If the Japanese composer and musician Keiichiro Shibuya’s new album ANDROID OPERA MIRROR were to be summed up in a single word, that word would be »bombastic«. From the very first track, »MIRROR«, the listener is bombarded with gliding synth violins, brass, and a robotic voice intoning existential questions – ironically written by an AI.
There is something charmingly awkward about Shibuya’s pop-oriented, over-the-top compositions and the android vocal’s cloying kawaii factor. But before the album is halfway through, the constant pomposity begins to wear thin. »On Certainty«, with its ever-present strings and densely packed arrangements, rarely gives the music – or the listener – room to breathe. Shibuya and his android voice are saying an awful lot all the time, and it is so overwhelming that very little of it actually carries weight. When everything feels like an epic crescendo or the expected release from one, the effect is lost.
Taken individually, several of the tracks are otherwise quite compelling: »Midnight Swan (Android Opera ver.)«, which sounds like the opening theme to a dark and romantic anime, and the closing track »Scary Beauty (Vocal and Piano ver.)«, which shines precisely by trimming away the excess and focusing on the emotional core of the composition – an impact made far stronger by the simpler instrumentation. When the listener is not constantly overwhelmed, the romance, melancholy, and existential questions are allowed to make an impression. Unfortunately, ANDROID OPERA MIRROR is a listening experience that frustrates through its lack of subtlety – something it would otherwise have benefited greatly from.
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek
»Music for me is my hobby, my job, my outlet, my mood, an endless source of discovering new music and new, old music, some of the best and can be some of the worst. And I love it!«
Track72 aka Tue Track aka Anders Lundby Brixen. Producer, DJ, rapper and more. Known for his role in the trio Malk De Koijn, which since the mid-1990s has created a personal universe in Danish hip-hop. Has performed in Ponyblod, Xtra Naan, Track Abdullah Rock, Booty Cologne and others.
On Wednesday, 5 August 2026, it happened again: a chord in John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) changed after two and a half years. Classic FM reports.
The work was written by the American avant-garde composer John Cage in the mid-1980s. The score consists of eight pages of music, and, as the title suggests, the instruction is to play it »as slow as possible.«
»What music is to me? Where have the great feelings gone?«.
Gellért Szabó is a composer, conductor and performer based in Leipzig, Germany. His work combines contemporary composition with influences from free improvisation, noise and the expressive richness of the late nineteenth century. He is the founder and artistic director of the 23-piece Ideal Orchestra, an ensemble dedicated to large-scale experimental music of sweeping emotional intensity. Alongside this work, Szabó performs internationally with his solo project Radical Radio Show, exploring symphonic textures and immersive sound worlds through a single electric guitar and live electronics. His music is driven by a search for intensity, vulnerability and uncompromising emotional expression.
From the Culture Yard in Helsingør, ships glide past Kronborg Castle through the narrow waters of the Øresund – a reminder of the trade routes that, for centuries, have carried goods, people and power between the Nordic region and the wider world. It is an apt point of departure for the Passage Festival, and for Marie Dahl's vocal work Silk. Sugar. Sand, which explores the intertwined histories of three materials.
Silk. Sugar. Sand is a vocal performance in three acts tracing the historical journeys of these materials through colonialism, the global economy and geopolitics. Five singers from Ars Nova Copenhagen perform within a minimalist scenography consisting almost entirely of coloured light and three sets of costumes that transform throughout the performance: first silk dresses, then crinoline-like structures evoking sugar loaves, and finally grey stone-like forms suggesting accumulations of sand.
The work's central device is to translate the physical properties of these materials into vocal expression. At one moment, the elasticity of silk becomes soft, flowing polyphony; at the next, a cocoon-like electronic crackle. Sugar's crystalline structure is rendered as sharp vocal attacks – brief, whip-like cracks – as well as sweet, intimate whispers, while sand creaks and rustles, resonating with a libretto about economy and domination, violence and desire.
The performance has no conventional narrative, and the five singers portray no distinct characters, moving somewhat stiffly across the stage, as performers often do when their primary focus is on the voice. Comparisons with Hotel Pro Forma's Flammenwerfer are difficult to avoid. There, the production's rigorous aesthetic was counterbalanced by C.F. Hill's wildly expressive visual universe and Blixa Bargeld's deeply vulnerable stage presence. Those qualities are missing from Marie Dahl's carefully controlled staging, which could have benefited from more of the sensitivity and chaos that also form part of Kirsten Dehlholm's artistic legacy.
»To us, music is a primal, elemental force that allows us to shed our inhibitions.«
Leizure is a Copenhagen-based quintet operating at the intersection of post-punk, no wave, and experimental rock. The band’s sound is characterized by atonal vocals, piercing saxophone, hypnotic guitar riffs, and a rhythmic foundation that oscillates between tight precision and raw intensity.
The band’s upcoming album, The Guillotine, explores themes such as societal decay, upheaval, and the challenging of established structures – all conveyed through a direct and high-energy musical style.
