Born of patience, meticulous attention and a purpose that is as focused in its approach as it is open to interpretation, crys cole’s music amplifies the sonic potential of the mundane with a view to long tours without a starting point or defined spatial destination. As if the reality that surrounds us were both another and a reflection of it, in a process of almost tactile immersion, escaping the functional sterility of ambient or more apathetic sound design and the ethnographic aspect of field recordings, given the intimacy and detail of her compositions. A Canadian living in Berlin, crys cole has seen her work come to light through labels that are as worthy as they are in tune with her craft, such as Second Sleep, Students of Decay and, above all, Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle – a long-time accomplice – while also amassing experience in collaborative agencies with people like James Rushford, Leif Elggren and Annea Lockwood. With the latter serving as a kind of spiritual antecedent to Cole, his music also shows the same life, hidden in small gestures and soft changes through field recordings, sound processing of everyday objects, soothing drones and contained pieces of percussion and synthesizer. A liminal space between the here and now and an indefinable other, reliably represented by albums such as ‘A Piece of Work’ or ‘Other Meetings’, created in the midst of lockdown and which, after a first edition in Boomkat’s Documenting Sounds series, was given new life at the end of last year by (of course) Black Truffle. Music of and for attention. With the calm that is required. NA

Half of Metametal and half of Soroastra, and collaborator on the sound matters of Alexandre Estrela’s ongoing exhibition at the MoMA in NY. Borja’s current sound experiments revolve around recursiveness. He employs intentionally wrongly decoded radio transmissions and drones made of pure intervals to create binaural textures and walls of sound during improvised performances.