Mo’ong’s instruments, built in Indonesia and brought into this new context, splice together metal parts, PVC horns, acoustic reverb chambers and crude distortion effects. Their voices range from foghorn‑like blasts to thin, reedy whines and insectoid buzzes, often layered into dense, wavering clusters. Dobie’s apparatus is equally hybrid: air compressors, timers and valves feeding bamboo pipes and organ flutes, automated systems that can tick, wheeze and sing with minimal human intervention. Between them, the duo create a palette where handmade and industrial elements are fused both physically and sonically, like a family of half‑mechanical creatures set loose in the studio.

The resulting music feels as if it belongs to many times and no single place. Through the clicks, clacks and buzzing overtones, surface traces of Scottish bagpipe music and Javanese folk traditions rub up against the aesthetics of improvised noise and sound art. Drones swell and narrow, suggesting distant chanters or metallophones; chattering valves and rattling hardware mimic hand drums or rattles, then veer into pure machine chatter. Automatic patterns generated by compressors and timers overlap with manually played rhythms, phasing in and out of sync so that it becomes difficult to tell where human intent ends and mechanical habit begins. Pipes fed by breath and pipes fed by compressed air blend into a single, layered chorus.​

Technologically, Landlocked seems to exist across eras at once. There is something archaic in the reliance on air, reeds and resonance, and something unmistakably contemporary – even speculative – in the way industrial detritus is repurposed into controllable, semi‑autonomous instruments. Occasional vocal noises slip into the mix only to be distorted beyond recognition, adding to the sense of a “mechanical folk music made with the help of phantoms”: tunes hinted at rather than stated, rituals carried out by proxies and shadows. The pieces favour process over climax; interest comes from watching structures form, erode and reconfigure as the two players adjust valves, reposition objects and lean into or away from the systems they’ve set in motion.​

Recorded on 6 and 7 May 2024 in Dobie’s studio at Studium P in Vilnius, Landlocked captures this encounter in raw but detailed sound. Mastering by Diego Delgado preserves the fragile dynamics and spatial cues, keeping the sense of being in the room with hissing hoses, ticking mechanisms and oscillating air columns. Visual framing comes from artwork by Chago, with risography by Laconcongrelos and serigraphy by Luis Bazán, extending the project’s DIY, materially attentive ethos into print. Released by Códex Editora as one of the label’s early statements, Landlocked stands as both document and proposition: a reminder that new folk musics can still be built from scraps, and that the line between the animate and the inanimate in sound is much thinner than it seems.