Wave Tank’s 8-track album, RawMantiSch (2025, Bandcamp) is a clever manipulation of faders and buttons, employing as best as it can the capabilities of a number of different synths and vocal filters. Without overloading the songs, the compositional approach is based on simplicity, repetition and imagination. In this way, loud, weird and monotonous bass lines, for instance, stay interesting and fresh throughout the songs, allowing beats and rythmic patterns to create the required atmosphere for the story that is communicated. In the end, whether inspired by personal obsessions (track No 3 – Christian Death’s, Dogs, and Dead Kennedys’, At My Job), or referencing personal favourites (track No 7 – Chris & Cosey’s, In Ecstacy), the Neo-Romantics of the 80s, the punk ethos and the goth rock aesthetics introduce a feeling of urgency to take action. But why take action and how is it encouraged?
The title of the album, RawMantiSch, makes immediately a connection with ‘romanticism’. Romantisch is the German word for ‘romantic’. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the Romantic movement in the arts was associated with heightened emotional expression and nature. It was a product of rural communities, valuing the countryside over the city. For the romantics, the city was unnatural, a monster.
However, although the title does sound like ‘Romantisch’, it uses instead the word ‘raw’. Raw, of course, can mean raw or uncooked food, as it has come straight from nature. Moreover, ‘raw’ can be understood as raw emotions – i.e. feelings which are unfiltered by civilisation and societal norms, and they can often be seen as honest, frank and realistic. Raw feelings sometimes are valued more, as ‘raw’ is also used to mean strong or intense.
Wave Tank’s song Human Memories is exactly about this. It looks back at earlier stages of human life on earth to bring our attention to what valuable things we have lost in the name of extreme urbanisation, digitalisation, human-to-human connection, increased separation from nature, and more:
- ‘Do you remember the colours and the sunset?’, ‘Do you remember the rain?’, ‘Do you remember the trees?’
Similarly, Do You Want Time to Get Slow is a direct attack to city life:
- ‘Do you feel time getting slow when you walk away this modern city?’, ‘All puppets want you to work, to work in high speed.’, ‘Do you want to break the clocks?’
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Atol Atol Atol exploded onto the scene of Wroclaw, Poland as the result of combined musical talents of the strongest pillars of the CRK’s ‘Salka’ community. Ukryte Zalety Systemu, Kurws, Przepych – they were the ones who raised the wave of the most exciting music to come out of Wroclaw since the legendary Klaus Mitffoch. The fact that this wave is still going strong is proved by Łukasz Plata (bass, vocal), Agata Horwat (keys, vocal), Hubert Kostkiewicz (guitar) and Artur Soszyński (drums), grouped under a bizarre banner in which a fantasy of having an exotic holiday clashes with a phantom of nuclear annihilation. The Atols play post-punk, but not in the manner dictated by the worn-out Anglo-centric canon. They rather evoke the dreadful spirit of no wave, the social sensibility of Dutch anarchists from The Ex, the approach of free music, and the reminiscence of the European rock avant-garde tagged as Rock In Opposition. All mixed together in changing, mutating proportions. The result is ragged, lunatic songs in which space is straddled by a sharpened groove, druggy synth clouds, the moans of a degenerated guitar and mechanically organised vocals, drawing heavily on Devo.
On their first album, tied to island imagery and filled with alarm sounds, Atols proclaimed the surreal “End of the Thousand Islands Dressing” (pol. “Koniec sosu tysiąca wysp”, 2022). Now they reduce the title message to a stark warning: Drone Drone Drone. The heat of the Pacific beaches recedes to make way for the cold breeze of local dystopia. In Plata’s lyrics, rats chase dogs in staircases, city blocks form Kafkaesque labyrinths, and icy neon lights bombard the streets. Drones fly into households through open windows (‘or maybe it’s just the system dropping by because it wants to know how you’re doing?’), ‘there’s stress in the air’. When exposed to these daily oppressions, the band acts like an irritated nerve, twisting in a feverish convulsion. However, it steps out of it in a dance-like manner, guided by the angular paths of a hyperactive bass. As if allowing itself one last dance against the world’s end. It is significant that the album ends with a denial, the word ‘no’ shouted at the end of the track 2025 – a readiness to resist. It is affirmed in the music: jagged, anarchic riffs and relentless rhythms, ready to tear the bodies and minds of listeners away from their senseless service to global capital and plunge them into a liberating trance.
“Dron Dron Dron” also channels connotations towards the second album by the unmissable band Przepych – “I inne zabawne rzeczy” (2022, eng. And the Other Hilarious Stuff). This is where the title track comes from, which Atol Atol Atol generously decided to save from obscurity and include in their repertoire. Both albums are imbued with an atmosphere of joyful experimentation. Here and there, electronic spectres and flashy dubs fly by, opening up spaces for motoric improvisations that enhance the absurdity of Plata’s poetry. The mosaic of references beams in many directions: the well-known This Heat, Contortions, a touch of Japanese Wha Ha Ha-style wackiness, but also the familiar native neurosis of and 80s Polish band Kosmetyki Mrs. Pinki. The result of this strange equation is a brilliant, stirring soundtrack to the old crises of the new times. [Mateusz Sroczyński]
LP / Digital Album [free download]
Dutch artist Sololust returns with a new album: Oh Allen, a captivating collection of eleven tracks that delve deep into the emotional and musical universe of minimal synth and coldwave.
“Oh Allen is a mystical album about loss, longing, and the elusiveness of meaning,” says Sololust about the album. “It’s an emotional reflection on the world as I experience it. That makes it my most personal work to date.”
LP / Digital Album
Autumns has long existed at the jagged edge of club music, taking the ghosts of post-punk and industrial and dragging them into the basement. On A Dead Influence, his first release for Honey Trap, the Irish producer strips the sound to its barest impulses—rattling drum machines, serrated synths, and a sneer that never lets up. The result is mutant body music that owes as much to Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire as it does to the darker corners of contemporary EBM.
Across six originals, Autumns stitches together a record that is both caustic and compulsive. Tracks like “The Unfortunate Touch” and “Don’t Be a Rat (I Know You Will)” grind with deadpan menace, while “Paid Engagement” and “Banged Alive” push his hardware into overdrive, balancing raw noise with sly rhythmic hooks. This is music designed less for smooth transitions than for confrontation—dance as abrasion, movement as release.
Cassette / Digital Album
The Serfs are a deliberately nebulous and incidentally industrialist gang of dance-floor hymners – perturbed and tranced-out troubadours whose sound and musical ideology seems to be a causal manifestation of their immediate environments. Like their Ohio predecessors, The Serfs seem askew from the art that surrounds them, and proud of it.
Digital Album [free download]
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