Found Sounds #7

Unlike some of the artists discussed in the first part, Omer Eilam uses nature not as a sound source, but a source of inspiration instead. For his self-released »Imaginary Ecosystems« album, the electroacoustic composer draws on mythological and scientific ideas for three complex, multi-layered pieces in which every sound is supposed to be thought of as an individual organism. This means that Eilam acts not primarily as a storyteller on this album, but takes on the role of a sonic facilitator—and indeed, two of the three pieces are based on improvisations.

Over the past five years, forms of minutiae has established itself as one of the city’s leading outlets for field recordings-based works. 2025 saw the release of the speculative »tracing basalt in the onsernone valley« by founder pablo diserens and Ludwig Berger, but the majority of its output was dedicated to and inspired by this being the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. Marc Namblard’s »Arctic Summer,« Ludwig Berger & Vadret da Morteratsch’s »Crying Glacier,« Yoichi Kamimura’s »Ryūhyō,« Cheryl E. Leonard’s »Near the Bear« and diserens’ »ebbing ice lines« find sonic responses to slow ecological catastrophes.

Preserving something and/or engaging with it artistically—that is also the leading idea behind Ignaz Schick’s five-part »City Sound Kolkata« series, released through his own Zarek label alongside collaborative albums by the prolific turntablist in tandem with other musicians. Together with six movers and shakers from the Indian metropolis’s scene such as Dibyokamal Mitra, Sukanya Chattopadhyay, or Varun Desai, Schick entered into a dialogue with Kolkata’s soundscapes and musical traditions during the original City Sound project in the years of 2022 and 2023. The result is a series of boundaryless, yet site-specific releases.

Berlin-based composer Khaled Kurbeh also weaves environmental recordings into his »Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh لكلّّ فضاءٍٍ إيقاعه« album, his debut for Australia’s Research label. Most fascinatingly, on »Nuzha I (نُزهة ١)« we listen to someone stoically shell sunflower seeds for 51 seconds while different birdcalls can be heard in the background. This makes for an almost surreally banal and quotidian moment on a record that works extensively with synthetic sounds and elegiac tones, and turns it into something that feels both earthy and cosmic at once.

A similar contrast marks »L'Makina,« the new album by theorist and sound artist Gilles Aubry. Released on Corvo, the record takes its name from a L’Haj Belaid song of the same name, which deals with the advent of the phonograph and its arrival in Morocco. Naturally, Aubry doesn’t take the cutting-edge technology of the 1920s as his starting point and instead works with that of the 2020s—with so-called Artificial Intelligence. Aubry used AI to deconstruct recordings of Belaid to pose fundamental questions about its impact on cultural production and music workers, widening the uncanny valley.

When percussionist Joss Turnbull uses modern technology, it is to enhance his playing. However, his new album on Boomslang is called »TURMOIL« for a reason, and that title is also an apt description of the music itself—a sort of electroacoustic braindance explosion in eight bursts, full of impossibly complicated rhythms and garbled vocals. Turnbull’s work is clearly indebted to his former teacher’s work with the tombak and daf, and indeed also Mohammad Reza Mortazavi’s new album »Nexus,« out on Latency, finds the Berlin-based percussionist use vocals and even sees him follow a more electroacoustic approach.

Rhythm has always been one of focal points in Alejandra Cárdenas a.k.a. Ale Hop’s discography and also the 13 pieces on her new album »A Body Like a Home« for Nicolás Jaar’s Other People are characterised by the Peruvian artist’s extraordinary knack for making her guitar-based sound art sculptures move with a groove. However, it also features spoken-word poems in which Cárdenas explores themes of political oppression and personal trauma. This creates friction with the mostly upbeat character of the songs—heavy subject matters, presented in a way that more often than not feels very light.

Prolific noisenik Joke Lanz also likes to mix it up, his weapon of choice being absurdist humour. For »Ella,« co-released by Klanggalerie and iDEAL, he teamed up with pianist Sophie Agnel. Their joint improvisations are full of twists and turns, winks and grins: This is cut-up-inspired noise that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but is seriously fun. Lanz’s solo album »Zungsang« combines material previously released through Paris label Vice de Forme with new pieces. As the title—roughly, »tongue sing«—indicates, Lanz primarily works with vocal recordings that are being manipulated, mangled, and collaged.

The voice has played a significant role in the work of Yan Jun in recent times, though his anarchic experimentation with overtone singing can be traced back a few years. The jack-of-all-trades recorded the two pieces on »rely,« out on London’s Infant Tree, with the Berlin-based bluetooth speaker-wielder Eric Wong in 2017. Much like on 2024’s »Dichotomic Language,« confusingly recorded years later, Yan Jun uses his voice and breath in similar ways to what can be heard on other recent collaborative albums. These two pieces are proper duets: Wong uses sine waves in ways that make his noise sound like a voice.

In contrast, Wong’s new collaborative album with ex-Berliner Ian Douglas-Moore and Dominic Coles seems more concerned with structure than with flow. The eight pieces on »under under hill« for sun yizhou’s Aloe label are meant to explore »resonance and psychoacoustic experience« through the interplay of electroacoustic guitar, digital sound, and Wong’s speakers. The trio works in the realms of the barely-perceptible and even stretches of silence that can create moments of delicious confusion considering the release medium: Is this just the regular tape hiss, or part of the music? And … who cares?

Michael Thieke and Beat Keller’s collaborative album for the Tokyo institution Ftarri sounds quiet and restrained, but there is a lot going on in this conversation between the former’s clarinet and the latter’s feedbacking guitar. »Last Breath's City Looks Kind Heart« is that rare thing, improvised music made for deep listening. Stefan Roigk similarly keeps it quite quiet on »Unpredictable – what remains in the end…,« recorded live at Studio 764—at least at first. The title is to be taken seriously: What starts off silently soon unfolds as a strange exchange between machine and man when the former starts spitting out randomly selected sounds and the latter reacts to them in ever-different ways. A veritable trip.

The transcontinental improv trio of drummer Christian Lillinger, pianist and synthesisist Elias Stemeseder, and flutist Camilo Ángeles also embraces chaos, mediating between electronic sounds and acoustic interaction. The four pieces on their self-titled début as Algol for the excellent Peruvian Buh label are wonderfully disorientating. The same words can be used to describe Sawt Out’s »Fake Live in America,« the inaugural release of the Berlin label Headache: These three pieces by Mazen Kerbaj on trumpet and percussionists Burkhard Beins and Michael Vorfeld were frankensteined together from various live recordings made during a US tour.

A similar deconstructivist approach is at the heart of »Love« by Das B, featuring pianist Magda Mayas, bassist Mike Majkowski and drummer Tony Buck as well as Kerbaj. However, what the quartet takes apart and puts back together on this co-release by Corbett vs Dempsey and thanatosis is someone else’s work, John Coltrane’s classic »A Love Supreme.« »Love« is both an exercise in reduction as well as in expansion, taking cues and ideas from the source material but never replicating them faithfully. What these four pieces share with the source material are less specific melodies or phrases, but rather a certain sentiment—a sense of quiet ecstasy.

Also Majkowski’s solo album »Tide« on Lawrence English’s label Room40 loosely takes jazz as an inspiration, but aims for something more atmospheric. Essentially consisting of nothing more than a few bars of Bohren & der Club Gore-esque dark jazz that are being looped and slowed down over the course of 34 minutes, it quite literally stretches time. This makes it a perfect album for the end of the year, a time in which life slows down in many parts of this world—even Berlin is becoming less noisy and busy, a little emptier and a lot quieter. It is a good time for catching up with one or two or 68 releases that you might have missed while everything else was moving at breakneck speed.