Mark Harwood – or, Urim (Penultimate Press) Haha I get it. Yep, quick, tell Mark Harwood I’ve cracked the code. It’s funny right? Some albums are puzzles that on immediate listen seem to make no sense, it’s like there’s something greater at play, a deep conceptual plan, a series of in jokes that…

Kevin Purdy – Hundreds and Thousands (Soft Records) There’s a woozy psychedelic energy at the heart of Sydney based Kevin Purdy’s eight solo album. It’s playful, inventive and fun, brimming with a mischievous energy, these odd eclectic constructions, unexpected asides and ill defined samples. It’s…

Cyclic Defrost: Best of 2025 I know what you’re thinking, am I human? Did AI write this? Or at the very least did it help? And the answer is who cares? It’s humans who are plunging us into unjust bullshit wars, pretending genocides aren’t occurring on our watch, telling us that reality can no…

Unravelling Le Guess Who?, Utrecht 6–9 November 2025 Now into it’s 19th year, Le Guess Who? (LGW?) is a major international music and arts festival occuring annually in Utrecht, a metropolitan hub of the Netherlands with a picturesque walled city at its core. From the outset, surveying the…

Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider – A Companion For the Spaces Between Dreams (Clandestine Label Services) Jamie Lidell has described this album as "...a guide for those liminal spaces you may find yourself in, so to speak." That space for the artist was an internal one after returning from…

Listen to the strange and beautiful soundscapes of Cleared . Cleared is the longstanding project of Chicago based Steven Hess and Michael Vallera. Since about 2009 they have released albums on Immune, Utech Records and Touch. Their work is characterised by repetition and layering, a near complete…

Listen to Rafael Anton Irisarri’s new music . Cyclic favourite, US composer, producer and mastering engineer, Rafael Anton Irisarri has returned with a new solo album. We've been fans of his work for some time, you can check out our interview with him earlier in the year here. The album, Points of…

Penelope Trappes @ Casa Montjuïc (BCN), 11th of October 2025 The first time we heard of Penelope Trappes was her outstanding remix for Field Works, a desolate soundscape given movement by her hypnotic voice in an already interesting project. That same year we fell for how soothing, oneiric and…

Listen to a newly discovered Western Grey improvisation . Western Grey is the Naarm trio of field recorder, composer and academic Philip Samartzis, guitarist and composer Dave Brown (Candlesnuffer), and late percussionist Sean Baxter. Their previous album Glacial Erratic (2003, Dr Jims), existed…

Princess Liar on songs being magic bullets to the destructive domino effect of “not owning your shit” and other topics Princess Liar is the latest evolution in the artistic journey of Julie Montan. We last caught up with Julie at the release of her Lovers of the Black Bird project ‘Ocean of No…

Jeremy Dower – Personal Computer Music 1997-2022 (Chapter) With Chapter commencing this reissue series of whimsical Australian electronic producer Jeremy Dower I’ve been tearing my house apart trying to locate his Chapter released compact disc EP from 2002, Music For Retirement Villages, Circa…

Cyclic Selects: Horse MacGyver Horse MacGyver is Naarm based media artist and sound designer Timothy Dwyer. He's been making some pretty unhinged music over the last decade or so on labels such as Nice music and Being Intense Records, playing live regularly, touring with Indonesia's iconic duo…

Listen to Brad E. Rose’s new piece about our impact on the world and its sonic landscape . Brad E. Rose is a Tulsa based musician who records both under his own name or under aliases like North Sea, Charlatan, and numerous others. He also runs The Jewel Garden label and is a founder of the Foxy…

Watch a visualizer for Horse MacGyver’s Bing Bong Horse MacGyver is Naarm / Melbourne based media artist and sound designer Timothy Dwyer who has previously released his music on the likes of !K7, Disaro, No Patience Records, Nice Music, and Moontown Tapes. His forthcoming third album is Bing…

Cyclic Selects: Ov Pain Ov Pain is the duo Renee Barrance and Tim Player who are not only band mates but partners, who hail from Aotearoa but have resided in Naarm for the last decade. They first came to our attention via a couple of albums they released on It Records, Reliquary of Dusk and The…

Cyclic Selects: Jeremy Dower Back in 2002 I chanced upon Jeremy Dower’s Music For Retirement Villages Circa 2050 and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Weird jaunty and melancholic it felt leagues ahead of the music I had been listening to. It turns out Dower had been making music under the name…

Watch Craven Fault’s new video In the last few months we've become a little obsessed with UK artist Craven Faults. His music is long form, hypnotic slow moving, modular synth work that seems to just hover in the air and fill the space. When combined with pastoral videos of sheep or fields in bleak…

Imaginal Soundtracking 3: The Wound Where The Light Enters (Phantom Limb) Somayeh is a writer, photographer and film director based in London. She is part of a new generation of Iranian filmmakers blending the poetic sensibilities of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi with “surreal Western…

Listen to a premiere of Lyon based Tauceti’s debut album Denovali · Tauceti - Guanyin Tauceti is the the alias of Lyon-based DJ, producer, and composer Lilou Chelal. Whilst she's known for her dark, tropical, and sensual techno sets, her debut ambient full-length album Guanyin offers a different…

Listen to Jeremy Dower’s Tetrphnm track ‘Flemington Dream House’ . Back in 2002 I chanced upon Jeremy Dower's Music For Retirement Villages Circa 2050 and couldn't believe what I was hearing. Weird jaunty and melancholic it felt leagues ahead of the electronic music I had been listening to. It…

Watch Daniel Menche and Faith Coloccia’s new Room40 collaboration This collaboration between Faith Coloccia and Daniel Menche exists somewhere between drone and field recordings. It began with Coloccia passing over five recordings of piano compositions which Menche treated, elongated and distended…

Dive within on David Shea’s peaceful new work . Originally from New York and living in Brussels and Melbourne since the early 2000s David Shea has produced over 115 recorded works since 1990. Having collaborated with the likes of John Zorn, Scanner, Jim O'Rourke, and Tullio Angelini as well as…

Zimoun: “When Nothing More Can Be Removed .” Swiss artist Zimoun is best known for installations of industrial objects, creating music from the mechanical, from oscillations and rotation – the sound of movement. If you go to his website you can see some pretty incredible videos which offer a…

Listen to the noisy misanthropic self loathing of YOUR MOTHERS DISGUSTING WINDOW . YOUR MOTHERS DISGUSTING WINDOW is a solo project from Darlene Aaron, who has previously released music as AA Matheson, Bison Grass, Boquillas, WE1 XAM, Jenny Hickingbotham band, and DARLENE over the last 20+ years.…

Listen to Connor D’Netto’s new music on Room40 . Connor D'Netto is a composer, performer and producer who explores the intersections of experimental electronica, ambient and electroacoustic music, combining hardware synthesisers, live instruments, guitar pedals and DIY creations. His music has…

Abstracting authoritarianism: dj sniff “Turntable Solos” (Discrepant 2025) Initial impressions: vinyl scratches in, insects, kids going aah, muffled voices, a drone, static/white noise, a thunderstorm, machine sounds…a spliffed-out beat, jazz drum breaks, dissonant guitar licks, more scratching…

Espinoza @ Festival d’Art Sonor 21st of August 2025 La Festa Major de Gràcia, a celebration that’s been around for over 150 years, took place this year from the 15th until the 21st of August, holding our beloved sound art festival in the Perills passage-way amongst the festivities. The context of…

Listen to Ov Pain’s new synth experiments . Ov Pain is Renee Barrance and Tim Player, an Aotearoa born Naarm based duo who have recorded five albums together. Their approach, often improvisatory is based around immediacy. In the past they've released a couple of albums on It Records and have…

Ryoji Ikeda ultratronics/ CORIN presents DIWA – Now Or Never Festival: Melbourne Town Hall: 28th of August 2025 Japanese audio visual artist Ryoji Ikeda is so far down the digital rabbit hole now that he’s made the world of 0’s and 1’s and digital code his instrument of choice. It’s hard to think…

Listen to Mike Majkowski’s evocative new piece Berlin based Australian bassist and composer Mike Majkowski is no stranger to Cyclic Defrost. We last spoke with him in 2019, you can read that here, and we've reviewed a bunch of his albums including 2023's durational work Coast (review here), 2019's…

Alex Zhang Hungtai x MATRIA (Now or Never Festival): Royal Exhibition Buildings Melbourne: 21st Aug 2025 It was impossible not to feel a sense of anticipation as we headed towards Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Buildings on the opening night of the Now or Never Festival, thanks to the warm pink glow…

Tropical Fuck Storm – Fairyland Codex (Fire Records) Firstly, I just want to shout out to our dearly beloved Fiona Kitschin (Bass player and vocals) who has been through the tough ordeal of breast cancer. Great to see you back Fi. After reviewing their relentless live album Tropical Fuck Storm’s…

Listen to the new 26 minute piece from Australian trio The Necks . Australian improvisational instrumental trio The Necks have returned with their 20th release. Disquiet consists of 4 long form pieces clocking in at 3 hours plus and not unexpectedly traverses some pretty diverse terrain. That's…

Listen to Alister Spence’s textural exploration of his Fender Rhodes . Alister Spence is a Sydney based pianist, composer and improviser who boasts a multitude of projects in a variety of styles. We last saw him in Asteroid Ekosystem, a cross genre supergroup of sorts with Ed Kuepper, Lloyd…

KUKII + Howie Lee at Laure Prouvost “WE FELT A STAR DYING”, Kraftwerk Berlin, 4 May 2025 On a grey drizzly evening in early Spring, punters queued up for a finissage performance at Kraftwerk Berlin, a massive multi-use space in a former powerhouse. It is part of an art and events complex in the…

Elif Yalvaç and Çağrı Tozluoğlu: We had a chat with the multi-faceted UK based Turkish artists Elif Yalvaç and Çağrı Tozluoğlu. They released ‘Sediments’ earlier this year on TimbreWorks, and after reviewing this work that we decided to dig a bit deeper into their universe and explored the…

Lagoss & Abagwagwa – Island Slang (Discrepant) Lagoss are a trio boasting Discrepant label head Gonçalo F. Cardoso, along with Mladen Kurajica and Daniel García (Tupperware), who’s debut album featured these electro acoustic snippets of fantastical island exotica. They’re joined by Abagwagwa (aka…

Various Artists – Recognition 25 Years (Recognition) We were glad to receive Recognition's V.A. in commemoration of their anniversary. The pioneering Polish label turned 25 this year and celebrates with a delicious compilation featuring most of the artists that are part of their catalogue. Started…

Revisit Ben Frost’s seminal Steelwound via a forthcoming 20th anniversary edition Can you believe its been over 20 years since Ben Frost released his incredible Steelwound album? Room40 honcho Lawrence English does. As an early champion of Frost's work, he released it initially back in 2004 and…

Listen to the weird hyper potpourri that is Polonius Released in April on Discrepant's sub label Souk, we've been really enjoying the work of Egyptian-French artist Seif Gaber aka Polonius. It's weird stuttering stilted funk, odd fragmented of sound that seems to synthesize so many references,…

Abul Mogard: “The idea was to find a place at the edge of dissonance.” Abul Mogard has had a very prolific past couple years, and it wasn’t missed on our radar. Aside from remarkable duos (‘In Uno Spazio Immenso’, ‘Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close’), live shows recordings (with Rafael Anton…

Watch Sergio Merce’s forthcoming microtonal sax music Sergio Merce is a sax player and sound artist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Beyond the sax he uses a variety of instruments, electronics and field recordings. He has released much of his pretty diverse solo work on the Hitorri label as well…

Unsound Adelaide: Fri 11th – Sat 12th July 2025 To call Unsound eclectic is an understatement. It never fails to provoke, confound, seduce or dismay – often in equal measure, and often in the course of one set. Held across two nights in the Adelaide CBD it has become something of a beacon for…

Cyclic Selects: YEARNS YEARNS is Joel Saunders of Spirit Bunny and A Country Practice alongside Andrew Foley of An Heirloom and Grids/Units/Planes. Outside of YEARNS they have separately appeared on releases on Room 40 and hellosquare Records, collaborating with artists including Erik Griswold…

Watch The Bug’s bleak fuzzed up take on Galya Bisengalieva’s Alash-Kala We're pretty taken with this brutal, bleak industrial rework from one of our favourite purveyors of bass music, The Bug. It's his remix/collaboration with Kazakhstani artist Galya Bisengalieva. If you're curious to hear the…

Hara Alonso – touch•me•not (Fuu Records) A highlight of this year for us came from the hands of Hara Alonso on Fuu Records with her EP touch•me•not. The Stockholm-based pianist and sound artist from Spain is joined by Ryan Packard’s percussion, Ville Bromander’s double bass and Ellen Söderhult’s…

Holden & Zimpel – The Universe Will Take Care Of You (Border Community) There is a carefree euphoria at the heart of The Universe Will Take Care Of You, the debut long player from forward thinking UK DJ and producer James Holden and Polish woodwind extraordinaire Waclaw Zimpel. The music bubbles,…

Judith Hamann – Aunes (Shelter Press) We’ve been paying attention to Judith Hamann recently - you can check out her Cyclic Selects from 2020 here. The Australian artist based in Berlin has had collaborations with Oren Ambarchi, Alvin Lucier, The Necks and La Monte Young, just to name a few, and…

Ryoji Ikeda to premiere ULTRATRONICS as part of the Now or Never Festival Iconic audio visual artist Ryoji Ikeda is coming to Melbourne this August as part of the Now or Never Festival. The Festival, now in its third year, also boasts the likes of Laurel Halo, Moritz Von Oswald, and Alex Zhang…

Sonar Barcelona: 12th – 14th of June 2025 From June 12th to the 14th we had one of the key events in the electronic music scene every year: Sónar Barcelona. With a tension in the air leading up to the festival, it was a blast and we enjoyed performances from Four Tet, Skrillex, Todd Terry and…