Reviews
Autistici (aka David Newman)—seasoned by releases on respected labels such as 12k, Audiobulb, Home Normal, Hibernate, and Eilean Rec—demonstrates a masterful ability to reshape emotive landscapes and fractured sonic environments. The opening segment presents a four-track suite shaped in collaboration with Jacek Doroszenko, Russ Young, and Corey Gordon, each contributing to a delicate choreography of sonic intricacies, where coarse drones and exploratory electronic elements intertwine with representative sleek artwork by Jeff Dungfelder. This is especially evident on the nine-minute opener “Fluctuating State,” where ambient fragments and digital debris tether synthesized expressions to raw environmental recordings.
Autistici and Jacek Doroszenko ignite the journey with “After Water Formed A Shape,” a slow-burning stream of organic flutter and densely layered noise, where analog hues collide with glitch-driven mechanisms. Their shared vision continues in “Your Modal Realism,” a surreal audio tapestry where abstract tonalities and minute sonic detail drift through mosaic-like scenes, navigating the terrain between memory and imagination. Within these dreamlike reveries, Autistici seems most at ease—dwelling in the strange beauty of the in-between.
The suite concludes with “Observing Hyphae,” a sprawling twelve-minute piece crafted by Autistici, Russ Young, and Corey Gordon. Inspired by the filamentous threads that form the foundation of fungal life, the composition unfurls gradually—each sound fragment branching outward, multiplying and evolving like a living system. Here, the trio conjures a sonic habitat where ambient electronics and field recordings coalesce into a luminous web of sound, a quietly astonishing ecosystem where every note breathes and expands with quiet purpose.
We look forward to the next two installments—Familiarity Enfolded and Familiarity Unfolded—as Audiobulb continues to refine its craft, sculpting sound into immersive compositions that offer a sense of otherworldly refuge and sonic introspection.
Autistici’s "Familiarity Folded" is less a record than a philosophical prompt. It opens not with a bang, nor even a whisper, but with the ghost of an idea taking shape - half-memory, half-sonic mirage. It’s ambient music in its most molecular form, a kind of atmospheric origami folded from found sounds, soft synths, and the intangible matter of intersubjective collaboration.
This is part one of a triptych - soon to be followed by "Familiarity Enfolded" and "Unfolded" - and functions as both artifact and invitation. An artifact of shared artistic labor between Autistici and fellow sonic archaeologists Jacek Doroszenko, Russ Young, and Corey Gordon. An invitation into a world where loops bend time, drones stretch perception, and a stray note can become a portal.
Let’s get this out of the way: if you’re looking for a bass drop or a hummable melody, keep walking. This isn’t music in the conventional sense - it’s sound sculpted into emotion, the ambient equivalent of weathered poetry scratched into a glass wall by raindrops.
Each piece feels like a tiny chamber in an ancient machine, still humming quietly long after its original purpose has been forgotten. "Fluctuating State" might be the sound of your brain recalibrating during a lucid dream; "After Water Formed A Shape" (co-created with Doroszenko) evokes the gentle confusion of watching ripples form on a pond you didn’t know was real. On "Your Modal Realism", it’s unclear if the 'modal' refers to harmony or ontology - and that’s exactly the point.
The 12-minute closer "Observing Hyphae" (with Russ Young and Corey Gordon) is a slow, fungal sprawl of processed tones, patient textures, and subterranean life. It doesn’t grow. It multiplies, gently. Like spores learning to whisper.
The philosophy behind the record is one of deep listening and deferred authorship. Remix, in this context, is not a DJ flex - it’s a form of sonic empathy, a way to inhabit another’s thoughts without speaking over them. The collaboration here isn’t flashy - it’s intimate, like passing handwritten notes under the skin of a composition. You can feel the trust.
If all this sounds terribly serious, it is - but not pretentious. There’s a soft humility to the work, a refusal to shout in a world already drowning in slogans. Autistici, as always, operates with the care of someone tuning a delicate radio signal from a distant star.
What "Familiarity Folded" offers is space - mental, emotional, maybe even spiritual. Space to pause, absorb, forget, and re-listen. It’s a kind of audio anti-algorithm, disinterested in virality and perfectly calibrated to not go viral.
Familiarity Folded represents the first entry in what is to be a three part series of collaboration between Autistici and several other artists. It involves complex remixing of previously recorded material, not necessarily from full compositions, but engaging small pieces of sound with one another in intricate ways. The result of this thoroughly enmeshed sonic collaboration, at least in this first entry, is a series of tracks that feel like winding aural labyrinths that excite and entrance. There’s a variety of sounds at work, but they all feel as though they have been placed in a specifically treated place - a room that was made almost specially for them. The first track, “Fluctuating State,” feels minimalist on the surface while a much closer listen reveals a wealth of tiny sounds swimming under the surface. Soft and indiscernible whispers, minute clicks, and soft tonal shiftings all come together to create a soundscape that hides its complexity for those willing to listen closely enough to experience it.
This kind of dynamic becomes the primary theme of the album. This motif of the minute sounds being enveloped in the more obvious, requiring the listener to really put themselves into it fully to experience the full depth of the compositions. It’s truly a remarkable bit of layering that lets each piece of it exist in seemingly its own space. It can be beautifully disorienting at times and wonderfully calming at others. I found the final track in this collection of four to be among the most enveloping as it begins with the apparent and present pads, which slowly fade away as the song slowly transforms into the quiet atmospheric clicks and pops with those full but slightly cold pads pull away from the mix. This is definitely a low lit room and headphones kind of album, one that is filled with all the soft ear candy you could want.
It’s been a while since I last heard music from David Newman’s project Autistici. I am unsure whether he was in hibernation for a while or if he had only online releases. On this album, he has one solo track and three tracks in collaboration with others, none of which I had heard before. Two pieces with Jacek Doroszenko, each taking the lead, and one with Russ Young and Corey Gordon. As I play this release, I think about the entire laptop ambient genre. Music from labels such as Newman’s Audiobulb, 12K, Home Normal and others, and I realise these are all labels of which I haven’t heard new releases in a while, and I am unaware of changes, if any, that took place in this kind of music. Perhaps I am also a bit surprised that people work along these lines, as I assumed many had turned to modular synths. It’s great to hear this kind of thing after not hearing it for a while, or at least not to the extension I heard this 20-25 years ago. Newman is someone who writes his software patches (I recommend his ambient patch, which I found very resourceful and easy to work with), and I assume he uses these in his music. He uses it to process sounds from instruments, even when we no longer recognise them, and field recordings, also rendered beyond recognition. While there is an unmistakenly digital quality to the music, fragmented in grainy details, there’s also a subdued character to these pieces, warm and with an ambient feeling. Rhythm is, however, not absent as it is to a larger and lesser extent part of these pieces. The four pieces are certainly extensions of one another, with the last one, the three-way collaboration, containing the most experimental scratchy sounds but set against the most traditional synth backing. This is a lovely ambient for the changing season, with autumn colours spread across the sounds here. (FdW)
Two new Autistici albums, "Familiarity Folded" and "Familiarity Enfolded," will be released on Audiobulb on July 25 and August 2, respectively. These two releases mark the beginning of a three-part series dedicated to the creative potential of digital collaboration with other experimental acts. The focus is on the idea of relinquishing one's own control in favor of collective processes—a dialogic working method that is reflected in both remix projects and collaboratively composed pieces.
Existing material is not only altered, but transformed into a new form. Sounds are looped, stretched, fragmented, or reintegrated, a process reminiscent of thought and memory processes in which past perceptions and current experiences overlap. Sonically, the two albums oscillate between electronically charged, almost aquatic textures with shimmering and crackling details, acoustic instruments and field recordings, and openly contoured arrangements in which otherworldly moods unfold. Autistici's signature remains clearly audible: a meticulous, narrative sound architecture that repeatedly allows for moments of introspection.
"Familiarity Folded" was created with Jacek Doroszenko, Russ Young, and Corey Gordon. "Familiarity Enfolded" features work with Tomo Nakaguchi, A Dancing Beggar, OdNu, and again Russ Young. The artwork for both releases is by Jeff Dungfelder, who, in addition to his graphic work, is primarily known for his own musical work under the moniker Ümlaut. Both albums are available for download.
These are the first two parts of a trilogy celebrating collaboration among musicians, with Sheffield's Autistici at the core. The producer's name reflects his "fascination with tiny sounds", and approachable moments like 'Observing Hyphae' (with Russ Young and Corey Gordon) and 'Fata Morgana' (with OdNu and A Dancing Beggar) wring real beauty out of relatively simple ideas, via exquisite sonics and a slowly unfolding sense of drama. 'After Water Formed A Shape' and 'Fluctuating State' employ some nicely understated distortion, but generally things glide along with serene, engaging charm.
