Limited to 200 hand-numbered copies. Packaged in a squashed can with 2 sets of nuts and bolts holding the package together. Inside the package is a paper strip insert. The essence of Aube's artistic philosophy has never been more distilled, more physically incarnate, than in Squash, the 1995 cassette that transmutes the humble sound of compressed metal into a meditation on materiality, reduction, and sonic design.

Originally released in a limited run of 100 copies on Chocolate Monk UK via Aube's own G.R.O.S.S. Records imprint, Squash stands as a singular artifact in the lineage of conceptual noise. Where other practitioners of extreme sonics have pursued abstraction through electronic aggression or formal experimental technique, Akifumi Nakajima - the Kyoto-born sound designer behind Aube - approached the work as an industrial designer would approach a structural problem: with precision, constraint, and an almost architectural sense of purpose.

The album operates from a deceptively simple mandate: a single source material (tin can), processed and manipulated through voltage-controlled oscillation and electronic filtration, yields three tracks of densely textured, paradoxically warm noise. What emerges is neither merely destructive nor merely abstract. The sound has weight. It has memory. It carries within it the acoustic properties of its origin - the ringing quality, the resonance characteristic of compressed metal - while simultaneously transforming that materiality into something almost sculptural, almost frozen in time.

Aube's refusal to label his work as "music" in the conventional sense becomes clarifying when encountering Squash. This is not composition in the lyrical tradition. This is not even noise-as-provocation, in the manner of certain industrial or power electronics lineages. Instead, it represents sound as design, sound as a material property equal to pigment or steel, to be explored with the rigor and conceptual clarity that one might bring to any engineered object.

The packaging itself encodes this philosophy. Squash arrived as a literally squashed tin can, held together with nuts and bolts - the physical container embodying the sonic content, material form reflecting material source. In an era of increasingly dematerialized music distribution, the recovery of such an object feels not nostalgic but profoundly necessary.

For those seeking an entry point into Aube's vast and often hermetic catalog, Squash offers both accessibility and uncompromising depth. It is neither his most aggressive work nor his most ethereal, but rather a perfect equilibrium: a work in which restraint becomes radical, in which the reduction of variables clarifies rather than diminishes meaning.

Aube passed away in 2013, leaving behind a discography that remains largely unavailable through streaming platforms and conventional distribution channels. The reissue of Squash - in all its material specificity and conceptual rigor - stands as both memorial and invitation: an opportunity to encounter one of experimental sound's most singular voices at a moment when such voices feel increasingly necessary, increasingly difficult to reach.