Audion 86 arrives as a concentrated blast of deep listening culture, a 44-page A4 issue that treats the margins of rock, jazz and experimental sound as its natural centre. First published on 6 February 2025 in simultaneous printed and pdf editions, the magazine continues Audion’s long-running refusal to follow fashion, pursuing instead what its editors call “explorations in sound and music” - the points where history gets strange, regional scenes bloom in isolation, and aesthetics mutate far from the spotlight. Edited by Steve Freeman, with writing, research and layout handled primarily by Alan Freeman and additional contributions from Andy Garibaldi and Adam Naworal, this instalment is “absolutely full” of articles and reviews, backed by a substantial multimedia component via Bandcamp.
The issue opens with “Australian Oddities and Curiosities,” a feature that digs into the more eccentric corners of that country’s rock and experimental history, tracing a line from obscure private-press releases to overlooked label projects and hybrid forms that sit awkwardly between prog, psych and post-punk. From there, Audion 86 shifts northward to Sweden, with a focused article on Hooffoot - “quality instrumental prog-fusion from Sweden” - followed by the latest chapter of the long-running “Scandinavian Fusion Legends” series, now up to its thirteenth instalment and spread over eleven pages. Together, these pieces sketch a parallel Nordic canon, one where extended compositions, jazz-trained players and rock dynamics collide in ways that never quite fit mainstream fusion narratives.
French heads are well served by a “Choice French Label Classics” survey of Pôle and Saravah, two imprints whose catalogues bridge jazz, chanson, experimental rock and the avant-garde, and whose aesthetics radiate through countless subsequent micro-scenes. In a different register, “Joachim ‘Eroc’ Ehrig - 20 questions with” offers a concentrated Q&A with the Grobschnitt drummer, producer and solo artist, drilling into tape tricks, studio lore and the eccentricities of the German underground from someone who helped shape it. Shorter features like “Was ist: Macht das Ohr Auf?”, “British Progressive Rock Today?”, “The Avant-Garde Sector”, “Rescued Relics” and “Short Cuts” act as satellites around these longer essays, respectively unpacking German-language oddities, taking the temperature of contemporary UK prog, surveying current experimental practice, and pulling neglected albums back into circulation.
Label-spotlight sections focus on Bright Carvings, Mylodon Records, Sloow Tapes and Whitelabrecs, four outfits operating in very different niches but united by a commitment to small-scale, artist-led production and a taste for the oblique. As always with Audion, the reviews pages are where the sprawl really shows: here, names like Aglaia, Cosmic Ground, Fermata, Henry Now, Kwoon, Eve Libertine & Eva Leblanc, Luciano Margorani / Dario d’Alessandro / Chris Cutler, Nurse With Wound / Diarmuid MacDiarmada, Jon Porras, Ring Van Möbius, Tagubu & Klimperei, Uneven Eleven and many more are not just ticked off but discussed in enough detail to suggest how they sound, where they sit, and why they’re worth tracking down.
