The next record on Nyxphere is the first one we are announcing before it is out, and it is worth the announcement. Error States of the Body is a record about a body that a system cannot read. Breath becomes code, voice becomes signal failure, intimacy becomes system noise. Its ten pieces move from the body being scanned as data, through verification, corruption, cultural mistranslation, trauma and pop collapse, to refusal. The titles tell that story on their own: “BOOT: flesh.exe”, “Captcha for a Soul”, “Turkish Delight Algorithm”, “Auto-Tune for the Apocalypse”, “The Body Refuses to Render”.

What the titles do not tell you is how austere the music is. There is no beat. No kick, no hats, no grid, no sidechain, none of the objects of dance music. This is a deliberate refusal, and it is what places the record in the lineage of test patterns and data music, of Ryoji Ikeda’s test-tone precision rather than the club. Rhythm here is polymetric and pointillistic: cycles of three, five, seven, nine, eleven and thirteen pulses running against one another, each cycle with its own click and its own fixed place in the stereo field, so that the polyrhythm reads as separate voices in a room rather than as a pattern. Patterns phase against slower copies of themselves. Binary counters modulo a prime fire clicks bit by bit. Pure tones and noise are gated at competing rates. The low end arrives as events on their own prime cycles, never as a bassline.

Nothing repeats

The rule that organises the album is that no two pieces share a low end or a low click. Each has its own: a loading glide, a held pure sub, a struck resonator, a liquid sustain, a resampled note, a plucked string, a vowel hum, two notes beating out of tune, a note that forgets to switch off, a swell that thins. The same goes for the small percussive families, a crackle here, a water-drop there, a hand-drum on an aksak nine in “Turkish Delight Algorithm”. It is the opposite of a producer’s template. Ten pieces, ten bodies, and no generator shared between them.

The whole album lives in one harmonic world, a dark diminished field on D, so that however different the pieces are in material they are unmistakably one record. Everything is synthesised in code or drawn from the composer’s own sample pool; the cuts are hard, with three-millisecond edges, over a living floor that never falls to digital silence. And her voice, for once, is absent by design. It is the one thing the system never manages to render.

A second layer, performed

The mix treats each finished piece as an instrument. The click band travels a stepped path through the stereo field on its own polymetric period; a wide dark room is cut by a rhythmic gate so the space itself stutters; at the seams an instant of the lattice is frozen into a spectral pad and held under the clicks; tuned combs on the album’s chord are excited by the clicks so the lattice sings the harmony. Beat-repeats accelerate into edits, reversed pre-echoes announce every entrance, and the dry signal drops out while the room keeps ringing. In “Ebru Dataset No. 1” the image is mirrored. In “Sub-Bass for Unprocessed Trauma” an octave below the sub is added in the refrains. “Auto-Tune for the Apocalypse” narrows to mono as it fails.

Why it matters

Eda Er’s recent records have each taken one material and pushed it to its limit: bells, an organ, a tray of water. This one takes the click, the smallest unit of digital sound, and builds a body out of it that the system keeps failing to parse. It is the most rigorous thing she has made and, in its refusal to give you a pulse to hold, the most demanding. Play it in the dark, on speakers that can carry a sub event without flattering it, and let the primes fall out of step with each other. Thirty-five minutes, and not one bar of four.

Error States of the Body by Eda Er — ten pieces, 35 minutes, 44.1 kHz / 24-bit. Composed, produced and mastered in code by Eda Er, 2026. Forthcoming on Nyxphere; release date and pre-order to be announced.
Tracklist: 1. BOOT: flesh.exe (3:06) · 2. 99.999% Pure Signal (3:24) · 3. Captcha for a Soul (3:23) · 4. Ebru Dataset No. 1 (4:00) · 5. Frozen Sample (3:23) · 6. Turkish Delight Algorithm (3:36) · 7. Sub-Bass for Unprocessed Trauma (4:06) · 8. Auto-Tune for the Apocalypse (3:42) · 9. MIDI Error in the Garden of Eden (3:36) · 10. The Body Refuses to Render (4:00).

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Soufflerie is the French word for the wind system of an organ: the blower, the trunks, the room where the instrument breathes. It is a good title for a record that has a great deal of wind in it and no organ at all. The instrument on these six pieces was built pipe by pipe in code, seventeen ranks of it, every pipe with its own harmonic series, its own permanent tuning error, its own turbulence and its own way of speaking. Then it was tuned. Not to a temperament out of a book, but to Eda Er’s voice.

The method is simple to state and strange to hear. Two hundred and sixteen held notes were measured out of her recordings and folded into twelve pitch classes. What came back was a temperament: octaves pure, fifths twelve cents wide, thirds eighteen cents wide, a minor second of ninety-two cents. Nobody decided any of this. It is simply where she puts her notes. Because the fifths are wide they beat, between one and four times a second depending on the register, and that beating is the only rhythm on the record. Kali Malone’s The Sacrificial Code, the obvious neighbour here, inherits its wolves from the meantone organs of Malmö and Stockholm. This one inherits them from a woman’s larynx.

The voice as a rank

Her voice is not a soloist over the organ. It is drawn on the instrument as a stop. A sung note is extended the way a pipe sustains, the steady middle of it looped forward and back so that the loop has no seam, and several separate recorded instances of the same note are sounded together the way several pipes of one rank sound together, so the rank’s undulation is her own intonation drifting from one take to the next. Nothing is transposed, resampled or corrected. She sings inside the chorus, never on top of it. The wind is her breathing: the floor under all six tracks is made from the breaths between her phrases, and the blower is never switched off.

Down in the pedal there is one more borrowed body. The 16′ reed was voiced from the trombone of Simon Sieger, her partner in äbädä, eighty-three sustained low notes measured out of the duo’s sessions and turned into a spectral envelope so the formant stays where a trombone keeps it. It is still synthesised, still in her temperament, and it is drawn gradually into all six pieces.

Jazz, held until it dissolves

What keeps this from being an exercise is the harmony. It is jazz: rootless thirteenths, quartal stacks, guide-tone tritones, the minor line cliché, a walking bass moving at one note a minute, voiced for an organ in her temperament and held until it gives way. Every chord change throws the room open and lets it dry again; the voices of a chord circle the building on their own slow orbits, spreading and meeting; in two of the pieces the reeds lean on the swell in a slow swung grid, long-short, the way a ballad organist’s hands do. The spacing rule of the record, no adjacent upper interval narrower than a fourth, turns out to be exactly the spacing pianists use for rootless voicings anyway. So the music got richer without getting rougher.

Six registrations

Each piece is named for the registration it is played on, and each is generated by a rule that is audible from the first minute and never broken. “Plein Jeu” is a chain of thirteen chords in which one voice moves at a time, twice through, the upperwork drawn one stop at a time on the second traversal. “Tierce en Taille” sets the old French solo in the tenor against the same fourteen notes in the pedal at exactly twice the length; the canon takes eleven minutes to come apart and never resolves. “Voix Céleste” is two string ranks five and a half cents apart and seven chords in eight and a half minutes.

“Fonds d’Orgue” lets the pedal walk down through the bottom of the instrument, one note every ninety seconds, so that the chord held above it is consonant, then wrong, then consonant again with nobody moving. “Récit de la Voix Humaine” leaves the organ’s own vox humana in its case and gives the solo to her; and because the notes she sang most are D, E, F, G, A, B flat and C sharp, this piece alone is in D. The mode is whatever her lungs have most of. “Grand Jeu” draws everything, tightens its harmony three times, and then puts the stops in one by one until a single pipe is left, and then that goes too, and what is still sounding is her.

The verdict

Organ records of this kind live or die on patience, and Soufflerie earns its sixty-four minutes because nothing in it ever holds still. The chords sag and recover, the ranks come and go, the beating speeds up and slows as the register changes, and underneath it all a person is breathing. The conceptual move, tuning the instrument to the singer instead of the singer to the instrument, is the kind of idea that could have stayed a footnote. Here it is the sound of the whole record: an organ that is slightly, permanently, humanly out of tune, and a voice that finally has an instrument built to its own measure.

Soufflerie by Eda Er — six registrations for organ and voice, 64 minutes, quadraphonic 4.0 and stereo, 48 kHz / 24-bit. Composed, built, performed, mixed and mastered by Eda Er. All voice from the “Route des Romains” sessions, at natural pitch. Trombone 16′ voiced from the trombone of Simon Sieger. Cover photograph: Eda Er. Released 1 September 2026.
Tracklist: 1. Plein Jeu (9:09) · 2. Tierce en Taille (11:32) · 3. Voix Céleste (8:39) · 4. Fonds d’Orgue (12:09) · 5. Récit de la Voix Humaine (10:39) · 6. Grand Jeu (11:56).
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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Ebru, the Turkish art of paper marbling, is usually described as painting on water. Pigment is floated on a thickened bath, combed into patterns, and lifted off onto paper in a single pull. Eda Er has spent years turning that tray into an instrument. On Mouth of the Marble she does something stranger: she stops treating it as an instrument at all. The tray is a mouth. Across five pieces it learns a language, refuses a name, catches a fever, is prayed to through a thinning wall, and finally closes over the sky.

The premise sets the terms of the sound. A woman sings into water, and the water answers in machine language. The voice throughout is Er’s own solo recording, never pitch-shifted, only cut, retriggered and granulated at original pitch. Every other sound is drawn from her own sample pool: an industrial loop sliced into beats, a hundred-hertz speaker tone repitched into every bass and sub on the record, low instrument tones frozen into bells and walls, a creature’s croak for the machine’s answers, an off-hook telephone tone for a refusal. Nothing is synthesised from nothing. The result sits between divination and club ruins: wet electronics, a diseased four-on-the-floor, Turkish vowels whispered at close range, swelled bells, a soprano that keeps melting into gloss. Everything low is mono and clean. Everything high is kept dark and wet.

Five actions

“Oil Tongue” is the tray learning to speak, and the language it learns is hers. Breath, saliva-clicks, whispered vowels, the small sounds of the comb on the surface; then her real sung fragments surfacing between the synthetic whispers, each answered a moment later by a warped double of itself, the water repeating her imperfectly. The last phrase goes unanswered. Then the voice is granulated into oil, grain by grain, and the surface closes.

“The Water Refused My Name” is paperwork turning into a rave. A broken kick grid at 132, full of dropped and displaced beats, rubber-stamp percussion colliding in threes against the fours, a name tried and tried again in stuttered whisper fragments. Every hard cut keeps the sub underneath, because the water never actually leaves. At the end the name is sung once, whole, and pulled flat semitone by semitone until the water swallows it.

“Pink Disease / Dancing Plague” is Strasbourg, 1518, the summer a city danced itself to exhaustion. The vocal loop returns every four bars but never identical; with each wave of fever it comes back faster, more jittered, more saturated, until an echo-dancer joins it uninvited. The kick itself sickens and detunes as the fever rises. Dancing because you are cursed, not because you are free. It ends with a heartbeat, one last flattened loop, a breath.

“I Was a Room Before I Was a Woman” is the emotional centre: a slow prayer in D minor sung inside a resonant room, drones as walls, glassy electronics as windows, sub-bass felt through the floor. The whole piece is governed by one parameter, the thickness of the wall between you and the voice. It thins over four minutes until the prayer is almost in the room with you, then closes again, leaving the hum inside.

“Marble Eats the Sky” is ceremonial and cosmic. Stacked soprano drones are the sky, swelled bells strike a slow ritual pulse every thirteen seconds, a D pedal holds the earth. Twice the surface is stirred and the whole harmony slips a semitone down into a darker world; the first time it comes back, the second time it does not. From the midpoint the voice stops narrating and is granulated into texture until there is no singer left, only marble. It ends with one enormous bell, a hanging grain of voice, a single droplet.

The verdict

The whole EP breathes around D, and the fact that it ends a semitone lower and stays there is the record in miniature: a transformation that is not a resolution. What makes Mouth of the Marble more than a concept is the discipline of its materials. Because every sound is either her voice or something she recorded herself, the machine’s answers have the same grain as the questions, and the water really does seem to be talking back in a language it learned from her. Twenty-five minutes, one surface, and by the end you are not sure which side of it you are on.

Mouth of the Marble by Eda Er — five ritual actions for voice, water and machine, ~25 minutes, 48 kHz / 24-bit, stereo and quadraphonic 4.0. Composed, produced, mixed and mastered by Eda Er; all voice her own, at natural pitch. Released 3 July 2026.
Tracklist: 1. Oil Tongue (4:37) · 2. The Water Refused My Name (4:26) · 3. Pink Disease / Dancing Plague (4:48) · 4. I Was a Room Before I Was a Woman (5:49) · 5. Marble Eats the Sky (6:07).
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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The Glitch Bloom is Eda Er and Danniel Ribeiro, and the name is a fair description of the method. Ribeiro plays electric guitar and electronics, often through transducers and objects, the guitar treated as a surface to be touched as much as an instrument to be played; Er brings voice and electronics. Harsh sounds intermingle with melodic ones; acoustic manipulations are transformed through processing; sound is treated as both physical and transient. The duo’s practice runs from composed work through improvisation to video, and refuses to settle on any of them. Memory Garden, their first single, is the first time it has been put on record.

At a little over eight minutes it is a single in name only. It begins as an improvisation between the two of them and is then left to overgrow: small failures kept and cultivated, a phrase of voice returning as a texture, a guitar gesture repeating until it becomes an environment. The title is exact. Things are planted, some of them take, and what you hear by the end is not the planting but the garden.

The film

The single comes with a film by Eda Er, generated from the music itself. A per-frame spectral analysis of the track drives a slow botanical growth, vines and blooms in amber, rust and oxblood, with a glitch that creeps through the image as the sound thickens. It is the visual half of the same idea: nothing is drawn by hand, everything grows from the audio, and the errors are the flowers.

Ribeiro’s solo record palpability is elsewhere on this shelf, and hearing the two side by side is instructive: the same touch, the same patience with noise, now in conversation with a voice. More is coming from the duo. For now this is eight minutes of what happens when two people let a mistake bloom.

Memory Garden by The Glitch Bloom (Danniel Ribeiro — electric guitar and electronics; Eda Er — voice and electronics). Single, ~8:22. Film by Eda Er. Released 22 May 2026.
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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Before äbädä was two people in one room, it was two people who could not get to the same room. Entre Deux Rivages, between two shores, is the duo’s first record, and it was written across a closed border in 2020. Separated by countries and composing in correspondence, Eda Er (electronics, synth, voice) and Simon Sieger (trombone, valve trombone, tuba) sent each track out as a letter and got it back shaped by the other’s voice. The record is the sound of that exchange: a phrase offered, a phrase answered, a distance you can hear being crossed.

The circumstances are written into the titles. “Mistral” came out of Marseille’s gusts and a city locked indoors. “Toi d’un autre rivage”, you from another shore, came out of the two shores of Istanbul. “Curfew Dance” came out of the night the curfews were announced in France, a dance for a room you were no longer allowed to leave. Around them, “When the rivers meet the seas” opens the record where fresh water turns to salt, “I’m so lost in blue” and “C’est le son que vous obtenez en caressant une orchidée” (the sound you get when you stroke an orchid) carry the tenderness, and “Meşk”, the Ottoman word for the lesson learned by playing alongside a master, closes it: a piece about how music is passed from one person to another, on a record made of exactly that.

Voice and low brass

The pairing is unusual and it is the whole point. Sieger’s trombone, valve trombone and tuba give the music a floor of breath and metal, slow-moving, physical, sometimes barely more than air through a tube. Er’s electronics and synth sit above and around it, and her voice moves between the two, now a line, now a texture. Because the parts were made apart, neither player ever plays over the other; the arrangements have the spaciousness of a conversation where both people are listening. Laçin Şahin’s mix, with Ece Gülensoy assisting, keeps that space intact.

What it started

Everything äbädä has done since follows from here. The later records were made in one room, mixed in quadraphonic with the two players turning slowly in opposite directions, and their concrete palette grew to include objects, breath and the body. But the founding idea of the duo is already complete on this debut: sound as correspondence, absence as dialogue. It remains the clearest statement of what the project is for, and it is the record to start with if you want to understand why two people who play such different instruments belong together.

Entre Deux Rivages by äbädä (Eda Er — electronics, synth, vocal; Simon Sieger — trombone, valve trombone, tuba). Seven pieces, 38:44. Mix and master: Laçin Şahin. Assistant engineer: Ece Gülensoy. Cover illustration: Eda Er. Released 1 January 2021.
Tracklist: 1. When the rivers meet the seas (5:32) · 2. Mistral (5:41) · 3. I’m so lost in blue (5:32) · 4. C’est le son que vous obtenez en caressant une orchidée (4:01) · 5. Toi d’un autre rivage (5:23) · 6. Curfew Dance (6:01) · 7. Meşk (6:34).
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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klank.ist ensemble is the standing group of the klank.ist collective, founded in Istanbul in 2019: a female-identifying and minority-led ensemble of composers and improvisers who work from free improvisation through semi-structured improvisation, comprovisation and open form. Hierarchy is questioned, boundaries stay fluid. V. DİALOGS is their first studio album, recorded at the ITU MIAM studios in June 2019 and released in April 2021, and it is the clearest document of how the group thinks: four pieces, one by each member, every one of them grown from the dialogue in the room.

The ensemble’s own account of the sessions is worth quoting in spirit. They set out to nourish the dialogues through which they made their sounds and voices heard, valuing the fluid manifestations of activity and passivity: everyone affected by everyone, being affected and affecting one another in turn. The title nods to Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, and the record was made, in their words, at a time in which every silenced voice needed to be heard and reintroduced through dialogue. The monologue becomes a dialogue. That is the whole programme.

Four pieces, four voices

Each member leads one piece, and you can hear four sensibilities sharing one language. Aslı Kobaner’s “Principle of Pleasure” opens the record from the electric guitar, electronics threaded through it. Eda Er’s “I took a Train to Mars” is the longest piece at nearly twelve minutes, electronics and voice carrying a journey that keeps changing scale. Fulya Uçanok’s “Circumstantial Multitudes” works with electronics and the massed voices of the group. Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu’s “C Atmosphere” closes it from the cello, which spends as much time being air and pressure as being a string instrument.

Everyone sings. That is the detail that gives the record its character. Cello, guitar and two electronics rigs is a texture that could easily go cold; the vocals, shared across all four players, keep it in the body, and the moments when the instruments fall away and only the voices remain are where the album’s title lands.

The verdict

Ensemble improvisation records are often documents first and music second. V. DİALOGS is both, and the studio treatment is a large part of why. Laçin Şahin and Oğuz Öz’s recording, Şahin’s mix and Gökhan Deneç’s master give the four pieces a depth of field that lets the listener move around inside them, and Ömer Özçelik’s artwork gives them a single face. It is the record to hear if you want to know where the klank.ist lockdown singles came from, and where the collective’s translocal Sonic Cartographies series was heading. Four people listening hard enough that being heard follows.

V. DİALOGS by klank.ist ensemble (Eda Er — electronics, vocals; Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu — cello, vocals; Aslı Kobaner — electric guitar, electronics, vocals; Fulya Uçanok — electronics, vocals). Recorded at ITU MIAM, Istanbul, June 2019. Recording: Laçin Şahin, Oğuz Öz. Recording assistants: Utku Gürler, Hamit Sultanov. Mixing: Laçin Şahin. Mastering: Gökhan Deneç. Design and artwork: Ömer Özçelik. Released April 2021.
Tracklist: 1. Aslı Kobaner — Principle of Pleasure (8:27) · 2. Eda Er — I took a Train to Mars (11:49) · 3. Fulya Uçanok — Circumstantial Multitudes (7:03) · 4. Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu — C Atmosphere (7:10).
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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The Nyxphere catalogue does not open with an album. It opens with four singles, released within five weeks of each other in the autumn of 2020, all of them made by members of klank.ist ensemble in Istanbul while the city was shut. They were recorded apart, in flats in Tarabya and Kurtuluş and wherever else the five players found themselves, and assembled together afterwards. They are the sound of a group learning to play in a room that did not exist, and they are the right place for a label built on distance to begin.

NYX 001 — Uzaktan

Uzaktan means from afar. It is an electroacoustic piece by Merve Salgar and Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu, recorded in April 2020 between Tarabya and Kurtuluş, two neighbourhoods on opposite sides of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, in the first weeks of the first lockdown. Cello and piano, listened to across water. Salgar took the cover photograph. It is the earliest recording on the label and the first number on the shelf.

NYX 002 and 003 — Lockdown_2 and Lockdown_1

The two Lockdown recordings are the full ensemble at a distance: Merve Salgar, Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu, Eda Er, Fulya Uçanok and Aslı Kobaner, each in her own room. The numbering follows the dates the audio went out, which is why the second comes first. Lockdown_1, filmed in May 2020, is the quieter and stranger of the two: Salgar on tanbur, Er on synth and voice, Kobaner on acoustic guitar, Hatipoğlu on cello, Uçanok on amplified objects, five rooms in one mix. Lockdown_2, filmed in July, shifts the instruments around: Er on synth and drum machine, Hatipoğlu on cello, Salgar and Uçanok on piano, Kobaner on guitar, with a video by Merve Salgar. Both were mixed and mastered by Eda Er, who also made the cover for the second.

NYX 004 — 1.5

“Distancing, the new normal.” 1.5, the safe distance in metres, is an electroacoustic track for voice, electronics and electric guitar by Eda Er and Aslı Kobaner, the second duo project to come out of the ensemble’s quarantine period. Recorded in May 2020 in Istanbul, it is the most concentrated of the four: two players, one line of thought, the space between them measured exactly.

Why they are here

These four are modest recordings and they know it. But the collective they came from, klank.ist, was founded on the idea that a group can be built on exchange rather than on a single address, and its later Sonic Cartographies series, concerts in one city performing video scores written in another, grew directly out of the months these singles document. The ensemble’s studio album V. DİALOGS, recorded the year before, shows what they sound like in one room. These show what they sound like when the room is taken away.

Uzaktan — Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu and Merve Salgar. Recorded April 2020, Istanbul. Cover photo: Merve Salgar. Released 4 September 2020.
Lockdown_2 — klank.ist ensemble: Eda Er (synth, drum machine), Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu (cello), Merve Salgar (piano), Aslı Kobaner (guitar), Fulya Uçanok (piano). Video: Merve Salgar. Mix, mastering, cover: Eda Er. Released 4 September 2020.
Lockdown_1 — klank.ist ensemble: Merve Salgar (tanbur), Eda Er (synth, voice), Aslı Kobaner (acoustic guitar), Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu (cello), Fulya Uçanok (amplified objects). Mix, mastering: Eda Er. Released 8 September 2020.
1.5 — Eda Er (voice, electronics) and Aslı Kobaner (electric guitar). Recorded May 2020, Istanbul. Released 8 October 2020.
All four at klankist.bandcamp.com and nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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Some duos chase a sound. äbädä — the pianist Simon Sieger and the composer-vocalist Eda Er — chase a climate. Unclassifiable Weather, their second album, is six improvised tracks that behave less like songs than like passing weather systems: pressure builds and releases, lyric fragments drift in like warm air, noise gathers and storms, and then the sky clears. The title is the thesis. This isn’t a fusion of genres; it’s a weather in which genres appear for a moment — a snatch of song, a percussive squall, a chamber gesture — and are gone before you can name them.

It’s the follow-up to the duo’s debut, Marseille 2019, and it represents a real refinement. Where the first album cut between ideas with sharp, Fluxus-like edits, this one moves in smooth arcs. Each track is shaped as a single continuous weather event — a density curve that swells and recedes — rather than a series of interruptions. The result is more patient, more enveloping, and, frankly, more beautiful.

How two people make one sky

The making of it is unusual and worth knowing, because you can hear it. Sieger (piano) and Er (voice, kalimba, electronics, and objects) improvised in parallel, their performances captured as sample-locked stems and then mixed into a four-channel quadraphonic space. In that space the two performers rotate — Er clockwise, Sieger counter-clockwise, at different speeds in every track — so the music is constantly turning around the listener like a slow front moving through. Crucially, neither is ever fully absent from any direction; the piano and the voice are always present somewhere in the room, only ever emphasized one way or another. Even folded down to stereo, that rotation survives as a gentle, perpetual drift.

Holding it all together is an A-minor tonal centre that runs the length of the album as soft, piano-like sustained tones at the structural turning points — a horizon line you can always find. And in place of the more mechanical sound-objects of the debut, the concrete palette here is entirely of the body: breath, whisper, mouth and tongue clicks, humming, footsteps, hand-rubbing, and a heartbeat that runs, quietly, underneath. It makes the weather feel less like a storm outside the window and more like one happening inside a body.

Six systems

The sequence is a forecast in six parts. “Pressure System” opens at low pressure — breath-forward, heartbeat throughout, the density swelling and receding twice without ever bottoming out. “Small Storm for Piano and Mouth” is the turbulent one, and the piece chosen for the album’s video: it builds to a genuine squall around the two-and-a-half-minute mark, mouth-clicks and tongue-clusters crackling at the peak, before an aftershock returns and passes. “Weather Inside the Strings” is the most pianistic — long sustained notes with fifteen-to-twenty-second decays forming an internal weather of resonance inside an enclosed, reverberant chamber.

Then the back half opens out. “Objects in High Wind” is the percussive, scattered track, footsteps and hand-rubbing and clicks blown around a sparser piano. “A Song Breaks the Forecast” does exactly that — a brief melodic phrase climbs and falls through the middle of the piece, a genuine song surfacing out of the atmosphere before dissolving back into it, and it’s the emotional high point of the record. And “Afterpressure” closes everything down: the slowest rotation, the longest fade-in, a single gentle arc, the heartbeat slowing, and a final low A that decays over twenty-some seconds into silence. The pressure has passed; the room exhales.

The verdict

What’s striking about Unclassifiable Weather is how a concept this systematic — rotation formulas, density curves, a fixed tonal centre — produces something that feels so organic and unforced. The rigor is all in service of atmosphere. You don’t have to know that Er turns clockwise while Sieger turns the other way to feel the music breathing around you; you just feel weather moving through a room. It’s improvisation refined into climate, two players dissolved into a single shared air.

Put it on, let it rotate, and watch a small storm pass. Thirty-five minutes; one continuous sky.

Unclassifiable Weather by äbädä (Simon Sieger — piano; Eda Er — voice, kalimba, electronics, objects) is out now. Six tracks, 35:06, quadraphonic 4.0 + stereo downmix, 48 kHz / 24-bit. The “Small Storm for Piano and Mouth” video was created by Eda Er.
Tracklist: 1. Pressure System (5:18) · 2. Small Storm for Piano and Mouth (5:46) · 3. Weather Inside the Strings (5:50) · 4. Objects in High Wind (5:27) · 5. A Song Breaks the Forecast (6:10) · 6. Afterpressure (6:35).
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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palpability is a strange and lovely word for a record, and an exact one. It means the quality of being touchable — of being so present it could be felt with the hand. Across three improvised pieces, the Brazilian composer Danniel Ribeiro spends about twenty-four minutes chasing precisely that: sound you don’t so much hear as feel against the skin.

Ribeiro is from Bahia and based in California, where he completed his PhD in composition at UC Berkeley, working in contemporary and experimental music. palpability collects three studio recordings of solo improvised performances made in Bahia in the summer of 2023 — and it carries an unusual numbering. The tracks are titled “II,” “III,” and “IV.” There is no “I” on the album, because Part I lives elsewhere: the project began as a superimposed improvisation triptych on video, and what you’re hearing here is the work continuing past that first stage, into the studio and into solitude.

Three improvisations

The album is short and asks to be taken whole. “II” (7:28) and “III” (7:08) are close cousins, and the closer, “IV” (9:37), is the longest and most expansive — the piece that lets the project breathe out. These are improvisations, but not in the busy, look-at-my-hands sense; they unfold slowly, texture first, as if Ribeiro is feeling around in the dark of a sound to find its edges. There’s a patience here that comes from trusting the material: a gesture is allowed to ring, decay, and leave a residue before the next one arrives. The recording is close and unhurried — performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered entirely by the artist — and that intimacy is the whole point. You’re near enough to feel the surfaces. The sound world is built from a prepared electric guitar — played as often with mallets and objects as with fingers — alongside a tabletop rig of strings and electronics, an instrumentarium that turns the guitar into something closer to a resonant surface than a six-string.

What makes it cohere is restraint. Nothing is rushed toward a climax; the drama is in micro-events — a swell that almost resolves, a tone that thickens and frays, a silence held a beat past comfort. It’s improvisation as close listening, the player as attentive as the listener.

Made tactile, on screen too

The version of “III” that circulated with a video makes the title literal in the most beautiful way. Instead of performance footage, the image is water: droplets striking a surface, rings expanding and colliding, light pooling in the troughs between ripples — sound rendered as something you could put your finger in. Palpability, made visible. (Full disclosure, since we mentioned the friendship: that video was put together on our end, by Eda Er.) It’s a fitting translation of music that is itself about texture and pressure, about the moment a vibration becomes a physical fact.

Why we’re pointing at it

There’s a quiet kinship between this record and a lot of what we care about at Nyxphere — improvisation treated as composition, sound approached as material rather than as a vehicle for notes, a comfort with patience and space. palpability doesn’t announce itself; it rewards leaning in. At five euros for the download and barely twenty-four minutes long, it’s an easy, low-stakes invitation into a sensibility worth knowing.

Put it on with headphones, somewhere quiet, and let the first ripple find you. Some music you analyze; this one you just touch.

Listen: palpability by Danniel Ribeiro is out now (digital, 24-bit/48kHz; released March 19, 2024). Performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by the artist.
Tracklist: II (7:28) · III (7:08) · IV (9:37).
More at dannielribeiro.com · Watch the project’s first stage (the superimposed improvisation triptych) on YouTube.

Written and published by Nyxphere — an artist-run label for genre-resistant sound, experimental music, and undefinable sonic worlds. Not a Nyxphere release; just one we love. “III” video by Eda Er.

▶ Watch the original interview on YouTube

How would you describe your music?

That's a hard question for a composer, because describing something forces you to structure it — and then you feel obliged to keep doing it that way. So instead I'd rather describe my interests: why I compose.

I started composing almost by coincidence. I was always writing songs and imitating people, and one day a composition teacher saw one of my songs and asked how many years I'd been composing. I thought, "Am I composing?" I didn't even know what the word meant. I was making music — producing it — so I began on the computer, performing through those means, before I was writing anything down on paper.

Then I started learning how to orchestrate acoustic instruments. My question was: how can I write the kind of music I love in electronic music, but without using electronics? Around that time I discovered extended techniques and all the other ways of drawing sound out of acoustic instruments. That gave me another way to talk about my music — or about myself through music.

So now I have electronic music, which I produce, perform, and prepare entirely on my own; and acoustic music, which I compose for ensembles and soloists. For a long time those two practices ran separately, and I kept asking myself why I didn't combine them. I still ask that. When I compose on paper I don't feel obliged to add electronics — acoustic instruments already hold an enormous potential I don't fully understand yet, and I want to discover more in that direction.

I've been lucky to work with many enthusiastic ensembles. Beyond that, I'm an improviser, a performer, and a singer when I get the chance. I don't see music as a single art form — I see it as a whole: a performance, something narrative. I always have a concept; I always have something to say. So when you ask me to describe my compositions, I'd say I always want to tell something through my music. I often work with gender issues I've faced and personal experiences I've been carrying for years. It's a way of releasing what I otherwise couldn't.

How did you start in music?

I didn't start out knowing. In high school I was in theatre, and a role called for me to play guitar. I found one, taught myself a few chords, and started writing songs — I'd just been through a teenage breakup and was writing poems, so I set them to music with the limited chords I had. People started liking the songs and asking me to record them. This was the MP3 era; there was nowhere to really upload anything. I had friends who played other instruments, and we'd record together in small studios and burn CDs to hand out.

That's how I began, but I still wasn't seeing music as a future profession — it was more for fun. I was far more involved in theatre then. I really wanted to be an actress, and music was a kind of tool for that: you have to know how to make music, perform, dance, use your voice. I was building those tools. But in the end I enjoyed the music more.

In any art form, the things that influence you aren't only other musicians — the artists around you matter too. You walk into a gallery, see a painting, and it triggers an emotion that becomes something in your own work. Especially now, we draw on many things at once. I don't really think of composition as writing music anymore; you're producing a performance. You have to be aware that the performers' physical gestures are part of your story, your music. The other elements of the stage — light, movement, interaction — matter just as much. A lot of incredible composers are working with this now, and it's inspiring to follow my contemporaries.

On improvisation, Berlin, and being a musician first

I was invited to a Berlin improvisation festival to play a solo set alongside other wonderful acoustic musicians. At the end we all improvised together for fifteen minutes. It was a beautiful night.

I'm not sure it's harder to improvise with electronics. I started composing through improvisation in the first place. Even when I was making fixed-media pieces I improvised — I'd improvise sounds, listen back, keep the material I liked, and edit it later. I don't think there's a way of composing that doesn't pass through improvisation. Improvisation is composing too: listen back to the recording, and it's a composition.

Improvisation matters to me because it makes me feel free. I'm not bound to any tradition or to any requirement I have to fulfil. The premise is that you're improvising, so of course people can dislike it — but they can't judge you against a particular technique. It gives you a kind of freedom, a way of playing. It feels like a game, like being a kid with a toy. That same happiness, that same freedom, stays with me when I improvise.

I feel that I'm a musician — and I think feeling like a musician matters more than feeling like a composer. You never know how long you'll want to compose, but you'll be a musician at every stage of your life, because that's how you were formed. Being a composer does shape my improvising, though. People often ask, "Did you compose that?" after I improvise something — I think I care about form. Even mid-improvisation I'm thinking about form before I begin: what shape it will take. It's just a way of thinking.

On Berkeley and the Bay Area

Last August I moved to the California Bay Area to pursue my PhD in composition at UC Berkeley. It's been an interesting year. Culturally you have to adjust — to understand how people think and act, and why. It was challenging for a while, but at some point you start to get it: people think like this, these are the customs, this is what I should do.

At Berkeley I'm quite happy. My fellow composers there are genuinely talented, creative, inspiring people, and that's one of the best things about being there. The Bay Area is eye-opening in its own way — it's not like Europe; you have to find your own path. Maybe that's a more American way of thinking, I don't know. You have to go out, meet people, and pursue your interests yourself. So far the experience has been positive — except that the Bay Area is enormously expensive, which for a musician is its own challenge.

On meeting Simon Sieger, the pandemic, and the album

I met Simon in Berlin. He was playing a concert and I went as an audience member. He played several instruments in a jazz trio — really impressive. We talked about music, exchanged contacts, and later he reached out: he'd listened to my work and enjoyed it, and wanted to collaborate. I visited him in Marseille, where his friends live, and we talked through ideas. This was 2019. We thought: maybe we can make an album together. Just play, just improvise, and see what we like.

Then he came to Istanbul — I was living there at the time — and we recorded some music, three tracks I think. We felt it was going well and decided to make an album. The plan was to meet again in Berlin, play a show, and then have him come back to Istanbul to finish it. But as we all know, the pandemic happened, and everything was cancelled. He even tried to come, but France told him that if he travelled to Turkey he wouldn't be allowed back. So strange.

I told him: just send me an improvisation and I'll work on it, for fun. We'd more or less given up on the album. He sent me a beautiful, emotional tune. I sang over it, added some electronics, and sent it back. He said it sounded great. So we thought: maybe we can work like this — him in Marseille, me in Istanbul, sending material back and forth. In the end it would be improvised and composed at once.

The first track was called When the Rivers Meet the Sea — because we were each beside water in our own cities, and you look across and feel close to someone who isn't really there; it's another shore. There's a track like that on the album. The whole record took shape around this idea of trying to meet and never quite managing to. Lockdowns kept returning, I kept moving cities, it never worked out. So we decided: why not make the album about exactly that? We built the tracks one by one. If you read the titles, you'll understand why we named them the way we did.

In about six months we had a rough version. With the help of a sound-engineer friend we mixed it, and then Simon mixed and mastered it.

Let me explain I Am So Lost In Blue. When you listen to the music it's like red, black, white — I was seeing all these different colours. At the time I was trying to learn another language, bored in lockdown, thinking: okay, this is red; blue is interesting. When the Rivers Meet the Sea was about the sea, about water, and blue is the colour of water. I thought: I am so lost in blue. I keep counting the colours, but I keep reaching back to the blue each time, like a crazy woman. I improvised that verse and lyric while I was thinking it through, recorded it once, and barely changed it. That doesn't always happen, but that time it came easily.

I described this to a visual-artist friend. She loved how I was constructing things visually — we collaborate a lot, and she knows I have a very visual mind when I make music, which for a visual artist is gold, because they want that information. She made the video clip from what I described to her — from my craziness, basically. I love it. It's a beautiful piece, and one of my favourite tracks on the album.

Do you also make visuals?

I love visuals, and I often make them myself for my music — I draw and animate things, though not in a very polished way. It's more analogue: I'll record something on a phone, edit it, add some sound. I really enjoy making visuals by hand.

I know some Jitter work in Max/MSP, and I'm not against digital visuals at all, but I try to feel connected to the visuals I'm making rather than just generating them through software — though I'm experimenting with that too. I record a lot of little videos, use them as material, and transform them.

I'm a very visual person. Making music is visual for me, so I often end up working with images as a natural consequence. I love collaborating with visual artists and directors when I can. For years I composed for theatre and made pieces as a duo with visual-artist friends, and I learned an enormous amount from them. I enjoy working with video as an artist in general.

What is it like being a woman composer?

First of all, I'd rather not define myself as a woman composer — but I understand why the conversation keeps happening. There are few of us, and there are reasons for that. It isn't only that institutions don't admit enough students to these programmes; it starts much earlier, in how we're raised. Women aren't supported in the same way toward certain kinds of musicianship — conducting, composing. They're encouraged instead to be beautiful on stage, to perform, and not on every instrument. I think that has to change first, from when we're small.

I had no example of a woman composer in front of me where I grew up, which had both positive and negative effects. The positive: you can't measure yourself against someone else or set anyone up as an idol. You're alone, and maybe that pushes your creativity, because you have no limit. The negative: you don't know that you can become someone — that you can achieve things and be recognised in your field. I've been discouraged many times by men in the music business, and I still am. It isn't always spoken; sometimes it's blunt, and other times you simply feel that they don't want you there. Not everyone — but some people see you as a threat to their own work.

There's a belief I've heard more than once, so I think I can repeat it: "Oh, you're getting this because you're a woman, not because you're talented or hardworking — they need one or two women to show diversity." Maybe that's sometimes true and maybe it isn't, but it isn't my problem as a composer. If a festival programmes a couple of women to look diverse, that's not my problem either. I just try to make music like any other composer, regardless of gender — men, women, non-binary people, who face a great deal too, and I want to mention them as well.

This discouragement makes me more ambitious — not to prove anything to them, but to prove it to myself. You can do it; you don't need their encouragement. But you do need commissions, you do need support from somewhere. So it's a tricky situation.

Being a woman is hard everywhere, not only in music. Still, I'm lucky compared to many people I know — there's always someone better off and someone worse off. Yes, it's hard, but it's not something I can change about myself, so I'll go through it and hope for the best for the generations after me. As a millennial, I think we're setting examples right now — there are women composers today, and there are older generations I admire and follow.

My wish is that one day, when I'm their age and perhaps teaching, my class will be half and half — not two women and ten men, not one woman and the rest men. Then I'll see the change. I think it's about education early in life more than at university level. We have to show our children: you can do whatever you want; it's not about who you are, it's about what you want. Then the world will change.

I'm not very optimistic at the moment, given the political direction of the world. It isn't going well. But maybe we always have to keep hope — as artists, that's our duty. We have to set an example, to believe in utopian dreams, because a doctor or someone else can't necessarily do that. We have to, because it's our mission. That's what I believe; I feel I'm here to do this, to show something. That responsibility sometimes weighs on me. I can't just do something at random because I like it — though of course I have that right, and I do make music because I love it — but it always carries a meaning for someone else that I can't control. I'm a woman; I'm not European or American — I carry a lot of responsibility for minorities. So I hope that in the future I'll feel I did my best. That's my own wish.

Which cities have shaped your music?

I'd start with Istanbul, because sadly, after the pandemic and the political pressure on artists and musicians, things there have gone really badly. It wasn't like this ten years ago — everything has changed. Artists are usually the first to be silenced in any society, because we talk a lot, and they don't want us to talk. There are still COVID restrictions placed on musicians specifically in Istanbul, and it's affecting how people survive there. I'm deeply concerned about the scene. I still have friends there and love performing with them, but I want to emphasise — as a Turkish musician I feel it's my duty to say — that things are not going well in Istanbul. Such a beautiful city; such a pitiful thing to watch happen.

As for California — it's so big. There are small gatherings and improvisation scenes, mostly in Oakland and some in San Francisco. But nowhere beats Berlin for a lively, welcoming music scene. Berlin is special. Every corner has gatherings and events that surprise the audience — musicians not just playing a genre but doing their own kind of music. It's impressive. The musicians I've met here are open to any kind of collaboration, which is wonderful for me. As I said, I draw inspiration from people; I need people in order to make music, otherwise it doesn't make sense to me. Berlin provides that — beautiful, highly skilled musicians with open minds. It's an education in itself just to play alongside them, just to be in the same room.

I've played in other European cities — Amsterdam, Antwerp, and more — and there are places I still haven't been. But for now, nobody really beats Berlin for a music scene.

What about streaming?

I don't fight the system anymore, because I don't think we can change it overnight — this horrible system we have now. Streaming, or releasing online, is really more for your publicity than for actually sharing your music. In this century you'll be forgotten if you're offline for a week, because people live inside their phones and computers. So as a musician you have to have a social-media presence, and I see the streaming platforms exactly like an Instagram account, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel — they're social-media accounts.

How to earn money from it, I don't know; I don't earn much. We should probably aim more at live performances, at concerts, because even big pop artists don't make their money from streaming. They make it from concerts, from advertising deals, from other things. Practically speaking, they don't earn from making music — they earn from being seen making music. So it's about image.

It's a horrible system because no one really seems to care anymore. But you have two options: stay outside the system, or go with the flow. Even as an experimental musician, people do still search for this kind of thing. I once found one of my tracks on Reddit — someone had written, "There's this crazy experimental musician, check this out." I was stunned. I'd uploaded it to YouTube years earlier; the link wasn't even public anymore, but that person had it. We don't know each other. I was called crazy, and I was happy about it.

So I think it's mostly about publicity right now — hoping a few people will discover you in that pool of millions of fragments of information. We should keep releasing, keep doing things, because that's how the algorithm works: you become more visible when someone types something in. That's my humble opinion — I don't really know the music business. But fighting it as an individual won't help or hurt me, so I'll go with the flow as long as I can. And if I ever get famous, I promise I'll speak up about it.

How is the world of music changing?

It's changing because the generations are changing — that's obvious. My generation is in our thirties now, and there's a new generation in their twenties making cool things. It shifts naturally; every decade brings something new, because new people appear. Is that positive or negative? I don't think the change is negative overall. Being introduced to new music, a new point of view — that's a positive thing.

For electronic music specifically, at least now when you tell people you do electronic music they understand something. Often they assume techno, but some people are starting to realise there's another kind of electroacoustic music too.

I also think we sometimes want people to understand what we do faster than they possibly can. They're under no obligation. They don't have to listen and say, "That's cool, I get it." They really don't. We care too much about our product sometimes. I try to detach from my music and see it as a product — that way, when a critique comes, I don't take it to heart, because it's about the product, not about me. It's just a piece of music. I don't think we should weigh it down with so much importance. Just make another; keep going. The most inspiring people in history were the ones who kept going. You know a few famous pieces by certain composers, but look at their catalogue and they wrote hundreds — and somewhere in there they found something.

We shouldn't dwell on what other people think. We should enjoy what we're doing and do it, if we really want to. In the end it will be something. It will be you. What's more beautiful than that? Why am I doing this? I think we all have an ego — a need to show ourselves, to say: hey, I exist, I'm here, see me. It's all for that. My only hope is that in ten years I can be more me, and confidently say: this is me. Purely me.

What do you watch and listen to?

Because I deal with a lot of serious things in my practice — I'm in a PhD programme — I listen to demanding music all the time. In daily life I prefer lighter things. I genuinely love pop music; I always have, not just now. I watch a lot of very corny comedy shows. I really want to be a light person outside of my practice, because when I watch something very good — an art film, say — I start analysing the concepts and what's behind it, and sometimes I just don't want to. I want to watch something completely silly and laugh, because I'm just a normal person.

I love cooking — it's one of my things. I have a pop playlist for it: I put it on, cook in peace, drink my wine. Sometimes a K-drama, that kind of thing. I try to empty my mind and enjoy my life. Being a musician is hard in that way, because your relationship with music isn't always about enjoying your time with it. So I try to keep those moments separate. When I want to enjoy myself, I don't restrict myself to anything.

Where can people listen to your music?

I'm pretty easy to find on most platforms. Type my name — Eda Er — into Google and you'll get Spotify, SoundCloud, the other platforms I'm on, and my personal social media. Those links are in the description below.

Thanks for watching and listening. If you made it all the way to the end of the interview, thank you — really. I hope to meet you again through music, somewhere else. Bye.

Interview & camera: Paul Clouvel. Recorded at betahaus Kreuzberg, Berlin. Original edit: Zoé Khan-Thibeault. Re-edit: Nyxphere, 2026. Original interview: youtube.com. Featured track: "I Am So Lost In Blue" by äbädä (Eda Er, Simon Sieger). All rights reserved for Nyxphere on behalf of Eda Er.

Strike a cast bronze bell and you don’t hear one note — you hear a small crowd of them. Among the loudest is a partial tuned to a minor third above the fundamental, slightly out of tune with everything around it, and it’s the reason a bell sounds mournful even when nothing sad has happened. Bell-founders call it the tierce. Eda Er has named an entire album after it, and TIERCE turns out to be exactly what the title promises: four short pieces that live inside that dark, inharmonic glow and refuse to leave it.

This is the most concentrated of Er’s recent work — four pieces for voice and bells, about thirteen and a half minutes in total, each one a single tonal centre explored with almost obsessive care. After the room-sized electroacoustic canvases of her other 2026 records, TIERCE feels like jewellery: small, hard, and made with no wasted material. Every element is built in Python — bells physically modelled by additive synthesis with realistic cast-bell partials (that 1.19× tierce among them), voice drawn from two source takes, and a third recording, a Serbian Orthodox choral session, folded in for its tonal match rather than its provenance.

Form as a refusal to repeat

The organizing principle is stated plainly and obeyed strictly: the music is through-composed, with irregular meters, non-recurring gestures, and a different spatial treatment for every return of a motif, so that no two appearances of anything ever sound the same. A bell tone that comes back will be autopanned one time, sent through a chorused pitch-shift cascade the next, ping-ponged across the stereo field a third. The score’s “no verbatim repeats” rule isn’t just in the notes — it’s in the stereo image, in the attack envelopes, in the ornament counts. The result is music that feels hand-carved rather than looped, which for synthesis built entirely from code is a real achievement.

The titles move between English and French, and Er says the common language is the image: os, halo, langue, verre — bone, halo, tongue, glass. Hard, gleaming, slightly funereal objects. That’s the album’s palette in four words.

Four pieces

“Halo, Os Blanc” opens in A Phrygian and free, proportional time — a long arc that starts narrow, breathes wider toward an apex around two minutes, then dissolves. Twenty-six bell strikes walk the mode without repeating, voiced three different ways (struck, bowed with no attack noise, plucked), while a Moog-style filter sweep keeps the underlying pad from ever settling into a static drone. Six untransposed voice gestures and three Serbian choral excerpts share the tonal centre; the climax is a convergence of bells on chord tones with a stretched voice peaking alongside them.

“Mother Tongue” is the most rhythmically alive — D Phrygian-dominant over a Balkan-style additive meter, 110 bars of shifting sixteenth-note groupings drawn from odd numbers with no three-in-a-row ever repeating. The exotic augmented-second interval at the mode’s heart returns six times, each time differently ornamented and treated (dry, bit-crushed, granulated, chorused), and a six-hit accelerating frame-drum roll throws you into the climax. It’s the piece chosen for the album’s video — concentric bell-rings pulsing amber out of black, the sound of the strike rendered as expanding light.

“La Cloche n’a Jamais Sonné” (“The bell never rang”) is the sparsest and, to my ear, the most beautiful — A hirajōshi, a Japanese pentatonic, in pure proportional time. Long stretches of near-silence are part of the form here; fourteen temple bells fall at power-law-distributed intervals, the gaps between them feeling populated rather than empty. After a single moment of convergence, a four-bell descent closes the piece, and the final low A carries a twenty-six-second slow autopan across its entire decay. A title about a bell that never rang, scored mostly from the silence around the strikes — it’s the album’s quiet conceptual heart.

“Crowned in Glass” breaks the spell on purpose. A natural minor with chromatic colour, seven through-composed sections, and — suddenly — drums: a softened sub kick, gated snare, stuttered hats, dubstep and glitch in character. A Reese-style detuned sub-bass wobbles through the apex while a kick on irregular groupings runs against bell layers in periods of 5 and 13 that, being coprime, never realign. At the apex there’s an actual drop — a half-second of held breath, then a deep bell crash and a long vocal cry. It’s the sound of the sacred album equipment getting plugged into a soundsystem, and it closes the set with a jolt.

The verdict

TIERCE is a small record that rewards close, repeated listening more than almost anything in Er’s catalogue. The physical modelling gives the bells a believable, slightly bitter shimmer; the through-composed discipline keeps every gesture fresh; and the move from sacred stillness (“La Cloche”) to club physics (“Crowned in Glass”) quietly argues that a bell, a voice, and a single tone are enough to build a whole world — or four of them. Listen on headphones, where the per-strike spatial treatments come fully alive, and let that inharmonic third do its slow, dark work.

Thirteen minutes; not one of them wasted.

TIERCE by Eda Er — four pieces for voice and bells, ~13:33. 24-bit/48k & 16-bit/44.1k; mastered to −14 LUFS / −1 dBTP.
Tracklist: I. Halo, Os Blanc (3:18) · II. Mother Tongue (3:20) · III. La Cloche n’a Jamais Sonné (3:35) · IV. Crowned in Glass (3:20).
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

Listen on Bandcamp↗

Luc Ferrari called his great tape piece Presque rien — “almost nothing” — and made a whole world out of a fishing village waking up. Eda Er borrows that almost-nothing for her own ends. Presque Rien pour une voix perdue — almost nothing, for a lost voice — is a seven-movement quadraphonic album in which a human voice is recorded, then slowly allowed to dissolve back into the room that recorded it. Language frays into breath, breath into hum, hum into the architecture itself. By the end there is, almost, nothing left. What lingers is astonishing.

The premise is stated with unusual precision. The voice here is not a carrier of words but a fragile acoustic trace, caught oscillating between body, memory, and disappearance. A real artifact anchors the whole thing: a 193 Hz hum from the recording space — a fridge or HVAC compressor — was notch-filtered out of the room beds and then rebuilt as a structural drone, so the sound of the room’s own machinery becomes the music’s spine. Beneath everything sits an E3 (164.81 Hz), the most stable pitch Er could find in her source recordings. Even when the voice vanishes, its frequency stays in the room. That is the album’s quiet, haunting thesis: a voice can disappear and still leave its resonance behind.

Four speakers, four selves

What makes the record more than atmosphere is its architecture. It’s composed for four loudspeakers in a square, and each corner is assigned a dramaturgical role: front-left is language and body, front-right is language and machine, back-left is memory and body, back-right is memory and machine. The space around the listener becomes a kind of psychological map — present versus remembered, human versus mechanical — and sounds migrate across it with intent. When a voice drifts from back-left to front-left, it isn’t a pan effect; it’s a memory becoming present, a body walking into the room. Even folded to stereo the drama survives as restless left–right motion, but the concept is unmistakably spatial, and gorgeously literal in the visuals, where the four corners are labelled outright around a dark field of orbiting points.

Seven movements toward silence

The album opens, perfectly, mid-sentence. “Quelqu’un parlait déjà” (“Someone was already speaking”) drops you into a room where speech is already underway, a Ferrari-style ambience of distant traffic and anecdotal water drops — until, at the four-minute mark, a 120 BPM kick fades in through the back-right, rave residue heard through concrete. The ecstasy of the dancefloor arrives muffled, remembered through a wall, and the track collapses to a held breath and a single unfinished sentence, cut hard.

That muffled rave haunts the whole record. “Géographie de bouche” turns the mouth into terrain — insect-like consonant percussion scattered across all four speakers, a body-pressure sub beneath it, then a sudden collapse into one sung vowel that holds for two and a half minutes while the rhythm fails around it. “Presque chant” (“Almost song”) is the emotional center: a just-intonation chord crystallizing out of four vocal drones in counter-rotating orbits, a heartbeat-rate sub kick, then an acceleration to a 90 BPM glow before the pitch collapses through a downward glissando into a final breath. “Archive d’inondation” is the flood — the densest, most aggressive piece, where fragments of earlier tracks return alongside slices of Er’s own ECHOPRAXIA, broken techno at 130 BPM rotating double-clockwise before an implosion and a hard cut to a single inhale.

Then the long exhale. “L’auditeur se dissout” (“The listener dissolves”) is the morning after the rave — the room amplified until the room is the track, a distant train crossing right to left, voice fragments placed at hallucinatory intervals. “Quatre haut-parleurs et un fantôme” makes the speaker dramaturgy literal: each corner performs a different self, then they vanish one by one until only the back-right — memory and machine — remains, a single reverbed voice alone in the corner. And “Après la dernière phrase” is the last human trace: three dry, exposed, barely-corrected vowels up front, a near-inaudible 60 BPM heartbeat that is body memory rather than club music, and finally speaker-hiss implying the loudspeakers themselves with nothing left to play. Ten seconds of fade to absolute silence.

Craft in service of disappearance

This is rigorously made music that never lets the rigor show as coldness. The sustained voices are processed through formant-preserving pitch correction and freeze-drone synthesis, but with a deliberate micro-pitch jitter so the held tones breathe rather than lock — the difference between a synthetic drone and a living one. The just-intonation tunings, the 5-limit ratios stacked against that E3 root, give the harmony a pure, slightly uncanny glow you feel more than analyze. And the recurring sub frequencies — 38.5 Hz, 41.2 Hz, 49 Hz — are placed as physical pressure, the body remembering a dancefloor it can no longer hear.

The accompanying visuals match the restraint exactly: a near-black field, the four speaker roles labelled at the corners, faint concentric rings and slow-orbiting points of light tracing where the sounds move. No performer, no footage — just the architecture of listening, drawn as a diagram you can fall into.

The verdict

Presque Rien pour une voix perdue is a study in absence that manages to be deeply moving rather than merely conceptual. It understands something true about memory — that what we lose keeps resonating in the spaces it left — and it builds a four-cornered room in which to feel that happen. Put it on in the dark, ideally with a little space around you, and follow the voice as it fades. The remarkable thing is how present almost nothing turns out to be.

Presque Rien pour une voix perdue by Eda Er — seven movements, 48:00, quadraphonic 4.0 (FL / FR / BL / BR), 48 kHz / 24-bit.
Tracklist: I. Quelqu’un parlait déjà (7:00) · II. Géographie de bouche (6:00) · III. Presque chant (9:00) · IV. Archive d’inondation (8:00) · V. L’auditeur se dissout (5:00) · VI. Quatre haut-parleurs et un fantôme (7:00) · VII. Après la dernière phrase (6:00).
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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Here is a techno record with no drum machine anywhere on it. The kick is a metal pipe being struck. The hi-hat is a steel scrape. The clap is a sheet of paper torn in half. The bass is the sustained hum of a tired machine. Every percussive sound on Eda Er’s Danse Acousmatique is a real object, recorded and transformed — and yet the thing grooves, pumps, and builds like club music that knows exactly what it’s doing. That tension, between the dancefloor and the field recording, is the whole album, and it’s a thrilling place to spend forty-eight minutes.

The title says it outright. Acousmatic — sound heard without seeing its source, the founding idea of musique concrète — meets danse, the body moving to a pulse. Er treats those two traditions not as opposites to reconcile but as a single instrument. Underneath the rhythm runs a continuous dark-ambient bed of drones, hydrophones, breath, vinyl crackle, vent hum, and bowed metal; on top sits a 4/4 architecture of transformed objects. The two layers lock together through sidechain pumping and aggressive quadraphonic spatialization, so the room itself seems to breathe in time with the kick.

A manifesto you can dance to

The opening track, which gives the album its name, is a thesis stated aloud. At 124 BPM it rotates broken kick patterns through four dissonant rhythmic templates while three polyrhythmic percussion layers stack at 3, 5, and 7 against the 4 — grids so coprime they only fully realign after 105 bars, longer than the track itself. You don’t need the math to feel it: the groove is always almost-locking and never quite settling, which is exactly what keeps you leaning in.

Its real trick is a single pen click. That tiny sound proliferates across the piece — first as polyrhythmic punctuation, then granulated into a twelve-second swarm, then, at the climax, exploded into an eight-voice “orchestra” of transposed clicks arranged in a circle around the listener and reverbed into a chord, and finally time-stretched eighty times into an eighteen-second drone. One object becomes percussion, harmony, drone, and architecture. That is the album’s logic, declared in miniature: give Er a single thing, and she will build a world out of it.

Six rooms

From that manifesto the record opens into five more spaces, each with its own conceit.

“Presque Rien pour le Club,” named for Luc Ferrari, is an abandoned club remembered through a wall — the kick low-passed almost to nothing, reverb-drenched, techno bleeding through brick from a courtyard. Footsteps approach during the build; a door creak announces the climax, the moment of stepping inside; then the filters close and the music recedes back through the wall. Memory, corrupted on the second visit.

“The Reverberant Body” is the human center: an 80-BPM heartbeat felt as pressure rather than heard as a drum, a single breath expanding into vast reverb until the body becomes architecture. The entire nine minutes, the notes tell us, is structured as one continuous exhale — and it plays that way, a held breath you don’t realize you’re sharing until it releases.

“Concrete Litanies” is the most straight-up techno thing here, 130 BPM and locked, and also the most violent: a kitchen accident scaled up to industrial volume. Wood-chops pitched down and drowned in cathedral reverb, a glass-break at the peak, a six-voice ceramic chord arranged in a circle — domestic objects rendered as ritual destruction. “Hydrophone for the Disappeared” is the slow piece, submerged: the pulse nearly vanishes, hydrophones teleport around the quad field, and water carries fragments of processed voice until you can’t tell which is liquid and which is breath.

The closer, “Rituel pour les Machines Fatiguées,” is a controlled collapse. It begins as locked techno and then degrades on a single curve that governs everything — tape wow deepens, the bit-crusher eats more bandwidth, kicks lose their pitch, a clock pendulum slows and corrupts. By the end the loops audibly shatter into stutters and tape-stops, the machinery exhausts itself, and the album ends on a final tape-stopped thud and one last hydrophone drop. The dance doesn’t end so much as wear out.

Rules as engine

What keeps all this from being a pile of clever ideas is how strict the underlying system is. Pitched material moves only through minor, diminished, and augmented intervals — never a major third, never a perfect fifth, never the same pitch twice in a row — so the harmony is permanently unsettled, dissonant by design. The spatialization is just as systematic: counter-rotating layers tracing rosette patterns, drones sweeping at polyrhythmic speeds, percussive volleys teleporting between the corners of the quad. Even folded down to stereo, that motion survives as restless L–R movement. This is music built on constraints, and the constraints are exactly what give it its nervous, unrelenting life.

The visual language follows suit. One video renders the music as blood-red concentric rings rippling out of a black void — radar, shockwave, the pressure-front of a kick made visible. Another presents the piece as a working analysis readout: spectrum, waveform, vectorscope, and level meters scrolling in real time, the sound laid bare as data. No bodies, no club footage — just the object and its measurement, which is precisely the album’s subject.

The verdict

Danse Acousmatique sits in a lineage that runs from Schaeffer and Ferrari to Emptyset, Pan Sonic, and Mark Fell, and it holds its own in that company by refusing to choose between the head and the hips. It is conceptually airtight and physically convincing at once — you can write a thesis about the pen click or you can just feel the room pump, and both readings are correct. Play it loud, ideally somewhere with a little space around you, and let the objects do their dancing.

It’s the rare experimental record that earns the word techno twice over: as a genre it actually moves, and as an idea it actually means something.

Danse Acousmatique by Eda Er — six tracks, 47:44, quadraphonic (4.0) + stereo downmix, 48 kHz / 24-bit. Written, produced, and spatialized 2026.
Tracklist: 1. Danse Acousmatique (7:29) · 2. Presque Rien pour le Club (7:51) · 3. The Reverberant Body (9:00) · 4. Concrete Litanies (7:23) · 5. Hydrophone for the Disappeared (8:32) · 6. Rituel pour les Machines Fatiguées (7:29).
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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We tend to think of a voice as something that carries meaning — words, melody, feeling. Eda Er’s Voice Studies for Empty Rooms begins from a stranger and more interesting premise: that a voice is also a tool for measuring space. Across seven movements of quadraphonic electroacoustic music, the voice here rarely “expresses” anything in the usual sense. Instead it pokes at rooms, sets their air vibrating, and waits to hear what comes back. The real subject of the album isn’t the singer. It’s the architecture, and the absence inside it.

That idea sounds austere on paper. In practice the record is engrossing, even haunting — an hour that reorganizes how you hear the spaces you sit in.

A premise you can hear

The conceit is stated plainly and then explored with real rigor: each track is an experiment between voice, room, resonance, emptiness, distance, listening position, and architectural memory. The empty rooms are not treated as neutral containers. They remember bodies. Crucially, rave elements drift through the record — not as nostalgia, but as low-frequency architecture, the bass pressure that seems to survive in a space after the crowd has gone home. It’s one of the album’s best ideas: the club as a haunted building, collectivity reduced to a residue you feel in your chest more than your ears.

The materials are exactly what the concept promises — dry voice, distant singing, stairwell reverbs, abandoned architecture, contact-mic textures, fluorescent hum, spectral resonance, low-frequency pressure, and fragmented rhythmic residue. If you know the lineage of deep listening and musique concrète, you’ll recognize the family: Luc Ferrari and Hildegard Westerkamp on the field-recording side, Pauline Oliveros and Éliane Radigue on the side of glacial, attentive drone, and Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, and Pamela Z in the extended-voice tradition the album extends. Er earns the company by not imitating any of them.

Seven rooms, from concrete to memory

The sequencing is the album’s quiet masterstroke. It moves, deliberately, from physical rooms toward psychological ones — from acoustics you could measure with a microphone to acoustics that exist only in recollection.

It opens with “Study for an Unoccupied Space,” all footsteps, breath, and mic handling, a dry voice entering cautiously before the room takes over and a distant sub-pulse begins to throb underneath. “Corridor Study” turns a hallway into an instrument, the voice ricocheting down a resonant passage. “Voice Study in Fluorescent Light” is the cold heart of the record — sustained vocal drones hovering between singing and pure vibration, threaded through electrical hum and flicker, the longest and most Radigue-like stretch here. “Study for Four Walls and Sub-Bass” is where the rave residue presses hardest, bass pressure boxed inside an unforgiving room. “Empty Club, 5AM” is exactly the desolate, beautiful scene it names. “Voice Study for Closed Doors” muffles and encloses, and the closer, “Room Tone After Departure,” lets the architecture exhale on its own — the sound of a space after everyone has left, which is the whole album in miniature.

By the end the room has become internal memory. You realize you’ve been listening less to a singer than to the act of listening itself.

How it’s made — and why that matters

This is composed sound design as much as it is performance, and it’s clearly the work of someone who built her own tools rather than reaching for presets. The textures — room tones modeled with the grain of concrete or the 60-cycle whine of fluorescent tubes, voices stretched into slow-rotating drones, granular clouds of breath — have the specificity of an artist designing each space from the inside out. The quadraphonic format is not a gimmick here; the whole point is where a sound sits relative to you, how distance and listening position become compositional parameters. Even folded down to stereo, that spatial thinking survives, and the writing gives sounds room to decay fully before the next gesture arrives.

The accompanying visuals follow the same logic. There are no performance shots, no soft B-roll. Instead, thin vertical lines stand like columns in a darkened corridor, faint blues and rust-orange flickering at a horizon, the screen mostly black — architecture rendered as the barest possible diagram. It’s the visual equivalent of the music’s restraint: just enough structure to orient you, and a great deal of deliberate emptiness to listen into.

The verdict

The risk with conceptual electroacoustic work is that the idea outshines the listening — that you admire the premise and forget to feel anything. Voice Studies for Empty Rooms avoids that trap because its concept and its sensation are the same thing. To follow the album is to feel rooms close around you and open back up, to register absence as a physical presence, to hear the ghost of a bassline in a space that’s gone silent. It is patient, intelligent, and genuinely eerie.

Put it on in a dark room, ideally one that’s a little too empty, and let it do its measuring. By “Room Tone After Departure” you may find you’ve started listening to your own walls.

Voice Studies for Empty Rooms by Eda Er — seven movements, quadraphonic electroacoustic, total runtime 49:00.
Tracklist: I. Study for an Unoccupied Space (6:00) · II. Corridor Study (7:00) · III. Voice Study in Fluorescent Light (8:00) · IV. Study for Four Walls and Sub-Bass (7:00) · V. Empty Club, 5AM (6:00) · VI. Voice Study for Closed Doors (8:00) · VII. Room Tone After Departure (7:00).
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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Most solo piano records are assembled. Pieces are written, takes are stacked, the best moments are stitched together until the seams disappear. played through, the new album from Simon Sieger, does the opposite and tells you so in its title. This is one improvisation, played start to finish, captured in a single uninterrupted take. What you hear is what happened in the room, in the order it happened. Nothing is hidden, and nothing is fixed in post.

That nerve pays off. It’s one of the most alive piano records I’ve heard this year.

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, the company he keeps will. Born in France in 1986, Sieger is a multi-instrumentalist in the old, unfashionable sense — pianist, trombonist, tubist, arranger, composer — who learned the trade at the elbow of his father, a saxophonist steeped in the creative-music scene of the eighties. He’s worked with the drummer Famoudou Don Moye since 2015, joined the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 2019, and has been part of Moor Mother’s orbit since 2023. His playing here sits squarely in that lineage of Great Black Music, free jazz, and collective improvisation — you can feel Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Hassan Ibn Ali, Elmo Hope, and the Art Ensemble moving under the surface — and yet the architecture is entirely his own, built in real time and never repeated.

Green, in eight tongues

The conceit is simple and quietly brilliant. The album divides its single performance into eight indexed sections, and every one of them is the word green in a different language: “green,” “vert,” “yeşil,” “grün,” “verde,” “lùsè,” “akhdar,” and a final eighth that closes the cycle. One color, said eight ways; one improvisation, walked through eight rooms that all open onto the same courtyard. The cover image makes the theme literal — moss spilling green over a weathered red wall, water shimmering above it — but the music never illustrates. It just keeps finding new dialects for the same idea.

Because it’s a continuous take, the “tracks” behave less like songs than like movements or weather systems. Sieger moves between groove and rupture, density and silence, lyricism and abstraction, and the transitions are the point. A passage will lock into an insistent, motoric figure and then dissolve, mid-thought, into something searching and harmonically unmoored. Lines turn modal and refuse to resolve where a Western ear expects them to — a friction that rewards close listening rather than smoothing itself away. You are hearing a musician decide, second by second, where to go next, with no safety net and no rhythm section to catch him.

The center of gravity: “yeşil”

If there’s a peak, it arrives at the third section. “Yeşil” — Turkish for green — is the longest stretch here at nearly ten minutes, and it’s where the whole performance seems to gather its weight. It opens with a small repeated figure that behaves less like a theme than a question asked over and over with slightly different inflection each time, then builds the way a long conversation builds: not by getting louder but by getting deeper, accumulating implication until it has nowhere to go but release. When it finally lets go, the quiet that follows feels earned rather than incidental.

It’s also the section chosen to carry the record’s visual identity. The accompanying video — abstract green filaments of light, an oscilloscope rendering of the sound itself glowing against near-total black — is one of the rare cases where a “music visualizer” actually serves the music. There’s no footage of hands on keys, no soft-focus mood lighting. The sound is turned literally into light: every transient and sustained tone becomes a living green thread that breathes and frays in time with the playing.

The room itself

A one-take record lives or dies on how it’s captured, and played through is captured beautifully. Recorded at the CRR in Strasbourg, France, and mixed and mastered by Eda Er — who also made the “yeşil” video — the album keeps the piano close and honest. You hear the instrument as a physical object: the felt, the wood, the resonant bloom after a chord, the small mechanical sounds a piano makes when no one is trying to scrub them out. The 24-bit master has the air and depth to make that intimacy count. It’s the sound of a real room on a real day, which is exactly what a performance like this needs.

What keeps the record from becoming a private exercise is how much shape Sieger finds without a script. An improviser’s instincts are doing the work of a composer’s pen — phrases land where they should, ideas return transformed, and sections end a beat earlier than you’d expect, which is its own kind of generosity. By the time the eighth and final pass fades, you have the sense of having followed a single sustained train of thought from one end to the other, rather than flipping through a folder of unrelated cuts.

For listeners who know Sieger from the Art Ensemble’s maximalism or Moor Mother’s confrontational collages, played through is a chance to hear that same intelligence alone and unguarded. And for anyone who’s never heard a note of his work, it’s an unusually direct front door: no overdubs, no edits, no homework — just one musician, one piano, and an hour of thinking out loud that trusts you to follow.

Put it on without skipping. The album was played through in one take; it’s best heard the same way.

played through by Simon Sieger is out now (digital, 24-bit/48kHz).
Piano: Simon Sieger. Recorded at the CRR, Strasbourg, France; mixed and mastered by Eda Er. The “yeşil” video was created by Eda Er.
Also available at nyxphere.bandcamp.com.

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