Reverse Acceleration of Dragons signals a new chapter for Glasgow’s 12th Isle and for its makers Radx, the freshly minted duo of label regulars X.Y.R. and Vlad Dobrovolski (½ of S A D). Emerging after the label’s short pause in the first half of 2025, the album plays like a quiet relaunch manifesto: deeply electronic yet oddly organic, rooted in vintage 80s and 90s synthesizers but entirely uninterested in museum-piece nostalgia. Instead, X.Y.R. and Dobrovolski meet in the overlap between their solo practices – one inclined toward gently naive, lo‑fi drift, the other toward more textural, environmental constructions – and build a shared space where “ambient-adjacent furniture music” is populated by dragons and other speculative entities.
Those dragons aren’t fantasy window dressing so much as conceptual anchors. Drawing on the science-fiction of Michael Swanwick, where dragons act as living machines engineered for war and labour, Radx imagine their synths as similarly semi-sentient devices, happily idling until someone or something nudges them into motion. You can hear this in the way the pieces unroll: tones that feel more grown than programmed, pulses that suggest internal metabolisms rather than strict drum patterns. The duo openly reference the electronica of Kim Cascone and Hydrosphere – detailed but unhurried, patterned but porous – yet their sound is warmer, more humid, suffused with the slightly odd sense of scale that typifies 12th Isle’s catalogue.
Across the record, various synthesis models, pedals and samplers are combined into layered, slowly shifting scenes. The “cathedralic ascension” of “Heavenly Shepherd of Silence” rises from a single, almost organ-like drone into a halo of overtones and upper-register figures, like a church piece smuggled into a space station chapel; reverb is used not as a blur but as vertical architecture, suggesting height, metal and mist. “Ovgo’s Etheric Mind” leans into the back-room bean bag mode hinted at in the notes – soft pads, rounded bass swells, little constellations of high synth twinkle – but there’s always some slippage, a warble or detuned shimmer that keeps it firmly out of generic chill-out territory.
“Liminal Space” thickens the air. Here, Radx drift toward dense, jungle-like humidity: low-end fog, looping midrange figures, faint percussive hints buried so deep they feel more like the creak of branches than beats. It’s music that evokes plant growth, condensation, bioluminescence – the ambient end of the catalogue “built upon further,” but with a clear sense of ecosystem rather than wallpaper. Elsewhere, pieces pivot between calmer plateaus and mild disorientation: filters opening and closing like breathing, stray melodic fragments rising, circling, then sinking back into the bed of sound. Throughout, the duo’s fondness for vintage synth character is evident – chorus, grain, the specific glow of old chips – yet always subsumed into a slightly off-world narrative.
What makes Reverse Acceleration of Dragons stand out is its refusal to resolve into a single listening mode. It works beautifully as background – true “furniture music” in the Eno/Satie sense – yet it rewards close attention with a steady supply of small, satisfying events: a change in envelope here, a sudden harmonic twist there, a new layer of texture quietly stitched into the stereo field. It’s also a neat summation of where 12th Isle has found itself: understated but distinctive, happy to sit near ambient bins while gently undermining the genre’s clichés. For anyone who has followed X.Y.R. and Dobrovolski’s separate trajectories, the album feels like a natural convergence; for newcomers, it offers a fully formed, self-contained world, its dragons dozing peacefully in the circuits, ready to stir the moment you press play.
