It looks like a solo album—but that’s misleading. Oli Kuster is anything but alone. A bass line starts to march, and in its slipstream an entire acoustic apparatus springs to life. It drones and rumbles, hums and booms, stutters and rattles, wavers and meanders; just as your legs want to dance, an abstract, intricate breakbeat cuts across the flow or a dissonant beep bores into the ear. Stop. Rewind. In the pandemic—while others folded origami and baked bread—the Bernese musician finally did what he’d long resisted: he burrowed into a workshop with a modular synthesizer. A black-hole affair that swallowed hours and days, as Kuster—trained electronics engineer, jazz-school graduate—coaxed a man–machine symbiosis from analog circuits, chasing the moment when the construct begins to breathe on its own.