Interstitial Spaces is Martin Brandlmayr’s debut release on Faitiche. In this award-winning radio collage, the well-known drummer and composer (Radian, Polwechsel) explores the quiet moments in music and film recordings.

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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

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Das Kinn — »Die Knochen / Die Kanten«

On 31 October 2025, the labels Altin Village & Mine, Mangel, and Ichi Ichi will release the 12″ LP Die Knochen / Die Kanten. The album collects the two EPs by Das Kinn, originally issued in 2020 and 2022 as limited 10″ vinyl and cassette, both now sold out.

Die Knochen (2020) and Die Kanten (2022) were recorded at the Office du Pain studio in Frankfurt and mastered by Gavin Weiss in Hamburg. Menschen 1987 features additional vocals from Charlotte Simon, while Johanna Gauder performs alongside Simon on ASMR. Cover photography is by Monika Piel (Die Knochen) and Nicola Malkmus (Die Kanten), with the original EP artwork by Sofie Böhm. For the LP, Carmen Orschinski reworked these elements into a cohesive new design.

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Assembled by Pedro Alves Sousa, Má Estrela is a conjuration of ideas and obsessions around dub, leftfield dance phenomena and the hypnotic potential of urban somnambulance.

In a levitating state, not exactly detached from the unease of these end times, Sousa surrounds himself by a number of accomplices from past and present endeavours to project a scrying mirror reflection of distinct languages of trance and liberation – dub’s space and infinity, jungle and footwork’s broken shards, DJ Screws legacy perpetually reanimated via numerous slowed down anonymous versions on Youtube and the lyricism and fire of jazz.

Temporarily a quartet, comprised of Sousa on saxophone and its electronic processing, Bruno Silva and Simão Simões on electronics and Gabriel Ferrandini on acoustic and electronic drums, after the departure of Miguel Abras, Má Estrela had in their 2022 debut album their first document of this ongoing process that’s now continued with ‘Tornada”. Miguel Abras has since been replaced with Bruna de Moura and Má Estrela came back to being a five piece.

Coming out in November through Discrepant, with Miguel Abras’ bass still present, ‘Tornada’ deepens the symbiotic connection between those rhythmic, melodic and textural particles in a mutating flux of continuities and disruptions throughout seven tracks. Featuring the invocations of Elvin Brandhi in ‘All You Did’, ‘Tornada’ makes its way amidst harmonic spectres, rhythmic debris that breathe for life and a certain, implicit idea of ritual that sustains itself liminally between the ethereal dissolution of time and the physical projection of space.

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