Another strong release from this gifted English electro-acoustic composer, whose discography to date shows the clarity of her ideas, each composition focused on one object or concept at a time, and seeing through the plan to completion. She’s also unafraid of telling stories, a rare thing in this genre.

On this survey of recent pieces (2018 to 2023) I somehow detect a very “modern” sound, made by a creator informed by glitch, techno, ambient and related developments in our field since around 1999 onwards. The “interruptions” of the title manifest themselves as micro-edits and dramatic timbral shifts, making each track an excitement of fizz and texture. There’s also plenty of interruptions on the opener Home Truths, which expresses her own exasperation at trying to get things done at home, without being continually distracted. It may start out as a sonic treatise on domestic objects, but the abstractions of the piece successfully delineate a restless mind and the way that her thought processes work. Microplastics doesn’t have quite the same urgency as that powerful visualisation, but it has an ecological message — it started life as a search for plastic bottles as a sound source and soon became a critique of the “colossal mountains of rubbish” we’re producing in our consumerist society.

After those two well-informed observations, Farewell Fairlight arrives as a more benign centrepiece to the album; well, she got her hands on a Fairlight machine, the sampling keyboard so beloved of Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Trevor Horn and many others, and uses it to create something wholly unexpected. She did use some of the pre-loaded sounds on the floppy disc, but created her own samples of sounds produced by some of the machine’s internal mechanisms — e.g. powering it up, the light pen touching the screen, even the sound of the fans. Events not reckoned as music or even desirable artefacts of the Fairlight. Yet from her notes, it’s clear she knows more about 1980s pop production than the entire staff of BBC Radio One, and it’s both ingenious and entertaining how she’s spliced all this knowledge and innovative sampling methods together with the strictures of formal musique concrète composition. Top marks for this layered and wonderful rainbow symphony which dazzles and brings joy in less than 13 mins.

Also here, Cupboard Love, a virtual exploration of her own mental memory as manifested in wooden cabinets full of photos and papers; and Landline, based on happy memories of an old dial phone from her family home. You can probably guess at the audio texture of this telephone piece, but it’s still a delight and far from clichéd. If there’s a pattern running through these five selections, it’s as much to do with her own personal exploration of her past, as well as devising and applying compositional methods that are entirely aligned with the objects at the centre, in a very sympathetic manner. Besides being full of creative energy, Manuella Blackburn is one of the more altruistic and accessible composers on this label.

Third collection of music on this label from this Argentinean composer, following on from 2019’s Yegl, and this one surveys her works from 1995 up to 2020. Although she began her studies in Rosario and Buenos Aires, she also served her time in France with Horacio Vaggione in 1988, and had a teaching role there (as well as academies in her home country and in Spain).

Many of these eleven compositions are tributes or “hommages” to some of the big Kahunas in this field — perhaps they are personal friends, or have acted as mentors to Justel — including Bayle, Parmegiani, Ferreyra, Ferrari, and other names such as Gonzalo Biffarella and Annette Vande Gorne. It’s good to see this personal and friendly dimension, reaching out to her fellow composers instead of seeing them as competitors, and the listener will be glad to hear she’s not producing pastiches or slavish copies of their techniques. Indeed one of the pieces Dialogo con Ana is explicitly structured as a musical conversation, produced by swapping tape recordings with the improvising pianist Ana Foutel. Elsewhere, we see evidence of more familiar concerns that thrive in this genre, such as taking the listener into “virtual and imaginary worlds”, and reworking tapes from the archives of GMEB and GES Vierzon in France.

Elsa Justel may, for me, lean a little too heavily on the formal practices and techniques of tape composition, but who can resist a composer who describes one of her earliest pieces as “brown and liquid like tea,” a 10-minute piece full of “blurry” and “dripping” textures. Such phrases have an immediacy and idiosyncrasy that is just priceless.

There is a particular kind of composer who does not simply write music but builds worlds and then invites you to get lost in them. With Cartografía interior, his first solo release on empreintes DIGITALes (IMED 25200), Diego Bermudez Chamberland does precisely that: he drafts a private cosmogony and hands us the map — though not without erasing the legend first.

Composed between 2020 and 2023 and revised in 2025, this 44-minute acousmatic triptych draws inspiration from Scandinavian mythology as recounted in Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. But let’s be clear: this is not programmatic folklore with surround-sound Vikings. Bermudez Chamberland is not illustrating sagas; he is metabolizing them. The mythic scaffolding becomes an energetic principle rather than narrative content. Yggdrasil may hover in the background, yet what we encounter is less a tree than a network of forces.

Online responses to the album have often highlighted its sculptural quality — and rightly so. Bermudez Chamberland, trained at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and shaped by years of dialogue with figures such as Martin Bédard and Louis Dufort, approaches sound as a malleable substance. His studio becomes both laboratory and observatory. Field recordings of natural elements, instrumental gestures from collaborators, and a battery of synthesis techniques are fused into a fixed stereo medium that feels anything but static. The “2.0” format might suggest limitation; the listening experience suggests vertigo.

The opening movement, Chronomundo, operates at a planetary scale. It unfolds like a slow rotation of cosmic matter, with dense textural strata that seem to drift across enormous distances. Spatial depth is not decorative here; it is structural. One senses tectonic shifts, orbital sweeps, the almost comical audacity of trying to sonify something as grand as cosmology. And yet, the piece resists bombast. Instead of thunderous clichés, we get evolving masses and microscopic fissures within them. Time feels stretched, elastic, as if the listener were perched somewhere between geological patience and stellar combustion.

If Chronomundo maps the macrocosm, Destin // Trouble zooms in on turbulence. The double slash in the title becomes audible as montage logic: call-and-response fragments, sudden anticipations, sonic behaviors that appear, scatter, regroup. Bermudez Chamberland personifies nature without anthropomorphizing it. Woody timbres sprout and dart; iterative flutters evoke insect wings clustering around a light source; storms accumulate not as Hollywood drama but as layered agitation. The movement is playful in its complexity — one can almost imagine the composer smiling while coaxing chaotic systems into temporary alliances.

What stands out is the music’s vitality. Reviews circulating online frequently note how alive the material feels, how it refuses to settle into static drones. Even when textures sustain, something is always mutating at the edges. Energy here is not merely volume or density; it is behavioral. Sounds behave like entities with impulses, hesitations, and collisions.

The final movement, Punto maximal, turns inward — or downward — toward the infinitely small. If the first movement surveyed mythic vastness and the second dramatized conflict, this one examines intimacy. The microscopic becomes epic. Tiny iterative “points” punctuate the sonic field, suggesting cellular or particulate life. The humor, perhaps unintended, lies in the realization that the smallest gestures can feel as overwhelming as galaxies. Bermudez Chamberland treats the micro-world with the same grandeur he afforded the cosmic, collapsing scale into perception.

It is tempting to describe Cartografía interior as immersive, but that word has grown tired from overuse. What makes this work compelling is not immersion alone, but its elasticity of perspective. The composer revisited and revised the piece in 2025, reinserting materials, rebalancing energies — effectively bending his own past into the present. The album becomes a meditation on time not only thematically, but structurally. Past, present, and speculative future coexist in the studio’s layered memory.

There is also something tender beneath the mythological ambition. The project’s genesis traces back to youthful readings of Nordic lore, encouraged by a mother who nourished imagination with books. That detail matters. Beneath the sophisticated sound design and conceptual architecture lies a child enthralled by infinite worlds and cosmic trees. Cartografía interior is, in a sense, a grown-up answer to that early wonder.

And perhaps that is its quiet achievement: it reminds us that mythology was never about gods alone. It was about scale — about locating oneself between the titanic and the microscopic. Bermudez Chamberland does not give us a literal Valhalla or a faithful sonic Yggdrasil. He gives us thresholds, energies, morphologies. He gives us a universe that feels invented yet strangely familiar.

In the end, the “inner cartography” of the title is less about mapping territory than about mapping attention. The record suggests that every listener carries a cosmogony inside — vast, turbulent, teeming with unseen life. This album simply hands you the coordinates and says: explore.

This is one of those records that doesn’t arrive so much as surround you. You don’t press play and wait for something to happen. You step inside, and the light politely excuses itself.

Du noir tout autour is Armando Balice doing what he does best, which is treating darkness not as mood, but as material. Not metaphorical gloom, not cinematic dread, but darkness as a working condition. As substance. As a space where sound has to earn its right to exist. This is acousmatic music that remembers where it came from: microphones out in the world, analogue oscillations with rough edges still showing, edited with care but never sanded down to politeness.

Balice has been circling this territory for years. A French-Italian composer shaped by Ina-GRM and the lineage of Denis Dufour and Jean-Marc Weber, he carries both the discipline of electroacoustic tradition and a taste for density that flirts openly with noise, metal, and orchestral mass. His music often sounds like it wants to be larger than the speakers that contain it. This album is no exception.

The record is built as a triptych, three long-form works that function like different angles on the same inner landscape. Black Garden, Empty Garden, Light Garden. The titles might suggest a neat progression, but the experience is less linear than that. Darkness doesn’t disappear. It reorganizes.

Black Garden opens the set with a sense of dramatic restraint. Field recordings, ravens, forest textures, and the cello of Lola Malique are not presented as scenery, but as unstable elements. Silence and noise keep interrupting each other, like tectonic plates that never quite lock into place. The short noir movements puncture the flow, brief moments where the ground seems to drop out entirely. It feels calm only if you mistake stillness for safety.

Empty Garden is the most unsettling of the three. Here, emptiness is not absence. It’s pressure. A void that hums quietly with potential. Sounds emerge cautiously, hover, then withdraw, leaving afterimages behind. There’s something almost physical about the way Balice lets space breathe, then compresses it again. This is not ambient comfort. It’s the kind of quiet that makes you aware of your own listening.

By the time Light Garden arrives, the title risks optimism, but Balice avoids that trap. Light here is not resolution. It’s exposure. Refractions, iridescent textures, and spectral reflections rise from the same dark matter as before. The cello reappears, birds return, synthetic tones stretch and fracture. Light and shadow coexist, inseparable, like two sides of the same sound.

What stands out across the album is Balice’s sense of form. These pieces collapse and rebuild themselves constantly. Elevations fall. Ruins reorganize. It feels architectural, but unstable, like a structure designed to test how much imbalance it can survive. Editing plays as big a role as sound generation, but the edits never feel surgical. They feel like collisions.

There’s a quiet humor buried in all this severity. Not jokes, but a kind of wry awareness. The idea that in the dark you can see more than you expect. That monochrome surfaces hide complex materials. That a flock of birds and a cello can share a space without explanation. Balice doesn’t underline these moments. He lets them happen and trusts the listener to notice.

Du noir tout autour is not an easy record, and it has no interest in being one. It demands attention, patience, and a willingness to let images form slowly, then dissolve. But it’s also deeply lyrical in its own abrasive way. A reminder that darkness is not the opposite of clarity. Sometimes it’s the only place where things come into focus at all.

With the release Cartografía interior (Inner Cartography), Diego states that ’I had envisioned exploring Scandinavian mythology through my acousmatic compositions’ although why a Québécois Costarican would do this isn’t actually explained, nor does the music picture any such thing to me as a listener.

As a triptych, each of the three pieces lock on to themes also contained in the other pieces, so that it all — in effect — feels like one work. Its tumultuous writhing and crashing, ripping and breaking sounds, picture to me great devastating storms, with buildings ripped apart and collapsing under the strain. Couple that with multi-pitched filtering giving it all a surreal 3D feel, it’s all quite a spectacular and exhausting listen. Play it loud and you neighbours will probably think the house is falling down!

So, quite where any of the Scandinavian mythology fits in with all this I don’t know. An interesting release, but certainly one I’d need to be prepared for and in the mood!

My prior listening notes for Du noir tout autour (Blackness Al Around) state ’good, a bit Stockhausen in parts’ and ’extraordinary’ and on this third listen I’m no less impressed. It’s obvious that Armando is well versed in advanced manipulation of sound, and he’s also quoted a s quite an active improvising artist, and first came to the attention of the wider public as one of the finalists of the Prix Russolo 2016-17 competion.

Containing just three big pieces, the disc opens with Black Garden, credited as an eight part work in which elements of the three “Noir” phases are also revisited in the following tracks. My immediate impression of the opening this time is that it’s not so far removed from Boguslaw Schaeffer’s similarly Hymnen like (Stockhausen-esque) works on the Edition RZ releases Inventionen 1 and 2. It goes through a number of phases, with the final section the icing on the cake. Empty Garden then follows more subtly at the start, with environmental sounds, including footsteps, carrying the piece along, and again it culminates with a powerful phase. Light Garden opens with a record run-off and crackle, and then grows with grandiose electronic tones heralding two peaks during its length.

All impressive stuff, and with great use of combining acoustics, musique concrete and electronics, ranging from the subtle to the almost mind-blowing.