Vida’s base material (created with a computer controlled modular synthesizer) tends to be very elasticated in its pitch and movement: tiny beeps ping into the foreground as if held taut and released, squelches of bass stutter to a near-standstill before rekindling their momentum out of nowhere, while other fragments twitch and quiver like little muscular spasms. And when sound isn’t restlessly on the move, it’s poised uncomfortably off axis – frequencies are often weighted asymmetrically, tilting the listener’s sense of balance by dumping generous loads of bass frequency on one side or the other.

The album’s best moments come in split-second flashes that evaporate the second they’re acknowledged: the watery droplets on “Pin Ans Sweep” that collapse into angry sub-bass crunches, the taps and pops on “Qweek Plus Enner (Outro Too)” that sound like marbles being dropped on a smooth table, the sliding drones of “Zizzlerz” that seem to suddenly turn the world on its side. In fact, it’s this last example that best highlights what makes being immersed in esstends-esstends-esstends so compelling: as a listener, I don’t feel like the anchoring centrepoint by which placement and distance are measured, but I like a floating fragment of Vida’s sonic flux – free to be thrown and pinged through imaginary space along with the sounds that whizz by and above and beneath.

Talk about a contrast. Far from the grandiose, theatrical gestures of the band before, Max Bondi switches audience focus to the miniature modulations brought on by knob tweaks and patch lead swaps. He leaves the wiry electronic guts of his synthesizers on show, exhibiting the process behind each gentle growth and contortion of his bass-heavy electronics. Digital clinicalism and analogue warmth are swapped back and forth; musical life arrives as breaths of hand-modulated synth drone between streams of algorithmic calculation, with the music switching between the organic synthesizer muscle-flexes to precise arpeggiation babbles reminiscent of Keith Fullerton Whitman’s Generators. It’s an impressive solo debut for Bondi, even if sometimes there’s a sense that he’s trying to do too much, and the insistence on placing multiple textures in parallel often mean that audience is unable to appreciate the intricacies of any layer in particular.

After two starkly different support slots no doubt capture the crowd off guard, A Whisper In The Noise arrive with a few surprises of their own. Tonight’s set is surprisingly dependent on earlier material – with a few cuts from the recent To Forget weaved in for good measure – drawing as much from the band’s harder, more cathartic tendencies as from the sedated melancholy of the later work. The most immediately impressive aspect of their sound is the way in which the recorded versions are carried over to the live setting, with barely a single intricate texture spilled en route; whether it’s via sparingly applied backing track or by Thordson switching coolly between hands on synthesizer keys to beaters on drum pads, AWITN make it all happen and make it look easy. At one point, three songs are threaded into one by a simple drum loop than runs throughout all of them: a device that could look like cheating in the wrong hands, but gifts the music a gorgeous flow in this context. The night’s highlight was arguably “Your Hand”, in which Sonja Larson gazes moon-eyed into the audience and spills a beautiful vocal line, backing away from the microphone to bring beautiful swoops of violin arching out over Thordson’s simple melody undercurrent.

“Phill 1” (a nod to Phill Niblock, perhaps?) begins instantly, as though popping a bubble within an anechoic vacuum and releasing the sound; drones arc downwards and then slide gradually up again, moaning like distant evacuation sirens, while a reactive slab of sub-bass dances tectonically with the various drones and overtones that slide over the top of it. Much like Niblock, the music evades stasis in favour of agonising slow motion, and each movement in pitch or volume takes place in the lumbering turning circles of a gigantic ship. In contrast, the progression of “Study A” feels like the product of chance rather than deliberation: sound spills out on its own accord, veering into discordance and harmony like ink left to run haphazardly across a page, with O’Malley and Rehberg feeling less like the composers and more like the observers of chance and accident. Frequencies enter and depart in such a manner that the music appears to rotate and tilt (a quality that recurs throughout V), like shrill and shimmering razorblades balanced precariously in low gravity.

But it’s the latter two pieces that take KTL to an atmospheric scale never previously breached. For “Phill 2”, the orchestral arrangements of Johann Johannsson move in bellowing lurches while the duo drop electronic shrapnel from a aircraft hangar ceiling, spilling across the soundscape’s edges with a density that increases throughout the track’s duration. Soon the “shrapnel” is a gas, swamping the orchestra from all sides and clouding the melody within a bristly veil of trapped electronic static.

Meanwhile, “Last Spring: A Prequel” stands as the most sparse – and perhaps most disturbing – KTL work to date. Jonathan Capdevielle performs a schizophrenic monologue over a delicate concoction electronic scrapes and phantom echoes, as if he’s been left stranded within a cave and driven mad by relentless isolation. It’s virtually toneless, empty – sound is as gas and as ghouls, streaking the audio space with cold absence and cavernous nothing. The piece was actually created for Vienne’s installation of the same name, taking the music of KTL back to adopt its original function, and proving that O’Malley and Rehberg are more capable of fulfilling this role than ever before.

A Dream In Blood

The 20-minute opening track works the best, largely because it showcases Bodley’s ability to disguise stark contrast in gentle mutations and slow-motion cross fades. But while the narrative itself may move in these horizon-sweeping arcs, the activity within doesn’t necessarily adopt the same sort of patience; the music is littered with spikier textures, from jagged bursts of white noise to the brisk winter crackle of field recording. His music thus blooms into three dimensions, allowing the listener to narrow their concentration on an intricate rustle of noise in the foreground or gaze wondrously at the sonic cloud formations that collate in the album’s distant corners.

One particularly interesting aspect of A Dream In Blood’s construction is the way in which Bodley used short sine waves as the initial building blocks for the album’s illustrious soundscapes, with homemade Max/MSP patches adding chance and randomisation to the way in which these textures went on grow and crystallise. And while there’s a definite musical sensibility to the way in which the sounds often gravitate towards complementary harmonic forms, the pieces are equally prone to collapsing into dissonance, bending inwards from smooth parallels to form ugly tonal frictions beyond the composer’s control. Bodley is no more than the seed-planter here, and it’s beautiful to observe this record flourish largely on its own accord, without the intrusion of constant human intervention.

Either Day Of The Demons enlightens me to an aspect of Palestine’s palette that already exists and I had yet to discover, or the sedative drones Janek Schaefer have managed to lull his collaborative partner into a much gentler meditative state that previously seen. Palestine’s uncompromised charisma still spills into every part of this release, yet unlike the Ambarchi collaboration I witnessed last month, the record is one of intimate connection and attentive response – the sound of two artists entwined, emanating in absolute unison but with their own distinctive tones still very much distinguishable within the chorus.

“Raga de L’apres midi pour Aude” is the first of these two 20-minute pieces: ascending gradually upward through a haze of overlapping organ drone and Palestine’s encircling vocal wails, which quiver awkwardly out from between strained jaws. Various other instruments become audible from within the fog – accordion, strings, piano – but only momentarily, and soon enough they drift back within the vaporous mass of sound, with only Palestine’s vocal harmonies permitted to ascend spiralling above the drones.

In many respects, “Fables From A Far Away Future” is the polar opposite. Where “Raga…” bleeds into itself and becomes a solitary entity, “Fables…” keeps its seams very much on show. An eclectic array of samples are hauled together (bitcrushed children’s prayers, street carnival chatter and the mutterings of various different languages) and slotted in amongst relentless accordion dissonance, clumsy chimes and beautiful rushes of synthesised strings. It’s haphazard, full of contrasting atmospheres that react discordantly to eachother’s company, with voices and field recordings misplaced with dream-like incohesion.

The whole record feels as much of a withholding as it does a creative release. Palestine and Schaefer seem to be on telepathic parallel throughout – effortlessly tuning into eachother’s eerie ambient abstraction – but there’s a sense of imminence throughout, as though Day Of The Demons is a forewarning for something terrible about to occur. The nature of this impending disaster is never disclosed, kept as a shared secret between Palestine and Schaefer: an intimate souvenir of the collaborative experience to be treasured by them and them alone.

So after drawing the listener’s attention down to the creation of sound on a molecular level and crafting it miraculously from silence itself, the transition to the live recording is startling. Chung’s tones become nestling in amongst the fierce rustle of feet and projectile coughs in a 16-minute set dedicated to Yuki Aida; both performer and audience battle to achieve a pristine silence in which the music can ripple and glisten, and the fact that this is forever denied by a distant background chatter and the room’s ambient reverberations is somewhat charming.

The contrast with Yuki Aida’s half is stark to say the least. Whereas Chung’s music seems to patiently question its own existence, Aida’s sounds are recklessly alive: juddering and buzzing in bursts of varying lengths, ranging from the stuttering computer errors of the opening 90 seconds to the prickly, dissonant cyberflow of the final track’s 13 minutes. The unperceivably slow slides of transition comprising Chung’s work are replaced by sudden timbral switches: muffled radiator hums become jittery loose livewires, which in turn dissolve into globules of ambient water floating in anti-gravity. But while the sounds themselves are far more brash than those of the album’s first half, their construction is no less meticulous for working with bigger, louder building blocks – equally, neither is the increase in volume at the expense of a mesmerising level of sonic detail. Aida merely works with sound on a larger scale, and where Chung evokes an appreciation for the way in which sonic particles move and interact, Aida compiles them into towering objects, no longer restricted to the parameters of sound, but free to adopt the attributes of place and shape.

It’s a sound that has frequented his recent output – often scattered in between the rhythmically driven pieces like a “timewarp” style segue – but the fact that the album is largely founded on a live recording means that it throbs out into physical space rather than being wired into the ears with digital immediacy. Often its rapid-fire throbs feel like rings of light, shooting over the listener’s head as if they’re hurtling through a deep space wormhole, tilting and turning as volume and frequency are adjusted with a delicate laboratory precision. Reverb is trickled over the electronics and then let loose in ghostly howls, blurring the cascade of pulses into a stream of noise. Only the occasional deviation into the sparse pitter-patter of clicks and pops offer fleeting respite; Kippschwingungen is otherwise devoted to minor adjustments and mutations of its central texture, contorting within its stasis before its kaleidoscopically dazzled listener. Pure and beautiful.

Strangely enough, the album’s first few bars look set to fly into high-velocity drum and bass; the punchy synthesizer riff and haphazard splash of drum machine cymbals on “567” seem itching to let loose like a shot, only for it to gradually drag itself to its feet at half the expected tempo. From here on in, Matsunaga builds up a gorgeous electronic with which to toy with the idea of space and distance – reverb is applied in both moderation and reckless excess, with the track’s main synthesizer motifs breaking out of their sterile quantization to flood imaginary cathedral walls. In fact, the album’s first batch of tracks are the strongest by a stretch. The quivering staccato harmonies of “476” entwine beautifully over the track’s rolling 6/8 rhythm, while “638” arrives as a reverberant synthesizer mist, possessive of a mysterious gloom that brings to mind earlier Boards of Canada works.

Two brief interludes – both comprised of sporadically placed notes, bouncing off of eachother like reactive molecules – act as the bridge into a slightly less enthusing second half. The groove here on in feels more complacent, either reprising the mood of earlier tracks or wringing solitary ideas dry: “55” steps the tempo up toward techno, cycling between various drum machine inflections without a sense of purpose to drive it forward. Meanwhile, “530” clings to its unwavering hip-hop drum loop and leaves it to stagnate beneath synthesizers plonked nonchalantly on the rhythmic upstrokes. The closing three-minutes offer something of a last-gasp recovery though: a spiraling electronic sample unwinds like an underwater music box, writhing between various shapes as the listener’s sense of orientation is teased by dizzying frequency sweeps. Plenty to enjoy here, with this last track acting as a reminder to head straight back in to the stellar first half.

Structurally, this Lichtung edit is neatly arranged. It drifts seamlessly between the two artists, blurring locational boundaries so that the listener is deep within Machinefabriek territory long after they realise they’d even departed from Roden’s soundscapes (and vice versa). The autumnal crunch of Zuydervelt’s “Leaves” floats gracefully into the path of Roden’s “Ice Strings” – the latter of which sounds like the oceanic bubbles of disturbance surrounding a glacier in motion – while Roden’s “Birds Plucks Stones” and Zuydervelt’s “Wind” find their point of transition in a mutual sense of desolate wintery chill.

And while Lichtung is impressive for the way in handles its own motion, it’s also a delight during the times it settles, at which points those intricate details can be best observed. The aforementioned “Birds Plucks Stones” is Roden’s own highlight, mingling staccato birdsong chirps (that ping between each ear like a tennis match) with an eerie metallic creak on loop, bringing to mind the ghostly rotations of a disused children’s roundabout. Meanwhile, Machinefabriek excels most prominently during “Floor Radio”; high-frequency drones linger like dust particles turned into audio, while thumps and clatters echo like a ball bounced and rolled across aged wooden floorboards. As expected, the album collates engrossing audio from both parties, and is immersive enough to eradicate the shadow of Lichtung’s installation roots.

The fact that Fuck You! is in a constant struggle with its raison d’etre is both its central frustration and one of its most prominent charms. Rather than stumble upon a handful of musicians that cathartically vent their aggression at “the regime” (judging by the recurrent questions posed at the film’s interviewees, this may well be what the filmmakers expected to find), Fuck You! is an eclectic bag of intense political bitterness and utter indifference. Much of the time, Guy-Marc Hinant and Dominique Lohle appear to be trying to excavate the inner punk and revolt within their subjects when in fact there is none; many of these musicians play their music out of enjoyment alone, meaning that the interviewer’s queries as to whether political motive or escapism exists within the music are often met with shrugs or tentative agreement. And while the film frequently falls clumsily into awkward silences or translation issues (turning French into Chinese and back again proves to be tricky), a certain impetus starts to arise as the film gradually mutates from “what does it all mean?” to the liberation of “does it need to mean anything at all?”

Ultimately, it’s a film about making a film. The frayed edges are left in: interviews are obscured by the backs of heads and shoulders, mic choices and potential and camera angles are openly discussed, interview questions are freely misinterpreted and criticised. The only real point at which Fuck You! becomes a sleek visual work is during the central chunk of performance footage of Torturing Nurse – shots are overlain as shots of mixing desks quiver under the sheer weight of audio velocity, as guitars, performers and microphones blur into a cacophony that slots neatly into the noise it accompanies. It’s no surprise that the performance footage is the most captivating element of Fuck You!. Whereas the interviews vary drastically in their degree of insight and interest (Sun Meng’s tale of first discovering The Beatles and Bob Dylan is a highlight, while Zbigniew Karkowski’s indulgent political lectures are a frequent turn-off), the shots of these artists in both sound check and performance are an absolute delight; sometimes caught in a gloomy, lamp-lit darkness, sometimes shrouded in a grainy-red mist that veils the performers in a sort of volcano vapour. Ironically, for all of the battling that ensues to wring significance out of the art, 30 seconds of obliterative Chinese noise proves enough to render all theorising irrelevant.