** 2025 Stock **  No overture, just a slow dissolve: with Axolotl Lullabies, Felix Kubin assembles a suite of crepuscular pieces that treat sleep as a laboratory and melody as a moving organism. The tracks glow with Kubin’s signature paradox—playful and faintly eerie—where toybox timbres coexist with burnished analog haze, and radio-play dramaturgy whispers beneath the surface. Lullabies arrive bent and refracted, their spine intact but their shadows longer, as if sung underwater by an animal that never fully grows up, never fully grows old.

Across the album, miniature architectures rise and vanish: a music-box figure detunes into a comet tail; a pulse peeks out, blinks twice, and yields to choral vapor; a single note is rocked in place until it becomes a room. Kubin’s touch is tactile—faders as brushes, tape hiss as breath, negative space as a kind of percussion. The mood stays light on its feet yet quietly charged, inviting the ear to lean closer, to listen between events where the real story lingers.

Presented as a nocturne cycle rather than a genre statement, Axolotl Lullabies favors suggestion over spectacle. It regards the bedside as a stage and the mind’s afterimages as actors: fragments of kosmische drift, nursery-rhyme intervals, and stray signals from imaginary stations. In this dim, lucid theater, comfort is never anesthetic, and wonder never loud. The record doesn’t promise sleep; it offers passage—an oneiric glide where tenderness and strangeness share the same dim light.