single electrical fluctuation is being suspended in time and space, so Vorfeld can rotate it, zoom in and zoom out and extrapolate polyrhythmic multitudes. Beyond the eccentric optical-electro-acoustic process, Glühlampenmusik builds wonder from sounds typically fizzing in the background.

Forró originates from northeast Brazil, a genre characterised by accordion, triangle and zabumba (a drum the player wears and plays with sticks). Through the decades it has twisted, splintered and electrified into various subgenres. A wide mix of globally dispersed folk dances could be tracked flowing in and out of forró, but DJ and producer JLZ and journalist, academic and critic GG Albuquerque place it and its offshoots into a specific continuum on Medio Grave. The mixtape seeks to “challenge and redefine perceptions of forró, integrating it into the musical ecosystem of sound systems and the black diaspora.” The whole thing is sequenced and mixed in a way to capture a delirious, ecstatic quality of the music. Much of the first side has the texture and pace of a radio broadcast, while a synthetic percussion hit cranked up in the mix holds a rhythm across tracks which all sound like they’ve been plucked from different decades. Later come fiendishly fast BPMs, stadium-sized dance pop mutations, and synth bass propelled dancehall like spaces. The title, meanwhile, translates to ‘mid-bass’, it references how forró is often heard through paredões (‘big wall’) soundsystems made by rigging speakers up to the side of a truck or a car boot and tweaking them to ramp up mid and high frequencies. JLZ and Albuquerque plot how a genre evolves through time, while the frenzied sequencing hints at where forró thrives, transmitting the impression of a gleeful street party from the other side of the world into your speakers.

Composer and guitarist Tara Cunningham is a member of Red Snapper and Modern Nature as well as a frequent improvisor and collaborator. In her solo work she uses effects to stretch the potential of six strings, glitching and granularising while never fully jettisoning the grain of electric guitar. It’s an approach that feels descendent of John Abercrombie’s extension of the guitar into a synthesiser to play jazz as much as the history of ambient musicians turning guitar into a texture, which is to say effects extend rather than stand in for harmonic richness. Almost – Not Exactlyfollows the shimmering, twitching sketches she released earlier this year on Two, Three, bolstering her abstracted guitar with beats made from samples of shells and driftwood collected from a beach while in Brittany, France. The result is a suite of miniatures (no track hits a minute and a half) where warm tones drape and crease around prickly, mutating beats. On ‘Street Wall Crash’ grainy chords come like uneven brushstrokes across the trickling rhythm. ‘Triptych’ sees guitar babble and yelp around a shifting matrix of skimming stones. It’s all perfectly at one with the curious series of super 8 videos Jemima Seymour made to accompany the album, where two dancers move in stuttering yet elegant unison. Meanwhile, a trio of remixes find new angles and vectors in the originals. The pieces have a postcard-like quality, and while the end of each leaves me wishing it went on longer, Cunningham excels at concision, each track carrying exactly the right amount of action, colour and sentiment to contain a full picture.

GN fuses gnomes and computer music. fft_Materialism, a new series from Riforma, invites artists to reflect on the use of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithms. Put simply, FFT algorithms can take an input in one form and provide an output in another. An early use, for instance, was sampling seismological data to test for nuclear activity. In music, they’re used to convert audio signals into their frequency information. French duo 乃٥乃 and Ougdol’s response to Riforma’sspec builds from the phrase “gnome in the shell” (riffing off ‘ghost in the machine’). Paraphrasing, their approach is to equate gnomic folklore with glitches, AI ghosts and computing errors, and run from there. The result is an intriguing gloop of computer music which sounds oblique on the surface but gets equally verdant as your ears adjust to its wavelength. Among the digital wobbles and shimmers emerge hints of squeaky voices, bell-like chimes and other suggestions of non-human cultures. Listening is like eavesdropping on a village inhabited by bearded anthropomorphic beings made of ceramics and code. It’s a little peculiar, you don’t really understand what’s going on, but you can’t pull yourself away.

Music Of The Terrazoku, Ethnographic Recordings From An Imagined Future is described as an artefact from a ‘transitional period in humanity’, a point in the future after the climate’s collapsed. The music lands somewhere between Ursula K.Le Guin’s & Todd Barton’s Music And Poetry Of The Kesh and Mad Max. Will Glaser is predominantly a drummer, but here he also wields synths and electronics, alongside acoustic instruments played by a cast of collaborators. The album begins with insectoid synths and a tapestry of gongs before launching into a pounding, sidewinding groove. Elsewhere come shimmering, percussion-free moments, such as ‘Sunshower’s lulling strings and voices, and soaring bass clarinet interludes from James Allsopp. The second tape gets increasingly synthetic, and increasingly perilous. ‘Bees’ begins in an apoidean swarm before hitting a spasm of drum machines and sequencers. ‘There’s Shit In The River’ has Ed Dudley’s vocals ranting like a one-person riot beneath scorched beats, the title suggesting the future Glaser is imagining isn’t that distant from our time of, well, shit filled rivers. The album’s a roaming space where narrative starts to emerge through shifting tempos and a vast toolkit of percussion, layers of polyrhythms and frazzled electronics giving the impression of a society battling to stabilise its groove in a junked world knocked off its axis. It all ends with Laura Kinsella somberly reciting a poem by activist Yang Licai. It’s a step away from the precipice, a warning that the increasingly apocalyptic freight train ride suggested by the album’s arc might still be diverted.

Eric Wong and Yan Jun have both appeared in this column before, but not together. The former’s practice focuses on subtle sounds, proximity and motion, typically taking advantage of the portability of Bluetooth speakers. The latter is a multi-disciplinary artist, the nature of whose diverse work is perhaps best hinted at by a quote on his Bandcamp – “I wish I was a piece of field recording.” Tracked in Berlin in 2017, Relyis the duo’s second collaboration album, although it was recorded before their first, 2024’s *Dichotomic Language.*On the first side, Wong broadcasts sine tones from a laptop, which Yan’s voice, a stream of hums and groans, seems to, if not mimic, at least attempt to share space and shape with. Sounds bodily and electronic become curiously entangled through close proximity and unlikely familiarity with each other. The second side, ‘Barely’, is dominated by the kind of fiendishly high, oddly captivating feedback tones typically dwelled in by Sachiko M. Around, voice exhales, gurgles and gulps. As sounds diffuse across both sides of the tape they accrue a sense of presence far greater than something much louder could. This music occupies the space it’s moving through in utterly perplexing ways.

High-definition bass sways out from fuzz and static. Brittle guitar lines weave together fragmented voice notes and scuffed beats. Mobile phone alarms abruptly disperse vaporous clouds. B Side, the second album by Peru-born, UK-based producer Areliz Ramos, plays with the borders between in and out of focus, clarity and obfuscation, drift and grounding. On ‘Recuerda!’ AF85’s verses stride through a glistening beat and soaring, dewy synths. On the title track, a candid diary entry from Ramos about searching for a certain sound blurs into waves of self-doubt while the track swings from glacial elegance to glitching smog. Her tracks are full of information, yet her music feels light, intimate, as if all this audio is acting as glue as much as a distancing boundary. B Sideis a den built using sheets made from the noise of the outside world. It’s a little creased, but once you’re inside it’s hard to leave.

Mordran is a one-person black metal project, but Witchwood marks a move into synthesiser music, the Sweden-based artist ditching guitars and drums for a MIDI keyboard and VSTs of 80s and 90s synths. The album is a soundtrack to a computer game imagined by the artist (a full description is outlined on the Bandcamp page). It manifests as 11 tracks of highly lucid dungeon synth, where hints of intricate early music glow through warm, lo-fidelity synthesis. On the title track, mournful pads underpin layers of elegant arpeggios. ‘Eldwyn Village’ arrives like a sombre fanfare. ‘Slaying The Heart of The Coven’ slips into a stately stride echoing the intensity of Mordran’s heavier work. Witchwood the game might not exist, but there’s enough clarity and drama in this music for it to augment reality all by itself.

New York City-based trio Blisspoint make pop music as a jumpstart for the future. High velocity trance synths meet distortion bathed guitar chug on Left Respected’stitle track. Jungle breaks rip through floor dissolving bass and soaring emo choruses on ‘Bastard’. The final two tracks, doused in chorus-drenched guitar, move into ballad-like terrain until a blast of distortion hits like a lightning strike on closer ‘In Two’. Angst and catharsis seeps through the songs while the anthemic choruses hint at genres that have been rendered inert by exposure to stadia – IDM, shoegaze, emo, but Blisspoint reanimate and revitalise through high velocity beats and restless, relentless energy. The EP exudes a contagious urgency, Blisspoint trapping an adrenaline surge and riding it over the horizon.

A held tone modulates like a time warped siren while electricity crackles and a cathedral sized chord looms in the background. ‘Attractors’, the opener on Ruben Borgers’ *Local Maxima,*sets the scene for an album that’s both vast and richly detailed. Wielding synths and electronics, the Belgium-based artist forges panoramic, elemental music full of delicate fluctuations. ‘Lofting’’s crackling synths sound like icicles shattering against a digital glacier. ‘Vaalbara’ is slow evolving and drastically expanding, its arc akin to diligently following the signs of a nature trail and finding a spectacular valley has appeared behind you. Borgers’ music crafts monuments from minutiae, so that listening both shrinks you and makes you feel like a giant.