African Grey Parrots are disarming creatures to share time and space with. Their ability to mimic sounds isn’t as bewilderingly comprehensive as the lyrebird, and they don’t have the raucous squawks of macaws, but the symphony a group of them emits is stunning – a babble that sounds like a tapestry of radical synthesizer noise sewn with strands of human speech. They’re friendly creatures, seemingly fascinated by humans. Attract one’s attention and they’ll come close and start tentatively trying out their curious collection of sounds – some quoted from humans, some not. You can sense they’re trying to communicate something, but you’re also struck by the fact that you’re unlikely to ever fully understand each other. Even when they make sounds we understand, most meaning is likely projection on our part.
This isn’t to make these genius creatures sound unintelligent, they’re clearly not. Maybe one day we’ll even learn to properly understand each other. Unsurprisingly, AI is being touted as a possible solution to interspecies dialogue, a way for humans to understand animals. Although, judging by the amount of tedious AI text filling my Instagram feed, I’m not sure I really trust a human-designed generative machine to capture the nuance, sentiment and intelligence of what a non-human creature is saying. More interesting are two new tapes released recently by Joanna Duda and the JC Leisure Group, which seem fascinated in attempting to cross the unbridgeable human / animal communication gap. They work with animal vocalisations as a way to break the human monopoly on music. The attempt to discern ‘human melody’ in birdsong is an established mode of exploration. But these two tapes look elsewhere for inspiration, forging connections with the natural world that go beyond field recording. Actually, the don’t so much bridge gaps as they embrace differences. It’s an anti-speciesist approach to the natural world which celebrate the rich complexity of other creatures’ dialogues without being limited to anthropomorphisation.
Joanna Duda – Regina Silva (Pointless Geometry)
Joanna Duda created the music on Regina Silva while in Kenya in 2024. Struck by the intensity of the soundscape, she began to perceive the natural environment as a single organism in constant communication. That inspired her to begin collecting field recordings of animal vocalisations, some of which she translated into the rhythms and melodies used on this tape, using digital and acoustic instruments to create vast, intricate compositions organised around logic beyond human music. On ‘Noctuae’ vocal samples alternate between voluble babbles and snaps of human language, a synth flourish flaps like a startled bird and a kick drum lands like a seismic event. ‘Lemurs’ sees a bulbous, gong-like synth duet with jovial animal calls. Regina Silva writes the verdant unpredictability of soundscapes into the structures of musical compositions rather than using one as accompaniment to the other. Teeming with life and musicality, there’s a connection in process between Duda and Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux, but to different ends. Duda works with a more panoramic view of aural life, smudging the boundaries between music, both human and natural.
JC Leisure Group – Low Tide, Hi Grypus! (Edições CN)
During the early Covid lockdowns, Liverpool-based JC Leisure Group retreated to Wales’ Porthdinllaen Peninsula, spending their days recording a colony of Atlantic grey seals. Bringing this archive of pinniped sounds back to Liverpool, they decided they wanted it to become more than field recordings, so built a system that would trigger seal sounds “in aleatoric and unrepeatable ways” in response to musical gestures from humans. Low Tide, Hi Grypus! documents a night-long recording session at 90mil in Berlin, where different ensembles of local improvisors interacted and responded to the seal system. The human component sees judicious use of pedal steel guitar slither through harp, organs, flutes, piano and AutoTuned voice. The seals deliver an array of gurgles, whoops, squeaks and cries which nudge the musicians into ever looser and more peculiar shapes. The results oscillate between sounding like a ramshackle sci-fi country jam band and sparkling levitation, while the vocal led ‘Sonata i’ beautifully encapsulates the bizarre space that emerges when humans try to adapt to animal lexicons. The JC Leisure Group go beyond creating a backdrop for the seals. Instead, they map the impossibility of an interspecies dialogue and the odd music that emerges from the attempt to create a common ground.
Gelbart – TK 745 (Kitchen Leg Records)
A snarl of guitar. Drums charge in. We’re in the land of garage rock until seconds later everything trips into a maze of Super Nintendo synth tones. Vocals sound like (The Fantastic Four’s) H.E.R.B.I.E. babbling through a busted walkie-talkie. An orchestra appears as if from nowhere for an epic finale. ‘Crawl Into Your Cloud’ opens Berlin-based Adi Gelbart’s TK-745 in a blast, constantly wrong-footing the listener while never feeling forced. It sets a bamboozling tone and pace Gelbart maintains throughout the album, which is named after the Grundig TK-745 – a 1970s reel-to-reel used amply on this cassette. The rest of his set up includes “Dutch consumer-grade plastic mics” and “basic tape effects”. ‘Koenji’ is drum machine surf rock with carnival organ, ‘Autostatic’ sounds like The Sonics jamming with Koji Kondo. Closer ‘The Egg’ is a surreal haze equal parts sixties girl group and tape mangled exotica. Genuinely eccentric, casually mind-blowing, DIY with a boundless sense of imagination, TK-745 is the sound of a one-person pocket pop-symphony traversing the confines of the home studio.
Bara & Isa – Spring EP (Warm Winters Ltd)
Bara & Isa work in slow reveals on Spring EP, the follow up to their 2024 debut, ii. On initial listen it’s sweet, playful music. As your ears acclimatise the subtle weirdness woven into the tunes creeps out. Once fully adjusted to their wavelength you’re struck by how tenderly beautiful the world their music creates is. Opener ‘Dearest, Far’ begins with slide-whistle-like sounds. The duo’s voices enter in lulling duet, circling around each other then collapsing, holding harmony and melody even as they bend it out of shape. ‘2×2 / 3×3’ has a lullaby-like quality, given an edge by rattling percussion and groaning bass. When the track is remixed by producer Verschrin to close the tape, it’s subjected to extreme glitching, yet the distortion and scrambling only makes it more delicate. Where the Vienna / London-based duo Bara & Isa recorded their debut remotely, this follow up was tracked in person. In their webs of toy piano, small instruments and tangled threads of vocal harmony, they sound like a shared safe space. Lopsided, intimate and prone to crumbling, connection and collaboration are sounded as both precarious and magical all at once.
Lina Filipovich – Flowers Of Evil II (Hundebiss Records)
Minsk-born, currently Paris-based Lina Filipovich positions her tape, Flowers Of Evil II, as an unofficial sequel to separate records by groundbreaking synthesists Suzanne Ciani and Ruth White which were both called Flowers Of Evil. Those two records, separately, reflected on Charles Baudelaire’s angst-ridden Les Fleurs du mal. Sonically, Filipovich leans into a much more-clubby space than Ciani ventured into with her 2019 album (White’s was released in 1969). Opener ‘Broken Bell’s glassy sound design and synthetic gusts sashay into the pounding kicks and sticky, side-chained synths of ‘Obsession’. The tape largely stays in this throbbing, gothic-tinted and glass-blown groove, interspersed with creepy drumless interludes and shimmering luminescence so the tracks often seem like their minimal techno structures are being perforated by crystalling mirages. This tape burrows; the music sounds like it’s pulling you into a basement simultaneously dank and full of ecstatic energy. These pounding beats are an ode to the joyous possibilities to be found glowing in a city’s dark and dingy subterranean spaces.
A.A.X’T – Beton Library: Clockwork System Archive [1] (Sacred Tapes)
A.A.X’T is artist Aubrey Taeuber, and the plunderphonic montages and collages on Beton Library: Clockwork System Archive come packaged in a hefty dose of lore which weaves “a tale of forbidden knowledge stolen by elites and denied to the poor.” That could resonate with any point in history, but feels especially raw in 2026’s vortex of arts cuts, generative AI and flag fetishisation. The music itself, which the release notes paint as being snuck out of technocrats’ cultural vaults at some point in the future, includes strange saunters through pastoral stories for kids, a flirty Welsh language lesson, folk songs sung in a variety of languages, explosive piano playing and an interpretation of an iconic film score. There’s not a huge amount of processing going on with these samples, Taeuber seems more interested in layering and sequencing to create a perplexing narrative such as the ominous organ tone wobbling below the documentation of a day in the life of Mary Mouse. The whole thing flows like a discombobulating audio book, Taeuber toying with the innate weirdness of hearing the material they’re working with played out of context.
Fenland Drone Workshop – Wicken Dawn (Mossy Tapes)
Fenland Drone Workshop are an elusive entity. Releasing music since 2022 according to their Bandcamp page, there’s little information about who they are other than they’re based in The Fens. Their records are often captured in churches, Wicken Dawn was tracked at the Leper Chapel in Cambridge, a building dating to the twelfth century and one they’ve used previously. Sonically, they sit where the pastoral, cosmic and arcane intersect. On the a-side, waves of shimmer are occasionally corralled by tip-toeing bass and owl hoots before lapping against an organ. On the reverse, what sounds like the whir and blur of a celestial tape loop unravels into a motorik synth arpeggio followed by a lilting guitar vamp. Throughout, samples of speech oscillate between the diaristic and the existential, keeping these celestial zone-outs tethered to earthly struggles. It gives their music a spooky gravity well beyond new age, a sense they’re summoning ghosts from the built and natural environment. It means the aviary of bird song playing completely uninterrupted for several minutes at the end of the first side goes beyond sounding like a tranquil bed to becoming both lush and portentous simultaneously.
Estuary Fragmentation – Sedimentary Flesh Diary (Riforma)
All that is solid melts into gooey plastic on Sedimentary Flesh Diary. Denver, Colorado-based Estuary Fragmentation’s process involves “weaving field recordings together with granular ephemera”. Across the tape, the listener hears creaks and croaks of poorly-lubricated hinges, scrapes and jangles, rattling aerosol cans, trickling water and what sounds like someone DJing in an ice rink. These sounds gurgle and twist in collages with subtle electronic augmentation, all tied together with gloomy piano which oscillates between twinkly meandering and sudden sombre focus. The end result is an album that sounds like it could have been recorded at the Groupe de recherches musicales studio, but with an embrace of and toying with the familiar, which GRM artists historically have tended to avoid. The space this music creates fluctuates between disconcertingly proximate and perplexingly remote, indoors and outdoors, crowded and desolate. At several points a sound that starts acoustic seems to morph into digital in front of your ears. Estuary Fragmentation revels in the possibility of sound, not just to evoke settings, but to create situations where physics as well as perspective appear to bend and twist.
NIKKOLAHS – Window Areas (Indefinite Boundary)
Window Areas roams thresholds and perimeters. On the title track, Tokyo-based artist and multi-instrumentalist NIIKKOLAHS mingles wheezing flute, insectoid percussion and birdsong with crystalline synth sequences, gradually sliding into speaker rattling drums, that wouldn’t sound out of place on an African Head Charge album, backing eerie, whispered vocals. On ‘Earthworks’, strident percussion collapses with the arrival of what sounds like a kosmiche rhythm section. Further traditions barrel in, creating a situation where multiple idioms and time-signatures are colliding and miraculously striking equilibrium rather than chaos. It’s this intricate sense of rhythm that makes the album’s anarchistic cultural geography really sparkle. NIIKKOLAHS doesn’t just borrow grooves from across the globe, but tessellates them until new ones jump out, with the pulsating, tempo-dilating momentum striking ecstatic terminal velocity on closer ‘Elementals’. Window Areas is music as interpolation, reveling in the new possibilities that sprout between known quantities.
Alga – Terceiro Solstício (Colectivo Casa Amarela)
For Terceiro Solstício, Alga, the music project of multimedia artist Cláudia Simões, offers a dedication to winter, her swirls of austere guitar, bowed strings and voice feeling tuned to the timescales needed to process gradual changes of climate and matter. On opener ‘Luz’ she assembles a trembling choir of layered voice, a glacial construction which starts to creak and crack like rapidly thawing ice. From there she slips into a series of mantras on electric guitar, approximately slowcore in mood but stuck in a lulling motion that seems tied to more elemental pacing, reinforced by the water trickling that runs in the background of much of this tape. For closer ’em flor(es)’ she slips into a sway of harrowed drones and vocals which surge so much speakers distort, closing the arc of an album which could either be soaring upwards or spiralling inwards depending on how you listen to it. There’s a special kind of minimalism in Alga’s music, her balance of repetition and variation never feels laboured but grounded in rhythms of cyclical motion and constant evolution. Her focus is winter but the album feels tied to feeling the movement through seasons more broadly. The whole thing holding time like an abrupt change in air pressure.
