“Known for shaping a world of pulsating analog frequencies, brooding atmospherics and industrial tinged techno, the duo expands their sonic reach with a record that moves with sharpened precision, wider depth and a more deliberate sense of immersion. Described as crafting fierce, dense, widely reverberating techno, Stärker established their signature tone with their acclaimed previous releases on Hospital Productions & Zhark, celebrated for their raw rhythmic focus and enveloping ambient strata. On “Spectral”, the pair deepen this tension between propulsion and abstraction, refining their interplay of rhythm and drone into a more cinematic and enveloping architecture. The album builds from tightly coiled analog pulses into vast, corrosive sound fields, creating an experience that navigates between ritualistic momentum and spectral stillness. Each piece carries a sense of physical weight, yet remains permeated by an atmospheric haze that gives the music its uniquely hypnotic character. The interplay of rhythmic sensibilities and experimental ambient continuum remains central, but evolves here into something more unified, more assertive and more evocatively textured. Spectral stands as a culmination of STÄRKER’s ongoing exploration of industrial pressure, low frequency tension and immersive ambience, presenting a body of work that is both immediate and deeply layered. It marks a decisive step forward for the duo, reinforcing their presence within the techno, experimental and dark ambient spheres”. (Aesthetical)

Vigroux beschreibt das Projekt: “Nacht is the sound of language dissolving into resonance, the echo of meaning after words have disappeared”. Die beiden rund halbstündigen Stücke verbinden paukende Detonationen und strömende, teils orchestrale Elektronik mit einer stark aufgeladenden Vokaleinbindung, die zwischen Zurücknahme und deutlicher Präsenz wechselt. Die Produktion bewegt sich zwischen strukturierter Präzision und Momenten des Zusammenbruchs, getragen von einer Spannung aus Rhythmus, Verzerrung und einer teils fast überdeckten Stimme. Das Album ist auch zum Download erhältlich.

“Frederic Arbour’s musical output over the last twenty five years has been one of consistent, dark eyed focus. His project Visions and the collaborative Skorneg has issued abyssal dark ambient and textured minimal drones respectively. Further, the output of Stärker, his duo with Martin Dumais, published isolating industrial techno on Hospital Productions and Zhark, notable amidst a sea of clones for their conviction in utterly colourless productions, the sound of factories producing for a customer long since dead. Purgate feels like a conglomeration of this previous work with eyes set outward and upwards, space gazing instead of bowed toward the iron ball beneath all of our feet.” (Aesthetical / Opal Tapes)

“The album [...] revolves around the concept of “illusion” to be understood as a succession of images, sounds, colours, objects, actions that vividly affect the senses and imagination showing unreal and intangible figures, but still visible and paralysing, just like our fears are. In fact, each track deals with my different turmoils, negative thoughts that have conditioned the last few years of her life and describe uneasy conditions shared by most of her peers (toxic relationships; job insecurity and exploitation; immateriality of the future, translated into frustration, exhaustion/desperation, claustrophobia and a desire to escape; anguish, panic and a sense of powerlessness towards nature and disease). The project is presented as a cathartic experience in which she exorcises her mental ghosts and confronts challenges with the powerful and persuasive weapon that is sound, composed of obsessive rhythms and evanescent atmospheres. Finally, the reference to the Magic Lanterns is linked to her research in the field of audiovisuals, since they were the first performances in which an attempt was made, through the combination of motion graphics, light games and sound, to obtain greater sensorial and emotional involvement with the public.” (Aesthetical)

“New full length album of Franck Vigroux’s uncompromising signature sound of colossal electronic music. Atotal gathers material from Franck’s latest live A/V of the the same name. Working with his long time visual partner Antoine Schmitt, ATOTAL is an audiovisual performance aiming to reconstruct in order to better deconstruct the processes of imposition of will by repetition and absolute synchronism, to propose a breach to a potentially life-saving decoincidence. The total work of art, when pushed to its paroxysm of absolute coincidence of the perceptions of a captive spectator, is similar to the techniques of mental manipulation of

totalitarian regimes, proceeding by annihilation of the critical mind, repetitive semantic pounding, subliminal messages. The ideal of a deterministic universe of Newton in which everything rationally stems from its causes, in which everything is predictable like a totality for Laplace’s daemon, where everything can be considered already written, has been undermined in the infinitely small of the uncertainties of Heisenberg which tell us that it is impossible to know everything about a particle, in the quantum mechanics of Schrödinger which reveals to us that

the looker affects the looked-at, and in the infinitely abstract of Gödel’s incompleteness which explains to us that certain things are literally unexplainable. The show ATOTAL slips into these flaws and, like a clinamen of Lucretia, deviates the visual and audio atoms from their destiny. Mastering by Denis Blackham. Artwork by Mostafa Khaled” (Cyclic Law / Aesthetical)