This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors Arifur Rahman, Words By Shoaib, and Gavin Senaratne.
It’s Friday, and ‘Between The Cracks’ lands on the site once again. Six fresh finds from across the board have wriggled their way into view as the week wraps up. KAKUHAN, Otto Benson, Mary Ocher and more are in the mix this time. Dive in, enjoy, and keep showing love to the artists and labels. Check out our latest picks below.
Albums
KAKUHAN – KAK
With KAK, Japanese duo KAKUHAN sharpen the strange, thrilling tension that made Metal Zone so compelling, pushing even deeper into the space where human instinct collides with machine precision. Built from Koshiro Hino‘s clipped, algorithmic rhythms and Yuki Nakagawa’s restless cello work, the album feels less like a collection of tracks than a living system, always shifting, recalibrating, and threatening to slip off balance. Its appeal lies in that instability: digital structures snap into place only to be smeared, bent, or disrupted by raw acoustic pressure. That dynamic is especially vivid on ‘KAK-ST‘, whose long-form architecture lets the duo stretch their electroacoustic language into something both punishing and hypnotic, and on ‘KAK-JUK’, where jagged rhythmic detail and bowed textures lock together with an almost physical intensity. Even in its more abstract passages, the record never feels cold; there is always friction, breath, and movement inside the machinery. Rather than simply refining their debut, KAKUHAN make KAK feel more immersive and exacting, a fiercely modern record that turns controlled chaos into its own kind of pulse. – WBS
Otto Benson – Peanut
With Peanut, Otto Benson steps into a softer, more exposed kind of songwriting, trading the twitchy electronics and glockenspiel-heavy experiments of earlier work for something hazier, warmer, and far more intimate. His first vocally focused album feels like a late-night drift through half-formed memories, built from nylon-string guitar, muted keys, and a lo-fi production style that gives everything a slightly waterlogged glow. Benson’s voice sits low and unforced in the mix, never demanding attention but gradually becoming the emotional centre of the record. That sense of closeness comes through clearly in ‘Mr. Peanut‘, which opens the record with a strange, gentle charm and turns surreal imagery into something unexpectedly comforting, while ‘Red and Neon‘ leans into Benson’s gift for dreamy, understated hooks, wrapping its melancholy in a soft psychedelic haze. Other highlights include the whimsical ‘Raisin ‘, the quirky synth instrumental detour ‘Soy Beans‘ and the dreamy ‘Drive Away‘. Across the album, even the oddest lyrical turns feel natural inside the carefully built atmosphere, giving the songs a quietly hypnotic pull. Rather than abandoning his experimental instincts, Benson folds them into something more human on Peanut, making it one of his most inviting and quietly absorbing releases yet. – WBS
Juli Deák – Brisk
Juli Deák transforms the solo flute into a surprisingly expansive sonic palette with her solo debut, ‘Brisk’. Rooted in classical technique but constantly pushing outward, the album draws on the freedom of jazz by amplifying unorthodox techniques such as breath noise, multiphonics, and improvisational phrasing. The album was recorded in single takes with no overdubbing at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Budapest, utilising the building’s natural reverb to create a tactile, intimate atmosphere. Rather than presenting fully composed works, Deák often lets ideas unfold organically, giving the record a sense of immediacy. The title track establishes the album’s language; rapidly varying pitch, loudness and articulation to create an unstable tonal landscape. ‘Steam‘ pushes further into jazz-inflected phrasing, where rhythmic looseness and tonal bending take over. By contrast, ‘Tamed‘ aims for a more serene soundscape, with a reedy, resonant sound that’s quite unlike anything I’ve heard in a flute performance. ‘Contact‘, the longest track on the album, foregrounds the raw, physical interaction between flute and metal. Brisk is a thesis built around the physicality of sound itself. It lacks a clear thematic structure, but that is not a weakness. This is an album that invites close listening and rewards your patience with subtle, shifting detail. – GS
Leila Bordreuil + Kali Malone – Music for Intersecting Planes
Every so often, an album comes along that quietly redraws the borders of ambient drone, think The Tired Sounds, Monoliths & Dimensions, Deep Listening, Yirinda, and The Sacrificial Code. With Music for Intersecting Planes, Kali Malone nudges the ambient‑drone canon forward once again. Recorded at night by candlelight in the Temple of La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, Music for Intersecting Planes captures the immediacy of sound in space. Organist Malone, in collaboration with cellist Leila Bordreuil, presents four tracks that are minimal in means yet expansive in effect, slowly unfolding like beads on a thread, punctuated by silence and deep breaths. The scale of the music is majestic, bellows whistle within feathered string harmonics, interference patterns pulsate throughout the chapel, and the environment itself becomes part of the composition, with ringing church bells and motorcycles passing in the distance. No more words, listen. Recommended. – CFS
Mary Ocher – Weimar
With Weimar, Berlin-based artist Mary Ocher strips her sound down to its barest emotional core. Known for her confrontational art-punk and politically charged experimental work, Ocher takes a strikingly different path here, building the album almost entirely around piano, minimal arrangements, and a quietly intense vocal presence. The result feels intimate yet heavy with historical awareness, drawing subtle influence from 20th-century minimalism, chamber pop, and modern classical composition while still carrying the reflective urgency that has always shaped her music. That restraint becomes one of the album’s greatest strengths. ‘The Dance‘ opens the record with a spare, cabaret-tinged mood, its slow piano movement and measured delivery setting a reflective tone that lingers throughout. Later, ‘On The Streets of Hard Labor (revisited)‘ deepens the atmosphere, with Yukari Aotani’s violin adding a fragile emotional edge to Ocher’s stark piano framework. Across its brief but carefully shaped runtime, Weimar feels less like a dramatic statement and more like a quiet meditation, where history, vulnerability, and resistance echo through the silence between notes. – WBS
Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes – Unrelated
Friends and musical comrades Sam Wilkes and Sam Gendel once again join their creative minds to produce ‘Unrelated’. Two of the boldest, most singular voices in ‘LA’s contemporary jazz orbit have delivered their best work to date. The album opens with ‘RAPWORLD‘, which begins with soft, dreamy synth music at odds with its name. The track continues at a fixed melody and tone throughout its runtime. The next track, ‘LOS‘, uses soft percussion, electric strums, and synth sounds for a dreamlike, immersive ambience. The album has clearly discernible themes: musical creativity and a relaxed feel. The final two tracks on the album, ‘FIEFDOM‘ and ‘PI-PI MALAGUII‘, showcase the musical duo’s experimentation. Both tracks use flute sounds, jazz instruments, and electronic tunes. The last track includes a mellow electric guitar with a soft, consistent electric melody. The album leaves the listener lost in nostalgia and warm colour memories. This record is the perfect embodiment of mellow jazz blended with intricate instrumentalisation. It’s an album that needs to be put on repeat to be fully absorbed. – AR
