RLW

*2026 stock* Last time, RLW (Ralf Wehowsky—active years ago on P16.D4 and since then releasing a largely uncategorizable brand of noise music across numerous publications) thrilled us on these pages with his album Satanic Inventions. Now, again on Stephen Meixner’s label Black Rose Recordings, the similarly conceptually dense album Fading Pictures is released.

In the liner notes, Wehowsky describes the close connection between electroacoustics and Cinéma L’Oreille. He understands electroacoustic music as “autonomous” music—not as “programme music,” not as a means to an end. Rather, the individual pieces of the album are meant to give the listener room for free associations, so that their own “creativity” can develop. The titles of the nine tracks in total can—though they don’t have to—offer hints for interpretation; they can also be ignored.

The label speaks of “haunting atmospheres” (the artwork, designed by Chris Low, seems to underline this especially on the back), and that’s definitely the right description for these pieces—each one also has something, in a positive sense, unsettling about it, though it can be understood as meaning that conventions are being disrupted.