REGHOSTER: This acoustic piano-drums collaboration can be transformed through electronics into a hybrid spatial continuum creating a frictional, nervous symbiosis filled with jolts but also with abrasive and/or restrained fluidity. Nicolas Field (drums & electronics), Thomas Florin (piano & electronics), Jérôme Noetinger (Revox tape machine), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Fritz Welch (voice).

You’re approaching the region where gravity feels tampered with; “Dreaming With The Lights On” is to drift into a zone where bodies and objects appear to have slipped into a dream’s editing room and reassembled themselves according to priorities still unfamiliar.

The music begins long before the sound does—inside a suspended brightness, a sky that hums with the possibility of transformation. The listener’s mind becomes a surface onto which impossible gestures imprint themselves: limbs blending with other limbs, forms collapsing into hybrid contours, and vertical structures hanging like instruments from a dimension that refuses to close fully.

Performed live at Archipel Festival, “Dreaming With The Lights On” operates like the sonic equivalent of a floating, warped tableau. The ensemble doesn’t merely play the score; it bends around it, leaking into its margins. Field’s composition offers coordinates but not instructions—an energetic lattice that encourages strange entanglements, acoustic grafting, and sudden shifts of density. What results is a kind of audio-organism, mutating in real time, reshaping itself the way figures and objects fuse and distort in a dream-state that should know it is awake.

In this heightened condition, sound behaves as if it has its own musculature. Gestures stretch, fold, and tangle; pulses climb upward like suspended cables; resonances pool and merge with uncanny elasticity. Textures cling on and then peel away, leaving behind residue—scrapes of voice, ripples of breath, mechanical glimmers. You might feel these sonic shapes leaning against you: intimate, unstable, oddly tender, and slightly alarming. Familiar signals appear briefly before dissolving into something more speculative: a sub-reality flickering at the edge of perception, an alternate version of “now” brushing against the present.

What emerges is not a narrative but a state—a lucid dream conducted under full illumination, where everything is visible yet nothing behaves as expected.

Dreaming With the Lights On moves toward its own logic with unwavering confidence. It makes sense the way dreams do: through atmosphere, mutation, and a peculiar brightness that feels both inviting and slightly dangerous. This is still The Style.

It’s still the way it has to be!

ROTTER OTTER is a Glasgow based quartet featuring the talents of Rose Dagul (cello); Hannah Ellul (synth & tapes); Ben Ellul-Knight (vocals & samples) & Rebecca Wilcox (Vocals & Samples).

HABITS is Rooter Otter’s release on Chocolate Monk: a soundtrack to a still life of objects arranged so-so along a skirting board. Wafting around the carefully arranged scene in ‘besides bugs’ is a chamber music for the tiny beetles scuttling around the casting of a child’s feet; commemorative plates and a light bulb balanced on a jam jar. Photographs, domestic mutations abound in ’slimy blobs’ – a shimmer of light from a fountain – lucky coins flipped, horse hair stripped, heard in submerged duet with the clicks and pops of plant life. Ah Ah Ahhh what ‘hangar’ repeats is the scrunch of a crisp packet, textures for dreaming picked apart by anxious hands. With the little bits and pieces re-forming as song particles that only ‘seems like a flow’ kicked up and disturbed in different directions when exposed to the light.